Chris Hedges: The Evil Within Us
March 22, 2021
Those who blind themselves to their capacity for evil commit evil not for
evils sake, but to make a better world. This collective self-delusion is
the story of America.
Original illustration by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
Robert Aaron Long, 21, charged with murdering eight victims, six of whom
were Asian women, at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, told police that he
carried out the killings to eliminate the temptations that fed his sexual
addiction. His church, Crabapple First Baptist Church, in Milton, Georgia,
which opposes sex outside of marriage, issued a statement condemning the
shootings as unacceptable and contrary to the gospel.
The church, however, also immediately took down its web site and removed
videos, including one that was captured by The Washington Post before it was
deleted where the churchs pastor, the Rev. Jerry Dockery, told the
congregation that Christs second coming was imminent. And when Christ
returned, Dockery said, he would wage a ruthless and violent war on
nonbelievers and infidels, those controlled by Satan.
There is one word devoted to their demise, the pastor said. Swept away!
Banished! Judged. They have no power before God. Satan himself is bound and
released and then bound again and banished. That great dragon deceiver
just that quickly God throws him into an eternal torment. And then we read
where everyone everyone that rejects Christ will join Satan, the Beast
and the false prophet in hell.
I heard a lot of these types of sermons by fundamentalist preachers during
the two years I crisscrossed the country for my bookAmerican Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America. I attended Bible studies, prayer
groups, conventions, tapings of Christian television shows, rallies held by
Patriot Pastors, talks by leaders such as James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and
Tony Perkins and creationist seminars. I visited the 50,000-square-foot
Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, took an Evangelism Explosion
course, joined congregations at numerous megachurches for Sunday worship and
participated in right-to-life retreats. I spent hundreds of hours
interviewing scores of believers.
The simplistic message was always the same. The world was divided into us
and them, the blessed and the damned, agents of God and agents of Satan,
good and evil. Millions of largely white Americans, hermetically sealed
within the ideology of the Christian Right, yearn to destroy the Satanic
forces they blame for the debacle of their lives, the broken homes, domestic
and sexual abuse, struggling single parent households, lack of
opportunities, crippling debt, poverty, evictions, bankruptcies, loss of
sustainable incomes and the decay of their communities.
Satanic forces, they believe, control the financial systems, the media,
public education and the three branches of government. They believed this
long before Donald Trump, who astutely tapped into this deep malaise and
magic thinking, mounted his 2016 campaign for president.
Core Beliefs
January 25, 1899 issue of Puck magazine. (Wikimedia Commons)
The killings in Atlanta were not an anomaly by a deranged gunman. The hatred
for people of other ethnicities and faiths, the hatred for women of color,
who are condemned by the Christian right as temptresses in league with
Satan, was fertilized in the rampant misogyny, hyper-masculinity and racism
that lie at the center of the belief system of the Christian right, as well
define the core beliefs of American imperialism.
The white race, especially in the United States, is celebrated as Gods
chosen agent. Imperialism and war are divine instruments for purging the
world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism, because God
blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to
poverty and suffering, is shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation.
The iconography and symbols of American nationalism are intertwined with the
iconography and symbols of the Christian faith. In short, the worst aspects
of American society are sacralized by this heretical form of Christianity.
Believers are told that Satanic forces, promoting a liberal creed of
secular humanism, lure people to self-destruction through drugs, alcohol,
gambling, pornography and massage brothels. Long, who had frequented two of
the massage parlors he attacked, was arrested on his way to Florida to
attack a business connected with the pornography industry. He had attempted
to block porn sites on his computer and sought help for his fascination with
porn from Christian counselors.
The secular humanists, along with creating a society designed to tempt
people into sin, are blamed for immigration programs that fuel demographic
shifts to turn whites into a minority. The secular humanists are charged
with elevating those of other races and beliefs including Muslims whose
religion is branded as Satanic along with those whose gender identities
challenge the sanctity of marriage as between a man and a woman and
patriarchy.
The secular humanists are believed to be behind an array of institutions
including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women,
Planned Parenthood, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations, the State
Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), elite
universities and media platforms such as CNN and The New York Times.
In D. James Kennedys book, The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail: The Attack
on Christianity and What You Need to Know to Combat It, he writes that
although the United States was once a Christian nation, that is no longer
the case because today the hostile barrage from atheists, agnostics and
other secular humanists has begun to take a serious toll on that heritage.
In recent years, they have built up their forces and even increased their
assault upon all our Christian institutions, and they have been enormously
successful in taking over the public square. Public education, the media,
the government, the courts, and even the church in many places, now belong
to them.
The incendiary rhetoric creates an atmosphere of being under siege. It
imparts a sense of comradeship, the feeling that although the world outside
the walls of the church or the home is dangerous and hostile, there is a
select community of brothers and sisters. Believers only owe a moral
obligation to other Christians. The world is divided between comrades and
enemies, neighbors and strangers. The commandment Love your neighbor as
yourself is perverted to Love your fellow Christians as yourself.
Nonbelievers have no place on the moral map.
When Christ returns, believers are told, He will lead the elect in one final
apocalyptic battle against the people and groups blamed for their
dislocation and despair. The secular world, the one that almost destroyed
them and their families, will be eradicated. The flaws in human society and
in human beings will be erased. They will have what most never had: a stable
home and family, a loving community, fixed moral standards, financial and
personal security and success and an abolition of uncertainty, disorder and
doubt. Their fragmented, troubled lives will become whole. Evil will be
physically vanquished. There will be no more impurity because the impure
will no longer exist.
God Judging Adam, William Blake, 1795. (Tate Gallery/Wikimedia Commons)
This externalization of evil, however, is not limited to the Christian
Right. It lies at the core of American imperialism, American exceptionalism
and American racism. White supremacy, which dehumanizes the other at home
and abroad, is also fueled by the fantasy that there are superior human
beings who are white and lesser human beings who are not. Long did not need
the Christian fascism of his church to justify to himself the killings; the
racial hierarchies within American society had already dehumanized his
victims. His church simply cloaked it in religious language. The jargon
varies. The dark sentiments are the same.
The ideology of the Christian right, like all totalitarian creeds, is, at
its core, an ideology of hatred. It rejects what Augustine calls the grace
of love, or volo ut sis (I want you to be). It replaces it with an ideology
that condemns all those outside the magic circle. There is, in relationships
based on love, an affirmation of the mystery of the other, an affirmation of
unexplained and unfathomable differences. These relationships not only
recognize that others have a right to be, as Augustine wrote, but the
sacredness of difference.
External Force to be Destroyed
This sacredness of difference is an anathema to Christian fundamentalists,
as it is to imperialists, to all racists. It is dangerous to the hegemony of
the triumphalist ideology. It calls into question the infallibility of the
doctrine, the essential appeal of all ideologies. It suggests that there are
alternative ways to live and believe. The moment there is a hint of
uncertainty the ideological edifice crumbles. The truth is irrelevant as
long as the ideology is consistent, doubt is heretical and the vision of the
world, however absurd, absolute and unassailable. These ideologies are not
meant to be rational. They are meant to fill emotional voids.
Evil for the Christian fundamentalists is not something within them. It is
an external force to be destroyed. It may require indiscriminate acts of
violence, but if it leads to a better world this violence is morally
justified. Those who advance the holy crusade alone know the truth. They
alone have been anointed by God or, in the language of American imperialism,
western civilization, to do battle with evil. They alone have the right to
impose their values on others by force. Once evil is external, once the
human race is divided into the righteous and the damned, repression and even
murder become a sacred duty.
Immanuel Kant defined radical evil as the drive, often carried out under a
righteous façade, to surrender to absolute self-love. Those gripped by
radical evil always externalize evil. They lose touch with their own
humanity. They are blind to their own innate depravity. In the name of
western civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, in
the name of America, in the name of the free market, in the name of Jesus,
they seek the subjugation and annihilation of others. Radical evil, Hannah
Arendt wrote, makes whole groups of human beings superfluous. They become,
rhetorically, living corpses before often becoming actual corpses.
This binary world view is anti-thought. That is part of its attraction. It
gives to those who are alienated and lost emotional certitude. It is
buttressed by hollow cliches, patriotic slogans and Bible passages, what
psychologists call symbol agnostics. True believers are capable only of
imitation. They shut down, by choice, critical reflection and genuine
understanding. They surrender all moral autonomy. The impoverished language
is regurgitated not because it makes sense, but because it justifies the
messianic and intoxicating right to lead humankind to paradise. These
pseudo-heroes, however, know only one form of sacrifice, the sacrifice of
others.
Human evil is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery. It is a bitter,
constant paradox. We carry the capacity for evil within us. I learned this
unsettling truth as a war correspondent. The line between the victim and the
victimizer is razor thin. Evil is also seductive. It offers us unlimited
often lethal power to turn those around us into objects to destroy or debase
to gratify our most perverted desires or both. This evil waits to consume
us. All it requires to flourish is for us to turn away, to pretend it is not
there, to do nothing.
Those who blind themselves to their capacity for evil commit evil not for
evils sake, but to make a better world. This collective self-delusion is
the story of America, from its foundation on the twin evils of slavery and
genocide to its inherent racism, predatory capitalism and savage wars of
conquest. The more we ignore this evil, the worse it gets.
The awareness of human corruptibility and human limitations, as understood
by Augustine, Kant, Sigmund Freud and Primo Levi, has been humankinds most
potent check on evil. Levi wrote that compassion and brutality can coexist
in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic. This
self-knowledge forces us to accept that no act, even one defined as moral or
virtuous, is ever free from the taint of self-interest. It reminds us that
we are condemned to always battle our baser instincts. It recognizes that
compassion, as Rousseau wrote, is alone the quality from which all the
social virtues flow.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that some are guilty, but all are
responsible. We may not be guilty of the murders in Atlanta, but we are
responsible. We must answer for them. We must accept the truth about
ourselves, however unpleasant. We must unmask the lie of our pretended
innocence.
Longs murderous spree was quintessentially American. That is what makes it,
along with all other hate crimes, along with our endless imperial wars,
police terror, callous abandonment of the poor and the vulnerable, so
frightening. This evil will not be tamed until it is named and confronted.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist who was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the
Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He
previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian
Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT
America show On Contact.
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular
column twice a month.