
Several days ago NPR published an interview with Christian Picciolini, the author of Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead, and the co-founder of Life After Hate, a nonprofit that helps “radicalized individuals disengage from extremist movements and begin the process of deradicalization” (from their website).
Picciolini himself is a reformed white nationalist, and when asked about the individual who drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others, Picciolini offered this explanation:
I think ultimately people become extremists not necessarily because of the ideology … I believe that people become radicalized, or extremist, because they’re searching for three very fundamental human needs: identity, community, and a sense of purpose.
In other words: people become white nationalists and join extremist movements because they’re just like me.
We have the same needs, after all. The needs to which he refers — meaning, intimacy, destiny — are the needs that drive nearly every human action. They’re the deepest cravings of every human soul, and they’re no accident. They were placed in us by design, with the intention that we would find fulfillment and satisfaction in fellowship with the Creator. It stands to reason, then, that when we focus our efforts on meeting these legitimate needs in illegitimate ways — ways not sanctioned by the Author of Life —those efforts always terminate in pain. Sometimes, as in Charlottesville, they terminate in violence.
I’m not a white supremacist, but I am a me supremacist, which terminates in its own kind of pain and violence. I didn’t march through the streets of Charlottesville carrying a tiki torch (which is, it’s worth noting, maybe the least-menacing variety of torch); I’ve never strapped myself with swastikas; I’ve never plowed through a crowd of innocent people with my vehicle.
That isn’t to say that I haven’t inflicted violence on people in my life, though. Frankly, I’ve inflicted more pain on the people in my life than Richard Spencer ever will. Am I really going to lean back and breathe a sigh of relief and thank God I’m not like him?
I’m not the villain in the story of what happened in Charlottesville, but I am after all a villain to somebody, somewhere.
In I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains Real and Imagined, cultural commentator Chuck Klosterman suggests that, “In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.” In other words, a villain is one whose comprehension of a situation, or of a person, does not translate into empathy.
The question of empathy — whether knowledge of a situation translates into compassion — may be the most critical question facing our country, and it’s a question that must be answered on the individual level in order to be fully realized corporately. The problem is that there’s a bit of paradox where knowing and caring are concerned. If you’re familiar with the writings of St. Paul, you might recall his observation that “Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Those who know the most are so commonly driven to ambivalence it’s as though the two go hand-in-hand.
Does the general attitude of those who work in politics — especially in political media coverage — skew toward idealism or cynicism? Is it ridiculous even to ask a question with such an obvious answer? And if your Facebook and Twitter feeds look anything like mine, you may notice (with exceptions, naturally) that your connections who are the most tuned-in to politics seem to be the most snide, the quickest to write off those who don’t agree with them:
“Our president is a piece of shit,” one Facebook friend of mine boldly proclaimed recently. “If you don’t think so, you are too.”
Where’s the empathy in that?” I wondered. Where’s the redemptive message in that?
Virtue-signaling is a great way to win applause from people, “who have but one breath in their nostrils.” But the older I get the more I’m concerned with whether I have the approval of the One who created noses. I’m not interested in lashing out at half the people I know just to score cheap points in form of likes and retweets from the other half.
Here’s the point:
In at least one sense — and it’s certainly not the least important sense— the villain is not the person who has the most detestable ideology. The villain is the person who has the least amount of empathy for marginalized people, for oppressed people, and — come on— people who are not like him or herself. I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t pretend that I know this for sure, but my suspicion is that the people who have the most detestable ideology probably started as the people who simply lacked the capacity for empathy.
It’s silly, then, to go about patting ourselves on the back because we’re not as bad as those other people. The posture itself reveals an arrogant and self-righteous heart, and — if Chuck Klosterman’s definition of a villain is a good one (it is) — it’s precisely that sort of attitude that provides the soil in which the seeds of hate grow.
I’m fond of saying, in the spirit of W.H. Auden, that I believe Jesus is God because when I read the Scriptures I often find myself wanting to kill Him. There aren’t many passages more enraging to me than Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee (a religious elite type) and the Publican (the corrupt government official type). The Scriptures explicitly tell us that Jesus told this parable because there were people in His audience “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt.”
Jesus draws their attention to two important truths:
- People — including and especially religious people — aren’t always as they seem.
- People ultimately have to answer to God not just for their words and deeds, but for the contents of their heart.
Here’s the parable:
Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: “God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.” But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!” I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
Want to kill Jesus yet?
Here’s why I find Jesus so frustrating:
Jesus doesn’t step into the world and draw a line down the center of the issue and say, “If you’re on this side you’re right and if you’re on the other side you’re wrong,” Instead, He draws a circle around Himself and says, “Everyone outside of this circle is broken. Everyone outside of this circle is imperfect. Everyone outside of this circle is bent toward their own kind of wickedness, and everyone outside this circle is as good as dead. Everyone outside this circle is wrong and needs to repent.”
This is why any discussion of Jesus’ social or political ethics that doesn’t begin with His Messianic claim is an exercise in futility. You can’t understand Jesus outside of His Messianic role as the one who ushers in, and rules over, the Kingdom Of Heaven. This is why cries of “Jesus was a socialist!” are so laughable — any Biblically-literate person knows Jesus is an authoritarian.
Jesus’ point in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican is that the second I start to fixate on the wickedness in someone else’s life at the expense of acknowledging the evil that lives inside my very soul I have taken the first step toward becoming that which I despise.
I’m certain that Jesus’ message to white supremacists and racists is, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
But that’s also His message to you and me.
Jesus doesn’t bring the same message to all people because all sins are equal. They very plainly aren’t. Racism and adultery and dishonesty and malice and gluttony and pride are not all the same. They have different consequences in different situations. Sin is only equal in the sense that the tiniest bit of it is enough to fall short of God’s perfect standard. One cannot argue from the Scripture that God sees all sin as equal or the same.
Jesus brings the same message of repentance to all people because at the bottom-most part of our souls our needs are the same: identity, community, and purpose. And our common needs have a common source of fulfillment.
This is why I take pity on white supremacists. Not because I sympathize with their wretched cause, or because I think they have a point, or because “there are good people on both sides.” I take pity on white supremacists because they are deceived. They are horribly, tragically misguided; they want to find their identity in their race, their community among violent extremists, their purpose in trying to trample other people under their feet.
I don’t want to be so arrogant, so self-righteous, and so delusional as to think I’m not misguided in my own way, that there aren’t places in my heart where I think I’m right but I’m wrong, that I don’t have my own illegitimate ways of trying to meet the deepest needs of my soul. In that way, I’m not actually any different than a white supremacist. It’s not that our sins are the same. It’s that our sins have the same remedy: redemption that only comes through Jesus Christ.
I want to be a man whose entire life is marked by repentance, accompanied by an increasing acknowledgement of my need for grace, not someone whose self-righteousness causes them to look on others with contempt — even those people in my life and in our world who are seemingly irredeemable.
