The word, “delinquent” was already dated by the time I became a pastor at an evangelical church, but I recognized its shadow. I recognized the tendency within religious communities to label some people as good and others as bad.
In my experience as a pastor, one of the most damaging ways of making sense of the world is dividing things up into good and bad, right and wrong. The damage is practical, familial and communal, but it is also damaging to faith. Rigid ways of seeing the world prevent people from seeing God. This is not to say that good and bad are false concepts, and certainly the desire for moral growth is a positive desire. We like to be in relationship with people who can be counted on to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing. Many of us, hopefully most, want to be those kinds of people. However, in the evangelical church, talk of absolutes often becomes absolutism. Absolutism, like any ideology, when aligned with fundamentalist thinking, divides the world up into good and bad, us and them. That ideology wreaks havoc and even excuses abuse. Any educational or religious institution that has as its starting point, “you are bad” is bound more towards the darkness than towards light.
CBC recently ran a documentary called “Born Bad”. It examined the history of what were called “training schools” within the Ontario education system in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. The last training school closed in 1984. Training schools were where students who were labelled as “delinquent” or “dangerous” were sent. The concept was that such students needed, not only to be educated, but, more than that, to be socialized. The manifestation of such socialization was rigid structure, harsh discipline and, as many ex-students related, a great deal of violence. One of the men interviewed for the documentary recalled the time when he attended one such school. In a noticeably gentle voice he said, “It was total discipline. Every moment of your day was control, 100%. It was a very violent atmosphere. One man in particular, I think the man was sick, the way he treated us, he just seemed to really relish beating up children. He was very sadistic. It wasn’t just discipline, it was brutality. It really was.” The documentary goes on to tell accounts of other students, kids and young teens, boys and girls, often beaten and sexually assaulted. There is some attempt to outline the intent of such schools. They were to take kids labelled as “bad” and discipline them away from badness towards goodness.
When the rich young ruler (as recorded in Luke and Mark) approaches Jesus saying “Good teacher” and Jesus responds with “Why do you call me good?” I think that there is some indication of the danger of stark and rigid ideas of good and bad. If the somewhat arrogant rich young ruler calls Jesus good, then he must be willing to call other people bad. Jesus right away seems a little put off that this man categorizes people in such ways. I think that Jesus may have had in mind the people who such a man would categorize as “bad” and his dismissive response to the man’s characterization may have been a defense of those people.
The Ontario training schools were part of a larger social construct of explicitly labelling people as good or bad. The kids who were sent to the schools were often kids who faced many obstacles in life relating to family or poverty or other considerations. In some cases, even without “bad” behaviour on their part, they were labelled as likely to become bad and therefore in need of socialization. The system of absolutism in this educational setting led to physical, sexual, emotional and mental abuse. Kids were told over and over again that they were terrible, and then treated as if, because they were terrible, it was okay, even necessary, to control them with fear and violence. I would assume that not every child was beaten or suffered violence, but there was a way in which every child was hurt. In the same way, when religious systems trade faith for absolutism, everyone is hurt.
Absolutism always leads to a culture of psychosis. In systems where absolutes are aligned with concepts of the divine there are always people who are declared to be the protectors of the absolutes. These people become leaders who then begin to relate to followers (forced or otherwise) as the problem to be solved, to be disciplined, to be controlled. If it wasn’t so often damaging, it should be laughable that some elder or pastor in a church actually thought that they got to decide who was good and who was bad and who needed disciplining. When I hear accounts like the one of the man who spoke of being beaten in the school by a man he labelled as sadistic I feel heartbroken for the child who suffered, and anger towards the person who became so twisted in thinking, that they would willingly beat a child. My strongest anger, though, is for a system that would perpetuate and produce a culture in which people were dehumanized by their supposed adherence or non-adherence to absolutes. Often the real victims in such systems were the ones declared to be bad, while the actual perpetrators of sin, violence, and terror were the ones who declared themselves to be most closely aligned with the absolutes.
In religious circles the same kind of psychosis can play out, most often, but not always, in less extreme ways. If you were raised in evangelical settings you may have heard about how the world “has no absolutes anymore”. The next step was often to decry moral decline in the world and also in the church. Then a call was issued to get “back to absolutes”. I suppose that some people speaking such things thought that they were talking about faith and I cannot speak to their motivation. I can say that absolutism is not faith.
If you were ever labelled as “bad” in a church culture, I pray that you would be freed from such simplistic, but harsh, judgment. If you were labelled as “good” within a church culture, you know that this label came with its own dehumanizing baggage. If you were one who taught or preached or led in an evangelical church and you presented absolutes as religious faith, I continue to hope that you have seen or will see something so much better than that.
Of course how you live matters. Of course there is right and wrong in the world, but maturity blesses us to see the lines are often not as rigid as we were once told, and that often the ones who hollered loudest about moral decay were an awful lot like the “whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones” that Jesus once described.
What is curious to me now is how the trumpeting of absolutes may have actually led people away from an awareness of the presence and love of God. It’s up to other people, not me, to determine, but I hope that my speaking against moralism and absolutism was because I saw it as preventing people from truly valuing their humanity and the humanity of others and preventing them from seeing the love of God for themselves and for all people.
The way I see it, until the Christian church becomes clear in its definition of “Hell”, there will be
absolutes. The “good” will go to Heaven and the “bad” will go to Hell.
To my astonishment, I hear some of my Christian friends declaring that some people should definitely go to Hell, the “very bad ones”, for sure.
Myself, I have never felt qualified to decide who should go to “Hell” and I am not even sure if there is such a place.
Sadly, absolutism in Christian circles is rampant in the labels of “us” and “them”.
If “us” is good then “them” is bad. The “other” is never good.
I, too, would like to see the labels abandoned.
Christ died for all and that is what really matters.