There's a developmental appropriateness to young children's desire to divide the world into goodies and baddies, to categorise them neatly as one or the other. Recent events have shown that adults are not immune either to the temptation to divide people into simple categories of 'goody' and 'baddy'. For instance, there has been a move to recategorise historical figures from 'goody' to 'baddy' with the toppling of statues; in the UK, protestors toppled the statue of slave trader philanthropist Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour. A statue of Winston Churchill has been boarded up ahead of planned protests; he is regarded by many as a great wartime leader. He also believed in racial hierarchies.
Christians are not immune to these problems either. We fall in love with our spiritual heroes and then belatedly realise they too have feet of clay. Martin Luther and his anti-semitism. Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and their ownership of slaves. John Wesley's marriage. William Carey's family life. It can get more personal too. Church leaders fall into sin. Christians we looked up to let us down. And with the tangle of thoughts and emotions that we're left with, it's easy to either turn a blind eye to someone's sin, rationalising it away, or to go to the other extreme and dismiss every good action or truthful word they've ever done or spoken.
We might also take groups of people and automatically assign them to be goodies or baddies. Cops. Protesters. Politicians. Civil servants. Journalists. Bankers. Climate change activists. Climate change deniers. Creationists. Evolutionists. Social workers. Home schoolers. Baptists. Anglicans. J K Rowling. The list goes on.
The world would be a simpler place if we could just think of everyone as either a goody or a baddy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." In the same vein (but not quite as literary high-brow), British comedy actor John Cleese recently tweeted a clip of his from 30 years ago in which he says, "the great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you."
Both Solzhenitsyn and Cleese are echoing the truth that people are complicated. As image bearers of God, every one of us is able to do good. As people who have rejected God and trampled on his law, every one of us does evil. That is not to say that we are all equal in our degree of goodness or evilness. The line that divides good and evil does not cleave every human heart equally in two. But the history of humanity is a history of complex people. Heroes have flaws. Villains are capable of good deeds. David who killed Goliath was the same David who took another man's wife and had her husband murdered. A towering theologian can hold appalling views (and not just be excused as a 'child of his time').
The line dividing good and evil cuts through my heart too. As I look back at Christians of the past and wonder how they could have got some things so very right and other things so terribly wrong, I wonder what a Christian living in fifty, one hundred, two hundred years time would say if they could look back at my life. If they nodded their heads in agreement with my reformed, Baptist theology, what words and actions of mine would cause them to wince? On what issues would they ask how could someone who held to those Biblical principles end up so far from the mark in that particular way?
As our children get older, we're slowly teaching them that while good and evil are real and clear categories, labeling people as good or evil isn't quite so clear cut as they'd like to believe. We're reminding them that in the ultimate good vs evil story, we're the baddies and the only goody is Jesus. And yet we're also baddies who image God and so we can still reflect God's goodness, albeit in a distorted way.
And so this is my plea to the adults: resist the caricatures. Recognise that people are complicated. Good and evil swirls together in each of our hearts. It's not that good and evil don't matter. I'm not saying that you should never describe someone as evil. I'm not saying that we should never apply church discipline, call out false teachers or judge that a leader is unfit for church or public office.
But we need to be nuanced in our thinking. It's a whole lot easier to view the world through a lens that views individuals (or groups of individuals) as simply goodies or baddies. But good and evil are too important to simply take the easy option. We must be honest about both the failings of people we admire and the good deeds of those we don't. We need to praise the good and we also need to be unequivocal about the bad. We need to be people of truth and integrity.
Post script: the following articles have been helpful for me in educating myself and sharpening my thinking on this issue, particularly regarding Christian heroes.
"Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, and the Theology of African-Americans", Thabiti Anyabwile
"Luther's Jewish Problem", Bernard Howard
"Some thoughts about statues..." Michael Ots
"When Our Heroes Don't Live Up to Their Theology", Thomas Kidd
