"Wicked!"
15 June, 2008
When I was very young, my concept of evil was
pretty simple: evil people were mean.
At church I was taught that anyone who disobeyed the Bible was sinful, which was nearly the same thing as evil. But I was also taught that everyone was sinful to an extent that made us all equally undeserving of divine grace. While everyone was equally undeserving, there were wicked people in the world who delighted in being sinful. So I developed a new definition of evil: someone who really enjoys doing bad things.
As I got a little bit older, the church's
definition of evil
became more complicated and insidious. Sin was so delightful, they
said, that wicked people wanted more and more of it. They would grow
tired of ordinary sins and seek more outlandish and depraved behaviour
until they were consumed and destroyed by their wickedness. But sin
could also be very subtle. We were cautioned to watch ourselves and to
study the Bible more and more, because we might be sinning without even
realizing it.
How could it be intoxicatingly delightful but
not noticable at the same time? No one seemed to have an answer.
As I studied more, I started noticing
contradictions. Wearing clothing made out of more than one kind of
cloth was a sin punishable by death, according to the scriptures, but
no one
looked askance when a lady at the church talked about her new
cotton-blend blouse. Eating shrimp or clams was also forbidden (and
also required a death sentence), but
when one church member's aunt from Louisianna was visiting and made a
big pot of gumbo for a church potluck, the preacher went back for
seconds and thirds.
I eventually realized that most of my fellow
churchgoers had never read the Bible from cover-to-cover even once.
Most of them had this vague notion that certain bits in the new
testament gave us permission to ignore a lot of the commandments in the
old, but no one seemed to have a good answer as to why verses 9-12 of
Leviticus chapter 11 were unnecessary laws neutralized by the new
covenant, while verse 22 of chapter 18 of Leviticus obviously was still
an active commandment.
Then there was the problem of infant
mortality. The denomination I was raised in went to great pains to talk
about why our brand of faith was truer than other churches, and one of
those areas was that unlike those other churches, we didn't believe
that babies who died before they were baptised wound up in hell. Oh,
no! Our god was far too compassionate to condemn a being that was too
young to have even understood that they had a choice between being
wicked or righteous. In other words, sin wasn't just accidentally
violating some obscure passage of the Bible, you had to intend it.
Which got me wondering, how can we say
that people who are raised in other faiths are condemned? If you have
to know that what you're doing is wrong before it actually counts as
being a sin, then those who didn't know, no matter how old they were,
can't actually be sinning, right?
"Everyone knows in their heart the difference
between right and wrong," I was told. God gives everyone a conscience
which can guide them away from sin. And if they listen closely enough
it will eventually lead them--even if they are in some obscure part of
the world that no missionary has ever reached--to our faith.
When I asked when this conscience arrives, I
was
told we were born with it. But that seemed to undermine the whole
babies-don't-go- to-hell thing, and since our preachers talked about it
a lot (they just loved to draw the contrast between us and certain
other denominations) it was obviously very important. If we're born
with the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, then the
claim that infants are too young to know there is a choice must not be
true, and vice versa.
These kinds of questions started getting me in
trouble at church. Teachers stopped trying to give me answers and
started lecturing me for being disrespectful. More
than once I was told to stop over-thinking everything. At least twice
it was
implied that my constant questioning was not only sinful, but that I
was actively doing the devil's work!
There were people who attempted to give deeper
answers; who were willing to follow questions to their logical
conclusions. They were the ones most likely to mention what was
supposed to be the fundamental dogma of our denomination: truth is
between each person, their conscience, and god. No human has the right
to decide for another the path to righteousness.
Which completely contradicts all the talk
about one faith being truer than another, disobeying the Bible was sin,
and so on.
When I pointed that out, the usual response
was to fall back on the notion of basic principles that everyone can
agree to. No one argues that it is all right to kill another person, so
killing is wrong, for instance. Except they do argue that it isn't
always wrong--not guilty by reason of self-defense, for instance. And
don't even get me started on how enthusiastically the denomination of
my childhood advocates the righteousness of military service.
It was all very confusing.
Understanding didn't get any easier as I came
to the realization that my orientation was not heterosexual. Because
those verses in Leviticus that everyone in my church was certain were
still in force seemed quite clearly aimed at me. Which was pointed out
to me again and again as I stopped hiding who I was. The more honestly
I lived my life, the more some people insisted I was wicked. And the
longer I lived without my life devolving into depravity and death, the
less willing they were to talk. They sincerely
believed that they had the truth, no matter how contradictory their
truth was. I was wrong, and all my reasoning, my
productive and responsible life, and my continued happiness were just
tricks of the devil.
Their sincerity began to look more and more
like smug vindictiveness. The death and destruction they had predicted
in my life hadn't materialized, but they remain certain it will
eventually. Then they will be vindicated. My pain will be proof of
their faith, and what could be more joyful than faith realized?
What is meaner than looking forward to someone else's suffering? But they think I'm the wicked one? Perhaps someone should give them a mirror.
--Tom Driberg
.