I Can’t Stay Silent, Part 3

...so, I’ve been thinking about evil again, partly because Donald Trump has found his way back into my head for a fairly ordinary reason. I’m currently reading Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Apparently the amount of Trump already available in the daily news wasn’t quite enough.

But reading about the machinery around him, rather than simply watching the latest outrage arrive and disappear into the next one, has brought me back to a much older question. What do I actually mean when I look at a person like Trump and use a word as loaded as evil? I don’t mean evil in the horns, pitchforks and horror-film sense, where bad people know they’re bad and presumably spend their evenings plotting somewhere with poor lighting. I mean evil as a moral category. The word we reach for when selfish, dishonest, cruel, corrupt, vindictive and dangerous no longer seem large enough on their own to describe the accumulated thing we’re looking at.

I grew up believing evil was real. I became a Christian at eleven and remained one until my early fifties, including several years working professionally in churches. Good and evil weren’t matters of personal taste. God was good. Satan was evil. Humanity was fallen. Morality ultimately came from God. Christians could argue endlessly about what belonged in which category, and we certainly did, but the categories themselves were supposed to be real.

Oddly enough, Christianity never introduced me to the Problem of Evil. I discovered it much later, at university, while studying sociology. The version usually linked to Epicurus is brutally simple, even if the history behind it is a bit messier. The familiar formulation survives through Lactantius, a Christian writer several centuries later, who attributes the argument to Epicurus.

Either way, the question itself isn’t especially complicated: if God is perfectly good, knows everything and possesses unlimited power, why does apparently pointless suffering exist? If God knows that a child is suffering, wants that child not to suffer and has the power to prevent it, why doesn’t he?

We certainly talked about suffering in church. We prayed about it and had explanations for it. Human sin. Free will. A fallen world. Trials that strengthen faith. God’s mysterious purposes. What we didn’t tend to do was put God’s supposed qualities together and ask whether they were compatible with the world we could actually see.

Looking back, I can understand why. The question doesn’t nibble around the theological edges. It walks into the middle of the room and pulls the rug out from under the whole thing. When you’re embedded in Christianity, asking it too directly rather shits in the nest. University gave me the tools to ask it anyway. Sociology was teaching me to examine institutions, power, culture and the way groups construct beliefs that eventually come to feel natural and unquestionable. Once I began applying that same scrutiny to Christianity, one question led to another.

There wasn’t a lightning-bolt conversion to atheism or some angry resignation from Jesus. It happened slowly. Eventually the explanations I’d accepted for most of my life stopped carrying the weight I was asking them to carry. That ancient paradox was only one part of it, alongside questions about scripture, morality, evidence and the nature of belief itself, but it was an important one. Which makes it strangely circular to find myself back there now, after leaving Christianity, with Donald Trump standing in the middle of the question.

There are really three things tangled together for me. First, there’s Trump, and whether evil is actually a reasonable word for what I think I’m seeing. Then there’s the stranger question of Christians placing enormous political, and sometimes almost spiritual, faith in a man whose behaviour seems so radically at odds with the morality Christianity taught me. And behind both sits the question that helped undo my own faith: if there really is an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful God behind this human mess, what exactly is he doing while the suffering takes place? The more I think about them, the less separate they seem.

With Trump, I want to avoid the amateur psychiatry that seems to accompany almost every discussion about him. Psychopath. Sociopath. Narcissist. Dementia. Cognitive decline. I’m not a psychiatrist and I can’t diagnose Donald Trump from my home office. More importantly, I don’t need to. We can make moral judgements about behaviour without knowing its clinical cause. With Trump, it’s the accumulation that matters. The demand for personal loyalty, repeated dishonesty, humiliation of opponents, vindictiveness, creation of enemies, dehumanisation of vulnerable people, and the extraordinary self-mythology in which Trump becomes warrior, conqueror, saviour and occasionally something uncomfortably close to a religious figure.

Any one incident can be explained away. After enough incidents, explaining every one separately starts to look less like fairness and more like refusing to acknowledge the pattern. When I call Trump evil, I’m not suggesting he wakes up at 11, orders a Double Quarter Pounder and wonders how much suffering he can squeeze in before Fox News starts. Evil is rarely that obliging. People who do terrible things generally possess explanations for themselves. They’re protecting something, restoring something, punishing somebody, defending the nation, reclaiming greatness. Human beings are remarkably good at constructing moral stories around things they already want to do.

And I should be clear about the distinction I’m making. Moral hypocrisy is one thing. Motivated reasoning is another. Supporting a politician I dislike tells me very little, by itself, about somebody’s moral character. My judgement about Trump is more specific. I think his accumulated pattern of cruelty, dishonesty, vengeance, dehumanisation, self-glorification and indifference to suffering has reached a point where softer language starts to feel evasive. I’m not asking a medical question about what’s wrong with Donald Trump. I’m making a moral judgement about what he repeatedly chooses to do with enormous power. The harder question for me is Christianity’s accommodation of him, including people I know and people who were once friends.

I remember the Christianity I was taught. Pridefulness mattered. Truth mattered. Sexual morality certainly mattered. Wealth could corrupt. Vengeance was dangerous. The poor, the stranger, the sick and the powerless mattered. Humility mattered. Character mattered because what somebody repeatedly did was understood to tell us something about who they were. These weren’t obscure theological extras. They were woven through the faith. So I find it genuinely fascinating watching what happens when a politically useful person repeatedly violates the moral standard. Instead of this standard disqualifying the person, the standard itself becomes surprisingly flexible.

One of the more interesting ways Christians have dealt with this is the Cyrus argument. In the biblical account, Cyrus the Great was a pagan Persian ruler whom God nevertheless used to accomplish his purposes for Israel. Applied to Trump, the argument is that God has always used flawed or ungodly people. Trump doesn’t need to be Christlike, or even particularly Christian. He can simply be an instrument. Fair enough, but notice the size of the concession being made. The argument has stopped being that Trump demonstrates Christian character and become an argument that his character doesn’t matter enough to disqualify him because he’s useful. “God can use a bad man” isn’t the same proposition as “therefore the badness no longer matters”. Cyrus might provide a theological explanation for why God could use Trump. It doesn’t explain why Christians need to defend him when he behaves badly. Sometimes the Cyrus argument feels less like theology and more like theological WD-40, sprayed over whichever bit of the machinery has started squeaking this week. And this is where the question gets bigger than Trump.

Human beings are very good at discovering moral complexity when somebody on our side behaves badly. The behaviour of our opponents is obvious. The behaviour of our allies requires context. Christians didn’t invent that. We all do it. And we certainly don’t need to look across the Pacific to find it. Australia has its own version gathering momentum right now. Pauline Hanson and One Nation have moved well beyond being the strange political relative we occasionally found at the far end of the Senate ballot paper. Their renewed appeal is being fed by very real frustration about housing, cost of living, migration, regional neglect and the sense that the major parties have become increasingly detached from the people they supposedly represent.

Some of that frustration is entirely understandable. People really are struggling to find somewhere affordable to live. Infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. Governments have made stupid decisions. Communities can change quickly, and not everybody experiences that change as an uncomplicated good. Dismissing all of those concerns as racism is lazy, and politically stupid. The interesting bit is what happens to the frustration once politics gets hold of it. One Nation’s answer has always relied heavily on identifying who the problem is. Migrants. Muslims. Globalists. Elites. Bureaucrats. The establishment. Somebody somewhere is taking something from ordinary Australians, and Pauline is going to give it back.

Which makes me think of Henry Lawson, oddly enough. In The Duty of Australians, Lawson wrote about patriotism too, but it was a very different sort. His Australia didn’t need to prove its love of country by running somebody else’s down. He wrote of our “duty to the stranger”, including the newly arrived foreigner struggling with English, and finished with the wonderfully simple reminder that he may become “a father of Australians, as our foreign fathers were”. That was written more than a century ago. Yet it feels remarkably current. There’s a version of Australian patriotism in Lawson that seems almost unfashionable now: confident enough in itself that it doesn’t need a frightened outsider to define who belongs. You can love the place without needing somebody else to leave it.

Then Gina Rinehart walks into the story. Australia’s richest person has become a prominent supporter of Hanson and One Nation. Hanson describes her as a friend, says she takes policy advice from her, and Rinehart has even gifted One Nation a million-dollar aircraft to help it campaign around the country. There’s something almost perfect about the contradiction. A movement drawing enormous energy from resentment towards establishments, privilege and powerful people supposedly pulling the strings finds itself being advised and materially supported by the richest person in Australia. Apparently the problem with elites isn’t always that they’re elite. Sometimes they’re simply the wrong ones.

I’m not saying Hanson is Trump or Rinehart is Musk. Australia has different institutions, different political traditions and compulsory voting. But the emotional machinery is recognisable. The outsider story survives even when the outsider is travelling with a billionaire. Anti-establishment politics can apparently survive being funded by the establishment, provided everyone agrees that our billionaire is one of the good ones.

And there’s the moral trick again. The contradictions on the other side barely require explanation. The contradictions on ours come with footnotes.

Sociology gives us some useful ways of understanding how that happens. Groups create meaning together. We construct categories and decide who belongs inside them. Once somebody stops being primarily a person and becomes an invader, an enemy, an illegal, a terrorist sympathiser or the other, their suffering becomes easier to accommodate. That process doesn’t require everybody involved to be consciously cruel. In some ways that’s what makes it more dangerous. People can believe themselves to be defending perfectly decent things such as safety, nation, family, faith or social order while gradually becoming comfortable with treatment of other human beings that would once have horrified them.

Which is why the pro-life question has become impossible for me to separate from all this. I understand the Christian argument against abortion. I may no longer share its theological foundation, but I understand its internal logic. If you genuinely believe abortion ends an innocent human life, then protecting that life becomes an enormous moral obligation. Human life possesses inherent value. The innocent shouldn’t be sacrificed because protecting them is difficult or inconvenient. That’s a coherent moral position. The difficulty comes when we keep applying the principle after the child is born.

A Palestinian child trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza is still a child. An Iranian Muslim child killed by a missile whilst learning maths at school is still a child. An Israeli child killed or injured by a rocket in a border town with Lebanon is still a child. Yet the moral temperature can change very quickly when the conversation moves from abortion to war. Absolute language about innocent human life suddenly acquires footnotes about strategic objectives, deterrence, proportionality, military necessity and collateral damage.

Some of those distinctions genuinely matter. War is morally complicated. Intention matters. Responsibility matters. The murder of Israeli civilians by Hamas can’t be excused because of what Israel subsequently did in Gaza, any more than Palestinian civilians can be made collectively responsible for Hamas. Iranian civilians don’t become the Iranian government and Israeli civilians don’t become Netanyahu.

I don’t want to flatten those distinctions simply to produce a cleaner argument. But if the underlying principle is the sanctity of innocent human life, nationality and religion can’t determine how much moral urgency we attach to that life. You can’t spend decades insisting every innocent life is sacred and then quietly add an asterisk once the innocent life is Muslim.

Israel adds another complication because, for some Christians, the modern state isn’t simply another country. It occupies a place inside a sacred story. Biblical promises, prophecy and the idea of God’s chosen people can enter the political judgement before the political judgement has properly begun. That doesn’t describe all Christians. Plenty have condemned the suffering of Palestinian civilians and criticised Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Antisemitism is also real, vile and dangerous, and criticism of the Israeli government should never become an excuse for hatred of Jewish people. But precisely because those distinctions matter, we should be able to make them. The Jewish people aren’t the Israeli government. Israel isn’t Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinians aren’t Hamas. Iranians aren’t their government.

For Australians, Gaza became less abstract when Zomi Frankcom was killed. She was an Australian aid worker with World Central Kitchen, killed alongside six colleagues. We knew her name. We saw her photograph. The distance shortened. But why should it require an Australian? A Palestinian child shouldn’t need an Australian standing beside them before their death becomes morally legible to us. If life has inherent value, that’s rather the point of the word inherent. And this is where my old problem with religious certainty comes back.

When I was a Christian, there seemed to be an explanation available for every possible outcome. If something wonderful happened, God was good. If something terrible happened, God had purposes we couldn’t understand. If prayer was answered, God intervened. If it wasn’t, his ways were mysterious. I don’t say that mockingly because I believed it myself for decades. The difficulty I eventually saw was that the conclusion could survive every possible piece of evidence. Nothing could count against it.

Once I saw that structure, I couldn’t unsee it. And there’s something uncomfortably familiar about watching a similar process operate around Trump. Success demonstrates his strength. Failure means somebody undermined him. Legal consequences become persecution. An appalling statement becomes humour, exaggeration, negotiation or something taken out of context. When his character becomes impossible to square with Christianity, Cyrus arrives again. The explanations change, but the conclusion survives.

That’s the bit I keep coming back to. It isn’t simply that people support politicians I dislike. Of course they do. That’s democracy. Something more interesting happens when political support becomes part of identity, because changing your mind about the politician can start to feel uncomfortably like changing your mind about yourself.

That’s true in America, but Australia is hardly immune. One Nation’s renewed appeal draws on real failures, real frustrations and genuine political neglect. The moral question is what happens next. Do we follow those problems towards housing policy, taxation, infrastructure, stagnant services and the people who actually hold power? Or do we make them easier to understand by giving the frustration a face? 

The migrant. The Muslim. The foreigner. The person who arrived after you did.

That doesn’t make every One Nation voter a racist, nor does it make every concern about migration illegitimate. It does mean we should notice how easily legitimate resentment can be redirected away from power while still being sold as rebellion against it.

For Christianity, surely all of this should create some friction too. The central figure of the faith was executed by the state, spent much of his time among the poor, sick and excluded, warned repeatedly about wealth and pride, and reserved some of his harshest criticism for religious leaders obsessed with status, public righteousness and control.

I no longer believe Jesus was divine, and I’ve no interest in recruiting a first-century Jewish teacher into modern progressive politics. But surely the broad moral direction of the Gospels still creates a few awkward questions. A faith suspicious of wealth should experience some discomfort around the worship of billionaires. A faith concerned with strangers should have something meaningful to say about migrants beyond their administrative status. A religion whose founder told his followers to love their enemies should become suspicious when a political movement depends upon continually identifying new ones.

And a faith that calls itself pro-life should probably notice dead children. That seems a fairly low bar. I think this is where that old theological problem has changed for me. I left Christianity partly because I took its claims seriously enough to examine them. I was told truth mattered, so I investigated whether what I believed was true. I was told morality mattered, so I asked where morality came from. I was told God was good, so when university finally put that ancient question in front of me, I asked whether the world I could see was compatible with that goodness. Eventually I decided it wasn’t. But strangely, many of the moral demands survived the theology.

Alain de Botton gets somewhere close to this in Religion for Atheists. His argument, broadly speaking, is that rejecting religion’s supernatural claims doesn’t mean we have to chuck out everything religions have learned about morality, community, ritual, compassion or how human beings manage to live together. I think that’s close to what happened to me, although I didn’t have a theory for it at the time. I stopped believing in God. I didn’t suddenly stop believing cruelty was cruel. I just don’t believe morality requires God anymore, but I still think cruelty matters. Lying matters. Power should make us more suspicious of somebody’s character, not less. A frightened migrant, an Israeli child, a Palestinian child and an Iranian child all matter before we know their nationality, religion or usefulness to our politics.

Perhaps that’s the human version of the same question that I hadn’t quite understood before. We rarely decide, all at once, that cruelty is good. We make an exception because this situation is different, the stakes are higher, our side has no choice, the other side is worse, there’s a larger purpose. Then another exception becomes possible, and another. Each comes with an explanation, and eventually, like the proverbial frog in a saucepan, we can travel quite a long way without noticing how far we’ve moved.

If we claim to know what good is, and we claim to know what evil is, there has to be some point at which our principles cost us something. Otherwise I’m not sure they’re principles at all. They’re preferences we keep while they remain convenient.

I used to wonder how a good God could see evil and do nothing about it. These days I find myself wondering something closer to home: how people who believe in that God can look directly at what they once taught me to recognise as evil, and somehow find a way to call it good.

References

Lactantius, On the Anger of God, Chapter 13. The surviving text attributes the familiar argument concerning God, power, goodness and evil to Epicurus.

Henry Lawson, “The Duty of Australians”, The Land, 12 December 1924, p. 2.

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, 2012.