Meeting The Powers And Structures Of Evil

April 1, 1984
Lakeland

April 22, 1984
Port Charlotte

Sources Of The Living Tradition – II

Meeting The Powers And Structures Of Evil

“The living tradition we share draws from words and deeds of prophetic men and women which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” In speaking of this part of our living tradition, it is necessary to define the limits of the subject.

I would have you think on a definition of evil; how this evil seems to become part of institutions whose power has few limitations; then suggest that in frustration or compensation, people respond to imaginary or legendary heroes who successfully won out over the establishment.

Also I will point to the execution of Jesus as history’s most vivid example of both corrupt power and misplaced blame. But there is always hope because prophetic men and women have confronted the structures of power with justice, compassion, and hope. That the human venture will prevail – Passover, Easter – the awakening of earth – blossom, bird – is analogous to the re-awakening of the human....

Evil is that which is corrupt, unsound, malevolent, transgresses on human rights, injures persons deliberately. Evil is the perversion of good.

By the powers and structure of evil is meant those institutions, whether public or private, which violate or are callous to the men and women and children the institutions presumably were organized to serve. These institutional powers and structures would include religion, government, and other organized power structures. Many times the evil is not deliberate malevolence, but the stagnancy of a self-serving bureaucracy.

Thus the matter of individual evil is not the subject today – not the lone burglar, the individual mugger, the car thief, the shoplifter or the killer who murders in a flash of passion.

Consider how institutions decay, forget the ideals which gave them birth, are corrupted by the power that comes into their hands. Look at almost any entrenched institution – church, government, whatever, and compare their deeds to the high cause with which they began. Franz Kafka wrote, “every revolution evaporates, leaving behind the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

Even our own government, noblest in principle than any other, is a source of frustration for many. But just say, “You can’t fight city hall” and usually there will be nods of agreement. We become increasingly cynical about campaign promises. Frequently, we have had the hunch (and sometimes the evidence) that the winner has greater obligations to those who were the principal funders of the grotesquely expensive campaign, and much less obligation to the voters who elected the official. Ambrose Bierce, with his cynical humor, defined the political conservative and liberal: “A conservative is a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” President Woodrow Wilson observed, sadly, that the “United States is governed by the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Congress.” Our nation is the best on earth, but it is subject to the same corruption, real and potential, that afflicts all giant institutions.

A month or so ago, I had occasion to send a mailing which cost 88 cents. The clerk sold me stamps in the denomination of 50¢, 25¢, and 13¢. [There were] pictures on the stamps:

The 50¢ stamp had a lamp with the words, “America’s light sustained by love of liberty.”
The 25¢ stamp had a picture of Frederick Douglass.
The 13¢ stamp had a picture of Chief Crazy Horse.

That combination of stamps was a parable for me. “America’s light sustained by love of liberty.” But we confiscated the lands of Crazy Horse and his people, and made war on them. Frederick Douglass was born a slave, escaped to freedom, and was one of those who struggled valiantly for emancipation. For almost 200 years, our nation tolerated slavery. That combination of postage stamps suggested to me that we must not only have noble words, but [we must] be more persistent in living up to them.

We are aware how the accretion of power transformed the religion of Jesus into a hierarchical monopoly which encouraged and approved execution of heretics, the torturing Inquisition, the brutal Crusades, and internal decay. Nor did the Protestant Reformation alter [any of] that much. Luther turned power over [to] the princes, who dictated the religion in their territories and in the cruel wars which devastated Europe.

I came across a story which treats, perhaps too lightly, this problem of the power of institutions:

When a foreign visitor was introduced to the structure of Christianity, he was intrigued by the variety of offices within the Church.

“The deacons are the servants of the people,” said the guide.
“Yes, but who are the Bishops?”
“Oh,” said the guide, “they are servants of the servants of the people.”
“Ah, but who are the people?”
The guide quickly replied, “They’re the ones with servant problems.” (quoted from CONTEXT)

Throughout the centuries and today, people, perhaps because they are disheartened or do not have the courage and the energy to “fight City Hall,” have taken comfort in the anti-establishment heroes.

Think of the legends of Robin Hood, who stole from the rich to give to the poor. Sir Walter Scott, in the novel Ivanhoe, made Robin Hood the anti-establishment hero who thwarted the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. Such popularity is not limited to Robin Hood. It’s not much of a jump to the Lone Ranger or Mike Hammer.

A recent feature story describes the popularity of heroes who buck the establishment. I made a point to look at an episode of one of the most popular, The A-Team. The heroes are all mavericks, outlaws, AWOL soldiers, one a mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran who is sprung from a mental hospital because his flying skills are needed. The heroes are in violent conflicts with the army and the police. Of course, they emerge victorious at the end of the episode.

A TV producer commented, “That’s exactly the appeal (of the maverick enforcers). This type is very deeply rooted in this culture in the idea that the individual is not powerless.” (USA Today 3/22/84) Another commented, “Individual determination is supplementing and replacing the institutions we grew up relying on.”

But other than being social tranquilizers, the fantasy heroes are no help when confronted with realities of institutional decay and irrelevance.

In this season of Easter for Christians, consider Jesus as the victim of corrupt institutional power. Throughout the Christian centuries, the Jewish people have been scapegoated for the execution of the Jewish prophet. Who crucified Christ? “The Jews” - and that answer brought on the cruelties, persecutions, extermination. As recent studies make plain, the proper question was not “Who killed Jesus?” but “WHAT killed Jesus?”

From the time of Herod, the High Priest was appointed by the ruler. This was in direct violation of the Jewish tradition which called for the High Priest to be of the House of Zadok. Caiaphas was confirmed in his office as High Priest by Pilate. Pilate’s job as procurator was to keep down any uprising of the rebellious Jews. Josephus writes in detail about the High Priest being under the control of the Roman ruler or procurator. The Sanhedrin was a council, not a religious body; they made no religious decisions. It functioned as an adjunct to political authority. They were collaborators and the quislings of their day.

The Sanhedrin watched carefully for agitators who might spark rebellion. Particularly feared were charismatic preachers, such as John the Baptist, whom Herod executed. Josephus tells us of others who were executed, such as Judas of Galilee and Theodas. It was not that these magnetic, god-filled prophets were always preaching rebellion against Rome. Jesus taught of the Kingdom of God. But the fact that these prophets drew crowds was enough. A crowd could be incited into rebellion. Get at the cause and eliminate the prophets – that was the Roman policy, using the obedient collaborator Caiaphas.

Ellis Rivkin (WHAT CRUCIFIED JESUS, p, 117), “For it emerges with great clarity, both from Josephus and the Gospels, that the culprit is not the Jews but the Roman Imperial system,” What crucified Jesus? An institution of power and repression which squelched every hint of uprising.

The story of humankind would be sorrowful and hopeless if that’s all that could be said. We might fully agree with Mark Twain who wrote, “such is the human race. Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party didn’t miss the boat.” But powerful empires like Rome did not endure forever. The Vandals, Goths, and Huns came plundering from the German forests.... Livy, Roman historian, writing of the past glories and decline of his time, [noted,] “our defects are unendurable and so are their cures.” (Grant, HISTORY OF ROME, p. 272).

Always, “there have been prophetic men and women (who confronted) the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” The list is long – Amos, the Old Testament prophet who confronted dishonest, greedy merchants and other selfish rich. Francis of Assisi. Servetus, physician and anti-Trinitarian. The stellar group of our nation’s founding – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Monroe. Florence Nightingale, who confronted the disgraceful ways the war-wounded were treated and almost single-handedly made the British Empire regard the soldier as a person and not just cannon-fodder (and she transformed the nursing profession to a calling of competence, honor, and dignity). Gandhi confronted the powerful Empire and secured India’s independence with his persistence to the values of compassion, love, and non-violence. The list is long, and that roll of honor will not be completed while the human spirit recognizes what is, compared to what could be.

Before the consolidation of Unitarians and Universalists, the Universalists in their 1935 Washington Declaration affirmed “We avow our faith in the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.” Today we affirm it differently ... but the continuing intent remains strong. Henry David Thoreau, with his sensitivity to the lessons of nature, made the same point another way: “As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so one would say where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length, blows it down.”

So with power institutions that become corrupt in the effort to perpetuate themselves, the truth at length blows it down. ....

Most persons are better than the institutions of which they are a part. But I have quoted many times, “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Frustration with the inertial drag of institutions sometimes causes people to forsake their occupations and return to the land, seek a self-survival existence apart from the institutions they deplore, adapt anarchistic attitudes, cynically refuse to vote.

However attractive these options seem, they are essentially cop-outs. Institutions are changed not by running away from them, but by confronting their power. Thomas Paine was jailed by the leaders of the French Revolution when he forthrightly condemned those leaders for their abuse of power which led to the Reign of Terror. The guillotine worked ceaselessly in the name of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But the voices of Paine and Lafayette were unheeded, and the corrupt power of the Directory led to the corrupt power of Napoleon.

There is a story from the Talmud which is an affirmation of hope: the legend of the thirty-six just men. “The rabbis taught that if the thirty-six just men did not exist, mankind couldn’t last a day, it would drown of its own wrongs. The thirty-six are not marked out by any rank or office. They cannot be recognized. They never yield their secret, perhaps they are not even aware of it themselves. Yet it is they, who, in every successive generation justify our existence, and who every day save the world anew.”

If the world is to be saved anew it will be by just, compassionate men and women. One of them, Sojourner Truth, fits that heroic mold. Sojourner Truth was a slave woman who could neither read nor write, but never gave up the struggle against slavery and the discriminatory treatment of women.

“Once a heckler told Sojourner he cared no more for her anti-slavery talk than a fleabite. ‘Maybe not,’ was her answer, ‘but the Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.’” Marian Wright Edelman, who told that anecdote in a college commencement speech, is president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a lawyer, and long-time civil rights activist. She went on telling the Sojourner Truth story, “The Lord willing today, we should keep those who turn their backs on the social ‘outcasts’ of our society, and who would threaten world peace, scratching. Enough fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog – biggest community institutions or government – mighty uncomfortable. If they flick some of us off and others keep coming back, we will begin to get the needs of our children and the poor heard, and oil the creaks of our institutions that many say no longer work....”