Reverend Curtis Webster, Reverend Jennifer Brooks, and Phil Zimbardo consider issues on the relationships between theology and social science. Read more about The Lucifer Effect Theology Blog.
fter receiving a sermon from a minister on the west coast and another from an east coast minister that they had delivered to their congregations around Memorial Day, I put them in touch with each other. Both sermons utilized some concepts in The Lucifer Effect to illustrate vital themes in religious scriptures. From that synchrony emerged the idea of sharing their views on the relationships between aspects of theology and social science in a blog format on this web site. Reverend Curtis Webster and Reverend Jennifer Brooks will start these dialogues, leading off with copies of those sermons, and then opening the venue to consider issues that they are dealing with, as well as responding to input from viewers of this site. Their brief bios follow the sermons. Our hope is to expand the range of theological perspectives presented here. We start with “Lucifer Goes to Church" and we invite input from all interested parties so that soon Lucifer can also go to Synagogue, Mosque, and Temple. - Phil Zimbardo
First off, I want to be perfectly clear on something . . .
Bernie Madoff got exactly what he deserved. We haven? yet printed a book too big to throw at him.
The point of this post is not to argue that Madoff is somehow not to be blamed for the wanton destruction he caused on other peoples?finances.
The point of this post is to underscore, once again, a massive breakdown in systemic safeguards and a massive retreat from reality by a whole bunch of people who should have known a whole lot better.
Randall W. Forsyth has laid out the various red flags that were ignored over the years by funds managers, investment advisors and even Madoff? own family in an article posted June 30 on barrons.com entitled ?adoff Is ?vil,?But Hardly Unique?(http://online.barrons.com/article/SB124632749654371491.html).
Forsyth, a veteran reporter who has been observing the Wall Street scene for close to thirty years, argues that ?he very idea that he [Madoff] acted alone utterly beggars belief.? Forsyth is not suggesting a criminal conspiracy with Madoff as the ringleader. He is arguing a tacit conspiracy of ignorance by the ?rofessionals?who were charged with preventing these kinds of financial rape-and-pillage sessions.
Forsyth characterizes the managers of the various feeder funds who kept Madoff supplied with capital as ?seful idiots who chose not to delve too deeply into Madoff? practices lest true due diligence might disturb the flow of hundreds of millions of fees they collected.?
There were some fund managers, though, who smelled something rotting in the Madoff empire a long time ago and refused to play along. According to Forsyth, James Hedges of LJH Global Investments stands out as one hero who refused to pony up billions of dollars of investors?money to feed Madoff? voracious appetite. ? have said over the years to many people: Do not touch Madoff with a barge pole,?Forsyth quotes Hedges as saying.
Forsyth? insights illuminate a sad reality that the proactive evil perpetrated by the Madoffs of the world cannot succeed without the cooperation of the passive evil of financial gatekeepers who elevate ignorance to an art form when confronted with the choice between competently discharging their professional responsibilities or making a ton of money.
We saw the Lucifer Effect at work in the financial markets with the mushrooming of derivatives trading and we see it again now in the muck left in the wake of the Madoff scandal.
Sometimes mass psychological dysfunction leads to genocide, sometimes it leads to oppression, and sometimes it leads to financial catastrophe.
Bernie Madoff? success at convincing intelligent and well-informed people to buy his snake oil points up a spiritual deficit in our culture that continues to imperil our national well-being. Tarring and feathering Madoff is a good start, but if we think we?e solved the problem because we?e ridden the rascal out of town on a rail, then we are tragically naive.
The Obama administration has rightfully proposed a series of new regulations in response to Madoff. They are but a start, however, in preventing future billion-dollar scams. It is only when we, as a culture, can summon up the moral fortitude displayed by James Hedges to resist the siren songs sung so convincingly by the billion-dollar scammers that we can begin to enjoy some measure of security from their predatory schemes.
Today we remember those who died in the service of ideals we cherish. We remember the fallen. We mourn what is lost. And on this day I wonder what lessons we might draw from our new understanding of the Lucifer Effect.
I will never forget my first walk through the Vietnam war memorial. The walkway slanted gently downward, inviting entry. As I descended, the wall rose around me, each step taking me deeper and deeper into the hall of the dead.
April 20, 1999.
On that date, two teenage boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Harris and Klebold were members of a group/gang called the Trench Coat Mafia. Embittered over years of bullying, the two went on a shooting rampage in which they targeted athletes, Christians, and African-Americans. They killed 12 students and a teacher, and injured 23 others before they turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide.
Harris and Klebold were such extremely disturbed loners that authorities should have seen it coming. It should be easier in the future to identify potential school shooters because of the profiles that could be developed from analyses of Harris and Klebold.
And that’s how it happened . . .
Or is it?
“I admit that I am responsible for the crimes, torture and execution at S-21.”
– From a prepared statement by Kang Kek Ieu, a.k.a. “Duch,” March 31, 2009.
Kang Kek Ieu, the born-again Christian who once ran the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture facility in Phnom Penh, came tantalizingly close to making one of the most dramatic gestures in the history of international war crimes tribunals last Tuesday as his trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal opened.
Duch, as he was called in his days of active duty with the Khmer Rouge, actually took a measure of responsibility for the thousands of brutally painful deaths inflicted at the Tuol Sleng S-21 facility.
He asked forgiveness for his actions. “I apologize to the survivors of the regime and also the loved ones of those who died brutally in the regime. I don’t ask that you forgive me now, but I hope you will later.”
Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”
-- John 2:15-16 (NRSV)
On Sunday, March 15, 2009, the Third Sunday of Lent, the Reverend Janelle Tibbetts-Vaughan, the incredibly talented and creative Associate Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Encino, California, delivered the best sermon on the above passage (and several surrounding verses) I have ever heard.
Janelle thoroughly analyzed the passage and concluded that Jesus was not angry over the simple fact that business was being transacted on the grounds of the Jerusalem Temple. No, Jesus was angry because the Jewish peasants who came faithfully to the Temple and attempted to practice their faith were being fleeced mercilessly by predatory merchants taking advantage of certain mandatory Temple rules that left the poor of Judea no choice but to be gouged before they made their sacrifices.
As I was listening to my colleague deliver her powerful message, I could not help but relate it to some headline events from the preceding week.
In Adam on Mars, I imagined humans living in a domed city that protected them from the harsh wilderness of a partially terraformed alien planet. Cut off from the civilization that produced their domed city, the inhabitants gradually lose the ability to do the right thing. One of them—Adam—makes a decision that cracks the dome and dooms the city.
The doctrine of “original sin” explains the suffering of humanity as the result of a taint that spreads from one man’s wrongful action. God tells Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree; Lucifer whispers; Adam disobeys; humanity is cast out of Eden. Acknowledging the innate human capacity for both good and evil, the Lucifer Effect offers a broader perspective on evil acts. Phil Zimbardo’s psychological experiments show the extraordinary power of situations to override “the better angels of our nature.”
What we’ve learned of Lucifer Effect challenges the idea of “original sin.” Free will means the capacity to choose good or evil. What would it have taken for Adam to make the right choice?
It’s almost too perfect.
On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S., Barack Obama takes the oath of office as America’s first black President.
The temptation to declare victory in the ages-old struggle against prejudice is strong. Inauguration Day 2009 is indeed a milestone, an event that few of us who are old enough to remember the civil rights struggles of the sixties and seventies ever expected to witness. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that the Obama presidency ushers in a new era of unprecedented equality?
Imagine a place like Mars: barren, dry, lifeless. But in the far future humans have learned to terraform planets—to make them like Earth. As the planet changes, its thin atmosphere gradually increasing, the first tentative plants taking root, humans live in a domed city safe from the harsh external world. Inside the dome they have everything they need: air, beautiful gardens, food, wildlife, lakes and streams.
But some catastrophe happens back on Earth, and the humans living in the domed city on the strange planet are cut off from humankind. Over time they lose the knowledge of how the domed city came to be. They carry out the tasks that support their environment without understanding what they do, simply following the rules that sustain their environment. As the years pass, the atmosphere outside the dome slowly grows supportive of human life—though it is still harsh and unwelcoming compared to the veritable Garden of Eden that is their city inside the dome.
Then one day a man (let’s call him Adam) decides to break one of the rules he does not understand. Like the first bite of an apple, his decision ruptures the curving wall of the dome. Was Lucifer whispering in his ear?
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians.
– Martin Luther
“On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543)
Seventy years ago, on November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi stormtroopers, along with mobs of civilian thugs, went on a rampage against Jews throughout Germany.
Nominally sparked by the assassination of German diplomat Ernest vom Rath by a 17 year-old Jew in Paris, Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”) marked what seemed at the time the culmination of a five year campaign by the Nazis to villify and persecute German Jews.
92 Jews were murdered. At least 200 synagogues were burned. Countless Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked. And, perhaps most ominously, something in the neighborhood of 30,000 Jews were rounded up and deported to concentration camps.
Jews who had prayed that Kristallnacht would mark the high tide of violent anti-Semitism in the Third Reich, though, were soon to be tragically disappointed. Kristallnacht was not an end to the violence, but merely a prelude to the full horror of the Holocaust. Kristallnacht was a turning point, but not an end point.
The behavior of too many on Wall Street is a violation of biblical ethics. The teachings of Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths condemn the greed, selfishness, and cheating that have been revealed in corporate behavior over decades now, and denounce their callous mistreatment of employees. Read your Bible.
– Jim Wallis, www.sojo.net/blog/godspolitics
September 18, 2008
Jim Wallis, the evangelical founder of Sojourners, has thusly summed up the theological implications of the recent capital market meltdown so eloquently that I hesitate to presume to add to the discussion.
With so many Americans believing that we live in a Christian nation, the disconnect between our economic practices and the Bible’s repetitive trumpeting of warnings against greed and economic injustice is truly astounding.
Beginning with the laws given to Moses by God right on up through the post-Resurrection preaching of Paul, Scripture consistently tells us that we must always be on the guard against greed and that we must always seek economic justice for all.
And yet, here we are again, suffering through another devastating economic catastrophe brought on by greed.
We can erect all of the regulatory schemes our imaginations can spawn and we can have politicians denouncing Wall Street from now until the next millenium, but until we learn to embrace the totality of Biblical teachings about economic morality as a part of our social fibre, we can expect to see this cycle repeated once every few decades.
These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation. They have caused great pains and have damaged the church’s witness. Victims should receive compassion and care and those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice.
-- Pope Benedict XVI, speaking in Sydney, Australia, on sexual abuse by priests.
“Where is forgiveness in all of this?”
I hesitated, not being quite sure at all how to answer that question.
The woman standing in front of me was an independent and successful professional. She hardly seemed a likely person to excuse male sexual misbehavior. Yet, there she was, arguing that her pastor, convicted in ecclesiastical proceedings of sexual misconduct with several female congregants, should be “forgiven” and allowed to continue in his pulpit.
“Perhaps he should be forgiven,” I replied, trying to avoid an overtly confrontational tone of voice. “But he has abused his authority and, until he can demonstrate that he has learned how to control his urges, he should not be allowed back into professional ministry.”
That was not the answer this woman apparently was hoping to hear. The conversation ended rather quickly at that point.
That exchange took place several years ago. In the intervening time, I have observed the effects of sexual misconduct on a number of different congregations. The only change I might make in my answer today would be to drop the possibility that any proven sexual predator could ever be allowed to return to parish ministry.
It was almost exactly a year ago that I sat in the living room of the man Vann Nath has described as “The Butcher of Tuol Sleng.” My interview with the former chief of guards at the Khmer Rouge interrogation and detention (read “torture”) center in Phnom Penh was an experience I’ll not soon forget. As I have written in earlier blogs, the hour I spent with the seemingly amiable Him Huy put me face-to-face with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and has haunted me ever since.
My interview with Him Huy was part of a larger agenda on a trip to Cambodia in quest of both perpetrators and survivors of the Khmer Rouge holocaust. There was an urgency to that trip, borne out of an understanding that the long-awaited Khmer Rouge Tribunal would likely be putting the surviving senior leaders of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea on trial for crimes against humanity before the end of 2007. Determined to provide a running commentary on the proceedings in this blog, I was attempting to prepare myself fully for my self-appointed role as a close observer of the Tribunal’s proceedings.
A year ago . . .
Nobody, it seems, can make documentaries quite like Ken Burns.
His recent series, “The War,” tells the story of America’s involvement in World War Two through the eyes of four American cities and towns, among them Mobile, Alabama.
When war broke out, Glenn Frazier, a 17 year-old infantryman from Mobile, was serving in the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur. In “The War,” Mr. Frazier admits that he had enlisted several months earlier with no thought of ever seeing combat, and that he had gone to the Philippines under the assumption that it would be a nice, safe duty station in the event that war did break out.
And Mr. Frazier had a good reason to do his best to avoid combat.
“I was raised in a real Christian family,” Mr. Frazier explains, “ and, as a result, killing was not part of my training, and that was a big hurdle for me to get over because I’d been taught not to kill.”
He goes on to describe the incident that pushed him over the edge and caused him to get past that particular doctrine.
After watching a Japanese plane bomb a hospital and then land a direct hit on a friend of his, Mr. Frazier had a turn of heart.
“When that Japanese Zero turned its wings right above the trees and started to fly away,” Mr. Frazier recalls, “I could see him with a smile on his face and at that point I had no trouble killing people. As a matter of fact I got to the point where I hunted them, and if I didn’t kill Japanese in a day I felt I didn’t do my job.”
In 1859 a young Swiss entrepreneur named Henri Dunant witnessed the battle of Solfertino, where the French and Italians were fighting to drive Austrians out of Italy. Three years later he published a book about the experience, A Memory of Solfertino.
Dunant's book tells about the bloody battle, but its focus is on the aftermath—the fruitless attempt to help the wounded and dying. The book concludes with a proposal that all nations form volunteer committees of non-combatants to help care for soldiers injured in battle.
Two years after A Memory of Solfertino was published, twelve nations met in Geneva to sign a treaty, the first “Geneva Convention.” They agreed to form national committees of the “Red Cross” and to respect the battlefield neutrality of Red Cross volunteers. It was the first step to a new way for the global community to think about war.
Today everyone knows about the International Red Cross. They go to places where terrible things have happened and they bring first aid, food, blankets. They stand between people and disaster; they hand out bottles of water and when they can they set up field kitchens so people can have a hot meal. In wartime they bring balm to the injured, make the wounded whole; and they visit prisoners held by opposing armies.
Today there are many additional Geneva Conventions. In addition to battlefield neutrality for armband-wearing volunteers, the newer Conventions lay out a plan for humane treatment of non-combatants and prisoners of war. The Red Cross has expanded from 12 nations to 181, and its symbol from the red cross to (in Arabic countries) a red crescent, and (in countries that wish to adopt neither cross nor crescent) a red crystal.
The current challenge for the International Red Cross is the detention of people who are not prisoners of war but persons named as unlawful enemy combatants. A 10-year-old Afghani boy named Esrarullah saw his father for the first time in 8 months—not in person, because families of detainees are not allowed to visit—but by an internet video conference arranged by the Red Cross. I cannot imagine how difficut it must have been for the Red Cross to arrange an internet video conferencing in Kabul, Afghanistan between a father detained at an American air base outside Kabul, when for months the authorities had allowed no contact.
The acts of genocide, which have no statute of limitations, mean any acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
* killing members of the group;
* causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* forcibly transferring children from one group to another group.
-- From Chapter I, Article 4 of the Law on the Establishment of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea.
The terms “Khmer Rouge” and “genocide” seem to fit together, hand in glove. For those not versed in the intricacies and subtleties of international law, the deaths of nearly two million people through governmentally sanctioned programs of extermination, abuse, overwork, and deliberate neglect obviously constitute genocide. If that isn’t genocide, one might understandably ask, then what is?
Well, as is so often true when dealing with the realities of the Khmer Rouge, the answer may not be quite that simple.
“Revolution’s victory over imperialism is not about inviting guests
to a dinner party,
not about writing a text, not about embroidering flowers,
not about having the right education, not about being soft,
not about being well-mannered and polite,
not about fearing the enemy;
the revolution is about seething with anger against one class,
about striking and destroying that class”
“We, the Communist Party,
follow the correct and clear-sighted line.”
“For the Angkar, there is no god, no ghosts,
no beliefs, no supernatural.”
Throughout the reign of the Khmer Rouge, a propaganda machine in Phnom Penh spewed out a lengthy series of official slogans that were then distributed to the general population through radio broadcasts and political education meetings held in local villages and labor camps.
Short and simple, the Khmer Rouge slogans were masterworks of ideological indoctrination. Although many sound clumsy when translated into English, they conveyed clear and unambiguous messages easily absorbed by the largely illiterate rural population that had been the base of the Khmer Rouge’s support from its earliest days.
French Cambodia-watcher Henri Locard has done a huge service to all who seek to understand the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by translating a large collection of these slogans and publishing them in “Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar” (2004: Silkworm Books).
To study Locard’s translations is to step into a nightmarish world ruled by black-and-white, either-or thinking. Angkar, the Khmer Rouge regime’s self-label, knows all and is perfect in its ideology and governance. Anyone who questions Angkar is an enemy, and enemies are everywhere. Eternal vigilance against enemies and tirelessly self-sacrificing devotion to Angkar are small prices to pay for the privilege of living in Cambodia’s collectivist paradise.
Samuel said to Saul: “The LORD sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
1 SAMUEL 15:1-3 (NRSV)
For Christians and Jews who stand in opposition to genocide and oppression, the verses quoted above from the First Book of Samuel in the Old Testament are something of an embarrassment. There’s just no way to interpret around it: God is commanding Saul, the first king of Israel, to commit genocide upon a people known as the Amalekites.
And this passage is not unique in the Old Testament. God repeatedly commands the Israelites to wipe out one indigenous people or another on the way to a complete conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land.
To lay such verses such as these alongside Jesus’ teachings on love and forgiveness is to engage in an exercise of theological dissonance. And, the Old Testament itself also contains passages that proclaim a more universal vision of humanity in which war has no place. At Isaiah 66:18-19a, for example, God declares: “For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and see my glory, and I will set a sign among them.”
How can God seemingly countenance genocide in one place and then command love, forgiveness, and forbearance in another?
The story of Daniel in the lion’s den is the perfect Sunday School thriller. There is the good guy, the hero, Daniel; the bad guy, the Evil King of Babylonia, Darius, who orders Daniel thrown among the lions simply for practicing his faith; and the lions, scary and dangerous, who mysteriously do no harm to Daniel.
Children come away from this story, no doubt, impressed with the idea that if they, too, faithfully honor their religious teachings, they will be protected from danger.
That lesson is actually not the real story, the truth of the story.
The real story of Daniel is far more nuanced than the Sunday School moral lesson, and as a result it tells us much more about good and evil, and how we figure out which is which. The truth of Daniel's story involves the Lucifer Effect.
Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign; he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, just as Jehoiakim had done. Indeed, Jerusalem and Judah so angered the LORD that he expelled them from his presence.
-- 2 Kings 24:18-20 (NRSV)
Now here’s a passage that doesn’t get much play in your average Sunday School curriculum. I’ve not heard a sermon preached on this passage and I doubt seriously that I myself will ever preach such a sermon.
In the Biblical books of 1 and 2 Kings, there are many such passages. King after king after king ascends to the throne only to prove himself to be unworthy by practicing evil (which usually entailed the worship of a polytheistic phalanx of ancient Canaanite gods). After the death of the legendary King Solomon we see only a handful of faithful and competent kings. The vast majority, according to the Bible, are scoundrels and weaklings.
This long sad tale of monarchical sloth eventually culminates a few hundred years later in the seizure and sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army and the exile of Jerusalem’s best and brightest to Babylon. Indeed, the miserable Zedekiah’s faithlessness appears to have been the last straw that broke the camel’s back of divine patience. Zedekiah’s last royal act is an ignominious flight from a burning Jerusalem, climaxing in the capture of Zedekiah’s entourage, the painful death of Zedekiah’s sons, and the gouging out of Zedekiah’s eyes.
Thirty years ago, Nhem En worked as a cog in a machine of evil.
Assigned to the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh, Nhem En stood at the center of the firestorm of torture, brutality, and murder that swept over Cambodia in the late Seventies.
What exactly did Nhem En do at Tuol Sleng? Was he an interrogator, inflicting unspeakable torture? Was he a guard, imposing severe punishment for minor infractions of arbitrary rules? Was he an executioner, bashing in the skulls of those condemned without trial or evidence?
Nhem En played none of these roles.
Nhem En was a photographer. He took pictures.
Nhem En’s photos are on display at the museum that now occupies the Tuol Sleng facility. Each is a black-and-white of a face, essentially a mug shot. In the case of mothers with children, there are multiple faces.
As each new truckload of recent detainees arrived, Nhem En and the photographers whom he supervised would set up their cameras at Tuol Sleng’s intake building. Before being delivered to holding cells that were little better than human kennels, each prisoner had his or her picture taken. By the time Phnom Penh fell to the Vietnamese in January 1979, thousands of these photos had been taken.
Today, these photos constitute powerful physical evidence of the horrors that the Khmer Rouge inflicted upon fellow Cambodians.
fter receiving a sermon from a minister on the west coast and another from an east coast minister that they had delivered to their congregations around Memorial Day, I put them in touch with each other. Both sermons utilized some concepts in The Lucifer Effect to illustrate vital themes in religious scriptures. From that synchrony emerged the idea of sharing their views on the relationships between aspects of theology and social science in a blog format on this web site. Reverend Curtis Webster and Reverend Jennifer Brooks will start these dialogues, leading off with copies of those sermons, and then opening the venue to consider issues that they are dealing with, as well as responding to input from viewers of this site. Their brief bios follow the sermons. Our hope is to expand the range of theological perspectives presented here. We start with “Lucifer Goes to Church" and we invite input from all interested parties so that soon Lucifer can also go to Synagogue, Mosque, and Temple.
