The Question: What is Evil?

When is the last time you heard a sermon in a mainline church on the topic of Satan or evil? Have we forgotten how to talk about it? Or are we afraid to try?

I’ve been writing quite a bit recently on Christian first principles, and this essay continues in that vein, and considers the question of evil and the existence of Satan—two subjects that I suspect most mainline Christian readers will not have heard discussed very often or very robustly at church recently.

First, a bit of autobiography. There was a significant period in my life (college, seminary, early days of priesthood) when I oscillated between thinking there was some being in the universe somewhere that we could point to and call “Satan,” to being rather unconvinced. I never denied the reality of sin and evil, of course. There’s ample evidence of that. But Satan? Maybe; maybe not.

Part of the reason for this was the result of the ways in which we have mythologized Satan. Most Christians derive more of their understanding of Satan and Hell from Dante’s Divine Comedy than they do from Scripture—whether they realize it or not. In the same way, my evangelical upbringing spoke freely and often of Satan and “Satanic” activities—like reading or watching Harry Potter books and movies. I rejected what people said about Satan, and it wasn’t a long journey from there to rejecting the idea of Satan entirely.

In the years since that time, however, I have become increasingly convinced of not only the existence of a being we call “Satan,” but also of his active, powerful work against Christ and His Church. Why this change? To be honest, observing human behavior. I tell folks who question the doctrine of total depravity that all they have to do to be assured of its validity is to work the night shift as the triage nurse at the local ER on Halloween. G.K. Chesterton once quipped that total depravity is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically proved.

My colleague The Rev. Dr. Gabrielle Thomas, who teaches early Christianity and Anglican Studies at Emory University, has written a compelling piece on the function of Satan in the thought of the Cappadocian Fathers of the 4th century, which is enlightening. She also has a forthcoming book on the subject, which is in my Christmas wish list already! She puts to rest the simplistic notion that evil is only and always the result of this supernatural figure called Satan and instead contends that Satan is a “third force” in the schema of evil: the original sin problem, the sins of commission and omission problem, and then the Satan problem, which may be analogous to what Paul calls “powers and principalities.” More can and should be said on this point, but we’ll leave it here for today.

Returning to our current moment in history and culture, when the metaphysical reality underpinning Christianity begins to evaporate, and is replaced with a kind of sentimental or perhaps Epicurean materialism,¹ the idea of a force called “evil,” or the existence of a non-human, quasi-eternal being called “Satan” is unsustainable. What takes its place? When we can’t talk about evil conceptually, we often try and talk about it clinically. Take that and couple it with our culture’s unhealthy and inaccurate understanding of “mental illness,” and some pretty disastrous things begin to happen.

A couple of months ago, South Carolina marked the dark, tragic tenth anniversary of the shooting at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston. In the weeks and months that followed that tragedy, many people raised questions about the mental capacity of Dylan Storm Roof, the man who murdered nine people gathered for Bible study on that fateful day. There is a well-meaning assumption that no one in their right mind could do such a monstrous thing. However, except in pretty rare circumstances, the data is overwhelming: horrific crimes are almost always perpetrated by people who know exactly what they’re doing. In Roof’s case, while one evaluator determined the existence of both a personality disorder and psychosis, it was determined that his mental capacity did not inhibit his ability to differentiate between right and wrong at the time of the offense, or to aid in his defense—both of which are general standards for assessing competency (or, in some states, capacity) to stand trial.

We throw around cultural buzzwords like “psychopathy” and “sociopathy” a lot, which only muddies the waters. “Sociopathy,” for example, is not a diagnosis at all according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), and “psychopathy” is not a stand-alone diagnosis, but rather as a diagnostic “trait” or “feature” that can exist within a larger diagnosis of a personality disorder—usually, but not always Antisocial Personality Disorder. I’m not a mental health professional, so I don’t want to get too far out over my skis. The point is this: people who are mentally ill are far more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the perpetrator. Likewise, mental illness or the existence of a mental health diagnosis does not automatically mean that a perpetrator did not know what they were doing, or that it was wrong, immoral, or against the law.

Let’s zoom out a bit and consider notoriously monstrous people such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or even Vladimir Putin. Taken together, these three men are responsible for the mass extermination of upwards of 20 million innocent men, women, and children. However, no serious effort has been made to raise suspicion about their sanity. There’s a kind of logical incongruity to it, isn’t there? The mass slaughter of millions can surely only be perpetrated by a madman. To even conceive of doing such a thing is the definition of insanity. And yet, the truth is that these atrocities were perpetrated by men who were (and are, in the case of Putin) as lucid and conscious of their actions as you and me. Although we try and “clinicalize” evil and make it into a diagnosis, the evidence doesn’t support that move, and there are some pretty disastrous consequences if we wander too far down that road—not least of which is risking excusing or absolving evil, immoral behavior as something other than what it is. What is the old line from Solzhenitsyn’s classic book, The Gulag Archipelago? “To do evil a human must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.”

Returning to the idea of materialism, which is the dominant cultural framework of the 21st century Western world, it seems to me that materialism is missing a category (well, many categories, but one in particular). How do we account for evil? How do we speak about it intelligibly? A priest is caught attempting to solicit sex from a fourteen-year-old; a well-known politician is caught with shockingly grotesque images of child sexual abuse on his computer; a nurse quietly poisons dozens of babies over a period of years at a local hospital. These aren’t just things that happen—matter moving about and modifying itself—no, these things are evil pure and simple. They transcend this plane of existence and bring us into terrifying proximity with what the first letter of Peter refers to: “Discipline yourselves; keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour…” (1 Peter 5:8) or what Paul referred to as “powers and principalities…” (Ephesians 6:12)

Another way to ponder this question is to consider that evil may be the exception that proves the rule. Oscar Wilde said it well in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.” Our inability to account for or properly categorize evil proves that our accounting and categorizing is insufficient. There must be something more!

C.S. Lewis once wrote that the one essential doctrine of Christianity that he would most like to disavow is the doctrine that Hell is real, and that it is (at least for some period of time) populated.² Most people I know, of course, don’t want people to go to Hell (despite what they may shout when frustrated in rush-hour traffic!), and Jesus is resolutely clear that any wish or desire or sentence or pronouncement on any individual’s damnation is itself sinful. A Christian cannot wish damnation on anyone; rather, we must hope for salvation for everyone!

That is, however, not the same thing as saying to someone who is leading a notoriously sinful life, “If you keep going down this road; if you keep turning away from Christ and the Church, then in all likelihood, you’re not going to like where you end up.” To paraphrase Lewis again, when all is said and done, either we say to God, “Thy will be done,” or God says to us, “Thy will be done.” The Church must retain the moral clarity to speak up and say, “killing children is evil.” “Letting children starve is evil.” “Burning food stocks rather than sending it to those who need it is evil.” “Your soul is in peril if you do these things.”

I fear that many well-meaning pastors are anxious about making such statements because they worry that a clear-eyed moral statement will be seen through a political lens. This is where false moral equivalencies make me want to walk into the ocean. Being against Palestinian babies starving and dying doesn’t mean I support Hamas, or approve of what happened on October 7. Likewise, being against the mistreatment of people who are undocumented has nothing whatsoever to do with my support or lack thereof of the President of the United States writ large. I don’t make these decisions because I am a member of one political party or another (I’m actually not a member of any political party), I make these decisions because I’m a Christian, and Christians have to be against starving innocents everywhere and inhumane treatment of the vulnerable everywhere.

At the risk of bias, I don’t think we can lay the blame squarely at the feet of pastors. Culturally speaking, most Americans are somewhere on a sliding scale between being de facto Epicurean materialists (those who seek the “good life” and value happiness above all else) and de facto Hedonistic materialists (those who seek pleasure above all else). I am persuaded that neither of these metaphysical or philosophical frameworks can fit within a faithful Christian life. But that doesn’t keep folks from trying anyway!

To be honest, I’m not firmly doctrinally committed in one direction or another as to the origin of Satan in particular, and frankly, I’m not sure Danté’s version is that far from the squints and and whispers of Scripture. The question of what Christians mean by “evil” is, however, much clearer. A simile, though imperfect, may prove instructive here. Evil is the source of sin in the same way as uranium is the source of radiation. Another way to think of it is that sin is a matter of choice, and evil is a force at work in creation, which has bearing on our choices.

It’s easy to get caught up in the semantics of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve—and particularly the bit about eating the forbidden fruit and thereby dooming all of creation with the burden of original sin. But a closer reading reveals some powerful insights. Walter Brueggemann, of blessed memory, picks up on an insight from our Patristic Fathers in observing that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is the first character in Scripture to speak about God, rather than with God. (Brueggemann quips that this might qualify the serpent as the first theologian, but I digress.) You know the rest of the story: serpent deceives, man and woman eat, there’s a whole thing about nakedness (in the South, we might say they were nekked), et cetera. The point is this: evil is born when we turn away (however slightly) from God. Sin results in the subsequent choices we make (or don’t make) as a result of our turning away.

But let’s be honest: if the goal is “the good life” or “pleasure” or “happiness,” who wants to hear about evil and Satan, anyway? The only problem is: just because we don’t talk about them doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. In fact, the less we talk about them, the more prone we become to falling prey to complacency, apathy, and avoidance—each its own millstone fitted for our necks.

1. I’m defining materialism here as the belief that the only thing that exists are matter, and that reality is constituted by matter’s movements and modifications.

2. See C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.