Are there any bad people?
Photograph by AbsolutVision via Unsplash
Jim Huffman
Often, these days, I totter on the edge of John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond, wondering, as he put it in “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” how to escape the “fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all . . . get together and settle in this place.”[i]
Reading the newspaper each morning, I find my feet stuck in the mud and my brain reeling from the stench. Iniquity abounds. There is no escape. I worry about where my nation — my world — is heading. And I struggle to keep from labeling people I distrust as evil.
On a few mornings, however, I am taken back six decades to a classroom on the shores of Lake Michigan where Curtis MacDougall, a teacher of editorial writing, sent my mind in redemptive new directions.
No professor ever maddened me more than he did. I found him outrageously liberal, both politically and religiously. He was dogmatic. He tossed out wild ideas. Some days he exhausted me; others he intimidated me. But he never let me stop thinking.
He was the one who brought me to an understanding that in a genuine democracy, government is not “Them” but “Me”: I am the government I critique. That insight transformed me, but it paled beside another idea with which he and my fellow students challenged me.
Most of my seminar peers were secular liberals who relished tearing apart conservatives, my kind of people. I loved God; I loved America; I believed in capitalism, hard work, and self-sufficiency. And I suspected that liberals were not just wrong but bad people, ideologues out to undermine America by giving handouts to the loafers and the lazy.
During MacDougall’s class one day, I had a revelation. It dawned on me that my classmates had the same thoughts about conservatives. We were not just wrong; we were bad people, selfish ideologues determined to enrich ourselves through capitalism, I was stunned: they didn’t just disagree with me; they considered my way of thinking selfish and evil.
Wow!
I knew that my conservative friends were good people. I knew it because I knew them. And my classmates knew their liberal friends were good people — because they knew them.
So there it was, a truth powerful enough to set me free. People on both sides surely were right in knowing their own kind to be good human beings. Maybe I should trust the hearts, even the integrity, of liberals whose ideas I still believed to be wrong, and maybe they should trust the souls of conservatives. Maybe we were indeed all members of God’s family.
I do not have to accept everyone’s political or religious positions. I may see their policies as evil. But I must accept the God-given, God-enfolded humanity of every person.
Over the years I have taken this revelation further. Believer, agnostic, pro-choice, anti-choice, confused, clear-headed, Assemblies of God, Unitarian, even supporters of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance: I do not have to accept their political or religious positions. I may see their policies as evil. But I must accept their God-given, God-enfolded humanity.
Talk about getting a glimpse of the Beloved Community! Talk about implications for my daily life! And talk about complicating things in a period when, now a progressive, I feel alienated from so much of my society.
Is there any possible way to follow Jesus’ command to “judge not” in a time when every day brings news that makes me feel judgmental?
That question takes me even further back, to a Sunday morning riding to church in my grandpa’s green panel truck, seated on covered melon crates — arguing with my cousins about what it meant to hate the sin and love the sinner.
My cousin blurted out, “I may have to love her soul, but I sure don’t like her!”
His outburst was not very loving, but my time in MacDougall’s classroom convinces me he was onto something fundamental.
I believe with all my heart that policies designed to impoverish people of color are evil; so are efforts to deny immigrants a path to citizenship and to round them up in ICE raids. The killing of 67,000 Palestinians infuriates me. Does God not say, “I will not listen” to the prayers of people who have no compassion for the oppressed (Isaiah 1:15)?
But I believe just as strongly that I dare not hate the people who come up with those policies.
I may detest the words of a sister or brother who advocates white Christian nationalism, but I must — I must — love that sibling as a child of God.
I may demonstrate against an ICE agent who apprehends a child on her way to school, then sprays tear gas on the crowd gathered to protest, but it is not up to me to think I know the heart of that agent.
This conviction makes life complicated. It often confuses me. It burdens me with a sense of guilt when I find myself unable to follow it. Sometimes it makes me feel like a hypocrite for trying to love people whose actions upset me.
I know, however, that Jesus told me to love even my enemy. I also know that when I demean people rather than policies or programs, I am less capable of reasoning with those people and effecting real change.
This is a hard path, a narrow road, almost an impossible one on many days, but it is the only road I know to the beloved community. Or to being God’s effective agent on earth.
Jim Huffman spent his career teaching East Asian history at Wittenberg University, then moved to Chicago. Since retirement, he has been a board member of Chicago Area Peace Action and a member of Lake Street Church in Evanston, Illinois.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1933, p. 16.
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