A Treatise Against Virtue Signaling

Last updated on: September 25, 2016 at 7:12 am by Anne Kennedy

A Treatise Against Virtue Signaling 2016-09-25T07:12:05-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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The most difficult thing in the world in the world, I often think, is to face the reality of evil head on. One of the reasons I struggle any longer to “enjoy” social media is that I can’t bear to watch videos and see pictures of the destruction and devastation of people, intermingled with the light and diverting. I scroll along, looking at funny memes and cat videos, and suddenly there are the eyes of a young girl who has been raped and ruined by brute and unfathomable evil. I not only recoil, I retreat into the placidity of a safe book, or a task that will get my mind off the image.

I often think that ancient Israel, right before it fell into captivity, didn’t have a good grasp of the deep roots and pervasive nature of evil. Economically, things weren’t so bad. The social structure and hierarchy were in place. The king was on his throne. The temple was going along in its corrupt quiet way. The poor were poor. The rich were rich. As far as any ordinary person was concerned, evil was something going on far away, or at the very least across the street.

Contrast the settled calm of the ordinary Israelite going about the daily grind with God’s overemotional, overwhelming indictment of his people. Try to read through Ezekiel 16 and not flinch. For one thing, the images, for me anyway, are too much. For another thing, if you think about the order and virtue of your own life, or the lives of people you know, you have to wonder whence cometh the anger. The people in Israel weren’t doing anything we would classify as That Evil. They were in the realm of ordinary bad idolatry. A little bit of child sacrifice, a little bit of cheating of the poor and widows and orphans, a little bit of making a buck where they could, a lot of not trusting in God for international treaties. I mean, they hadn’t engaged in the systematic slaughter of any one kind of people, and they weren’t Kim Jung Un. Why the emotion, God? Why the disappointment?

The answer to which, of course, is that I misspoke in the first line. It’s not evil in general that we have a hard time facing, it’s our own evil. It’s the idea that humanity is at a deep gut level really evil. Everyone. And just because the evil is restrained, or not that obvious, doesn’t mean it’s not there or that God can’t see it. At any point that you feel a righteous hot anger welling up in your throat over something that someone else has done, that’s not usually the same moment you stop and consider what You might have done. Because everything that you’ve done can’t be that bad compared to the weight of everybody else’s awfulness. It is really impossible to understand the strange idea that God is offended by the least sin, just as he is offended by the greatest. Your evil is enough to separate you from him forever, even if you don’t think it’s that bad.

The illusion that humanity is good, pretty good anyway, is the bedrock foundational starting point of all our human institutions and systems. We depend on the wide smooth roads, the well stocked groceries, the ease of reliable transportation, the plentiful electronic diversions. The absence of obvious violence in the grocery aisle must indicate that Things Are Fine. It cannot be that God might be very angry, that he might have, say, wrath fomenting against the small things, the things that not very many people can see. We go on. We go to work. We do what we gotta do. The wrath of a just and holy God is not registering in any of our Facebook feeds.

And yet, notice, as you read through that difficult chapter in Ezekiel (the 16th if you’ve already forgotten) that the anger is counterbalanced with patience, and love. The reason that God is so angry is because of love. He is eternally invested in the human project. He isn’t turning his back and chucking it, no matter the plentiful numbers of rejections he receives day by day. His investment in the human person is so profound that he absorbed the depth and height and breadth of our evil in himself on the cross. The bloodshed, the corruption, the pride, the selfishness–all of it he substantially and capably bears In himself.

If you come to him. If you look at yourself and admit that evil lies close at hand, not just across the world and across the street.

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