Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
History and Religion
Are We All Vladimir Putin?

Are We All Vladimir Putin?

Last updated on: August 31, 2022 at 2:47 pm by Anthony Costello

Are We All Vladimir Putin? 2022-08-31T14:47:41-07:00 Anthony Costello

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

During major human tragedies I often look at local news stories. Right now the world’s attention is focused on the atrocities in the Ukraine. This focus is entirely justified. Our horror at the human devastation and our righteous indignation at Vladimir Putin is not misplaced. However, in moments like these, one must also realize that similar atrocities are occurring all around us, every day.

Atrocities like this one and this one are no less evil, no less malevolent and no less bizarre than Putin’s unprovoked attack on Russia’s neighbor. In fact, they are in some ways worse, as one stumbles in the darkness trying to find any justifying reason for them at all. At least Putin has some semblance of a geo-political argument for his terrorizing of the Ukraine, even if it is a bad one. These other atrocities seem truly mindless.

But what does this show? Why compare the acts of a Wisconsin woman and some 12-year old girls in Indiana to those of someone who now appears to be one of history’s great tyrants?

We All Come Auschwitz Enabled

My old professor at seminary used to say in his class on the problem of evil: “we all come Auschwitz enabled.” A truer statement could not be made. Of course what Dr. Jones (not “Indiana,” but “California”) was referencing in that pithy phrase was the foundational theological doctrine of original sin. One of the books assigned in the class was Christopher Browning’s harrowing account of the German 101st Reserve Police Battalion, Ordinary Men. In the book, Browning details the history of a group of very ordinary men from Hamburg who became one of the most efficient Jewish killing teams in Eastern Europe.

In the Afterword to the account, Browning presents a series of possible explanations for such cruelty: 1) that by the time Hitler rose to power an ideology of radical anti-semitism was already firmly embedded in the collective German psyche (Daniel Goldhagen’s thesis), 2) that anti-semitism and the final solution were only tangentially related to a more fundamental German need for self-determination and national pride, 3) that the humiliation and total degradation of Jews was psychologically necessary to carry out the functional, yet gruesome, task of killing people, and 4) social-psychological theories about the submission to authority (see Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments).

Ultimately Browning, in contrast to Goldhagen who sees anti-semitism as monocausal for the atrocities of Nazi Germany, opts for a multi-causal explanation for how such ordinary men could do such extraordinary evil. For Browning, the social scientist writing for a secular audience, ideological motivations, peer pressure, deference to authority and the “intensifying effects of war and racism” (216) all lend to the overall explanatory thesis. Given this analysis, at the end of the book, the author makes an incisive and unsettling statement:

In short, the fundamental problem is not to explain why ordinary Germans, as members of a people utterly different from us and shaped by a culture that permitted them to think and act in no other way than to want to be genocidal executioners, eagerly killed Jews when the opportunity [was] offered. The fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men–shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions–under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history.

Browning, 222 [emphasis added]

In other words, there is nothing unique about 1920’s Germans that compelled them to do what they did. And so too is there nothing unique about 2020’s Russians compelling them to do what they are doing now. There are multi-causal factors for such actions, to be sure. But clearly ideological motivations, peer pressure, deference to authority and desensitization to violence are themselves only features of something far more fundamental to human beings.

After all, all cultures share in these psycho-social features. But certainly having these features doesn’t necessitate such barbarism. We can easily imagine, at least, benevolent ideologies, positive peer pressure (like the kind we see on an athletic field), appropriate deference to relevant authorities (children to parents) and a reasonable desensitization to violence (not having a nervous breakdown at the sight of a cut finger). There must be something else, something that underlies these social and psychological features that they only exacerbate.

Moreover, as the local cases I referenced above prove, cruelty is by no means limited to men. Apparently 12-year old Indiana girls can be as cruel and unusual as ex-KGB agents and Nazi executioners.

Describing Evil

According to Daniel Goldhagen, it was anti-semitic ideology that made all Germans “of one mind” with Hitler. Browning shows, however, that that cannot be the only explanation for the barbarity of the Holocaust. There were Germans who were not ideological at all, yet still maimed, tortured and killed (just like the mid-American, public school educated preteens referenced above). These Germans did not care about the ethnicity of their victims. Perhaps they did just kill out of peer pressure or as deference to what they saw as their highest authority (which raises another theological problem).

Perhaps.

Or perhaps there was something more innate in them, something a bit more central to them in virtue of their just being human that is the source of maiming, torture and abject cruelty? If there is something beneath the social and psychological features, this would explain why we see the same tendencies in 12-year old Indiana girls, as well as the Wisconsin woman who recently beheaded and dismembered her boyfriend, as their German and Russian counterparts. Is there a property, a capacity, common to all human creatures that not only can be activated under extreme circumstance (like an Eastern front during WWII), but also that just desires to express itself even when circumstance are “normal” (like in Logansport, Indiana).

One of the noticeable features in the numerous testimonies of the reserve police officers that Browning reviewed for his book, was their inability to speak of the atrocities they witnessed or committed in moral terms. In several of the testimonies men designated to kill Jewish prisoners spoke of not having “the nerves” to do so. Or, if they did shoot a Jew, and then felt bad about it later, they spoke not of moral guilt, but of “weak nerves.”

Instead of speaking about their actions in terms of guilt and shame or good and evil, they only spoke of them in physical, almost medical, terms. After a day of killing, these “weaker” Germans felt sick or nauseas. They had a Nervenzusammenbruck, or what we would call a “nervous breakdown.” This is a very typical German phrase, still frequently used today as a replacement for more traditional terms like Schuld or Sünde, terms too freighted with theological meaning for most postmodern Westerners.

But this reduction of evil down to medical malfunctions is rife in our own society. When children torture other children we can expect some psychological or neuro-scientific explanation, instead of a moral and metaphysical one. The loss of our theological categories has made our language simply inadequate to describe what we actually witness.

And so we are at a loss to come to grips with things like the intentional mutilation of little bodies in our suburban homes. For clearly the fact that human beings do such things cannot be explained in mere medical terms. Nor does our legal usage of guilt and innocence seem to capture the depth of what we see. There is a quality to the phenomena that our contemporary language fails to articulate. And, in failing to articulate it, we fail to recognize some crucial aspect of reality.

A Return To Sin

In his very readable, and eminently shocking, book on sin, theologian Cornelius Plantings gives us a better way of talking about “agential” evil:

Sin outstrips other human troubles by perverting special human excellences. When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician feels a spasm of happy satisfaction over the sour review of a colleague’s recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans the hooking of a fresh customer, when a teenager reviles his confused grandmother, when we put other people on a tight moral budget while making plenty of allowances for ourselves–when we human beings do these things, we exhibit a corruption of thought, emotion, intention, speech, and disposition. By such abuse of our highest powers, we who are fearfully and wonderfully made, we creatures of special dignity and responsibility, evoke not only grief and consternation but also blame.

Plantinga, Not The Way It’s Supposed to Be, 3

There is no medical language that can describe the reality of human evil commensurate to its actual nature and our experience of it. The reason for this is because human beings themselves are far more than what either our biology or our socially constructed identities say we are. We are metaphysical creatures, creatures that have a special dignity and unique power. We are not only our bodies nor only our social relationships.

As such, our capacities, our “special human excellences” have a profound grandeur to them that often surprises us. However, because we are metaphysical beings, the corruption of those special excellencies takes on a quality that, when seen in living color, is an absolute nightmare to behold. To describe that nightmare, and to know what to do about it, we need terms that can grasp this profundity.

We need to return to theological categories in order to talk about human evil. We must, in a very real sense, have a “return to sin,” as a moral category that is. In addition we must resuscitate theological language itself. Nervous breakdowns, chemical imbalances and cognitive disorders are insufficient for coming to grips with the phenomena of evil. Finally, we must do this so as to recognize, and recognize quickly, that, in the end, we all come Putin enabled.

Image: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

General Christian

History and Religion

Politics and Religion

Religion News

About Anthony Costello

Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago to a devout and loving Roman Catholic family, I fell away from my childhood faith as a young man. For years I lived a life of my own design-- a life of sin. But, at the age of 34, while serving in the United States Army, I set foot in my first Evangelical church. Hearing the Gospel preached, as if for the first time, I had a powerful, reality-altering experience of Jesus Christ. That day, He called me to Himself and to His service, and I have walked with Him ever since. You can read more about the author here.

Previous Post

March 7, 2022

Four Moral Battles Worth Fighting: Number 4 - Critical Social Justice

Next Post

March 14, 2022 The First Temptation(s) of Christ: The Test of Waiting

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Analytic Theology Apologetics Biblical Theology Critical Theory Cultural Apologetics Devotional Epistemology Existentialism Fred Sanders Historical Jesus Historical Theology Metaphysics Moral Theology Philosophy of Religion Politics Problem of Evil Roman Catholicism Social Justice Spiritual Formation Systematic Theology The Trinity Uncategorized

Select a Month April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 October 2025 September 2025 July 2025 May 2025 April 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does Paul say will happen to those who are in Christ at the last trumpet?

Select your answer to see how you score.

They will be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye They will receive new bodies They will meet the Lord in the air They will be caught up together