Anarchy and the Dark Side of God

I have just completed The Man who was Thursday. It was the first novel by G.K Chesterton that I have ventured to read. Rest assured it did not disappoint. One reviewer summed it up well when he said that this book is either comprised of the most nonsensical witty banter or it is the profoundest of stories for all of humanity.

The book focused on a secret council of anarchists who throughout the story discover the truth that they are all working undercover for the same character named “Sunday”. The revelations that are worked through in this book brought up a lot of interesting thoughts for me - the discreet battle between good and evil and the disguises of each, the different aspects of chaos and order in society and similarly the attractions and fears of anarchy and revolt against governing authorities.

Anarchy has some obvious attractions. It empowers the individual to be, to do, to believe what they choose. It is a sort of freedom that is felt as “glory and isolation” in being one’s own authority. The danger associated with anarchy (that is not often feared enough) directly corresponds to the potential for evil that is in every individual, no matter how noble or just the revolt may be.

It would appear from the bumper stickers and late night television shows I’ve seen recently that our culture is working hard to foster a society devoid of these pesky governing authorities. We know and have seen the corruptibility of such powers - like the church, religion, government, even gender or family roles. We want to live in a culture where an individual is free to believe whatever he or she or “it” wants. My fear is that we have not yet considered the digression of this way of thinking. Isn’t this the forerunner to individualistic entitlement? Why are we shocked when someone takes entitlement to a horrifically evil conclusion?

We are told sexuality is one of the areas in which we deserve to be satisfied. We are justified in doing some pretty odd things as long as it turns us on and gratifies us physically. Then we look on with apparent shock when someone digresses this thinking into a power hungry sexual abuse tragedy like the Sandusky scandal at Penn State.

We are told freedom of speech is a staple for this country. We can say anything we want as long as we are not taking any physical action against another person. So in a lot of ways, we are allowed, practically encouraged, to breed small pockets of entrenched fear and hate for other people groups. Then we are bewildered when we turn on the news and see a white supremacist band member killed after he went into a Sikh Temple and opened fire.

We are becoming convinced that gender should have less meaning and that the standards which men and women are held to should be the same. However, two days after the Aurora movie theater shooting the top article on CNN.com was about three men who “upheld the man code” by diving in front of their women friends. So somehow the moment of utter chaos and evil snapped us back to standards that are all of a sudden no longer disgraceful hindrances but beautiful acts of valor.

I think it is fair to assume that we want freedom but we also want safety. Does safety always include some sort of authority? Perhaps what we have decided we need is something to set those curious lines, the lines between being safe and being free, for us. If only we had an objective type of governing authority, one that is not capable of prejudice in race, gender, or religion. Maybe we should just have science, math and logic be our governing authorities. These should work because they are non-partisan and objective, right?

So what would it look like if we were governed by science? Instead of holding Mr. Sandusky responsible for the abuse of children, perhaps we can find that he had something known as Histrionic Disorder (defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriately seductive behavior). This way we can be assured he wasn’t just a normal guy who was capable of doing some really bad things. We can have a scientific explanation that shows he was a diseased outlier. We can be assured that we have nothing to fear from a systemic standpoint.

Let’s also say that James Holmes (Aurora movie theater shooter) was one of these crazies too. We can come up with a good scientific/medical term for it, so that we know exactly why he did what he did, or at least that he was incapable of adhering to our ethical paradigms. This way we will have no reason to fear the way our society operates in its current condition.

Hmmm… but perhaps, this whole science thing isn’t giving enough respect to the digression of perverse egoism that has flooded our culture. If we write these men off as simply “bad eggs” than we don’t have to approach the difficult task of recognizing the potential for evil in our own behavior.

Please understand that I am not advocating that school masters should go back to spanking misbehaving children or that the Church should be allowed to take offerings for made up ministries. But we need to be aware when we eliminate all conscience-driven authorities, that's exactly what we have done. Science is not capable of making ethical decisions.

In one of his other masterworks Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton describes the Holy Church in an example that relates well to this argument.

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the center of the island; and their song had ceased.”

And here is the freedom that Christianity can foster. Only with a powerful but loving father is a child able to truly feel safe and to be free. Loving so that the child knows the father has his best intentions in mind, and powerful so that the child knows the father is truly capable of protecting. The question then becomes the decision of the loving father to allow his children to suffer. This was probably the most interesting part of the book. The character “Sunday” is revealed as the source of both the peace and the peril that the other characters go through.

Here is the main character’s description of encountering “Sunday”.

"When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained."

This is at the foundation of my faith. When I have gone through trials I have thought good just the rare occurrence of something going right for me. But when I have seen true goodness in my life, I have been assured that I am not seeing the whole story. It is a sort of eager relief that comes in knowing surely that there is a God and he loves me. What excitement awaits the deeper understanding of this darker side of God, not evil but simply unknown. The depth of his universe would make the suffering of his people “comparable to a father playing hide and seek with his children.” I am astonished and eager, awaiting the great magician, the loving father to reveal his undeniable mastery of intermingled chaos and order.

Tim