Here’s the trope: the villain doesn’t know they’re the villain. It’s classic, and it’s realistic; generally, people choose what they think is good or necessary or acceptable, even if it hurts themselves or others. Or, as Mary Wollstonecraft put it:
It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men
This isn’t a new idea, either. According to Quote Investigator, it can be traced back to the Greek stoic philosopher, Epictetus, who said:
And indeed, all Evil whatsoever, is in some Sense an involuntary Misfortune to the Soul; for the Soul never chooses Evil, considered as Evil, but under the Disguise and Pretence of some Good; as sometimes Riches, sometimes Sensual Enjoyments, or Honours, or Preferments and Greatness.
Epictetus
We become villains through our personal pursuits, and I suspect this is at least in part because of our limited perception as human beings. We can’t know the full extent of our choices, the impact and consequences of everything we do and say. So, we do our best with what we have and stumble our way into villainy.
However, this doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. We are accountable, both individually and collectively, for our villainy.
What Is a Villain?
A villain is someone who harms other people. That harm can be physical or psychological, and we’re not talking about merely hurting someone’s feelings or offending someone’s sensibilities. This is the difficulty of identifying villains; such a broad definition leaves open the debate: what is harm?
This is a double-edged sword — it cuts both ways. On one hand, I think the truest and wisest definitions are broad enough to encourage negotiation and exploration. Love is my favorite example. The continued discourse around love has helped many people learn to love themselves and others more freely. It has also helped people identify their abusers by giving them healthier concepts of love.
On the other hand, it’s such broadness that gives people opportunities to be villainous. Most versions of “tough love” are good examples of this. Many Christians find themselves in spiritually, emotionally, and/or physically abusive communities and marriages under banners of love. Similarly, abusers may convince their victims that the roles are reversed, that the victims are the villains.
Before we go any further with villainy, though, let’s lay some groundwork.
Evil vs. Suffering
Evil and suffering are often conflated. Certainly, the two can be related, but is all suffering evil? If you accidentally stub your toe on some furniture, you suffer, but has there been evil? Are you evil for causing your own suffering? Is the furniture evil for existing where your toe tried to go? I think most people would agree that, in this case, the suffering isn’t related to anything evil. If you agree, then we recognize that not all suffering is evil. But, what if someone steps on your toe?
If you’re at a crowded event and someone accidentally steps on your toe, have they done something evil? In this scenario, the suffering was caused by another person; does that change our perception? What if the other person intentionally stomps on your toe? Is that evil? I think most people would recognize some difference between these two scenarios, and I believe what separates them is intention.
Perhaps the simplest definition for evil is something that intentionally causes harm or suffering that leads to harm. Of course, this is a broad definition that leaves a lot of room for debate. What counts as harm? What counts as suffering? How do we measure intention? Still, hopefully, we can agree that going around stomping on people’s feet probably comes closer to something we’d call “evil” than accidentally stepping on someone’s toes.
What Is Harm?
My assertion is that both villainy and evil are related to causing harm or suffering and with intention, but what is harm? Again, I think the most helpful place to start is with a broader definition. Harm is essentially physical or psychological damage. This allows us to at least begin distinguishing harm from suffering and identifying suffering that leads to harm.
While suffering can be prolonged, it doesn’t inherently cause damage. A helpful analogy might be frostbite; being cold for a long time might be considered suffering, but if the cold results in frostbite, we’ve crossed from suffering into physical harm. Similarly, feeling things like sadness or fear might be categorized as suffering on their own, but the long-term, psychological impact of keeping a child constantly afraid might be categorized as harm (e.g. Dissociation from self, unable to have loving feelings, or learned helplessness).
So, here’s what we have, so far:
- Villains are those who cause harm or suffering that leads to harm
- Evil is intentionally causing harm or suffering that leads to harm
- Harm is physical or psychological damage
- Not all suffering is evil or leads to harm
Examples of suffering without harm or evil: exercising, banging your funny bone, feeling uncomfortable when trying something new, feeling anxious when running late, grief at a funeral, etc.
Demonizing Suffering
Unfortunately, many Christians live as though all suffering is evil or, at least, evidence of evil. It’s part of the way fundamentalism convinces people to protect the status quo. If all suffering is evil, anything that causes us suffering is arguably evil. Then, if we decide something qualifies as suffering, we can dismiss its source as evil without much thought or worse, label it as the enemy and take up arms.
You know what causes suffering? Cognitive dissonance. Fear. Shame. Confusion. Change and uncertainty. When we demonize suffering, we become incapable of engaging with these things in healthy ways. Add to this a personified evil, such as the Devil, and eternal stakes (e.g. Heaven and Hell), and the discomfort of things like fear, shame, and uncertainty becomes a battleground in the war for one’s eternal soul.
Yes, that did escalate quickly. Making demons out things or out of others doesn’t leave much of a middle ground. By removing the nuances between evil and suffering, people can be pushed to increasingly dualistic thinking. This is the core of “slippery slope” arguments. Either you’re upholding the status quo or you’re careening toward eternal conscious torment; fundamentalism doesn’t leave anything in between.
Righteous Villains
Righteous villains are those who harm others specifically because they believe their actions to be righteous. I don’t mean that they accidentally harm others; I mean they choose to harm others thinking they are justified in doing so, or, at least, they allow themselves to be complicit in the harm.
Let’s consider the “tough love” I mentioned above. Many parents still classify beating their kids as “tough love,” rationalizing to themselves that the harm they’re causing their children is somehow loving and ultimately beneficial. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge the harm they’re causing; it’s that they’re ok with causing that harm. The ends justify the means. This is where it’s important to have a functional definition of evil.
When evil is defined as intentionally causing harm, it’s easy to see that “tough love” is often just evil masquerading as good. This helps reveal the cognitive dissonance that many fundamentalists live with. This extends well beyond parent/child relationships, as well.
Christians are often the villains in societal narratives because so much evil (so much intentional harm or suffering that leads to harm) is done in the name of love. To bring it full circle: “the Soul never chooses Evil, considered as Evil, but under the Disguise and Pretence of some Good.” This is why oppression and colonization are so heinous; the condescending posture of both lean into the pretense of good to rationalize the harming of others. People are conquered, enslaved, and murdered under such pretenses as saving them from their own sinful nature.
These postures give rise to another common phrase: “necessary evil.” A more explicit companion to “tough love,” necessary evil recognizes the harmful nature of the actions while rationalizing them as “good;” the ends justify the means. Ultimately, we imagine ourselves to be heroes, not villains, so we speak of our goodness rather than the harm we cause. Yet, if it’s evil to intentionally harm others, the ends can’t justify the means.
Merely Villains
“Righteous villains,” then, are merely villains. Since righteousness is about justice, villains can’t actually be righteous. This is precisely why many Christians refuse to accept such a functional definition of evil. Simply put, it isn’t specific enough to guarantee they end up on the “good” side of things, and the shame of fundamentalism makes the unrighteousness of evil unbearable. For many, it seems better to grasp a lie than to shatter under the weight of accountability.
This is also one of the reasons why many Christian dogmas and doctrines can’t tolerate actual, scientific data. Having a vague sense of the harm one causes may be tolerable because of excuses like tough love and necessary evils, but the more knowledgeable we become about the specific and observable harm we inflict on others, the harder it becomes to live with the dissonance.
Remember the demonizing of suffering mentioned above; if all suffering is evil (and dissonance surely causes suffering), the sources of suffering are also evil. More awareness of the data leads to more awareness of the harm, leads to more dissonance, leads to more suffering. Therefore, the science is evil; worldly people, devoid of God, attempting to lead us astray. Again, yes, this is escalating quickly, and we can see examples of it in many Christian theologies and doctrines.
One of the clearest examples might be the doctrine of the sin of empathy. DesiringGod.org, which arose from John Piper’s ministries as a Reformed Baptist preacher, has a two part series modeled after C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Part two is titled “The Enticing Sin of Empathy,” and the series argues that empathy is a sinful corruption of compassion that serves Satan. We can see this play out in real time among Christian nationalists, right now. The inability of fundamentalist Christians to see the suffering and harm they’re causing and supporting isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
I think this is also why most fundamentalist Christian institutions are led by white men. Those who have the least amount of fortitude for personal accountability have the greatest interest in systems that shield them from it. It’s the same motivation behind statements like “all lives matter” and “not all men.” The ones with the most vested interest in those sentiments are often the ones who ought to be most accountable without them.
Accountability, Not Villainization
My goal is accountability, not villainization. This isn’t about making villains but about learning to recognize when we are villains. Too often, we adopt vague, uncritical ideas without functional ways of analyzing or articulating them. We base our views of others and of ourselves on how we feel without any way to question or test those feelings against reality. This leads to theologies and postures that are at best all theory and no practice and at worst actually harmful.
It’s true that real life is messy enough to require more discussion and nuance than I’ve provided here, but I believe these broad definitions are a strong starting point for more functional discussions about how our theologies interact with people’s lived experiences. We have to get at the roots of our understandings if we want to do better.
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