2008-03-07 09:26:57

POLITICS AND PROSE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Filed under: Books,Justice,Politics
Posted by: Craig

When we saw the purple awning announcing “POLITICS AND PROSE,” we knew that we’d arrived at a perfect venue for the PURPLE STATE ROADSHOW. I asked Carla Cohen, the co-owner of this proudly independent bookstore, if the purple sign was a plea to get past partisanship. She assured me she was plenty partisan! Would our audience be polarized? Galvanized? Energized? Would we even attract a crowd on a night when Anne Lamott was reading from her latest book across town?

How great to see a strong turnout of avid readers. They were ready to discuss the messy mix of faith and politics. John read from the opening of his acclaimed book, REASONS TO BELIEVE. The audience definitely followed along. We also screened the first fifteen minutes of PURPLE STATE OF MIND. My experience of Jesus may have been foreign to many in attendance, but their questions went to the heart of this highly politicized, religious moment in America.

We were asked whether we smoked pot in our dormitory. We were asked about pluralism and how we will all manage to live together. We were asked about the problem of evil. It may be noble to ask, “Can we all get along?” but at what point are we called to decry injustice? When and how do we resist evil?

John Marks and I had just toured the National Holocaust Museum together. It is such a smart, measured memorial. From the elevators to the exhibits, the museum places you within the crucible of post World War I Germany.

Photographs offer a strong sense of life in Jewish shetls. You feel the palpable loss of entire families, villages, and ways of life. Communities that prospered for nine hundred years were wiped out by the Nazis in a single day. The faces of the departed rise to the ceiling, an offering of grief to God.

The museum illustrates how indifference toward Hitler allowed Nazism to rise. The pograms and unprovoked attacks like Kristelnacht were widely reported in their day. Yet people of conscience failed to act. Hitler noted people’s silence toward genocide in Armenia. Hitler reasoned that if the world did condemn those atrocities, why would they protest his invasion of Poland? Hitler felt he could literally get away with murder.

How humbling to discover afterwards that the question about resisting evil had been asked by an Armenian woman. She was all too familiar with Hitler’s quotation. My answer had connected with her own experience of injustice.

At the Holocaust museum, John and I were also struck by how the Nazis singled out minorities for persecution. Women and children were often sent straight to the gas chambers. The Nazis stigmatized the Hebrews, the Roma Gypsies, anyone identified as “other.” They experimented upon the handicapped and tortured homosexuals. Surely, Jesus stood in solidarity with those victims of the Holocaust. Yet, the comparative silence of God rightly caused many to question their faith. Did God hear the cries of his people? If so, why did he take so long to rescue them? God clearly defends minorities, outsiders, the oppressed. But was it too little, too late?

The onus remains upon us to act, to intervene, to rise up in protest. America’s invasion of Iraq started five years ago. A case was made that we were dethroning a dictator. While it is questionable what kind of threat Saddam Hussein presented to America, surely plenty of Kurds and Iraqis suffered under his regime. It remains to be seen whether a viable democracy can be forged from three distinct peoples. We honor those who are serving in the military. We weep for those who have lost loved ones. We offer up a cry for justice in America, in Iraq, in Darfur, in every part of the world where the powerful exploit the powerless.

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