The Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys
God alone is good
There’s a simplistic mindset we are all fond of. There are good guys and bad guys. Karl Marx claimed the insight that all of history is a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. He was concerned about the bourgeoisie oppressing the proletariat. Less than a century later, Adolph Hitler thought he had realized Marx’s mistake—he said the problem was the Jews persecuting the Aryan people.
Today, we believe the “bad guys” are illegal immigrants, or white people, men, feminists, conservative Christians, or transgender people. It depends on your politics. But we should be leery of “you people” politics, no matter where on the political spectrum it comes from.
That communists and fascists thought they were the good guys is a cautionary tale. Each saw the problem in the other, but not in themselves. Similarly, the problem with fallen angels is not that they decided, “Hey, let’s be evil today.” The problem is that they believed in their own goodness instead of believing that God alone is good and that any goodness in anyone else comes from God.
Of course, Democrats are not communists and Republicans are not fascists. Hyperbole is a boy crying wolf. Yet, both think they’re the good guys. But St. Paul wrote that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). We are fallen—every single one of us. We must seek the good, which is found only in God, but we must never think that the good is our possession.
After doing a stint in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented a more nuanced view than his Marxist-Leninist handlers held: the line separating good and evil passes through the middle of every human heart. He recognized that if circumstances had been different, he might have been a guard rather than a prisoner.
It’s chilling to realize how easily we turn to evil while thinking we’re good. The effort to pull back and remind ourselves that we’re fallen in is a litany of failures. But we must keep trying.
Your opponents, however, can too easily attack you by agreeing that you’re not the good guy, while maintaining that they really are the good guys. Remind them that people convinced of their own goodness are usually the most flawed.
Believing in ourselves is a mistake. Jesus asks us why we’re so concerned with the speck in our brother’s eye when there’s a beam in our own (Matthew 7:5). Still, we’re tempted to say, “I’m not like other people.” The beam blinds us.
In a similar vein, Stoic philosopher Epictetus (Discourses 2.1) recommends tempering confidence with caution. We should let go of things beyond our control, but we should pay attention to how we respond to them. We should be careful, though, because our desires could be misguided. Everyone is the bad guy sometimes, but not everyone is a good guy—and even then, not consistently.
Even so, if you try to have a reasonable conversation with your ideological opponents, they might shout you down. If that doesn’t work, they might resort to violence. Violence in the name of social justice might seem nonsensical to someone who hasn’t drunk the ideological Kool-Aid. But we must remind ourselves that our ideologies are not God’s ideologies, though they can reflect godly values to greater or lesser degrees.
Endeavoring to live a Christ-centered life is a continual process of getting off track and trying to get back on the path. Further, while “us vs. them” is a pitfall, so is revolutionary fervor. I’ve heard it said that traditions are experiments that worked. Besides, attempts to start over with year zero create chaos. Put differently, overvaluing abstract ideals detaches us from the lessons of history.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to improve society—but we should be careful. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, we must hate what is wrong with the world enough to want to change it, but also love the world enough to want to preserve it. It’s noteworthy that the French and Russian revolutions ended in mass murder and tyranny because they sought to dismantle their existing societies. The American Revolution, on the other hand, sought to preserve the English tradition of liberty, and the U.S. eventually abolished slavery.
So, here we are today. Will our better angels prevail? Will rising political violence make us realize that we must finally come together? Or will we let our desires define what we think is good?
Our politics follow from our relationship with God, but partisanship is devotion to the ideals of man. Our focus should be a society where people can pursue the good. But we must resist the temptation of thinking that we are the heroes of the story. In Luke 17:10, Jesus tells us that “when you shall have done all these things that are commanded you, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”