It’s not hard to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are when watching a movie about the Nazis. But it’s a little harder to recognize evil when it’s closer to home, when it appears respectful and reasonable, urbane and sophisticated.

You’ve probably heard of Godwin’s Law—the idea that as an online discussion progresses, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler increases. Godwin’s Law is meant to be humorous, but it says something serious about our society that one of the last remaining vestiges of moral coherence is that we all know Hitler was wrong.
Richard John Neuhaus once described the Holocaust as “our only culturally available icon of absolute evil.” We may not know what’s good anymore, but we know that is bad. This is why many rush to Hitler as a shortcut to or substitute for making a moral argument.
The often tenuous attempts to link certain attitudes and actions to Hitler—as if we can’t name something as bad unless it’s tied to our culture’s agreed standard of what constitutes evil on a massive scale—signal that many in our society are increasingly incapable of recognizing evil unless it shows up without ambiguity, perpetrated by people already in the category we’ve deemed “morally problematic.” Our moral imagination is impoverished. And this may be why we have a harder time recognizing evil deeds by people who don’t seem to be villains.
Heroes and Villains
I recently watched Netflix’s adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, a book by Anthony Doerr I appreciated several years ago. It’s been too long since I read the book to remember how the German villains were portrayed in the original text, but the miniseries made them out to be sadistic animals, gleefully inflicting terror and trauma wherever possible. It’s as if the German commanders know they’re the bad guys. They seem to relish their role.
The truth is scarier. Yes, the historical record reveals the brutality of some of the worst officers in the German army (the entire enterprise was evil through and through), but most soldiers believed they were on the right side of history. They were the heroes, preserving their fatherland by eliminating the Jewish menace and paving the way for their superior race to install a new kingdom in Europe. Don’t forget: for the highly educated, culturally sophisticated, technologically advanced German society in the 1930s, Hitler was a hero.
The Germans saw themselves as the good guys. That’s why a clip from the British sketch comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look went viral, where one Nazi looks to the others in a moment of self-assessment and says, “Are we the baddies?” It’s funny, but the point is serious.
Frighteningly Ordinary Face of Evil
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a deeply unsettling book about WWII. Browning reminds us of the sheer scale of the killing that took place in Eastern Europe, much of it outside the concentration camps and most of it done by ordinary people without much investment in the fight—simple men and women conscripted into Hitler’s killing machine. Browning claims the majority of individuals in this particular battalion weren’t zealous Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged, working-class men who nevertheless perpetrated heinous acts.
Browning’s book shows three distinct groups emerging within the battalion: a core of enthusiastic participants, a majority who executed their responsibilities reliably but lacked initiative, and a small minority who avoided involvement in the acts of violence but were engaged in other activities that did nothing to diminish the battalion’s overall efficiency in carrying out atrocities. Hardly anyone seriously resisted. Ordinary Men shows how easy it is for people to yield to the influences of those around them, leading to actions they’d never consider otherwise.
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Written by J. Chase Davis |
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
On our heavenly pilgrimage, we don’t settle for the ghettoization of Christian communities….We stand ready to defend our own with all the biblical masculine virtue we have to throw ourselves into the battle wherever it rages. We march forth, taking ground; we live with strength and courage because the Lord is with us. We don’t aim to lose. We aim to win because our victory is secure in Christ. 

[American Reformer] Editor’s note: The following is a lightly edited version of a speech delivered at the Burn the Ships Conference in Boulder, Colorado on July 27, 2024.
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.—C.S. Lewis
Because modern Christians have been taught and believed lies about reality, they have completely misunderstood the nature of reality. One of those lies involves the nature of our heavenly pilgrimage, or our spiritual life. We have been taught that our heavenly pilgrimage is solely immaterial or “spiritual.” Meaning that the things that concern our pursuit of Christ are only immaterial concerns or soul level questions. I believe two tools have been used to reduce our heavenly pilgrimage to such a state. First, the induction of egalitarianism and, second, its subsequent demonic sister, the vice of tolerance.
Egalitarianism
Here, we are not merely talking about the theological concept of egalitarianism. We are talking about that, but it is much bigger than that. In our day, there is a wildly held falsity propagated about the nature of reality and mankind. This is the notion that we are all equal, all people and all cultures are equal. We are told that all people are equal in any and every way.
In more conservative contexts, this is sometimes laundered under biblical teachings about the imago Dei. In more liberal streams, it is glossed over with verses about there being neither male nor female, no Greek or Jew in Christ. We are taught to believe that men and women are equal in any and every respect. The worst stage of this cancer has been revealed in transgenderism, thinking that men can become women or women can become men. No longer, we are told, is there any biological reality to maleness or femaleness. It is all a social construct.
More broadly, this falsity flies under the radar, using verses such as “judge not” when referring to various cultures. We are told that we cannot judge the morality or immorality of any culture or people other than our own. Why? Because they are only doing what they have been taught how to do. We are told that if given the same opportunities and privileges, they could be successful; in fact, they might even be better than us. All cultures are equal.
Closer to home, we are taught to feel an inherent shame about our very biological makeup as men. Your testosterone is not given by God, but instead a cancer you must rid yourself of. Your assertiveness and aggression are not Christlike. Your confidence and desire to win is anti-biblical. Your willingness to fight is not reflective of the meekness of Christ. On and on, they drone.
This is the lie of egalitarianism that even among men, there is no one better or worse, no one stronger or weaker; we are all one and the same. And Christians have bought this lie hook, line, and sinker. But nature abhors a vacuum, and all men know this is a lie. When you play a game of pickup basketball or throw the football, you remember the old ways. And the old ways are designed by God. Like a dog who instinctually chases a cat, even the most effeminate man will somehow discover a prior to undisclosed masculine drive when he enters the area. Because God designed men to be this way. Christ did not come to obliterate your masculinity, and he did not come to lower your T-level. Grace does not destroy nature. Christ came to restore your manhood.
Egalitarianism reduces Christianity to a consumer good. By twisting the Bible into an egalitarian framework, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that Christianity is just one option among others, which are all equal. The Christian religion is just believed to be another option among many. We adopt the anti-Christian ideal of principled pluralism and subjugate our religion to market demands. Our churches become branded such that we compete with others, not in terms of holiness or excellence but in programs and marketing. Christians themselves conceive of the church in market terms, determining the goodness of the church only in terms of success in reaching the lost.
Tolerance
The second lie is what I call the vice of tolerance—we have represented Christianity in terms of its emotional effect on other people, namely pleasure. Therefore, if people have a negative emotional experience or feel pain from our witness and our journey to the heavenly city, then we assume we must be doing something wrong. Why? Because Jesus is not mean.
We have remade Jesus in our own image regarding what it means to be a good person. There is a version of Christian tolerance that is virtuous, but today, that is not what is lauded. Instead, we see hypocrisy from those who claim tolerance and yet display nothing but contempt for Christians, particularly Christian men. It is good to overlook an offense. It is good to live in peace and harmony. This is a blessing from the Lord. But the enemies of God do not intend to live in peace and harmony with you.
G K Chesterton wrote, “Tolerance is the virtue of those who believe in nothing.”
Excessive tolerance or the vice of tolerance is more tempting than intolerance. Why? Because the coward risks no pain. It is a vice of pleasure. The person guilty of the vice of tolerance risks nothing and, therefore, can gain nothing. But they can at least preserve some sense of pleasure in knowing that they don’t have to endure pain, whether the pain of social ostracization or the pain inflicted on someone else by openly disagreeing with them. In a culture of pleasure and decadence, the idea of ever causing any pain to someone else, like what they call emotional distress, is seen as wicked.
Much of our conception of our Christian witness and sharing the gospel cannot fathom this reality today. The idea that we should cause another pain in what we tell them is seen as anti-gospel. We live in a world obsessed with pleasure. Avoid pain at all costs. Comfort by any means.
And yet, the comfort we truly need only comes from God, who comforts us with his salvation and presence. And we can only receive that comfort by facing the pain of our condemnation and the reality of our human condition apart from God. We rightly conceive of the gospel as good news. But there is no good news to speak of if people have no concept of there being bad news. The good news of the gospel is not perceived to be good if people have no familiarity with what is bad, to begin with.
There is no gospel without pain. Without pain, the news we share is simply one option in the marketplace of ideas at best. But to preach the gospel, people must hear the law to understand their standing before God. There must be condemnation in order for there to be reconciliation. This is not legalism. This is just faithful gospel preaching.
It is not cruel to speak the truth about sin plainly. In fact, to avoid speaking about sin plainly leads people to hell. Yes, this will create enemies. That is part of the deal when you come to Christ. You will have enemies. There will be people who hate hearing the good news. The aim is not necessarily to make enemies for the sake of making enemies. The aim is to proclaim the truth of God, knowing that enemies will be made. And we should pray for our enemies, especially by praying the imprecatory Psalms.
Christ says that we will have enemies, but because of these lies of reality, egalitarianism, and the vice of tolerance, which create what we might refer to as an unreality or anti-reality version of Christianity, we cannot even conceive of other people as enemies. After all, who are we to judge?
What a pox on this house of ours. We have twisted ourselves in knots to butcher the Bible to justify pacified men, a pacified church, and, therefore, a pacified society that is easy to control. We submit to the yoke of tyranny, so long as we can just conveniently order something to our doorstep. Christ did not die for his church to be pacified. He died for his church to march to the beat of his drum as we go forth into the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey what He has commanded. But we have traded this vision of the church at war for a utopian vision of a pacified church filled with pacified men, just hoping if we are winsome enough, they won’t take our children from us and put them on puberty blockers.
This was one of the critiques Nietzsche made against Christianity, or his conception of it at least. For many, Christianity has become a pacifier, like you would give a baby. Churches gather in the name of self-soothing. Sermons cater to people’s felt needs. Worship services are created to fill one with good emotions that soothe one from the pain of life.
Nietzsche saw this. He conceived of a concept called ressentiment. This is the concept that if one is filled with such jealousy because of an inferiority complex, one becomes hostile to others. Furthermore, projecting their own insecurity, they will conclude that those who are superior to them are morally repugnant and inferior themselves. To understand Ressentiment, you must understand master and slave morality in Nietzsche. He’s telling a story about the origins of humanity that challenges Christianity.
It goes like this. There were people, and the bigger, stronger people took from the little weak people. Think like Conan the Barbarian. These bigger strong people Nietzsche conceived of as masters and the weaker people he conceived of as slaves. The master conceives of the good and not good in different terms than the slave. What’s good is getting food, being stronger, getting women. What’s not good: not eating, being smol, not getting women. This is the mindset of the master for Nietzsche.
When the master sees the slave, he doesn’t even think of the slave. “I don’t even think about you.” When the master encounters another master, they admire them, even if they end up fighting each other. The master, this big, strong brute, might give things to other masters to show his power.
How do the slaves feel? The slaves are naturally conflicted. Why? The slaves also think that getting food, house, and women are good, BUT they look at the master and think he is bad because he wants what they want, but the slave cannot prevent it. The master takes what they have, and they can do nothing to stop it. They are filled with resentment. The slaves can’t see the desires in their hearts as naturally good because the master has the same desire. The slave can’t look at another slave and respect them.
This resentment leads to slave morality. Master mentality honors who you are and your natural goods. Because it is good to get food, be strong, and get a wife. Slave morality looks at good things and is suspicious of them. They can’t imagine life as a master because they resent the master. They hate that the master is strong, gets food, and gets the woman. They resent him and create an entire moral framework to justify it. They end up filled with jealousy and contempt for anyone with money, power, and sex.
Nietzsche thinks the world is filled with slave morality and hatred of anyone who is rich, powerful, and competent. And he says that the point at which the slaves began running society began with Christianity. He suggests that Christianity creates this slave morality because in his day the liberal churches were doing this. They were creating entire theological frameworks based on sentimentality, not reality. Of course we as Christians not believe this, but his critique based on the evaluation of many churches and Christian men seems to have some truth to it.
This slave mentality leads people to build the world around them in such a way to accommodate their slave morality. They build a cage to cope and seethe with their conception of reality. They will construct a reality in which they can cope and seethe in their resentment. Slave morality resents those with money, power and success. In fact, from many pulpits and articles you would get the idea that Jesus does not want you to have money, power, success, or find a wife. We are told that being like Jesus means the only good thing to do with power is to give it away. The only good use of our natural God-given ambitions is to avoid them because they might become an idol. And that you should just settle for singleness.
Boiling under the surface of all of this, many Christian men live with a disquieting resentment. They are taught to hate themselves and deny how God made them all in the name of following Jesus. Is it any wonder that men oftentimes want nothing to do with a church that, by all accounts, hates them? Rather than encouraging men towards excellence, churches often just teach men that they are defunct women. Men are taught that they are spiritually deficient if they didn’t cry during church or talk about Jesus as they would a boyfriend.
This all creates a pacified church obsessed with soothing our pitiful state. In the name of egalitarianism and the vice of tolerance, Christian men are deceived into thinking something is wrong with them in their creational design.
Because of this anti-reality teaching, egalitarianism, and the vice of tolerance, Christians live in the undesirable state of having no principles on which to fight, no enemies who they are to fight, and therefore can not even fathom praying the imprecatory Psalms, much less being animated by Christian virtue and honor in manly warfare in our pilgrimage to the heavenly city.
Instead, our heavenly pilgrimage is conceived exclusively in quietist and anabaptist terms. This is not a call to arms or a call to revolt. It is simply to say that everyone who came before us had no qualms conceiving of reality according to God’s design. I often wonder about the fortitude of the men who came before us, who took up arms against a British Empire that was far less tyrannical than the American empire. It bothers me when I look around; we seem to lack the moral conviction and clarity that the men who came before us possessed.
It was common in the old days to understand that Christians, churches, and Christian societies would have enemies that must be defeated. The Puritans often provided a type of chaplain service to their town or colony before they went to battle. Even today, Christian chaplains pray for their men’s success on the field of battle. In sports, chaplains pray for the success and victory of their football team.
We must recover and appreciate these simple acts as reflections of what we should be doing in all of life, whether in business or politics. We must recover a martial spirit of victory or death. We must embrace the conflict of a world that wars against the Creator. And to that, we must reject egalitarianism, which flies under the guise of feminism most prominently, and reject the vice of tolerance. We must embrace God’s design for the world. God’s world is built hierarchically. And it is built to flourish where wickedness is not tolerated, and righteousness abounds.
In a world of hierarchy, there will be conflict. There are tribes and factions, some stronger and some weaker. God’s Word maps onto reality and describes how to navigate these waters. However, the utopian egalitarian vision of the world in which everyone is equal in any and every respect also produces conflict. But because it is not reality-based but a fantasy, Christians are often at a loss as to how to navigate the conflict because the Bible assumes hierarchy, not egalitarianism. It would be like trying to look at the rule book for golf when you are playing football. You won’t succeed. Many Christians struggle and fail in their heavenly pilgrimage and all that it entails because rather than conceiving of the world according to God’s word, they have assumed the lies and tried to apply the Bible to the lie. They try to apply God’s reality to anti-reality and wonder why they fail. They assume they are playing a sport the Bible was not created for. We accept the rules of the enemy and wonder why we fail. In the worst cases, the Bible becomes a manipulative cudgel to suppress the actual conflicts we need to have. Now, instead of making war against Satan and his demons, we are called to monger peace, avoid conflict at all costs, play nice, and never offend anyone. What man would be drawn to such a religion?
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It’s also not an error that the gospel writers sometimes order their events differently. The authors make no claim to include all the events of Jesus’ life or to put those events in strict chronological order. In fact, each writer wrote with a slightly different purpose in mind and deliberately arranged the material to that end. Matthew, for example, wrote for a Jewish audience, so he emphasizes the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Mark, on the other hand, wrote for a non-Jewish audience and deliberately leaves out many of those details. 

Theologians call it inerrancy. The idea that the Bible is completely without error in everything it says. Whether it speaks of geographical, historical, or theological details, it is completely trustworthy.
Now, some folks have a problem with the idea of the Bible’s inerrancy. They think they’ve spotted errors in Scripture. And very often, it’s because they’ve not understood some important, commonsense clarifications of what an “error” actually is.
Firstly, it’s not an error if it’s not in the original documents. Especially where numbers are concerned, there are some errors in every Hebrew and Greek copy of the Bible. Unlike the original writers of Scripture, the copyists weren’t guided into “all truth” by the Holy Spirit. Copy out the forty chapters of Exodus, and chances are you’ll have introduced one or two errors into the text. (Hopefully it wouldn’t be a major blunder, like the 1631 edition of the King James Bible that commanded its readers, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”) Thankfully, comparing the truly vast number of surviving copies of Scripture enable textual critics to reconstruct with tremendous accuracy what the original documents said before they were copied. Inerrancy relates to what the biblical authors actually wrote, and we’re able to discern what that was even though all we have are copies of what they wrote.
Second, It’s not an error if we misunderstand the author’s intention. When you open up a newspaper, you’ll see many different kinds of writing. Appearing alongside factual reports of world events, there may be celebrity gossip, infographics, stock market gains and losses, football statistics, book reviews, cartoons, and weather forecasts. Instinctively, few of us read a cartoon in the same way we read a war correspondent. In the same way, biblical authors write in a number of different genres, and they expect us to read each one accordingly. If we read a war correspondent as if he were a cartoonist and wonder why his writing isn’t funny at all, the mistake will be ours rather than his.
Also, biblical authors sometimes use metaphors and similes that aren’t intended to be taken literally. When the newspaper’s sporting correspondent informs us that a particular player is currently “on fire,” we shouldn’t become alarmed and call the fire department.
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