How do we stand up to evil?

In France last week, the latest skirmish between free expression and censorship was fought. I’m not sure who won or who’s winning that ongoing battle, but I do know two things:

1) Human beings will continue to kill other human beings over what they think and believe.

2) Human beings will continue expressing what they think and believe in spite of it.

As the late Russian dissident and novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent many years in the Gulag Archipelago of Siberia, put it in 1974 on the cover of Time magazine (which still hangs on my wall as a reminder): “Blow the dust off the clock. Throw open your cherished heavy curtains. You do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside. Man has distinguished himself from the animal world by thought and speech. And these, naturally, should be free. If they are put in chains, we shall return to the state of animals.”

The battle in France was also about satire. Islamic radicals believe (fervently) that certain subjects should be off limits. The satirists at Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine targeted by terrorists, believed (just as fervently) that there are no “sacred cows.”

In the aftermath, although everyone is appalled by the acts of violence, I still hear the censorship-lite argument, pressed by those who claim they’re in favor of free speech, and even of satire, as long as it’s polite. They wonder aloud why the French illustrators deliberately provoked a group of people with a history of violence in defense of their religious beliefs and who are willing to give up their own lives in the process. There are limits to free speech, they argue, while playing the tried-and-true censorship-lite trump card: “After all, you can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”

In other words, they conclude, let rabid dogs lie. Don’t arouse the murderous impulses of crazed zealots.

The censorship-lite argument also targets satire, which is pertinent in this case. Satire is all well and good when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert make us laugh. But what if it goes over the line into “bad taste” (e.g. the recent film The Interview about a fictional plot to assassinate the dictator of North Korea)? Every Republican skewered by Stewart and Colbert, of course, thinks it’s done in bad taste. And certainly the North Korean power structure believes the Sony film went over “the line” of decency. 

But satire by its very nature is offensive. Afflict the comfortable, skewer the self-righteous — and Islamic terrorists are among the world’s most self-righteous.

The culprit here isn’t Islam. The culpable ones are homicidal lunatics who use Islam to legitimize their acts of terrorism. But Islam isn’t the only faith system so misused. Anti-abortion terrorists in this country have, in the past, resorted to murder and violence, bombing abortion clinics and executing practitioners, using the ultimate in twisted moral logic: “If you don’t respect life, we’ll have to kill you.”

Borrowing a concept from Pope Francis, a spiritual “disease” is partly to blame. It has to do with the ongoing conflict between faith and certainty.

A popular adage making the rounds on the Internet, often attributed to writer Anne Lamott, holds that “the opposite of faith is not doubt. It’s certainty.” Lamott credits Paul Tillich, one of the foremost Christian theologians of the 20th century, but it appears what he really said was, “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. It is an element of faith.” 

Doubt is certainly not an element of faith for people who are willing to terminate infidels with extreme prejudice. But as Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno put it: “Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.” 

Lamott adds, “You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.”

Underlying all of this is a universal imperative: resisting evil — the problem being we don’t universally agree on what is evil or how to resist it. True believers (not just in Islam) think evil must be destroyed, the most famous example provided by Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Captain Ahab destroys himself, his crew (except Ishmael), and his ship in a blind obsession with killing the Great White Whale.

Those who believe evil must be violently confronted are morally corrupted in the process. Yet if responding to evil with violence is itself an evil, France did just that — and most of us were likely rooting for them.

All of us share a desire to stand up to evil. Islamic terrorists believe with unshakable certainty, that they are doing Allah’s work when they kill those who “blaspheme.” Yet as Washington Post writer Fareed Zakaria noted the other day, blasphemy is mentioned nowhere in the Koran. And anti-blasphemy laws in Muslim countries violate human rights, according to the U.N. Human Rights Committee. 

Perhaps sanctions against governments that cynically exploit religious zealotry in this manner would be one way to take a stand against evil.

Then again, the Unity March in Paris and elsewhere in France on Sunday showed a far more inspiring reaction to murderous self-righteousness.

Fortunately, we have plenty of other precedents (including Martin Luther King Jr., the man whose legacy we celebrate this month) that prove non-violent resistance is a more effective way to engage evil.

Satire, using our God-given wit, is one of the tools some human beings use to resist pathological certainty and self-righteousness. Satire has traditionally provided a means by which the powerless can strike a verbal blow against the powerful. When satire makes fun of a pompous oppressor, it can be very effective in galvanizing opposition. The more mean-spirited satire becomes, however, the more it resembles a weapon instead of a tool, and the more it looks like violence. 

Those who practice living faith, on the other hand, say that love is the better tool. 

As Lutheran pastor Peter Marty concludes in an online forum, “Loving others is more important than being right. Isn’t that one of the gifts of love: to bring the arrogance of certainty to its knees?”