First, the believer has an uneasy conscience, and so is incapable of committing atrocities (however minor) with equanimity. Second, the believer identifies with all human beings—the good, the bad, and the indifferent—and thus is an unlikely candidate for totalitarian seduction. Finally, the believer has a certain capacity for disloyalty—disloyalty to existing arrangements, to the principalities and the powers. The believer is not good at the usual excuses. The phrase, “I was only obeying orders,” would stick in the throat of the believer. The Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, has become the exemplar of this unimaginable obeyer of orders from above. He was pronounced perfectly sane; and, as Thomas Merton has pointed out, “It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea, aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones have prepared.
Believers reject this kind of “sanity” and choose the kind of craziness that is committed to expanding existing horizons, crossing frontiers, and stepping over boundaries. They don’t believe in abstractions, which are the spiritual weapons of governments. They are suspicious when their “responsibility towards the State” is invoked. Their loving is local, particular. To quote William Blake, they know that those who invoke the general good are often “scoundrels, hypocrites, and flatterers.” The believer is a sort of subversive in the world, one of God’s spies trying to make room for hope.
Amen.
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