Mark Ralls writes that Christians surrender the vocabulary of evil at our peril:
Melinda Henneberger is right. We must not personify evil and casually ascribe it to someone else. Yet Barack Obama is more right. We must dare to speak of evil when we encounter it. Otherwise, we have no chance of recognizing it when it comes to “sleep in our bed, to eat at our table.”
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“60 Minutes” hosted an interview with two friends of Loughner’s. They used to get together four or five times a week to discuss philosophy. And their philosophy of choice was nihilism. One friend said this, ‘It wasn’t that Jared didn’t believe in anything. It’s that he actually believed in nothing.’ Loughner became obsessed with a film called “Waking Life” where a man considers different philosophies of life and finally settles upon nihilism. He demonstrates his commitment by setting himself on fire.
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One of the things Loughner has to teach us is that of our own complicity in the Tucson tragedy. We do this by passively capitulating to our culture’s celebration of nothingness. Consider something as silly – and seemingly harmless — as “Reality TV.” Shows like “The Jersey Shore” not only make light of terrible life choices. They glorify the wasted life. They propagate the cultural myth that our lives lack purpose. As Christians fail to counter this myth with prophetic utterance and interceding prayer, we are complicit in the cultivation of troubled young hearts and minds.
See our post last Thursday, Conflating mental illness with evil, on Henneberger’s thoughts about using “evil” to describe Jared Loughner.
Is our complicity in the Tucson tragedy to do merely with nihilism?