Art plays a big role in unRival Network’s Artisans of Peace programs, like the one
and I are helming this Fall. In past cohorts, I’ve seen worn-out professors and activists set brush rather than pen to paper for the first time since they were kids, taking a break from tightening prose to paint a whorling watercolor. The act transformed them in ways they couldn’t believe.Art has ways of enfleshing abstract concepts like desire and rivalry with concrete examples and high stakes. Personally, I find this well of insight most frequently between theology and fiction. Though I take the doctrinal content of Christianity with utmost seriousness, its catechistical forms rarely feel as incarnate as the God who reveals them. Take Question 18 from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, for example:
Q18: Wherein consists the sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell?
A18: The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell, consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called Original Sin; together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it.
I can gather from this that sin (at least as this Catechism teaches) is more than doing bad things; it’s a state of being, of total “corruption.” That’s a pretty dire state of affairs, if it’s true.
So why don’t I feel, day in and day out, how dire it is? What are the habits that might help me feel the urgency of sin and my need to be saved from it?
These are questions I struggled with when I started reading fiction more closely, mapping the circumstances and choices of sometimes fantastical characters onto my own emotional life. There are countless stories out there that helped me feel the anxiety, the horror, and the wonder of being a concrete, contingent creature whose abilities to know, choose, and love are an absolute mess.
In the process, though, fiction also taught me to scrutinize these concepts of sin, of “want,” and of “total corruption.” To ask whether the stories I’d been taught in Sunday School weren’t more complicated under the surface. The best stories I read rarely included the kind of bold, on-purpose evil I expected from the “unsaved” based on my upbringing. Sure, I could port those expectations into the text, but only at the cost of seeing those tragic oversights that made the characters feel real and made the story tick. I remember being a confident and pious 17-year-old reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and thinking about how much heartache would’ve been saved if Jurgus and Ona just had more faith, made different choices.
Talk about missing the point.
At that time, I didn’t want to see the real world. I wanted to protect my own innocence, my ideas about personal responsibility, and my hope that there were always answers–if not easy answers then at least clear ones. That God didn’t let things like this happen to really good people. I wasn’t ready to have my commonsensical moral worldview upended by stories from the margins, from the victims of evil in all its banality. Their experience of evil made it harder for me to think of myself as “good.”
Now, I’m learning that lesson anew through Tanararive Due’s The Reformatory.
Florida’s Soil is Soaked
The Reformatory (2023) is a supernatural thriller that tells the story of 12-year-old Robert “Robbie” Stephens, his sister Gloria, and their fight for survival in 1950s Gracetown Florida during the late years of Jim Crow. Coming to his sister’s defense one morning, Robbie makes the worst mistake of his young life: he kicks a White teenager in the shin. The teenager, Lyle McCormack, seems ready to brush the whole incident off, but his father Red isn’t so lenient. Gloria, at 16, can readily see the turning gears of a horrible machine: in young Robbie, Red McCormack sees the opportunity to deal a distant blow to Robbie and Gloria’s father, Robert, a civil rights activist who fled to Chicago after an accusation of rape set him up to be lynched by the locals with impunity. The long arm of the law keeps Robbie out of prison, but only by “mercifully” placing him in the Gracetown School for Boys for 6 months… A sentence that everyone but Robbie knows is tantamount to execution.
Robbie might not be able to see the machinery of injustice as clearly as his sister can, but what he can see are ghosts–the “haints” of other boys that stalk the halls of the School. Through these haints, Robbie starts to understand the danger he’s in: one specter in the kitchen walks around with a knife in his back; a charred corpse visits a sleeping Robbie in the dormitory. Worst of all, to cross the grounds, Robbie must pass through a field that holds, frozen in time, the moment when dozens of boys like him–cast-off Blacks and Whites alike–died locked in a cabin that was then set on fire.
While Robbie fights to survive, Gloria fights to set him free, learning that justice is only as real as the help people are willing to give–which is often maddeningly little.
Three Theses on Sin
“Sin” is definitely part of Due’s vocabulary, represented by the relentless and prayerful Miz Lottie, Robbie and Gloria’s aging guardian. “I don’t b’lieve in ‘evil’ in most ways,” Miz Lottie says at one point:
I believe in the devil, all right, but man don’t need no help from Satan to do what folks call ‘evil.’ Man do evil ev’ry day and call it doin’ their job. ... [C]olored folks fighting for what’s theirs is like a virus to white folks—and they kill a virus so it don’t spread. That killing is the work of man, not the devil. And if there’s any such thing as evil on this earth, Gloria, it’s here in Gracetown. In the soil, hear? Gracetown soil remembers. It’s like a mirror that shines yo’ ugly back at you.
There’s a lot going on in this speech, but Miz Lottie offers what are essentially three “theses” on evil that play out in the rest of the novel:
Humans often mistake their own evil–their expulsion and eradication of others–as duty and righteousness.
Such a confusion of evil and goodness is somehow endemic to the ways humans understand themselves and one another.
The repetition of this mistake affects the whole world, to the point that the world “reflects” human evil back onto victims and perpetrators alike.
The first point is the most concrete, and Due provides us with examples crossing a whole spectrum of human wickedness. The rector of the Gracetown School tells young Robbie upon meeting him, “As an officer of the state, I will beat you bloody and sleep like a babe at night because it will make you a better man. God himself says so.” Here is a man who associates his own violence with religious and civic duty.
But upstream of him, there are others like the judge who sentences Robbie in the first place–aman who, we are regularly reminded, earnestly believed he was doing Robbie a kindness when he sentenced him to the Gracetown School for Boys instead of to prison. The man who, upon passing down this sentence, “beamed at Robert as if he expected to be thanked.” Though he holds young Robbie’s destiny in his hands, he does not relate to Robbie with the rector’s outright viciousness; he relates, like other lawmen, with a “shrug” from his semi-divine position in the American judiciary. “Shrugging was an ugly gesture,” Robbie feels immediately, “especially when it was meant for you. Your situation. Your life.”
The last two of Miz Lottie’s “theses” on evil are more abstract; “deductions” from or consequences of the first. The metaphor of Florida soil being “soaked with blood” persists. The reader senses that the land, so saturated with human evil, exerts its own kind of “constraining” force on the people who live there. Due suggests that even the most wicked racists of Gracetown are not entirely in control of themselves; culpable, yes; responsible, yes; but the land itself, overflowing with the “sins of the fathers,” somehow keeps people locked into the worst versions of themselves.
As Miz Lottie says in her third thesis, the more evil is poured into the world, the more the world tends to give it back. The Apostle Paul describes the state of sin as being unable to do the good I want to do, and compelled to do that which I don’t want to do; in The Reformatory, even American soil is complicit in that binding.
It’s not for nothing that theologian Bernard Lonergan describes sin as a kind of “moral impotence,” and Sebastian Moore further describes it as “the unavailability of energy, of élan, of ‘oomph,’ for loving.” We are sucked dry of our empathy, of our attention to the other, because all that energy is “hugely diverted into the labyrinths of mimesis,” into the “pretentious lie” that my sense of self arises not concurrently with the flourishing of the other, but only at their expense. Following the mimetic theory of René Girard, Moore identifies sin as “the mistake, universal and seemingly synonymous with culture and its institutions,” that scapegoating, victimization, and sacrifice are somehow necessary to stabilize human identity and society.
This is, essentially, Miz Lottie’s second thesis on evil, deduced from simply watching the relationships of Blacks and Whites in America: human beings think in terms of “over-against.” A person does not know who they are unless they compare themselves to someone else who is suffering. And because the suffering of another is such a powerful stabilizer of personal identity – “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like them” (Luke 18:11) – we easily find ways to justify the victimization of other people as part of our religious, moral, and political “duty.” At this point, we no longer see the “evil” of victimizing the other; we only see the “good” of knowing who we are.
To communicate this complex idea, Due needs complex people in her novel–characters more complex than a violent rector or self-satisfied judge. She needs characters like the rest of us. Characters like David Loehmann and Anne Powell.
“Good Enough”
Both Loehmann and Powell are White folks who provide glimmers of hope to Robbie and Gloria respectively. Loehmann, a Jewish social worker from up north, sympathizes with Robbie and treats him like a human being. He gives Robbie advice on keeping his head down, and promises to pull every string he can, knowing there won’t be many. As a Jew, Loehmann isn’t exactly welcome in Gracetown himself, and he shudders to think what sort of treatment his children will receive at school if word gets around that he’s helping the “rapist” Robert Stephens’s son out of doing his time. He’s right to worry, because we’ve already seen that Gracetown is a land of scapegoats: of sons punished in the place of fathers, of lynching trees proudly memorialized. Loehmann knows very little protects him beyond the color of his skin, and so he stays in his lane.
“Miss Anne” Powell is in a similar bind. The daughter of a judge sympathetic to civil rights, her social position is already ambivalent: secure because of her pedigree; precarious because of her politics. She carries on her father’s legacy as best she knows how, by being a good and humane employer to Gloria while remaining mostly oblivious to the persistent indignities of Gloria’s position. When Robbie is sent to the reformatory, Miss Anne uses what little power she has (“What good is having white skin if you can’t do anything with it?” Gloria wonders at one point) to secure funds for Robbie’s defense and to connect Gloria with Miss Channing, a “woman lawyer.” Gloria’s secretive, swampside meeting with Miss Channing is less than hopeful, and she realizes that Miss Anne’s problems also run deeper than she knew: Miss Anne and Miss Channing are very likely in a romantic relationship, placing them at the margins of society as well. Any help they might offer also places the other at risk.
Neither David Loehmann nor Anne Powell are bad people. They are not depraved, or corrupt to the core. They themselves are marginalized, at risk of retaliatory violence if they step out of bounds. They have people they want to protect. But they, like those around them, have bought into the “pretentious lie” that they can safeguard their own sense of identity by “doing their duty.” That stopping short of full solidarity still leaves them in a safe zone of being “good people.” Though they recognize the plights of other victims–always near to becoming victims themselves–their worldview still assumes, at some level, the necessity of victims for personal stability. Miss Anne and Miss Channing are, Gloria observes, oblivious to how “Robbie and Papa were lost inside these women’s other secrets from Gracetown.” Sacrificed to White secrets, Gloria’s family become the scapegoats through which the Jim Crow order of things remains in place:
“One day,” Channing said, “things will be different for everyone. You’ll see.”
“I don’t think so,” Gloria said. “Papa said we’d be farther along now if people weren’t so scared to tell the truth. Is that gonna change too?”
Miss Channing didn’t answer.
No One is Righteous; Not Even One
“I have come to understand,” writes theologian James Alison, “that [the] view of original sin–whose crude version is ‘the world is in a mess, and Christ is the solution’–is seriously inadequate.” It is, Alison writes, a little like trying to replace the door on a house: first, you assess the scope of the damage (sin) and then get a new door to replace the old (Christ). But this kind of theological thinking requires us to assume we already have the measure of the problem before setting to work on it. We recognize the “fittingness” of Christ’s death on the cross because, we assume, we understand the problem of sin well enough. We rarely stop to ask whether the death of God-in-Christ at Calvary is an act so monumental, so gratuitous, that it changes our perception of the problem Christ addresses. Alison likens the “crude version” of the story to pouring new wine (Christ) into old wineskins (our own perceptions of how “the world is a mess”). Instead, he argues, the “new wine” of Christ must dictate the fabrication of an entirely new wineskin, a worldview that can properly hold the weight of what God has done in history.
I think we get a glimpse of that worldview in The Reformatory. Tananarive Due wants us to take seriously that evil is not something “plain to the eye,” as Gloria observes early on. But Christianity has often warned us about sin and evil in ways that Sebastian Moore calls “vague,” or “muddled,” or even “miserably confused,” because our catechistical language is often too stark. Rarely do we experience—from each other, or our systems—the kind of wickedness we’d expect from words like “total depravity.” We expect to feel–or think we’re supposed to feel–like the spider in Jonathan Edwards’s sermon, writhing in the hands of an “angry God.”
The reality is much more concrete—though no less easy to fix, short of supernatural intervention: evil disguises itself in the banal and the commonsense, in those things we take for granted as “just the way things are,” or rush to defend as somehow essential lest civilization collapse. Evil tucks itself up inside the beautiful, in those things that aren’t totally corrupt. The moment we try to be “good people” within such systems, we’ve already ceded too much to the sacrificial assumptions that give these systems power in the first place.
Christianity warns us that following a crucified God means, in a sense, “losing our identity.” It means, above all, losing our sense of self as a “good person,” as innocent or righteous. But if Moore and Alison are to be believed, we must lose our senses of self and goodness not just because we don’t appreciate how utterly evil and depraved we are, but because those projects of self and goodness sow the seeds of evil by keeping us from loving other people. Each of us is our own Tower of Babel, reaching to the heavens; we lay every brick believing–however unconsciously–that someone else’s tower must fall if ours is to rise. We are so focused on the foundations of our own being that we cannot attend to others. It is only by receiving our sense of self and righteousness from Jesus that we stop trying so hard to be (a striving that has violent knock-on effects) and instead become available to the others we cannot do without: “There is no change in ‘me’ except insofar as there is a change in the relationality with the other,” Alison writes. “[And] this change can be initiated only by the other.”
Sin, Alison offers, is in many ways “a failure to rest peaceably in what made it possible for there to be a ‘me’ at all.” To rest, in other words, in the “self” God gives us when he knits us together. It’s by taking over this process that we thwart the Spirit of God. As theologian Willie James Jennings says, “The main thing God is pressing [us] to do is to go be with people [we] would prefer not to be [with].” But if one yields to the Spirit of God, he advises, “especially at the site of racial division [and] racial comfort…what will open up in front of you is what you’ve always wanted, but that you aren’t able to see unless you yield and risk with the Spirit of God… The Spirit of God is the Creating Spirit. But the new always waits on the other side of risk.”
“Whoever loses his soul for my sake will find it,” Jesus says. What would you risk this week, if you could peaceably rest in the self you’ve been given by God?
I’m grateful to do this work under the banner of unRival Network, a non-profit organization that accompanies peacebuilders to nurture hope, inspire collaboration, and overcome destructive rivalries in a nonviolent struggle for justpeace. This newsletter is part of unRival’s mission to expand its community of regular people seeking ever-better ways of being together:
This Fall, Joel D. Aguilar Ramírez and I will be working with unRival to refresh the hearts of US-based Christian leaders buffeted by polarization but motivated by nonviolent theology and discipleship. We’re designing a safe space for doubt, wrestling, and healing together. A community for developing spiritual habits that will sustain us into an uncertain future. If you value this work and want to support it or be part of it, please get in touch, and consider signing up: