Theology and Peace: Part 4, The Lord's Prayer and Cycles of Violence

During dinner on the first day of the Theology and Peace conference my table was having a conversation about how victims tend to create more victims. I talked a bit about this in my post on Monday when I pointed to James Hunter's analysis regarding narratives of injury in American political discourse, how everyone is rushing to claim the position of victim in order to use moral leverage against opponents. In short, victims create more victims.

This is the argument made by social psychologist Ray Baumeister in his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. In this book Baumeister takes on what he calls "the myth of pure evil." According to Baumeister we tend to think that evil is produced by sociopathic sadists. But if you really look at the violence in the world you quickly realize that very little of it is caused by purely evil people. The vast majority of violence comes from normal people like you and I. Consequently, if we stay fascinated by the myth of pure evil, and Hollywood helps greatly with this, we'll never come to grips with where violence comes from.

So where does violence come from?

Well, one of the places violence comes from is from victims. Again, victims create more victims.

Take, as the paradigmatic case, Nazi Germany. No doubt Hitler was a sadist. But Hitler couldn't kill six million people all by himself. Hitler needed the cooperation of his Christian nation. How'd he get that cooperation? Well, he got it because Germany felt victimized in the aftermath of World War I. That narrative of injury, to apply James Hunter's term, allowed for the rise of the National Socialist Party.

Take, as a second example, the Rwandan genocide. The majority Hutu had a longstanding grievance of injury toward the Tusi who had ruled Rwanda for many centuries (backed, in the modern era, by Germany and Belgium). That narrative of injury drove many to the Hutu Power ideology that fueled the genocide.

And the examples can get more local. Take, as a third and final example, the research Baumeister cites in regard to domestic abusers. Why do these men beat their wives or girlfriends? Shockingly, these men tell narratives of injury. They, and not the one they abused, are the real victims. Think about that: abusers think they are the real victims. How so? The stories vary. Maybe she was flirting with a guy. Maybe she disrespected or demeaned him. The point is, even if we see all this as self-serving and ridiculous, the guy sees himself as having a reason, a reason that comes from a sense of perceived injury.

In sum, a great deal of evil in the world comes from feeling victimized. And these narratives of injury allow us to aggress against others in a way that feels right, moral and justified.

And if that's the case, how are we escape this cycle of violence? That is what we were talking about over dinner.

During this discussion Michael Hardin made a comment about the Lord's Prayer that really grabbed my attention. Specifically, he said this: The only way we can stop this cycle of violence, a cycle driven by our experience of being a victim, is to first recognize that we are perpetrators. As it says in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."

The first move is to recognize my own violence. The first move is to see how I victimize others. The first thing I confess in the Lord's Prayer is my own sin.

And in making this confession in the Lord's Prayer, in facing our own violence before anything else, we step away from narratives of injury and the cycles of violence they perpetuate.