By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Las Vegas, Nevada — “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is the
most abused line in the Bible and possibly the most tortured and misunderstood
sentence in English. (Perhaps the passage is clearer in Matthew’s original
Greek or in other translations. Hit me up, New Testament scholars.) “Judge
not!” is practically the municipal motto here in Las Vegas: What happens in
Sodom . . . But of course we must judge. We must do justice and mercy, protect
the vulnerable, enforce the law, maintain order — and none of that is possible
without judgment. We value judgment above all in public men and those who are
entrusted with important affairs. (Well
. . .) When your children are going the wrong way in life, when you meet at
addict, when your neighbor keeps showing up with unexplained bruises on her
face, Judge not! is the worst of all possible advice.
And yet . . .
Did I ever tell you how I came to oppose capital
punishment? In the 1990s, I went to write about a protest outside the prison in
which Texas conducts its executions. There was a small group of people voicing
their opposition to the execution — the usual hippies and protest hobbyists.
They were pretty dusty. There was also a much larger and more expressive group
cheering on Old Sparky — and they were having a great time. It was a rave, and their eyes were shining, and they
were alive with joy. The horror of the scene, it seemed to me, was not what was
being done to the man inside the walls of the prison — who surely had it coming
— but what was being done to the citizens gathered outside those walls.
You may have observed a similar phenomenon in less
dramatic circumstances. There are some people who when gossiping about some
moral outrage or act of depravity positively glow. Their eyes light up as they relate the details of the crime,
and they smile or even laugh as they articulate their disgust.
Maybe King David was one of those. Having betrayed his
comrade Uriah and taken the man’s wife, Bathsheba, as his own, David is rebuked
by the prophet Nathan, who tells him a story:
There were two men in one city; the
one rich, and the other poor.
The rich man had exceeding many
flocks and herds:
But the poor man had nothing, save
one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up
together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank
of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.
And there came a traveler unto the
rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress
for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and
dressed it for the man that was come to him.
And David’s anger was greatly
kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man
that hath done this thing shall surely die:
And he shall restore the lamb
fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.
And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.
Which is to say, King David judged and was judged in
turn. Nathan passes along a direct message from God: “I anointed you king over
Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house
to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel
and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even
more.” But David wanted more even than that, and he — see if this starts to
sound familiar — wanted it on his own terms. Powerful men are like that. Men
who aren’t powerful are like that, too, but you hear less about them, because
they generally have less capacity for bending the world to their will. King
David, as our Evangelical friends like to put it, was convicted. He confesses his wrongdoing and repents. Reminding us
that the God of the Bible often has a sense of justice that is fundamentally at
odds with our own, the Almighty kills David’s son to settle the score. “With
what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Big on killing sons,
the God of the Bible is. “Oh, you must find your faith very comforting,” they always tell us.
Do you think David’s eyes shone with glee when he
pronounced death on the rich man in Nathan’s story? I’ll bet they did. I’ll bet
he was ready to go all Old Testament on that rotten so-and-so, that sorry
whatever the really really ancient Hebrew was for “rat bastard.” Some
Christians travel the world looking for fragments of Noah’s ark or ancient
inscriptions because they want to prove that the Bible is true. They’re up
there on Mount Ararat, snuffling around in the caves, on the hunt. But they
have climbed the wrong mountain.
King David? I know that guy. If you want to meet him, you
can find him at Starbucks, you can find him down at Circus Circus drinking a watery
rum cocktail and playing bleep-bleep-bloop-bloop Wheel of Fortune–themed video games, you can find him down on the
floor at any political convention. Standing outside the death chamber,
everybody facing the same direction and chanting “Burn, baby, burn!” and aflame
with glory. Up and down the Vegas strip, a whole raggedy army of them, marching
in flipflops and sun hats. And if all
this had been too little, I would have given you even more. How do you
recognize him?
Ask Nathan. He knows.
The news for the past few weeks has been full of Jeffrey
Epstein and R. Kelly, two men who are different in trivial ways but nearly
identical where it matters most, which is not their shared taste for gold
chains. Both have been indicted under federal law for crimes involving sexual
relations with underage girls. Epstein already is a convicted sex offender and
is under federal indictment for trafficking; Kelly has not been convicted of
any crime, was previously acquitted on similar charges, and, in spite of what
certainly appears to be a mountain of evidence, categorically denies wrongdoing
in the matter. Innocent until proven guilty and all that — as a legal matter.
But: Judge not?
We’re going to judge. Of course we are. We are going to
judge and judge and and judge and, if the evidence ends up looking like what
the evidence certainly looks like it’s going to look like, we are going to just
judge the hell out of them both. We must. Wisdom makes cooperators rather than
rivals out of justice and mercy, and while even the worst monsters have a claim
on our mercy, the victims of these monstrous crimes have a claim, too. About
that there is no question. It is stipulated. We are going to judge them
righteously.
And, inevitably, self-righteously. There are already the
late-night comedy routines, the prison-rape jokes on social media, the attempts
to use one man or the other or both to make some kind of political point. Of
course, they have it coming. So did that guy who was being put to death in
Texas. So did the man in Nathan’s parable. So did King David. And, then as now,
there is a real moral danger for those of us standing outside the prison walls
looking in — pruriently, self-righteously, indignantly, eyes blazing, stoned on
outrage, hearts full of merciless joy. We are having a great time. We are going
to enjoy this too much.
“Judge not!”
is a specifically Christian maxim, and although the wisdom contained therein
may be fruitfully incorporated into the moral philosophy of those who do not
affirm the gospel, it imposes specific burdens on Christians and presents us
with particular challenges, assuming that there is more to our faith than the
proposition that Jesus is our buddy and sometimes helps us win the scratchers.
And here we begin to take shelter in the plural: “All of us are fallen,” the
affirmation goes, “all of us have fallen short of the glory of God.” Original
sin, “total depravity” as the Presbyterians say, is kept at a little bit of
safe intellectual distance by emphasizing that it is a universal condition. “It is certain that there is no one who is not
covered with infinite filth,” as the hygienically minded John Calvin put it. It
is not, strictly speaking, rational for the individual to feel less shame about
his undignified state simply because all his friends are in the same
hamartiological pickle as him, but we do.
And that creates a little bit of an opening for error:
“Oh, sure, we’re all fallen creatures, all in a universal condition of total
depravity, but that guy is a real
m——r.” In his most famous poem, Father Gerard Manley Hopkins describes the
moment of Christian redemption this way: “I am all at once what Christ is,
since he was what I am.” (To which John Calvin would no doubt add the
parenthetical: “Filth!”)
Christians do not believe that they meet their Savior because they are good but
precisely because they need a Redeemer, and it is in the depths of the darkness
that they encounter Him. The Incarnation referenced by Hopkins bridges the
cosmic gulf between the fallen creature and that from which he has fallen. And
what did the crucified messiah find when He descended into Hell? Only us. What do we — and it is
remarkably easier to say we than I, isn’t it? — find when we descend into
the muck and darkness and vileness of the crimes of R. Kelly and Jeffrey
Epstein? Do we have the moral courage to answer: Only us? That, whatever the particulars of the case (which are not
trivia), we are what they are — and not “all at once” but, rather, are and
always have been. Nietzsche did not have it quite right: When you look into the
abyss, it is not the abyss that looks into you — it is your own face, my own
face, there, staring back from the shadows, awful and depraved but also
fearfully and wonderfully made. Nietzsche and his swaggering epigones were
right to hate and fear the moral edifice built upon the foundation of that
truth: It is radically at odds with what they love and most esteem. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
Not even Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly.
David the king was also David the psalmist. And he also
went into the darkness.
Whither shall I flee from thy
presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou
art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall
cover me; even the night shall be light about me.
Even the darkness will not be dark.
Why would David want to flee his Lord? And if we follow
into the darkness and chaos, what will we find there?
Only us.
While Christians are off looking for the lost metatarsals
of Saint Polycarp of Smyrna, patron saint of dysentery, the nonbelievers may look
at all this mumbo-jumbo we’re always going on about — incarnation, death,
resurrection, redemption — and ask, not unreasonably, “Isn’t this all a bit . .
. involved?” You might think that the
Author of the Universe would come up with a more efficient and more direct way
of going about His daily business than taking on human form in some backwater
of the Roman Empire to complicate the wedding plans of two ancient Palestinian
Jews and organize yet another
Levantine wine cult. Why not just wave the old Omnipotent Hand and magic things back into paradise and
perfection? William Greenough Thayer Shedd, a 19th-century American theologian
who was blessed with a superabundance of names and sideburns both, saw the
affair as a kind of grand police proceeding: “The law is obligated to punish
the transgressor as much as the transgressor is obligated to obey the law,” he
wrote. “Law has no option. Justice has but one function. The necessity of
penalty is as great as the necessity of obligation. The law itself is under
law; that is, it is under the necessity of its own nature; and therefore the
only possible way whereby a transgressor can escape the penalty of the law, is
for a substitute to endure it for him. The deep substrata and base of all God’s
ethical attributes are eternal law and impartial justice.” If you are like me,
you might think there’s a little intellectual base-stealing going on somewhere
between “a substitute to endure it for him” and “eternal law and impartial
justice.” The innocent are punished, and the guilty escape the rightful penalty
laid out for them — how is that justice?
Would we think it justice if Jeffrey Epstein paid a substitute to do his time for him?
Of course we are talking here about two very different
things: The ordinary administration of criminal justice under the law and the
redemption of mankind under Providence. But the latter must to some extent
inform the former for Christian citizens — which is to say, for those of us who
believe that religious principle has a home in the public square as well as in
the confines of the church. Which brings us right back to: “Judge not, that ye
be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with
what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou
the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in
thine own eye?” King David made many mistakes and committed many crimes, but
there is a maturity and a clarity in the psalmist who understood that God saw
through him and into him, that there was no place to hide from that reality,
and that God nonetheless did not reject or abandon him. Even in His terrible
vengeance — taking the life of David’s child as a substitute for the
transgressing king himself — He did not simply abandon the reckless man to the
outer dark.
It is easy to imagine the glee with which the people
might have expounded on the crimes of the king. (Though perhaps they may have
been more circumspect; an errant ruler was an extremely dangerous thing in
those days, even before Twitter.) It is a powerful story — we still sing songs about it.
The judgment on David was terrible, which surely did not go unremarked upon —
indeed, the king was closely watched throughout the episode, at the end of
which he does something extraordinary.
It came to pass on the seventh day,
that the child died. And the servants of David feared to tell him that the
child was dead: for they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spake
unto him, and he would not hearken unto our voice: how will he then vex
himself, if we tell him that the child is dead?
But when David saw that his
servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead: therefore David
said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead.
Then David arose from the earth,
and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the
house of the Lord, and worshiped: then he came to his own house; and when he
required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.
Then said his servants unto him,
What thing is this that thou hast done? thou didst fast and weep for the child,
while it was alive; but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread.
And he said, While the child was
yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be
gracious to me, that the child may live?
But now he is dead, wherefore
should I fast?
King David appears to exhibit an almost superhuman
equanimity in the face of the death of his son, whose life was taken by a
wrathful and vengeful God — and David’s first act after the killing of his son
is to go to worship the killer. But
David knew himself and was honest with himself. He was not an innocent. His
crimes had been heinous. Saint Paul would later describe himself as the “chief
of sinners.” Peter “wept bitterly” at his own cowardly lies denying his
association with the condemned Jesus. “Yes, we are all fallen, but I’m no R.
Kelly.” But Paul? But Peter? But King David?
The point of law is to encourage human flourishing. It
is, properly understood, a utilitarian concern. We could get by perfectly well
without it, if we didn’t mind living in a world in which there was a great deal
of uncertainty, in which disputes were settled by bonking one another on the
head, and in which the main deterrent to antisocial behavior was ad hoc
violence. We could simply tear Jeffrey Epstein to pieces on the street for his
crimes and maybe argue a little bit over whether that is proportionate. (“The police
are just a janitorial service used to
clean up your blood after you’ve been murdered,” as the philosopher Wynn Duffy
observed.) But we don’t do that. We have a piece of social technology called
law, which helps us to have some security and predictability in our lives,
which in turn allows for things like trade, investment, the provision of public
goods, and other life-enhancing social practices. And it is to that end that
criminal law is properly administered.
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But what about vengeance? The desire for it is not
necessarily wrong or discreditable. But I do not want to put that particular
loaded gun in the hands of the people chanting “Burn,
baby, burn!” at executions or entrust it to the political system that
brought us both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anger makes you
stupid, and self-righteous anger makes you stupid and dangerous. And if there
is to be a mode of modern citizenship that has a particularly Christian
character, it should begin not with arrogant crusading and joyous
heretic-burning but with moral and political
humility. Spend a little time here in Las Vegas and tell me whether you think
we should moderate our expectations of democracy just a teensy bit. If we really believe what we say we believe — that we are made of the same stuff as R.
Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein — then perhaps it is enough for us to seek to
secure decent and regular administration of the law, reasonable public order,
such prevention of harm as we can manage, and a measure of rehabilitation for
those who can be rehabilitated. If we must judge and punish — and we must —
then let us do so only because it is a mournful necessity, not for the love of
the act itself and its power, or for the seductive pleasures afforded to us by
detestation, reckoning, and hatred.
Thou art the man,
Nathan said. And we say we believe it. But when we are put to the test — “Don’t drop the soap in the prison shower, ha!
ha! ha!” King David, standing on the roof of his splendid palace, could
think only of what he did not have, that gnawing terrible empty place inside
that can be filled with many different things, not the least of which is the
satisfaction of vengeance. But the desire for power will do, too, as will
ordinary lust, greed, ambition, wine, resentment, sloth: Vegas, baby! — all that neon out here in the holy quiet desert, and
that compaction of id and appetite and anxiety, a golden tower looming in the
background crowned by the squat serif letters “Trump.”
That’s one way to fill up the hole in the middle of you. Better to fill it with
something else first — something better. That it now requires an act of almost
heroic imagination to begin to discover what that might be also testifies to
our fallen state, and suggests, more than a little bit, that we don’t even
remember which way is up.
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