The reason it is important to distinguish team-building propaganda from admonishment is simply this: One is often tempted to excuse one’s own evil by comparing oneself with Those Bad People Over There. Not everybody who bucks up the home team is acting from noble motives. The proof of this is that the Axis powers had their propaganda too and tried to justify their evils by pointing to our faults as well. They were not admonishing anybody. They were justifying their own crimes by poisoning their citizens’ minds against people they had never met, would never communicate with, about whom they knew nothing but what the state fed them.
On a much smaller scale, we can do the same thing: We can gossip about “those people” and tell our inner circle what jerks they are— pretending we are bravely admonishing the sinner when all we are doing is indulging in a mutual-admiration society with our friends at the expense of those we dislike.
The point is this: Admonishing the sinner means confronting the sinner, not gossiping about him behind his back. Moreover, for the Catholic, it means confronting him in light of Christ’s revelation, rooted in that hope that he is capable of moral reasoning and repentance by the power of the Spirit.
We are well on the way to abandoning that hope. Our manufacturers of culture—left and right—speak as though an opponent can be motivated only by a sort of subhuman stupidity or malice impervious to moral reasoning. Liberals and conservatives in pop media routinely fulfill Godwin’s Law, a puckish “rule” of Internet discourse: “As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” Everybody from Bush to Obama to NPR to Fox News winds up being Hitler for fifteen minutes.
This lazy tendency to indulge in tribal vilification instead of admonishment is, of course, nothing new. In the New Testament, Jesus had to oppose such attitudes not only in his enemies but in his friends. He broke social and cultural barriers constantly and amazed or appalled both the Pharisees and the apostles. He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, talked to Roman soldiers, consorted with lepers, took former terrorists like Simon the Zealot as his disciples, and befriended dodgy women with unpromising psychological profiles, such as Mary Magdalene, “from whom he had cast out seven demons” (Mark 16:9). It’s therefore not surprising that the Pharisees’ spiritual laziness—which caused them to strain at gnats such as hand washings and to swallow camels such as hypocrisy, malice, and pride—also caused them to act supremely lazy by harshly judging him. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. ‘Nuff said. There was nobody there for the Pharisees to know: just an enemy to be ignored and—when he criticized them—to kill.
Lest we moderns gloat over the foolish Pharisees too much, however, we should note that postmodernity has contributed something new but not improved to this ancient evil of spiritual laziness. Post-moderns have added to the ancient tribalism of the Pharisee another very significant reason for the abandonment of admonishment: our rejection of the reality of sin.
Rejecting the reality of sin, we have ended up abandoning the hope of repentance. When you reject the idea of common truth, prattling that “truth is whatever is true for you,” you reject the basis for reason and argument. But you don’t (and can’t) reject the reality of your anger over sin. You can’t ignore it when somebody steals your wallet or beats up your child. But you can pretend that the sinner was an irrational animal acting solely on the influence of genes or environment and not to sin of which he can repent. So we increasingly treat sinners as we treat animals: diagnosing, caging, or killing them like rabid dogs, but never talking about sin or repentance.
The old idea of the penitentiary is almost entirely gone. It is no longer, as the name suggests, a place for penance. It is a state-run warehouse (and slaughterhouse) for human animals who have, as the saying goes, “forfeited their humanity.”
It is, of course, possible to laugh off the notion of repentance as hopelessly Pollyanna and caricature it as the naïve belief that hardened thugs will melt into saints if you talk nice to them. But that’s not my point or my claim. It is, rather, that in abandoning our understanding of the human person to the secular state instead of having the courage of our convictions as Catholics, we are laying the foundation for treating all human beings as animals and potential criminals rather than as citizens of a free society. One need only note the changes in our security state over the past ten years. Big Brother has eyes everywhere. In airports and public facilities across America, Boy Scouts, nuns, and little old ladies from Lake Wobegon are expected to endure invasive searches that, in any other context, should result in an arrest for sexual predation. An eighty-six-year-old bedridden woman is tasered (twice) while the cops stand on her oxygen hose and her protesting grandson is cuffed and frog-marched out of the house. The cops explain that it was all justified because she “took a more aggressive posture in her bed.” The idea that she was a human being never entered their heads.
The curious result of our culture’s growing abandonment of the notion of sin is (as Faustian bargains tend to be) a loss of our humanity. As we become coarser and our belief that humans are made in the image of God fades to a theory of humans as animals shaped by heredity and environment, our faith in the power of moral suasion goes with it. So, for instance, a majority of Americans (including, alas, Catholics) forget our successful use of conventional interrogation with Nazis and Communists and embrace the lie that intelligence can best be gained from enemy combatants via “enhanced interrogation” (a euphemism for torture). This is a complete rejection of the Church’s teaching on human dignity and is founded on the assertion that human beings are, at bottom, beasts. Eventually it occurs to Caesar that if “enhanced interrogation” may be used on perceived foreign threats, then why not on domestic ones too? Enhanced interrogation begins to be deployed to interrogate not merely suspected terrorists abroad but also suspected criminals at home.
In short, as a culture embraces the view that men are brutes, it is not possible to keep that genie in the bottle of a CIA black site. Caesar inevitably starts to treat his subjects that way too. He abandons the language of a ruler maintaining ordered liberty for a free people and speaks more and more like a bureaucrat barking threats at contemptible servants—or cracking whips at beasts. So, for instance, where there used to be public-service announcements saying “Every litter bit hurts,” we now get “Litter and it will hurt.” “Buckle up for safety!” has been replaced with “Click it or ticket!” “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” is replaced by “Drive hammered. Get nailed.” Threats, not admonishment, are the order of the day.
One stark example of such contempt-based social control in media from a few year back is the infamous “No Pressure” ad sponsored by 10:10, an organized campaign to reduce carbon emissions. There was no attempt to admonish by saying, “Even if you are skeptical about anthropogenic global warming, it couldn’t hurt if everybody pitched in and cared for the environment as best they can.” That would respect human dignity. Instead the ad (which its makers actually imagined was funny) shows an elementary-school teacher urging her class to reduce their carbon footprint. When two children express reservations, the teacher mildly says, “No pressure,” and then pushes a large red button on her desk, whereupon the non-conforming kids explode in bloody chunks, splattering the other screaming children in the classroom. This revolting gag is repeated a few more times to drive home the message: Submit or be slaughtered like animals.
If Christ is to be believed, all this violent contempt for human dignity is foreign to what we actually are. Why do we prefer to treat people like animals when, in fact, admonishing the sinner and not stampeding the herd is truer to our nature as rational beings?
Answer: because admonishing the sinner is hard. Christ did it, and it got him nailed to a cross. For admonishment means looking somebody in the eye rather than imposing bureaucratic solutions from three thousand miles away. It means addressing a fellow human being as an equal, not a lab rat, sheep, or contagion. It means stating truly unpopular opinions, not to peers who share them but to enemies who don’t. It means the risk of losing friends, family, job, and reputation. It means speaking about things that are awkward and uncomfortable. And in our post-Christian world, it often means doing it in a grammar and terminology that members of our culture know, if at all, only in a sort of pidgin.
I know only a few replies to the person who says, “Then I think I’d rather not.” One is this: You should anyway, if for no other reason than that you will sleep better at night. Another is this: Sometimes when you admonish the sinner, he repents—because the sinner still has a conscience, heart, and soul. Some of the moments I am most thankful for are those when a friend who truly loved me took me aside and, with tears glistening in her eyes, said, “Mark, I wouldn’t want to hurt you for the world. But when you did X, you really disappointed me. I know you are better than that! Repent, ask forgiveness, and right the wrong you did.” Half the time my conscience was nagging me before my friend spoke. It was a relief to admit the sin.
In such cases admonishment is particularly revealed for what it is: not a shattering blow designed to humiliate and destroy the sinner but a reassuring reminder that, heinous as we both know this sin was, God is not abandoning the sinner but is calling him back to mercy and restoration. Indeed, many, many times admonishing the sinner means admonishing him not to despair over his sin.
The hope of our tradition is very simple: It is that God saves sinners— real, nasty, repulsive sinners—and not merely colorfully charming golden-hearted rogues from comic burlesques who drink a bit, like the sight of a pretty pair of legs, and wouldn’t harm a flea. It is a faith rooted in the R-rated spectacle of the life of King David, a power-drunk despot who used his clout to steal a good man’s wife, impregnate her, and then murder the victim of his despicable crime by trading on his very loyalty to send him into battle for his king— and abandon him there. In any other oriental despotism of antiquity, confronting the man who committed such a crime would have meant instant death. But when the prophet Nathan admonished David, something extraordinary occurred. David sagged on his throne and, instead of having Nathan executed as an example to his court, sobbed, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Samuel 12:13). Then he composed one of the greatest poems of antiquity. It’s a beacon of hope to every sinner who has ever lived after him. It reads in part:
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your merciful love;
according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
…
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit. (Psalm 51:1–2, 10–12)
That psalm stands as a permanent reminder of the power of the Holy Spirit, even at this hour, to change the world when a disciple of Jesus calls a sinner to doff the mask of sin and become who he really is: a child of God in the image of Christ.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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