evil.

It’s been hard to convey my seminary experience accurately, fully. The best metaphor I’ve found is (unsurprisingly) birth and the transition to parenthood. You can witness so many births, babysit so many kids, study child development intensely, read allllll the websites and books and Instagram posts—and the experience is still never, ever truly going to be what you expect. The joys are different, the challenges are different, the growth is so, so different.

And so it has been with seminary. I knew some things would be hard—and some that I thought would be hard were harder, and some were actually joyful, and some didn’t matter at all. I knew there would be joy—but it didn’t necessarily come from the places I anticipated, and sometimes it was much, much bigger and deeper and higher and, I don’t know, sparklier than I ever could have known.

God’s love has always been at the core of faith for me. God’s love hasn’t always just been warm and fuzzy—God’s love was a constant caretaking, something I didn’t receive as a child that God provided, a steadfast and patient love. God’s love was sometimes an excruciating lesson. God’s love was justice, however messy. God’s love was a promise, sometimes not yet fulfilled. I expected to go even deeper into God’s love in seminary, to find new pathways and challenge old roadblocks—and I did. I really did. What I didn’t expect was to find in my heart was such a deep belief in evil.

I knew that the God of love was also the God of justice. I knew that God’s love extended to every corner, to every person—to people I hadn’t yet learned to love. To people I maybe wouldn’t ever love—to abusers and despots and wealth hoarders, as much as some part of me didn’t even really want that to be true. I still deeply believe that to be true.

I don’t think that evil is some force lurking out there that makes us think about sex too much, or causes us to not come to church on Sunday, or creates some kind of bullshit War on Christmas. It’s much, much more sinister, much more dangerous—evil is killing people and inflicting untold suffering and disappearing people and looking into the faces of fellow humans and just spitting on their dignity. It’s using humans to carry out all of it, too.

Friends, what’s happening now in our country isn’t just a moral wrong. That’s okay if that’s your framework and a moral wrong, a horrifying moral wrong is what this is to you. But to me—someone who believes in things that are divine—it’s fucking evil. I say that from the depths of my soul. It makes me shake, it gives me goosebumps, it turns my stomach.

Keeping anyone from seeking safety and joy is evil. Inhibiting migration is evil. Declaring authority over land through colonization is evil. It’s evil today even if the system was implemented long ago. Our immigration policy—the policy on paper, not only the horrific actions we see—is evil. And putting on a mask and snatching an immigrant from his family as he steps outside of a courtroom is an evil, evil action.

I don’t think people themselves are evil. I really don’t. That may sound incongruous to what I’ve written, but it’s actually part of the fiber and nature of evil. It’s something that grips us and turns us away from who we are—whether you think that’s a human with no relationship to a deity or if you think we are beloved children of God. When an ICE agent pulls a neck gaiter up over his face and physically rushes another human to imprison them—that agent has been stripped of his humanity, by evil.

(My hands are shaking as I write this.)

In some conservative evangelical churches growing up—the kind that were then leaning toward Christian Nationalism and now have jetted towards it full throttle—I was told a lot about evil. Those words caused a lot of harm, manipulated me into a “faith” in a way that felt separate from my own free choice, that felt separate from God’s love. I thought I was evil, and that’s why I was hurt at home, that’s why I couldn’t get the love I needed from other people. I thought if I prayed more, tried to be more “righteous”, if I didn’t disobey my parents, or masturbate, or cut class, that that would reduce my proximity to evil. Once I returned to the church as a young adult, I needed to hear less about evil, so as to not exacerbate the trauma of that theology. I needed to hear more about love, about how I wasn’t evil, about how gay people weren’t evil deviants and women weren’t evil Jezebels and pro-choice people weren’t evil murderers.

Maybe I’m working from a place that has (mostly) healed right now, and I’m ready to face the reality of evil. I still believe overwhelmingly in God’s love, and I think that choosing actions in line with God’s love—if that’s something you believe in or want to believe in—is how we work through this absolute terror. I also think that people have a choice to engage in evil actions or not. And while I don’t think that anyone is not worthy of God’s love or that anyone is irredeemable or that anyone is at their core purely, permanent, built-into-their-very-fiber evil—people are carrying out blatant, abject, devastating evil every day.

To be clear—in a way that I feel that I can, that others may not feel that they can, that even the church as a whole may not feel like it can—I think ICE agents are engaging in evil. I think that lawmakers and leaders are engaging in evil. I think that people saying shit like, “come the right way” or using the word “illegal” to describe another human being are engaging in evil (and also woefully, woefully misinformed about the very basics of our immigration system). I’m not sorry to say those things if one of them describes you, and my words make you feel hurt or angry. If those things make you feel hurt or angry, stop engaging in evil.

I’m saying this all as someone who also chooses evil every day. Yes, I’m writing this on a computer that was made in a way that furthered human suffering. Yes, my actions each day are furthering climate change. And I’m not saying that flippantly—it’s true. Those are sins, from which I need to repent and for which I need to answer.

And also, at this moment, we must shine a bright light on the evils of kidnapping and torturing and dehumanizing our fellow siblings-in-God. We must shine a bright light on the fact that these actions hurt those who are engaging in them, as well. They eat away at your soul, my friends! Not in a way that God can’t fix, but in a way that will leave a trail of harm and destruction in its wake and that you will never, in this lifetime, fully be able to erase from your personhood.

It’s overwhelming. It’s also not inevitable.

Lord, have mercy.