Stories about human evil are uncomfortable because they rarely let us stand safely outside them. It is easy to think of evil as something done by monsters. The harder truth is that ordinary people, in the right circumstances, can do terrible things, and that ordinary people, with the right faith, can also stand against it. "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21).
This post looks at evil in the human heart rather than the question of why God allows suffering, which we covered in Stories About Doubt and the Problem of Evil. Below are three sermon illustrations, each retold in full in our own words: a French village that said no to the Holocaust, a Yale experiment that shocked the world, and four quiet watercolours signed by the most notorious man of the twentieth century. Each ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- Le Chambon: The Rainbow in the Storm
- The Milgram Experiments: How Far Would You Go?
- Hitler the Artist: The Evil That Looks Ordinary
Le Chambon: The Rainbow in the Storm
It has often been said that there are two things human beings cannot look at directly without going mad: the glory of God and the darkness of human evil. Philip Hallie, a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University and a veteran of the Second World War, must have felt close to madness after years of studying human cruelty. He was working on a project about Nazi atrocities and had focused on the medical experiments Nazi doctors carried out on Jewish children in the death camps.
"Across all these studies," Hallie later wrote, "the pattern of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetitions of the patterns of persecution." His study of evil, he said, had become a prison, its bars made of his bitterness toward the violent and its walls made of his horrified indifference to slow murder. "Over the years," he confessed, "I had dug myself into Hell."
During that time Hallie came across a short article about a small Protestant village in the mountains of south-central France, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which had become a place of refuge for Jews in German-occupied Europe. He read it with academic detachment, trying to classify types of cruelty and forms of resistance. About halfway down the third page he became "annoyed by a strange sensation on my cheeks." He reached up to brush away what he thought was a bit of dust, and found tears. "Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet." Those tears, he later wrote, were an instinctive expression of moral praise.
That was Hallie's introduction to the people of Le Chambon, who during the war sheltered and smuggled to safety a great many Jewish refugees, many of them children. Hallie himself spoke of around five thousand refugees; historians today give a range, with most estimates for Jews sheltered in the area between eight hundred and several thousand (Wikipedia). In 1990 Israel's Yad Vashem recognised the whole community as Righteous Among the Nations. Hallie told their story in his modern classic Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979). One of his readers summed it up in words he came to agree with: "The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le Chambon was the rainbow." Hallie concluded that for him, too, "the little story of Le Chambon is grander and more beautiful than the bloody war that stopped Hitler."
What comes through in his account is the stubborn courage of the Chambonnais. They were Huguenots, French Protestants shaped by their faith in Christ and by three hundred years of persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They were led, taught and encouraged by their remarkable pastor, André Trocmé, and his equally heroic wife, Magda. But what stands out most is their character, and the down-to-earth, no-nonsense quality of their faith.
Many in France let themselves be fooled by the propaganda the Germans used to hide the death camps. The people of Le Chambon simply did what had to be done, what they had been taught to do, what Christ would have expected of them. They sheltered and saved their neighbours, the Jews, who were in danger.
The evening Pastor Trocmé was arrested sums up the whole story. He and Magda had been invited to dinner by members of the church, who knew the couple often forgot such invitations and sent their daughter to remind them. When the girl walked into the Trocmés' dining room, she found the police arresting her pastor. Word flew around the village: André Trocmé had been arrested.
But Magda Trocmé, typically, invited the two policemen to sit down and eat dinner with them. Her friends were later shocked and upset. "How could you bring yourself to sit down to eat with these men who had come to take your husband away, perhaps to his death? How could you be so forgiving, so decent to them?"
Magda always gave the same answer: "What are you talking about? It was dinner-time; they were standing in my way; we were all hungry. The food was ready. What do you mean by such foolish words as 'forgiving' and 'decent'?"
That response was typical of the whole village. The Chambonnais shrugged off praise again and again. They would look Hallie in the eye and say, "How can you call us 'good'? We were doing what had to be done. Things had to be done, that's all, and we happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it was the most natural thing in the world to help these people." An outsider's words of moral praise, Hallie concluded, were "like a slightly uncomfortable wreath laid upon a head by a kind but alien hand."
Takeaway: Hallie had studied evil until it nearly swallowed him. What rescued him was not a theory but the sight of ordinary Christians doing the obvious good thing, and doing it so naturally that they did not think it deserved praise. That is what overcoming evil with good looks like. "Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed" (Psalm 82:3-4). What would "the most natural thing in the world" be for you to do for someone in danger today?
Source: Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, drawing on Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979).
The Milgram Experiments: How Far Would You Go?
In 1961 a young assistant professor at Yale University, Stanley Milgram, began an experiment on obedience. He wanted to find out how far ordinary citizens would go in obeying an order to inflict pain on another human being (Wikipedia). The question had special urgency: it was the year Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem, claiming he had only followed orders. Sopranu examines that trial and Hannah Arendt's idea of "the banality of evil" in its analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Members of the public were recruited by newspaper advertisement and paid a small fee to take part in what they were told was a study of memory and learning. Two participants were introduced to each other. One was given the role of "teacher," the other the role of "learner." What the teacher did not know was that the learner was an actor working for Milgram.
The learner was strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to his arm. The teacher sat in front of a large generator with a row of switches. The experiment, they were told, would test the effect of punishment on learning. The teacher would read out a series of word questions, and every time the learner got an answer wrong, the teacher was to give him an electric shock. The shocks began at 15 volts and went up with every mistake. The switches were labelled in rising steps, all the way to a section marked "Danger: Severe Shock" and beyond.
No real shocks were given, but the teachers did not know that. As the voltage rose, they heard the "victim" groan, then cry out, then scream in pain and beg to be released. When teachers hesitated, a man in a grey lab coat calmly told them that the experiment required them to continue.
Before the study, psychiatrists had predicted that only a tiny fraction of people, those with psychopathic tendencies, would go all the way to the highest level. To Milgram's astonishment, about 65 percent of the participants in his first experiment kept going right to the top of the scale, 450 volts, well past the "Danger: Severe Shock" warning. These were not monsters. They were ordinary people drawn from the general population of New Haven, acting in ways we would all call cruel.
What do the experiments prove? Some social scientists doubt they show a simple willingness to obey authority blindly. After all, people disobey authority all the time: they defy their parents, speed in their cars, ignore what their teachers tell them. Lee Ross of Stanford University and his colleague Richard Nisbett argue instead that the experiments show how powerfully context shapes our behaviour. To disobey, the participants had to step outside the whole situation and tell the experimenter that his experiment was wrong. Ross and Nisbett suggest that people often do things because of where they are rather than who they are. In different circumstances, the same person may act in a completely different way.
Takeaway: Milgram's teachers were not cruel people, but they were in a cruel situation, and most of them went along with it. That should humble us. "The heart is deceitful above all things" (Jeremiah 17:9), and none of us is as immune to pressure as we like to think. What situations in your life make it easy to go along with something you know is wrong?
Source: reported in The Good Weekend magazine, 2 December 2000. For a related study of situational evil, see Sopranu's review of The Lucifer Effect.
Hitler the Artist: The Evil That Looks Ordinary
In the collection of the United States Army Center of Military History in Washington are several watercolours by a soldier-artist of the early twentieth century (Wikipedia). The report this story comes from describes four of them, wartime scenes that most art critics consider unremarkable. The historian William Shirer is quoted as calling them "crude, stilted and lifeless." Their value lies entirely in the name in the bottom corner: "A. Hitler."
Adolf Hitler's name is a byword for evil and brutality. Yet many people do not realise that before he became the dictator who menaced the world, Hitler earned a meagre living selling his own paintings and postcards in Vienna. At eighteen he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He dreamed of becoming a great painter, and he had some flair for drawing, but he failed the entrance examination, and failed again the following year.
Marylou Gjernes, a former curator of the US Army Art Collection, reflected on Hitler's paintings this way: "It's a side of him that no-one expects. You don't expect to see an artist. It's very incongruous and, in a way, it's frightening. If someone who can perpetrate such evil can also have this softer side, then who's to say that possibly isn't in all of us?"
Sopranu looks at how a failed art student became the architect of genocide in its review of The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler.
Takeaway: We would prefer evil to look monstrous, so that we could recognise it easily and be sure it has nothing to do with us. Hitler's quiet watercolours suggest otherwise. The same hands that painted gentle street scenes signed orders for mass murder. Jesus said that evil thoughts, murder and every kind of wickedness come "out of a person's heart" (Mark 7:21-23). Where do you need to guard your own heart, rather than assuming evil only lives in other people?
Source: reported in The Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine, 1 June 2002. We could not independently confirm the Shirer quotation.
Final thoughts
A village that hid refugees as if it were the most natural thing in the world, an experiment that showed how easily decent people can be pushed into cruelty, and a dictator who once painted quiet street scenes. Put together, these stories about human evil tell us two things at once. Evil is closer to ordinary people than we would like to admit. And goodness, too, is within reach of ordinary people who are shaped by faith and willing to say no.
The question is not whether we are capable of evil. Milgram showed that most of us are. The question is what we are being formed into, day by day, so that when the moment comes we will do what the people of Le Chambon did. What is shaping you?
More stories you may like:
- Stories About Doubt and the Problem of Evil
- Stories About Sin and Temptation
- Best Stories About Courage
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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