Henry Idema: You cannot negotiate with evil
If you have been paying attention to the news lately, you see politicians on both sides of the aisle getting wobbling knees about continuing our support for Ukraine. One of the worse effects of secularization is the weakening, or the total disappearance, of the Christian religion's doctrine of evil. Evil is symbolized in the Bible as the devil, Satan, the Prince of Darkness, and Beezebul (called "the prince of demons" in Matthew 12:24). Sometimes the devil is called Lucifer and identified with Satan. The devil in our culture has been reduced to a Halloween costume or the villain of the movie "The Exorcist."
Yet, in my lifetime there has never been a human being on the historical stage as evil as Putin. Stalin, Hitler and Mao and some others were arguably even more evil, and cost more lives, than Putin. But what we have been witnessing in Ukraine — the rape and murder of women and even children, torture, the bombing of civilians, the kidnapping of children to be brought up as Russian, etc. — is all due to one man, who is evil incarnate. He will be remembered years from now alongside the other evil men I mentioned.
The Church and all people of faith must not let our government make the same mistake France and Britain made with Hitler in 1938 when they agreed to let Hitler occupy a part of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland), and then let him swallow up the whole country. The red line in 1938 then became Poland, and when Hitler invaded that country France and Britain declared war.
The Ukrainians have said they will not negotiate away any of their land, including Crimea, and the war will only end when the Russians have left their land. It is incredibly sad, and dangerous, that there are politicians in our government who support Putin, and to my knowledge Donald Trump has never criticized Putin for his aggression and war crimes. He once called Putin a genius for his invasion. Talking heads at FOX, such as Tucker Carlson, have been very weak in their support of Ukraine and seem to be taking Putin's side in this conflict. Liz Cheney has even identified what she calls "the Putin" wing of the GOP.
Do you agree with Jesus that the devil, or Satan, is a reality, a force that works in opposition to God in the unfolding of history? Or have we explained Satan away as an ancient symbol that has no reality? Men like Hitler and Putin should make us at least stop and think about this question. A professor I was studying theology under in 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a Roman Catholic priest, told a bunch of us students sitting by a fire one stormy October night, with glasses of wine in our hands, that the movie "The Exorcist" was based on a true incident in Georgetown. Since then, I have gone back and forth about the existence of a supernatural power of evil that we call Satan.
But one thing I have no doubt about is that within all of us there exists the potential for doing evil. Carl Jung called this "the shadow" side of our nature. Wars bring this out for all of us to see as do the mass shootings plaguing our schools and society. Jung thought of Satan as the shadow side of God, which prevents dualism but then raises all kinds of questions about the nature of God.
I prefer to think of God as love as set forth in the New Testament. But I admit that this view of God leaves us with the problem of evil, unless we argue that all evil in the world comes from human beings. If human beings were wiped out by a disease or an asteroid (like the dinosaurs), evil would disappear. A tiger eating a cow in India is not evil, it is the tiger's nature. Of course, the story of Noah and the flood is a story of God destroying all animals and human beings except for those on the ark in order to wipe out sin and evil from the planet. That did not work, as the story tells us, because the surviving humans from the ark began sinning again. Their shadow nature remained.
It is the Church's task, along with all people of faith, to identify evil such as Putin, and then never let our government negotiate and compromise with such evil. Evil in the end must be destroyed or locked up where it can never escape again.
Those who compromise with evil instead of standing up to it become enablers of evil, as we saw in Munich in 1938.
— Henry Idema lives in Grand Haven. He can be reached at henryidema3@yahoo.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Henry Idema: You cannot negotiate with evil
