Sometimes things just come to me – thoughts that won’t let me go until I have thought them through. This hit me hard on Christmas night.

Like a cup or bucket that cannot hold another drop with overflowing, or (more pertinent in Southern California) like a rain-saturated hillside that cannot take one more tenth of an inch of rainfall before it gives way to a mudslide, I have reached my lifetime saturation point on some things.

One of them is cruelty. Whether it be cruelty to animals or children, or women—or cruelty to POWs, children and animals in Iraq ([1] it just goes on and on), or the atrocities of Darfur, or bullying of gay-appearing teenagers, or all the genocides of the 20^th century, some of which I have lived contemporaneously with and others were only lessons I learned as a student (the Jewish Holocaust had ended before I was born)— I am beyond wearying of cruelty.

These days I find myself not wanting to read a news headline if my cruelty meter begins to beep. Individual acts of psychopathic behavior or cruelty, or the utter madness of foreclosures upon the elderly and a marshal escorting someone from their own home because of missed payments, the bottom line is that our society still tolerates, if not legalizes, many forms of cruelty.

Like many other things, cruelty is concealed under different terms. Society accepts the unacceptable because it re-labels things to appear less odious, less inhuman, less cruel. When it comes to the tragic gay bullying of recent months that led to a wave of teen suicides, for example, how many of us heard “boys will be boys” as the standard excuse, a deflection of the evil. Braced as I was for the tragedy of it, I still got weepy watching a live production of [2] The Laramie Project earlier this year in Pasadena, telling the chilling story of mixed reactions to the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard in1998. Cruelty is perpetrated by overpowering the weaker party. Masculinity is constantly measured and defined by the ancient contest to prove who has weakness, as if weakness then is justification for contest, for warfare, for cruelty.

When I was in college, our Drama Department produced “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, a defining work that views the 17^th century Salem witch trials through a moral lense. Although there was no visible violence, what took place in those trials was also cruelty, disguised and re-packed as religious righteousness, and the slowly-grinding wheels of justice to conceal fear and superstition. But like masculinity in another context, justice and righteousness cloak the redefinition of cruelty so that it seems somehow necessary in the service of a higher good.

Nonsense!

One can always explain evil things that happen, but explanations cannot excuse them. For one human being to condemn another to death, or to torture another to death, is cruelty. Cruel is defined as willfully or knowingly causing pain or distress to another. Wikipedia’s article on [3] psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder is long and complex, but disturbing. For example, “Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.”

I would love to talk this over with a mental health professional in terms of religious convictions. Is there a corporate psychopathology that is easily cloaked with religious rectitude?

Today is St. Stephen’s Day on the Christian calendar. St. Stephen of the Acts of the Apostles (6:8–7:60), the first martyr in fact for the name of Jesus. Stephen was cruelly stoned to death by an angry mob that took offense at his religious views.

It is probably not wise to make any comparisons of that act with the actions of Muslims who defend their faith by taking umbrage whenever the Prophet is demeaned in a cartoon, etc. Christians have perpetrated perhaps as much or more cruelty than others to defend what they suppose is “the Christian faith.” Think the Crusades, the Inquisition. Think of burning gay people alive at the stake. Think of a flawed moral theology, pushed onto the faithful, which expects them to tolerate and accept unbearable burdens.

For example, “God never expects us to bear burdens which we cannot bear,” according to an old saying. You can find various wordings of this cliche on [4] Answer Bag. Such a cliche is just as much heresy as anything else ever said. It is not God who lays unbearable burdens on us, but other Christians who load those burdens, completely lacking a “sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.” There you have theological psychopathology.

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One thinks of that outrageous preacher from Topeka who preaches hatred at the front door of funerals. He thinks he is morally and theologically “right” as if that justifies cruelty and the complete absence of compassion. No wonder that “followers” of Jesus give him a bad name!

But Mr. Phelps is only the most publicly odious of the under-scum of our society which tolerates and excuses cruelty. It is time that decent people stop condoning hatred and cruelty no matter how it is labeled.

—Pastor Dan Hooper