My wife asked me to watch the movie “The Help” with her last night. It’s usually tough for me to get into these sorts of movies, especially at the beginning. Too many women doing unmanly things. How long can I last? But eventually the movie made its way around to something I actually wanted to follow.
One of my personality quirks is that I tend to always be looking for a big picture analogy about the human condition. Mississippi circa the early 60s was certainly full of potential analogies. I’m going to really reach, though, and take inspiration from movie’s depiction of old-south social groups to critique… groups as a whole. That’s right. I am a critic.
Of.
All.
Groups.
At least a little bit. If you never critique anything at all, you develop a false sense of the inherent perfection of things. So I certainly don’t avoid groups and I don’t think they are bad. The power of a club, group, team or organization can be tremendous. But here’s the key: without the present and pervasive Gospel (see The Gospel According to MLK, Jr) people will always abuse power. I don’t even mean that people have to understand the gospel the way a Christian understands it, but they have to at least value the principles (see Gandhi). If they don’t, power cannot help but be abused.
[I know a lot of skeptics, and the first thing they will point to when this topic arises is the Catholic Church. What about the abuse that has come to light from the Church? Doesn't that prove the gospel is insufficient - perhaps even an evil tool employed to manipulate and control? Nope. No more than it proves Martin Luther King, Jr. was really an evil double-agent for the KKK. People have always sought power. The avenue through which they attempt to gain it is not necessarily good or evil, by itself. That said, the gospel IS good - because it suffers and serves and loves (even an enemy). What the church seems to have mishandled is the gospel's natural response to people themselves. The gospel is, in fact, a person: Jesus Christ. He is the one who told the parable of the prodigal son, which contrasts the common selfishness of BOTH sons with the infinite forgiveness and generosity of the father.]
But I digress. My point is that human nature does not naturally lean toward the gospel (toward Jesus) – and when humans get together and formalize groups, the “leaning away” effect is often compounded. Nothing about hierarchy, efficiency, stability or any other prized group characteristic necessarily moves people toward thinking like Martin Luther King, Jr.
King’s was perhaps the least practical-sounding approach ever. Can you imagine a group voting to ratify King’s approach? “All in favor of suffering and dying and showing love to our enemies indefinitely say ‘aye’.” No way. But Jesus Christ was the primary motivator for King, and his was not a practical solution so much as a principled solution. King was bound and determined to do what he believed was right regardless of the outcome. He did not start with a goal and then strategize on how to reach that goal, as we are largely taught is the proper way to live (reverse engineering morality). He started with immovable truth and then called others to live according to that truth, to that gospel, to that Christ… no matter what. King knew that, in the end, love wins. And like his spiritual mentor, King gave his life for the principle.
Most groups, like those old southern groups from 1960′s Mississippi , are well intentioned. But they are also blind to the lack of value they place on other human beings. Goals, efficiency, hierarchy, longevity, and comfort become idols for groups. Idols are things that supersede the natural affection man ought to have for his fellow man, and groups are usually just too busy to deal with that. The gospel may be believed as a fact – just like Moscow is believed to be the capital of Russia – but it is not present and pervasive. So even if it is only a community ladies’ club, there is a measure of power to be had in any group. And that power will still wound before it heals in the absence of Love.
“You a Godless woman! Ain’t you tired, Miss Hilly? Ain’t you tired?” - Aibileen Clark to Hilly Holbrook, the social leader of the women’s community
