Roots of Violence

Roots of Violence
By Henlee Barnette, Emeritus Professor
Southern Baptist Seminary and
Clinical Professor (ret.), University of Louisville School of Medicine

• Theological Roots
• Ideological Roots
• Psychological Roots
• Reduction of Violence
• Individual
• Parental Responsibility
• The Role of the Church

Violence is primarily anthropological, a problem within persons. And we have largely focused on the problem without, rather than the one within. Thousands are chopping off the limbs of this evil tree while only a few are striking at its roots.

Theological Roots

Violence has theological roots. The Bible has a realistic view of human nature. The Judeo-Christian faith is the only major religion that teaches that we are sinful in nature from birth (Ps. 51:5). We are all sinners saved by grace. Even after conversion, Luther declared that we are simul justus et peccator. That is to say, "justified sinners." We have a dark side, a heart of darkness. In the beginning of holy history Cain killed his brother Abel out of jealousy (Gen. 4:8). Fratricidal warfare has persisted to this day. Jeremiah noted: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt, who can understand it?" (17:9

Jesus saw the evil in people. He struck at the root of murder when he stated that it related to anger in the heart (Matt. 5:21). He internalized morality, laid the axe at the root of the tree and dealt with the violence within the heart. Augustine, in the midst of a violent time as Roman civilization was disintegrating, wrote his magnum opus, The City of God, in which he declares that Rome`s problems did not lie in events taking place around them, but in the human heart. And that when the heart turns from God, evil things happen.

In his great work Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky has one of his characters, Smerdyakov, confess to his half-brother Ivan, a philosophical atheist, that he has murdered and robbed his father. Smerdyakov declared, "If there is no everlasting God, there is no such thing as virtue, and there is no need of it." (Part III, Book XI, 325) In other words, if there is no God anything goes.

The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the results of the denial of "the everlasting God" and the belief in a one-dimensional homo sapien. Terrorists that murder, steal, and destroy, sometimes do so in the name of God. Terrorists who destroyed the Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon did so believing they would go immediately to Paradise.

Ideological Roots

Violence and rage have ideological roots. Racist groups in America that advocate violence have an ideology grounded in religion. One group calls itself the Christian Identity movement. Its religio-ideology holds that whites (Celtic Anglo-Saxons) are God`s chosen people. The "Phinehas Priesthood" is the terrorist arm of Christian Identity. In the Bible Phinehas is the grandson of Aaron. He became the hero of the people of Israel by stopping a plague in the nation in BC 1452 (Num. 25:7-13). Phinehas also killed an Israelite and his pagan wife because he did not believe in racial intermarriage. Eventually he won the perpetual high priesthood.

Today members of the "Phinehas Priesthood" see themselves as soldiers of God to save America from Satan and a "one-world government." Hence, they justify their terrorism because it is warfare against evil. The action of modern Phinehas types is taken for the glory of God (The Christian Century, Sept. 8-15, 1999, 842).

Christian leaders must find new ways to counter hate groups such as Christian Identity, the KKK, Neo-Nazi cells, and other terrorists. Coalitions can be formed by ministerial associations to counteract their propaganda. The media must be used to inform citizens of their hateful ideologies. Community education is imperative.

Psychological Roots.

Depth psychology reveals that within all human beings lurks potential evil. A hidden violence exists within ourselves and others no matter how pious we may be. Sometimes we are startled to discover these demons within. A college classmate who was interned in a concentration camp, denied to a starving child that he had any bread on him. When he was freed, he wrote an article entitled "Hunger Makes Devils of Us All."

As human beings we are plagued with inner contradictions in both thought and action. For example, we have a private language and a public one, an inner one and outer one, a spoken and a non-spoken one. Our inner language betrays our embarrassing hidden violence. As psychologist Carl Rogers observes, there is within us a lack of congruence of "self with self." (On Becoming A Person, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961, 340)

Paul the Apostle describes the inner conflict that results in undesired behavior. He confessed: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." (Rom. 7:15-20) A civil war raged within him. Paul`s experience finds an echo in all of us. Only by the grace of God we can be delivered from this dilemma. (7:25)

The latent violence in us all can emerge in the hysteria of mob psychology. Near a church a black man murdered a wealthy farmer. When the authorities arrived at the killer`s home, they found him sitting on the porch with the dead man`s head nearby. He was arrested and on the way to jail, a mob took the prisoner and lynched him. Members of the mob cut off his fingers and toes for souvenirs. I was shocked to see a church member pictured in the photo of the lynched man. I am not sure that he participated in the lynching, but he was present.

Reduction of Violence. 

Many cures for contemporary violence are offered, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Some argue that posting the Ten Commandments in the public schools would have saved them from the violence and crimes of youth.

Since we cannot completely eliminate violence, our efforts should be toward reducing it in individuals and society. This will not be easy, for a whole generation has become psychically numb to the images of violence. The major theme projected by the mass media, especially movies and television, is increasingly the acting out of violence as a normal way of life.

We do not have a pharmaceutical substance that quells our violence, nor have we identified an evil gene we can eliminate. Let us therefore focus on more realistic and concrete possibilities.

The Individual. How do we handle our own anger? First, we become aware that anger and fear are what Gaylin calls "emergency emotions." To control these emotions we have mechanisms of control. Healthy persons, says Gaylin, have "a large repertoire of defenses" against his or her own anger (Willard Gaylin, The Rage Within: Anger in Modern Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, 96).

Here are a few we may use:

1) deny that you are angry;
2) use catharsis as a means of eliminating pent-up anger. (personally, I write articles, letters and notes for publication or just file them away);
3) disguise our anger by clothing it in passive aggressive behavior;
4) project or dissipate our anger;
5) try Paul`s principle: "Don`t let the sun go down on your wrath;" and
6) give some charity five dollars every time you explode with anger.

Let me add a few more:

7) Be calm. My longtime friend Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm, and I were making a film of the old Haymarket in downtown Louisville in the early 1940`s. I lived on the same block near Stoney`s Night Club. Over a period of two years numerous crimes had been committed there, including two homicides–front page stories in the newspaper. When the manager of Stoney`s saw us across the street taking pictures, he was furious. He came toward us shaking his fist and pouring forth profanity. Clarence remained calm and greeted the man with soft-spoken words: "Friend, this is a free country is it not?" The man was astounded, turned around, and headed back across the street muttering, "To hell with it!" I learned existentially what the Bible means, "A soft answer turneth away wrath." (Prov. 15:1)
8) Be courteous. Avoid name-calling; treat others with the same treatment that you receive from Christ. Recognize that the enemy is a person made in the image of God and one for whom Christ died.
9) Be in control of yourself by being filled with the Spirit. If one is filled with the Spirit, he or she displays love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." (Gal. 5:22). Program your anger toward reconciliation, not destruction.

Parental Responsibilities. Some of our major moral problems are rooted in dysfunctional families. As the basic unit of society, the family provides children with basic character formation. In the home children develop a sense of right and wrong, respect for others, a sense of responsibility, and regard for others. Hence, it is imperative that we find ways to strengthen the spiritual and moral foundations of the family.

Helping fragmented and broken families is one of society`s greatest challenges. Half the marriages in America end in divorce. Ironically, divorce between religious couples is slightly higher than of the non-religious. Baptists presently have the highest divorce rate of any religious group-twenty-nine percent of Baptists are now or have been divorced. The only Christian group with a higher rate is among non-denominational churches, who have a 34 percent divorce rate. Lutheran and Catholics have the lowest percentage of divorced persons at 21 percent. Atheists and agnostics are below the national average at 21 percent. Mormons, known for their emphasis on family values, fare no better than the national norm of 24 percent. (Baptists Today, Feb. 2000, 8).

America has the highest divorce rate among western industrial nations. Children who are victims of divorce are more pathological than children from families that remain together. Violence in children often has its roots in broken homes.

Every child needs a family of two parents, a father and a mother. Statistics show that families with two parents function better. Children need parents as role models of love and care, parents who will teach them by example values of civility and good manners. My son and his family from Alabama visited me in Louisville one Thanksgiving. My grandchildren, ages five and seven, surprised me and others by their behavior. They wanted to leave the table before others. So when they had finished they came to the head of the table where I always sit and asked, "Granddaddy, may I be excused?" Back of that simple act was years of teaching and example.

Children thrive on four things: attention, affection, affirmation, and acceptance. They crave affection and loving care; they desire recognition, affirmation, encouragement, and support; they must be accepted as a whole with their foibles and failures, their weaknesses as well as their strengths. This is the sort of nurture children need in their struggle toward maturity. It is their fundamental right.

Spiritual nurture is absolutely essential in a child`s life. Children deserve to be brought up in the nurture and discipline of the Lord. Fathers must take the lead in matters spiritual. Joshua set the example when the decision had to be made whether to serve the true God or the false gods of the past. "As for me and my house" declared Joshua, "we will serve the Lord." (Joshua 24:15) But in our time fathers have largely turned this task over to mothers. Greg Walcott, the veteran movie and TV star, once told me that he played the role of priest in his home. Then I understood why he and his family were different from the typical Hollywood family.

Some mothers also desert their responsibility of raising their offspring. The ostrich hatches its young without incubation, depositing her eggs in the sand to be hatched by the sun`s heat. Here her function as a mother ends. Like the ostrich, some mothers drop their responsibility for their children at birth. Or like the cowbird that does not build a nest but lays her eggs in the nest of other birds, some mothers want others to raise their children.

The Role of the Church and Violence.

The church has a vital role in the reduction of violence in our society, especially in the family. By strengthening the spiritual and moral foundations of the home, the church improves the quality of family life. Because the church touches the life of every member of the family, it has a unique opportunity to assist parents and children struggling with anger, conflict, and abuse.

One place for the church to begin is to teach the Christian meaning of marriage: its purpose, permanence, and the procreation and care of children. Millions of women and children are battered every year in the United States. It is estimated that a woman is attacked every five seconds. Churches can provide trained staff to minister to the abused, to provide a "safe place" of shelter for those seeking to escape a dangerous situation, and to cooperate with social services in a community.

Sometimes it takes years for women to escape from a bad relationship. The church can facilitate that transition to freedom. Churches may form a coalition with the Salvation Army and others who provide shelters for the abused. Pastors now have access to an enormous amount of resources provided for victims of violence. Education of the laity allows members to get involved.

Churches must awaken to the seriousness of our violent culture and take the action necessary to make a difference. Murdered Archbishop Romero of El Salvador wrote:

A church that doesn`t provoke any crisis,
a gospel that doesn`t unsettle,
a word that doesn`t get under anyone`s skin,
a word of God that doesn`t touch the real sin of the society
in which it is being proclaimed-
What gospel is this?
Very nice, pious considerations,
that don`t bother anyone,
that is the way many would like preaching to be.
Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter
so as not to be harassed,
so as not to have conflicts and difficulties,
do not light up the world they live in.
Archbishop Oscar Romero in The Violence of Love.

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