One of the Niebuhrs (was it Reinhold or Richard?) said that it is much easier to sin corporately than individually. He, whichever one it was, may well have been referring to the nightmare in Nazi Germany. Even if he wasn’t, it is a “stellar” example of corporate sin. What we would never do on our own, we willingly do corporately.
Take that Nazi Germany example. How many people would go out and round up their Jewish neighbors and gas them to death? Only the most depraved. But put a lot of otherwise very decent people together and they can do the most despicable acts, like gas 6 million Jews.
We who live far removed from such atrocities can wag our tongues and our fingers, but are we so above these people? Are we not just as quick to fall into such sins?
What happens when a sinful act is done corporately is that blame doesn’t get assessed very well and where blame is murky, repentance is even less likely to occur. We can hide among the masses.
Take the racially based lynchings of the 20th Century. While most of these ended by mid-century, there were isolated occurrences right up into the far more civilized 1990s. The actual lynchings were done by only a handful of people, not necessarily white hooded either. But a lot of other people were usually standing around gawking if not cheering, none of them doing a thing to stop it. And when the “show” fell out of vogue, whole communities still played complicit roles in allowing such darkness to rule their nights.
Most of these people were what we call God-fearing, church-going. Why some of them were even preachers of the Gospel, no less – saved, baptized, sanctified, and all the rest.
What possessed them to act so vilely on Saturday evening and then go to church on Sunday morning and lift up supposedly holy hands to God in heaven? It wasn’t that they were more evil than others around them.
One of the most compelling stories I’ve ever heard out of the Nazi trials was the one about the Jewish man who broke down in the witness stand. The compassionate judge apologized that he had to go through such an ordeal as facing the man accused of such heinous crimes against the witness’ family.
The witness replied that he wasn’t crying because of what that other man had done. He was weeping because he had suddenly realized that that criminal was a human being just like himself, and that even he the victim himself was therefore just as capable of such atrocities.
We like to compartmentalize sin so that we can feel safe – not safe from being hurt by others’ sins, but safe from feeling that we are capable of such darkness. But as soon as we do that, as soon as we say that the reason that sinners sin is because they are so much worse than us ordinary people, we make ourselves even more capable of sinning big time.
Listen to the rhetoric abroad among “good Christian people” today and what you hear is a lot of talk about how evil “those” other people, whoever “those people” are. The world is going to hell in a handbasket because “those people” are increasing in power and we need to do something to stop it – either push them out or cloister ourselves.
Reality is that if we hide from “them” we will all too soon discover that we have “them” among us who are hiding. As Pogo, the cartoon character, years ago said, “We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us.”
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