During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". My frame of reference here is political, not philosophical.
I have elsewhere talked about naive idealism as Jacobinism, but that term has more of a leftist connotation, and I want to define here more broadly. Naive idealists as a type, whether they are on the left or the right, hate the world as they find it and are committed to work toward the realization of an ideal world as they wish it would be. They believe in the righteousness of their cause, and they believe that any one who opposes them must be evil. And for this reason, they are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Since for them evil is the force that prevents the world from conforming to their ideals about how it should be, they often become explosively angry, and this anger at the intractability of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries. They see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, but instead they become a force that promotes it.
Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror, Stalin's and Mao's purges all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the red guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but also in secular ideologies like Marxism and fascism.
Naive idealists always present their murderous causes in the most lofty of terms. Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course, not. But he was an unhinged fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil than for good. Is Islamo-fascism evil? Without a doubt. Does that mean that it should be purged from the world? The impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it and those who seek to exterminate it. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.
So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. We Americans are vulnerable in this sense. One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck.
Contrast this attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction of Jesus' confrontation with the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is not one of liberal tolerance, but neither does he condemn. His attitude contrasts profoundly with those who were about to stone the woman, because whether they realized it or not, their desire to kill her made them just as much a part of the system as she was. There was a karmic loop in the making there that would have continued in perpetuity unless there could be an intervention from outside of it, and that's what Jesus' confrontation with the woman represented--not a condemnation, but the chance of liberation from the loop. And the story is so moving because she appeared to have accepted that chance. She understood what was being offered to her.
But the point is this, the only way you escape the loop is by being thrown a lifeline from a source outside of it. The person caught in the loop, of course, has to choose to use it to climb out. There's no forcing compliance. But it's not even a possibility unless such a lifeline is thrown. The task for the genuine Christian and for every person alive to the possibility of grace is to throw lifelines, not to condemn or to force their will on those who are resistant to it.
That's my understanding of the meaning of original sin. None of us, if he lives in the real world, is ever free from the influence of evil in it. It's just there; it's not the whole story, but it's in the air like toxic fumes. We are all of us caught in an all-but closed system, and we would eventually suffocate if something were not offered from outside of it, a lifeline which does not lift us out, but rather pumps oxygen to us which strengthens us to live more effectively in a world full of toxins. But I do believe that it's possible to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins, both as individuals and in communities, but no one is ever free so long as he walks the earth. That's why we need to throw such lifelines to one another and to be grateful when one is thrown to us.
The Middle East is a horrific mess right now. The Israelis and Palestinians are caught in such a violent karmic loop, and now so are the Americans and the Islamic fanatics in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the same old, same old story. But who is there now to throw us a lifeline?