The Men Without Chests
Bullying as Policy and A Christian Response
His name was Marcus. Freakishly tall, a spindly mustache growing like moss on his pale prepubescent face, with long stringy black hair and mean dark eyes. I didn’t know him at all but was sitting in front of him on the bus ride home after school during my elementary school days in Mississippi. He started flicking the back of my head. Ok, once. Accident. Twice. Is this happening? Third. It’s happening. Fourth, turn around.
“Hey…” hoping for some measure of just kidding friendliness but what I found was something else. He wasn’t interested in passing it off in jest. He was picking a fight. “What’s your deal?” I said with whatever courage fourth-grade me could muster. “I don’t like you, you’re ugly.”
“Well you’re dumb and ugly so I’d be mad if I were you too.” Of course, I never actually said that. I’m not clever. I have a big mouth but a slow mind. I said something reciprocally combative and that’s when the challenge was issued. “Get off at my stop then.”
I at least had the presence of mind to realize getting off at his stop would have meant being on his turf and potentially a long, swollen walk home.
“Get off at mine,” I retorted.
“Oh I can’t today.” What?
“But tomorrow…” he threatened.
I showed up the rest of the week, not exactly sitting next to him but staring at him constantly, wondering what he would do. And every day for the rest of that week and the weeks that followed, he got off at his stop.
Eventually, he moved on and so did I. I never grew to like him, didn’t really get to know him, just ignored him. But I didn’t back down either.
We all recognize them immediately. For most of us, we’ve known them our whole lives. Their snarling jeers, their contemptuous laughs, their need to be surrounded by a pack because though they claim to be strong, they really are weak and afraid. We see their initial form in the grade school lunchroom, or at recess, or the back rows of the bus. They are scared little boys and girls cowled in masks and bravado, parasites who try to feed off the empty calories of fear and approval. But they can never be satisfied.
They are bullies.
Ours seems an age particularly gilded with bullies of many stripes and vocations. Politicians, the “police” force aptly named I.C.E, pastors, and podcasters all puffing themselves up with threats of violence or actual violence to make themselves feel and seem large. Yet, ever always, smaller. The irony of course is that we are trained from an early age to see the bully as a caricature, a stereotype of low self-esteem, shame, and terror that they might be seen for who they really are. Watch any kids show with a bullying antagonist and you will roll your eyes at the outsized, cartoonish biker-attire, putdowns, and idiocy.
C.S. Lewis, in his seminal, The Abolition of Man writes of the removal of the heart as the link between the intellect and instinct. His shorthand for this missing component is the chest:
“The Chest—Magnanimity—Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison offices between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
So why, then, with our keen senses attuned to be repulsed by bullying, do bullies thrive? Why does it seem like, with the psalmist, that the wicked prosper (Psalm 73v3)?:
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against heaven,
and their tongues range over the earth
Psalm 73vv6-9
One of Lewis’ central focuses, in The Abolition of Man, is on the creeping erosion of big-T Truth, and its attendants beauty and goodness and the shockwaves this would leave in ethics, science, civility, and politics. Lewis’ concern was that the lack of acknowledgment and awareness of a center of the universe would lead to a relativism that felt like freedom, but really was the dissolution and fracturing of humanity. Untethered from this transcendent reality, technocrats, pundits, and of course, politicians in power would seek to impose a “new” vision of human flourishing that really would just be a reiteration of the old ways of trying to be like God, of subjection and domination, of propaganda in service of power and state religion.
Lewis writes:
But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique; we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. [...] It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.
Lewis’ foretelling of the “omnicompetent state” and “irresistible scientific technique” could hardly be more prescient in regards to the totalizing nature of our federal government and Silicon Valley and the increasingly blurred lines between them. But the heart of Lewis’ ominous prediction is about what he labels the Tao, or in Hebrew thought, the Law, or in Christian thought conformity to Christ himself. The virtues that have long transcended culture, time, and place, from Lewis’ vantage nearing the latter years of World War II that were drying up. It’s especially interesting that at a time of great heroism and sacrifice on the part of many of Lewis’ countrymen—and the rest of the Allied forces alike—Lewis saw the cultural drift that was already set into motion.
We are the disinherited generations of this pendulum shift. It’s one thing to evoke some mythic past where things were “better,” particularly in America. I’m under no delusions of pining for halcyon days of virtue, justice, and goodness—ask our black, brown, and Asian brothers and sisters about that. But it’s quite another thing, in my view, when even the pretenses of trying to achieve virtue have been removed, when mercilessness is seen as goodness, illusion as truth, and cruelty as beauty not to mention the tattered rags that pass as civility, honor, self-sacrifice.
What’s left, as Nietzsche foretold, is winning, domination at all costs. It hardly bears rehearsing, how many claiming the name of Jesus have contorted themselves into every shape expect the shape of the cross to latch on the supposed surge in this power. The justifications and explanations are myriad, but the simple heart of the matter, from my vantage point, is that many Christians are trying to make their peace with bullying as a means to an end.
Looking again at a brief survey of the whole of Jesus’ life rejects any crude utilitarian ethics, any severing of means and ends, any dissonance between word and deed. Jesus is the logos, the word of God, in that he reveals God by the things that he says and the things that he does. God, in all of his power and providence, could have had Jesus born to the line of Herods or amongst the Sadducees, inheriting power over palace and temple from his parents. Instead he chose peasants, Joseph and Mary. Jesus, as Luke 4 confirms, could have led a large and loud campaign of miracles and might. Instead, he chose the way of self-denial, obscurity, the wilderness. Jesus placed himself within the complicated web of the political realities of first-century Jewish thought. His disciples would have represented a wide political spectrum, Judas Iscariot likely a zealot of some stripe, Matthew (Levi) one who gained from the status quo, James and John wanting to call down thunder on the enemies of God, and Peter drawing his sword to go to battle for his Lord and friend. Jesus would have none of it. Because none of it was the way.
At his trial, Pilate’s steely taunts—“Don’t you know that I have power to kill you or release you?” Welded to either a premodern cynicism or a megalomaniacal sense of self—what is truth? And Jesus remained silent, unmoved by his pretension of power and control. The cross, the ultimate abdication of anything resembling self-actualization, glory, sovereignty and yet Jesus wields it as his weapon of victory. And the resurrection, not proclaimed from the palace halls in Rome or the temple mount, but around tables, entrusting the good news to his good friends and empowering them to share it and to live it.
Not a hint of triumphalism or utilitarianism. But within all of it, the power of God.
God is not a bully and Christians obviously shouldn’t be bullies either. Wherever we see injustice, cruelty, or lack of mercy, we should instantly object. This is why the current administration and its long antecedents have always been so bewildering to me as a pastor. From the beginning it was clear that the intention was bullying of some nature, “locker room” talk, mockery, meanness, diminishing, desperately trying to get others in on the pointing and laughing. You can say it’s all words, and that we shouldn’t be snowflakey, so sensitive. But I would argue that the issue is not mere words, but virtue, honor, truth telling, wisdom, fidelity, self-sacrifice, a gentleness of spirit that marks true strength. And if we are talking specifically about manhood, for a moment, true manhood.
Again Lewis: We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
I can understand the desire for sound immigration policy and enforcement. I can’t understand how Christians are buying and spinning justifications for why the approach from ICE, at the president’s behest, we have seen in places like Minneapolis and Chicago or for me in Princeton, NJ, is valid or necessary, much less just. Their stated aim of curtailing criminals who are both here illegally and have committed various crimes is noble and a proper exercise of governmental authority. The enforcement of immigration laws of course falls under the purview of the federal government but the situations that many people find themselves in, undocumented, in America illegally yet working, raising families, being good neighbors, and paying taxes didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened within the context of real political history and real personal history. To try to treat all of these cases as generic resulting in immediate deportation is harsh and bureaucratic. There are humane solutions to these problems.
My father was a legal resident alien in the United States for most of his life, moving to the United States from England when he was just a boy. As a resident alien, he served in the United States military, graduated from college, got married, had kids, coached baseball, worked and contributed to the good of his place and neighbors. In his 60’s he finally became a fully-vested US citizen.
And my father taught me how to treat bullies, to not cast my lot with theirs, and how to stand up for people who were being bullied. As the church, we should recognize the bullies for what they are and do what has always worked against bullies. Stand up to them, confirm to them their worst fears that others don’t actually need to fear them, turn the other cheek to demonstrate the impotence of their threats, tell the truth joyfully and consistently.
As the people of the victory of the cross, we are the ultimate victors of history. Thus we should never lend our voices to those belittlers, mockers, and scoffers, unless we are joining our voices in praise with the savior’s taunting of death itself—where, o death is your sting? We are a people who win by losing. Jesus loses glory to take on our flesh. Jesus “loses” to the forces of empire, religion, sin, shame, hatred by taking on the cross. And we lose ourselves to gain the victory of the resurrection.