How to spot a bad man.

Sin and the Booky Wook of Common Prayer.

“The bad boy label is just an assumption.”

Russell Brand.

How do you spot a bad man? Well, it’s obvious isn’t it. He uses bad language. He does bad things that make it easy for us to spot his badness, like driving over the speed limit or wearing grey slip-on shoes or listening to Scouting for Girls. Maybe he wears a t-shirt that’s not ethically sourced or perhaps he eats Nestlé products with impunity. He probably watches GB News and votes Tory. He definitely won’t have rainbows or the word feminist in his bio, because we all know that these things are code for a good man not a bad one. He won’t have any friends. No one will speak well of him. He won’t give his money to charity and he never helps people. Nobody will like him, obviously, because he’s bad. And he’s not just going to admit to being a bad man, because if he really was a bad man then he would hide it, like a dirty secret, because that’s what bad men do. Don’t they?

One of the complaints about the Book of Common Prayer is that it’s over-concerned with sin. I understand the dilemma: we want to share the good news of Jesus and we want more people to come into our churches. Banging on about sin is off-putting to say the least. God loves you is a far more potent message and not only because it’s true. In a hurting world full of unnecessary judgement and pain, knowing we are loved is a soothing balm that has the power to be transformative. People who know they are loved and accepted for who they are tend to pay that love forward. “Come and confess your sins and wickedness on your knees with wailing,” on the other hand, is a much harder sell.

It’s often said that the people most in need of the gospel, and the soothing balm of God’s mercy and love, are those who know suffering best. The poor. The marginalised. The lonely and the grief stricken. The beaten and abused. But maybe the people who are most in need of God’s mercy are those who are most likely to believe they don’t need it.

“The trouble is, Vicar,” Ena said one Sunday morning, “I just don’t feel that guilty. Why are we supposed to be so miserable?”[1]

I take Ena’s point, at least partly. As a fourteen year old from an atheist family, I vividly remember R.E lessons at the Roman Catholic school my parents sent me to. In particular, I recall the teacher saying, “Only Jesus was perfect, and none of you will ever measure up.”

I’m bloody well not going to even try then, thought I, an attitude which served me very well for twenty-years, until God unexpectedly came into my life and changed everything. I didn’t care about not being perfect anymore, because I knew then that I didn’t have to be. Letting go of perfection, and finding a place in the world where I could be me and still be loved was one of the things that drew me to Christ. But to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, you don’t realise how bad you actually are, until you try consistently to be good. In other words, if like Ena, you don’t find the burden of sin intolerable, then you’ve really not been paying attention.

What does this have to do with knowing how to spot a bad man? Because we don’t take our own sin seriously, we fail to see it in others even when it’s screamingly obvious that sin is taking place. We fall for the double bluff of someone openly, repeatedly confessing to their sin, failing to spot that the self-referential admittance of bad behaviour is a red herring. We forget that when people clearly show us who they are, we ought to believe them. Also, I want to suggest that with rare (and probably pathological) exception, there is no such thing as good and bad people. Only people who exist in the grey area of being both and neither.

Christianity is supposed to be a living faith which denounces the false dichotomy of good and evil as a simplistic binary which either denies people any possibility of redemption or refuses to take sin seriously, in ourselves or others. It might be satisfying to sort people into boxes like we’re recycling card and plastic, chucking them into the appropriate bins, but humans are a mixed medium, being neither wholly one thing or another. This is a maddening state of affairs in a world which loves clear identities and reductive labels.  

We either valorise or we demonise and there is no middle ground. Acknowledging that people we hate and who have caused us harm might actually be capable of good, is deeply unpalatable. I’d rather chew a paracetamol and wash it down with root beer than admit that the people who’ve harmed me might not actually be all bad. In fact, it’s far easier to characterise them that way, because the alternative means grappling with the knowledge that they’re not bad at all, they just knowingly did bad things. The bad person becomes a caricature of a human; they do bad things because that’s who they are. It’s their nature. Their inherent badness makes them less than human, and therefore easier to hate.

But it's equally dehumanising to characterise people as wholly good. We shy away from imagining that the people we like, love and admire, can be capable of doing bad things. That they might have actually done things so awful we wouldn’t want to look them in the face. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in the Church of England found that abusers escaped justice because their friends and associates weren’t willing to believe someone they respected could be capable of doing the awful things they were accused of. I think the thought process goes something like this: If the friend who I’ve defended is actually a bad person, if they’ve caused harm or behaved in a way in which the world will never forgive, then what does that say about my own judgement? What does their sin say about my own? Defending the indefensible becomes less about defending the person and more about protecting a particular version of reality. At the heart of it all is the pride which prevents people from admitting they’ve made a poor judgment call, but also an impoverished view of the forgiveness of God. A realistic fear that to be guilty of sin means to be treated like the world treats sinners, and there will be no forgiveness offered, not ever. Because there never is.

A church which helps us to recognise the sin in one another, and still promotes love despite its existence, is a healthy church. It’s a church which uses that knowledge to recognise what sin looks like, where it lurks, and the harm it causes to us all. This is the kind of church which will care about justice and openly seek it. A church which takes sin seriously will never adopt an infantilising, both-sideism mentality, where we’re all sinners and no one is perfect anyway so let’s just keep schtum and mind our business. NO. It’s a church where justice should roll down like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. A church which will challenge disgusting, sexist attitudes that allow women and young girls to be harmed with impunity. A church which will say no and refuse to be silent when it sees sin seeping into our institutions, our homes, our schools, and our own congregations and structures of power. We are called to recognise sin, and that begins by taking it seriously within ourselves. A church which can’t bear to admit to its own sin, or worse, tries to cover it up at every turn, is one which is rotten to its core.

One of my favourite days of the liturgical year is Ash Wednesday. That millions of Christians all over the world will have a cross of dusty dirt pressed onto our skin to remind us who we are and where we come from, absolutely blows my mind. We are all creatures of the dirt and the dusty cross is a powerful leveller which says “you don’t need to know you’re special. You need to know you’re human.” The miracle of grace isn’t that God affirms that which glitters, it’s that God loves us even when all is grey.

How do you spot a bad man? You don’t. He’s just a man.

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Best,

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[1] Clatworthy, J. God, am I really that bad? https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/media/5685648/the-book-of-common-prayer-a-church-times-guide.pdf