Evil is a strange thing. When enough of it gathers in one place, it can become horrifyingly beautiful to look at. It develops a life of its own, like a sinuous alien monster twisting and turning, pulling down buildings, institutions, and people in its path. You are horrified by what it does, but you cannot help staring at it.

The danger is that while we stare at evil, transfixed by its grotesque power, one of its tentacles reaches behind us, seizes our chests, and inseminates its offspring inside us. The offspring feeds on anger, shame, humiliation, and the desire for vengeance until a root of bitterness sinks deep into the soul. Eventually, it erupts from our mouths, spewing its nastiness everywhere.

The longer we stare at evil, the more we begin to organize our lives around it. We hate something so passionately that our hatred begins to determine what we read, what we think about, whom we trust, whom we despise, and eventually who we are. The evil we oppose may still be genuinely evil. But somewhere along the way, without realizing what has happened, we become monsters of our own.

This is how good-hearted, justice-oriented people can become the very thing they hate. They see hypocrisy, abuse, racism, cruelty, or corruption, and they are rightly horrified. But then the horror becomes fixation, the fixation becomes anger, and the anger becomes an organizing principle for life. Over time, they begin doing to others the same kinds of things they once condemned.

I think this danger is especially real for people who grew up in Christian institutions where Christ was proclaimed but was not always lived out by those in authority. Whatever the particular failure, we can become so transfixed by what others did wrong that we never notice what is developing in our own souls. We study their failures, document their failures, talk about their failures, and define ourselves against their failures. All the while, the seed is growing.

I am afraid this became part of my own story.

As I discussed in my last post, I wrestle with my Bob Jones identity when I encountered the racist rhetoric and policies in the University’s past. This history was not my present experience of BJU. I loved the institution, had been deeply formed by it, and identified with its people. But as I began to understand more fully how deeply race, politics, and Southern culture had shaped parts of its history, I grew disgusted with what I found.

I traced the racial history from the University’s early years and the broader white supremacist culture in which it developed, through Bob Jones Sr.’s sermon Is Segregation Scriptural?, through the litigation of the 1970s and early 1980s, and through the Supreme Court decision in 1983. I kept going into the later years and the controversy surrounding George W. Bush’s visit in 2000, after which BJU dropped its prohibition on interracial dating. Thankfully, by the time I came, the University had moved on from these issues.

But the real issue for me was not even the fact that BJU had these positions. It was a university started in the Jim Crow South, so what else would you expect? What disturbed me most was the vitriol and hate that I read over and over again. In many public statements, the spokesmen seemed to embody the opposite of Christ.

So I kept digging. I went through archives, finding another document, then another letter, then another court record, then another set of minutes. I probably worked through material from twenty university and public archives. Again and again, I found episodes in which the public posture of Bob Jones University spewed defiance and arrogance rather than the humility of Christ.

Somewhere in that process, however, my research changed. I was no longer merely studying evil. I had become transfixed by it.

And with each discovery, something grew inside me. Anger grew. Frustration grew. Embarrassment and shame grew. Eventually, those emotions began consuming my own heart. The monster I had been studying was no longer merely an alien presence rampaging out there. I could feel its offspring crawling around inside me.

Then I became angry, and in that anger I lashed out. I said things that should not have been said, or at least should not have been said the way I said them. The fact that some of my criticisms were correct did not sanctify the anger with which I delivered them. I hated who I had become.

And that, I think, is the twisted trick of evil. Evil can reproduce itself through the people who hate it. A person may sincerely oppose racism, abuse, communism, authoritarianism, liberalism, fundamentalism, wokeness, or any number of other things. Some of those judgments may be correct, and some may not. But if opposition becomes the center around which a person’s life is ordered, the thing being hated gains an astonishing amount of power. Evil begins reproducing itself through its enemies.

At first, I think I wanted Jesus to help me manage the creature. I wanted him to make my anger more respectable, to make my criticism more careful, to help me carry this thing without letting it embarrass me. But Christ does not negotiate with what destroys his children. He does not ask the unclean spirit to become a more responsible tenant. When Jesus meets the thing that enslaves, he breaks it. Through desperate alleys and broken paths, Jesus lead me to the place where I would finally realize that the anger, the inseminated spawn of evil, could only be exorcised by him.

I needed an exorcism. I do not know if there was a demon inhabiting me like those described in Scripture. But my mental state had become so warped by anger that I could no longer think straight. Whatever else was happening, I knew I needed Christ to root the evil out of me. And began to uproot the anger.

Underneath the anger was shame. I was ashamed of belonging to an institution that had done things I believed were wrong. I was embarrassed by parts of the history, and because I was embarrassed, I felt an almost desperate need to separate myself from it. I wanted everybody to know that I saw it, that I understood it, that I was not one of those people. I wanted to retain my pride and conceal my shame.

Jesus would not let me stay there either. “For whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (Matt. 23:12). I had spent so much time looking at the pride of people in old documents that I had not recognized how easily pride could mutate and survive in me. Their pride could say, We were right. Mine could say, At least I am not like them.

Eventually, I also had to accept that this history is part of my spiritual heritage. These are my people. This place helped form me. But I do not have to call wrong right in order to admit that, nor do I have to amputate my past in order to prove that I have learned from it. Jesus redeems us from our past and uses it for his glory. He’s the one who put us there in the first place.

Once I could admit that, I also had to let myself grieve. There are things I wish had been different. There are things Christians should have seen more clearly. There are moments when people who loved the Bible should have listened to it better, and there are consequences of those failures that cannot be undone by pretending the past is gone.

Jesus said, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). I began to understand that there was a way to mourn what happened without constructing my identity around the thing I mourned. I could feel sorrow without turning sorrow into hatred. I could say that something should not have happened without needing to spend the rest of my life regretting it.

The process was not quick. Christ worked through family, medical intervention, therapy, church, and friends. But through all of it, he kept turning my head away from the monster and toward himself.

That was perhaps the strangest part of the exorcism. I had assumed that overcoming evil meant staring at it more accurately, understanding it more completely, and developing better categories for describing its movement. But Jesus kept saying something much simpler: “Abide in me” (John 15:4).

That command is almost offensively simple. Yet Jesus continues, “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.” Then he says it even more plainly: “Without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:4–5). Apparently, I cannot even hate evil correctly without him.

The answer, then, was not to stare harder into the darkness. I had already done that. What I had not learned was how to look away.

Jesus was teaching me to look at him. And when I began looking at him, he began directing my eyes toward the people around me.

Not abstractions. Not “the institution.” Not “the critics.” People. Men and women I work with, talk with, eat with, argue with, laugh with, and love. The souls standing immediately in front of me became harder to reduce to symbols in the great historical drama playing inside my head.

Jesus does not permit me to love him abstractly while despising the people around me. “This is my commandment,” he said, “That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15:12). That “as I have loved you” is the part that ruins nearly every justification I construct for hatred. Christ did not love me after I became safe to love. He loved me while I was still someone who required saving. And Jesus presses it farther than I would prefer. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” (Matt. 5:44). Jesus told me to love.

That is where the exorcism becomes painful. The creature fights for every inch of my soul. It wants to convince me that removing it would be treason against justice. It screamed that if I surrender my hatred, I am excusing what happened. If I stop feeding my anger, I must no longer care about the people who were hurt. If I love the people whose history embarrasses me, then somehow I have compromised with evil.

But that is another lie. Justice does not require possession, and truth does not require hatred.

Jesus said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). I had spent years examining the creature, naming it, tracing where it came from, and understanding how it worked. But I could not dissect myself into freedom.

The Son had to make me free.

And so, through the suffering of repentance, I had to let it go. I think I did. Perhaps, Jesus has more to root out from my soul. But praise God I’m freer than I was.