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 fter receiving a sermon from a minister on the west coast and another from an east coast minister that they had delivered to their congregations around Memorial Day, I put them in touch with each other. Both sermons utilized some concepts in The Lucifer Effect to illustrate vital themes in religious scriptures. From that synchrony emerged the idea of sharing their views on the relationships between aspects of theology and social science in a blog format on this web site. Reverend Curtis Webster and Reverend Jennifer Brooks will start these dialogues, leading off with copies of those sermons, and then opening the venue to consider issues that they are dealing with, as well as responding to input from viewers of this site. Their brief bios follow the sermons. Our hope is to expand the range of theological perspectives presented here. We start with “Lucifer Goes to Church" and we invite input from all interested parties so that soon Lucifer can also go to Synagogue, Mosque, and Temple. - Phil Zimbardo
Rev. Jennifer J.S. Brooks
Minister of the Unitarian Church on Nantucket Island
The Lucifer Effect: A Sermon for Memorial Day
President Dwight David Eisenhower, who understood war as a participant and as a
national leader, said in 1953: “No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.” Eisenhower was reflecting painfully on the disruption to peace that followed the end of World War II: the formation of opposing power blocs each armed with nuclear weapons...
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Rev. Curtis Webster
Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Encino, CA
To End All Evil
Back in August of 1971, a Stanford University professor by the name of Philip Zimbardo wanted to do some research on the psychological effects of imprisonment and he needed to do some first-hand observations of prisoner behavior in a controlled environment. After some psychological screening to weed out obvious pathologies, Dr. Zimbardo randomly chose one group of volunteers to be “prisoners” and another group to be “guards...”
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Nobody, it seems, can make documentaries quite like Ken Burns.
His recent series, “The War,” tells the story of America’s involvement in World War Two through the eyes of four American cities and towns, among them Mobile, Alabama.
When war broke out, Glenn Frazier, a 17 year-old infantryman from Mobile, was serving in the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur. In “The War,” Mr. Frazier admits that he had enlisted several months earlier with no thought of ever seeing combat, and that he had gone to the Philippines under the assumption that it would be a nice, safe duty station in the event that war did break out.
And Mr. Frazier had a good reason to do his best to avoid combat.
“I was raised in a real Christian family,” Mr. Frazier explains, “ and, as a result, killing was not part of my training, and that was a big hurdle for me to get over because I’d been taught not to kill.”
He goes on to describe the incident that pushed him over the edge and caused him to get past that particular doctrine.
After watching a Japanese plane bomb a hospital and then land a direct hit on a friend of his, Mr. Frazier had a turn of heart.
“When that Japanese Zero turned its wings right above the trees and started to fly away,” Mr. Frazier recalls, “I could see him with a smile on his face and at that point I had no trouble killing people. As a matter of fact I got to the point where I hunted them, and if I didn’t kill Japanese in a day I felt I didn’t do my job.”
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Sometimes heroes are people who stand between.
In 1859 a young Swiss entrepreneur named Henri Dunant witnessed the battle of Solfertino, where the French and Italians were fighting to drive Austrians out of Italy. Three years later he published a book about the experience, A Memory of Solfertino.
Dunant's book tells about the bloody battle, but its focus is on the aftermath—the fruitless attempt to help the wounded and dying. The book concludes with a proposal that all nations form volunteer committees of non-combatants to help care for soldiers injured in battle.
Two years after A Memory of Solfertino was published, twelve nations met in Geneva to sign a treaty, the first “Geneva Convention.” They agreed to form national committees of the “Red Cross” and to respect the battlefield neutrality of Red Cross volunteers. It was the first step to a new way for the global community to think about war.
Today everyone knows about the International Red Cross. They go to places where terrible things have happened and they bring first aid, food, blankets. They stand between people and disaster; they hand out bottles of water and when they can they set up field kitchens so people can have a hot meal. In wartime they bring balm to the injured, make the wounded whole; and they visit prisoners held by opposing armies.
Today there are many additional Geneva Conventions. In addition to battlefield neutrality for armband-wearing volunteers, the newer Conventions lay out a plan for humane treatment of non-combatants and prisoners of war. The Red Cross has expanded from 12 nations to 181, and its symbol from the red cross to (in Arabic countries) a red crescent, and (in countries that wish to adopt neither cross nor crescent) a red crystal.
The current challenge for the International Red Cross is the detention of people who are not prisoners of war but persons named as unlawful enemy combatants. A 10-year-old Afghani boy named Esrarullah saw his father for the first time in 8 months—not in person, because families of detainees are not allowed to visit—but by an internet video conference arranged by the Red Cross. I cannot imagine how difficut it must have been for the Red Cross to arrange an internet video conferencing in Kabul, Afghanistan between a father detained at an American air base outside Kabul, when for months the authorities had allowed no contact.
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The acts of genocide, which have no statute of limitations, mean any acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
* killing members of the group;
* causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* forcibly transferring children from one group to another group.
-- From Chapter I, Article 4 of the Law on the Establishment of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea.
The terms “Khmer Rouge” and “genocide” seem to fit together, hand in glove. For those not versed in the intricacies and subtleties of international law, the deaths of nearly two million people through governmentally sanctioned programs of extermination, abuse, overwork, and deliberate neglect obviously constitute genocide. If that isn’t genocide, one might understandably ask, then what is?
Well, as is so often true when dealing with the realities of the Khmer Rouge, the answer may not be quite that simple.
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“Revolution’s victory over imperialism is not about inviting guests
to a dinner party,
not about writing a text, not about embroidering flowers,
not about having the right education, not about being soft,
not about being well-mannered and polite,
not about fearing the enemy;
the revolution is about seething with anger against one class,
about striking and destroying that class”
“We, the Communist Party,
follow the correct and clear-sighted line.”
“For the Angkar, there is no god, no ghosts,
no beliefs, no supernatural.”
Throughout the reign of the Khmer Rouge, a propaganda machine in Phnom Penh spewed out a lengthy series of official slogans that were then distributed to the general population through radio broadcasts and political education meetings held in local villages and labor camps.
Short and simple, the Khmer Rouge slogans were masterworks of ideological indoctrination. Although many sound clumsy when translated into English, they conveyed clear and unambiguous messages easily absorbed by the largely illiterate rural population that had been the base of the Khmer Rouge’s support from its earliest days.
French Cambodia-watcher Henri Locard has done a huge service to all who seek to understand the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by translating a large collection of these slogans and publishing them in “Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar” (2004: Silkworm Books).
To study Locard’s translations is to step into a nightmarish world ruled by black-and-white, either-or thinking. Angkar, the Khmer Rouge regime’s self-label, knows all and is perfect in its ideology and governance. Anyone who questions Angkar is an enemy, and enemies are everywhere. Eternal vigilance against enemies and tirelessly self-sacrificing devotion to Angkar are small prices to pay for the privilege of living in Cambodia’s collectivist paradise.
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Samuel said to Saul: “The LORD sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
1 SAMUEL 15:1-3 (NRSV)
For Christians and Jews who stand in opposition to genocide and oppression, the verses quoted above from the First Book of Samuel in the Old Testament are something of an embarrassment. There’s just no way to interpret around it: God is commanding Saul, the first king of Israel, to commit genocide upon a people known as the Amalekites.
And this passage is not unique in the Old Testament. God repeatedly commands the Israelites to wipe out one indigenous people or another on the way to a complete conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land.
To lay such verses such as these alongside Jesus’ teachings on love and forgiveness is to engage in an exercise of theological dissonance. And, the Old Testament itself also contains passages that proclaim a more universal vision of humanity in which war has no place. At Isaiah 66:18-19a, for example, God declares: “For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and see my glory, and I will set a sign among them.”
How can God seemingly countenance genocide in one place and then command love, forgiveness, and forbearance in another?
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The story of Daniel in the lion’s den is the perfect Sunday School thriller. There is the good guy, the hero, Daniel; the bad guy, the Evil King of Babylonia, Darius, who orders Daniel thrown among the lions simply for practicing his faith; and the lions, scary and dangerous, who mysteriously do no harm to Daniel.
Children come away from this story, no doubt, impressed with the idea that if they, too, faithfully honor their religious teachings, they will be protected from danger.
That lesson is actually not the real story, the truth of the story.
The real story of Daniel is far more nuanced than the Sunday School moral lesson, and as a result it tells us much more about good and evil, and how we figure out which is which. The truth of Daniel's story involves the Lucifer Effect.
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Thirty years ago, Nhem En worked as a cog in a machine of evil.
Assigned to the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sleng interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh, Nhem En stood at the center of the firestorm of torture, brutality, and murder that swept over Cambodia in the late Seventies.
What exactly did Nhem En do at Tuol Sleng? Was he an interrogator, inflicting unspeakable torture? Was he a guard, imposing severe punishment for minor infractions of arbitrary rules? Was he an executioner, bashing in the skulls of those condemned without trial or evidence?
Nhem En played none of these roles.
Nhem En was a photographer. He took pictures.
Nhem En’s photos are on display at the museum that now occupies the Tuol Sleng facility. Each is a black-and-white of a face, essentially a mug shot. In the case of mothers with children, there are multiple faces.
As each new truckload of recent detainees arrived, Nhem En and the photographers whom he supervised would set up their cameras at Tuol Sleng’s intake building. Before being delivered to holding cells that were little better than human kennels, each prisoner had his or her picture taken. By the time Phnom Penh fell to the Vietnamese in January 1979, thousands of these photos had been taken.
Today, these photos constitute powerful physical evidence of the horrors that the Khmer Rouge inflicted upon fellow Cambodians.
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Back in the mid-to-late-eighties, I was off in a whole different professional world, pursuing a career as a young corporate lawyer. How I got there is a long story, and how I got from there to ordination as a Presbyterian pastor is an even longer story, neither of which will be told in this post.
The essential point is that, after serving the customary apprenticeship slaving away for a few years in a large national law firm, I had made my way to the legal department of a major financial institution, which I will refer to here by the fictitious name, “Anonymous Savings and Loan Association.”
I went to work for Anonymous Savings because it was truly out on what was then the cutting edge. Seizing upon a recent re-tooling of federal financial regulations that permitted federally-insured savings and loan associations a much wider range of investment options, my new employer was leaving the competition in the dust.
Upon my arrival, I was impressed not only by the sense of vision but also by the very high caliber of the people working at the senior and middle management levels. The Finance Department boasted a number of accountants from “Big Eight” (as they were then known) accounting firms. The Investment Department had lured some top-notch analysts from big Wall Street houses. My fellow lawyers had all come from reputable law firms.
And these people were not just smart and extraordinarily competent. They were also highly ethical, very much aware of the obligations that came with the privilege of federal deposit insurance. We were indeed riding the cutting edge, but we were determined to ride it responsibly and within the boundaries of the relevant federal and state regulatory schemes.
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The joint U.N.-Royal Government of Cambodia Khmer Rouge Tribunal made its first formal charge against a former Khmer Rouge leader on July 31, citing Kang Kek Ieu, otherwise known by his revolutionary name "Duch," for crimes against humanity.
Duch, who has been held in detention by the Cambodian government, has been transferred to the custody of the Tribunal.
Duch was the head of the infamous S-21 detention and torture center at the former Tuol Sleng high school in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge regime in the Seventies. At least 14,000 men, women, and children were held at S-21 and eventually executed at the Choeung Ek killing field outside of Phnom Penh.
Documentary evidence seized at Tuol Sleng after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam in 1979 provides overwhelming evidence of Duch's role in directing torture and ordering executions.
Duch, a born-again Christian, was discovered living near the Thai border by journalist Nic Dunlop in 1999 under an assumed name and working in refugee camps.
Further indictments are expected in the coming weeks, most likely against the three most senior Khmer Rouge leaders still living, Noun Chea, Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary.
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On Sunday, May 20, 2007, somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand Cambodians gathered at a place called Choeung Ek (rough pronunciation: “Joing Ike”), which lies about 13 kilometers to the south of Phnom Penh.
The crowd looked on as a group of actors presented a disturbing drama based on gruesome events from Choeung Ek’s recent past.
In the shadow of a huge glass tower containing hundreds of skulls of the victims of Khmer Rouge genocide victims, actors portraying political prisoners with their hands securely tied were led to a broad expanse of grass and forced to kneel.
Young men wearing the simple black uniforms associated with the Khmer Rouge then approached each prisoner and, using sturdy bamboo sticks, pantomimed executions inflicted by blows to the back of the prisoners’ skulls.
As each prisoner slumped to the ground, bodies began to accumulate visibly, simulating a vast “killing field.”
May 20.
Known benignly as the “Day of Remembrance,” but more popularly called the “Day of Anger” or “Day of Hatred,” each May 20 since 1984 has been a sort of dark holiday in Cambodia.
The Day of Anger is a day when Cambodians make grim pilgrimages to Choeung Ek and to many, many other sites of Khmer Rouge genocide around the country. It is a day when survivors of the Cambodian holocaust mourn lost family members and friends and to re-kindle feelings of anger toward the Khmer Rouge.
May 20 was chosen as the date for the Day of Anger because it was on May 20, 1976, that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea decided to transform all of Cambodia into one vast agrarian collective. Many mark that day as the beginning of the nightmare that led to the killing fields.
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