Article

America

Creed

Justice

5 November 2024

6 min read

Is it okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right?

Here's what a mean street preacher really taught me.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Behind a passer by a street peacher holds up a large yellow sign with a message on it.

Street preachers on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

LaTerrian McIntosh on Unsplash.

A few months ago, my cousin was visiting my hometown of Seattle for work. We planned to meet one evening for a Mariners baseball game during her visit. I suggested that we meet near the wonderful Ken Griffey Jr. statue near the stadium gates. What I hadn’t realized was that this was the precise spot a street evangelist had also decided to station himself in order to share (mostly shout) his message of judgement and destruction the same evening. Kind of like a pre-game verbal hors d'oeuvres. I arrived at the meeting point a few minutes before my cousin, giving me ample time to hear the preacher preach.

Now, I grew up in church, and, in fact, am myself a speaker and writer on topics involving faith and God. In other words, I’ve had over 40 years to experience the church’s, umm, “quirks”. I’d like to think that very little coming from the mouths of faith preachers could shock me. Alas, I was wrong.

As I began to listen to the preacher, lines like “weeping and gnashing of teeth” scorched through the preacher’s megaphone. Yep, nothing new there. The preacher used the word “judgment” a lot. Actually, impressively a lot. I’ve never before heard the words “God” and “judgment” used in conjunction more times within a two-minute span. There was a raging intensity to the sermon, but still in the range of normal for street preaching.

Then, my cousin texted me that she was outside the ballpark but might have gotten the location wrong. I realized she and I were at two different locations. While I texted my cousin back, I tuned out the preacher’s message. That is until I heard him shout through his megaphone, “He hates you.” I stopped texting. I looked up at the preacher. Did he just say that God the Almighty hated all of us outside the ballpark? Families, little boys and girls, and elderly? Did God hate all of us lining up for the game? It was “bark at the park” night so even the dogs were casualties in the preacher’s line of fire. If nothing else was gleaned from the man’s message, it seemed, we were all to understand that God hates us.

Minutes later, when my cousin and I finally found each other, I told her that she had had the good fortune of missing out on the street preacher informing her that God hates her. She replied, “Oh, I have plenty of others who tell me that!”

Sadly, many of us have received that negative message from different sources in our world and too often from people sharing some association with God.

In America, as election season comes to the boil, I’ve noticed (and maybe you have too) the not-so-subtle attitude that it’s okay to say mean things about another person as long as that person is on “the other side”. A verbal dig here, an eyeroll there, name-calling and slanderous nick-naming the enemy for the sake of ridicule have become all too common, if not a soft virtue in political discourse. It has become hard to discern where the moral line is, or if such a thing still exists within political dialogue.

Conversations like the following happen so frequently following a political debate or interview, they’ve become cliché: “I almost cannot believe he said that!” Response: “Well, yes, that was pretty bad. But he’s right, isn’t he?” Translation: it’s okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right.

Evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

The meaning of the word ‘evangelical’ here in America is a complex thing, to be sure. But perhaps one of the reasons it is understood as a political word more than a religious one is because the combative and rude nature of discourse seen in politics has become increasingly acceptable even in Christian settings. As a friend of mine said to me years ago, “It feels as though Christians have turned rudeness into a spiritual gift.”

The thing is, you probably don’t know the preacher I heard in downtown Seattle, but you’ve probably heard or know a person who makes Christian claims in the same kind of rude ways. The result is that evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to audiences on topics of faith and God for around 20 years now and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met who feel unlovable, already hated, and unforgivable for the decisions they’ve made in life.

So when I hear a preacher shouting a message through a bullhorn in the name of God and I hear not words of hope, peace, grace, love, and forgiveness, but strictly judgement and burning, I fail to see how this God can be the one who came to earth out of love for people in the person of Jesus Christ.

It’s true that the Bible does depict God enacting justice and judgement. But equally true is that the Bible not only displays, but out-and-out defines God as being love. My concern with the street preacher’s message is that although he might have communicated the justice of God (albeit in a warped way that would make old-time revivalists look tame), his message left little room for hearing about and feeling the love of God.

If there is anything we need to hear today, it is the message that God, in his very nature, is love. One particular writer of antiquity, and a close friend of Jesus Christ, once penned a letter to first century churches. In attempting to explain what God is like and what people of faith should be like he wrote: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

For those of us who have never been to a church, we only need to watch or attend an American football game to see a sign with the words John 3:16. That reference, taken from one of Christ’s biographies states that, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.”

This is a message we need to hear. It’s something we need to let into our bones—that those of us who feel beyond the reach of love, are in fact loved by God.

In a strange way, I can’t help but admire the guts those street preachers have, banging out an unpopular message to strangers in crowds. The problem lies in the fact that often their message, so boldly proclaimed, is God’s disappointment, disapproval, or outright hate for people.

Because this is the truth and too important to miss: God doesn’t hate you. He loves you. He always has and he always will.

Interview

Culture

Education

Justice

S&U interviews

17 February 2025

8 min read

How justice shaped a world of rights

Historian John Coffey talks about his contribution to a new book: Justice & Rights.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A statue of a woman holding a spear in one hand a lightening bolt in the others that reads: 'Droits de l'homme'.

A French statute celebrating Human Rights.

DDP on Unsplash.

In our networked world old problems, and new ideas to solve them, flash across our minds and screens. It can be a hectic and dis-orientating feeling that occurs when we try to make sense of it all. Whether it's the global order changing or yet another injustice occurring.

Seeking insights on all this means crossing boundaries, and that’s what over 160 scholars do by sharing with each other. The members of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), drawn from all faculties usual in great universities, integrate faith and scholarship through dialogues. They examine the themes of justice, order, flourishing and beauty - mixing subject matter expertise in everything from physics to public policy.

The GFI has just published the results of one such dialogue in a book Justice and Rights. Among the contributors is Professor John Coffey. His work explores the history of religion and the big ideas like justice and rights. Recently he talked with GFI coordinator Bethan Willis, on its Justice podcast series. Here’s an extract of the discussion that looks at the ‘genealogy of rights.’

Bethan Willis So, shifting focus now to the question of rights, particularly. So, you talk in your Brief about the genealogy of rights, and in his Theology Brief, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case for placing rights at the centre of our understanding of justice, but that's obviously not an uncontested move. And some people would see a focus on rights as problematic, and part of the debate about the legitimacy or the value of rights can sometimes centre around the question of where rights actually come from. So which period in history, which philosophy and vision of human life and justice gives rise to this language. So can you tell us a little bit about that kind of trajectory that you've set out in your Brief , the different points at which people might identify rights as coming to the fore and why that happens and the various interests at play in these discussions of where rights come from?

John Coffey So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the Middle Ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So, you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

BW Your work is focused on the contributions that religious groups have made to politics and ideas. And you particularly reference the Levellers in the 17th century and the abolitionists at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about the contribution that Christians may have made to the development of rights and particularly to the rights of freedom of conscious thought and belief in particular?

JC Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So, it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So, it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So, this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

BC And it's often to articulate the kind of victim's perspective, isn't it, to defend the weak against the mighty and to say there's a bigger kind of justice that is beyond the state or the law. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about how that works?

JC Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So, it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

BC But as you said, Wilberforce himself doesn't really use this language much, partly because the arenas he's speaking in and partly because of these associations with the French Revolution. Is that right?

JC Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So, the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So, it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So, Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Follow the rest of John and Bethan's conversation on the GFI podcast.

John Coffey on Justice.