Take Mohammed Emwazi, for example.
You may know him better as "Jihadi John", the guy who beheads innocent civilians and aid workers in the cause of a global Caliphate.
But I could just as easily name the "bad guy of the day" -- the one who's made headlines because of his barbarity toward children as a pedophile or the most recent drug-dealer who's moved in on the local neighborhood.
This is a tired, old label, but it still persists. Any person who commit some atrocity that seems out-of-bounds for what "civil" society might tolerate is the next "monster".
It's tired because the label doesn't really say much, other than we're looking for a way of getting ourselves off the hook. We need a way to neatly categorize this anomaly to our otherwise-genteel culture. Ultimately, however, calling someone a "monster" doesn't really say much.
Here's why.
I know my heart. It's as cold and dark as human hearts come. When I'm honest with myself, in a way that our culture doesn't want to encourage, I know that there's little difference between myself and Jihadi John.
It's a tired old label precisely because it's based on a lie. That pernicious lie that we're progressing as a society, getting better and better than those "bad guys" who are sub-human.
Are we really all that different? I'm not so sure. There but for the grace of God ...
Labeling Emwazi as a monster means we're nicely absolved of any responsibility for trying to work out what might have led to their actions. It further absolves us of any responsibility for any aspects of our society, our shared values and behaviors and systems that might possibly have contributed to or enabled their becoming as they are. They're simply evil monsters, and must always have been that way; end of story.
But, if you've been paying attention for a long, long time, human history is littered with stories of those of us who are rather evil precisely in our banality.
So in a strange way, calling Jihadi John a "monster" makes him less responsible. I don't expect vampires to do anything besides suck blood, so why expect Emwazi to do anything other than behead folks?
See, I think Emwazi is responsible for his life, so I refuse to use this old trite description of him or his behavior. It simply is too easy.
In one sense, you can be sure Emwazi is responsible for what he's done.
And yet ...
People aren't simply born doing bad things. Emwazi is no exception. Violent terrorists are made, not born. And he didn't make that decision in a vacuum. I'm not letting him off the hook and saying he isn't responsible. I'm insisting that responsibility might be spread a little further around than just one man.
Because, let's be honest here. There were two people who believed 9/11 was an act of war: Osama bin Laden and President Bush. That's because history is made by those who create contexts in which we make decisions. It's easy for me to imagine a world in which Emwazi's actions (while brutal) aren't seen as "evil" and in which he's hardly a "monster".
In Britain, the "Christian" state routinely tortured, beheaded and burnt dissenters only a few centuries ago (and many have pointed out that Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity). In parts of the world, extreme violence and brutality is simply part of life, a way of survival. And of course, in war, bloody and brutal acts have always been the norm, though recently we've had the Geneva Conventions to keep that within limits.
Emwazi clearly believes that he is engaged in a war on the evil West.
And Americans have only been too willing to oblige him in the use of his "war" rhetoric. "The War on Terror", anyone?
To Emwazi's mind, we are the evil ones. The enemies of true faith and the godless.
Make no doubt about it, these Islamic fighters are fundamentalists. They hold to a very idealized world in which they're engaged in a holy and righteous cause against the forces of Western wickedness. So while I happen to think his actions are evil, I do so from withing a framework that names "evil" in very specific ways -- in my case, Christian -- but it's hardly all that different for him. It's just that he's a Muslim fundamentalist. (I know plenty of Christian fundamentalists who've used the same rhetoric Emwazi has used in reference to war against Islam.)
What we need to do, then, is drop the rhetoric. Emwazi isn't a "terrorist" or a "monster". He's a human being. Until we admit that, there's no difference between what the Nazis did with the Jews or the Hutus with Tutsis.
If you can see someone else as non-human, whether as a monster or a pest -- as unworthy of respect or kindness or fair treatment -- then you can commit any brutality or perversion on them without compunction. You can even believe that they deserve it, as Emwazi clearly feels about his victims.
That was Jesus' point, I think, in Matthew 5.21-22.
Whenever we demonize another, we diminish not only them, but also ourselves.
Because, like I said, in being honest about myself, I'm no better off. We -- Emwazi and myself -- are in the same boat. "There is none righteous -- not even one", as Paul put it in Romans 3.10 (referencing Ecclesiastes 7). We're all born as Shakespeare -- and Hitler.
So: "Let him without sin be the first to cast the stone", to quote Jesus.
If you've never looked at an enemy with enough rage to wish them dead, I'll be surprised. Because I have. Those pressures, those weaknesses, they're a part of being human, not being monstrous.
What matters, however, is that we love our enemies, because that's the genuinely human thing to do. It's only when we recognize the good that's in them, as in ourselves, that we see them as Christ sees us.
So I utterly reject all this non-sense that I'm hearing. It's entirely unChristian of us to insist Emwazi (or anyone else) is a monster.