The Evil of Doing Good

For Protestant Christians, the RCL text for Sunday is from Romans 6. It concerns sin and the act of dying to sin (in baptism) and being alive to God in Christ. Paul calls it "walking in the newness of Life."

Commentaries on this text are interesting. Many focus on how we end up sinning (or doing evil/bad things) in the process of doing what we think is good and right.

For example, this morning I heard Randall Terry ranting about how he heard Terri Shaivo say she wanted to live and how, despite all medical and legal evidence to the contrary, her husband abused her, wanted to kill her, and is an evil man. I don't doubt that Mr. Terry has convinced himself that his statements are true. And he has a higher agenda that fuels him - some type of anti-abortion, "right to life" agenda that he believes God has called him to fight for. But this doesn't mean that it is right to lie, manipulate the truth, and defame a man's character, no matter what good you think will come out of it.

The same goes for W who lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to convince the public that we needed to invade Iraq. Maybe Saddam did need to be removed by force, but this doesn't mean that it is right to lie, to manipulate the truth, no matter what good you think will come of it.

To be fair, let me offer an example from the other side. Gitmo needs corrected. It is an embarassment to the example of human rights that the USA is supposed to model. 520 prisoners are held, without being charged with a crime, without access to legal respresentation. But this doesn't mean that the people there are being abused. And to make that suggestion, even with the higher intent of forcing Gitmo's reform, is wrong.

We need to be careful about what we do because of what we believe to be "good." We may just end up doing more harm before any good can ever occur.