Christianity Today: Wicked or Misunderstood? Q&A With Beth Moore:
Each week on The Bulletin, Russell Moore, Mike Cosper, and Clarissa Moll discuss the media’s top headlines—the people, events, and issues that are shaping our world. In this conversation, The Bulletin talks with best-selling author and Bible teacher Beth Moore about the new hit movie musical Wicked and the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the suspected murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Are the wicked truly evil or simply misunderstood?
larissa Moll: … [T]he central question of Wicked has been applied over and over. Were these men inherently wicked, or did the situation in which they found themselves compel them to wickedness? Is this a fair question, or is it a false dichotomy? Are we actually wicked, or is wickedness thrust upon us?
Beth Moore: I’m thinking off the top of my head of Psalm 51: “In sin my mother conceived me.” In other words, we are born into wickedness by nature. Even in the very beginning of Ephesians 2 is that we have all been “children of wrath.”
“Wrath” is a strong, strong word. So we would, biblically speaking, very much believe that we were born with a very sinful nature, yes. Now, can circumstances take that and make it something that becomes overwhelming to us and turn us into something that we might never have otherwise been? That’s another matter, and for much greater discussion.
CM: In the case of Luigi Mangione, folks have responded very powerfully to the story of the manhunt. For example, while some were condemning him as a cold-blooded killer, others have been flooding the Macy’s website to buy his look-alike Levi’s jacket and lauding him as a folk hero.
While there is clarity mounting that he might be the shooter, people are really struggling with seeing this young man as wicked. Why do you think so many people respond to a complicated story like this and try to make it simpler, perhaps, than it actually is? …
Russell Moore: … You think about the way the Bible talks about us as both created and fallen. If you think about the pop culture version of it—the Wicked movie and, before that, John Gardner’s Grendel and other things—it would take villains and put them in the protagonist role to show, kind of, this is how that person developed into this.
Something about that is, I think, embedded in the way God made us to see even villains as created in the image of God. But another part of it I think is sort of cynical and self-justifying when it becomes this attitude that, Well, we’re all just as wicked as we can possibly be.
We’re just pretending in various ways. So you can’t expect anything other than just the most base motives in people, which then gives me the justification to think, I’ve got to be just as wicked as the next person if I’m going to survive. I mean, that’s a mindset you see in so many different aspects of American life right now.
Mike Cosper: It’s interesting. I see it a little differently. The other way to think about it is that Wicked in particular is a product of a therapeutic culture. The dangerous message of Wicked is that once you understand somebody’s origin story, you realize that the evil they do is a result of their victim status.
At our core, at our inmost being, we’re creatures who are fallen and prone to sin. And the question then becomes what we do about our agency. I think there’s an aspect of these narratives—whether it’s about the shooter, whether it’s about Wicked—it robs people of agency.
Because it says, Well, they do these evil things because of what’s happened to them, because of where they’ve come from, rather than saying, I don’t care where you came from; you don’t shoot somebody because you’re unhappy with your health care coverage. That’s evil. There are lines we do not cross in civil society. And that seems to be lost a bit in this conversation.
RM: And it’s powerful because it is partly right. There are many situations where I will say, I don’t approve of what that person is doing, but I get it. It makes me think of when Joseph is receiving his brothers at the end of Genesis and he forgives them and says, You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
And many lives have been saved. Only Joseph can say that. The brothers can’t say that. The brothers can’t say, Well, in the end it all worked out, and kind of hand over their agency. And so I think there’s a sense in which we do need to look at people and say, in a lot of instances, they’re picking up what they learned.
We do need to understand that as we try to help them and disciple them, but never in a way that says you’re a victim of fate.
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