There Are No Bad People

I worry that we’re erasing the line between “he has bad ideas” and “he’s a bad person.”

I heard a story recently that stuck with me. A man was working in a community of sex traffickers, trying to help them find Jesus and in so doing to make better decisions. Someone asked him if he wasn’t scared of being killed by the traffickers.

He answered: “They’re not traffickers. They’re my neighbors.”

His answer didn’t mean that he was excusing the traffickers’ awful decisions. To the contrary, he was literally risking his life in order to stop them from trafficking. His answer just meant that he wasn’t willing to label these men and women according to their worst sins.

I think too many of us in modern society are eager to label people according to their worst thoughts and behaviors. He’s a bigot. She’s a drug addict. He’s a convict.

But when we do that, we make a cardinal mistake: we forget that the person we’re describing is made in the image of God. At Identity Exchange, Jamie and Donna Winship have a Daily Prayer of Affirmation that reads in part: “Thank You [God] that when You look upon me, You only see righteousness, worthiness, holiness, and purity because that is how you created me.” When we label people by their worst mistakes, we forget that those words apply just as much to the person we’re labeling as they do to us. We forget that the offender we’re condemning is one of God’s precious children, and we turn our back on trying to see him or her the way that God does.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold people accountable for their actions. We absolutely should. But I think we should impose those consequences with sorrow rather than with gleeful judgment, knowing that the person we’re locking behind bars (for instance) is still one of God’s precious children. I think, in short, that we should rediscover the crucial distinction between “John holds this terrible idea” or even “John did this terrible thing” and “John is a terrible human being.”

How would our society change if more of us remembered that distinction?

For one thing, I think it would dramatically change how we treat people on the outskirts of society. Jesus taught that “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40, NLT) and “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matthew 25:45, NLT). I don’t think He was just talking about orphans and widows and the destitute, though He certainly was talking about them. I think He was also talking about people who have experienced such unutterable pain that they grow up to do terrible things. I think He was talking about the young man who joins a gang because his father was sadistic and abusive. I think He was talking about the trafficker who lures young women into traps because she was herself lured the same way, and this is the only life she feels like she deserves now.

I think a lot of us write these folks off as beyond helping. But one thing I’ve learned is that no-one is beyond saving. No-one. I’ve heard stories of terrorists, sex traffickers, and gang members who, when someone took the time to minister to them, started to be better people and to make better decisions. I think that if more of us were willing to condemn actions rather than people, we might find that we could do a lot to help these broken souls.

I also think about the distinction between “bad thoughts/behavior” and “bad people” in the context of our toxic polarization.

A recent survey from The Argument chilled my blood: it found that fully 50 percent of respondents on the left, and 11 percent of those on the right, considered it acceptable to cut off contact with a family member over political differences. In my work as a bridge-builder, I’ve seen what that looks like on the ground. It looks like parents, hurt and bewildered that their adult children will barely speak to them. It looks like once-close siblings who now only talk at family reunions. It looks like people telling family members who have loved them since the day they were born that “I’m not comfortable talking to you unless you vote the way that I do.”

Part of what leads to these severed relationships is that one party labels the other. One person decides that the other person is bigoted or hateful or otherwise a Bad Person, and that the only responsible thing to do is to cut off contact. Even where the person we’re condemning does have genuinely awful political views, we make the cardinal mistake of conflating those views with the other person’s humanity. We make an unjustified leap from “John holds sexist views” to “John is a bad person with no good inside of him”—and it’s the latter view that makes us feel justified in cutting John out of our lives.

I think that if we could get back to seeing John as God’s precious son who is made in His own image but who has said or done some bad things, rather than seeing John as a terrible human being, we might be a lot more reticent to cut ties with good people who love us over differing political views.

I heard a story of another man who worked with people on the outskirts of society. Someone asked him: “Are you friends with racists?”

He responded: “Of course I am. I’m friends with racists. I’m friends with sexists. I’m friends with drug addicts and thieves and people who have cheated on their spouses.

“And I try to point every one of them towards Jesus.”

I think that’s a better model for how to treat people who have made terrible decisions than simply judging and condemning them.

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