Realizing Abrahamic evil
Published on 2024-10-04
Content warnings: violence, classism, religion
I get text messages from my province's Conservative party every once in a while. Most people do. I have no idea how they got my phone number so they must have bought it off some data broker I'll never know about. Today they sent me something particularly nasty: they asked me if I agree with their plan to "remove tent city".
Right off the bat, I have to wonder what exactly they mean by "remove," but I know it can't be good. Residents of my town's tent city can barely be called "residents." Infamously, they aren't allowed to physically be there for most of the day; legally they're only allowed to be there at night. But "legally," they're barely allowed to "be" at all. Like most places that basically need to have some sort of tent city for the town's own failure to deal with houselessness, the city bylaws that govern living in tent city don't really seem to interact at all with material reality. I mean, the law never interacts with material reality; that's not really what it's for, but usually we write laws in order to guide behaviour in material reality. These laws feel more like they were passed to ensure that it's materially impossible not to be breaking them at any given moment.
So that's the reality residents of tent city face today: tent city is more like a liminal space that is continually recreated by a quirk of municipal regulation and the mere fact that despite the city's best and worst intentions, houseless people materially exist, and consequentially they must occupy some material space. If "removing" tent city doesn't mean giving everyone who lives there a house or some kind of shelter¹, then the Conservative Party's plan is either going to be dead on arrival or they have something much more sinister in mind.
In high school I had a friend who was really concerned with things like this. One day, I remember they started talking to me about Abrahamic unity, which is a fringe belief among the Abrahamic religions that the likes of Christianity, Islam and Judaism are more alike than they are different and that they should come together in some way to realize their shared goals for the world. The Baháʼí Faith is the only large Abrahamic religion that takes this idea at all seriously, and not too surprisingly, Christians, Muslims and Jews seem to agree at least that they all have unique and fundamental differences that keep their religions apart.
They were never the religious type, but they told me that they couldn't escape the feeling that the world was indeed somehow permeated by evil. I don't know if Abrahamic religions generally share a conception of evil as a "force" in the world—at the very least, they do agree that God is the source of moral law and that that moral law is both real and absolute, but you certainly see this kind of thinking in the way American Evangelicals talk². And, of course, if evil can be described, then maybe it can be destroyed, too. Maybe we can be saved.
Abrahamic religions and the conflicts between them have been at the center of atrocities seemingly forever. They still are today. So I suppose to this person, Abrahamic unity was a vehicle for revolution: a framework for establishing a shared sense of what's good and what's evil in order to achieve salvation.
When I wrote about Christianity and "goodness" earlier this year, I made the point that what Christians think of as "good" might be essentially different from what we generally think of as "good". Personally, I like to think of myself as a moral relativist. I don't think there's a hard and fast morality in the world, and trying to describe one is hopeless. But that's not to say having a universal moral code wouldn't be useful. If I'm being charitable I almost have to assume that's where moral universalism comes from. Even just having a lot of people on your side, sharing your ethics, would turn you into a powerful social force. Moral universalism could be a tool for change.
I described the text message I got today as "nasty" because that was my gut reaction reading it. I read it and I too couldn't help but feel the spectre of evil tapping on my shoulder. Of course, if I were to stop and think about it, I could reason that the person who sent it is probably some disaffected 20-something working in a cubicle, hired on contract by an organization hired on contract by the Conservative party to phone blast people in advance of the provincial elections. They may or may not personally want to see unhoused people suffer. Maybe they had a bad encounter with a poor person and their lizard brain took over. Maybe they've never personally encountered poverty, and all their impressions of it are informed by classist propaganda. Maybe those propagandists are otherwise very boring people being shuffled around by interest groups capitalizing on others feelings in order to advance completely unrelated interests. Maybe they hurt people, maybe they want people to suffer, or maybe that deserves more qualification.
All of this could be true, but that wouldn't make for a very compelling flyer.
Footnotes
¹ It doesn't
² This article is a lot more concerned with Christianity than Abrahamic religion in general, which is not surprising since that's the framework I grew up in. This article is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranty of the title having anything to do whatsoever with the body.
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