The Washington Post’s “On Faith” column is, for atheists, a mixed bag. They do publish some good stuff by unbelievers like Susan Jacoby, but it’s mixed with religious nonsense ranging from the mildly irritating to the outright disturbing. Tuesday’s column, “True believers: What JFK’s death did,” by Henry G. Brinton, is in the last category. (Brinton is described as “pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia and author of “The Welcoming Congregation: Roots and Fruits of Christian Hospitality.“)
While he takes pains to distinguish JFK from Jesus (the former, after all, was an adulterer), Brinton nevertheless tries to pry some good out of what was a tragedy—and he does this by comparing JFK’s death to that of Jesus. In the end, he practices theodicy: evil exists because it creates net good. But let us hear from Brinton:
The assassination was a hinge in history, on par with Pearl Harbor and 9-11. It pivoted America from the calm of the 1950s to the upheaval of the 1960s.
But terribly shocking tragedies can have unexpectedly good results. Christians understand this, which is why we put crosses in our churches and around our necks. The cross of Jesus Christ is a reminder of a horrible death that had beneficial results.
Now JFK was no Christ-figure — far from it. Christians believe that Jesus was sinless, while JFK had deep personal flaws that undermined his reputation. But his death, like the death of Jesus, changed history for the better.
Initially, reaction to Kennedy’s assassination was nationwide shock and sorrow. Then the American people rallied around his vision of putting a man on the moon by supporting the Apollo program. JFK’s call for civil rights was amplified by his successor Lyndon Johnson, who invoked Kennedy’s memory as he advocated for the Civil Rights Act.
In the end, the death of JFK was not only a tragedy but a catalyst. I believe that it led to advances that might have become bogged down, or not occurred at all, if Kennedy had served two full terms during the chaos and conflict of the 1960s.
Well, the Apollo program was in place beforehand, and was partly proposed to make up for JFK’s failure with the Bay of Pigs invasion: a way to challenge the Soviets in space instead of in Cuba. And although Johnson sometimes invoked JFK when pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in truth that was almost entirely Johnson’s own initiative, and he leveraged it using many machinations besides JFK’s death (see Robert Caro’s latest volume of Johnson’s biography, The Passage of Power). To be sure, Johnson may not have been electable had Kennedy not been killed, and so while the Civil Rights act was inevitable, it was probably speeded up considerably by JFK’s death.
But why try to find good at all in something that was a tragedy? Would Brinton say the world is actually better off because JFK was killed? If not, what is his point? After all, there are far more tragedies on this planet that have no good side at all, like the many people who die in natural disasters or the children who die from infections and cancer.
The point, of course, is to highlight the good that came from Jesus’s death. But scripture tells us that Jesus’s death was not really a tragedy, for it wasn’t the action of a disaffected killer but the deliberate plan of a benevolent God to save humanity. Dragging Jesus into the JFK assassination is a completely unnecessary way to push Brinton’s religious delusions on us. Nevertheless, he can’t help himself:
To find a benefit in tragedy seems counterintuitive, perhaps even scandalous.
But the followers of Jesus Christ now make up the world’s largest religious group, with more than 2 billion adherents. They accept the tragic death of Jesus as part of their religious history, and understand — in a variety of ways — that the evil that was done to him eventually resulted in great good.
On a practical level, Christians are motivated to fight injustice because it was a completely innocent Jesus who was nailed to a cross with criminals on either side of him. Across the country, for example, people are now working with the Innocence Project to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals.
The “evil” that was done to Jesus was planned by an loving God to give us a way out of Original Sin. It is nothing like the assassination of JFK, which was not planned to save humanity. Further, I know the people who founded the Innocence Project, and they aren’t Christians but secular Jewish atheists. They are not in the least motivated by religion, much less Jesus: they’re motivated by secular reason, a knowledge of forensics, and a secular morality.
Infected by the religious virus, Brinton goes on:
Religiously-motivated movements can have national implications — as significant as the Civil Rights Act and moon landing that followed Kennedy’s death. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, which allowed victims and perpetrators to speak in public hearings and move toward reconciliation. Such a Christian focus on forgiveness comes from what Jesus said about his killers from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
Could such good have been done without a violent death? Perhaps. But the assassination of JFK, like the crucifixion of Jesus, is both a shock and a stimulus. One death motivated the American people to work for progress, while the other continues to inspire Christians to fight injustice and do the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Of course Brinton neglects the religiously motivated movements that have had horrible consequences, including the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the eternal wars between Shiites and Sunnis, the downing of the World Trade Center. What good came from those tragedies? Did the violent deaths of 3,000 people in Manhattan, and the thousands more, guilty and innocent, who died in the resulting war in Afghanistan, have a silver lining? If there is one, I can’t see it. Brinton comes perilously close here to saying that JFK’s death was, in the main, a good thing. He forgets about the wife deprived of a husband, a family deprived of a brother or son, and the children deprived of a father.
He closes with this:
The anniversary of JFK’s death is a sign, like a cross in a church. It points us toward the possibility that death is not the end, and that good can come out of evil.
Yes, good can come of evil: Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded by a mother whose child was killed by such a driver. But good doesn’t always come from evil or tragedy—in fact, the vast majority of the time it doesn’t. The rest is just the senseless and unrequited misery and death inevitable in a material world containing immoral people. And a lot of that evil can, according to Pastor Brinton’s lights, be laid at God’s doorstep.
If God really was good, he would have brought about the Civil Rights Act by softening JFK’s heart and getting him to work more closely with LBJ—not by allowing JFK to be assassinated. God could have deflected Oswald’s bullets. Or was it His plan that the assassination take place so that we could have a Moon landing and civil rights? I’d love to ask Brinton this: if God is good, why do most horrible deaths not have beneficial results? And aren’t there other ways to get those results without suffering?
Finally, to compare eternal life with the Civil Rights Act is simply invidious. One is a tangible and beneficial change in morality; the other a religious fiction.
h/t: Diane G
