Over on his popular blog, Chris Boeskool, a progressive Christian, has suggested that there’s something rather un-Christian about the mocking posts in response to the news of Josh Duggar’s Ashley Madison accounts, and to his insufficient apology. Unlike Boeskool, I do not condemn those posting them.
Boeskool sets up a false equivalence between powerful victimizers and their marginalized victims, as well as between those with and without power in general. Jesus, for his part, did no such thing, as he took differences in power and position into account, supporting, for example, the woman accused of adultery over the hypocritical Pharisees and teachers of the law who were eager to stone her.
Boeskool grounds his argument in the disgust he’s come to feel with the kinds of salacious reality TV shows set up to catch spouses in extramarital affairs, or to catch sexual predators:
I used to enjoy watching these shows because it used to make me feel good to watch people ‘Getting what they had coming to them.’ I think I liked the idea of Justice—These people chose their path, and now they were ‘getting what they deserve.’ And if I was able to watch that person receive their Karmic Wedgie, all the better…. Then something changed. I started getting grossed out while watching those shows—Not so much at the acts of the people who were getting ‘exposed,’ but more at my own voyeuristic enjoyment of their humiliation. I started seeing them as people–People whose brokenness was being put on display.
The impulse to remember that we are all human, is, of course, ultimately noble. And for my own part, I have always been put off by talk show segments revealing extramarital affairs and allowing a handful of hurt people to yell at each other in the name of entertainment. It’s disgusting, but it’s also different from public reactions to Duggar’s downfall.
There’s a big difference between ordinary people being displayed on TV to be mocked, on the one hand, and condemnations of a very powerful man who had a bully pulpit that he used to marginalize and harm, on the other.
And Josh Duggar is not an ordinary person. Until recently, the 27-year-old rising conservative star served as executive director of the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. When someone like this is revealed as a hypocrite, righteous anger is the appropriate response, as Jay Michaelson argued at The Daily Beast:
Women, progressives, and queers have had to sit and listen to the likes of Duggar, Huckabee, Santorum, and Fischer talk about us, as if the outright lies they spread about our lives are somehow deserving of deference. So you can’t blame us for smiling when they take a fall.
But here are two reasons to get hopping mad instead.
First, all of the people and institutions I’ve named, while they were lying, cheating, and having lots of illicit sex, were also working hard to demean me and my family, and deny us our civil rights. They aren’t just hypocrites. Hypocrites preach one thing and practice another. But these guys aren’t just preaching; they are actively, and sometimes successfully, restricting my freedom, encouraging my dehumanization, and telling lies about me and people like me.
There are real-world consequences of this preposterous playing-out of religious conservatives’ inner psychoses, and real people who are affected. Kids attempting suicide, repressed men abusing their children and wives, and, of course, the victims of those who ‘stray,’ whose lives can be ruined.
I do feel sorry for the pain that Duggar’s family is going through, and I also can, in fact, empathize with Duggar himself. He is, in a certain sense, a victim of something as well, but not of undeserved public ridicule or anger. No, he’s a victim of a toxic culture and ideology that fosters his abuses and does great harm to the marginalized. And while we may feel empathy toward such a figure, it’s our moral duty to prioritize acting on our empathy for his less powerful victims, to focus on the voices of the marginalized and on the harm people like Duggar have done—harm that goes far beyond himself and his family—and what we can do to limit such harm from being caused in the future.
Boeskool is a Christian who fights the good fight, and he often gets it right. In this instance, however, that’s not the case. Jesus never said: “Woe to he who calls out powerful hypocrites.” First and foremost, Jesus defended the powerless.
