The Normalization of Evil

by  Chuck Colson                                                                                                                                    Vol. VI, No. 9, December 1993

[This article is reprinted from the duly/August issue of Jubilee, the newsletter of Prison Fellowship.]

As jurors deliberated last spring's Rodney King trial, South Central Los Angeles braced for the worst. Police cruisers filled the streets; the National Guard was on full alert.

Happily, the violence never came. Instead, citizens enjoyed a respite from a "normal" crime-ridden weekend. One woman said, "For the first time I was able to just go out for a walk on Saturday night and enjoy myself, without always looking over my shoulder."

It took a police army to afford citizens the domestic tranquility that is the first mark of a civilized society. The simple pleasure of strolling peacefully through one's neighborhood is now abnormal; the norm is the expectation of violent crime.

This is what Sen. Daniel Patriek Moynihan  has described as "defining deviancy down ward." Moynihan says that our society has adjusted to escalating levels of deviant behaviors by redefining them as normal.

Crime is the most obvious example. According to Kai T. Erikson, a society's capacity for handling deviance "can be roughly estimated by counting its prison cells ... its policemen and psychiatrists, its courts and clinics." When a culture reaches capacity, it wearily redefines crime.

Moynihan quotes a judge's haunting description of the unabated flood of crime – up 75 percent in 20 years – and its numbing, narcoleptic effect that "can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend and foe alike. A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.

It' s not just crime. We have lost our sense of outrage, and redefined our standards and morals, on other issues as well.

Take welfare. According to projections for children born in the year 1980, 22.2 percent of white children and 82.9 percent of black children will be dependent on welfare before reaching age 18. Shocking numbers but, argues Moynihan, "there is little evidence that these facts are regarded as a calamity in municipal government."

Or take the current movement to legalize drugs because drug abuse is so widespread and the jails are full.

Perhaps the most chilling example of defining deviancy downward can be seen in the family. Thirty years ago, one in every 40 white children was born to an unmarried mother; today it is one in five. Among blacks, two of three children are born to an unmarried mother; the figure was one in five 30 years ago. The divorce rate in America is now 50 percent.

William F. Buckley reports how one thoroughly modern scholar has responded to such figures: "Divorce represents the normal family life cycle. It should not be viewed as either deviant or tragic, as it has been in the past. Rather, it establishes a process for ‘uncoupling,' and thereby serves as the foundation for individual renewal and ‘new beginnings."'

So what was once a personal and societal tragedy is now a resource for "renewal."

It is bad enough to watch deteriorating mores erode society's standards. But it is truly horrifying to see the new trend that skirts those standards altogether by simply redefining deviance as normal. As Isaiah warned Israel, "Woe to those who call good evil and evil good."

Anyone who has raised children knows you cannot shape the family's standards to fit their behavior; the innate depravity of just one unchecked two-year old can rip a home apart. The same is true of a nation: Our democracy depends on sure national standards that do not shift because of deviant behaviors on the part of its citizens. Laws and social mores must serve as a moral teacher; when the law becomes a moral mirror, a nation is at the mercy of unchecked human nature.

And that brings us to the root of all this: an archaic, shockingly politically incorrect notion. Sin. The cultural elites are standing on their heads to redefine sin as an "alternative lifestyle." It's easy to be beguiled by the shifting standards of such relativism, especially when so many of us are worn out by the hard realities of crime and broken families and unmet standards. Confused and weary, we can be lulled into narcolepsy.

After the big homosexual march on Washington this spring, a group of Christians were discussing the parade. One, having absorbed the enthusiastic media coverage, said, "I know it's supposed to be wrong. But it just doesn't feel wrong to me anymore. Don't you think standards have changed?"