The Exploding Victim-Fleecing Industry

I wrote in the comments of a not-too-distant post that “…there’s an exploding victim-fleecing industry currently making its living off the backs of the afflicted,” and I wanted to follow up with a few thoughts on this.

God made the world such that sin and righteousness, guilt and forgiveness are necessarily at the center of everything. Another way of saying this is that God made the world with covenantal realities wound through the whole thing. Or, to say it in even simpler terms: the whole universe is personal. Everywhere you go, everything you do is related to God. You are either living under God’s personal blessing or else you are living under His personal wrath. There is nothing neutral, nowhere you can go to find escape from His presence.

But sinners gonna sin, and therefore, sinners gonna try to hide their sin. Like our first parents, Adam and Eve, we try to cover our nakedness, our shame. This is the instinct for atonement. Atonement means covering. They used fig leaves, and we use whatever we have at hand. When we sin, we are in some way taking something good and twisting it. And since we are surrounded by His goodness even when we’re trying to cover our sin, we’re still grabbing more of His goodness, twisting it and trying to use that to cover the previously twisted goodness, sin upon sin, guilt upon guilt.

So when we sin, we are plagued with guilt and shame, and God’s answer to that problem is the blood of Jesus. However, sinners enslaved to their sin refuse God’s answer and grab for their own answer, but the wages of sin is death and therefore, at some fundamental level what guilt craves is blood. But it’s not just any kind of blood. Sinners need innocent blood to cover them. Sinners need the blood of a victim.

Sinners rarely think clearly enough to put this all together in complete sentences, but this is true at a visceral level, an instinctive level. And so then, what are guilty sinners in search of? Victims. And since the blood of these victims, from Abel down to the present, only provides a momentary cathartic release and cannot actually take away our sins, guilty sinners need a steady stream of victims in order to get that momentary catharsis to feel more like a continuous covering for their sin, a sort of patched-together, shoe string faux-atonement.

And this is why rational, scientific arguments make so little headway in ending abortion. Guilt drives the whole bloody industry. While I am completely committed to doing everything I can to encourage and push for the complete abolition of abortion in America and throughout the world, I do not believe we will see significant change in our land apart from a massive evangelical revival. Millions of guilt-ridden Americans need to find their full and free atonement in the blood of Christ. This is why many so-called Christians, who claim to be pro-life, cannot find the courage to stand up to the holocaust. Even if abortion were outlawed tomorrow, the bloodlust would break out somewhere else immediately. If blood is not shed in the clinics, it will be shed in the streets. This is simply a fact about the way God made the world. You cannot banish the bloodletting in a land full of guilt and expect everyone to come to their senses.

And like most addictions, what was satisfying last week will not be enough next week. And so the lust for blood grows. And it begins breaking out in child abuse, sexual perversions, self-harm, including genital mutilation, body piercing, increasing suicide rates. But far from the chaos of zombie movies and Halloween specials, I’m inclined to agree with C.S. Lewis that the Devil is actually the supreme bureaucrat:

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the managerial age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see the final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven faces who do not need to raise their voice. (From the Preface of Screwtape Letters)

In other words, the Devil’s deep insecurity is revealed in his lust for organizations and systems and bureaucracy. God created the world with plenty of order, and there’s something truly glorious about the rhythms and cycles of nature. But the personality of God also breaks through in all the changeups and surprises and variations in the order. But if the Devil were in charge, he would obliterate the exceptions, the variations, and the surprises. And so what I mean by all this is that sinners, prompted by their Accuser, instinctively want systems of guilt relief, industries of atonement, programs of shame reduction, ministries of victim-sharing. The medievals introduced confessionals and indulgences, purgatory, penance, and pilgrimages, but the devilish instinct is still with us in creeping ceremonials and rituals in the church, with the white-coated administration of “medicine” to “terminate a pregnancy” or “gender reassignment surgery” — here, would you just fill out this paperwork, and now an explosion of organizations specializing in “helping” victims of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, PTSD, and the list goes on and on and on.

Now hear me carefully: I’m not saying there are no Christian counselors or Christian ministries that are doing good, faithful work to minister God’s grace to the hurting. But what I am saying is that there is a dark and ancient lust to cover guilt with the blood of victims. There are perverse incentives resident in this world and in the hearts of guilty sinners attracted to victims for all the wrong reasons. They are not consciously seeking to harm the victims, but there is a certain thrill and satisfaction in the high drama, the outrage over injustice, reliving and retelling the cruel and violent acts and words, a vicarious sharing in the suffering, such that there are multiple levels of incentive for perpetuating a victim status, not all of which are selfless. Guilty sinners, if they cannot find a way to make themselves victims, will draw a certain sense of peace and strength from the agony of victims around them. This is what I mean by “victim-fleecing.” This can and will be euphemistically spiritualized as sympathy, compassion, identifying with suffering, weeping with those who weep, and surely counselors will come to truly believe that this is why the work gives them such peace and feels so empowering. But the truth of the matter is that there is a deep victim-lust in the hearts of guilty sinners. And there is a devilish administrative impulse that loves an orderly flow of victims signing up, making appointments, and pouring out the agony of their hearts, and the vicarious sufferers share in the pain, share in the gruesome details like a junkie shooting up.

But you know it’s counterfeit when it doesn’t break the cycle. You know it’s counterfeit because slaves are not actually set free. I was at a memorial service recently where my Dad gave the sermon and he pointed out that if you read the gospels carefully you come to realize that Jesus never did funerals. He was often late to funerals, and when He did show up, He always interrupted them. He always raised the dead. Jesus doesn’t do funerals. He couldn’t even do His own.

And so it is that Christians should be highly suspicious of the explosion of the victim industries, the explosion of what we might call the mortuary arts. We are Christians. We don’t really do funerals. Yes, we bury our dead with dignity, planting their bodies in the ground in the hope of the Great Spring. But mostly we do resurrections. We preach for resurrections. We baptize for resurrections. We pray for resurrections. We eat and drink at a table that proclaims resurrection. And so we counsel and we minister for resurrections. Everything Jesus touches comes back to life. Everything Jesus touches is healed, forgiven, cleansed, and set free. In Christ, our identity is Conqueror — actually, More Than Conqueror — through Him who loved us.

We are not victims. We are not survivors. And we are not here to assuage someone else’s guilt, to make someone else feel a little better about their sin, as they vicariously share in our suffering.

We are victors because there is a perfect victim who has already suffered in our place:

Man of Sorrows! what a name
For the Son of God, who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Guilty, vile, and helpless we;
Spotless Lamb of God was He;
“Full atonement!” can it be?
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Lifted up was He to die;
“It is finished!” was His cry;
Now in Heav’n exalted high.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

When He comes, our glorious King,
All His ransomed home to bring,
Then anew His song we’ll sing:
Hallelujah! What a Savior!