Many people, believers and non-believers alike, struggle with the evil that’s rampant in this world. The theological term for how God’s goodness and justice fit with the reality of pain in the world is theodicy.
Theodicy helps us tackle the question most of us have asked at some point: “If God is good and He’s in control, then why does He let bad things happen?” It’s about trying to make sense of God’s goodness in a world that’s often anything but good.
These questions have brought people to faith, and they’ve led others to abandon faith. One of those who fall in the latter camp is Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party.
In a recent interview, Badenoch described how, as a teen, she read about a woman in Austria whose father kept her locked in a basement for over 20 years. Badenoch felt that God was answering her trivial prayers for good grades and longer hair while not answering the Austrian woman’s prayers, and that led her to turn her back on her Christian faith.
For what it’s worth, Badenoch considers herself a “cultural Christian”; in fact, her self-description a few years ago was the first time I’d heard that phrase. She says she “hasn’t rejected Christianity,” but doesn’t believe in God. She wants the goodness of Christianity without the God who makes it good. She wants the kingdom without the King.
Related: The Church in Wales Chooses Woke Culture Over Biblical Faithfulness
Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie takes Badenoch to task in a column in The Spectator from earlier this week. He blisteringly points out that her prayers for good grades didn’t work all that well, but he adds that her teenage view of faith may have been ripe for apostasy:
Leaving aside the fact that Mrs Badenoch’s A level grades [the UK equivalent of Advanced Placement] were three Bs and a D, it reveals a remarkably incurious attitude to the deeper questions of good and evil. If God could only exist in relation to his direct influence on a teenaged Kemi Badenoch, he wouldn’t be much of a Divinity at all. That the Leader of the Opposition seems unable or unwilling to reassess her rejection of a God who appears to have been understood entirely as a quid pro quo giver of gifts, a sort of cosmic Father Christmas, suggests that she isn’t really willing or able to give the issues of good, evil, faith and doubt the attention they need if one is going to, for instance, opine upon them in interviews.
Butler-Gallie argues that theodicy makes sense in light of the understanding that man is fallen. And that mindset also tracks with conservatism, which Badenoch professes.
“The existence of evil and suffering doesn’t conflict with the goodness of God as he is neither the cause of evil, nor capable of suffering it, as nothing can meaningfully diminish his goodness,” Butler-Gallie explains. “Instead, and because of that goodness, God chooses to exist alongside evil so that in the end all things might be brought back to his goodness.”
“At the heart of conservatism is a necessary cynicism about human nature – we are not good, perfectible beings who can build a Utopia on earth, but fallen and sinful and with an incredible capacity to do things that are stupid and wrong,” he adds later in the column. “Hence the existence of evil.”
Instead of understanding that conservative view of humanity, Badenoch threw it out as a teenager. Granted, we make a lot of rash decisions when we’re young, but not many of them have eternal consequences. But what Butler-Gallie wonders is how Badenoch can truly advocate for conservatism with that mindset:
If domestic conservatism is going to be credible it desperately needs to have an intellectual narrative which can challenge the most damaging of liberalism’s assumptions about human nature. The dominance of an elite which essentially believes that human nature can be bribed or oppressed or educated into goodness has been a catastrophe for the last 50 years of policy making. A conservative alternative will need to have a coherent answer to the issue of human nature. Mrs Badenoch seems to have simply the same, tired, impractical view as her opponents.
I like Badenoch as a leader. She’s got some grit that tracks well with American conservatives who “fight.” But she suffers from the same problem as most of the modern Tories: She has drunk from the well of wobbly moderatism too long. That’s what the mindset of hers that Butler-Gallie points out brings to the table.
Sooner or later, everyone has to reconcile what Butler-Gallie refers to as “that pesky problem of evil” — including Badenoch. Whether or not that reconciliation leads her to Christ, if Badenoch can figure theodicy out, it’ll make her a better conservative.
The “problem of evil” isn’t just a question for theologians — it’s a challenge every believer, skeptic, and conservative must face.
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