The Appeal of the Middle

Most of us have a deep-rooted instinct for the middle ground. When two sides are shouting at each other, we assume the truth probably lies somewhere in between, and it often does. In a marriage, on a church board, or in a city council budget fight, the person who finds common ground is usually the wisest in the room. Compromise is one of the ordinary graces that keeps a society from tearing itself apart.

The Bible commends this kind of wisdom. The book of Proverbs is full of warnings against quarrelsome people who insist on winning every argument, and Paul urges the Romans, as much as lies in them, to live peaceably with all (Romans 12:18). Christians, of all people, should be known for listening, conceding a good point, and holding their preferences loosely. A believer who treats every disagreement as a holy war has not understood grace. He has simply baptized his temper.

But there is a category of problem in which this instinct to find common ground, so useful elsewhere, becomes deadly. When the issue on the table is not a disputed good but an evil in itself, the middle way is not a path to virtue. 

You cannot split the difference between a lie and the truth and end up with something halfway decent. You simply end up with a lie.

Imagine a man who tells his wife he has decided to be only somewhat unfaithful. He will see the other woman less often, be discreet, and not let it interfere with the children’s school events. He might even present this as progress, and in a narrow sense it is less than what he was doing before. But no wife on earth would call it fidelity. She would rightly see that he has not moved toward faithfulness at all. He has simply negotiated better terms for his betrayal.

I want to make a simple argument. Attempts to legislate halfway measures on inherently evil matters always result in evil. That sounds absolute, and it is meant to be. But I hope to show that it is not the absolutism of the zealot. I believe it is the only position that takes both evil and human beings seriously. And I want to show, at the end, that it is also the position that most deeply reflects how God himself has dealt with evil.

What Evil Actually Is

To see why compromise fails here, we have to ask what evil is. The Christian tradition has never treated evil as a rival substance, a dark stuff that sits on the scale opposite the good, so we could weigh out a little of one and a little of the other. Augustine argued that evil has no independent existence. It is the absence or corruption of a good that ought to be there, the way blindness is not a thing but the loss of sight, or a wound is not a thing but damage to healthy flesh.¹ In his Confessions, he adds that a thing can only be corrupted if it was good to begin with, because corruption is always the harming of something that had worth.² C. S. Lewis put it more simply: badness is only spoiled goodness.³

This distinction matters enormously because it reveals two very different kinds of moral problems. The first kind involves good things that can be misused. Wine, money, sex, ambition, and political power are all gifts. Each can be twisted, yet the gift remains beneath the twisting. Timothy Keller argued that idolatry usually turns a good thing into an ultimate thing.⁴ When the problem is a good thing out of proportion, the right response is to put it back in proportion. In such cases, regulation and limits make perfect sense. We do not abolish wine because of drunkenness. We teach moderation. We do not outlaw commerce because of greed. We write laws against fraud, and the honest merchant goes on doing honest business.

The second kind of problem is different. Some acts are defined by the corruption itself. There may be a healthy way to drink wine, but no healthy way to own a human being. There is a righteous use of authority, but no righteous way to break a prisoner by inflicting pain. In these cases, the evil is not a misuse that can be trimmed back toward a proper use. The evil is the whole thing. Remove the corruption, and nothing remains to regulate.

Here is a simple test. Ask what the thing would look like if it were done perfectly. A perfectly good use of wine is the wedding feast at Cana. A perfectly good use of money is generosity. A perfectly good use of power is a ruler who protects the weak. But what would perfect slavery look like? What would a perfectly good act of torture look like? The questions are absurd, and the absurdity is the answer. When there is no righteous ideal toward which reform could move, reform is not real reform. It is only the management of evil.

That is why moderation, a virtue in the first kind of problem, becomes a vice in the second. You can moderate a good, but not a privation. A smaller amount of an inherently evil act remains the same act. A law that allows fewer lashes still authorizes the lash. A policy that allows only some people to be owned still declares that people can be owned. The quantity changes, but the essence does not. It is the essence that God judges.

Slavery: Abolition, Not Gradualism

Consider how this played out with chattel slavery. When the issue was how to do better than slavery, the project was not understood as an effort to civilize slavery. It was not defined as an effort to justify some forms of slavery and condemn others. That is not because people never tried the halfway route. They did, again and again, and history has judged the results.

In the British Empire of the 1820s, the official policy was called “amelioration.” Parliament sought to improve conditions on the plantations: limit flogging, permit religious instruction, and protect families from being sold apart. It sounded humane and reasonable, and many decent people supported it. It also failed almost completely because planters had every incentive to ignore it, and the system itself depended on the very cruelties the reforms tried to soften. You cannot make a man work without wages for a lifetime unless you are willing to hurt him when he refuses. The whip was not an abuse of the system. It was the system’s engine.

A Quaker woman named Elizabeth Heyrick saw this clearly. In 1824, she published a pamphlet whose title was its entire argument: Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition.⁵ She understood that you cannot make a person’s ownership kinder by degrees. Gradualism simply meant more years of people being owned and more children born into bondage while the respectable classes waited for the right moment. Many leading abolitionists of her day considered her pamphlet radical, even embarrassing. Within a decade, the movement largely came around to her position, and Parliament passed emancipation in 1833.

The American story is even more sobering. The Compromise of 1850 was designed to hold the Union together by giving each side something. One of its provisions was the Fugitive Slave Act, which required officials and ordinary citizens in free states to assist in returning escaped people to bondage.⁶ Notice what happened. A measure meant to contain slavery ended up conscripting the whole nation into it. A Massachusetts farmer who had never owned anyone could now be fined for refusing to help put a man back in chains. The halfway measure did not produce half an evil. It produced the evil act itself and spread the guilt more widely than before.

This is a pattern worth noticing. Compromises with evil rarely hold. They are presented as fences that contain evil, but evil does not respect fences. It treats every concession as a beachhead. The Missouri Compromise gave way to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which brought bloodshed to the prairie and led to the war itself. Each halfway measure bought a few years of quiet and paid for them with more ground surrendered.

The people who saw this most clearly were usually those who had felt the lash or stood closest to those who had. When William Lloyd Garrison launched The Liberator in 1831, he announced that he would not equivocate on the subject or retreat an inch.⁷ Frederick Douglass, speaking in Rochester on July 5, 1852, told his audience that the hour did not call for gentle argument. “It is not light that is needed,” he said, “but fire.”⁸ Douglass knew that a nation seeking a reasonable middle ground on slavery was seeking a comfortable way to keep people like him in chains.

Abraham Lincoln, who for years hoped for a gradual solution, finally wrote, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”⁹ That is the logic of the second kind of problem. Once you see that the thing is wrong in itself, there is no stable middle ground between permitting it and ending it.

Torture and War: The Same Logic

Now, consider torture. How far could we get by trying to justify some forms of torture and condemn others? We do not have to guess, because we have tried. In 2002, a legal memorandum within the United States government narrowed the definition of torture so far that only pain comparable to organ failure or death would count.¹⁰ Everything below that line became, in effect, permitted. New, gentler words were found for old practices. And the predictable happened. Once a nation decides which forms of torture are acceptable, it does not torture less. It tortures with a clear conscience, and the line keeps moving.

The international community had seen this coming. The Convention against Torture states plainly that no exceptional circumstance, whether war, the threat of war, or any public emergency, may be invoked to justify torture.¹¹ That is not naive idealism. It is a hard-won recognition that once you write an exception, the exception becomes the practice. Every torturer in history has believed his situation was the exceptional one. C. S. Lewis’s senior devil, Screwtape, understood the principle well. He advises his apprentice that “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one.”¹² A soul, or a nation, is rarely talked into atrocity all at once. It is walked there, one reasonable step at a time.

We can apply the same question to war. When war is the issue, should it be understood as an effort to justify some wars and condemn others? Many serious Christians have answered yes, and I want to treat that tradition respectfully. It was born of a genuine desire to restrain violence, not to celebrate it. Augustine himself, who did so much to shape it, wrote that a wise person who must wage a just war ought to lament the necessity, because it is the wrongdoing of others that forces his hand.¹³ That is obviously not the voice of a warmonger.

But we must be honest about the record. Nearly every nation that has gone to war has believed its cause was just. The criteria meant to restrain war have far more often been used to bless it. Chaplains on both sides, time and again, have prayed to the same God for victory. A framework meant to say “only this far” has mostly functioned as a permission slip, and once war begins, its own logic takes over. Restraint in choosing targets gives way to bombing cities. Rules about proportion give way to the demand for total victory. What was supposed to be limited refuses to stay so.

Martin Luther King Jr. saw this in his own time. Speaking at Riverside Church in 1967, he warned that a nation that keeps pouring its wealth into the machinery of war while neglecting the poor is approaching spiritual death.¹⁴ He understood that war does not merely kill bodies abroad. It reshapes the nation’s soul.

We cannot stop war merely by modifying it. Jesus said that faith as small as a mustard seed could uproot a mulberry tree (Luke 17:6), yet war is more tenacious than thistles or mulberry trees. Its roots run deep into the human heart, into fear, pride, and the desire to be safe at any cost. James asks where wars and fighting come from and answers that they come from the lusts that war within us (James 4:1). You do not kill a root system like that by trimming the branches. We should not court failure with half measures.

But Didn’t Moses Compromise?

At this point, a thoughtful reader of the Bible will push back, and rightly so. Doesn’t the Old Testament itself regulate practices it does not approve of? The law of Moses permitted divorce and set rules for it (Deuteronomy 24:1–4). It regulated practices in the ancient world that later generations of believers came to regard as deeply wrong. Isn’t that God legislating a halfway measure? And if God can do it, why can’t we?

Look at how Jesus handles that very question. When the Pharisees cite Moses’ permission, Jesus explains that Moses allowed it “because of the hardness of your hearts: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). Notice two things. First, Jesus never calls the concession good. He calls it a concession to sin. Second, he refuses to let the regulation become the standard. He points back to creation, to what God intended from the beginning. The permission was a dam holding back a flood, not a blessing on the flood.

This helps us draw a crucial line. There is a difference between law that restrains evil and law that licenses it. Restraining law says, in effect, “This is wrong, and here is how far it may go before we stop it.” It keeps calling evil by its name and always points beyond itself toward something better. Licensing law says, “This version is acceptable.” It carves out a protected category and grants it a clean conscience. The first kind of law can be a mercy in a fallen world. The second kind always ends in the evil act because it has quietly redefined evil as good. The prophet warned against exactly this: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).

Paul names the deeper temptation. Some in his day accused him of teaching, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” His verdict on that reasoning is blunt: their condemnation is just (Romans 3:8). Every compromise with an inherently evil act is a version of that sentence. We will do a little wrong so that a greater good may come. Scripture does not allow us to make that trade.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who paid for his convictions with his life, described a counterfeit he called cheap grace. It is grace that justifies the sin rather than the sinner.¹⁵ That is precisely what licensing law does in a nation’s moral life. It offers the comfort of absolution without the cost of turning away. It lets us keep the evil and feel forgiven at the same time. Real grace never does that. It forgives the sinner completely and, for that very reason, refuses to make peace with the sin.

Why the Middle Road Feels So Safe

If halfway measures against evil fail so reliably, why do we keep reaching for them? Part of the answer is that they let us feel we are doing something about evil without paying the price of opposing it.

The prophet Jeremiah condemned the religious leaders of his day for this very thing. They soothed the people’s hurt, saying, “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). They were not cruel men. They were reassuring men. They told people what they wanted to hear because the truth would have been disruptive. Halfway measures are often the moral equivalent of a light bandage on a deep wound. They make the wound look tended while the infection spreads beneath the surface.

Martin Luther King Jr. made the same point in his letter from a jail cell. The great stumbling block to justice, he wrote, was not the open segregationist but the white moderate, more devoted to “order” than to justice.¹⁶ The moderate agreed that segregation was wrong in principle but counseled patience, preferred a gradual approach, and found the present moment inconvenient. King saw that this posture, however polite, defended the very evil it claimed to oppose.

A spiritual diagnosis underlies all of this. We prefer halfway measures because we want to be acceptable to those in our circle of family, friends, and those with authority over us. Taking a clear stand against entrenched evil will cost us friends, money, standing, and sometimes even safety. The halfway road lets us keep our reputation for reasonableness. In other words, it is often the idol of approval that is at work. We want to be seen as balanced more than we want to be faithful. And the gospel is the only thing strong enough to break that idol, because it gives us an approval no crowd can give or take away.

How God Deals with Evil

So how do we live this out without becoming harsh, self-righteous crusaders? Here, the gospel offers us something no other philosophical framework can offer.

Think about how God himself dealt with evil. He could have lowered His standard and simply excused us, which would have made Him less than just. Or He could have kept the standard and condemned us, leaving us without hope. Most human religions and philosophies choose one. Some offer a God so loving that He hardly cares about sin. Others offer a God so holy that no one can come near Him. Instead, at the cross, God neither negotiated with evil nor ignored it. He absorbed it. Paul says God did this so that He might be both “just, and the justifier” of those who believe (Romans 3:26). Sin was not split down the middle. It was paid for in full.

That means Christians, of all people, should refuse to make half-measures with evil, because our salvation rests on God’s refusal to compromise. If God had been willing to compromise with sin, Jesus would not have had to die. The cross is the most emphatic statement in history that evil cannot be bargained with.

But it also means we can never oppose evil from a posture of superiority. The same cross that shows how serious evil is also shows that it runs through every human heart, including our own. The gospel tells us we are more sinful than we ever dared believe and more loved than we ever dared hope.¹⁷ The person who knows the first half of that sentence cannot look down on anyone. The person who knows the second half does not need anyone’s approval. And so that person can fight slavery, torture, and war with total conviction and still pray for the slaveholder, the torturer, and the soldier.

This combination is rare yet powerful. History’s most effective opponents of evil have often possessed it. They refused to compromise with evil itself or to hate the people caught up in it. They knew the goal was not merely to defeat their opponents but to win them over.

The instinct for the middle is a gift in a thousand ordinary disputes. But some things are not disputes. They are darkness, and darkness cannot be partially admitted to a room. Our calling is the one Paul gave the church in Rome: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). 

Not with a little less evil. 

With good.

Notes

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

1. Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, chap. 11.
2. Augustine, Confessions, bk. 7, chap. 12.
3. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper One, 2001), bk. 2, chap. 2.
4. Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters(New York: Dutton, 2009), introduction.
5. Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824).
6. Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, ch. 60, 9 Stat. 462 (1850).
7. William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” The Liberator (Boston), January 1, 1831.
8. Frederick Douglass, Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5th, 1852 (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann, 1852).
9. Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 7 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 281.
10. Jay S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, memorandum to Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, “Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A,” August 1, 2002, Office of Legal Counsel, US Department of Justice.
11. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, art. 2, para. 2, December 10, 1984, 1465 U.N.T.S. 85.
12. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperOne, 2001), letter 12.
13. Augustine, The City of God, bk. 19, chap. 7.
14. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (speech, Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967).
15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1995), chap. 1.
16. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
17. Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (New York: Dutton, 2011), 48.