Scott’s Column: Wicked

This last weekend was Wicked.  I’m only playing with the slang use of the word from my youth.  I really mean the opening of the new film version of the popular Broadway musical.  Everyone seemed to be going to see it, and social media was flooded with posts about.  I personally missed out on the pop cultural moment, stuck at home with a sick child.

The original novel Wicked is magnificent, if you haven’t read it.  Much richer, darker, more complex than the musical, with deep reflections on religion actually.  I talked about a scene from the book once in one of my sermons on time.

Being unable to go see the movie, instead I reflected upon what “wicked” means.

The British philosopher Mary Midgley has a good book with the rather straightforward title Wickedness.  In which she wants us to grapple with the darker side of our human condition–“We need to grasp clearly how appallingly human beings sometimes behave.”

She thinks we get distracted by thinking of the wicked as powerful and spectacular, for most evil occurs in rather ordinary settings by rather ordinary people.  And so she defines the concept–“we shall need, I believe, to think of wickedness not primarily as a positive, definite tendency like aggression . . . but rather as negative, as a general kind of failure to live as we are capable of living.”

Much wickedness arises from self-deception, she argues.  So we should cultivate awareness of our shadow sides, better understanding our motives and hidden biases.  We must also avoid projecting our own problems onto other people and be leery of political movements that appeal to our dark sides.  Of the latter she writes that “Influential psychopaths and related types . . . get their power not from originality, but from a perception of just what unacknowledged motives lie waiting to be exploited, and just what aspects of the world currently provide a suitable patch of darkness on to which they can be projected.”  What these movements do is grant permission to people to want some of the dark things we already want.

So to avoid that, we need to develop better awareness of ourselves, avoiding self-deception.  “To deny one’s shadow is to lose solidity, to become something of a phantom.  Self-deception about it may increase our confidence, but it surely threatens our wholeness.”  Life is full of conflict, so we must learn to handle our fear, anger, and aggression.

But, most importantly, we should be cultivating rich, full lives.  Developing our good capacities.  Because it is empty or shallow lives that are most likely to fall into wickedness.

The story of the musical wrestles with some of these themes, but it also scrambles the rather simple, black-and-white understandings of good and evil we associate with the original Wizard of Oz.  And it elevates some of the gender politics that play into our traditional moral notions.

So, it’s fun to think about how feminist theologian Mary Daly approaches the concept her in groundbreaking book Beyond God the Father.  In which she claims that to be a woman with the courage to be herself, liberating herself from patriarchy is to be “wicked.”  Which Elphaba surely represents in the movie.

According to Daly, “Wicked women strive to overcome the amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia inflicted by phallocracy.  We actively pronounce certain ideologies, institutions, practices to be blameworthy and evil. This pronouncing/denouncing portends the end of such evil, auguring an Other reality.”

Daly embraces the subversive, creative, feminist power of the image of the witch–“The sources of authentic hope are to be found within Wild women–Self-proclaimed Witches/Hags who choose the creation of our own space/time as a primal expression of the intellectual/e-motional vitality, knowing that without this we will suffocate in the ranks of the living dead.”

Of course the religious tradition we are a part of has its own shadow side, including the dark history of how our Colonial era forebearers treated the so-called “witches” of their day.  I believe one reason the Congregationalists (and ultimately the United Church of Christ) became so liberal over time is that four hundred years ago we saw firsthand what our religious fundamentalism could do and, even in the lifetimes of those involved, began to repudiate what had happened and to head in new directions.

Now, maybe I can get to the film this week over the Thanksgiving break?