Extremes – Good or Bad?

“The most dangerous person in the world is a true believer.”

This was a favorite saying of a history teacher of mine. It always puzzled me. What is the preferable alternative? Hypocrisy? Superficiality? Apathy? Nihilism?

I have often heard atheists decry religion because it raises such passion in people. It makes them willing to fight and die, to act contrary to self-preservation and common sense. “Religious zeal” is a phrase that raises apprehension these days. The capacity of religion to provoke extremism is often a point against it.

But should it be? Hadn’t there ought to be something worth fighting and dying for? And if there is, oughtn’t we to do whatever is necessary to defend it? If one is fighting evil, is it ever okay to do so in moderation? If I am witness to an attempted rape, should I use only moderate effort to stop it from happening? Extremity isn’t the opposite of restraint; it’s the opposite of mediocrity.

Of course, there are certainly people who have been driven to ugly extremes by religion, just as there are people who have been driven to ugly extremes by atheism – the French Reign of Terror and Communist purges come to mind. True belief is very dangerous. A true believer cannot be stopped.

We must remember, however, to look not only at the kamikaze pilot or the suicide bomber, but at Jean Moulin fighting for his beloved France even under Gestapo torture, or the Greek soldiers charging across the beach at Marathon, or John Paul Jones, who had “not yet begun to fight” when asked for surrender. A true believer isn’t one who believes blindly; he is one who commits to what he believes.

There is a difference between moderation and temperance. Moderation means never having too much passion about anything. Temperance means having correctly-oriented passion – passion to do good and stop evil.  Moderation is negative; temperance is positive. Moderation is not a virtue; temperance is. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, “there is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction.”

It is certainly true that without religion, there would be less passion in the world. If we all accepted that we were nothing more than biological machines, coming into existence, reproducing, and dying without any higher cause, we would not feel the need to defend what we believe in. Without believing in truth, goodness, justice, love, or any of the other unseen, empirically unproven things of this world, I’m sure there would be less fighting.

But that is like saying that without the plot of an action movie, the hero would get into fewer fights. It is certainly true that the action movie would be much less violent. It would also no longer be a movie worth watching. And without something worth our extremism, I am not at all sure this would be a world worth living in. Fortunately, our world is one of beautiful extremes.

I will end on a quote by another Christian who expressed this thought much more eloquently than I could from inside a certain jail in Alabama:

“…though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label…the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified… for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

“Love Explosion” by Stuart Caie is licensed under CC BY 2.0