Who Are We To Judge

Fraser Dyer

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281072484
• eBook ISBN: 9780281072491
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Jesus says 'Do not judge' yet our human instinct often leads us to harsh judgements of others. In a world where snap judgements are made in seconds on social media, how can Christians resist the urge to join in?

Christians may be especially adept at dressing up their
judgement of others as righteousness and being a witness for Christ without recognising the psychological and spiritual
pitfalls. It remains easier to point the finger at clearer and more
observable sins than to recognise the way judgementalism corrupts us.

In this insightful and wise book, Fraser Dyer helps us to understand
what compels Christians to be judgemental towards others. He
explores the condemnation of judgementalism throughout scripture, and particularly in the ministry and teaching of
Christ. He also includes a set of practical approaches, rooted in
Christian spirituality, to enable us to journey from the self-righteousness of judgementalism towards love of God and neighbour.

Part 1

UNDERSTANDING JUDGEMENTALISM

‘Why do you pass judgement on your brother or sister?’

Romans 14.10

1

The urge to judge

An ageing pop star has his house searched by police investigating historical allegations of sexual misconduct with an underage boy. Although the singer is given no warning of the search taking place, the media are tipped off by police and his name is all over the internet within minutes. Before any formal charges are laid, and in spite of the celebrity’s denial of any wrongdoing, users of Twitter share their judgements online. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised’, says one. ‘I knew he’d be the next celebrity to turn out to be a rapist or paedo’, says another. ‘Why do all these celebrities have to live like beasts?’, says a third, before adding the menacing hashtag #MurderThem.

Reading about this story on social media is a depressing experience. While some commentators remind us that a person is innocent until proved guilty, the torrent of abuse, off-colour jokes and assumptions of guilt permeate the debate like a bad odour. An MP, remarking on the injustice of being judged guilty before any charge has been prosecuted, says, ‘People have zero per cent of the facts and a hundred per cent of the opinions. It’s quite wrong for people to prejudge.’¹

But we do – all the time, in fact. Our brains are busy working away, constantly making assessments of other people and trying to determine whether we can trust them – or not. Do we like them, believe them or feel we can cooperate with them? And when people behave in a way that’s out of kilter with who we are, we find ourselves trying to figure them out. When they transgress our values, customs, etiquette or social norms we wonder, ‘What is it with them?’

There are good sociological reasons why our brains work this way. They’re finely tuned to assess danger in a situation, including the people we encounter. You only need to walk down an unlit deserted street and notice a hooded figure appear in the opposite direction to feel your senses go into hyperdrive and understand that instinct has taken over.

Desmond and Mpho Tutu write:

In the past our survival depended on recognizing and being suspicious of difference. If people were in and of our group, we could assume good intent. If people were not in and of our group, we would be safest to assume evil intentions.²

This is all very useful in a primitive monoculture, and if our capacity to judge other people stopped there, we’d be doing fine. But when we look further we begin to see what problems our tendency for judgement can create. We make decisions about other people without having all the facts; just a look or a remark can turn us off a person quite unjustifiably; an encounter with someone bearing a physical resemblance to someone in our past can create ill feeling. Because judgements we make frequently rest on too little information, we fill in the gaps ourselves, based on – well, on what?

Our drive to judge others moves beyond a reasonable need for safety to one of competition – that human compulsion to clamber to the top of the pile, often at the expense of others. Or as Eugene Peterson puts it, in his translation of Galatians 5.21, ‘The vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival.’³ Before long our judgementalism is about putting others down in order to elevate ourselves in front of friends or colleagues. This is not self-preservation but chipping away at the reputation of others we judge to be threats or obstacles.

What began as a useful mechanism for personal safety can become a corrosive and destructive social weapon. Some of us are worse in this than others of course, but who hasn’t made a snap judgement about another person without hearing that little inner voice saying, ‘You’re being unfair’ or ‘You’re being unkind’?

Our judgemental streak, then, is a spiritual matter. In our quest to be the best we can be, to journey towards wholeness, the way we behave towards others is paramount. For Christians this is particularly so, as we follow the teachings and example of one who has much to say against judging others. Yet looking at the Church today I can’t say I observe that its most striking feature is an absence of judgementalism.

A member of my congregation wants to start a new project in the parish. I suggest she write a proposal for the PCC to discuss. ‘What?’ she exclaims. ‘That useless lot. If you left it to them we’d never get anything done.’

A new person starts attending our services. He’s come from another church, where he became unpopular for asking awkward questions – ‘You need to leave’, they’d told him; ‘You have a spirit of disobedience.’ (In fact he had a mental illness and needed support to get the right treatment.)

A homeless person starts sleeping in the churchyard. ‘We can’t let this go on. Look at the mess he’s creating. How could he have allowed himself to get into this state? It’s so irresponsible.’

These remarks were made to rather than by me. But they could easily have been my words – I’ve certainly said things very like that and seen the consequences of such ill-informed judgements.

When I make remarks like these I never give the object of my judgement the benefit of the doubt. Lobbing an opinion into a situation, like a hand grenade, seldom leads to greater understanding or enlightenment. I shut down possibilities and fail to spot potential or new opportunities because I haven’t opened myself up to discerning what’s really going on. There’s no inquiry, no curiosity, no open-mindedness, no possibility for growth. It’s simply destructive – the conversational equivalent of turning my back on someone and walking away.

It is also hugely self-regarding when we speak of others in such ways. We pretend to ourselves, and those we talk to, that we’re in a fine position to judge; that we have the experience, knowledge, upbringing or skills to assess others and their situation; that we have all the facts at our disposal to deliver our verdict.

It’s also damaging to others in the way it diminishes them, setting aside any notion that they’re made in the image of God or that we’re called to see the face of Christ in them. The hand of friendship, far from being stretched out, is thrust deep in our pockets. Problems aren’t resolved properly, the marginalized become even more disengaged and the misunderstood more so.

Christians are themselves on the receiving end of much judgementalism, not least in the ‘God debate’ that has recently emerged from the writing of the so-called new atheists. We’re told that our beliefs are worthy of ridicule; that we’re hypocrites who have failed to live up to our principles; that our Scriptures are works of fiction. There’s been no shortage of responses, the most entertaining of which return fire in the same polemic style.

One of the charges levelled at the judgement of fundamentalist atheists is that they’ve failed to educate themselves on rudimentary theology and that their own aggressive rhetoric is open to the same accusations they make of religious fundamentalists. Like many debates rooted in deeply held views, the God debate has been all heat and no light, and the judgementalism that’s bandied back and forth – no matter how entertaining – does little to illuminate our understanding or build common ground. But then that’s rather the point of ‘debates’ like this: it isn’t about finding a way forward but simply about building support for our point of view while undermining our opponent’s.

Some of this behaviour is present in everyday conversation. One of the ways we judge other people is by how we listen to them. Rather than listening with a view to understanding, we commit half our mind to hearing what’s being said while the other half busies itself deciding if we agree or not. Often we’ve made up our mind before they’ve finished speaking. Sometimes we prejudge what we think they’re about to say, not what they’re actually trying to say. ‘To retort without first listening is both foolish and embarrassing’ (Proverbs 18.13, NJB).

Both the Bible and Christian teaching down the centuries have plenty to say about the folly of judgementalism. Indeed it is often portrayed as a burden. ‘If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil . . . then you shall take delight in the LORD’ (Isaiah 58.9, 14).

Or consider this saying from the Desert Fathers: ‘Abba John the Little said: We have abandoned a light burden, namely self-criticism, and taken up a heavy burden, namely self-justification.’⁴ We shall see later how self-justification is a key driver of judgemental behaviour.

Francis de Sales, writing over 400 years ago, said:

‘Judge not and you will not be judged,’ says the Saviour of our souls; ‘Condemn not and you will not be condemned.’ Or as the apostle Paul wrote, ‘Judge not, but wait for the Lord. He will bring to the light things now hidden in darkness, and disclose the secret purposes of the heart.’ Rash judgements are most displeasing to God. People’s judgements are rash because we are not meant to be one another’s judges, and in so acting we usurp the prerogative of God. Their judgements are rash because so often they proceed from malice, from the impenetrable depths of the human heart. Indeed they are impertinent, because each of us should find sufficient employment in sorting ourselves out without having time to judge our neighbours.⁵

That last point is easier said than done. Judgementalism is an indicator of the state of our relationship with God, a kind of public and visible thermometer that exposes how much we trust God. It is perhaps in this way that our judgement of others leads to our own judgement, because it reveals the state of our heart and the quality of our relationship with God. ‘When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God’s work and not ours, we can put to rest our passion to set others straight’, writes Richard Foster.⁶

Much of this I know and understand. And yet my trigger-happy tendency to judge others is not abated. I find this embarrassing because I now realize that my judgementalism says more about me and the state of my spiritual health than it does about those I criticize. Clearly there are some deeply embedded psychological habits and patterns that are hard to shake off – it is to these we now turn.

2

Tribalism

Humans are tribal people. We stick to those of our own kind, reserving some of our worst judgements and prejudices for those who are different, perhaps even stereotyping them to help box them into a particular set of predetermined judgements. (Indeed prejudice is a form of judgementalism where we simply lift opinions off the peg, without stopping to think or offer people the benefit of the doubt.) Our own sense of identity comes from the tribe(s) we belong to, which not only defines us by who we are but also who we are not. We might go so far as to say that much conflict is not so much a rejection of the other as an assertion of the self.

Where once humans went to war over territory or resources, many of the conflicts we see in the world today are fought over beliefs – religion, race, culture or values. Tribalism is still writ large across the pages of our newspapers as journalists report on these hostilities. What is it that we find so intolerable about people who are different?

According to the primatologist Frans de Waal,

We belong to the category of animals known among zoologists as ‘obligatory gregarious,’ meaning that we have no option but to stick together. This is why fear of ostracism lurks in the corner of every human mind: being expelled is the worst thing than can befall us. It was so in biblical times, and it remains so today. Evolution has instilled a need to belong and to feel accepted. We are social to our core.¹

If we are to find meaningful acceptance within a social group, it follows that others must be defined as outside that group. Somehow, belonging to the whole family of the human race is not enough for most of us. So my judgements and rejection of some people feed my sense of affiliation to my own group. I am not English, I’m Scottish; I am not black, I’m white; I am not Roman Catholic, I’m Anglican; I am not right-wing, I’m left-wing; I am not straight, I’m gay; I am not a baby boomer, I’m Generation X.

It isn’t enough to label ourselves. Each tag brings with it a whole bag of assumptions, prejudices and judgements about those outside our group. These really help to cement our own sense of who we are. I won’t list the things people might think about some of the above categories – just observe any prejudices your own mind suggests to you.

Any temptation to think that Western society today is somehow more sophisticated or multicultural than so-called primitive societies fails to recognize that, psychologically at least, we remain as tribal as ever. We have not shaken off the need to belong or the instinct to expel those who don’t. Margaret Thatcher’s famous question is never far from our minds: ‘Is he one of us?’

What has perhaps become more sophisticated these days is the way such tribalism plays out in our lives. While many of us have learnt to shake off inherited values of sexism, racism, homophobia and so on, and have embraced more inclusive communities and churches, the tribal mindset still makes itself known in our judgementalism.

‘Because of the deep insecurity of our society,’ says Timothy Radcliffe, ‘we seek the assurance of the like-minded. But no community of the like-minded is a sign of the kingdom of God.’²

Jesus’ ministry focused on the Jews. His mission was to fulfil the promises God had made to Israel. Even so, the multitribal nature of the kingdom of God couldn’t help itself from breaking out and revealing itself in his encounters with ethnic and religious outsiders. Think of the Roman centurion, the woman at the well or the Syrophoenician woman.

It would fall to the Apostles to do the follow-up work of bringing the good news to people outside the Jewish faith and working out the thorny issues of how they did Church together. Imagine all those clashing cultures and customs and beliefs, finding unity in the body of Christ. For all that the universal Church still struggles to get this right, we see in the Christian testament some great visions of the rainbow community of the kingdom of God. Consider Pentecost and the multiplicity of languages that are spoken when the Holy Spirit is received. Or the images in Revelation of a multitude ‘from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’ worshipping together (Revelation 7.9).

While the kingdom of God charts a course to break down our tribalism, our humanity remains powerfully tuned to primal instincts that shun difference. Yet we humans also have the amazing capacity to change the way we think, to reprogramme ourselves to choose different responses. As we journey on the path towards wholeness, our Christian heritage and faith offer many tools and resources to help shape our behaviour, the better to reflect the image of the divine we all carry within us. The starting point is to ‘know thyself’.

When it comes to judgementalism we must take note of what is going on in our minds the moment a judgement is formed. Richard Rohr explains:

Ill will is a poison which, if you don’t catch it in the first ten seconds, tak...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Understanding Judgementalism
• Part 2: Jesus and Judgement
• Part 3: Towards Discernment
• Notes