The Gate is Narrow

If I was a social scientist I would propose a new variation on the famous Milgram Experiment, which, in its attempt to discover why so many went along with the Nazis, concluded that two-thirds of people will go along with whatever someone in a position of authority tells them to do.

In my version, I would come up with a series of statements and situations, ranging from benign or positive statements about perceived enemies to objectively psychopathic and potentially murderous ideas and policy positions. Then, taking a statistically representative cross-section of society, I would gather who they consider to be their least- and most-trusted public figures. Finally, using generative AI, I would present them with videos of these figures randomly delivering this spectrum of statements. While measuring their biometric response, the participant would be interviewed after each statement to get their level of agreement and reasoning for their position. Some examples of statements could be:

• Their favorite figure heaps praise on their least favorite figure, or proposes to send that person and their followers to camps.

• Their least favorite figure admits that their favorite figure is a great guy who loves his country, or that millions will die if he gets his way.

• Their least or favorite figure proposes that we work for the well-being of a country that the participant has a strong favor or disfavor towards, or proposes that we carpet-bomb that country, pointedly dismissing the humanitarian cost.

If you haven’t figured out my hypothesis yet, I believe that we’ve become, by and large, a successfully propagandized people who often cede our critical reasoning to personalities and organizations, who, because of this dependence, must be treated as practically infallible. I suspect that, regardless of political leanings, the more checked-out from cable news and/or social media debates the participant is, the less strongly they’ll rank figures as favorable or disfavorable, and the less likely they’ll be to go along with the more sociopathic statements from people on the favorable side of their rankings.

In the last day, we’ve seen this play out in real time over Donald Trump’s proposal that the United States “own” the Gaza Strip, bulldoze it, and force its two million residents to leave, so that it can be turned into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” This is not a politics blog, and I’m not going to feed the propaganda machine, but I’m someone who has spent years studying the history of modern governments committing atrocities as they removed large swaths of people from their land, whether by direct violence or starvation—from the Trail of Tears, to the Missouri Mormon extermination order, to the European pogroms, to the Holodomor, Holocaust and Great Leap Forward. From this historical standpoint, what the President proposed is logistically no different. Every time something like this has been attempted, regardless of the stated motives, the result has been mass death. I think most people know that, but, again, we are a successfully propagandized people.

Where, of course, this matters most to me is in the realm of Christian ethics. Watching successfully propagandized conservative evangelicals not only defend this proposal, but cheer it on and outright dismiss the obvious humanitarian cost—I had a private conversation yesterday with a well-known evangelical commentator who did just that—presents a quasi-existential crisis for me, as someone whom most would describe as an “American Conservative Evangelical.” While I don’t believe that Trump’s proposal will ever realistically come to fruition, the knowledge that part of my discipleship field, even within my own church (and not limited to right-wing politics), includes professing Christians who will suspend all pretense of basic Scriptural ethics for political victory, affects me in a way that I can only describe as hurting my soul. From the standpoint of aloof historical analysis, I’ve always known that large swaths of the church can and will do this, but like how I saw my neighbors, both progressive and reactionary, fail the Milgram Experiment during the COVID years, it’s painful to watch it play out in real time. I pray that I can suspend my own emotional response and help people whom I greatly care about turn their attention back to the narrow gate.