Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has recently published a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Back in 1971, he designed the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed that “anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.” For more information on Zimbardo, check out a recent article about him in The New York Times (3 April 2007).

I bring this up because today is Holy Friday, when we remember that bad things happened (and happen) to good people. It is important to remember, not only the victims/martyrs, but also what caused/allowed human beings to be so cruel. Zimbardo's work details the processes by which ordinary human beings because incrementally evil through the influence of their environment. I also just finished reading Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, where an 18 year old star student from the back country of North Carolina attends an Ivy League college and is corrupted by her environment. The young protagonist's moral fiber is unable to withstand the bacchanalia of a fraternity formal.

Both Zimbardo and Wolfe reaffirmed my commitment to contemplative prayer -- and to teaching contemplation to people of all ages. Without a developed interior life you are left without a ballast -- without any way of defending yourself against the influences of your environment. Charlotte thought she was being set free when she escaped North Carolina; instead, she was cast adrift. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib did not liberate the Iraqis, they captured, tortured, and humiliated them.

The same case could be made on a larger scale for what allowed, in the parlance Daniel Jonah Goldhagen book title, ordinary Germans to become "Hitler's Willing Executioners." Many of those ordinary Germans were Christians, who did not have a sufficient interior life to resist the Nazification all around them. There were notable examples like Dietriech Bonheoffer's Underground Seminary, which took spiritual disciplines seriously -- allowing them to critically examine and resist fascism and totalitarianism. Contemplation and spiritual disciplines are not the only path to individuation, the only way to develop defense mechanisms against "group think," but contemplation is one way, the best way for me.

Incidentally, I use the name "Holy Friday" instead of Good Friday because I don't believe in substitutionary atonement. So, Jesus' death doesn't seem particularly "good" to me. Jesus' death at the hands of the Roman Empire is what almost always happens when God's way meets the way of the world. It is a holy event, a martyrdom that should be remembered. But it is not good or redemptive in the sense that Anselm meant it. To use a vivid image from Dallas Willard, I'm not a vampire Christian: someone who is only interested in Jesus for his blood. John Dominic Crossan has recently published a book on this point: God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now.