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My bike trip this past spring brought me through Nauvoo, Illinois, a Mormon town. It is a tourist town, and a pleasant place, with the prosperity and wholesomeness once thought proper to all rural America but now almost the exclusive property of the Mormons. The lawns are crisply mowed, families walk blithely down the streets together, and the restaurants serve fresh apple pie. There are tourist shops selling Mormon-themed Christmas tree ornaments, pillows, and wall hangings. But one of the items in one of the shops caught my eye because it seemed so out of place among all this niceness: a bronze bust of a long-haired, long-bearded man whose visage was glazed by a smug, pusillanimous vacancy most unusual among the kind of heroes who are memorialized in bust-form. The name “Porter” was scrawled on the base of the image. I didn’t know who he was. Not far away was a large reproduction of a “wanted” poster, with a photograph of this same man which looked positively frightening – the hollow eyes of a conscienceless, stupid, vengeful, religious bigot. His name here was given as Orrin Porter Rockwell. The same poster was reproduced as a refrigerator magnet also.

This man was known as “the destroying angel of Mormondom,” the marshall and Officer of the Peace in Salt Lake City under Brigham Young. He had been accused of shooting Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs – the governor who had driven the Mormons out of Missouri – but the grand jury failed to indict him, due to lack of evidence. Rockwell never quite denied the charge – all he did was cryptically aver that he had “done nothing criminal.” Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a New York writer who was travelling through the West with Albert Bierstadt when he met Rockwell, said of him, “He was that most terrible instrument that can be handled by fanaticism: a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor a Yankee lumberman; in his memory a Bourbon [the old term for an extremely conservative Southerner]; in his vengeance an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American Continent.” Ludlow’s characterization after meeting the man in person was especially striking to me, because I had felt similarly just by looking at a photo of him. Rockwell had the reputation of being Young’s personal assassin; Rockwell merely said of his career that he “never killed anybody who didn’t need killing.” Mormon President Joseph F. Smith made it clear that while he might have been a murderer, he was a Mormon murderer, who was loyal to the tribe, and that was all that really mattered: “They say he was a murderer; if he was he was the friend of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and he was faithful to them, and to his covenants, and he has gone to Heaven and apostates can go to Hell.”

I was looking over my pictures from the bike trip all when I saw the pictures of Rockwell memorabilia all I could think of is how depressing all this revenge is, all this killing, all this partiality, all this endless retaliation, all this bad news. How depressing it was that some human being had decided to make a bust of Rockwell, and it had been popular enough to be turned into a tourist knick-knack. And of course we all know the current news: the police killings of black men, and black men’s killing of police. And we know how the retaliatory killings have changed the conversation, how now it all probably will add up to stagnation, and stagnation in a kind of hatred.

And yet in church there was no Orrin Porter Rockwell in the Gospel story, no bust to pick up at the cathedral gift shop of Jesus’s “destroying angel,” who dealt with anyone that Jesus determined “needed killing.” None of the apostles is celebrated as the one who took down Pilate after the fact, or settled the score with Caiaphas, or tracked down the man who nailed Jesus to the cross. The Gospels don’t even record what happened to these men – there is no joy that they later died choking on a tart or the like. Judas of course hanged himself, but even this feels like a tragedy, no triumph. Peter wished that he could be Rockwell – he pulled out his sword for Christ – and he was stopped by Jesus. Some Christians have claimed that that period of time – when Christians were supposed to bring Good News rather than just more bad news – ended when Jesus died, which is, of course, why St. Stephen, who seems to have died by Christian principles as much as he lived by them, is so important. Vengeance and retaliation was not the point. One person is named among the killers of St. Stephen, but he is not treated badly by the church. In fact, he went on to become the most celebrated apostle of them all – St. Paul. For a brief while at least, there was a group of people who were articulating an entirely different way. It is, for me, a little glimmer of hope. Now of course the question is how to convince the “Christians” in America and elsewhere of this.

The poetic justice of placing St. Stephen’s feast day next to that of Christ himself is easily felt. It might have been easy – indeed, it is, right now, easy – for Christians to say that Christ’s nonviolence was proper for him, but not meant for all of us normal mortals. St. Stephen followed in his footsteps, and established that Christ was not supposed to be merely a distant object of nominal worship, but an exemplar as well.

Stephen is also considered by scholars to be one of the figures who recognized just how truly revolutionary Jesus was, and insisted on a break with temple Judaism and the Law. Acts records that Stephen came to prominence as one of the “Hellenistai” – the Greekists, a term whose precise meaning is disputed – who protested that the early Christian community, in their work taking care of poor widows, cared only for “Hebraiai” (presumably Hebrew or Aramaic speakers, as opposed to Greeks). Stephen seems to have objected more thoroughly to the Jews-first approach, and apparently advocated a break from the Law and the Temple. “That man,” Acts reports, “does not stop speaking against the holy place, and the law; we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy the temple, and change the traditions which Moses has given us” (6:13). The Catholic commentary in the New American Bible on this verse is: “The charges that Stephen depreciated the importance of the temple and the Mosaic law and elevated Jesus to a stature above Moses were in fact true [I love how Biblical commentators, at a distance of two thousand years, can weigh in with such certitude on these matters]. Before the Sanhedrin, no defense against them was possible.” And in the speech of Stephen reported in Acts he really does not defend himself against these charges. He embarks on a lengthy disquisition on the history of Judaism, which makes it clear that it existed long before the Law and long before the Temple, which were hence not determinative: what was important was the relationship of promise which had begun with Abraham. “The most high,” he concludes, “does not dwell in things made by hands [Latin “Non Excelsus in manufactis habitat” – which should be put onto every church and monstrance in the world]… The Lord says, ‘What house will you build for me? What is my “place of rest”? Has not my hand made all these things?’” That this was blasphemy against God’s house was quickly determined:

Casting him out of the city they began to stone him; the people at the stoning, taking off their himations [the Greek toga], laid them at the feet of a young man who was named Saul. And they threw their rocks at Stephen, as he called upon God and said, “Lord Jesus, take my spirit.” Then falling to his knees, he shouted in a great voice, saying, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep. And Saul was there, approving of his execution. (7:58-8:1)

This is the prototypical martyr story, and Stephen is called in the Greek church the “protomartyr.” The details are nevertheless interesting: the eventual Christian overthrow of the practice of stoning, despite the fact that it is “Biblical”; the conviction that death is not the end but a “falling asleep”; the shouting of his last words, almost as an expression of strength, as opposed to mumbling them; the way that they convey that what is happening is wrong but not determinative – there is still some hope for the killers to break free of this cycle; the effect such a scene must have produced on the spectators, including in this instance the future Paul.

But it shows no sign of what I will call a “martyr complex.” Nietzsche believed that the Christian phenomenon of martyrdom was pure ressentiment, resentment disguised as obedient suffering: that it was “a triumph of Judaism,” a glorification of a sick, debilitated, bookish weakness. He believed that Christians went to their suffering the way a child hopes to die: “I’m going to die, and then you’ll all be sorry!” All human history before the prophets of Judaism, he thought, had glorified the victor: but now there was a kind of race to the bottom, as the Judeo-Christian “transvaluation of values” taught mankind to strive for the attention and sympathy that comes from being a victim.

Nietzsche is certainly describing something when he describes this martyr complex, but I don’t think he is describing the death of Stephen, or Christ, or Jerome of Prague, or Wyclif, or Martin Luther King, or any of the other true Christian martyrs. Stephen’s words – “do not hold this sin against them” – are quite the opposite of the martyr complex, whose entire point is to have something to hold against someone.

This does not necessarily mean that Stephen could not be lying, and actually meaning to damn his opponents to hell by being so goody-goody with them. I know full well that this kind of thing exists; but there is no particular evidence of it here, and I know also that its opposite exists as well. There is a way of being which allows us to suffer injustice without truly being its victim – and what I mean by that is, without losing our integrity. And fundamentally, it is our integrity which is the question. And this way of being, which Jesus and Stephen practiced, and Gandhi called ahimsa, is absolutely necessary to achieve transformation in civil societies.

I have thought a great deal about this problem, as it is one of the central problems of our moral existence – how to respond to injustice, when accommodation and overt resistance both seem to produce deplorable results. We are implicated in this problem constantly: when we see a child abusing a parent, or a parent abusing a child in a store; when we see children abusing each other in a classroom, or in our homes; when we see spouses abusing each other; or strangers in society; we feel that complaisance is no solution, but engagement does not seem to offer anything either. On a political scale the problem seems to be even worse. We supposedly use our military as a tool of moral correction, but we very rarely use it well. A friend of mine who fought in Iraq summed up the problem: “When I first started in Iraq I wondered how people could do bad things. By the time I finished I wondered how people could do any good at all.” Leaving the Iraqis to kill and torture each other seemed inconsistent with our own integrity, until we tried the alternative of getting involved, which was worse. We merely became the killers and torturers ourselves.

And I will repeat that I do not necessarily believe that isolationism is a solution. I think that any kind of spiritual transformation starts with what is near, and so we are always better off solving our own problems – in our nation, our states, our cities, our neighborhoods, our families, and our selves – but this does not mean that the proper response to every faraway problem is no response, or that we are all isolated in our own problems. And I do not necessarily believe that nonviolence is the only solution. I think it is exceptionally difficult to use violence well, but I acknowledge that sometimes it may be the necessary solution. Animals sometimes discipline their young with a swat, and I think we are still basically animals – not fallen angels, as the saying is, but risen apes. But how do we know when the “eye for an eye” approach is applicable, and when something else is necessary?

In fact I can say that I have, like most people, cherished memories of vengeance. And since I think I can make inferences from these stories – and because as primates we like stories like this – I will offer one. On a school trip in third grade – to the Museum of the American Indian – I was in a line of boys waiting to use a bathroom. The bathroom’s door-lock was not functioning. When it was my turn in the bathroom, one of the other boys threw the door open and kept it open, while all the other boys laughed at me being caught with my pants down in front of everyone else. I was quite powerless to close the door immediately, and I suffered immense mortification. Eventually I got to the door and shut it, and the teacher, hearing the commotion, intervened to keep order. All the way back to school on the bus I glowered through the window, watching the city pass by, and plotted revenge. The offending boy walked home from school every day; and he had to walk past my house. I did not have to do anything while in school; I would have opportunity later. At the end of the day we all had to line up at the front of the room with our coats and backpacks on. I finished my classwork and packing before everyone else, and was the first on line. Once the whole class was ready we walked down to the exit, and as soon as I was out the door I ran all the way home. I threw my backpack down, went back outside, checked to see if the offender could see me, and then, satisfied that he had not yet turned the corner of our block, I crouched behind a car and waited. After what seemed like an eternity he walked by. I sprang from behind him, grabbed his hair in my left hand, and proceeded to smash at his face with my right fist. I was a bit skinnier than he was, but wiry, and strong when motivated, and I had the element of surprise on my side. I yanked him around with my left hand so much I remember there being tufts of hair on the ground. I beat his face until it was slippery with his tears and my sense of revenge had been satisfied; and then I shoved him on his way and went home with an improved opinion of myself.

And I still don’t think that what I did then, as a child, was wrong, though I do believe that children can, in fact, do all kinds of things that are quite wrong. I can think of things which I did as a child which make me blush with shame to this day; but this is not one of them. I think many parents would today think that such behavior is wrong, and punish it; but my parents did not punish me. Why?

My answer to this question surprised me a little, once I had thought about it enough and come to my conclusion. Though I was different from the other kids and quite smart, I was not teased very much. I was different, but I was not a victim. And because of incidents like this, and others, the other kids knew this. It turns out that there are times when you fight, because you are not a victim; and there are other times when you do not fight, for precisely the same reason. It is not the fighting which is so important; it is the place it comes from. Sometimes bad things happen to us, but we are not victimized by it; our integrity, our humanity, is not impaired by the suffering. And we have a kind of instinctual sense of this: both I and my nemesis were satisfied with the results of the day. He did not give me further trouble – in fact we were friends again not long after – and I did not feel personally compromised by what I had done.

In part this was because my reaction was topical: I was not lashing out at him because my mother didn’t love me, or my father had left, or anything like that. That kind of spiritual robbing of Peter to pay Paul always leaves us unsatisfied, or, to persist in my terms, it does not take away the feeling of victimization. All you have done is add another person to the world’s total of victims. The result of this is just further self-loathing: and you feel even more a victim, now a victim of your own bewilderment, your lostness, your inability to solve your problems, your sense of guilt at having done this to someone else. I think we see this is many of the school shootings (and the most recent execution of the two New York City police officers), which do not seem to result in much satisfaction for the perpetrators. They always save their last bullet for the person they hate most of all: themselves.

It is quite possible to think of other circumstances where my actions actually would have made me ashamed, and where my parents might have punished me. One of them, in fact, might have been if the other boy had been himself acting out of some kind of displaced victimization. In that instance I might not have clearly seen it as a child, but my parents might have, and might have told me just to take whatever abuse he, in particular, gave me, because it would be wrong to beat up someone who was so troubled. And I suspect that our instincts – at least when reasonably well-trained and healthy – help us in such instances. Our consciences are troubled when we pick on the weak – on people who are already victims. We can sense that there is a displacement going on; sometimes we can only sense it after the fact, but we can feel that something is wrong. In that instance I think every good parent teaches forbearance and patience, and under this good tutelage we get more sensitive to what is happening in other people.

Indeed as we get older and the capacities of our compassion increase, we find it increasingly necessary to not fight; violence becomes less and less acceptable; we are less animal, and more human. That this is a form of strength, and not weakness, I think is almost always instinctually felt by people – that some people, even some people who do not fight back, even some people who suffer greatly, simply are not victims. They keep their integrity even under attack from other people: the attack says much more about the weakness of the attacker than it does about the weakness of the attacked.

Again, I do not deny that there are people who are compliant in injustice because they have, in fact, been robbed of their integrity: this certainly occurs. I remember seeing a young child slap his mother in the face, and she did nothing about it, because she no longer knew what to do. She was no Stephen speaking truth to power; she was simply weak and being trampled on. She was no martyr, or witness to the truth; at best she was working on her martyr complex – maybe she would be able to control her son later that way. There are also parents – and adults – who act violently for precisely the same reason that she did nothing: because they do not know anymore what else to do. They too are weak and trampled on, and we can expect nothing good of violence of this sort. Both are responses of victims, of people who feel temporarily unable to live their own lives, who feel powerless, and whose dignity has been lost.

One of the things I feel quite sure of is that we must distrust ourselves whenever we feel ourselves in this state. It seems to be almost impossible to see anything accurately when we feel powerless; and the result is some kind of displaced, inappropriate response. And, quite terrible to say, there is a tremendous cultural pressure to groom one’s own victim status: I don’t quite understand why. There is a kind of cultural cache to being a victim, and people will compete for the honor. (It is generally tied to group-identities as well, also a very dangerous, unstable emotional area: from the religious perspective, the only acceptable tribe is that of all creation, and all other thinking from any other premise is bound to be faulty.)  Nietzsche I think blamed Christianity for this, but he was wrong: Achilles himself sat and sulked like a baby because his “prize” – his sex-slave – was taken away from him. He wanted to see as many Greeks as possible killed while he was gone, so they would regret what they had done to him. In the absence of higher religious purpose and broader perspective, this egocentric thinking seems to take over everything. Journalism, and tabloid and internet journalism in particular, plays to this aspect of ourselves obsessively. Bad religion plays the same game. To get Republicans to believe that they are the victims of Democrats (and vice versa), whites of blacks (and vice versa), women of men (and vice versa), Christians of Muslims (and vice versa), the poor of the rich (and vice versa), is the constant work of news outlets. That injustices are committed is obvious. But I am certain that we must – must – be cautious whenever we feel even the slightest feelings of victimization and anger. One of the things that is most striking about people who do bad things is how consistently – almost universally – they feel they are the real victims. A person who believes he is a victim is capable of almost anything. The result is to create more victims, and make injustice flourish. Even to express the feelings of victimization and outrage seems to have a negative effect on other people.

But how to suffer without being turned into a victim is a most difficult spiritual problem. One thing is certain – we will all, certainly, suffer at each other’s hands. But some people – the ones to whom praise will come – will manage to transform their suffering into something else, rather than transmit it to someone else. But every form of pain which is not transformed will, in the end, be transmitted. We see it with parents and children; teachers and students; and society as a whole. The feast of Stephen commemorates one man who by not returning evil for evil, managed to take a little bit of it out of the world.

[For more on Nauvoo and Mormonism, read another essay here.]