Column

Comment

War & peace

7 September 2023

4 min read

Looking evil in the face

After viewing a new documentary on the Holocaust in Ukraine, a harrowed George Pitcher ponders his duty not to look away.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A mother cradles a child while another stands close by. They wear winter clothes of the 1940s and are amidst others waiting.

A Jewish family at Lubny, Urkaine, prior to the massacre there.

Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

It’s a commonplace to remark that Ukraine has a troubled history. It’s almost a means of assimilating its current Russian conflict; Ukrainians are used to suffering and fighting, so here we go again.

But, lest we forget, it’s as well to be reminded on a regular basis of the nature of Ukraine’s suffering. This week, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary called Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero, which traced through contemporaneous photography, academic commentary and survivors’ witness how Ukrainian Jews suffered and died in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as 1.6 million, at the hands of Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists.

Vocabulary fails. Harrowing doesn’t begin to touch the experience of watching a programme like this. But, I think, watch it we must, especially those with a religious faith who use words like hope and faith.

The “problem of evil”, known in scholastic circles as theodicy, has been a stumbling block for the Christian faith for centuries. If God is all-powerful, the problem states, he cannot love us if he allows this to happen; if he loves us, he cannot be all-powerful for it to happen. Ergo, he cannot both be all-powerful and all-loving.

Counter-arguments, which needn’t detain us here, are many and varied: That the gift of free will includes the freedom to abandon God for evil; that the light of love shines brightest in darkness; that the world is fallen – lapsarian – and has to find its way back to the Garden; that God is joined to the suffering of humanity on the cross.

After Channel 4’s film, I have to say that I’m less interested in all that than in what it actually means for us in a practical sense. I’m left wondering less why than how. I don’t want to know why God allows it. I want to know how we respond.

Allow me to say, as honestly as I can, how I literally responded to this documentary. I had to watch it alone, on Channel 4’s website. I wonder why that is. Perhaps watching it with someone else is too much like entertainment. Perhaps there’s a fear that the act of sharing is dissipating in some way. Perhaps it’s a dirty little secret that I wanted to watch it, through clenched fingers.

The second literal reaction I’d record is that when a photograph appeared of one of the most grotesque (though relativity here is invidious) perpetrators of the mass-murders, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, I found myself saying at his image on the screen “rot in hell”.

I find it hard to believe in a place of unending torment to which a benign God despatches human souls. I do believe in the hells, like this one in Ukraine, that men like him can create on earth. But I knew I’d found the limit of a human forgiveness and this was infinitely beyond it. And somehow I wished there was an eternal damnation to which Jeckeln could be consigned.

A third reaction to identify is more passive. I had to watch it – or, rather, I couldn’t look away. Please God, may that not be said to be curiosity. Surely not, when you know how scarring it will be.

It contained (and here perhaps I should issue a trigger warning for the rest of this paragraph) details of how the death squads moved on from men of military age to women and children, because they were too expensive to feed; how 90 orphaned children were murdered in one massacre for the same reason; how Jeckeln developed a system of execution to maximise space in mass graves called “sardines”.

I’m conscious of the title of the site for which I’m writing when I say that what is seen can’t be unseen and the horror must stay with anyone who watched this programme. To look away is to conspire with a pretence that it isn’t there or couldn’t have happened.

I wonder whether that means the Christian bears a duty not to look away, any more than we can look away from an innocent, naked young man left hanging in the midday sun, nailed to a cross. In witnessing these horrors, we’re not being brave, we’re acknowledging human reality.

And that human reality means that it really is no good saying “never again”. From the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the Bosnian war, to the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi minority in the Nineties, to the Iranian mass graves of dissidents being revealed even today, that is a failed resolution.

So is a faith in vain? It’s hard to argue a case for the divine in the face of 91-year-old Janine Webber, who says quietly on Channel 4:

“They killed my brother. They buried him alive. He was seven.”

Meanwhile, 86-year-old Bella Chernovets says of that countless million-plus:

“God keep them in paradise.”

Perhaps, we pray like that. I don’t know.

It’s impossible to conclude a column like this without being glib, or fumbling for closure. Because there are no conclusions. So I’ll just stop here.

Snippet

Comment

Identity

Justice

Politics

17 April 2025

3 min read

Deeper conversations on gender will continue after this court ruling

Can the whole mystery of gender be conceded to brute biological fact?

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A paiting shows four panels featuring women lawyers over a century

Legacy, by Catherine Yass, hangs in the Supreme Court and celebrates one hundred years of women in law.

The Supreme Court.

Every now and again, a society has to have a word with itself about something. Most social changes happen quite organically without a need for this kind of self-conscious dialogue. Hat-wearing in public was almost ubiquitous, for example, until about the middle of the twentieth century, when it simply stopped. No major debate happened about this - the hat simply sidled out of fashion. Western society just sort of internally worked out that the absence of a hat was not improper.

Whether or not gender is something real is not like whether it is polite to wear a hat. It requires a very hard conversation - one which pushes on some of the most fundamental differences people can have about politics, the world, and perhaps things even bigger than that. Whether one agrees with it or not, yesterday was a significant development in that very public conversation: the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that the Equality Act is predicated on a classic gender ontology (i.e. the ‘realness’ of male and female).

What is at stake here? For some, the expansion of categories like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to those who have undergone a clinical transition, and those who have an official certificate legally recognising their self-identified gender, is a crucial bellwether of our commitment to equality and freedom. They cite the rates of depression and suicide in this demographic, where an imposed gender causes deep distress.

Opponents of this move (like J. K. Rowling, who will be celebrating right now, no doubt) cite the dangers that de-anchoring gender from biological markers, like chromosomes or reproductive organs, will have. The justification of single-sex spaces is at least partially balanced on the idea that men and women are different, and separation of them is key for our sense of dignity or safety.

But both sides agree that we need copper-bottoms for our terms. All humans want to feel like our words are not empty gestures. Biological sex realists want to hold out for fundamentals which can be observed scientifically. This tallies with lots of observable features, history, and culture - but those who hold out for a definition of gender rooted in self-identification are not wrong to point out that overly medicalised definitions will struggle to divide all of the data without remainder. There are genuine cases of intersex people, for example.

What does a Christian like me think? Someone who is tied to what the Church has historically taught might look to the New Testament, where Jesus, for example, teaches that ‘male and female’ is a good, given aspect of our reality by God. That much might be consoling about the court’s decision. But a Christian may also feel a little cold about conceding the whole mystery of gender to brute biological fact. Surely there is something about being a woman or a man that is more than merely possession of certain physical features, as gender-critical activists claim?

St Paul, in one of his New Testament letters, says that men and women are an expression of something even more fundamental than chromosomes: “I speak of Christ and the Church”. But this does not make our genders into shadowy symbols. Rather, it says our gender difference is more real for pointing at is something beyond the physical. It is rooted in the most real thing a Christian knows: that God reconciles the world to himself through Jesus as if it was a cosmic marriage. On this view, maleness and femaleness is not a tick-list of attributes, but a goal at which we are all striving. It will require humility, mutual service, and love.

Society will keep on having its conversation about what exactly men and women are. But if it is to make sense of what things are really like, it may have to keep digging yet.

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