Rooting for the Bad Guy

Okay, I’ll admit it…I love to play the bad guy. Being the villain on stage is so much more fun than being the hero.

My first big lead in a play was in my high school production of Dracula, and to be honest, it was great fun… plus I got to kiss a girl on stage (that was fun too… but awkward).

Back then I didn’t know much about acting, but some things that were true then still hold today. Acting gave me the opportunity to pretend to be somebody else and I loved pretending to be a different person. The pretending I did at home, acting out scenes from movies, was my playground and became the foundation of what would become my career.

In my childhood the bad guys were just that… BAD. I would play the part thinking I was a bad guy and thus it was acceptable that the bad guy did bad things, but would ultimately die at the hands of the hero. But that was okay, because it was fun to act out death scenes too.

As I learned more about acting I began to understand that a bad guy… a real bad guy… doesn’t usually think of themselves as bad. To play a real bad guy I needed to understand why they did the bad things they did. It is then that you begin to see them as real people, not necessarily bad people. Often they’re just people who make a wrong choice or even do a bad thing for what might be considered a very good reason. They kill for revenge, they steal to feed their family, they cheat on their spouse because they feel a need for more excitement in their life. It’s called justification and if we are honest, we all do it. It is the knee-jerk reaction we all default to when we do a bad thing.

I play the Bible character Judas in a scene from my one-man show Encounters (see video at the bottom of this post). The scene is in the moments before he takes his own life after betraying Jesus. In writing and playing this scene, I wanted to show what might have been going on in this man’s mind—what motivated him to do the bad thing. If I do it correctly you—the audience—come away with a more sympathetic view of a person that many simply write off as a “bad guy.” And while in the biblical story he is a villain, I like to think that he wasn’t all bad. He was misguided, he did a bad thing for what he thought was a good reason.

Hollywood has done much to change the image of the bad guy in recent years. In the movies of my childhood you were not really given the option to root for the bad guy. They were bad—they will lose or die—John Wayne or Gary Cooper would see to that! End of story. Today we are given the choice and even encouraged to root for the bad guy. Hollywood has given us the anti-hero in characters like Walter White (Breaking Bad) and Dexter Morgan (Dexter) and a whole host of others. In these shows we see life from the bad guy’s point of view. It is expected we will root for the bad guy.

In some ways this has merit. It is good to see people—all people—as real people. It is easy to put ourselves in their shoes and to see how, given the right set of circumstances, we might make the same bad choices. I think it is helpful to empathize with people who do bad things.

But there is another outcome from looking at things from this perspective. Over time we can begin to no longer see things as bad. We numb ourselves to the degree that we even forget that what they are doing is bad. We can see this trend in real life. When there is a shooting, a terrorist attack, a rape, an affair, riot or a robbery—the media often takes the angle of exploring the motivation and looks for some justification for the crime.

While it is helpful to know the motivation for the crime, let’s not forget that a bad thing is still a bad thing.

It’s called sin… and we are all guilty.

And as for justification… there is only one sure path to that.

“That we may be justified by faith…”


Deceived from Encounters by Chuck Neighbors

To Millennials Who Don’t Like the Church

Glowing spiral light bulb character and tungsten one handshakingI just finished reading yet another article telling me and my generation of boomers how we have blown it when it comes making the church a place for millennials. According to the articles and books I have read, we are guilty of a multitude of sins. We are: too judgmental, too exclusive, too political, too old-fashioned and in general we are a bunch of haters. We hate sin, we hate sinners, and we hate those who are friends of sinners. We have it all figured out. We know right from wrong and if you disagree with us you are going to hell!

Did I get that about right?

Well, if you are a millennial reading this and you agree with those statements about us, then I want to tell you, I think you’re wrong. You see, most of those statements about the church people I know are not true. Oh sure, there are probably a few like that in every church, but not the vast majority. I spend my life visiting churches, it’s part of my job. Most of the people I encounter are far from the stereotype the media would have us believe. And here is the news flash: the people you are describing are your parents. I am the father of 3 millennials and I would be devastated if I felt my kids believed all those things about me.

As a parent I struggle, along with many in the church, to understand why so many of our children have abandoned the church. I don’t have the answers, but I can tell you if it is for the reasons stated above, for the most part I think you have it wrong. Let me address some of those points.

• Too Judgmental: While it is true that we grew up in a culture and in a time that had “all the answers,” we also live in the culture of today. Unless we have our head in the sand, we are aware of what is happening in the world around us. While we may have some strong opinions about right and wrong, we struggle along with everyone else to reconcile our our faith with the world in which we live. Some of us have faced the challenges and even changed our minds about previous assumptions. And most of the time when we listen to sermons, we are apt to be thinking about our own “log in the eye” and not about you. I don’t think many of us come to church to sit in judgment of the millennials outside the church.

• Too Exclusive: Obviously we are a body of believers united by our faith. But to set us up as a group of people who want nothing to do with people who are different from us is inaccurate and unfair. Most church people I know are concerned about others both inside the church as well as outside. I work for a charity that helps feed and care for the poor around the world. The people funding this work are church people. It’s church people that often offer free clinics, soup kitchens, and drives for school supplies for those who can’t afford them. And when it comes to politics, we are all over the board.

• A Bunch of Haters: Sure there are the few in our midst that would fall into that category, but they are a minority. A minority that is constantly reinforced in the media to make the rest of us look bad. The church at large is not Westboro Baptist Church–far from it. When you categorize us as haters, remember that millennials are our children! We don’t hate our children. Yes, we may have some strong ideas about sin and what needs to be done about our sin. But believing there is a right and wrong on a particular issue is not the same as hate. My experience is that most church people and church leaders are open to conversation about some of the things you think we hate. We may be on different sides of a cultural issue, but we don’t hate you because of it.

Most Christ followers I know are struggling just like everyone else to make their lives mean something in this world we live in. The church continues to be a place of community for us. It has it’s flaws, to be sure, for we are made up of humans who are flawed. As one pastor pointed out to me, the church the only institution that mattered to Christ. It is, or should be an institution of people known for their love, not their hate. I invite you to visit us with an open mind, talk to us. You might just be surprised at what you find.

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