The Lies We Tell Ourselves

By Audrey Stallsmith

I’ve been reading a book about the real-life escape of a light-skinned slave and her husband from the South prior to the Civil War. As so often happened, this woman (named Ellen) was the daughter of her master who obviously took advantage of his slaves in more ways than one.

In fact, Ellen—who could pass for white—so much resembled her master that his wife refused to have her in the house. So, he gave Ellen as a gift to one of his legitimate daughters. I had a hard time conceiving how any daughter could have dealt with keeping as a slave a woman who obviously was her half-sister and proof of her father’s infidelity to her mother as well.

Of his rape would be a better description, since a slave would have no choice in the matter. However, the legitimate daughter apparently expressed no objections.
Perhaps she rationalized that everybody else was doing it, since it was a common situation at the time.

Of course, even white women of that era may have believed that they had no alternative than to go along with whatever their husbands or male relatives decided to do. However, it must have taken some major contortions of conscience for slave-owning southerners and their families to live with themselves—and each other.   

Then there is the much more recent case where two former Mormons allegedly went on a killing spree to remove any perceived obstacles to their marriage. In their case, they claimed that all the people they murdered had “gone dark” (become zombies), so it was okay to dispose of them.

Obviously, in both that situation and the previous one I mentioned, the offenders had to believe that other people were somehow less human and less worthy of consideration than themselves. The same issue came up in a western Dad and I watched recently, which had the typical lone lawman (a U. S. marshal this time) defending his prisoner against a lynching-minded citizenry.

In this case, however, that citizenry knew quite well that the man they wanted to hang wasn’t guilty. Namely because they were guilty themselves, having—at the mayor’s instigation—all conspired together to get rid of the educated Native American who was involved in a romantic relationship with that mayor’s daughter. They then tried to pin the crime on a couple saddle tramps, reasoning that to do so would return them to the “safe and respectable” community they had had before.

Any intelligent viewer knew that was never going to happen—not after the times that so many of those so-called “respectable” citizens conspired together at murder kept piling up. They originally hadn’t expected the saddle tramps to ever be caught or tried. But, after one was killed in a shootout with the marshal and the other one jailed, everybody began to panic. And, rather than repenting of the two deaths for which they already were responsible, they connived at two more.

What most of the citizenry didn’t know was that their mayor previously had been involved in a relationship with a Native American himself, so his daughter actually was half Native American herself. Therefore, the whole plot, which depended on the townspeople’s racism, actually was cynically calculated to allow him to maintain his new respectability.

One scene showed some of those townspeople, who obviously hadn’t expected that things would go far enough that they would have to kill a marshal too, trying to convince themselves that their original murder didn’t count. After all, they reasoned, even outlaws didn’t include Indians in the tally of men they had killed. But we know that God counts everybody. “In this new life one’s nationality or race or education or social position is unimportant; such things mean nothing. Whether a person has Christ is what matters, and he is equally available to all.” (Colossians 3:11)

Although parts of that movie didn’t hold together well, the conspiracy was chillingly convincing since similar lynchings performed by the so-called “respectable” happened over and over again in the South in the days when the Klan held sway. All this just proves that people somehow manage to justify to themselves whatever they want to do, no matter how wild some of their excuses might be.

Therefore, I sometimes worry about what more subtle sins I may be tolerating in myself because I suspect it’s often those ones that initially start people, communities, or nations down a slippery slope which can end in bloodbaths. Most people don't start out condoning murder, after all. They start out condoning lesser sins and work their way up—or, rather, down.

As in Eden, I suspect our sins start out as rebellion against God, even if we avoid voicing that rebellion even to ourselves. Instead, we tell ourselves that times have changed, even when God tells us that he doesn’t. “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” (Numbers 23:19)

So, to continue justifying our sins, we have to alter our conception of God instead. As Paul writes in Romans 1:21, “Yes, they knew about him all right, but they wouldn’t admit it or worship him or even thank him for all his daily care. And after a while they began to think up silly ideas of what God was like and what he wanted them to do. The result was that their foolish minds became dark and confused.”

In other words, if you try to come up with a God who allows you to do everything you want, he must—of necessity—be soft around the edges to conform to your will. That is going to make him ill-defined because he doesn’t actually exist except in your imagination.

I think we all have occasional spurts of rebellion against the all too real God when He stands like a brick wall in our way: sometimes when He doesn’t give us everything we think we need, sometimes when we don’t understand how he operates, sometimes when we fall back on what we think we deserve. (Actually, if we truly understood how little we really deserve, I suspect we would drop that one like a hot potato!)

But we need to realize how dangerous trying to get around His requirements can be. He, after all, is the only One who stands between us and the potential evil still within us.

As for the Ellen I mentioned at the beginning of this article, she cleverly used the conventions of slavery against her own bondage by pretending to be a white male master traveling with a slave who actually was her husband. And she must have giggled to herself a bit every time somebody on her long train trip north warned her against taking that slave with her into Pennsylvania.

Although telling a lot of lies to those she encountered on her trip, she was already freer than they were. She, after all, didn’t have to lie to herself about what was acceptable and what wasn’t.