Mob Mentality:  When Godliness Gets Crowded Out

By Audrey Stallsmith

If mob mentality proves anything, it proves that human nature unrestrained is not a pretty thing. Like wild dogs, people tend to be at their worst when they run in packs. That applies both to the riffraff involved in the recent burning and looting and to the supposedly respectable white citizens who lynched black ones back in the Jim Crow days.

It was mob mentality that lynched Christ too. Pilate knew quite well that there was no legal reason for Jesus to be executed. But, like many lily-livered sheriffs in old Westerns, he didn’t have the courage to stand against the crowd. 

And, though most of us don’t go in for looting or lynching, we will find that it isn’t always the hostile crowds that are most dangerous. If we believe things just because our friends believe them and always go along with whatever our friends want to do, we, too, are victims of mob mentality. 

We might say that’s what is responsible also, in many cases of police misconduct, for the other cops not objecting. They don’t want to appear to be taking the side of the perp against their brothers in blue. But a friend isn’t really a friend if he isn’t willing to confront you when you are in the wrong.

We can find a good example of that in the Old Testament prophet Nathan, who must have known how dangerous it would be for him to call King David a murderer, adulterer, and hypocrite. Unlike the king’s nephew, Joab, who apparently raised his brows over his uncle’s plot against Uriah but went along with it anyway, Nathan took a stand. And I don’t think the prophet did so because he hated David, but because he had expected better from his monarch. 

Although Joab occasionally confronted the king on other issues, he didn’t this time, even though the military obviously was highly important to him. One of the things that might actually have pricked his hardened conscience was being forced to betray a soldier under his command. But, since Joab was a murderer himself, I suspect he enjoyed seeing his uncle pulled down to his level. And that is what mob mentality really is aimed at, pulling everybody down to the same level so we can get away with doing whatever everybody else is doing.

David may have convinced himself that he was acting for the sake of his nation rather than himself. How would it look, after all, if the supposedly godly king was seen to be involved in such a tawdry affair? Why, it might lead to a general collapsing of standards all around. But he, too, was a victim of mob mentality if he allowed himself to be turned into a murderer for fear of what everyone was going to say about him. 

Nathan didn’t buy the idea that David had to kill Uriah. The prophet knew that no matter how much we may feel pressured to do whatever everybody else is doing—or to hide what we have done from that crowd of critical gazes—each individual has a choice and will be held individually responsible by God for that choice. So we will be fortunate if, under circumstances similar to David’s, we hear from a friend the question, “Why, then, have you despised the laws of God?” (II Samuel 12:9) And we should love rather than hate that friend for the reminder about whose opinion is the important one.

It may, in fact, be the secret to avoiding mob mentality. Every time we are tempted to ask “What will everybody think?” we should replace that question with “What will God think?”   

Speaking of which, Dad and I just watched one of those gritty westerns that runs a little deeper than horse and gunplay. Ride the High Country involves an aging former lawman named Steve who has been reduced simply to acting as a guard. He’s been hired to bring gold down from a mining camp to a bank in town and hires one of his former deputies, Gil, and Gil’s young sidekick, Heck, to accompany him. 

The latter two actually plan to steal the gold, Gil having become somewhat embittered that all his years as a lawman have gotten him nowhere. Although they hope to talk Steve over to their side, he is sticking to “the high country” despite the fact that his career hasn’t enriched him either.

Things get more complicated when they encounter a domineering scripture-spouting farmer and his rebellious daughter, Elsa. She runs away to join the expedition to the mining camp, planning to marry a man there whom she considers her fiancé, and eventually has to be rescued from her brutish new family by Steve, Gil, and Heck. 

Proving that the influence of others can have a positive as well as negative side, young Heck begins to respect Steve and to have second thoughts about stealing the gold.
Elsa, who is suffering a kind of whiplash over being bounced from an overly self-righteous atmosphere to the entirely unrighteous one of the mining camp, also seems to take comfort in Steve’s unwavering adherence to his standards. As he puts it, “All I want is to enter my house justified.” 

We may consider that self-righteous too, until we remember it is based on the Biblical story of the Pharisee and the publican. Although “publican” actually meant “tax collector,” to the Jews it was synonymous with “sinner.” And it wasn’t the self-satisfied Pharisee but the repentant sinner who went down to his house justified. Because Steve had been wild in his youth, he obviously identifies himself with the forgiven rather than the sanctimonious, and he has dedicated his life to the law to make up for his earlier conduct.

So, when his friends finally do try to steal the gold, he takes them prisoner rather than going along with them. We might say that he already has taken them prisoner in another way, since his example that defending the right is not something you do for gain or glory has rather destroyed the allure of the filthy lucre for them.

In other words, instead of their winning him over to their side, he has won them over to his. In the end the two former lawmen step out, shoulder to shoulder, for their final fight with Elsa’s pursuing husband and his family.

When Steve is fatally injured, Gil even promises to do what his friend would have done and take the gold where it was supposed to go. So I think we can say that Steve does enter his eternal home justified.

According to the dictionary that means “declared or made righteous in the sight of God.” Because we all have been breakers of His law, we all are going to have to be made righteous by another Man’s sacrifice. Still, we have to do our part by taking a stand with Him. After all, it takes no brains and no guts to go along with the flock. Barnyard chickens do the same.   

And you will notice that it wasn’t the confrontational Nathan David hated when he came down to the end of his life, but the once so helpful Joab. That may have been partly due to the fact that it was Joab who killed David’s rebellious son Absalom. But I suspect it was just as much due to the fact that Joab saw the king at his worst—and raised no objections to what he saw.