Lent Reminds Us That a Penitent Imagination Can Counter Evil

Competing narratives—call it “spin”—will always be a facet of free societies. But how did we come to a moment in which facts themselves seem to be as up for debate as what those facts mean?

In this week’s Dispatch Faith essay, Dispatch Contributing Writer Hannah Anderson contends that what we suffer from is a failure of imagination. Though that phrase often connotes a failure to see the world better than its current state, Anderson points out that Lent might teach us that we’re fighting over facts because we’re failing to view certain situations as being dire as they really are.

These days, reacting to the events around us is like a continual Rorschach test. Someone posts a video on social media, and one person will see a virtuous display of patriotism while another will see the fall of democracy. I’ve always understood these differences as political tribalism and garden-variety confirmation bias but lately, I’m beginning to wonder whether they’re something more. I wonder if we’re actually facing a failure of imagination.

When I use the language of imagination, I don’t mean a flight of fancy or escape from reality. I’m thinking of our ability to conceive of a reality beyond the one being currently delivered to us. It’s the distinction that 19^th-century author (and scientist) George MacDonald articulated when considering how a person could discover something new, how a person could “be carried beyond himself and the regions of his knowledge.” The answer for MacDonald was that things “must be foreseen ere they can be realized—apprehended ere they be comprehended.”

In 17^th-century Florence, as Europe sat at a crossroads of profound societal, theological, and even cosmological change, Galileo Galilei and other astronomers turned their telescopes to the moon. But Galileo had an advantage on them. He had been trained in perspective drawing so when he saw shadows on the moon, he saw what others couldn’t: mountains. The telescope was not yet powerful enough to provide unassailable visual proof but his mind’s eye could conceive of their possibility—and from there, he could work to prove their existence.

Kerry Magruder, curator and chair of the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma, calls this approach “imaginative realism.” He likens it to how “a man crossing a swollen river relies both on his feet and upon his staff as he extends it out to feel for the next stepping stone.” Rather than a reductionism that is satisfied with simply collecting, curating, and debating facts, imaginative realism calls reason and imagination to partner together to reveal the true nature of reality. 

Our ability to engage the current moment depends in large part on employing a similar imaginative realism. Not only do we select and curate the data points that serve our personal biases, we no longer even agree on what constitutes a fact. In such a post-factual culture, the question shifts away from what facts we can comprehend to what we can apprehend—what we can imagine to be possible. Right now, we’re forced to consider: Is it possible that the allegations of the Epstein files  actually are  worthy of investigation and prosecution? Is it possible that married women’s ability to vote could actually be threatened? Is it possible that history did warn us and that we are repeating its inhumanity by locking our neighbors in camps? Is it possible that the Christian doctrine of human depravity is true?

Those who have experienced such evil firsthand would be quick to say “yes” because they have had their imaginations fundamentally altered by it. They know in a way that the rest of us don’t. So when they warn us about conditions in detention centers or the reality of childhood sexual abuse, they are speaking to our imagination, not just our reason. In this way, “believing survivors” does not mean accepting everything as uncontested fact, but it does mean opening ourselves to the reality that their witness is true. We must take their claims seriously enough to give them a hearing through formal channels of justice, honestly investigate them, and bring charges against the accused should the evidence warrant—no matter who it might implicate. 

But such warnings are so chilling—so grief-inducing—that often we shut down in the face of them. We struggle to wrap our mind around that kind of evil, so we often just don’t. During COVID, psychologists and scientists warned that as the death toll rose, we would actually become detached from it because our minds could not comprehend the reality of such large, abstract numbers. We may have a vague, impending sense of 1 million deaths, but we’re more emotionally and psychologically affected by 12 discrete deaths that we can attach to particular names and stories. We live in a similar moment politically.

In the realities that many people inhabit, it is unimaginable that the United States might already be functioning as a totalitarian state. It is unimaginable that underage girls were abused and trafficked through an elite, global syndicate—and that the man occupying the White House was in the thick of it. It is unimaginable that checks and balances have collapsed so far that Congress would be unlikely to consider impeachment, his involvement.

But to riff off Flannery O’Connor, “The truth does not change according to our ability to imagine it.”

On Wednesday the Christian season of Lent began. These six weeks before Easter call the faithful to humility and repentance, “to remember that we are but dust.” And yet, Lenten remembrance is not simply a factual accounting of all the wrongs that we have done; it is also a call to imagine the ways we could have erred without knowing it—that we sin, as the General Confession of the Book of Common Prayer originally put  it, both “by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” This simple act of penitent imagination, of naming possibility, can break the grip of evil because it undermines its ability to hide in plain sight.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt famously spoke of the “banality of evil,” But as Arendt understands it, the danger of evil is not simply that it is mundane but that it is:

Put more simply, evil is both more pervasive and more boring than we imagine. And it feeds on our obliviousness.

Imagination, then, may be one of the greatest forms of dissent in that it helps us see the possibilities of evil and unmask them. Imagination also allows us to enter into the plight of our neighbors who suffer under its brutality. And perhaps more than anything, imagination lets us conceive of a reality beyond the one we currently inhabit, showing us that things don’t have to be the way they are.

If the world order as we know it is collapsing, as some say, we must find a way to imagine that possibility. But we must also find a way to imagine the radical possibilities of goodness and the world that we want to make on the other side. This will require us to exercise the vision of those who “have a dream.” It will also require that we pray that God’s kingdom come and confess all the ways we resist earth being made as heaven. By this act of imaginative realism, we  begin  in some small way,  to apprehend its quiet, pervasive existence among us. Training our mind’s eye to see the Kingdom of God, we become people who can interpret its faint shadow as a magnificent mountain. 

To that end, I’ll leave you with a benediction that a friend of mine prays over her congregation:

Two decades ago it seemed that organized religion was on the decline, and leading the charge against it were the Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. But now—even as we know gauging what people believe is usually more nuanced than simple survey questions—we remember New Atheism is a cultural flash in the pan. Why?

In this week’s Monday Essay, Nick Pompella talked to thinkers like Zachary Davis of the nonprofit Faith Matters (and a former New Atheist) to examine why New Atheism faded so quickly, and whether today’s religious believers should heed some lessons therein.