How to Make Someone Good

I want to pose something that I believe is one of the most essential questions for our society today:

“How do you make someone a good person?”

We have no shortage of resources, of ideas to answer that question. Talk shows, daytime television, movies, there are so many people speaking to it. “How do you make someone a good person?” In fact, I suspect that you're already giving some thought to how you would answer it.

I'm going to, briefly, describe three ways to answer that question that are persuasive, popular, and, ultimately flawed, and then I'm going to describe what the Bible says about how God answers that question.

“How do you make someone a good person?” The first answer: “You force them.”

You force them.

There's something in us that immediately reacts against that: You force them? I don't want anyone to force me to be good. I don't want to force someone else to be good. That wouldn't work.

But if I ask you how a parent should get their child to do chores, or take a bath at least once a week, what's the quickest thought? Just make them do it.

If I ask you, say, how to prevent murder, or prevent theft, you're going to tell me that it should be against the law and a police force should enforce that law.

When you were a child, your parents could make you do your chores, even when you really didn't want to. Traffic laws can make me not double park, even when I really want to.

Families are not democracies: parents rule and children obey... or don't obey. Neither are schools democracies: staff rule and students obey... or don't obey. Until you finish high school, they can force to do or not do a lot of things. But they cannot force you to be good.

You can do a lot to try to force someone to act good, but you cannot force someone to be good.

To start with, if that were a way to make people be good, you would expect that people who have the most restrictions would be the best people. Having worked in a high school and middle school, I can tell you that students are wonderful and loveable, but they are not the best behaved people. You cannot force someone to be good.

Prisoners are subject to even more restrictions: forced to eat at a certain time, sleep at a certain time, go outside, work, even shower at a certain time. So are prisons great communities? No, they're the most violent places in the country.

Well, okay, you say, of course that's true: you can't force someone to be good. Everybody knows that it takes responsibility – you have to choose for yourself.

“How do you make someone a good person?” Answer two: “You get them to take responsibility.”

I recently read a book from one of the greatest thinkers of our day, one of the best selling books of last year – something like one and a half million copies. And it does an extraordinary job of sketching out a complete worldview and proposing a way of life that it promises will be happy, fulfilling, and, most important of all, will put you in the driver's seat.

This public intellectual I'm talking about is Rachel Hollis, and the book is Girl, Wash Your Face.

She is impeccably able to be engaging, relatable, entertaining, all while constructing a coherent ideology to answer the question I'm posing. How do you make someone a good person? You get them to take responsibility.

Her book says, “You, and only you, are ultimately responsible for who you become and how happy you are.” “You are meant to be the hero of your own story.”

Is it any surprise Girl, Wash Your Face is so popular? I mean, who doesn't want to read a book that's all about you?

It takes head on one of the common temptations we face: expecting that we will become a good, happy, fulfilled person because of a job, or because of a relationship. Or, perhaps maybe better said, it kind of takes that on, because Rachel Hollis's alternative is that you will become a good, happy, fulfilled person because of you. It's all up to you, and it's all about you.

One blogger describes this:

“Girl, Wash Your Face is littered with references to self-love and self-care. In fact, the theme is so pervasive that it shapes how Hollis responds to everything-from hardship to trauma to parenting to working out.

“In all these scenarios, the answer is always something like picking yourself up by your bootstraps and striving and trying and running a marathon and getting therapy and reciting mantras and reading a good blog post and seeing a guru and drinking wine and not drinking wine and relaxing and taking a vacation and keeping the promises you make to yourself. Anything but surrendering your life to Jesus and placing your trust in him alone. Your happiness, your success, your everything-it's all up to you.”

How do you make someone a good person? You get them to take responsibility.

I'm going to make you a good person. Just let me give you a task list, and some tools to take with you, and some shame that you haven't done this already, and some burdens to carry on your own: do these things and you will be good and happy and fulfilled and in control. You need to be in control. And let me give you one last thing: guilt. Guilt if you mess up and don't do it all, or do it wrong, or do too much, or guilt if you do it all and you're still not happy.

This will not make you a good person. This will make you an exhausted person.

So perhaps if the way to make someone a good person isn't by getting them to make certain efforts, it starts with a way of thinking first; it's in your mindset!

“How do you make someone a good person?” Answer three: “You raise their consciousness.”

That may sound like a new age-y sort of phrase, but I'm actually taking it from an atheist activist, Richard Dawkins, whose primary concern for the last twenty years has been what he calls other people's “infantilism”.

Religions, and in fact any beliefs that disagree with his, are a blight on society and the world, Dawkins says. The problem is first of all that people are thinking wrong. It's not enough to force someone to be good or to get them to take responsibility for themself to be good, because the root of the problem, as Richard Dawkins sees it, is that people are thinking wrong. They haven't acceded to the unquestionable beliefs of the Western European Enlightenment, and until they do that, they won't be good.

Dawkins writes that, “the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold 'beliefs' of any kind.” Of any kind, of course, except for his.

Maybe I've been too harsh on this idea already. Because it's a leading perspective in secularism for a reason, and in fact, it's a common perspective for religious people too.

Honestly, this is tempting for everyone: I've come to to the conclusion that my opinions are right. Some people disagree with me. There's a problem, and there's a clear solution too: other people need to change their opinions.

Religious folks, just as much as secular folks, can turn to someone in need and say – usually just in their head, though not always – “you would be fine, you would be a good person, if only you thought the same way as me and agreed with me about everything.”

You can be a good person by having certain opinions.

Rachel Hollis proposes being good through your efforts and your will; Richard Dawkins proposes being good through your mind.

How do you do that? Some hedge or avoid this issue, but Dawkins is completely straightforward in admitting that the great majority of people are not intelligent or educated enough. People need to be educated to have their consciousness raised. And who is fit to do that educating? Only a small coterie of enlightened European and American scientists.

This ideology requires there to be a group of people who are already good, who already have “raised-consciousness”. They – and only they – are equipped to answer the great questions, and even to decide what questions deserve to be asked and answered. They are superior in understanding, above others.

And that hierarchy never really goes away.

Some people might be raised to the same level of consciousness as these good people, but many will remain unenlightened, infantile, like Dawkins says, in comparison to the true grownups.

Perhaps this isn't so much a pathway to being a good person as it is a pathway to thinking you're better than others.

- - -

Before I give what the Bible's answer is, I want to make clear that these three that I've talked about were options for God.

Old pagan religions sometimes talked about their gods forcing people to be good. Some religions call people to work to be good enough for God's standards. Some religions see enlightenment as the highest goal to attain.

But the Bible says that God chose a different way.

“How do you make someone a good person?” Jesus' answer is to die for them

Sit for just a moment with how different that is. It's not force, it's not putting it completely on them, it's not by telling them to have the right opinions. It's just giving.

We read in the Bible about Jesus' trial and torture, and mocking, and that painful, humiliating death.

The Bible claims that Jesus went through this not because he couldn't help it, not by accident, but intentionally, so that he could make many people good in the deepest sense.

Of all the answers to that question, of all the ideologies and religions and perspectives, Christianity does not allow you to think that you are better than anyone else. If you've become good by having raised consciousness, then you can feel superior about that. If you've become good by putting your nose to the grindstone and taking responsibility, then you can feel superior about that. But if you've become good because Jesus died for you – then it's not about you. You are not better than anyone, in fact you just might be worse, because to be good because of what Jesus did means that you were not good on your own.

Now, if this is the answer that you cling to. If this is the way that you're trusting you become good, that the Son of God was equal with God the Father, but he let go of it, emptied himself, the Bible says, to become a human being, to be so humble and serving others that he even gave up his life dying on the humiliating torture device of the day, the cross. If that is how you believe you have become good, then that's going to completely color how you treat others.

You can't treat others as your inferiors, but there's more than that. Here's what I mean:

In the 4^th century, a pagan Roman emperor, Julian, was fed up. He said this, writing to a pagan priest: “when the poor were neglected and overlooked by our priests, then I think the impious Christians saw it and devoted themselves to philanthropy. When they support not only their own poor, but ours as well, everyone sees that we're not helping our people.”

Ugh. Those Christians, not only helping out other Christians in need, but poor people of any religion. What a problem.

What had been happening, in at least one city, was this: the plague came in. And when the plague came in to town, you got out. In fact, when someone in your household, in your own family got sick with plague, you would set them out your door. They would die, but they would die anyway, and you had to do it to keep yourself from getting sick.

But the Christians didn't leave town. And when the sick were set outside alongside the roads, Christians picked them up and brought them into their own houses.

Christians cared for the sick, and some survived, and some still died, but they died comforted. And the Christians who were doing this, many of them got sick too, of course, and many died, but this was the incredible thing: in the city after the plague, there were more Christians than there had been before.

People saw what they were doing, risking their lives, sacrificing their lives even, and said, “I have to know what makes you do this. I have to know what kind of God you have faith in.”

This is who their God is: the one who makes people good by giving his son to die for them.