The Good Problem

Or some thoughts on excellence

I think about this scene from “The Good Place" at least once a month.

What does it mean to be good? Is it recycling? Following the Ten Commandments? Not kicking kittens? (My personal favorite defense in an argument.) Love your neighbor? Do no harm? It seems to depend on who you ask. Most people, however, agree that they know what good looks like when they see it. Good, after all, is something we all strive for, therefore, we all must know what it is. Right? A lot of people at least appeal to “the greater good” or “doing the right (good) thing.” I do know it’s good to want to do good. I’m just not really sure what that means. 

I heard a story a few weeks ago about a kid playing at a church event with some K’nex-type building toys. This kid built three abstract figures and when asked what they were, he responded, “Jesus on the cross with two bad guys on each side.” The kid then asked the teacher to keep the figures assembled until Sunday, because then “Jesus wouldn’t be dead anymore.” It was clear by the way this story was told to me that I was supposed to laugh and say “how adorable.” But I found myself in a strange position. I couldn’t. It was one of those hit with a ton of bricks moments where I realized two things simultaneously: one, I had been told the exact same version of the Easter story, two, it was a terrible explanation of “good” and “bad”. 

Here was a kid who had been taught the Easter story by well-meaning people who, I’m sure, just repeated whatever Sunday school curriculum had been given to them. His takeaway from this story was Jesus = good and sinners = bad. Fine, sure, that’s an interpretation, but that’s not exactly what’s going on in this story. What we know from church tradition is the other two men had stolen something. We don’t know why. Maybe they needed to feed their families. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Maybe they just had to take that pomegranate. Doesn’t matter. In the eyes of the Roman government, they deserved to die in a very violent, public way. Did this make them “bad”? Did this make them inherently bad? Hardly. Jesus, after all, turned over the tables in the Jewish temple and claimed to be the son of God which you could (and the leaders of the time did) very easily classify as “bad.”

And yet, this seems to be how most of us learn morality. Here is a list of good things, here is a list of bad things. Do the good things, don’t do the bad things and you will be a moral person. What they neglect to tell you is no two good/bad lists look alike. Even in the Bible! How many times did Jesus say, “you’ve heard it said … but I say unto you”? Nearly every time he opened his mouth. Still, humanity tries to lay claim to the realest goodest “good” and then wrest the highest of moral high grounds for their team. 

Fundamentalist circles talk a lot about “excellence,” which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the quality of being outstanding or extremely good.” Excellence is good’s type-A older sibling. My Fundamentalist Evangelical pastor looooved to talk about Excellence. He called it The High Road. I honestly cannot remember a sermon, Bible study, chapel service, or book where he did not use the phrase. By his definition, The High Road is not “choosing between the good and the bad but choosing between the good and the best and always choosing the best.” (Yes, I did type that from memory and, yes, I did fact-check myself and got it 99% accurate.) 

The thinking goes like this: good is no longer good enough. In fact, good is now bad. Sure, sure, the Bible says I’m not righteous and Jesus died for my inability to be perfect, but that’s beside the point. The point is if I wanted to be a Good Christian, I actually had to be better than good. The best. Perfect. Why? Because I was now an example. I had to be an impeachable witness for Jesus and if I erred in any way, I would be personally responsible for damning people to hell. The stakes were actually that high. 

It’s a difficult position to be in, especially as a kid. Every year as part of my home school curriculum I had to write a conversion narrative or “how I got saved.” These assignments stressed me out. I hadn’t stolen or been addicted to heroin or been a prostitute, so how could I really know I had been saved? I hadn’t actually been “bad” before. My doubts ran rampant for years and were only compounded when I got old enough to actually do bad (lie, have a bad attitude, not obey immediately). I assumed I wasn’t saved because I was now bad, which only made me try even harder to be good. Perfect. 

Here’s the problem with excellence and with the good/bad binary in general, it’s not even about choosing between the good and the best; it’s about performing perfection as defined by those who are in power at the time. The “best” is not universally equitable. It’s not “good” to force women to be pregnant. It’s not “good” to allow K-12 teachers to carry guns in the classroom. It’s not “good” to ban books that discuss race, or queerness, or the Black experience. It’s not “good” to protect corporate wealth while thousands of people struggle to maintain housing, food, and basic rights. 

Excellence, then, is not merely a Fundamentalist impulse. It’s in this country’s DNA. Calls to “Make America Great Again” or “Be a City on a Hill” are actually calls to exceptionalism, American Exceptionalism to be precise. America is the best, they say, and must continue to be the best. After all, the argument goes, who else in the world is good enough to be The Light In The Darkness? Exactly. No one. 

So what do we mean by “good”? In the eyes of Christians, Jesus was good. In the eyes of the Romans, Jesus was bad. Even among the thieves one repented and became “good” while the other remained “bad.” 

For years I tried to be exceptionally good, until I realized–slowly, painfully–that many of the things I’d been told were “good” were actually “bad”. It’s like Lyz Lenz says in her new book “This American Ex-Wife”:  

“I’d spent so much of my life being good and following the rules, and I was miserable. I knew all the rules by heart. I’d spent my life in churches listening to men, who had wives who cooked and cleaned for them, theologically debate my right to happiness. The rules, it seemed, had been designed to keep me miserable, always striving for what I was told could never be attained.”

When I understood there was no such thing as “right” theology or a “right” way to live, I suddenly had a lot more space for spirituality, compassion, and, dare I say, goodness. I could stop performing perfection every waking moment and just … be. 

Excellence, at its core, is insecure. Excellence says “the way I have chosen is the best way and therefore it is the only way. If I open myself up to other ways, then perhaps someone could perceive me as being wrong and I don’t want to be wrong”. It doesn’t allow for variety or nuance. It’s just another system for those in power to maintain their power, or at least the illusion of it. 

I’m learning that true goodness takes time and it takes thought. It’s not perfect. It’s messy. The hardest work I’ve done is to learn how to take my own and someone else’s experiences into consideration when making decisions. I’ve learned that what’s good in one scenario is not necessarily good in another scenario. That what’s good for me is not necessarily good for someone else. It’s both easier and harder than cross-checking your actions against a pre-made list. That’s what I would want to tell that kid. I’d want to tell him the Roman Empire was punitive. All empire is. I’d want to tell him those men were probably good people who found themselves on the wrong side of a dictator. Just like Jesus. That sometimes being good means being willing to go to jail, or to be publicly shamed. Good isn’t always what the law of the day demands. Sometimes doing good looks a lot like being bad.

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Editorial tally:

• 4 weeks

• 3.5 re-writes

• 12 proof-reads

• 1 essay