Are some people evil?
“I know there are good people in the world,” the high school student told me. “It’s just that now I know there are evil people, too.”
Yes, his regular diet of TikTok content showcasing tyranny and brutality from every corner of the world had helped forge this perception. But it wasn’t just that, he said. All he had to do was look around his community to see the same things playing out on a smaller scale.
Maybe you’ve felt the same way about this good/evil divide. It’s not like the evidence isn’t there, right before our eyes. But even in the conversation with this student, there was something that offered a glimmer of hope. His tone told me that some part of him wanted to be proven wrong. He wanted to have faith that there’s at least some good in every single one of us.
Good turns out to be the only power—yes, even in people who before may have seemed like bullies.
That’s a role Christian Science has played in my life when I’ve been wrestling with tough questions. By turning me toward God, it’s helped prove that my own take on things isn’t necessarily accurate. This isn’t always easy to accept, because it seems to clash with one or more compelling narratives in my life or on my phone. And yet, when I do accept this divine perspective, good turns out to be the real deal, the only power—yes, even in people who before may have seemed like bullies, tyrants, and enemies.
That’s what I was thinking about during this conversation about “evil people.” I was thinking of a time when a friend who’s a high school teacher asked me to pray because there was a volatile, potentially dangerous situation building to a head in her classroom. A group of students seemed on the brink of taking control of the class. She was scared—and, honestly, after hearing her story, so was I.
In the past, whenever I’ve felt afraid or helpless, the best, most healing solutions have always come when I’ve asked God to show me what He knows—what’s real. One of the names the Bible gives to God is Truth, and I’ve always loved this name because it tells me that if I want the actual truth and not just my own or someone else’s perspective, God, Truth itself, is the only place to get it. Likewise, God is Love. This was especially comforting in this situation because Love felt like an answer to danger, fear, and potential violence.
I turned to God, to Love and Truth, with my whole heart and asked for help. I wanted to see beyond the appearance of destructive people or evil intentions and know more about what was really going on. What was God causing, seeing, and knowing about these students?
Immediately, this thought—and actually it was deeper than a thought, because it came as a feeling in my heart, too—bubbled up: “They want to be good.”
I knew in a way that was undeniable that this was true. Good feels like home. It is the most natural thing to each of us—the “true north” to which our internal compass naturally swings. This has to be the case, because we come from God, who is pure good. Good can create and cause only good. Good must flow out from good the way light has to flow out from the sun, simply because of the nature of its source.
I could see how my previous perspective, compelling though it had seemed, simply couldn’t be correct, since these teens weren’t self-determining individuals who could choose between being good and being bad. Each of them was a son or daughter of God and was only good, just like their Father-Mother.
And this proved to be true. The situation in my friend’s classroom turned around immediately. The bullying, threats, and power struggle stopped. One student even apologized.
Everyone wants to be good because, in reality, everyone is good.
Could this have happened if there really were “evil people”? To state the obvious: No. And that’s what’s given me the conviction that even now, with all that’s going on in the world, I can continue to rest solidly on the same truth that brought peace to my friend’s classroom: Everyone wants to be good because, in reality, everyone is good.
And when it doesn’t seem like it? That’s when we can be the witnesses, the pray-ers, the spiritual seers that our communities and the world need. Whether we see something on our own street corner or on a video from a country thousands of miles away, we can play a part in standing for, and drawing out, good. We can ask God to show us the goodness inherent in each of us and allow our trust in good to expand until we truly know that that’s all there is and that’s who we really are. Not evil. Good.
All of us.
