By 1916, W. E. B. Du Bois was more than fed up with the common phenomenon in America that had become known as lynching. He didn’t just detest the practice; he honestly wondered if it represented an evil that might destroy the nation itself. For decades, scores of young men had been subjected to mob violence, most often black victims of white mobs. But it was one particular case that brought Du Bois’s imagination to a full boil: the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas in May of that year. It was a gory affair, attended by thousands of curious Texans, many of them with their families. Washington’s body was mutilated, stabbed, burned, dragged around the town by automobile and then by horse, and left hanging just across the street from the courthouse for all to see. Photographs were taken, postcards produced, and souvenirs were sold. Crowds were estimated to be over ten thousand. Washington’s body hung just below the mayor’s window.

In response to this sheer, grisly desecration, Du Bois produced a landmark essay for the magazine he edited, The Crisis, complete with photos of the body as a supplement. Published in July of 1916, it was titled “The Waco Horror.” Du Bois’s account ends with a more general overview of the lurid practice: a table listing the number of “colored men lynched by year,” from 1885–1916, for example, totaling 2,853. Summing up, Du Bois writes: “This is an account of one lynching. It is horrible, but it is matched in horror by scores of others in the last thirty years, and in its illegal, law-defying, race-hating aspect, it is matched by 2842 other lynchings... What are we going to do about this record? The civilization of America is at stake. The sincerity of Christianity is challenged” (8).

I begin with this brief and sordid tale of what Du Bois called the “Waco Horror” for multiple reasons. First, I want to highlight the fact that he names this event a “horror,” a term that I think is precisely what describes the challenge of a scene like the one in Waco a century ago. Second, I want to suggest the theological importance of the mode and genre we commonly call “horror.” In particular, I am focusing here on the occurrence in our lives of what I wish to call “everyday horror”: the sudden, invasive presence of the horrific into the mundane lives that we lead. It seems clear to me, based on steady engagement with college students and many other twenty-somethings over the past quarter century, that everyday horror constitutes one of the most difficult apologetical challenges for the church at the present time. Finally, I will posit—despite the evil that surrounds us on a daily basis—a tentative response to everyday horror: an eschatological framing device by which we can find our way safely through the valley of the shadow of darkness.

My term “everyday horror” arises in part from David Dark’s entertaining exploration of the apocalyptic mode. In his quirky yet often brilliant book Everyday Apocalypse (2002), Dark suggests, as a postmodern variation on an old theme by the likes of the Transcendentalists, that careful observers can detect how the supernatural realm bursts into our lives on a regular basis. Dark provides a blueprint for understanding how such a mode of surveillance is available to us all the time, if we develop the skills to use it:

[A]pocalyptic expression is a radical declaration concerning the meaning of human experience... By announcing a new world of unrealized possibility, apocalyptic serves to invest the details of the everyday with cosmic significance while awakening its audience to the presence of marginalizing forces otherwise unnamed and unchallenged... It creates an unrest within our minds, and it can only be overcome by imagining differently, by giving in to its aesthetic authority, by letting it invigorate the lazy conscience... apocalyptic has a way of curing deafness and educating the mind... [it] will accommodate (indeed, insist upon) a socially disruptive newness... [it] is the place where the future pushes into the present. It’s the breaking in of another dimension, a new wine for which our old wineskins are unprepared. (Dark 11, 10, 12)

Ironically, the Christian church, which is ostensibly called to give voice to the apocalyptic presence inherent in culture and society at large, has frequently failed to maintain faithfulness to this calling. This failure is clearly something that Dark repudiates: a lazy, status-quo church unable or unwilling to sustain the prophetic edge and act out its role as cultural dynamite. As Dark notes, “Few could have predicted that biblical language would become so tied up in social hierarchies that religion would become the object of critique rather than the acknowledged source of the critique itself.... A political-economic order has nothing to fear from a sentimental, fully ‘spiritualized’ faith” (15). This sort of impotent prophetic voice is of little relevance to the culture-at-large and stands in complete contrast to the essence of the crucifixion of Jesus, described by theologian John Milbank as “the rejection by the political-economic order of a completely new sort of social imagination” (171). The church’s apocalyptic mode is meant always to challenge the existing order, and as such its deployment is a major duty of the followers of Jesus.

Beyond admiring Dark’s critique, I wish to adopt his use of the notion of “everydayness” by describing what I am calling here “everyday horror.” In my mind, everyday horrors function as an apocalyptic trace insofar as they are always invested in “cosmic significance... [creating] an unrest within our minds.” As such, and given the predominance of the news media erupting into our lives all throughout the day, I have lately been struck by the trending powers of the “everydayness” of horror. CNN News alerts show up throughout the day in my in-box; smart phones deliver bad news even during lunch breaks, meetings, or church services. Most threatening of all, I have been led to rethink the challenge of horror for personal reasons, as is the case with most of my readers. Honestly, our greatest challenge as believers are not the horrors emanating from Nigeria, Syria, or Yemen; or even those closer to home like the school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado or at Sandy Hook Elementary. The greatest challenge of horror are the disasters that affect us personally.

Meanwhile, the horrors keep filling my in-box. As I complete this essay in the beginning of May 2015, the state prosecutor in Baltimore has announced an indictment of six police officers as responsible for the death of Freddie Gray. Over the past week or two, the citizens of Baltimore (and the nation and world) have been appalled to see the widespread panic, looting, rioting, arson, and assault that have been unleashed in their city. In Garland, Texas, citizens were shocked to learn that jihadists had been lurking in their neighborhoods waiting for a chance to terrorize their neighbors in the land of the First Amendment. The violence unleashed in Baltimore and Garland seems grimly familiar to everyone here in the city of St. Louis, where in the past nine months, large-scale protest has been underway due to a similar kind of horror in our own streets. The corpse of Michael Brown, left in the broiling sun for an entire afternoon last August, became an icon of everyday horror, as it lay in the street just a dozen miles from where I sit today. The long list of violated bodies of black males—Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Rodney King, Emmett Till, and countless others—may all be compared to the desecrated and burned body of Jesse Washington a hundred years before, in what Du Bois called the“Waco Horror.” Each represented in their time a shocking challenge to belief in a benevolent God, and to belief in a nation that cared about such heavy abstractions as equality and justice. And all of these bodies inevitably suggested the bereaved parents: in Michael Brown’s case, the image of his grieving mother, bereft of her son, for all time destined to remain a symbol of everyday horror. Again, it is the horrors that turn up from time to time in our personal worlds that mark us most severely. Thus, and lest we forget: as bad as Michael Brown’s death has been for greater St. Louis, we would do well to remember that the horror is far worse for the grieving family members.

I proceed by thinking about the term itself: “horror,” a generic term often associated with certain kinds of films we all loved as adolescents. Let us pause and think about why the horror genre is so attractive, especially for young people. Is it the eschatological triumph of good over evil that has traditionally been the way to conclude horror films? Perhaps; but if it is, then we are left in a quandary when we remember that in recent decades, horror films do not always end with a definitive victory at all. One thinks of Hannibal Lecter wandering off into a crowded market scene on some unidentified tropical island at the end of Silence of the Lambs: the evil one, perpetrator of horror, has finagled himself out of harm’s way, and has escaped justice, maybe preparing that very evening another monstrous feast, a menu featuring human liver with fava beans and chianti.

Why do we find such scenes endlessly fascinating? Could it be that horror films provide evidence for our rapidly degraded view of this fallen world, an organizing metaphor for our utter worship of individual freedom, despite its fearful rejection of providence? It seems plausible to suggest that horror signals a growing conviction of the insoluble nature of evil and constitutes a strong clue to the growing suspicion of many: that God has lost control, that we have been abandoned to the fates, and that in fact evil and terror are winning the day. No longer cherished residents of a cosmos ruled by a benevolent God, Americans today are far more likely to think of themselves as anonymous and forgotten pawns milling about in a terrifying and material universe. Such a shift in thinking about our world has been trending for decades, but now seems to some to be leaping forward at an accelerated rate into a confusing, “unmappable” future. This trend, alas, disrupts what we have previously thought were the unimpeachable progressive ideals of our Western civilization. Or, as Charles Taylor puts it in a chapter entitled “The Dark Abyss” in A Secular Age: “Reality in all directions plunges its roots in the unknown and as yet unmappable. It is this sense which defines the grasp of the world as ‘universe’ and not ‘cosmos’; and this is what I mean when I say that the universe outlook was ‘deep’ in a way that the cosmos picture was not... Humans are no longer charter members of the cosmos, but occupy merely a narrow band of recent time” (326–27). This dark abyss is both unfathomable and terrifying, an unmappable region ridden with everyday horror. We may abhor this account, but more and more it appears that young adults find it accurate. Perhaps horror is endlessly fascinating insofar as it names and expresses a growing sense of vulnerability and orphanhood, and the conclusion that it is about time we grow up and deal with it.

Of course, the phenomena I am calling everyday horrors—and their concomitant effects upon religious faith and doubt, anger and depression—are not exactly new. Everyday horror is at the center of Job, one of the oldest books of the Bible. In the so-called imprecatory Psalms, we witness the response of God’s people in the light of atrocity and suffering, going so far as to pray that their enemies be “blotted out” in Psalm 109, considered one of the angriest prayers in Scripture. King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth demonstrate that the Elizabethans were not fearful of sketching horror: one recalls the beaten-down Lear, lamenting his dead daughter with those callous words, “Is this the promised end?” Obviously it would be misguided to propose that these are merely modern complaints. And yet, historians have suggested that the intellectual history of this concept took on a new urgency as far back as the massive earthquake in Lisbon, 1755, an event that shook Europe both literally and intellectually. Susan Neiman has called that moment the birth of the modern temperament: “The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon as we use the word Auschwitz today... It takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world” (1). Indeed, it was in the shadow of Lisbon that European attempts to forge a satisfactory theodicy emerged, chiefly from Leibniz, along with the counterclaims of theodicy’s inadequacies, as from Rousseau, Hume, and others. Later, the so-called “argument from horror,” by which a concept of a benevolent God comes under severe attack due to the horrifying evils we confront everyday, was expressed in many ways throughout the nineteenth century. Perhaps this argument’s most overwhelming version is stated by Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, and features the extremes of cruelty and torture to question the goodness of God. David Bentley Hart has praised the genius of Dostoyevsky’s argument, calling it “the only challenge to a confidence in divine goodness that should give Christians serious cause for deep and difficult reflection” (42). Hart’s ingenious point is that most believers have not taken Ivan’s (and Dostoyevsky’s) argument from horror as seriously as they should: “Those Christian readers who have found it easy to ignore or dispense with the case Dostoyevsky constructs for Ivan have not fully comprehended that case” (42). In America, Mark Twain certainly did not ignore the case against God: his later writings are littered with Dostoyevsky-like pronouncements.

Twain and Dostoyevsky were correct: we must try to “fully comprehend” the case against God. This case must process the facts presented to us daily in the form of the spectacles of horror. Phillip Tallon writes: “horror functions, in its expression of revolting disvalue, as the sharpest critique of divine providence that any aesthetic theme could offer” (182). When our jaws drop to the ground in the face of the bombing at the Boston Marathon; when we sob in disbelief at a 60 Minutes story about the children refugees of Syria hanging precariously to the side of an overloaded fishing boat attempting to cross the Mediterranean; or when we are struck by the thunderbolt of a more personal tragedy brought on by drunk drivers, heroin overdoses, or various forms of incurable cancers, we find our philosophy of God—if we even have one—brought shamelessly to its knees.

Everyday horrors, in short, wear on us, and challenge our visions of the Good, perhaps now more than ever. Horror presents arguments, especially about the Transcendent. But I hasten to add: any article like this one, focused on the problem of pain and evil and then trying to say something edifying about it, risks sounding glib. As C. S. Lewis has written: “All arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment against the author” (93). We risk sounding like Job’s goofy friends. My solution might also make me sound heroic; but again, like Lewis: “I am a great coward... If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it” (93, 94). Actually, the book I consider among the very best on these matters—What Shall We Say?, a wonderful work of pastoral theology by Thomas G. Long—taught me one main lesson: most of what I am about to say should never even be told to those in the earliest stages of grief. Because one enters the darkness of grief, either intimating this lesson in part, or not. One also learns these lessons differently than one learns other lessons: “solvitur ambulando,” as Long puts it; “it is solved by walking” (115). So I have found Long’s wise counsel, along with Lewis’s genuine humility, extremely valuable in working through these matters personally, and then trying to convey them to others. Thus, it is merely in the spirit of preparation that I say these things at all, knowing that some will still find them glib. I am merely sowing seeds of hope, the fruit of hard-won experience from those who have tragically gone before us down that lonesome road. But, as Lewis states, “to prove it palatable is beyond my design” (94).

Actually, I guess I should now come clean and confess my own worst encounter with everyday horror, of which there have been many: my credentials, as it were. None can compare with my closest happenstance with horror, the day my six-year-old son Daniel died. Little did I know on that afternoon how gripping and personal the problem of evil was about to become for me and my wife. On June 15, 1999, I went to pick up Daniel at the summer day-camp he was attending. The director of the camp met me at the doorway, shielded me away from everyone else, and said only that there had been an accident (a strangely empty word in retrospect). She told me that my son had been taken to a hospital and explained how to get there. My repeated demands for more information were ignored. So I ran to my car, fought through rush-hour traffic, pounded the steering wheel most of the way, and nearly freaked out from the disconcerting feeling that comes from not knowing what has happened in a desperate situation. I found out about twenty minutes later. The lifeguards at the Olympic-sized pool had allowed Daniel into water that was over his head. Unexplainably, they simply were not watching him. Daniel drowned, and was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.

And so June 15, 1999 was for me a day of horror—or at least, the first of many, many days. Now it is nearly sixteen years later, and I sit in my study, finishing off the manuscript of a essay on everyday horrors. The pain has largely subsided, but not vanished. It can still feel, at a moment’s notice and without warning, like a gash in my belly, taking my breath away. June 15 often falls on Father’s Day weekend, a twist of the knife of fate, a not-so-gentle reminder of what is lost. If trauma consists, as Cathy Caruth has written, of the “story of a wound,” I suppose this amounts to some level of trauma (4). Her metaphor reminds me of a line from The Gift of Pain by Phillip Yancey and Paul Brand: “Think of pain as a speech your body is delivering about a subject of vital importance to you” (222). But Caruth’s largely secular account leaves out what many consider the most important part of the story, or “speech.” The forgotten, or overlooked, element consists of promises like I Corinthians 15:58, which reminds us that, since death is to be defeated, we must be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.” The concept of the dead not “dying in vain” was a prominent theme in the nineteenth century, as it is today: echoing I Corinthians, it even found its way into Lincoln’s Address at Gettysburg. It has been invoked by grieving parents ever since.

As challenging as it is to believe it, I find terrific consolation in that idea. So here is my primary, best shot: pain and suffering, despite our greatest fears and doubts, can have redemptive results. And for years now, I have been interested in articulating the ways we might survive such encounters with the horrific and how we might try to console those who find themselves in that deep and dark valley. Although my essay is ultimately more descriptive of a thematic concern, than it is prescriptive of a solution, I do want to offer hope. It all begins with a sort of moral impression, based on the experiences of others in concert with our own predispositions toward the promises of Scripture. But in the grip of it, horror is visceral, and it can often feel nauseating: it ramifies on a much more primal level than argument or Bible study. Horror reveals what we truly believe: for better or worse. And so, everyday horror does undermine certain ways of thinking about the world and even our best intentions about God and the life of faith. Like Lewis, “I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ is not incredible” (94).

Similarly, my book Continuing Bonds with the Dead, when it appears in 2016, will tell the story of how various American authors have dealt with their own woes: in particular, the deaths of their own children. In general, I argue, they tried to do so “generatively”: by finding some element of redemption in profound suffering, even in horror. They managed to squeeze out of their suffering something useful, believing as they often did that such redemption had been promised to them by God. Du Bois, miraculously enough, even could conceive of the lynched black male body of Jesse Washington, hanging for hours in the hot Texas sun beneath the mayor’s office window, as a figure of hope, a symbol of redemption. Washington’s legacy of violent injustice, if Du Bois had any say in the matter, would be that he did not “die in vain.” As for me: my own decade-long submersion into the field of grief and trauma, and the nineteenth-century culture of death and dying, was probably at least partly motivated by the same desires. Perhaps it is even part of my own penance for, and tribute to, my own lost son. I am sure the grieving family of Michael Brown hopes against hope that their son’s death can also result in something positive. And if we have ears to hear: there is some saving message to be found in all this. It is a message of promise and hope, despite what the enlightened secular masters of the universe try to tell us.  

If, as some commentators suggest, our therapeutic culture has pushed us beyond the point of embracing true pain and evil, it is plausible to suggest that we have lost something precious. Did Michael Brown die in vain? Did my own son, Daniel? One’s answer, possibly, helps explain the two diametrically opposed manners of protesting that ensued in Ferguson: one violent and chaotic, the other orderly, prayerful, and non-violent. As a local resident watching the action unfold on the nightly local news, I can tell you that the non-violent, prayerful sort of protest was by far the most prevalent here in St. Louis. I participated myself in many of those planned events. Although that element may have gotten lost in the bigger picture of the national news media, it should strike us as a reason for hope: a way of surviving Ferguson, a decisive element in the “story of a wound.” Because the best kind of protest can only begin where there is hope that our actions are not in vain.

And so, and at the risk of sounding maudlin: it is at the grave when we discover what we truly believe and when we are most fully alive. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1950, William Faulkner complained about American authors: “the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing... His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.” Hopefully, my brief meditation here is sufficiently interested in the “human heart in conflict with itself”: and yes, it is risky; but only through risk does one approach those “universal bones,” and the “scars” left behind. The wound, we must remember, is the root of the Greek word for trauma: that which marks a body, and always remains. In this sense, and rephrasing Faulkner, the traumas of the past truly are not dead; they aren’t even past. It is an expert definition of trauma, in fact.

But beyond Faulkner’s universal bones is the yearning for more: a desire to touch and be touched by what Lincoln called the better angels. Or to use a phrase in Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk: we can sense a “vague unrest” to listen again to those lovely voices of the lost. The stories told here suggest that the bonds with the dead continue, along with the wounds; and they also suggest that death, in fact, is never in vain, and will eventually be “swallowed up in victory” (I Corinthians 15:54). Thus, we can indeed survive Ferguson, and all the other everyday horrors of our daily lives. If my writing is able to inspire even a few readers with that message, then I will have counted it a great success. And maybe, all the work I have done in memory of Daniel will not have been done in vain either.

Harold K. Bush is Professor of English at Saint Louis University. His book, Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors, will be published in spring 2016 by the University of Alabama Press.

Works Cited

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1996.

Dark, David. Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons. Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2002.

Du Bois. W. E. B. “The Waco Horror.” Supplement to The Crisis. July 1916. 1–8.

Faulkner, William. Nobel Prize Speech. Stockholm, December 10, 1950. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html.

Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005.

Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Touchstone, 1996.

Long, Thomas G. What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2011.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1991.

Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University, 2004.

Tallon, Philip. The Poetics of Evil: Toward an Aesthetic Theodicy. New York: Oxford University, 2012.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Yancey, Phillip and Paul Brand. The Gift of Pain. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993.