MICHAEL D. JAWORSKI
In Season One of Justified the shady character Boyd Crowder suffers a potentially fatal gunshot wound and interprets his survival as a sign from God that he must change his ways. This sets Boyd on a journey in which he feels he has been born again to a life of service to God.
The idea that certain happenings in our lives are part of a larger, divine plan is a familiar one. So too is the idea that a particular event might be a sign from God, calling a person who has strayed to reform and be born again to a life of righteousness. Many religious people see key moments in their lives in just the way that Boyd sees his brush with death.
Atheists, of course, don’t believe that there’s a God, and so they don’t believe that any event is a sign from God. Atheist philosophers often counter the idea that an event must be a sign from God by arguing that there’s a simpler explanation for the event in question, one that does not appeal to supernatural forces. The basic idea is that simpler explanations are to be preferred over more complex ones, and since we all agree that the natural world exists, an explanation that sticks to only natural occurrences avoids unnecessarily complicating things by bringing in the supernatural. Wherever a purely naturalistic explanation can be given, it is to be preferred, and according to the atheist philosophers, a purely naturalistic explanation of any event is always out there, waiting to be discovered. Boyd Crowder’s survival was not a sign from God, but merely the result of the bullet missing his vital organs.
Some religious philosophers have countered this line of reasoning by finding fault with the standard the atheists use to judge that an event isn’t a sign from God. The atheist treats the existence of a purely naturalistic explanation for an event as decisive in favor of the judgment that the event isn’t a sign from God. Religious philosophers can respond by asking us to suppose for the sake of argument that God did create the world. As part of the creative process, God would have chosen all the laws of nature for His world. And of course He would have chosen laws that allowed His will to be done in His world. But then it would be no surprise to find naturalistic explanations available for most events in God’s world. God’s will would normally be carried out through the laws of nature themselves; miraculous interventions would be few and far between. So, even if Boyd’s wound could be explained in a purely naturalistic way, it might have been a divine act, nonetheless.
Bearing the Fruits of Faith
Rejecting the atheist’s standard of judgment for whether or not an event is a sign from God is one thing; finding a suitable replacement for it is another. Surely, there have been people who believed falsely that events in their lives were signs from God, when in fact the events were simply coincidences, and the beliefs brought on by wishful thinking or self-delusion. How can we distinguish a genuine sign from God from a mere delusion of grandeur?
William James, the great philosopher and psychologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provides an alternative standard, one that judges whether an event is a sign from God by considering its impact on the event’s subject: does the subject’s life bear the fruits of faith? But this approach, promising though it may be, isn’t without its difficulties. Some transformations are more complete and permanent than others, so how can we draw a line between the real thing and mere illusion? Boyd Crowder’s transformation is messy and impermanent. Boyd’s life following his wounding thus provides an interesting case study to illustrate the debate about whether an event is a sign from God, and illuminate the challenges one faces when one attempts to apply William James’s standard to get an answer.
When we first meet Boyd in the series premiere, he bears the hardened heart of a man so accustomed to crime that it no longer fazes him. He casually discusses plans to blow up a building, determines that the available weaponry won’t suffice for the task, and launches a rocket into a church as Plan B. He then shoots his accomplice in the back of the head simply because he doesn’t fully trust the man, despite the fact that the results of a background check are mere moments away.
Boyd’s plans go awry when his old coal-digging buddy Raylan Givens returns to town as a federal marshal. Though the two men share a bond from their days working the mines, Boyd recognizes that Raylan is likely to interfere with Boyd’s shady operations, and plots to eliminate him. Boyd sends his overmatched underlings to ambush the marshals, and sets up a confrontation with Raylan that ends with Raylan shooting Boyd in the chest. The bullet just misses Boyd’s heart, and he suffers a serious but non-lethal injury as a result.
When Raylan stops by Boyd’s hospital room to check on his recovery, Boyd asks him whether the shot was intended to be fatal. Though Raylan claims that he aimed to kill and simply missed his mark, Boyd has already decided that Raylan’s miss was intentional. Boyd recounts a time in his recovery in which he felt terrible pain, not only in his wound, but in his soul. Boyd claims that he knew in that moment that God had acted through Raylan, guiding Raylan’s spirit to deliver a wound that would just miss being fatal. Boyd interprets both the wound and his survival of it as a sign from God that his life has been spared so that he may be born again as a changed man.
Boyd’s sincerity isn’t beyond question. The audience has already seen him control a cult-like group of neo-Nazis by reciting Bible interpretation so ridiculous that Raylan immediately recognizes that Boyd cannot possibly believe it. But put aside for now any questions of Boyd’s intent in telling Raylan that he will reform, and suppose that Boyd genuinely believes that God acted through Raylan in order to transform Boyd’s life. Certainly, Boyd isn’t the only person, fictional or otherwise, who has ever felt the firm conviction that an event in his life was guided by God in order to deliver a divine message. Throughout history and across cultures, many have attested to receiving such “signs from God.”
Even among those whose reports are sincere, it would be surprising to find that all of them were correct. Surely, many desperate souls, in their darkest hour, have latched onto the idea that a divine calling has been issued to them. The emotional instability of human beings in conditions such as Boyd’s could easily combine with the comfort and inspiration offered by the idea that one has been chosen by God for a special revelation to give them the false but unshakable impression that God has acted in their lives.
A Sign from God?
What method could we use to distinguish genuine divine revelations from potent but delusive emotional crutches? And can we apply our method to Boyd and his gunshot wound? Should it be considered a sign from God?
Atheists, of course, think there’s no wheat here, only chaff. God does not exist, so no event is a sign from God. In defense of this position, atheist philosophers can invoke the history of human attempts to explain events in the natural world. Ancient explanations for the changing of the seasons, the cycle of night and day, and natural disasters, cited the actions of various gods and goddesses. These ancient accounts were replaced by worldviews in which such events were attributed to a single deity, and these in turn were replaced by scientific explanations that made no reference to the supernatural at all. This history suggests that a purely naturalistic explanation could be given for any event, including those that people such as Boyd believe to be guided by God’s unseen hand. The atheist will remind us of principles like Ockham’s Razor, which advises us to keep our explanation of any event as simple as possible. If Boyd’s wound, survival, and psychological reaction can all be explained in terms of natural causes, treating the event as the work of God would introduce unnecessary complication to the explanation.
So, in response to our question, “How can we distinguish genuine divine revelations from false ones?” the atheist’s response is that a genuine revelation would have to be inexplicable in purely natural terms, a miracle in the strictest sense. And the atheist rejects the existence of miracles. But is the atheist’s standard of judgment fair? Some religious philosophers have thought that it is fair, and sought to show that miraculous interventions into the natural order do occur. But there are at least two problems with the atheist’s standard. First, it creates a methodological blind spot in which God, even if real, couldn’t be discovered. For the atheist will always assume that there’s a naturalistic explanation for any event. Presented with an apparent miracle, the atheist will always insist that we simply have not yet figured out the purely natural explanation for it. The second problem is that the atheist’s standard treats facts that are actually neutral to the debate as if they are evidence against divine activity. This problem will lead us to consider a different kind of standard altogether.
Suppose that an all-knowing and all-powerful God went about creating a universe, choosing its fundamental particles, its laws of nature, and so on, with a long-term plan in mind for its development. Would it make sense for God to set things up so that He could never interact with His world, except by violating the very laws of nature He so carefully chose for it? Surely, it would be more reasonable to believe that God would set up a world in which He could give people revelatory experiences within the system of laws He created, rather than by violating those laws. And if that’s the case, then many divine revelations would occur through everyday events—the very type of events we usually can explain without invoking divine activity. And that reveals the flaw in the atheist’s standard. The hypothesis that an event is a sign from God and the hypothesis that the event isn’t a sign from God both predict that we could give a purely naturalistic explanation for the event. That means that the existence of such an explanation is useless as evidence against the claim that the event was a sign from God. Suppose Boyd Crowder’s wound, survival, and psychological reaction can all be explained in terms of natural causes; that might simply show us what a good job God did in setting up the laws of nature so that His will could be done through them!
Mystical Experiences
This last point motivates us to seek a different kind of standard entirely, one that does not appeal to the existence of naturalistic explanations. An alternative standard is provided by William James. In his discussion of mystical experiences, James faces an issue similar to ours. Mystical experiences take place in states of consciousness very different from those we know from everyday experience. The abnormal nature of mystical awareness raises the question: how can we distinguish between genuine mystical encounters with the divine on the one hand, and extremely potent hallucinations brought on by abnormal brain function, on the other?
James considers a complaint against the authenticity of mystical experiences much like the one we have raised on behalf of the atheist against the reality of signs from God: abnormal brain processes, such as those brought on by hallucinogenic drugs, can create experiences similar to those reported by mystics. So, the best explanation for mystics’ experiences is that they suffered from a bout of neural dysfunction, and not that they received special revelation from God.
Because the complaint against the legitimacy of the mystics’ experiences parallels the complaint about signs from God, a similar kind of response can be made on the mystics’ behalf. The brain and nervous system are the source of human experiences. If these were designed by a God who wanted to be able to give people special revelatory experiences, surely that God would include within the design a capacity for the type of brain processes that would give rise to those special experiences. The fact that other, non-divine sources can trigger the same processes, and thus simulate the experiences, is no evidence against the idea that some experiences of that kind might be authentically revelatory.
But if we’re not to judge mystical experiences or signs from God based on whether or not there’s a purely naturalistic explanation for them, what standard can we use instead? James suggests a standard typical of his school of philosophy, pragmatism: we should judge these events by looking at their practical impact on the lives of those who have experienced them, to see whether and how those lives have been changed. Borrowing imagery from the New Testament, we can look to see what fruit their lives bear as a result of the experience.
Paul’s epistle to the Galatians contains detailed lists of the fruits of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit. The former list includes idolatry, enmity, strife, envy, and fits of anger. The latter list comprises love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In order to apply James’s standard to a person such as Boyd Crowder, we could compare Boyd’s ways before and after the event he claims is a sign from the Christian God with these lists from the holy book of Christianity.
Saving Souls
Let’s look again at the Boyd we meet in the series premiere. He is sorely lacking in the fruits of the Spirit. He’s a downcast, unhappy man who lives strategically rather than compassionately. He’s unwilling to tolerate anyone or anything that comes between himself and the goals he has set, regardless of how brutal he must be to eliminate them. He longs for his late brother’s widow, he lusts after power, and he resorts to violence at the slightest provocation. Boyd’s life of crime makes enmity a constant companion; law enforcement agencies and rival criminal operations are enemies that he must scheme to overcome. In order to feel confident that Boyd was truly changed by a sign from God, we would want to see a radical departure from this way of being. We would want to see a marked change in his overall emotional state and patterns of behavior that matches the spirit of his hospital bed conversation with Raylan.
When we meet Boyd again, he’s in prison. He has been spending his time trying to save the souls of other inmates. In a conversation with Raylan, Boyd’s primary focus is to get Raylan to partake in self-evaluation. Raylan has come seeking information on his own father’s illicit activities. Raylan isn’t simply doing his job as a lawman; he’s motivated by spite for a man who abused him in his younger years. Boyd turns the conversation to the number of men Raylan has killed, and how Raylan views his own standing in God’s eyes. The conversation ends with Raylan admitting uncertainty as to his own righteousness. When Raylan returns some time later, Boyd is pleased to hear that Raylan is no longer actively pursuing information about his father, and will instead try to let go of his anger. Boyd seems to be genuinely pleased, and conveys to Raylan a piece of Christian wisdom: only by forgiving can we be forgiven.
All of that is quite promising from the perspective of the Biblical account of the fruits of the Spirit. Peace, gentleness, and self-control are evident in Boyd in a way we had not seen before. Not only has his own anger subsided, but he attempts to lead others to change their ways, as well. Boyd’s outlook and goals seem to be consistent with true faith. His response to challenges and threats isn’t to fight, but to convey that human threats no longer matter much to him. All will be well for him in the end, because God is now with him. He’s more interested in saving other souls than he is in the human affairs that would otherwise make men his enemies. In one instance, he is lured into a fight with other inmates. But even this violence is a last resort: his Bible has been knocked from his hand, his preaching has been ignored and mocked, and he literally has been backed against a wall. Boyd handles these situations with the patience and self-assurance of a man who understands that the only state of affairs worth fearing is distance from God.
Boyd carries on in his new ways when he is granted early release from prison. Boyd also attributes this occurrence to God, saying that his ministry had gone as far as it could in prison, and now God wants him to continue His work in the outside world. If the story ended there, Boyd’s actions would probably be judged to have met James’s standard. We would have good reason to treat Boyd’s “sign from God” as authentic.
Something’s Lacking
Though events sometimes wrap up that neatly in stories, in real life they rarely do. And Boyd’s story follows a more realistic path: his transformation appears to be lacking in both its totality and its permanence. For one thing, despite the indications that Boyd has truly changed, others are not fully convinced. Boyd’s cousin Johnny expresses uncertainty about Boyd’s sincerity, citing the many similarities between Boyd’s new pursuit of a congregation and his old scheme to attract a Bible-based white supremacist cult. Boyd’s associate Dewey Crowe echoes these sentiments: “For a guy who’s supposedly changed, you sound an awful lot like you always did.”
Furthermore, Boyd’s actions after his release are not always peaceful. He shows a willingness to resort to violence against those who he perceives as poisoning the spirit of the local people. This includes organizing a deadly assault on a meth lab. Boyd cites the story of Jesus turning the money changers’ tables as justification for such aggressive practices in God’s name. During the investigation of these events, Raylan is asked whether Boyd is “completely full of shit” about having found God. Raylan replies that Boyd is indeed full of it—-though Raylan isn’t sure whether Boyd knows that or not.
These doubts about Boyd’s transformation reveal some difficulties for the defender of James’s standard. The language of being “born again” tends to obscure the fact that, in many ways, Boyd is still the same old Boyd. He still has a sharp wit and somewhat ironic tone of voice; he still displays the mannerisms of a smooth-talking criminal working an audience. This points to a general problem for those who wish to apply James’s criterion: it is unreasonable to expect a completely different personality to emerge from a revelatory experience. Though the tree bears different fruit, it is the same tree. It grew from the same seed, in the same soil.
No matter how dramatic a person’s experience of being born again, there will be a great deal of continuity with the person’s former life. Experiences, memories, innate tendencies and personality traits—so much of what makes Boyd or anyone else who he is—remain a part of the person even after a transformative event. Family and acquaintances will look at the person and see that continuity between the old and the new. To apply James’s standard, we must sort through what has changed and what remains, and try to distinguish between traits that are evidence of a failure to transform from flesh to Spirit, and traits that are simply a product of the person’s history and situation.
In Boyd’s case, this task is complicated because of how thoroughly immersed in criminal ways he had always been. Boyd comes from a family of criminals, and he has spent his life learning their ways. We must bear that in mind when we judge his actions involving the meth lab. It’s easy to look at that situation as evidence that Boyd hasn’t truly accepted a new way of being. An average person who plotted to blow up a trailer with a meth cooker inside would certainly be judged to be lacking in fruits of the Spirit. But an average person has not lived Boyd’s life. Violent activities are just part of the normal happenings of everyday life for a person with Boyd’s background. For Boyd, such actions probably don’t seem out of the ordinary. His idea of “normal” is different from ours. We should consider the possibility that his heart has indeed changed. But it is a changed heart paired with a mind that continues to know its way around the shady dealings of the Harlan underworld very intimately.
Another complicating factor is the Christian doctrine that no person—except Jesus—is fully righteous. Even the person who has turned away from the life of the flesh will stumble at times. Those who consider themselves to be on the path to salvation struggle at times with temptation, with their faith, and to accept difficult events in the world and in their own lives. They continue to have imperfect personalities that include traits that can lead them to bear bad fruit from time to time. If these features are present in everyone, saved or not, what distinguishes the saved from the lost? To answer this question, let’s return to Boyd as an example.
I believe that Boyd Crowder did indeed change as a result of his experience. I believe this despite the fact that Boyd wavers in his faith, wondering aloud whether he has just been talking to himself in his prayers. I believe this despite the fact that Boyd eventually embraces an identity as a man who is meant to work in organized crime. I believe this despite the fact that Boyd eventually renounces his faith, having decided that he was fooling himself all along. And I believe this despite the fact that the main characteristic that convinces me that Boyd has changed involves the absence of one of Paul’s fruits of the Spirit, peace. Given all of these reasons against taking Boyd’s transformation seriously, why do I say he was genuinely changed?
Old Boyd and New Boyd
The difference between the old Boyd and the new Boyd is found in struggle. The old Boyd was cold-hearted and unconcerned with any aspect of his actions except strategic payoff. Even the fanatical Boyd of the meth lab incident shows an emotional detachment from his actions. And though the new Boyd does not leave the ways of the criminal behind completely, the more he wrestles with his faith, the more he refuses to use his street smarts with malicious intent. Even as he sinks back into the world of crime he inhabited before, he becomes less hardened. By the time Boyd renounces his new faith, he has come much closer to genuinely exemplifying the compassion and good will that form its foundation. The old Boyd Crowder and new Boyd Crowder both wield weapons and commit crimes, but the unconcerned sociopath has been replaced by a man with a heart. And it is only upon seeing Boyd genuinely struggling that Raylan finally concedes that Boyd really has changed. Like Jacob in the Old Testament, Boyd has become Israel, he who struggles with God.
The biggest reason to doubt this assessment is Boyd’s eventual abandonment of his faith. For Boyd, the key test of faith occurs when his father murders Boyd’s entire congregation. Boyd fails to bear this loss with the patience of Job. Instead, he gives in to the thought that everything he has been doing has turned out to be meaningless, decides he has been fooling himself into thinking God had chosen him, and begins to sink back into his life of crime. Eventually, we find him once again thinking in purely strategic terms about the situations he is in. His motives have improved—rather than wanting to control criminal activities for the sake of the money and power involved, he now wants to be able to retire and raise a family outside of the world of crime. But he has returned to his old willingness to sacrifice others for the sake of his goals. For example, he has no qualms about attempting to kill Ellen May, a prostitute whose main flaw from Boyd’s point of view is simply that she has information that could damage Boyd and can’t be trusted to keep her mouth shut.
A Lasting Effect
One might well wonder whether a genuine sign from God would have had a more lasting effect. Paul didn’t go back to being Saul the persecutor, after all. In response to this, I want to point out two things. First, even after his abandonment of his faith is complete, he still seems to be a softer Boyd. He can put aside empathy for the sake of business, but he is no longer simply cold and unfeeling. Secondly, and more importantly: just because a person eventually loses their faith, that doesn’t mean they never had it in the first place. The language of being “born again” is problematic in this way as well, for it suggests that from the moment of transformation, the person’s status as saved is secure. In actuality, faith must be maintained. Faith is a journey, not a destination, and anyone who fails to be vigilant in cultivating it may become lost again. I believe that is what happens to Boyd as the series progresses.
Ultimately, I believe Boyd passes William James’s test. The fact that his transformation is incomplete and impermanent does not show that he was still the same old Boyd all along. It just shows that he’s human. He has given us reasons to treat his sign from God as legitimate. Granted, the mixed results we get from Boyd reveal some limitations of James’s method to give us precise and definite answers. But pragmatists love to turn questions around on their readers. And James would surely want each of us to consider what we reveal about our own characters by the judgments we pass on Boyd. When we consider people like Boyd, shouldn’t we keep our hearts and minds open to the possibility that they truly have changed, rather than dwelling on the things that seem the same? Isn’t the best policy a guarded form of hope, a hope that communes with the born-again person’s spirit of overcoming dark pasts and finding a better way?