The Wisdom of "Wicked"

"There are precious few at ease | with moral ambiguities."

The prophet Isaiah exclaimed, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil!” (Isaiah 5:20 KJV)

As in his time, so in ours too, human societies do not always apply moral categories accurately.

Wicked, the new movie-musical, directed by John Chu, is a story about how society comes to misapply moral categories. Based on Stephen Schwarz’s hit musical, Wicked reveals the social and political machinations behind our use of the labels “good” and “wicked.”

Moral praise, we learn, is apportioned on the basis of popularity, not praiseworthiness: “Popular! / It's all about popular / It's not about aptitude / It's the way you're viewed / So it's very shrewd to be / very, very popular like me!”

Self-certain moral judgment can revel in its certainty: “The good man scorns the wicked! Through their lives our children learn | what we miss when we misbehave.”

Wicked offers the backstory behind one of cinema’s most well-known villains, the Wicked Witch of the West.

And in so doing, it offers a modern parable about society’s misapplication of moral categories.

We should consider the wisdom of Wicked.

Post-Christian Morality?

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But not everyone agrees.

Some Christians and conservatives look at the trend of humanizing villains and lament.

Brett McCracken did this last week for The Gospel Coalition, in his review, “The Post-Christian Morality of Wicked”:

One of the most noteworthy theological trends in 21st-century pop culture has been the rehabilitation of the “villain.” From Cruella to Maleficent to the Joker and more, iconic villains are now routinely given spinoff movies and sympathetic backstories that complicate our categories of good and evil. This has dovetailed with the rise of the “trauma plot” and a narrative fixation on how destructive choices (let’s just call it “sin”) can be explained by past trauma.

Part of why Hollywood has gravitated toward this narrative is simply that it makes good (and financially lucrative) drama. Giving villains origin stories is intriguing. But I think this trend’s rise is also connected to the post-Christian culture’s confusion about sin and evil, morality and justice. In this world, the theological word “sin” has been replaced by the psychological word “brokenness,” and transcendent concepts of justice have been replaced by oppressor-oppressed power dynamics.

Wicked, McCracken argues, joins with other Hollywood hits in creating “confusion about sin and evil.” After all, in the standard fairy-tale universe, the wicked witch is the embodiment of evil, the good fairy the embodiment of good. Wicked turns this moral framework on its head.

Likewise, much as journalists dig up the backstory for criminals, uncovering trauma and brokenness, stories like Wicked deprive us of our moral clarity concerning evil. This is a contributor to moral relativism and confusion - is it not?

The Banality of Wickedness

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The answer is, “No.”

If you love The Wizard of Oz, and don’t want to see it tampered with, I do not begrudge you this view.

However, the moral and plot twists of Wicked contain a kind of wisdom from which I have benefited since I first performed the score of Wicked as a high-school orchestral trumpeter.

The first thing to say in Wicked’s defense is this: “Humanizing villains” is an act of moral maturity.

After World War II, Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil,” how the evils of Nazism were perpetrated by ordinary Germans just doing their jobs: Befehl ist befehl. In other words, the greatest of evils are not perpetrated all or only by figures of demonic significance. Most of evil is accomplished by ordinary human beings impelled by ordinary human motivations.

The same goes for the villains themselves. Every villain does have a backstory. Human evil is not Manichaean. It is perpetrated by humans, created in the image of God, but turned aside from the highest good by lesser goods.

As Paul Marchbanks recently wrote in Christianity Today, “No matter how flawed the person in question, remembering the call to love our enemies (Matt. 5:44), those who also bear the divine imprint (Gen. 1:27), should prevent us from targeting pesky people as if they were the Devil incarnate.” (Marchbanks article, “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Misunderstood” is a powerful response to McCracken’s judgment.)

The Social Misapplication of Moral Categories

But Wicked is not even primarily about humanizing evil. Wicked isn’t about how Elphaba (the witch’s name) became wicked. It’s about how society came to call her - a normal, well-intentioned, and even morally courageous individual - “wicked.”

Elphaba, the “Wicked Witch of the West,” has a backstory that explains her character, but she isn’t wicked. She is a mix of righteous indignation, aspiration, courage, and naïveté, like so many of us.

The banality of evil appears in people like Glinda, the Wizard, and the chorus - mob - all of whom think they are on the side of good.

Instead, Wicked is a tale about the social misapplication of moral categories. Wicked is a tale about how societies come to call evil “good” and good “evil.”

How? At some level there are political machinations. The Wizard hopes to unify the people behind a common enemy, so he takes aim at the talking animals and their removal from society.

At another level there are popularity contests. Glinda wants to be the most popular person, and this doesn’t only mean being thought beautiful or charming. It also means being thought good. The height of her achievement is to be declared “‘Glinda the Good’ | officially” (“Thank Goodness”).

Likewise, the Wizard of Oz wants to be thought “wonderful,” not to mention “great and powerful,” this in spite of him just being an ordinary men behind the curtain. A (so far as we know) childless man, he also “always longed to be a father” and so acts in ways to elicit the people’s love.

The result of this is a crusade against Elphaba, the one person with moral clarity about the evil of caging and persecuting the talking animals. In spite of their recent or ongoing love for her, The Wizard and Glinda cast her as “wicked” in order to be perceived themselves as good.

What if every moral crusade has this kind of moral ambiguity?

The Advent of Moral Ambiguity

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It would be odd for Christians to think that good and evil always come in costume; we can always just tell what is good and who is evil. In Wicked, there is no attempt to excuse the wickedness of the Wicked witch of the West. Elphaba isn't wicked. She is simply labeled as such for being out of step with the moral fashions of the moment.

Elphaba is canceled by a moralistic mob. (“March of the Witch Hunters.”)

But isn’t that what happens to so many? In a religiously conservative context, gay people may be cast as wicked. The story of Wicked could be a lifeline to a young gay man at a Catholic college, as Stephen Schwarz described in one interview.

In a politically liberal context, Christians may be cast as wicked. The story of Wicked could resonate with a young, straight, white Christian man who is persuaded, against the zeitgeist, that his faith is not merely bigotry.

In The Republic, Socrates argued that the ultimate test of moral virtue was to do justice while being thought unjust. After all, the just are not necessarily concerned with popularity or fame. But they are, to some degree, concerned with being thought just.

To persevere in righteousness even while being called “wicked,” that is the height of moral heroism.

The hero of philosophy, Socrates himself, suffered this fate. And he was succeeded by the hero and exemplar of our faith, Christ himself.

The Christ-figure is a key archetype of Western literature. And this figure resonates with people across ideological and identity divides.

A story like Wicked can, therefore, be a social antidote. Our society is polarized along lines where each side considers goodness and wickedness to be easily identifiable. I’ve seen criticism of Harry Potter, for instance, for leading a generation to think that evil always comes cloaked in a black, hooded garment. It’s a trip to see people then criticize Wicked for offering a corrective.

Christian faith often wrongly leads us to think that, under the banner of moral clarity, wickedness is obvious and uncomplicated. But a growing number of people, Christian and non-Christian, are coming to recognize that it is not so.

There are right and wrong actions.

But moral ambiguity comes with our judgments about “Good” and “Wicked” people.

The greatest wickedness can be performed by people who strongly and sincerely believe they are doing good. Each of us must consider that our own tribe or mob is engaging in exactly this type of activity. The chief target of Jesus’ ministry was the Pharisees, who had exactly this problem. In their concern for stark moral clarity, they called “wicked” the Son of God.”

On the other hand, acts of “braverism” often involve the risk of being labeled as morally odious. Sometimes the greatest acts of piety have the feel of transgression. Sometimes we must do what others condemn as “wicked” in order truly to be on “the right side of history.”

“And Goodness Knows, We Know What Goodness Is”

A friend of mine, in fact, podcast guest David Frank, once said that many people want to believe in black-and-white morality. They do not believe in moral grayness. By contrast, he said that he believed in the gray, but thought that it was composed of very fine black and white pixels.

In the same way, moral complexity is not a step on the path to moral relativism. As the Wizard says in act 2 of Wicked, “There are precious few at ease with moral ambiguities | So we act as though they don't exist.”

To acknowledge complexity is not to abandon morality; it’s a willingness to deal with moral reality.

I write this as one who has felt the desire for moral clarity. I have been impatient with moral ambiguity and complexity.

Yet I have now come to see recognition of ambiguity as a crucial step in discipleship, if not a step every believer is ready to take. And Stephen Schwarz’s masterpiece Wicked has played a role in my coming to this recognition.

In Wicked’s opening and closing number, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” Glinda trills, “And goodness knows, we know what goodness is.” Would that she had questioned her moral certainties.

Perhaps Wicked can help us question ours.