Joseph Duncan has been arrested for kidnapping two children, eight-year-old Dylan and his nine-year-old sister, Shasta. He is also charged with the murder of Dylan, Dylan’s mother, and her boyfriend. Fox News has flashed the same haunted picture of Joseph Duncan on the screen multiple times across the last number of weeks. As I have looked into those eyes I have wondered what goes on in Joseph Duncan’s mind.

Interestingly, he has at least somewhat exposed his psyche to public view by maintaining a blog, which he posted to right up to the time of the kidnappings. One of his last messages gives us some insight into what went wrong. In part, he said this:

“I am scared, alone, and confused, and my reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society. My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die. As for “Happy Joe” [his name for a temporary persona that he adopted when he believed that he might go straight], well he was just a dream. The bogeyman [his name for the devil] was alive and happy long before Happy Joe.

“I was in prison for over 18 years, since the age of 17. As an adult all I knew was the oppression of incarceration. All those years I dreamed of getting out…And getting even. Instead, I got out and I got even, but did not get caught. So, I got even again, and again did not get caught….

“Well that was when the “Happy Joe” dream started. I met a bunch of really great people, the kind of people I didn’t even know existed, but here they were, bunches of them, my neighbors, my landlords, my professors, my coworkers, and they were all good people, who were willing to give me a chance despite my past.

“So, I tried to make it work. But the problem was those demons. The ones who ‘got even’ for me.”

The last phrase conveys that Joseph Duncan lost hope of changing. He was convinced that the demons have ultimate control. He alludes to this in another of his postings where he asks, Who’s Gonna Save Me? He answers his own question by saying, “When you can see the strings that control your life, you tend to wonder.” Duncan saw himself as a puppet controlled by strings with no power to break them. This hopelessness led to his capitulation to the forces of evil within him.

The evangelical community has adopted something of the same victim mentality. We are taught that we are victims of emotions that have been stored within us, of parental failure, of our biological makeup, and our circumstances. We label a host of temptations as addictions and diseases, conveying that they have control of us. In fact, we tend to label every temptation as an addiction, thus absolving ourselves of the responsibility of allowing it to control us. If food is an addiction, then overeating is not a sin, but a disease, and I am not responsible.

In today’s American evangelical world, to suggest that the power of Christ enables us to break the strings is to risk being labeled a Neanderthal. Informed people recognize that when believers succumb to such addictions it is not their fault. To suggest otherwise is judgmentalism at its worst. It is just another case of “shooting our wounded.”

Not only is this victim mentality unbiblical because Christ has empowered us through His Spirit to be overcomers, but this perspective is cruel because it robs the individual of hope. Seeing ourselves as having the resources to overcome sin can be uncomfortable because it makes us responsible, but with that responsibility comes the wonderful hope of living as free people, as overcomers. Had Joseph Duncan understood the power available through Christ to break the strings that controlled him, he and his victims could have been spared. Likewise, many evangelicals might be enjoying freedom and triumph rather than slavery and defeat if they were not taught to see themselves as victims but instead as victors in Christ.