Drawing the Line: Notes on Persecution and Tolerance

Jean-Léon Gérôme / The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer

I've been thinking about tolerance a lot recently (see last post), and I'm planning to do a post that really grapples with the idea of the limits of tolerance. We all agree that some things, like murder and theft, shouldn't be tolerated, so how can we find the line between what should be tolerated and what shouldn't? But doing that topic justice is going to take some serious background reading and head-scratching, so today I'm going to write about something easier.

I'm guessing that if many conservative Christians read my last post, which celebrated tolerance, some of them will be thinking something like, "Yeah, well, you certainly spend a lot of time attacking conservative Christian ideas like creationism and support for traditional marriage. Just how tolerant are you, buster?"

It's a reasonable question, and one that deserves an answer. It seems to me that one of the biggest drivers of this country's current political divisiveness is misunderstanding. People don't understand what those on the other side really think. They see their opponents as more extreme, and less well-meaning, than they actually are. Some conservatives seem to think liberal democrats are really Leninists, and some liberals seem think conservatives are really fascists. I'm pretty sure they're both wrong. So, I think it would help if people on each side took the time to explain what they actually DO think. Maybe it would ease the other side's mind?

This is especially true when it comes to religion. Religious conservatives and secular liberals like me have a terrible time understanding each other, because we really do have strikingly different views of...well...reality. Why are we here; where did the universe come from and how old is it, why do good and bad things happen, what happens after we die, what are the foundations of morality--we don't just have different answers to these questions; we may even have entirely different ways of conceptualizing them.

I think this misunderstanding is part of the reason some Christians think secular liberals are out to get them.You often hear Christian conservatives in this country claim they're being persecuted. People like me, admittedly, find this laughable. After all, Christian conservatives are still one of the most powerful groups in this country. Self-proclaimed evangelical, born-again Christians regularly become governors, senators, and presidents. Self-proclaimed atheists and secular humanists do not. If you want to see real persecution of Christians, look at what ISIS is doing right now to Christian communities in Iraq and Syria. That's the real deal, and it's horrifying. Telling Christian teachers they can't lead their public school classrooms in prayer is not in the same ballpark. It's not even persecution at all.

Still, the secular side occasionally goes too far. A while back, a college professor caused a furor by telling students to write Jesus' name on a piece of paper and then stomp on it. If that's what really happened (and accounts differ) then yes, that professor would have been totally out of line. Recently, the CEO of Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox, resigned after it came out that he was against gay marriage. I haven't looked into exactly what happened, but he does seem to have been the victim of a bit of a witchhunt. After all, it's still perfectly legal to be against gay marriage in this country, and I hope it always will be--even though I'm a vocal supporter of gay marriage.

Despite these lapses in tolerance from the liberal side, it's clear that some Christians have an exaggerated view of how far liberals would (or could) go in opposing them. For example, a movie just came out called--you guessed it--Persecuted. It played here, and I thought about going just to see how the other side thinks, but I couldn't quite force myself to give them my ten bucks. The premise is that Congress tries to pass a law called the Faith and Fairness act, which forces religious broadcasters to give other religious views equal time. A minister refuses to support it, and the next thing you know, he's been framed for murder and is on the run. Former presidential candidate Fred Thompson is in the movie, as is Fox news anchor Greta Van Susteren, so this is not a fringe effort. Apparently many conservative Christians really think such a bill could pass in this country.

This tells me they think secular liberals like me are a touch more militant, and a whole lot more powerful, than we really are. That's why I think we should explain what we really do think and want, because we're apparently not making our intentions clear. I can't speak for others, but I can say explain my own views.

So here goes. First, I would never support a measure forcing religious people to support religions besides their own. I wouldn't support a law requiring ministers who object to gay marriage to marry gay people. But I do support laws that prevent businesses from discriminating against gays, for the same reason I support laws preventing discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, etc. Yes, I know there are difficult lines to be drawn between not forcing clergy to marry gay couples and disallowing discrimination in businesses, but that's where I think the line should go.

The point is, I do think there's a line, and we shouldn't go past it. What most people in this country don't realize about their opponents in the culture wars is that they do have lines beyond which they won't go. At least, I hope they do. That's one of my lines, and I would love to hear my conservative Christian friends tell me where their lines lie over on the other side.

As for things like public prayer, I think school kids should be allowed to pray if they want to as long as it's not disruptive. That's what they law says they can do. People who say kids aren't allowed to pray in schools are misinformed at best and lying at worst. I think teachers should be allowed to pray on their own time, but not lead students in prayer. Public schools shouldn't support any religion in any official capacity. There should be no prayers at graduation or football games, because you can't assume all the kids in that school are Christians, or even religious at all. Government entities like public schools should be officially neutral when it comes to religion, because it's everybody's government--not just the Christians'.

Finally, I don't think telling public school employees they can't promote religion while they are at school or acting in an official capacity amounts to persecution. If we started telling them they couldn't promote religion on their own time, or attend a certain church, or write editorials supporting conservative values, then THAT would be persecution.

Some of the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, have declared that parents who tell children they were born sinners, deserve to go to hell, and will in fact go there if they don't believe certain things, are basically engaging in psychological abuse. They've even questioned whether society should allow it. While I dislike the idea that parents tell their kids these things, I would never support laws telling them they can't. That would be going much too far, and besides, people would rise up with guns blazing if the law ever passed. It's not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen. I still stand by my right to question parents telling their young children their Jewish or Hindu friends are going to hell. But I'll also (force myself to) stand by their right to do so. As the saying commonly attributed to Voltaire (but really said by Evelyn Beatrice Hall) goes: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

I could go on, but this post is long enough, and it's not like my personal views are important, anyway. It's just that, once again, I think the misunderstandings in this country would be alleviated a little if people would explain what they really do think. That's all I'm trying to do here. To return to the question at the beginning of this post, am I intolerant of conservative Christianity and fundamentalism in other religions? It depends on what you mean by "intolerant." If speaking out against things like young earth creationism and official school prayer is intolerance, then I guess I'm intolerant. But that's an acceptable level of intolerance in a free and pluralistic society, just as it's acceptable for Christians to speak out against my beliefs.

It's also an acceptable level of intolerance to tell teachers they can't proselytize in the classroom. But here's the thing: this doesn't just go for Christian teachers. Atheist teachers shouldn't be allowed to promote atheism, and Muslim teachers shouldn't be allowed to promote Islam. Not in the classroom. If they want to do it on their own time, that's their business.

It's really all about fairness, and deciding where we should draw the line between what should and shouldn't be tolerated. My point here is that most people on both sides of this country's cultural/political divide do think there should be lines. I don't ever want to tell Christians, or members of any other religion, that they can't think, act, and worship according to their conscience (as long as they're not imposing on the rights of others). I hope most conservative Christians don't ever want to tell me I can't think and act according to my own conscience, or tell me that, as a secular agnostic, I'm not as much an American citizen as they are. I think they have lines of their own. Despite my fears when I hear people like Rick Santorum and James Dobson speak, I don't think most conservative Christians really want to turn this country into a Christian theocracy.

Well, I hope they don't. But it would ease my mind if they came out and said so, just as I hope some of the things I've said ease their minds. So how about it, friends on the other side: where are do you draw your lines?

Aiming for the Low Slopes: Thoughts On Tolerance and Love

I'm breaking my vows. I told myself I wouldn't write about religion for two months. So far, I've made it three weeks. And yet, here I am again. You just can't read the news the last few weeks and not think about religion. And what I think about, I can't help writing about.

But I'm still going to try to take a more charitable approach to religion; focusing more on its positive than negative side. In this post, I'm going to talk about what might be the most positive aspect of religion: the ideal of compassionate love. The Greeks and Greek-speaking early Christians called this kind of love agape, as distinct from eros (erotic or romantic love), philia (brotherly love), and storge (familial affection). Buddhists called it metta in the first Buddhist texts. Ancient Hebrews called it chesed or ahab. Whatever you call it, it's a central thread in many of the world's religions. Compassionate love is very highly regarded...if a bit more in word than it deed.

Some religions (at least in some scriptures and interpretations) extend love even to foreigners and people of other religions. But you wouldn't know it from watching the news lately. The last few weeks haven't been a great showcase for universal love, especially among the big three monotheistic religions. In the United States, desperate refugee children on the border have been met with compassion by some Christians, but with callousness and xenophobia by others. In the Middle East, Jews and Muslims are once again at war in Gaza, while the Sunni extremists of ISIS are rampaging across Iraq and Syria, killing other Muslims, as well as Christians and other religious minorities, while destroying ancient holy sites.

The failures of love I'm seeing in the news, and my resolution to see religion in a more charitable light, had me reading about love in the different religions. I was thinking I might blog about how love has been seen in various religions, but then I saw that ISIS had destroyed the ancient Tomb of Jonah, a site holy to Jews, Christians, and most Muslims. The tomb was part of the ruins of the ancient city of Ninevah, capital of the Assyrian Empire, which once scattered the 10 lost tribes of Israel. It was around 2800 years old. What's striking to me (beyond the sheer, senseless tragedy of the act) is that Jonah's Tomb was in an area that had been under Islamic control since the 600's AD. This shows just how extreme ISIS is in Islamic history. After all, the tomb lasted over 1300 years under the control of Muslims, most of whom saw it as a holy place and wouldn't have dreamed of harming it.

And now it's gone. And not primarily because of a failure of love, though it certainly was that. This was a failure of something far less lofty: simple tolerance for points of view besides your own. This kind of extreme intolerance is something rather new in Islam. For its first few hundred years, Islam was a fairly tolerant religion---at least for Christians and Jews, who were far better off in Muslim lands than Jews and Muslims were in Christendom. But things have changed, and now some (by no means all) Muslim sects are as intolerant as anyone in history. It's very scary.

All this made me think, "Why focus on something as lofty as love of strangers, when humans haven't even mastered basic tolerance yet? Isn't that like trying to sprint before you can walk?" And then I realized I had arrived at a point of view my Dad has stressed for years. He even wrote about it in a comment on another post in this blog, so I'll let him explain:

Much is made of “love” in religious writings. You know, “Love thy neighbor” and the like. I believe that such passages, if they really came from a deity, were surely misinterpreted. How could an all-knowing creator expect us sorry humans to simply “will” ourselves to love? Love is something that comes to us--overcomes us. 

I suspect the correct translation is more like "tolerance". Tolerance, unlike love, is a choice--something we can force ourselves to employ. With effort we can muster up the self-discipline to tolerate people and ideas which we find objectionable. Once tolerance is achieved; empathy, familiarity, and even acceptance can take hold. These transformations may not always lead to love rushing in. But if we humans could just get to empathy what a wonderful world it would be.

Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to me. In fact, I never quite realized how much sense it makes until this past week. Yes, loving our neighbors is a worthy goal--perhaps even the worthiest goal--but maybe we should start by aiming our sights a little lower. Maybe we should focus more on tolerating those who don't see the world the way we do? Maybe we need to master something basic--like not hating and killing those who aren't in our in-group--before we even think about trying to love them? Baby steps, you know? 

This in-group/out-group thing is the big issue, I think. I don't actually think the scriptures about love in various religions are mistranslations. They generally do translate as love, in the sense of feeling a kind of selfless compassion for other people. It's not that they aren't about love--it's the size of the group they're aimed at.  All too often, they're only talking about loving others in your own group. For example, when Jesus admonished his followers to "love your neighbor as yourself" he was echoing Leviticus 19:18, which says: "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself" (italics added). When Leviticus was written, "loving your neighbor" didn't mean just any neighbor. It only applied to your fellow Jews. Jesus took a more universal approach, and even spoke of loving one's enemies, but even he once referred to Gentiles as "dogs" (Mark 7 24-30), so it's debatable how universal his message really was. Some people think Paul was the real universalist, and I think they may be right. In any case, the point is that many religious verses on love may only be talking about loving a select group of people--a much more realistic goal than universal love, certainly, but not one that's very good at promoting peace on large scales.

Still, many religions should get credit for having scriptures that promote love, sometimes even universal love. The problem is that they may also have scriptures that celebrate exclusivity and the killing of outsiders. Similarly, most religions have scriptures promoting tolerance, but many also have scriptures promoting its opposite. So, the big question is not, "What do the scriptures really say?" They really say many different and often contradictory things. The big question is: which verses do you choose to follow? Most of the world's religions can be incredibly loving and tolerant, or incredibly hateful and intolerant. It just depends on what their adherents choose to focus on.

So what should people focus on? Obviously, I think they should focus on love and tolerance instead of their opposites. But I also suspect they should try focusing on tolerance more than love, for the same reason babies should focus more on crawling than running. Universal tolerance is just so much more achievable than universal love. And we haven't even achieved that yet. Not by a long shot.

Edward Compton  Matterhorn

I've started thinking of universal love as being like the Matterhorn. Yes, people get to the top of it, but it's really, really hard, and not for beginners. Luckily, there are lower, more accessible slopes; things like tolerance, forgiveness, following the Golden Rule, and so on. It doesn't make sense to tell people to aim for the peak when so many of them haven't even made it out of the swamps of hate and violence yet. Maybe it would be more fruitful to focus on getting them up to those lower slopes of tolerance?

Maybe. But I know some people will be skeptical about the whole idea of tolerance. I've written all this as though it were universally accepted that tolerance is good, and obviously, that's not accepted at all. Nobody is absolutely tolerant, and that's a good thing, because things, like murder, rape, and theft shouldn't be tolerated. Tolerance has a strangely paradoxical way of undermining itself when taken to its extreme. Should we be so tolerant as to say, "Yes, ISIS tore down that ancient, historic tomb, and is killing people as we speak, but that is seen as appropriate in the context of their particular culture, and who are we to say they're wrong?" What good is that much tolerance, if it lets the intolerant run wild? Philosophers call this the Paradox of Tolerance, and it truly is a paradox. At some point, true tolerance requires an intolerance of intolerance. Strange but true.

So, even if tolerance is an easier goal than love, there are still some big questions remaining. I'll grapple with those in another post. But for now, I'll go back to my Dad's thoughts on tolerance and its limits, because he (and Ogden Nash) said it better than I can.

Of course there are aspects of the human condition which deserve no tolerance. Discernment is the key, and that's the challenge to us all. 

Ogden Nash exposed my own self-doubts in that regard:

“Sometimes with secret pride I sigh. To think how tolerant I am; Then wonder which is really mine: tolerance or a rubber spine?”

Liberal Arrogance, Conservative Arrogance

A while back I got into a discussion that got a little more heated than I meant for it to. We've all been there, right? But this time I had a realization that might help me keep future discussions from getting quite so hot. I was looking back over my friend's comments, and realized: Wait a minute...she thinks I'm totally arrogant! Which was weird, because her point of view (in this particular case) seemed arrogant to me. What if neither one of us was trying to be arrogant? Maybe this was yet another way communication breaks down between people with very different worldviews?

In this case, the discussion was about religion, but let me hasten to say I don't think this kind of miscommunication is limited to religion. (That's why I'm writing this post--I'm taking a break from writing about religion, but this post is intended as a meditation on miscommunication, not religion.) I'm thinking this can happen any time you have a conservative traditionalist, like my friend, talking to a liberal non-traditionalist like me. In fact, as I realized when I went to Google Images and typed "arrogance", liberals and conservatives in general tend to see each other as insufferably arrogant. It's certainly true for me. I always thought George W. Bush was so smug--so absolutely sure his worldview was right--I could barely look at him (though I didn't feel that way about his dad). But what's funny is, I've realized conservatives see Obama the way I saw Bush. That's amazing to me because, while I don't always agree with Obama, but he's never struck me as smug. I don't look at his face and see a smirk. Did conservatives not see a perpetual smirk on Bush's face? As hard as it is for me to believe, no, they probably didn't.

Anyway, for the purpose of this post, I'm going to focus on one aspect of the conservative/liberal divide: traditionalism vs non-traditionalism. In particular, I want to focus on how each side sees arrogance when the conservative is defending a traditional value or belief, and the non-traditionalist is questioning it.

Here's my guess about what the traditionalist is thinking: she's thinking it's arrogant to set aside hundreds or thousands of years of tradition and go off in a new, untested direction. She's thinking, "Who are you to question values that have been foundations of our society for generations? They've been tried and tested for ages, and believed by many people smarter than you. If we ditch them, who knows what the consequences might be? How arrogant of you to think you know better."

As I said, that's a guess, and I may be wrong. As for what the non-traditionalist thinks, I don't have to guess, because I AM one. I'm thinking: "Sure, that's the traditional view in this part of the world, but what makes you so sure it's right? This society is just one of thousands that have ever existed on Earth, and if you grew up as a traditionalist in one of the other ones, you would probably think their way of doing things was right. Just because people grow up thinking something is true doesn't mean it is. Millions of people once grew up thinking the Sun went around the Earth, and that didn't make them right. Out of all possible beliefs, how arrogant of you to think yours, however widespread and traditional in this part of the world, are the right ones."

Obviously, I have more sympathy for my point of view (otherwise I would have switched to a different one). However, if you think about it, both sides have a point. And here's the thing: neither side is necessarily trying to be arrogant. They're just looking at things from utterly different points of view. You might say the traditionalist is taking a deep view, while the non-traditionalist is taking a broad view. Both ways of thinking can have merit.

So how can they find common ground? I'm thinking a few things need to happen. First, each side should probably realize they're going to seem arrogant to the other side. This may come as a surprise--I was surprised to realize how arrogant I seemed to my friend. Second, they should both try to sound as polite and un-smug as possible, because once somebody decides you're smug or arrogant, they're going to stop listening to you.* What's the point of having a discussion if neither side is listening? Third, they both need to cut the other side some slack, and realize they're probably not as arrogant as they sound...or at least, they aren't being arrogant on purpose.** They just have a totally different perspective about what's arrogant.

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* Here's something that may just apply to the non-traditionalists--we need to realize how much traditionalists have emotionally invested in their values and believes--especially if they're religious. When I hear someone make a claim about something deeply traditional and emotionally-charged, such as religion, I just think of it as one hypothesis among many others, to be questioned and--if found wanting--rejected. I don't feel the emotions associated with it, as they do. I forget that debating such questions isn't like debating things involving less emotional investment, like whether Star Wars is a better series than Star Trek (actually, some people get pretty worked up about that, too.) I've sometimes found myself surprised when I question one of these beliefs, and people react as though I were cursing, or insulting their mother, or otherwise being rude, when I had thought I was being pretty polite. What I forget is that the very act of questioning some beliefs seems rude, and perhaps even blasphemous, to people who passionately believe them, no matter how politely you phrase it.

** Unless they are, in fact, an arrogant SOB who can't imagine being wrong about anything. That can happen, of course, in which case...why talk to them at all?