Copy That!
Copy That! (35)
Suzanne Ross explores how our mimetic nature shapes daily life.
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Written by Suzanne Ross
I recently read an article by Ross Douthat that summarizes the thesis of his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and by the time I finished reading it I felt like the robot from the old TV show, Lost in Space, waving my arms wildly and shouting, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” As much as I usually admire and agree with Mr. Douthat’s columns, in this case I think he has completely misunderstood the cause of our current political polarization and the cure he offers is not only guilty of romanticizing the past but of promoting a dangerous religious unity.
Mr. Douthat says that since the 1950s we have witnessed a weakening of mainline Protestant denominations and an explosion of “more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith.” In his article he explains that our tolerance of religious diversity has led to a loss of a shared Christian center that we used to rely on to bridge political differences and “call people out of private loyalties to public purposes… inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, [and] inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether.” Our failure to achieve political unity to address national issues, he claims, is a result of weakened religious institutions and a resulting combative religious environment.
He points to the civil rights era as a time when religion served as a unifying force. In the 1960s, our religious institutions were still strong enough to unite people across the political spectrum, so much so that leaders of black churches were able to “shame many Southerners into accepting desegregation.” Douthat longs for that time when “the institutional churches proved their worth as both sources of moral authority and hubs of activism, and where religious witness helped forge a genuine national consensus on an issue where even presidents feared to tread.”
I do agree that the civil rights movement offers a masterful example of using faith to inspire reform, but Martin Luther King, Jr. did not accomplish that by appealing to the existing shared religious center. That shared religious center was an obstacle he had to overcome. [Cue robot arms waving wildly.] Segregation was preached as God’s will from pulpits across religious denominations and political divides. King could not appeal to the shared belief at the core of those churches, because that belief was racist at its core. And more problematic still, the racist God was also a violent God in whose name one could fire bomb black churches, murder black civil rights workers, and lynch black men as the main event at a summer picnic. These atrocities were all committed by good Christian folk who believed God was on their side and that they were acting in God’s name. Douthat may try to argue that this does not represent the essential core of Christian faith, but back then he would have a fist fight on his hands.
Martin Luther King’s success came from challenging that racist and violent faith by calling on Americans to believe in a different kind of God, a God whose mercy and love could not abide violence of any kind. Not even violence in the name of good, which is actually the only kind of violence there is. To challenge our faith in good violence, King refused to use violence as a weapon. He refused to hate his enemies or exclude them from God’s kingdom, even as they were excluding him.
The reason we are so polarized today is not that we have lost a common religious understanding or access to a shared value system, but exactly the opposite. We are at loggerheads with each other because we all believe in the God Dr. King was trying to overcome: the violent deity who is on our side and against our enemies. Despite appearances, we do have a shared national religion, and it is one that cannot tolerate any disagreement. If I am on God’s side and you are against me, I have no choice but to defeat you in God’s name. In this religion, the world is black and white, good and evil, and all differences must be violently eliminated.
What Mr. Douthat fails to see is that in our current climate, we have only the appearance of religious diversity. What has proliferated is a profusion of religious groups who all believe in the same violent God and who are trying desperately to distinguish themselves from one another by dividing the world up into good and evil. Not surprisingly, they find themselves and only themselves among the good. They have created a world of false differences to avoid seeing that nothing real distinguishes them from their so-called enemies.
Dr. King recognized that dividing the world into good and evil would only generate more division and more violence. He offered us a new kind of unity that would allow differences to flourish. Racial, cultural and religious differences would not be erased in this unity, they would become more fully alive, making the world more diverse, complex, and interesting. This other faith is what Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement offered us – a faith in a God of love and mercy who is capable of loving even those we call our enemies. The end of political polarization will not come about by a reunification of our religious center if we are gathering around a God of violence. Such an occurrence would be disastrous for us and for the world. It is what totalitarianism looks like. For a different kind of unity, I offer Dr. King’s own description of the crowd that gathered for the historic 1963 march on Washington, D.C.:
The enormous multitude… was an army without guns, but not without strength... It was white, and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, 222)
Christianity is the religion of a repentant lynch mob. To follow Jesus is to take our victim as our king and to never forget how dangerous the wrong kind of unity can be.
Please Strengthen My Non-Belief: A Prayer for Holy Week
Written by Suzanne Ross
Do you believe in violence? I don’t intend this to be a glib question with a simple answer. Rather, I hope it will evoke the complexity surrounding our decisions as individuals, groups and nations about whether or not to employ the power of violence to achieve peace. I’d like to briefly flesh out that complexity by putting the present day situation in Syria in conversation with the Gospels. It is Holy Week after all, when Christians retell the story of the use of state power to execute an innocent man known as the Prince of Peace.
At the beginning of Holy Week we find the road into Jerusalem teeming with pilgrims heading into town for the Passover festival. The road as well as the Temple itself was under tight surveillance by Roman troops who were looking for any excuse to execute a few pilgrims as an example of Roman power. I cannot help but think of the oppressed Jews of ancient Palestine when I read about the violence in Syria today. Then as now, people who feel oppressed and under the threat of violence must decide what they will do. To not decide, to do nothing at all, is to invite continued oppression. But whether or not they should resort to violence is no easy decision.
Some first century Jews believed that only armed rebellion would liberate them and eventually they did rebel. There was a war with Rome and in 70 C.E. Jerusalem was destroyed and the Temple burned to the ground. In the name of peace, patriotic and religious Jews violently rebelled against an Empire that was also claiming to be acting in the name of peace. Yet Jesus counseled his fellow Jews against believing in violence as a way to achieve peace. In word and deed, he witnessed to love and forgiveness, even unto death. His disciples must have wondered how the love and forgiveness of a troublesome minority at the far edges of the Empire would be greeted in Rome. Probably with derision, perhaps as an invitation to further oppression, for history offers too many examples that the refusal to use violence is perceived as weakness, as the mark of an easy prey. No doubt the Syrian rebels are faced with the same calculations.
In a New York Times article about the Syrian conflict, you can hear the echoes of the disciples’ choice between violence and forgiveness. The government of Syria is dominated by the Alawite sect of Islam. Sunnis feel threatened and have been subject to shelling and sniper attacks. A Sunni doctor from the town of Qusayr quit Syria’s ruling Baath Party to treat rebels and civilians injured in the attacks. One patient he treated later died and,
…as the doctor walked to visit the body laid out in a nearby mosque, he was asked if he worried that young Sunnis would take revenge on the Alawites. Monitors and news reports have cited evidence of revenge killings of [Alawite] security forces. “No,” he said as he trudged through a darkening peach orchard. “Our religion teaches us to forgive.” Beside him another Qusayr resident, Abu Khalil, disagreed. “Should we forgive until there are no Sunnis left alive?” he asked.
The questioner seems to think the answer is obvious, that forgiveness has its limits. Yet Jesus might ask in return, “Is it better to retaliate until none of you are left?”
As part of the comfort Jesus offers his disciples before his arrest and execution he says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives.” (John 14:27) If Jesus gives peace not as the world gives, not through violence, then how? René Girard says that Jesus left us with “a terrible choice: either believe in violence, or not; Christianity is non-belief.” It is a terrible choice, indeed, because the way of non-belief in violence is a path fraught with risk. The Prince of Peace himself, even as he whispered forgiveness of his executioners from the cross, was destroyed by the vengeful power of violence. Yet Christians profess not just the death but the resurrection, insisting that Jesus defeated the power of violence for all time.
Is the Christian belief in the power of forgiveness absurd? Is it more prudent and wise to believe in violence? There are no easy answers to these questions. But as we move into Holy Week I hope you can join me in a prayer about violence as Christians walk to the cross with the Prince of Peace: May God strengthen the world’s non-belief.
Good people across our nation are trying to find answers to the following questions: Was Trayvon Martin’s death a racially motivated murder or something else, an act of self-defense or a tragic accident? Is George Zimmerman a racist or something else, a decent man or emotionally ill? Is President Obama’s response measured and appropriate or something else, too timid a challenge to racism or too dismissive of concerns for safety and security? Is this incident unique or something else, a symptom of culture-wide racism, of too many guns in civilian hands or not enough?
Strident voices are shouting at each other from all sides, confident that they are in the right and that anyone who disagrees with them is willfully, undeniably wrong. As the conflict polarizes and we are forced to take sides, it becomes harder and harder to believe in the goodness of those taking opposing views. Here is the eerie thing about all this for me: it is sadly reminiscent of old, tired patterns of debating moral issues that go back to the Civil War. Let me explain.
When an issue is morally charged, good people take sides. That’s what’s happening here – the death of a young person from gun violence is a moral issue, and this death has become even more morally complicated by the charge of racism. Racist violence, unarguably a moral wrong, has a long history in this country: the violence of slavery, of white race riots and lynch mobs, and the institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. One of the tragedies of the Civil War, and there are many, is the way in which the North was able to hide from its own racism both before and after the war by shifting all the blame onto the South. Christian rhetoric from North and South provided cover. Pro-union sermons claimed God’s divine support for the union; pro-secession sermons claimed God’s divine support for secession. Each side believed they were fighting for God, liberty, patriotism and to claim their place as the true heirs to the Revolution. As Abraham Lincoln said, God cannot be for and against the same thing, so at a minimum one side is wrong. As if that were not enough of a minority position, Lincoln nearly became a minority of one when he dared to suggest that God’s purposes might be something neither side had yet imagined.
But wasn’t there a clear right side, an assuredly Godly side, when it came to slavery just as there must be a clear right side with Trayvon and George? Some must think so, especially the ones wearing the “I am Trayvon” t-shirts or speaking publicly in defense of George. But what seems clear at first often gets blurred on closer examination. Take slavery – talk about a clear moral issue! How could it be possible not to condemn the side that would fight to preserve it? The problem with framing the Civil War that way is that the Civil War was not about slavery. Look at that list of causes mentioned in the sermons – nothing about slavery there at all. It is a deafening silence that casts shame on our entire nation. The moral issue that divided the nation was the idea of the nation itself, a sacred cause that justified the killing and the dying. That we did kill and die in unprecedented numbers was taken as proof of our nation’s goodness. Bloodletting always creates hallowed ground. When the war ended and slavery was abolished – a clear moral good – we swept aside the shameful truth that slavery was made possible by a deep-seated racism in the North as well as the South. War erupted, raged and ended without Americans ever openly acknowledging and repenting of racism as a national moral failing. This misunderstanding at the heart of our national memory about the war continues to force the issue of racism underground.
And then it resurfaces in Florida and we take sides again thinking for sure we know what the moral issue is and for sure we are on the right side of it. But what if the real moral issue is something else? What if it has to do with the moral failure of thinking we are right? We all know that feeling of righteous rage, or moral indignation when we are sure we have the devil by the tail. Both sides of the Trayvon case are feeling it passionately right now. Maybe that night Trayvon and George were both feeling right, sure the other was wrong. I don’t know, and I don’t want to shift blame from a truly guilty person, especially in a murder case. I think that it is vitally important that the investigation proceed to determine why Trayvon was killed. But I raised the example of the Civil War because the bloodshed was largely due to everyone thinking they were right. Racism continues to rear its ugly head because we have persisted in refusing to share responsibility for what was and continues to be wrong with our nation. Shared responsibility means sharing being wrong, not forcing all the wrong on someone else. The insistence on being right and on accusing others of being wrong allows us to justify our own hatred and violence, the very thing we denounce in others.
As we deal with the tragedy of Trayvon’s death, perhaps we might step back from our accusations and self-righteousness to ask some difficult questions: Can I find the grace to listen to, maybe even to learn from, the ones I think are wrong? Can I give up my need to be right and be honest with myself about where I am wrong? Am I strong enough to gaze upon everyone who is suffering, even the ones whose suffering I have ignored or even celebrated? Do I care more about being right than I do about ending racism and making our communities safe for all our members? Can I seek the good in a spirit of forgiveness?
I’d like to leave you with the thought that the real obstacle to ending racism may be our need to take sides. It is 150 years overdue, but maybe we can find the grace to stop needing so desperately to be right so that we can embrace both Trayvon and George, an embrace that is generous and large enough to include the good and the wicked, the innocent and the guilty, the right and the wrong. Perhaps peace will have a chance if we can say together, “I am Trayvon and I am George.”
Peace Building Opportunity: If you’d like to learn how to give peace a chance in our schools, speak directly with Ted Wachtel on Friday, March 30 on our web radio show, Playing for Keeps. Ted is the president of the world's first graduate school devoted entirely to the teaching, research and dissemination of restorative practices.
Are you wondering what to make of all the God talk in today’s politics? It seems we can’t decide if we want God nosing around our political decisions and anointing candidates for us. Remember the dove that descended on Jesus at his baptism and the voice from heaven booming for all to hear, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased”? It’s as if some of today’s politicians think they have a dove floating over their heads and they can’t understand why they are the only ones who hear the divine endorsement: I’m God and I approved this message. Republican candidates in particular like to dally in this double-edged delusion: that (1) God takes sides in American politics and (2) is keeping his divine fingers crossed for your victory.
Of course, God will only root for you if your position is the right one. You have to be on the right side of every issue from economics to immigration. Stray across into the grey middle ground and God will join the crowd in calling you weak or wishy washy. Stray all the way to the wrong side and you might as well admit you are siding with Satan. And don’t be fooled by Democratic candidates who don’t use God-talk because they are just as guilty of certainty in the sanctity of their positions. They just claim to be “right” instead of divinely chosen. I’m not sure whose voice they hope we hear, but the point is the same. Being on the right side of an issue, whether you think in religious or secular terms, naturally results in absolute, unwavering, uncompromising faith in your position and total condemnation of your opponent’s. When it comes to casting our votes, they want us to believe in their differences from one another, but the thing that is becoming more and more apparent to voters is how alike the candidates are, not only in their pre-election barnstorming, but in how they behave in office. Choosing one over another seems to be a futile exercise, like choosing which pair of blue socks I’ll wear today. Just reach in and grab one/ vote for one, because the differences don’t matter.
And that, folks, is where we are today. Oddly it is where we have been before and the result was an American tragedy. The American Civil War was fought by two sides (there were a slew of diverse positions which telescoped into two opposing armies when the war broke out) that each believed that God was on their side. It was all God talk back then, because religion was assumed to be part of political life. Everyone was more or less a Christian in name if not in practice, and the Bible was the go-to reference book for how to vote or who to support in an election. Folks on both sides of the slavery issue whole-heartedly believed that they had Biblical and therefore Godly support for their position. Did you get that? Both sides of the slavery issue believed that God was on their side and the proof was in the Bible. I won’t go into that here, but if you can attend our conference at Wheaton College on March 16-17 you will hear directly from Civil War historians about how even the pro-slavery South could feel divinely inspired.
The salient point for us today is that the abolitionists and pro-slavery folks were locked in a heated argument about their differences, differences so extreme that God was supporting one side and condemning the other. Which side you thought God supported depending on which side you were on, of course. But each side resembled the other in a critically important way: their confidence that they knew the mind of God. Today’s debates around moral issues have a bit more diversity because all sides aren’t making the God argument. But if you substitute “certainty that I’m right and you’re wrong” for “knowing the mind of God” then our debates on same-sex marriage and reproduction, immigration and terrorism, fall into the same pattern as the slavery debate. According to Mark Noll, the insistence of both sides on absolute certainty that you are reading the Bible and the mind of God correctly created a hostile environment leading up to the Civil War that “transformed the conclusions reached by opponents into willful perversions of sacred truth and natural reason.” (The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, page 20) In other words, both slavery and anti-slavery positions were called “perversions of truth” by their opponents so confidently that the truth itself, that both sides were guilty of blind racism, was hidden from view for the next 100 years.
But what’s the risk today for a politics of certainty? Politics has become a form of entertainment. No one thinks that all this certainty and God-talk will lead to violence, do we? I mean, we’ve come a long way since the 19th century; we’d never let things go that far. But there is a place where God talk is part of an outbreak of violence: the fight against Islamic terrorism. Americans insist that we are completely different than terrorists whose conviction that God is on their side leads them to die for their cause and to murder civilians without ever doubting God’s favor. To prove how different we are, when we fight back we are careful to avoid God talk of any kind. But is that a difference that matters? Just like our adversaries, when we kill civilians, we don’t doubt our own goodness. When our soldiers die for our cause, our certainty does not waver. In a very real way, we are exporting our violence right now, allowing our combating certainties to play out in foreign wars. Our Civil War, four years of escalating violence in which over 850,000 Americans died, may be a warning to us that if our current wars end and we don’t start another one, all this certainty may find a violent outlet at home. We may be marching to the tune of our own infallibility toward a Sophie’s Choice of war abroad or the risk of war at home. I wonder which side God is on.
Do you have or know a child with an attention deficit disorder diagnosis? Then you are probably aware that the standard approach to diagnosing and treating A.D.D. is being seriously challenged by long term studies and neuroscientific discoveries. If you have been doing your best to cope with an A.D.D. child, this news may trigger a complicated range of emotions, everything from joy that there might be new hope for your child to anger, resentment, guilt or downright despair that by following the best medical advice of the last twenty years you may have harmed rather than helped your child. In spreading the news, it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad. That we have been misled is not our fault and fault-finding, while tempting in the short run to ease some personal pain, will not help your child. My hope for you and your child is that your undeniable willingness to do whatever it takes, including adjusting and adapting your own behavior, will enable you to listen with an open mind to the current discoveries and that you will find my parenting advice helpful. Here goes:
As a pre-school teacher in the late nineties, I had to deal with the standard approach to A.D.D. Over the years, a few of my students were in the process of being evaluated. Well-meaning parents, keen to give their children the best edge at early learning, eagerly embraced the diagnosis and drug treatment. But I wondered about the rush to diagnosis. Observing one parent at home with her young son, I couldn’t help but question the belief in genetic or born-with explanations. Believing that her child had trouble attending to the task at hand, I think it was playing with a set of blocks, she interrupted every few seconds with directions. It sounded like rapid gun fire to me.
See the big one? No not that one—the big one is blue. You know what blue is—you wanted to wear your blue shirt today. Look at your shirt. Look at your—don’t walk away. I want you to finish this. I know you can do it. Now sit down and see if you can find the big, blue one.
I felt my blood pressure rise as I listened to her relentless string of directives and I thought two things: no one could concentrate under those conditions, I don’t care how “normal” they were and her lack of confidence in her child broke my heart, and I am sure it wounded his. The big question that formed for me was this: Was this child truly born with an attention problem or was his parent’s behavior creating one in him? And if the latter, what good would a pill do?
The look-inside-the-child’s-brain-and-fix-it-with-a-pill approach to solving behavior problems is a symptom of a deeply held cultural conviction in the human being as a self-made, self-starting creature. The belief goes something like this: We are born with innate abilities and deficits, gifts and limits, that make us who we are. The job of concerned parents and educators is to correctly sort out what to encourage and what to fix and then to throw ourselves into the task with devotion as demonstrated by the barraging mother above. This conviction infects medicine, of course, as medicine is embedded in culture, not separate from it, and so medicine seeks to fix with its own brand of corrections. We have been operating under the self-made, self-starting picture of human beings for a good 500 years now, but this view is in the process of being overturned by theorists and experimental scientists and yielding exciting new ways to think about medicine, education and parenting.
In an article in the New York Times recently, L. Alan Sroufe, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, beautifully summarized the shift in thinking about A.D.D. that has occurred since the 1960s. From a theory of inborn dysfunction, the field has begun to recognize that “behavior and the brain are intertwined” and grow in a sort of feedback loop with one another. Behavior and environment influence and actually shape the physical brain. Prof. Sroufe says it this way: “One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience.” Or as René Girard, cultural theorist and founder of mimetic theory might say, we are not individuals at all but at every level and fiber of our being, we are inter-dividual, social creatures who when left alone as infants fail to thrive and even die. Just the opposite of independent self-starters, human beings develop under the influence of others, our community and culture. Are we born with particular bodies, unique genetics and predispositions? Of course we are, but that is not the limit of our becoming, in fact it is more like a cupboard of ingredients that can be shaped into different dishes by different environmental factors. It is also true that our particularities at birth will shape our response to the environments, but the critical discovery is the profound interaction of biology with environment that is the creative force in human development.
You may be surprised to know that this understanding of human development is not new, but rather has been part of the minority report operating below the surface. As a Montessori educator I learned that as early as 1903, Dr. Maria Montessori was teaching that the absolute worst thing one could do with children is to interrupt their play, or “work” as she called it. These interruptions interfere with a child’s normal attention pattern by imposing our will upon him. Today this is a common problem where busy lifestyles, the need to get to work, daycare, or other appointments forces the child into adapting to adult patterns of behavior.
Here is how Montessori described it in her medical textbook from the early 1900s:
Often what we call naughtiness on the part of the individual child is rebellion against our own mistakes in educating him. The coercive means which we adopt toward children are what destroy their natural tranquility. A healthy child, in his moments of freedom, succeeds in escaping from the toys inflicted upon him by his parents, and in securing some object which arouses the investigating instinct of his mind; a worm, an insect, some pebbles, etc.; he is silent, tranquil and attentive. If the child is not well, or if his mother obliges him to remain seated in a chair, playing with a doll, he becomes restless, cries, or gives way to convulsive outbursts (“bad temper”). The mother believes that educating her child means forcing him to do what is pleasing to her, however far she may be from knowing what the child’s real needs are, and unfortunately we must make the same statement regarding the school-teachers! Then, in order to make him yield to coercion, she punishes the child when he rebels and rewards him when he is obedient. By this method we drive a child by force along paths that are not natural to him. (emphasis in the original)
I do admire her boldness – she is really unconcerned if she is hurting the feelings of well-meaning parents because her first and foremost concern is with the child. It is a wonderful example to imitate. Prof. Sroufe, also putting the child’s developmental needs first, pointed out that behavior problems in children have “many possible sources. Among them are family stresses.” He lists a few obvious stressors like domestic violence or chaotic living situations, but the one that interested me was this:
…especially, patterns of parental intrusiveness that involve stimulation for which the baby is not prepared. For example, a 6-month-old baby is playing, and the parent picks it up quickly from behind and plunges it in the bath. Or a 3-year-old is becoming frustrated solving a problem, and a parent taunts or ridicules.
The mother I described at the opening may not have thought of her directives as taunting, but I wonder if her child would agree. Someone who hovers over you and persistently focuses your attention on what you are doing wrong may indeed be described as engaging in ridicule. Now, if you have read this far, you are surely following in Montessori’s footsteps by doggedly putting your desire to help your child ahead of your instinctive need to avoid feeling hurt, guilty or whatever. Allow me to conclude with some easy to implement parenting tips to support a child’s natural development.
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- When you see a child engaged in play or concentrating on seemingly trivial things like specks of dust or his own hand, think: “Einstein at work”. If you had to interrupt Einstein, you would do it in a spirit of humility and regret, wouldn’t you? That is the same attitude to take when you need to interrupt your child.
- Young children are notoriously bad at transitions, but easily coaxed into them with sufficient warning. Let’s use the example of transitioning from play time to dinner time. While the children are playing, slowly squat near them and in a quiet voice say, “Five minutes until it’s time to wash our hands for dinner.” Then walk away. Of course, the 5 minutes means nothing to them and be as short or long as you need it to be. But in a few minutes more, repeat your warning in a quiet voice, “3 minutes till dinner. It will be time to put your toys away and wash your hands.” Then give a one minute warning and finally, “It’s dinner time. Let’s put our toys away and wash up.”
- If your child balks at the moment of transition, don’t get into a power struggle. Just ask, “What did my words say?” Not “What did I say,” but precisely, “What did my words say?” Your child will think for a second and then repeat some version of “It’s time for dinner”. You will just shrug as if it is a shame for you, too, that we have to go to dinner, sharing in your child’s experience at that moment. Then off you go together, putting toys away and washing up as a team.
That’s it, three easy steps! It is hard to underestimate how vitally important this style of parenting can be to the formation of a healthy pattern of attention. As Dr. Montessori put it over one hundred years ago, “We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate life itself.” Too dramatic? Maybe, but maybe not. The beauty of it all is that to support life itself may be as easy as one, two, three.
When Fear Takes Hold: What we can learn from the Southern defense of slavery
Written by Suzanne Ross
Why did Southern states secede from the union? Between Lincoln’s election on Nov. 6, 1860 and his inauguration on March 4, 1861 seven states seceded, giving support to the theory that the South objected strongly to Lincoln and his Republican party. But in the 150 years since the war, the debate about the cause has hardly been settled. Added to Lincoln’s election, prime contenders are tariffs, states’ rights, and slavery. But one reason for secession is rarely on the list: security.
It seems odd to go to war – a risky endeavor involving death and destruction – to make yourself more secure, but it happens all the time. Security is why we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. We wanted to make ourselves safe by attacking terrorists on foreign soil, taking the war to them, as the reasoning went ten years ago. But the Southern states, by seceding, tempted an invasion. The war would be fought on their own soil, not in some far away land. How could security have factored into their thinking?
I’ve been reading a special issue of the monthly magazine The Atlantic called The Civil War. If you are interested in the Civil War it is well worth purchasing. It is a collection of articles that were originally published in The Atlantic during the 1850s and 1860s, before, during and after the war. There is nothing like cutting through 150 years of commentary to let the people of the time speak for themselves. One of the articles is titled Charleston Under Arms and it was written by John William De Forest, a Connecticut-born journalist. It recounts his visit to Charleston in January 1861. You may remember that though South Carolina had seceded on December 20, federal forces still held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This is where the first shots of the Civil War would be fired on April 12. De Forest recounts conversations he had with residents of Charleston during this tense and uncertain time before the war began.
South Carolinians were committed to their right to secede. They felt they had done nothing wrong, unpatriotic or illegal. They were clearly upset about Lincoln’s election and distrusted the Republican platform, though De Forest could not understand why. The platform, he explained to one dubious citizen, was “not adverse to slavery in the States; it only objects to its entrance into the Territories; it is not an Abolition platform.” Yet this South Carolinian wasn’t buying it. He replied, “We believe that [the Republican platform] is an incomplete expression of the party creed, — that it suppresses more than it utters. The spirit which keeps the Republicans together is enmity to slavery, and that spirit will never be satisfied until the system is extinct.”
Of course, the South had a great deal to lose economically if slavery were abolished. I am no economist, but it is not hard to imagine the wealth that could be lost and how desperately some might resist such a reversal of their fortunes. Yet the Southern gentleman had a reputation of being indifferent to money. It is one of the ways that the North and South had diverged culturally. Mark Noll in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis explains that the North was experiencing “the expansion of consumer capitalism, in which unprecedented opportunities to create wealth were matched by large-scale alienation and considerable poverty in both urban and rural America.” The reputation of the Southern gentleman, on the other hand, was as an aristocratic man of honor who was above the base pursuit of money for its own sake. A rivalry emerged in which each was contemptuous and yet secretly admiring of the other, contributing to a climate of distrust and resentment that found its full expression in the argument over the future of slavery in the United States.
But it was not a defense of Southern wealth that lay at the bottom of one South Carolinian’s concern regarding the Republican determination to end slavery. I will quote directly from the article:
When I [De Forest] asked one gentleman what the South expected to gain by going out, he replied, “First safety. Our slaves have heard of Lincoln,—that he is a black man, or black Republican, or black something, —that he is to become ruler of this country the fourth of March, —that he is a friend of theirs, and will free them. We must establish our independence in order to make them believe that they are beyond his help”…
My impression is, that a prevalent, though not a universal fear, existed lest the negroes should rise in partial insurrections on or about the fourth of March.
Above all this man expressed a fear of a violent slave revolt that would threaten the safety and security of his community. First safety. His fear was not unfounded. Slave revolts had taken place in which whites and blacks alike were killed. You will remember from your American History classes the names of John Brown and Nat Turner. These revolts caused fear and concern in the South. What we find in this quotation is that during the brief time between Lincoln’s election and the beginning of war, the threat of slave insurrections felt more real and imminent than any threat that might come from an invading Union army. Blinded by fear, the South would risk war to defend an evil institution.
What can we learn from this glimpse into Southern fears? Too often we view history a bit smugly, as if we have the perfect vantage point to understand motives, discern causes, and judge the right from the wrong, the wicked from the good. Used this way, history is not about the truth of another time or place, but is a part of the story we are telling about our own goodness. To avoid this pitfall, rather than sit in judgment of Southern fears, we might learn from them instead by asking a difficult question: Is it possible that our own fears are blinding us, too, preventing us from seeing some uncomfortable truth about ourselves?
Even more to the point, though slavery is long abolished, racism has been harder to eradicate. Are there ways in which we are as blind as South Carolinian slave holders to the continued suffering of the black community? Might a contemporary fear of loss of safety have a hold on us? I ask only because of the continuing presence of segregation in our schools and communities; I ask because according to Michelle Alexander, law professor at Ohio State and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began”; I ask because of lingering issues of voting rights discriminations and the undertones and sometimes overtones of racism in some attempts to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency.
Look, my point is not to make people feel bad. I know that for white America to admit it still harbors racist fears and delusions of racial supremacy is a really uncomfortable place to go. But sometimes allowing ourselves to feel bad is the only way to be truly good. Instead of running from our fear and pretending everything is okay, feeling bad opens the door for change. The Civil War ended almost 150 years ago but the battle for racial equality is far from over. I hope you won’t be afraid to learn more about the fears and struggles of the past. Perhaps you can join the Raven Foundation as we look at the struggles for integration in the 1940s when baseball led the way forward in the Lookingglass production of “Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting.” We are also offering an opportunity to explore new research into the theological arguments for and against slavery that were taking place before the Civil War, arguments that have left powerful handprints on our public life today. Raven is partnering with the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College to bring you leading Civil War scholars on March 16-17 for this historical and relevant conversation. Don’t miss these great opportunities to look together at our shared history – it might even feel good!
I have gotten a reputation in my family as a re-gifter. I accidently gave some monogrammed hand towels back to my daughter and a snowman appetizer dish to my daughter-in-law in two memorable senior moments. Luckily, they both laughed heartily at my mistake and thought I was adorable rather than tragically stupid. Doesn’t everyone know you are not supposed to re-gift to the giver but to someone else? I tried to soften my mistake by protesting that this didn’t mean I didn’t want or like their gifts – I liked their gifts so much, in fact, that I thought they would make great gifts for them! They weren’t convinced but at least I tried.
I mention this because I want to talk a little bit about the things we want and what that says about who we are. It’s the perfect time of year for it. We just got through December when everyone is asking each other, “What do you want for Christmas?” and we are in the middle of January when we are all asking ourselves, “What self-improvement resolution should I make – and break – this year?” What we want and who we want to be are as closely tied to one another as December is to January. Let’s take a quick look at how.
Most of the year we happily live with the delusion that our desires arise spontaneously from within our deepest selves. But in December that delusion is harder to maintain because advertisers are in an all-out, full court press operating on the opposite premise: that our desires can be influenced and manipulated from the outside. Think about your Christmas wish list for a minute – how did you come to want what you wanted? Did you see an advertisement that got you thinking about jewelry or a new coat? Did a celebrity interview entice you to see a movie or buy a book over the holidays? Maybe you saw someone using a new phone or overheard a conversation about a trendy restaurant for New Year’s Eve and you found yourself texting on your new device from the restaurant bar.
I bet you can connect each item on your list to the source of your desire, a source that lies somewhere outside of you. Even things that seem to be deeply personal don’t originate inside us. For example, this year what I wanted most was not a thing at all, but to feel happy during the holidays. Sometimes the season goes by so quickly and I am so stressed out that I don’t enjoy the parties and the family time very much. Clearly, sometimes I don’t even remember who gave me what gift! But I worked on it this year and I’m happy to say I got my wish. But where did that wish come from? I wish I could say that I was smart enough to know that the most important gifts aren’t things you can buy in a store, but not so. The truth is that I learned this from some great teachers over the years – Ebenezer Scrooge for one, Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and so many other holiday movies for another, and my spiritual disciplines of yoga and daily prayer are great teachers, too. All those influences somehow combined together so that this year I wanted to be more like Jimmy Stewart than the gal with the new diamond necklace in the Kay Jewelry commercials.
You see, advertisers have got one thing very right – our desires are suggested to us from the outside. The tricky part is that when they nestle inside it feels as if they have always been there. But that’s just a convenient delusion that preserves our sense of independence and soothes our easily bruised egos. It’s really much healthier to let go of all that ego gratification and accept the truth that all our desires originate outside of us. Having unattached desires is what allows human beings to learn and grow and be the most innovative of all species. Other animals have instincts, but we have free-floating, unattached desires – yeah for us!
The trick of life is to be really smart about who and what we let our desires get attached to. The big mistake we often make at Christmastime is that we let advertisers and others we think are smarter, prettier or sexier than we are direct our desires for us. The important thing to remember is that our desires don’t take a direct path to objects – our desire is always deflected toward an object by someone we want to be like. That’s how the advertisers do it – they show us smart, pretty, sexy people with the objects they want us to buy. It’s genius, really. But allowing advertisers to dictate our desires is not genius. They are the worst kind of models because they don’t want what’s best for us, they want what’s best for them, which is for us to open our wallets and fork over the cash or swipe the plastic, as the case may be.
Fortunately for our souls, January follows right on the heels of this month of marketing mania. Making New Year’s resolutions forces us to take a hard look at who exactly we want to be like: the skinny girl, the ripped guy, the powerful boss, the smart professor, the sexy friend, the popular celebrity, whoever! These are our models of desire. Before you make any resolutions, you might want to ask yourself if you are happy with your models. Can you trust them? Are they truly unselfish models, wanting for you only what is best for you? If not, you might want to shop around for different models. They may be fictional, historical or spiritual; you may find them in books or plays, at church or work or close to home. The best models are the ones who truly love you or inspire you to live a joyful, fulfilled and peaceful life. At least that bit of wisdom is the gift my models have given me, and I guess this blog is my attempt to share that gift with you. No senior moment this time, no accidental re-gifting. Learning the truth about desire and how to choose models is a gift worth re-gifting – pass it on!
Is there any rational reason to believe in miracles? The question is not about belief in miracles per se, but the reason behind belief. Lots of times the question of miracles involves the search for a rational explanation. If you find one, then bingo, you debunk the miracle and score another triumph for reason. Recently I experienced a miracle trifecta in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral: mass was being said at the central altar; to the left was a really impressive nearly life-size crèche complete with adoring camel; and to the right was a chapel dedicated to the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to a Mexican peasant in 1531. Transubstantiation, incarnation and visitation – easily debunked miracles, right? Yet there I was all dewy-eyed and verklempt receiving communion, lighting a candle at the crèche, and joining the crowd adoring Our Lady of Guadalupe because it just happened to be her feast day (coincidence or miracle?!). Had I taken leave of my senses and given in to some emotional, romantic experience of the presence of God or had my reason come along for the ride?
The question of rational reasons to believe in miracles might seem to be off the table from the start as a contradiction in terms. Yet I do think that there is a very rational reason to believe in miracles, a reason rooted in the very mundane reality of this world. At Christmas, angels (another easily debunked miracle!) announced that the mundane reality of the world was about to change. They proclaimed that a Messiah had entered the world as a little child to bring peace on earth. Really, now?? That would be a reality shifter of volcanic magnitude! The reality of this world is definitely one of not-peace and the idea that it could be transformed by a child, well, that would be a miracle! I couldn’t agree more! What I’d like to propose is that the reality of not-peace is sustained by a powerful, totalizing logic which would take a miracle to disprove.
Here goes: the desire for peace on earth is nearly universal, yet peace has been an elusive dream. Why is that? There always seems to be one more obstacle to peace, one more evil villain who must be defeated before peace can reign on earth. The job of good people is to be vigilant against evil and, if possible, to learn to identify evil before it can do harm to innocent people. This is the current quest of our own Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, Department of Defense and so on. The logic of good versus evil requires them to identify evil and destroy it by any means possible, all in the service of goodness and peace.
This logic is familiar to us and it permits the use of violence by good people in the name of peace. I have written about this many times before, so it will not be surprising when I point out that everyone who employs violence is doing so in the name of some ultimate good or another. Goodness is defined using me and my aims as the standard, of course, and evil is always located somewhere outside of me and my community. If goodness is always me-orientated, then anyone who opposes me, my goals or desires is by definition evil. Do you see how totalizing this is and how completely logical? If you begin with the premise that goodness equals me and evil is that which opposes me, then every “me” on the planet can self-identify as good and justify the destruction (figuratively or literally) of all the evil others out there who get in my way. We see it in domestic politics, international relations, and our own personal relationships when others seem to be willfully intent on obstructing our desires. They can be none other than evil by virtue of their opposition to the good – moi! This logic prevents us from seeing the truth that our enemies are using the same logic to define themselves as good and we as evil. All parties to a conflict use this logic to justify their use of violence so no one employing violence is self-identifying as evil. It is the good people, at least in their own opinion, who are doing all the bad things. Paradoxically yet logically, we find ourselves very busy creating a world of not-peace in the name of peace while never doubting our own goodness! A real predicament, isn’t it?
So what is the way out of this logical system? We could try to reason our way out, but ironically we have reasoned our way into it so successfully that any challenge to the system fits neatly into it: challenge my goodness or use violence against me and I have proof of your wickedness. Yet if I challenge your goodness or use violence against you, magically this is evidence of my commitment to the good. So anything that could crack open the logic at play here can’t come from within the system itself. A successful challenge would have to come from outside the system and appear other worldly, outside of our everyday experience – in other words, a miracle. A miracle that allows us to see ourselves in the face of our enemies and our enemies as children of God. The miracle can come to us in and through our mundane experiences: a birth, a meal, a message of love. When it comes, the logic of good and evil and of violence in the name of peace is revealed for a lie and peace becomes possible.
I believe in miracles because their existence challenges our reliance on logic and reason, which is an absolutely good thing given how much trouble logic can get us into. But miracles have a logic of their own, the logic of the possible impossible. In fact, the idea of a miracle might actually have some support from mathematics, the language of science. In the early twentieth century, the mathematician Kurt Godel discovered what he called the theorem of incompleteness which is the proof of a paradox, that there are true but unprovable statements. True but unprovable: maybe that’s what miracles are. You see, it was very reasonable for me to be verklempt at St. Pat’s and for all of us to be a bit dewy-eyed at the sight of the babe in the manger. Miracles make sense! Peace is possible! Merry Christmas!
This video is for parents looking for a positive way to connect Santa Claus to the Christmas story. If your child is young enough to believe in Santa Claus this video will help you handle Santa's naughty or nice list and your child's Christmas present wish list. Santa can be a wonderful example of what the love and joy of Christmas is all about.
A.C. Grayling (from left), Matthew Chapman, Rabbi David Wolpe and Dinesh D'Souza faced off on the notion "The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion."
A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher and a scholar recently teamed up at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to debate this motion: “The world would be better off without religion.” The live studio audience was polled before and after the debate and a winner was declared. Before I tell you the numbers, what do you think? Would the world be better off without religion?
Even more relevant – what do you think of the question? I had a hard time taking it seriously, especially after I started listening to the debate. I had hoped that before they jumped into arguing for or against the motion they would define what they meant by “religion”. They did not. For the sake of clarity, I hoped they also might have defined what “better off” meant since it requires a comparison to an imaginary world in which religion doesn’t or never did exist. They did not do that either. Those arguing for the motion said the things you would expect – we’d be better off without religion because it is the cause of war, provides justification for violence, and is indicative of faulty reasoning. People who believe in God are irrational, hypocritical and violent. Those arguing against the motion said that more wars and genocides had been committed in the name of atheism than God, that religion is an organized system that encourages people to be better and to work for a better world. They made the counteraccusation that those who said we’d be better off without religion were the ones guilty of faulty reasoning. Nothing either side said changed my opinion that the motion itself was flawed.
What the two opposing teams had in common was more telling than their so-called differences. For example, they both clearly got that there was a strong connection between religion and violence. One side thought religion made the world more violent and the other side thought less, but “less violent” was clearly what they meant by “better off”. What both sides failed to see, however, was that it isn’t the presence of religion in the world that’s the problem or the solution, but rather how successful religion is at any time or in any place at doing its job. In other words, the problem is not religion but violence itself. The job of religion is to respond to the problem of violence. Anyone familiar with anthropology knows that wherever human culture is found so is religion. The one does not exist without the other. A key idea of mimetic theory, which is the study of the connection between religion and violence, is that religion solved the problem of human violence, thus making human culture possible. Religion can be thought of as the mechanism that made the proto-human world less violent, putting the side arguing against the motion on the right side of the issue.
But to say that religion makes the world less violent misses a crucial point: If it was religion that controlled violence in the proto-human world, how did it do it? Ancient or archaic religion was a religion of sacrifice and it used violence to control violence. It involved rituals, prohibitions, myth and sacrifice: violence was controlled through sacrificial means, temple rituals in which humans and animals were killed often after ritual reenactments of wars or wild times in which all prohibitions were relaxed, kind of like Mardi Gras. The community discharged all its angers, resentments, little built up hurts and grudges in a ritual frenzy ending in the shedding of blood. Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto captured the pre-sacrificial frenzy and the calming effect of the sacrifice really well. A little bit of violence in a controlled (ritual) setting kept the violence outside of the community and life could flourish.
We no longer have ritual sacrifice per se, but archaic religion survives in a more subtle form. Anywhere violence is justified as a way to bring peace by invoking God’s name – or in the name of any supreme good like ethnic, racial, tribal or national identity – you have archaic or sacrificial religion. Today’s revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are the biggies) are still engaged with the problem of violence just as they were when they were revealed. The presence of violent passages in the sacred texts of these religions does not mean that they are advocating violence, but that solving the problem of violence is their main function. To think that those texts are the cause of violence would be like concluding that hospitals cause people to become sick and die. Violence is in the texts for the same reason sick people are in hospitals: everyone is looking for a cure. Revealed religions, though, offer a different cure than archaic religions. Rather than using violence to control violence, they aim at building peaceful communities through practices of love, mercy and forgiveness. This is the non-sacrificial solution but not all their adherents get the message. Religious and non-religious people too easily revert to ancient sacrificial practices: we find all kinds of excuses for using violence, including invoking God’s name, despite the efforts of revealed religions. When Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or any religious group claims God to be on their side, they are caught up in an old and dying paradigm. The long trajectory of human history is a religious journey away from the use of sacrificial violence toward a new way of achieving peace by peaceful means.
Here are the results of the audience survey: Before the debate 52 percent of the live audience thought the world would be better off without religion and 26 percent disagreed, with 22 percent undecided. Afterward, those in favor of a world without religion jumped to 59 percent and those against the idea rose to 31 percent — making the side arguing for a world without religion the winners of the debate. Ten percent of the audience remained undecided, maybe because they sensed the debate had been about the wrong question. The better motion would have been: The world would be better off without the justification of violence by anyone for any reason. Revealed religions are in favor of that motion. Which side are you on?