The Raven Foundation

My wife and I sat on the couch as we watched the first episode of TLC’s reality show All-American Muslim.  We were both excited to see how the show would portray life for Muslims living in Dearborn, Michigan.  But my wife was really excited.  Earlier in the day she saw a commercial for the first episode.  She laughed as she explained the commercial to me: Suehaila Amen, a woman on the show, was flying to Washington DC.  While in her seat, a woman sitting behind her said:

See that veiled woman? I’m very uncomfortable.

To which Suehalia responded,

Then you get your ass off the plane because I have a meeting to get to to educate people like you.

It was a very human response.  And that’s the purpose of the show.  The website for All-American Muslim claims, “Each episode offers an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.”  The show follows 5 families composed of members who are remarkably diverse in their religious devotion and life’s passions.  There are conflicts on the show between husbands and wives, parents and children, coaches and athletes.  But despite those conflicts, the people on the show are devoted to their families and to their community.  In this sense, these Muslims represent the best that America has to offer.

They even like football.

But not everyone is enamored with All-American Muslim.  The Florida Family Association, a Christian group in Tampa Bay whose goal is to improve “America’s moral environment,” has led a campaign to urge companies to pull advertisements from the show.  The FFA makes the old and tired scapegoating claim that you just can’t trust Muslims.  On the top of their website they claim that “TLC’s ‘All-American Muslim’ is propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda.”

Here’s the thing:  In order to “improve” our moral environment, humans have frequently gone to the old standby solution: Find a common enemy.  The FFA sees a problem with morality in America and needs to find someone to blame for it.  Muslims, especially since 9/11, are an easy target. So, the FFA points a finger of accusations against All-American Muslims and advertisers are following their lead.  On their website, the FFA claims to have influenced 65 companies to pull their advertisement from the show.  Only one company, Lowe’s, has actually admitted to pulling their commercials.

What I find interesting, and also sad, is that finding a common enemy is a contagious, escalating cycle.  When one group invites other groups to join them against a common enemy, that “enemy” will usually respond by inviting other groups to join them in uniting against the group that accused them.  And that’s what is happening.  Articles like “Say No to Bigotry and Lowes and Support ‘All-American Muslim,” “Corporations Pulling Ads From All-American Muslims Are Engaged in Jim Crow-Style Discrimination,” and “All-American Muslim Meets an Un-American Advertising Pullout” are directing us to view the FFA, Lowe’s, and any other advertisers who pull ads from the show as our common enemy.  This is interesting to me because all humans find a sense of unity through scapegoating.  As much as I hate what the FFA and Lowe’s are doing, I’m not taking the bait to make them into the enemy.  The enemy is the spirit of scapegoating.  The enemy is finding a common enemy to unite against.  That’s the problem.  The FFA and Lowe’s decision to follow their scapegoating lead against All-American Muslim are only symptoms of the disease.  But let’s not fool ourselves.  The reverse is also a problem.  As much as I detest the FFA and Lowe’s’ decision to boycott American Muslim, any boycott of the FFA and Lowe’s is mirroring the same scapegoating mechanism.

This is a deadly trap.  What I find so important in our religious traditions is that they are honest about the human tendency to scapegoat (which is why there are violent passages in our sacred texts), but they also critique that mechanism.  It is vitally important that we acknowledge and affirm Islam for doing just that.  When someone verbally or physically attacks you, the Qur’an says to, “repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain such goodness” (41:34-35).

It takes courage to repel evil with what is better.  To repel an act of scapegoating with forgiveness makes us vulnerable.  But that’s exactly the type of courage we need from our religious, political, and economic leaders.  Maybe then we and our enemies “will become as close as an old and valued friend.”

For more on Islam, see Adam’s Islam 101 series by clicking here.

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?