Monday Thoughts: "Other-ism"

I read/watched three different things this weekend that point to the same same social phenomenon--we tend to belittle the intelligence and of course value of the "out group." When we are talking about those who are "in group," we accentuate the positive and ignore the negative. When we are talking about those "out group," we accentuate the negative and ignore the positive.

No doubt I am also guilty... and no doubt you can see my myopia far more clearly than I can (thus, myopia :-). But of course, that doesn't mean we do not correctly see the stupidities of the past either.

This is the stuff of prejudice, racism, and sexism. I find a woman who does something less than intelligent and conclude, "All women are unintelligent." I find a black person who does something violent and conclude, "All black persons are violent." Meanwhile, I find a smart white male and conclude, "All white men are smart."

Three examples of "other-ism" stood out to me this weekend in reading/watching:

Anne Hutchinson
I was looking at Neil Elliott's Liberating Paul and he gave examples of how Paul's writings have been used to keep slaves in line in the South, women in line in Puritan New England, Jews in line in Nazi Poland, rebels in control in Guatemala.

The first one that stood out to me was the story of Anne Hutchinson. She ticked off the preachers of Massachusetts by meetings in her home. At these meetings, she and other women evaluated sermons, which eventually led to her trial and ultimate banishment from the colony (her family was then killed by Native Americans in Rhode Island).

It is fairly clear that John Winthrop and others who had it in for Hutchinson thought that women were by nature less insightful than men. Modern complementarians have done a good job of "cleaning up" the obvious stupidity of their ancestors. Those who used to say women shouldn't teach and shouldn't be leaders did not think that women were as intelligent and were more gullible than men.

In our day, however, this is so patently false that no one would dare suggest this in any forum where they might easily be shown a fool. So the modern complementarians, riding on the fumes of their forebears, have modified their position--it is not that women are in any way less spiritual or intelligent than men. It is, well, uh, not God's plan for them to lead. Yeah, that's it. It just isn't the way God designed things. They're equal, but just have different roles ordained by God and, yeah, that's what the Bible says too.

Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts. In an age where the naked truth that women are as smart and spiritual as men, this propped up version of the old "women are stupid and sin-laden" will evaporate away soon enough.

The Kite Runner
My wife has just finished reading this novel destined to be on future high school reading lists (sorry to my children and their friends--Harry Potter will not be on the list). So we watched the movie version last night.

There is so much in this movie to expose the "other-ism" among Christians. The movie is set first in the days before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then in 2000 under the Taliban. The other-ism in this case deals with a boy born out of wed-lock, the same boy as a Pashtun, a girl who had slept with another man previously, a man who did not have a beard.

Certainly we as Christians do not believe that Islam understands God as well as we do. However, the things that we say from our pulpits about Islam often indicate such a wholesale ignorance it is beyond words This year especially I have heard among freshmen the idea they must be hearing in their homes and churches that suicide bombers being good representatives of all Muslims in the world.

I found a statement left on a white board in a classroom that sums it up well: "Radical Islam is to Islam in general as the KKK is to Christianity." Can you imagine how stupid we would think someone was who assumed that all Christians had the same views as members of the KKK? That's how stupid we sound to most Muslims, especially American Muslims.

The Keys to the Kingdom
The faculty reading group I'm in is reading this 1940's novel to finish out the year. It's about a Catholic priest in Scotland who lives his whole life surrounded by Christians who aren't particularly good representatives of Christ. His father dies in the aftermath of visiting a nearly Protestant town to report how many salmon he's caught that month.

A woman is raped, has a child in a place where nuns can take care of the child, is forced to marry a man in town to make the situation "right." I'm not done and others say the novel is not clear about who the rapist was, but so far I wonder if it was a priest.

This priest become missionary doesn't fit in, in part because he doesn't do things the way everyone else does. There is a certain raw value and "get along" aspect to out-group people that consistently causes him problems with the in-group.

Maybe Rodney King put it best: "Why can't we all just get along?" That doesn't mean we aren't convinced we are right about what we believe. It means that those who disagree with us are just as valuable in God's eyes as we are.