WHO IS BEING PERSECUTED?

With the recent Supreme Court’s ruling on the right to marriage has come a lot of anger by some folks, and also the claim by some that their religious rights are being violated, or even that they are being persecuted because they are Christian.  (The definition of all Christians as those who don’t believe in the right of gay and lesbians to marry is another issue).  At the same time, I’ve seen people say that white people, straight people and Southern people are now being persecuted.

 

Some of this may be the heated rhetoric of the moment, but I think a lot has to do with a deep sense of loss. A loss of a perceived way of life, and a powerlessness to do anything about it.  I think the loss is real.  I think the powerlessness is a trap.  A trap by those who felt and perceived themselves to be in the “in-group” (even if they weren’t really), and now see others “taking their place”.

To play off Lord Acton, powerlessness tends to corrupt, and the projection of powerlessness tends to absolutely corrupt our vision and our ability to even distinguish truth from fear.

I have served in inner city communities for over 30 years, and in almost every circumstance there was an in-group that felt neglected/rejected/even attacked because a new group of people were coming in—and not only that, taking ownership!  In the Bronx, the in-group was Afro-Caribbean and middle-class African-American, the new group was Latino and poorer African-American.  In the current parish that I am serving, the in-group was white, the new group is Latino. 

 

(This is an oversimplification, because in each of these there were a lot of other dynamics: how different groups use space, how different people make decisions, even different conceptions of God and what being a Christian is.  Not to mention language!)

 

These church dynamics are connected to what is happening in the society at large.  My home town of Austin Minnesota was 99.99993 percent white when I was growing up (I just did the math!).  Now it has large Latino, Karen, Sudanese and other populations, and soon the schools will be majority non-white.  Some people have welcomed the change, some have not.  I often hear that “Austin has changed”, usually with a tone that means the change hasn’t been a good one. 

 

I’ve tried to put myself in the minds of the people who are uneasy or fearful about this kind of change.  It’s not so easy to do that, because I have my own fears and disquiet, and often the words we speak out of that are not very open to dialogue.  As more of my life has become about art, I’ve began to see that it’s not so much the thoughts that drive us, but the images we store.

 

I think about most people in my parents’ generation, or even my older cousins, who grew up in homogenous communities.  What they “saw”—on TV and in life—were white people everywhere, men running the show, no openly gay or lesbian leaders, and people of color almost always in the position of either entertainer (including athletes) or threat.  I put “saw” in quotes because another reality was present, but one had to look at it, and indeed, look for it.

 

Now “all of a sudden”, Latinos are living “among us”, gay people are acting as if they are “normal”, people “we don’t know” are running the show.  (I don’t have to explain the quotes, I think.)  I can imagine that this can cause some huge dissonance in people’s minds and hearts.  One way to deal with that dissonance is creativity.  Create something new, beautiful and challenging. Unfortunately, our media/entertainment industry, our economy and our politics don’t put a high value on creativity. (We claim to, but really, the underlying assumptions and structures don’t change much).

 

The other way to deal with dissonance is to make it into a contest, with a winner and a loser.  How much we do that!  The news report which movies scored the most at the box office, which politicians are leading in the polls, which company made the biggest profit.  Not which contributes to the community or our sense of it.

 

A couple years ago, there was a story about a small town in Iowa where significant ethnic change has occurred.  An elderly resident was quoted as saying something like: “I’ve lived in this town my whole life.  Why do I have to press 1 for English when I call the bank that I’ve banked at for 60 years?”

 

Now, we could laugh at the relatively minor inconvenience, compared to say, facing persecution and fleeing your homeland to come to the US and different languages, laws, customs and assumptions.  But I believe that this woman really felt her security was threatened because something so basic was now accommodating people she couldn’t understand and perhaps feared.  My guess is that she felt that she had lost, and some others had won.

 

For me—at least on my healthiest days—security comes from a loving, engaged God, and a family and community that is welcoming, honest and has the courage to be curious.  But to be honest, I too often feel threatened by people who have different opinions from me.  I don’t want to be, but there is a visceral, physical reaction in me that I can’t always control.  When my reptilian brain is running the show, look out, because the images it follows and finds can be horribly cruel and terribly blind.

I do have the power to seek, however.  To seek new images and communities that will be a challenge but may be a kind of salvation.

 

So,  I don’t think I and my fellow white people are being persecuted.  Many of us are suffering, and it would pay to seek the real causes of that, rather than attribute it to the victory of another group, and thus our defeat.

 

I don’t think that I and my fellow straight people are being persecuted.  We’re maybe not as cool as we used to be, but coolness is a rather fickle lover.

 

And I don’t think that I and my fellow Christians are being persecuted in this country (there are horrible persecutions in other places, just as there are horrible persecutions by Christians).  I do think that as people of faith we have an incredibly rich, mysterious, humbling tradition of the play of power and powerlessness, and where true power resides.  A deeper wrestling with that may be the way of a renewed vision.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be a seeker of new images.

 

Patrick