President Obama kicked things off with his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast:
We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion.
So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities -- the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ....
So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith....
[L]et’s remember that if there is one law that we can all be most certain of that seems to bind people of all faiths, and people who are still finding their way towards faith but have a sense of ethics and morality in them -- that one law, that Golden Rule that we should treat one another as we wish to be treated. The Torah says “Love thy neighbor as yourself.” In Islam, there is a Hadith that states: "None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” The Holy Bible tells us to “put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
Those comments, predictably, brought a
flood of condemnation from the right:
“The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R). “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”....
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama’s comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison.”
What we need more is a “moral framework from the administration and a clear strategy for defeating ISIS,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State....
“The evil actions that he mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians,” Moore said.
Ta-Nehisi Coates swiftly put that idea into the balance and
found it wanting:
On the cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation. His justification was not secular. The Confederacy was to be:
[T]he first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society ... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so.
It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.
Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar.... In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."
This all brings up a large number of questions, such as:
What does talking about these things do?
What does not talking about them do?
Should a person, or a country, follow the Golden Rule?
What happens if you do, or don't, follow the Golden Rule?
Is empathy a good thing or a bad thing? Why?
Projecting evil onto others and denying it in oneself is a human failing. Practicing it has also been a major factor in the tremendous material and political power achieved by the United States over its history.
Committing genocide against Native Americans cleared the land for settlement and industrial and agricultural development on a vast scale. It was done because religious and cultural triumphalism blocked empathy for the people whose lands were stolen from them and whose ways of life were destroyed to make it happen.
Centuries of slavery built up a store of wealth for the country that gave it its economic footing in the world and created the basis for the global economic powerhouse the country became, instead of the struggling pioneer backwater it might have been for long afterward.
Would that history have gone differently if people had followed the Golden Rule instead of separating off portions of humanity as not being worthy of being included in its bounds? Of course it would have. Very differently.
I think what President Obama was trying to get at is that the world would be a better place if we didn't project all evil onto others and paused to examine the mote in our own eye before acting, or condemning others.
I think that what his critics on this point believe is that projecting all evil onto others, and reserving all goodness for oneself, and acting accordingly has been a very successful economic and political strategy for the United States throughout its history, and is in fact the very essence of its dominance. It's the very essence of American Exceptionalism.
Personally, I believe Obama is right about this and his critics are wrong. It's a hard thing to hear that your exceptionalism is based on a lie, and on exploitation, and on the privileges and wealth that flow from exploitation. But admitting the truth, and your own moral shortcomings, is the first necessary step to fixing the problems those wrongs have caused and starting the process to move past them.
That is why I get nervous seeing liberals pointing and laughing or tsk-tsk-ing at conservatives about their moral failures -- their racism, their sexism, their bigotry and hypocrisy. Because those moral failures are human failures, not just conservative failures.
Commentary that points that out in an aggressive way can be hard to hear. But is it any less necessary for liberals to hear it than for conservatives to hear it? Or in fact for Americans as a whole to hear it from their president?
White America still benefits from that historical exploitation, in the vast wealth gap that exists between white and black families still today. Reparations should have been paid to remedy that, but they weren't paid, and they never will be paid.
White Americans still benefit from that exploitation even if their families have later roots in the country. They benefit by way of being white, and the socioeconomic circles that opens to them, and has opened to them.
White Americans benefit, and yet at the same time they can say, I didn't do that exploiting. I didn't create the situation. I can't change the situation. Why are you trying to put all that guilt on me for things I didn't create and can't change, even if I do benefit in ways I didn't create and can't change?
It seems to me that what the burning of the Jordanian pilot by ISIS sets out is an opportunity for reaching out to find true empathy.
We are horrified by the snuffing out of a young man's life in such a horrific way, with a religious justification. It's visceral, on an immediate, emotional human level, beyond any justifications or explanations or reasoning. It's horrific, it's horrible, it's inhuman. It's not how we treat others if we follow the Golden Rule. He was a young man with his own life to live that was taken away from him in a horrific way, and we feel terrible that it was done. We feel his pain, and that of his family and friends.
To those who bring up the fact that blacks in America were subjected to similar, and even worse, injustices, as a population, within living memory, is it so hard to answer, not It was a long time ago. Why are you still so angry? but Yes, it was horrific. It was horrible. It was injustice. It was inhuman. And the ripples of it still go on, and simply, I feel your pain.