On Intolerance
Conservative people who harbor
destructive prejudices against certain types of human beings—women, Blacks,
LGBT people, etc.—are fond of saying that liberal progressive people like me who
condemn such prejudice are no better than they are because we too have our own
prejudices. We too are intolerant of people whose views are different from
ours. On the surface that seems like a valid (and challenging) observation. On
closer examination, however, it turns out to be inaccurate because it conflates
two different types of intolerance. It conflates intolerance of certain aspects
of a person’s humanity with intolerance of opinions that are demonstrably
false. I concede that I am profoundly intolerant of racism, homophobia,
misogyny, xenophobia, disability shaming, class prejudice, and any other type
of prejudice that goes to some inherent aspect of a person’s very being. My
intolerance of those hatreds of who a person is in her very essence is
essentially different from intolerance of the people conservatives view as
less. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate the point.
I’ll start with racism and my
intolerance of it. Racism condemns people simply because they look different
from the people who are part of what is at least still a white plurality in our
country. Race actually is a totally artificial construct that says nothing
essential about a person’s humanity, but I’ll let that one go for now. Dividing
people by race is a core part of American identity, and prejudice based on it
is profoundly sinful. None of us chooses the race of which we are a part. I am
white. I was born white. I’ll die white. I didn’t choose to be white, and I
can’t choose not to be white. I just am white. Those statements are as true of
a person born Black as they are of me. Black people are born Black. They die
Black. They didn’t choose to be Black, and they can’t choose not to be Black.
They just are.[1]
Race (at least as American culture has always understood it) is an inherent,
inherited part of everyone’s humanity. It isn’t wrong. It can’t be demonstrated
to be false. It just is. Racial differences often come with cultural
differences, and those cultural differences can and do enrich our lives and our
cultures. As an old cliché goes, they aren’t to be tolerated, they are to be
celebrated. Racism is an attack on a person because of an inherent, inherited
part of that person’s humanity. The notion that Black people are less than
white people is demonstrably false. Racist attitudes can be transformed. They
can be overcome, and we desperately need to overcome them.
I am intolerant of racism, but that
intolerance does not put me on the same moral level as the racists. Racism is
not an intrinsic part of anyone’s humanity. It is an acquired attitude, not
something with which anyone is born. As Lieutenant Cable’s song from the
musical South Pacific says, “you’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late,
before you are six, or seven, or eight, to hate all the people your relatives
hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
Race is morally neutral, racism is not. Race harms no one. Racism does. No one
can hate a person because of her race without hating her as a person. I can,
and do, condemn racism without hating anything inherent in a racist’s humanity.
I don’t hate racism because racists are white (or because they are Black, for
there are Black racists too). I don’t even necessarily hate racists. I hate
racism. I hate it not because it is human but because it is evil. Racists hate
Black people because they are, the racists believe, the wrong kind of human.
Not let’s look at what is for most
of us liberal, progressive Christians the hardest kind of tolerance. People
tell me I’m no better than the racists or the homophobes because I am
prejudiced against Fundamentalists. People say I’m prejudiced because I don’t
like biblical literalism. They say I’m prejudice I because the reject the way
homophobes use scripture to condemn LGBT people. They say everyone’s entitled
to their opinion, and I am wrong to condemn opinions that differ from mine.
They say I am wrong not to want to associate with Christians who use the faith
to condemn others. None of these contentions will stand up to close scrutiny.
Fundamentalist Christianity and biblical literalism are not characteristics of
a person’s humanity. They are learned beliefs, and they are demonstrably false.
I won’t here go into how they are demonstrably false. If you want to know, read
my book Liberating Christianity. Yes,
people are entitled to their own opinions; but as the old saying goes, they are
not entitled to their own facts. When a belief is demonstrably false, when it
is based on what we are calling “alternative facts” today, it is right to reject it
and even to criticize people who hold to it despite its demonstrable falsehood.
Doing so is not rejecting anyone’s inherent humanity. Fundamentalist homophobes
are as human as I am; they’re just wrong in their beliefs, and demonstrably so.
My criticism of them is in no way equivalent to their condemnation of LGBT
people. They condemn a person’s humanity. I condemn only a person’s false
beliefs.
So let’s be done with this notion
that rejection of false beliefs is morally equivalent to rejection of a person’s
humanity. It isn’t. Let’s be done with bigots projecting their intolerance onto
those of us who do not share it, for that’s what they’re doing. Critical
thinking is not morally equal to uncritical condemnation of classes of God’s
people. Critical thinking is not the moral equivalent of reading scripture to
say what it doesn’t say. Critical thinking is not morally equivalent to reading
the Bible as though it had been written in the modern world, which is what
biblical literalists do. It wasn’t, and some of us have a capacity for
understanding that it wasn’t and what that means. We are not prejudiced when we
criticize views grounded in that fundamental misunderstanding of what the Bible
is and what it isn’t. We are not prejudiced when we are intolerant of such a
false view of our foundational text. We are just thinking Christians who use
the brain God gave us to understand all aspects of our faith. There is
unthinking, bigoted intolerance, and there is informed, critical rejection.
They aren’t the same thing.
[1]
Yes, I know that some very light-skinned Black people sometimes are able to
pass for white, but that doesn’t make them white. They’re Black people
pretending to be white. That sad reality doesn’t make my contention here false.
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