This blogpost was prompted by an interaction I was on the edge of recently. I came away wishing I'd found the right words to challenge the speaker at the time: I didn't, but I have been reflecting since on what made me feel so uncomfortable and what I wish I'd been able to communicate. And while I probably won't share it with the person concerned, who is not someone I really know, for what it's worth, I'm sharing it here.
In the conversation a member of Christian clergy was inviting someone, who they were meeting for the first time, to attend church. Fine, I don't have a problem with that, especially as the person they were talking to was expressing interest in a conversation about faith. The invitation included sharing what they valued about their own church. Also fine.
But they continued by actively denigrating another denomination. Absolutely not fine. For all they knew, the person they were speaking to, or any of the other people within earshot might have been deeply committed members of the denomination they chose to insult and might have been deeply hurt by the comments; but even if not, there was no justifiable reason or need to use criticism of another group as a way to celebrate their own.
As someone who has spent much of my adult life trying to engage in ecumenical and interfaith settings in ways which have been at times painful, but which have been about seeking common ground and celebrating difference in healthy ways, I found the throwaway dismissal of an entire swathe of people who share the same faith but express it differently to be deeply problematic.
On further reflection, though, this overheard conversation was symptomatic of something that is so much bigger than just the church, and the Christian failure to live out the commandment to "be one."
It reminded me of one of the core ways I think we have gone wrong as a society: that we have somehow learned that celebrating ourselves, individually and collectively, relies on criticising or condemning others.
Too often, as we seek to celebrate what we value about our own communities, we do so by some sort of compare and contrast with another. We resort to we are ‘this’ because we are not ‘that’, and we celebrate the ‘this’ because it is superior to the ‘that’.
And if religion / faith is one space in which this attitude is so often apparent, it is far from the only example. My work life in the migration sector is, obviously, littered with examples. But they aren't the only ones either. Othering has become (or perhaps has always been) so deeply ingrained in the way society works that we often barely even notice it. It seems to pervade the ways almost every community interacts with others. This conversation was a case in point: I don’t think this person was deliberately setting out to insult another group, they just hadn’t paused to reflect on how their words were so reliant on criticising someone else. This competitive us versus them rhetoric is so embedded as to be entirely natural to a point where we don’t even identify it as problematic.
Despite being expressed as derision or dismissal, it is often, in my opinion, more likely to be the result of ignorance and fear than of intentional, thought-out malice. I also suspect that despite surface level appearances to the contrary, it does not, in reality come from any deep-seated sense of self worth either. In my experience, those who are most confident and secure in their own identities, as individuals and communities, are in fact those least likely to need to vaunt their superiority over others. And I worry that this combination of fear and fragility risks being extremely toxic in the ways we relate to each other, individually and collectively.
It is to my mind, the antithesis of what the gospel calls us to: the building of diverse, inclusive communities where all are recognised and celebrated as beloved children of God, each with their individual stories and unique identities.
Don’t get me wrong, I think celebrating what we love and value about ourselves is entirely valid, perhaps even essential. I don’t really believe pride, in that sense, is necessarily inherently a deadly sin. I also think there are of course times and spaces when questioning or challenging others around their beliefs or practices is entirely justified. I just don’t believe that our celebration of self has to rely on contrasting or criticising the other.
I also know that I am far from perfect on this score. I know I have also fallen into the temptation of believing and expressing that my / our version is good because it is not theirs.
But I’m trying. I’m trying to live in ways which celebrate what I love about myself and what I love about the various different communities I belong to, and to do so because of their inherent worth or value in and of themselves, not in some imagined competition with another. I hope that, little by little, we can all find more ways to learn and to communicate, individual and collectively, that celebrating ourselves and valuing others are not mutually exclusive.
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