Comment of the Week: Dealing with Public, Religious Hatred

Christians frequently proclaim that theirs is a religion of love, peace, and justice, but in practice it's all to common to see incredibly un-loving statements and behavior from some of those same Christians. At best, Christians are no more loving and peaceful than their non-Christian neighbors, but even in the best case scenario they can manage to find ways to use their religion as a justification for their behavior and that only makes things worse. It's bad enough to hate some group, but when you imagine that your religion and your god sanction or require such hatred, the possibilities for moderation, compromise, and even improvement become extremely restricted.

Child of Preachers writes:

Having been born and lived my whole life in Canada, where religious belief and practice is quite subdued, I was suddenly shocked to notice a simultaneous bolstering of my experience of atheism while feeling the need to hide it quite strongly. I am not ashamed of my non-belief, I am just overwhelmed by the absolute mania caused here by religious "values".

While proclaiming Jesus-like righteousness but practicing racism, while hailing god's love and forgiveness but alienating cohabiting, unmarried couples (while abstinence-educated teenagers become mothers prematurely at an alarming rate), and while rejoicing about Jesus' humbleness and perfection but behaving in a way that is judgmental and cruel to oppressed minorities who, in the context of the Bible, Jesus would have welcomed, is it any wonder that I'm not about to open my mouth?

It's practically a matter of safety, particularly since I am not certain that the justice system here would be particularly eager to offer me protection.

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It should be noted that this writer is not a life-long atheist; instead, they are the child of two preachers (thus the name) who grew up in a very religious household. They thus have lots of experience with religion in their lives, but are still taken aback by the sort of religion they are experiencing in the American South. Such a reaction seems to require that a person not currently be an active, devout Christian in order to notice these sorts of things -- you need to somehow be "outside the fold" in order to recognize just how hateful, bigoted, and even violent so much of the rhetoric is.

This in turn should give us an indication about what's ultimately going on: tribalism. Doesn't all of the above look an awful lot like tribal behavior, with extremely harsh lines being drawn to separate insiders from outsiders? This isn't meant to "excuse" religion because tribalism and religion aren't mutually exclusive -- quite the contrary, in fact, because religion has been used as an important aspect of tribalism and tribalists behavior for as far back as we have records. Even the god of Jews, Christians, and Muslims started out as an exclusively tribal god, only developing universalistic claims much later on -- though that "universalism" doesn't cover over the tribalism entirely, does it?