Religious Bigotry in Delaware: Pogrom Expands to Include Muslims
The New York Times reports:
After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.
“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.
Notice that Mrs. Dobrich didn’t ask that all prayers be ended, something that she would have been justified in doing. Instead, she only asked that the prayers be more generic (which would have still singled out a type of monotheism for favoritism). Despite how often the Christian Right likes to pretend that America was founded on Judeo-Christian traditions and values, the Christians in her community were infuriated at the prospect of including Jews in the format of prayers.
For these Christians, only those prayers which are explicitly Christian have any value — more generic prayers are an interference with “traditions” and Christian “faith.” Jews who think that they should be incorporated into the political community are asking too much and should just leave the country altogether. They aren’t Christian so they don’t belong — they are inferior at best.
“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” [Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center] said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about. They’re just convinced that what they are doing is good for kids and what America is all about.” ...
Until recently, it was safe to assume that everyone in the Indian River district was Christian, said the Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Peter’s Church in Lewes.
The less religious pluralism there is in a community, the harder it is for the minorities which do exist to demand, much less receive, equal treatment or respect from the majority. The less religious pluralism there is, the more arrogant, self-righteous, and obnoxious the religious majority can be. They are often so convinced of their own rightness that they don’t see the need to accommodate the wishes, interests, or beliefs of anyone else.
In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.
“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”
People insisted that prayer remain in schools, but notice that taking prayer out of schools was never the issue. First, it was a question of prayers during school board meetings and not during school time. Second, it was a question of more inclusive prayers that weren’t explicitly Christian in nature rather than eliminating prayers entirely. Now, did those who called in simply not understand the issues or were they lied to by someone else who thought that distorting the truth would help inflame passions against the local Jews?
Why do you suppose Kenneth R. Stevens thought that minorities shouldn’t be accommodated? Remember, we’re talking about an elected government body rather than a private organization. A purely private group can plausibly argue that they have no obligation to accommodate anyone’s beliefs. There is no such argument that can be made when it comes to government bodies — there’s no logical or legal argument for the idea that government bodies should endorse and support the religious beliefs of the majority while excluding the religious beliefs of minorities.
That, however, appears to be precisely what Kenneth R. Stevens and many others believed. Stevens goes even further by insisting that anyone who doesn’t like it when government power is misused by singling out his religion for special treatment, then they should just leave. It’s their “way of life” to discriminate against minorities and treat religious minorities as if they were political and social inferiors. They should get used to it or get themselves out of the community — which is precisely what the Dobrich family had to do because they feared for their safety.
It’s worth noting that Mrs. Dobrich grew up in this community, and grew up as an Orthodox Jew as well. When she was growing up, she wasn’t teased, abused, or harassed for being Jewish or for having religious beliefs that differed from the majority. She reports that she was always treated with basic respect and dignity — both of which were denied her son:
Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”
Has there really been a dramatic shift? Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at the National School Boards Association, says that there does appear to be both an increase in litigation and the emotions involved in these cases. What would be driving this? Fear, I think. When Christians dominated culture, politics, and society, it was easy to be tolerant of minorities like Orthodox Jews. The presence of minorities without power, without a voice, and without the self-confidence needed to demand true equality never threatened Christian control of society.
Today things are very different. Christians have lost control of popular entertainment and media — whereas before they had the power to prevent the release of films which portrayed a priest in a negative light, for example, and stack the movie censorship boards, today they must accept a movie getting a PG rating in part because of the heavy Christian proselytization in it. Whereas before the interests of religious minorities could be dismissed and ignored entirely, today Christians are forced to modify government practices so as not to favor their own beliefs over others.
It’s still true that Christians dominate in so many ways, not the least of which is simply their sheer numbers in every part of society and politics. Culture, entertainment, and the law, however, have passed beyond them and are becoming far more pluralistic. They continue to demand special treatment and favoritism, but in so many cases they can’t get it legally. As a consequence, they are much more likely to lash out violently against those who appear to threaten those privileges.
In effect, people like the Dobriches are victims of their own success. Christians wouldn’t be lashing out at them like this if it weren’t for the fact that they are making requests that are not only reasonable, but legally correct. Christians wouldn’t be lashing out if there weren’t a long series of precedents for the government denying Christians special privileges and accommodating the needs or interests of religious minorities. Mrs. Dobrich is right, morally and legally, and in the end this is what has gotten the bigoted Christians in her community so up in arms. They know she is right and they know that unless they can intimidate her into giving up, she’ll win. Violence and abuse are the only tools they have left to them.
The cost of renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here. Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs. Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left Columbia because of the financial strain.
I knew that the Dobrich family had to move in order to escape the abuse and I figured that it couldn’t be easy financially, but I had no idea that it created such a tremendous financial strain that their daughter had to drop out of school. Columbia University should, at least ideally, do something to help her get back in and help her pay for her education there. We should keep firmly in mind the fact that Christians in Indian River, Delaware, are directly and personally responsible for this.
Christians are engaged in the abuse and harassment which made the Dobriches fear for their lives. Christians created the situation in which the Dobriches felt the need to flee the community and live far away. Christians created the family’s financial strain and thus caused Samantha Dobrich to drop out of college. None of this, it should be noted, was incidental to people’s Christianity. It’s not like someone getting a speeding ticket and only incidentally being a Christian — no, the Christians in this community acted on behalf of their Christianity and in defense of their Christian traditions.
Their Christianity is an important aspect of this story and without it, none of this would be going on.
Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters.
As important as all the rest of the this New York Times article was, I think this single sentence, unadorned by background details or substantive information, may be the most important of all: more schools in Delaware are engaged in proselytizing and harassing non-Christians. The story of what the Dobriches have endured needed to be told, but the reporter has missed the much larger story that the Dobrich experiences are not an isolated incident. There appears to be a wider pattern, a pattern which should have been explored not just for the details of individual stories, but also the background reasons which I have tried to outline above.
There's more going on here than meets the eye, and much more going on than is evident from even the decent articles we find in our newspapers — never mind the superficial articles we usually skim over in our haste to get on with our day. This is something we should keep an eye on.
Christian & Religious Privilege:
Religion in Public Schools:
Comments
“When Christians dominated culture, politics, and society, it was easy to be tolerant of minorities like Orthodox Jews.”
…whuh?
I was under the impression that Anti-Semitism had decreased over the years…
Antisemitism can occur on a number of levels. The Antisemitism which has decreased has been efforts to keep them out of certain jobs, certain universities, certain neighborhoods, etc. That’s the “I don’t like having you near me” type of bigotry. What those bigots didn’t do, however, was express much fear over the mere presence of non-Christian beliefs in the vicinity. Judaism, as non-Christian system, was more an object of curiosity than fear and hatred.
All that has switched today, at least in some ways. Jews can live, work, and study wherever they want. No formal, legal restrictions still exist. People who have the “I don’t like having you near me” sort of bigotry about Jews are in a dwindling minority now. In place of this is the “your presence threatens my ability to take comfort in my innate religious superiority over you” sort of bigotry. When Christians really dominated and Jews could be openly discriminated against, it was easy to feel superior. It didn’t take any work — you could just look around and everything in the culture told you that you were superior.
Today that’s not the case. Today, if a Christian wants to feel superior to Jews (or non-Christians), they have to work at it. Culture and politics don’t keep reinforcing this belief. So, when Christians who want to feel superior find a place where they can create such reinforcement, they latch on to it like a pit bull. They won’t stand for their local “traditions” being changed in order to accommodate the Jews — otherwise, they won’t still be told that they are supeirior by local government.
It would be wrong to call this “Antisemitism,” I guess, because it’s not really about Jews or Judaism. As I note above Muslims are targets, too. It’s all about being a religious minority and not being Christian. Doesn’t matter who you are, just so long as you aren’t one of them.
And then there is pastor Hagee of the 18,000 member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, TX. He is the leader of a growing number of megachurch pastors who are trying to drum up more support for Israel from their ultra-conservative evangelical constituency.
This is hardly motivated by sympathy for the poor Jews who are remotely connected by faith to evangelicals, but by the fact that Hagee & Co. view the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as the beginning of the end of times as it is prophecized in the Bible. What the evangelical pastors do not widely advertize is the horrible fate that awaits the Jews when the Messiah will return, at least according to their version of the Scriptures.
The evangelical campaign to support our Jewish friends in Israel is therefore completely self-serving. The Jews are being used to further the evangelical cause and Jesus will take care of the rest.