I’m going to take a long and important detour onto a discussion about religion, because of all our institutions, these are the ones that cause the greatest divisiveness in our society … after race, which I will get to next.
Our suspicions and our dislike of Muslims is complicated. The entire middle east is complicated. The western world has created a very large mess in the middle east. We did so through colonial activities as described above. The geopolitical boundaries that were established to maximize the extraction of resources offers a window into the mayhem that was created. A great example of this situation can be seen by trying to understand the current state of affairs of the Kurdish people. They are culturally and linguistically one people who have been forced by history to live in different countries. So many conflicts across the middle east can be viewed through this prism (western greed).
America has a sordid history of relationships in the middle east. So many of our decisions and so much of our behavior in the middle east has been driven by economics, i.e., our desire for cheap oil. So many of our military decisions have been made based on our access to oil. America has a history of picking sides with dictators the world over to facilitate economic gains and while engaged in the power chess match during the cold war. These decisions haven’t ingratiated us to the people of these countries who have had to live under these dictatorships.
We have had such a difficult relationship with Iran. If after the next Presidential election, the Chinese figured out a way to overthrow our President and install a dictator who favored practices that benefitted China, how would the American people feel about China. We’d hate them. How would we ever repair our relationship with and feelings toward China? If you want to understand our relationship with Iran, please study the last Shah of Iran, the efforts to nationalize the oil industry, and British and American activities to manage this situation (overthrow an elected leader). I don’t know if better understanding this history creates less suspicion, but it is hard to find examples where knowledge doesn’t create a better way to think about complex issues than ignorance.
The events of 9/11 changed America. It changed the way we think and feel about Islam and Muslims in the United States. The war in Afghanistan, which is ongoing and the longest war in American history, resulted from these events. The war was an attempt to fight them over there rather than fighting them here. We’re trying to clear the playing field which has fomented radical Islam so that moderates can flourish, i.e., can more readily tolerate Americans. Of the 19 hijackers on that day, 15 of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Why is it that we went into Afghanistan and not Saudi Arabia? If you want to understand what is going on in Saudi Arabia and the radicalization of so many of their people, please look up Wahhabism and try to understand how fundamentalism has influenced the people of this country. If you want to understand our relationship with Saudi Arabia, please look up cheap oil. Cheap oil explains our relationship with this country and the royal family for more than half a century. America has looked the other way while so many Saudi’s have become radicalized, i.e., they want western influence and America out of the middle east. That’s definitely what Iran wants. Just recently, a Saudi air force officer who we were training shot, wounded and killed Americans on a base in Pensacola. His action led to an investigation that resulted in 21 more Saudi military cadets being forced to leave the United States. We look the other way after they kill an American journalist. We continue to make excuses for the Saudi’s while so many of their citizens are prone to radicalization and real threats to American security.
And I haven’t even mentioned the State of Israel. So very complicated.
All these complicated and often destructive relationships are transported to within our borders and influence our thoughts and feelings about Muslims who are citizens of our country. One of the most revealing and profound examples of these destructive attitudes has occurred in fears and perspectives about Sharia law.
On February 11, 2015, Bob Smietana of LifeWay Research in Nashville published the results of a study concerning American attitudes about Islam.
As President Obama seeks to ramp up military action against the terrorist group known as ISIS, Americans remain uneasy over the place of Islam in the United States and in the world. More than a third (37 percent) say they are worried about Sharia law—an Islamic legal and moral code—being applied in America. One in 4 (27 percent) believe the terrorist group ISIS reflects the true nature of Islam, while 4 in 10 (43 percent) believe Islam can create a peaceful society. And most Protestant senior pastors (76 percent) say they support military action against ISIS. Those are among the results of two surveys of 1,000 Americans each, along with a survey of 1,000 senior pastors of Protestant churches….
Reporters from USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity engaged in a two-year investigation of copycat bills on sharia law in every state in the country. The following is an except from an article published by Dustin Gardiner and Mark Olalde on November 19, 2019.
A lawmaker in Idaho introduces legislation to prevent traditional Islamic law from infiltrating U.S. courts. In Florida, a legislator proposes striking at the foundations of terrorism with a bill bolstering victims’ ability to sue its supporters. The lawmakers’ efforts are seemingly unrelated, their statehouses almost 2,000 miles apart.
But both get their ideas, and the actual text of their bills, from the same representative of the same right-wing think tank. And when they introduce the bills, the same activist group dispatches supporters to press for passage. Eric Redman of Idaho and Mike Hill of Florida are among dozens of legislators who have sponsored copycat bills written and pushed by a network of far-right think tanks and activists.
The legislation was developed by the Center for Security Policy, which was founded by Frank Gaffney, a Reagan-era acting Assistant Secretary of Defense, who pushes conspiracy theories alleging radical Muslims have infiltrated the government. Once the copycat bills are introduced, local chapters of the Washington, D.C.-based ACT for America, which describes itself as the “NRA of national security,” encourage their supporters to show up at legislative hearings and flood lawmakers’ inboxes and phone lines in support of the bills. ACT’s founder, Brigitte Gabriel, has claimed that up to a quarter of all Muslims support the destruction of Western civilization.
ACT and the Center for Security Policy are at the center of a broader network that over a decade has waged a successful campaign that has reached every statehouse and led to the bills they’ve written and supported being introduced more than 70 times. Six states – Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee – have passed both the anti-Islamic-law and anti-terrorism measures. The special interest groups and lawmakers who sponsor their bills say they’re protecting Americans from Islamic extremism and terrorism. But the bills have had little practical impact.
In the case of the bill targeting Islamic law, known as American Laws for American Courts, supporters point to only vague threats. The terrorism bill, known as Andy’s Law, has never been put to use. Instead, say opposing legislators and civil rights activists, the copycat laws aren’t really about court integrity or terrorism.
“It is literally government-sanctioned Islamophobia,” said Robert McCaw, government relations director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil-rights watchdog. “The intended target is clear: American Muslims.”
The groups’ success highlights how special interests with lobbying power spread copycat bills – known as “model legislation” – state by state to further their agendas. Because disclosing the source of bill language isn’t required by most states, the process often occurs with little scrutiny. A legislator presents the bill as his or her own, while constituents and even other lawmakers don’t realize they have been targeted by a special interest group.
Meanwhile, the special interests behind the copycat legislation use their success to solicit donations and recruit other lawmakers to sponsor their bills.
Earth to Americans, Earth to Americans, Muslims are not going to be forcing sharia law onto every rural town in Indiana. Your way of life is safe from the threats of influence from a different religion than your own … which I’ll guess is some denomination of Christianity.
The lesson. We Americans don’t want another religion to influence our way of life. Please hold that thought.
Sharia law is religious law associated with the Islamic tradition. It is a code for living in accordance with G-d’s wishes. I’m familiar with the concept because Judaism has Jewish law. There are 613 mitzvot or commandments that define how a Jew should live. These laws cover everything from prayer, beliefs, marriage and kinship, dietary rules, agricultural and pastoral practices, prescriptions and proscriptions about marriage and sex, criminal laws, business practices, property rights, judicial procedures, rules for how to treat parents and family, people in our communities, people who are not Jewish, people who are strangers and people who are less fortunate. The laws cover everything. You follow all these rules, you are a good person. I’m sure sharia law operates the same way.
When thinking about these Jewish laws and sharia law, it is important to keep in mind one of the most important features of the definition of culture. Culture is a complex whole. The elements of a culture tend to be consistent with a total way of life; they are inter-related. Economic systems, political systems, religious institutions, kinship practices, social norms and values are categories that exist in western societies; these are western constructs. The way we compartmentalize our way of life is very much a western way of thinking and living. Most of the rest of the world does not perceive of their culture in this fashion. For almost all human existence, culture was very much a complex whole in all societies. I’m not sure how much of the non-western world remains non-western. Through missionary activity, urbanization, industrialization, the inter-dependence of world economies and Hollywood, non-western societies have likely changed considerably in the direction of the west. But if you’re looking for pockets of people who remain less changed, fundamentalists of all religious varieties would be a good place to look. Influences from the west create deeper and more complex conflicts with the traditional ways of life for these people.
To make a point, and notwithstanding the mixing and matching of nomenclature, in the US of A, Christianity is America’s sharia law!
When I was growing up, Blue Laws or Sunday Laws were strictly enforced. Retail stores were not open on Sundays. Sunday is the sabbath day in Christianity. The sabbath is the day of rest and the day of worship. People should not be thinking about secular life or business on the sabbath. They should be in their place of worship and recognizing this holy day after the creation of all the heavens and earth. Sunday is not the sabbath if you are Muslim, Jewish, Blackfeet, Inuit, Shinto, Buddhist or Hindi. Fewer stores recognize these proscriptions today because it appears as though capitalism is stronger than Christianity.
Blue laws still exist across the country. The following list was published by World Population Review. (Blue Laws by State Population. (2019-11-05). Retrieved 2020-01-20, from http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/blue-laws-by-state/).
Blue Laws by State 2020
Blue laws are laws designed to restrict certain activities on Sundays (or other specific days) for religious reasons in order to observe a day of worship or rest. Blue law also may ban shopping or ban sale of specific items on Sundays. While blue laws may seem unconstitutional because they are based on religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled them constitutional by citing that blue laws secure a day of rest for certain workers, and guarantee the free exercise of religion.
There are currently 28 states with blue laws, and the laws vary by each state, and different counties occasionally have their own blue laws.
Out of Arkansas’s 75 counties, 39 are “dry” counties where the sale of alcohol is prohibited. Private facilities are given some exceptions, and must have hard-to-obtain licenses. The sale of alcoholic beverages is entirely prohibited on Christmas Day. In most counties, alcohol and liquor sales are not allowed on Sundays and statewide Christmas Day.
Up until 2003, Delaware banned the sale of liquor on Sundays. Today, alcoholic liquor can only be sold in specifically establishments between the hours of 9 am to 1 am.
Some counties in Florida prohibit alcohol and sex toy sales on Sundays and during certain hours of the day.
Horse racing is prohibited on Sundays unless authorized by the local municipality. Car dealerships are closed on Sundays.
Sunday alcohol sales are permitted between noon and 8pm.
It is illegal for almost all businesses to be open on Thanksgiving. Hunting is illegal on Sundays.
Professional sports cannot play games before 1pm on Sundays. Except in Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George's counties, a new or used car dealer may not sell, barter, deliver, give away, show, or offer for sale a motor vehicle or certificate of title for a motor vehicle on Sunday.
Certain businesses have controlled hours of operation and the blue laws require that some businesses (retail establishments) pay their employees extra compensation on Sundays and on some holidays.
It is prohibited to buy, sell, or participate in a trade of motor vehicles on Sunday.
Liquor stores that choose to be open on Sundays are only allowed to operate between 11am and 6pm. Car dealerships are not allowed to be open or do business on Sundays anywhere in the state.
The sale of alcohol on Sundays is prohibited statewide.
New Jersey
Bergen County practices one of the only remaining Sunday closing laws. Shopping for clothing, electronics and furniture is not allowed on Sundays in Bergen County, which has four major malls. The city of Paramus in Bergen County has stricter blue laws, which ban all type of work on Sundays except in grocery stores, pharmacies, hotels, restaurants and other hospitality workplaces.
New Mexico
On-premise alcohol sale is allowed from 7am to 2am and off-premise until midnight. No alcohol sales on or off premise on Sundays or Christmas Day.
Alcohol can start being served on Sundays at 10am, thanks to introduction of the “Brunch Bill” in 2016. Certain New York counties have their own separate blue laws.
Alcohol sales are prohibited between 2am and 7am Monday through Saturday, and between 2am and either 10am or 12pm on Sundays depending on the county. Gun hunting is prohibited between 9:30am and 12:30pm on Sundays.
Car dealerships are closed on Sunday. Selling packaged liquor is prohibited on Sundays. Alcohol sales are prohibited on New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
Hunting is prohibited on Sundays, except for foxes, crows, or coyotes. Car dealerships are closed on Sunday.
Alcohol cannot be consumed on-premise between 3am and 10am on Sundays. If the local government had decided against extended hours for alcohol sales, the prohibited hours are 3am to noon.
Car dealerships must close on either Saturday or Sunday, and have the option to determine which day. Any retailer with a license can sell beer and wine for “off-premise consumption.” Beer can be sold from 7am to midnight Monday through Saturday, and from midnight to 1am and noon until midnight on Sunday. Wine can be sold between 7am to midnight Monday through Saturday, and from midnight to 2am and noon until midnight on Sunday. Liquor must be sold at specialized stores. Liquor cannot be sold on Sunday; on New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving or Christmas; and between 9pm and 10am.
Bars, clubs, and taverns are allowed to sell alcohol from 10am to 1am. Restaurants that serve alcohol are allowed between 11:30am to 1am, and the alcohol must be ordered with food. Additionally, alcohol sales have to remain under 30% of the restaurant’s total sales.
Earth to Floridians, Earth to Floridians, please stock up on your sex toys on Saturdays. Over and out.
Only in America could the Supreme Court rule that this blue law thing is okay. I want to be able to buy bourbon whiskey on Sunday. Where I live, I can’t buy it until 11:00AM. As a Jew, I’m not going to be in church on Sunday. I’m not going to be in church at all, unless I’m invited to a wedding or I’m attending a funeral. For me, Sunday is like Tuesday without football or 60 Minutes. I should be able to buy my bourbon whiskey at 9:00AM so I can have it with my veggie omelet and peanut butter on toasted challah.
The following is the First amendment of the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Well, isn’t this confusing! What happens if the free exercise of your religion starts to look like the government is establishing your religion? Put another way, what happens if your free exercise of religion has become such a pervasive part of our American culture, that it becomes an interference with both the practice of different religions or with the practice of an exclusively secular American way of life. Because, folks, that’s what is going on here. I don’t know what the framers of the constitution were thinking on this establishment thing, but I would imagine that this group of white guys were more concerned with not wanting the pope or the king of England causing mayhem over here than they were about sheiks, rabbis and imams throwing a wrench into the works.
The government doesn’t need to get involved in any of this, and when they do, they are imposing the dominant religion on everyone else. You don’t need Christian Sharia law in order to live your life as a Christian. Please go to Church on Sunday. Don’t work. Don’t buy alcohol. Don’t buy sex toys. Don’t buy a car. Why should the rest of us not have access to new sex toys on Sundays?
We fight all the time in this country about what all these words mean. We have the writings of Madison and Hamilton. There is a lot of historic background from Jefferson and Franklin and others. But at the end of the day, we have the words … and as a Jew in America, I cherish these words. We can debate their real meaning all day long. I love that we have the words to debate. The following example demonstrates what I mean.
These are the words of the Second amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
How I interpret the second amendment is, hey, we’re a bunch of rag tag states with no national economy or a federal tax to support our country’s important efforts. It is going to take us a long time to work through this whole state and federal thing. In fact, if we could see a few hundred years into the future, we’d know that we’re still working on it. If we go to war, we likely aren't going to have enough money to buy you a gun. Please keep your rifles and ammunition handy. If we need you to join the army to fight any enemies, please bring your guns, rifles and ammunition with you. Oh, and we might be able to get you a hat, but please also bring your own shoes. Thanks.
So, here’s how I look at all this amendment interpretation business. If I’m going to have to accept that the second amendment means more than bring your own weapons to America’s wars, you’re going to have to accept that the first amendment means that Muslims, Hindus, Hopi, Jews, Arapaho, Buddhists and every other of the hundreds of religions in America shouldn’t have to be twisted into pretzels not to have to adhere to Christian laws. Even if that’s not what the Christian white guys really meant when they wrote the bill of rights.
I love all these words.
Quoting from Wikipedia (the definitive resource on all known subjects), the following is the definition of Christmas:
Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A feast central to the Christian liturgical year, it is preceded by the season of Advent or the Nativity Fast and initiates the season of Christmastide, which historically in the West lasts twelve days and culminates on Twelfth Night; in some traditions, Christmastide includes an octave. Christmas Day is a public holiday in many of the world's nations, is celebrated religiously by a majority of Christians, as well as culturally by many non-Christians, and forms an integral part of the holiday season centered around it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
Anthropologically-speaking, I’m going to venture the following observations. This is a holy day recognizing the birth of Jesus Christ, the most central figure in Christianity. For Christians around the world, this is one of the holiest days on the calendar. If you live in a society where most of the people are Christian, and you aren’t, you are going to be ignoring Christmas. It sure didn’t start as a cultural non-religious celebration for people who aren’t Christian. There’s nothing to celebrate. I’ll speak exclusively as a Jew here. I’ll leave it to Hindus and Muslims to speak for themselves. Jesus doesn’t appear anywhere in the Torah, the Jewish holy books. Religiously speaking, some Jews are still waiting for the messiah. I’m just waiting for the government to regulate Facebook. If people are celebrating Christmas, it comes from assimilation to a dominant societal thing, and the desire to be in with the in-crowd. If Christmas existed as a small, quieter phenomenon, it would only be celebrated by Christians.
This was the meaning of Christmas in my household. My parents were home from work. We didn’t go to school. No stores were open. You couldn’t find a single thing to watch on television until the Lions or Cowboys game came on in the afternoon. And then we went to a movie and had Chinese food. Period. No religious rituals. No decorations or tree. No presents. No caroling. Just a really weird day in the middle of the week.
Why is Christmas a national holiday?
America isn’t allowed to impinge on the free exercise of my religion. That is the basis of the fear of sharia law. We don’t want a religion, other than the official religion of America, which is Christianity, influencing our way of life. Remember, culture is a complex whole. Christianity doesn’t just define beliefs and rituals concerning prayer, afterlife, morality; Christianity is a part of a complex whole that includes kinship, marriage, political systems, economics, social structure, and every other element of culture, including the arts. The American calendar is the Christian calendar. Christians don’t have any conflicts in their lives when it comes to how the calendar impacts work and play. Christians don’t get marked absent from school to celebrate their sabbath or holy days or have to miss a football game or basketball game or concert or play. There isn’t a need to take vacation to celebrate Christmas. It isn’t that way for people who have a different faith in America. Our lives have to accommodate a Christian calendar, because while the words of the constitution say otherwise, Christianity is, in fact, the official religion of American culture.
In his state of the union address, the president proclaimed that he would protect the right of students to pray in public schools. I think prayer in public school would be very nice. Students could start the day with a prayer. They could say a prayer before they have their lunch. They could pray before an exam. Students have the right today to say any prayers they would like, for any reason, and all day long. If the teacher leads the prayer, if a visiting minister or rabbi or imam leads a prayer, or if the principal or a parent leads the prayer, we’re in for a heap of trouble. What prayer is going to be said and from what religion? The government (public schools) are not permitted to establish a religion. The government is also not permitted to impede the free exercise of religion. The free exercise can be accomplished by a silent prayer. If there is some formal approach adopted that looks like the school is endorsing a religion, attaching to a religion, promoting a religion, celebrating a religion, they have crossed the line on the establishment clause. Ergo, he can proclaim whatever he wants until the cows come home, it will end up in court, and it will lose. Or the courts will ignore the words in the constitution, and all bets are off on what kind of country we’re going to be living in … as well as our children and grandchildren.
The only way to possibly see a war on Christmas is to have internalized America’s official religion. If you aren’t Christian in American society, the notion that there could be a war on Christmas is just a wildly bizarre notion. Do you mean you need to start listening to Christmas music over the public address system in the bathroom of your workout facility, the grocery store and Costco starting in August instead of October? Earth to Christians, earth to Christians, we surrender. If there was ever a war on Christmas, you’ve won the war. And in fact, there was never a war on Christmas … just a reflection on all those pesky words in the Constitution of the United States of America.
It is, by the way, in the same category of bizarre as the notion that white males are discriminated against in our society. In order to experience the absurdity of a war on Christmas and the discrimination against white males, it helps a lot not to be Christian or a white male. These phenomena exist exclusively in the bizarro world.
Fact is that many Americans don’t recognize that there is any other religion besides Christianity practiced in the United States. I know this, in part, from the numbers of people who wish me a Merry Christmas. G-d forbid, you should have no religion in American society.
If I observe that having a concert in a public school just before winter break (Christmas vacation) that includes all Christmas songs is a violation of the first amendment, I get angry hordes of parents who feel as though I am waging war on Christmas. Some schools will include a Hanukkah song to avoid appearing as though they are celebrating Christmas. As the number of Hanukkah songs is lame (besides the ones Adam Sandler writes periodically), this constitutional dilemma has created a market for the production of Hanukkah music. As a Jew, that feels sort of manipulative to me. Same phenomenon exists on the statehouse lawn. When a nativity scene appears on government grounds, the first thing public officials point to is the gigantic Hanukkah menorah on the other side of the government property. I didn’t read anywhere in the constitution that government shall manipulate the meaning of another religion to excuse oneself from violating the first amendment, i.e., celebrating the one true official religion of America.
The meaning of manipulation: Christians have applied way more significance to Hanukkah than Jews do so that Christians can celebrate their holiday without having to go to court every other year to deal with an ACLU lawsuit. It isn’t okay for one culture to define the meaning of a different culture’s holiday for their own purposes. It’s bad form and it’s not nice. Please cut it out.
When Christmas is celebrated in public schools, the government is establishing Christianity as America’s religion in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. The public schools can educate about Christmas, but if they are interested in passing the straight face test, it would be a good idea to sing all of these Christmas songs (many of which were written by Jewish artists), in October and cover the history and cultural significance of Christmas in June. To do otherwise is too confusing for all your Hindu and Arapaho students who feel like their public-school teachers are serving as missionaries, proselytizing Christianity. And, hey, what’s with the one Hanukkah song; why aren’t you throwing in a snappy Hindu and Arapaho song. Teachers carry enormous weight as role models for students. We want them to be respected and to serve in this capacity. How can we ask a student, and particularly impressionable elementary school students, to ignore what their teachers are doing, what they are teaching, and the meaning of these celebrations?
Parochial schools can do whatever they want when it comes to religion.
There are hundreds of religions in the United States. By far the dominant religion in American society is Christianity. While there are many different Christian denominations, and while for those who belong to those denominations the variations between them seem significant, for a person who adheres to a different religion, the differences don’t seem large or important. For those of us who are not Christian, if you blink really fast, all the denominations look the same.
When considering the differences between people and the suspicions we attach to thinking about different, religion is central to this process. It probably isn’t the most significant divisive feature in American culture – that probably belongs to skin color. But religion is right up there.
Here’s the American conundrum, culture is a complex whole even in western society – we are a Christian culture. While it is entirely contrary to the first amendment of the constitution, culturally, our society was founded by Christian white men. Our values, our ideals, and our way of life are founded on Christian cultural elements.
Oy vey.
Fear of the other. Distrust of the other. Dislike of the other. As old as humankind. Stripped to the core … not human. And because these differences make the other not human, we don’t have to treat them as we do real humans. Didn’t cause much trouble when we lived in caves. Not okay in our very diverse society. And most definitely not okay per the brilliant words in our Bill of Rights and Constitution.
Why does religion serve as such a divisive feature in this definition of the other, and the ways we act on these differences in our society? Most people in our society, regardless of their cultural background, find ways to participate in American society. We are participants in the American economic system by virtue of working, taking out loans to go to college and to buy a car and a home, by paying taxes. We participate in our political system by voting, by serving on juries, by working for candidates or contributing to a campaign, and sometimes by running for office. We are participants in many of the same aspects of the American way of life. When it comes to religion, and if you aren’t one of the Christian denominations, this is where we part ways.
There is no difference more threatening to tolerance, respect and acceptance than religious beliefs. It is impossible to separate religious beliefs from morals, ethics, values and world view. One of the more significant purposes of religion is to define these beliefs for their practitioners. Religion is the ultimate arbiter of defining what it means to be a good person or a bad person; what it means to behave correctly or inappropriately. Our criminal justice system can attempt to curb bad behavior by threatening a harsh sentence. Religion may discourage bad behavior by threatening the possibility of rotting in hell for all of eternity; a different magnitude of threat (if your religion offers you a belief in hell and/or eternity).
Religious beliefs are often a matter of faith. Faith involves a personal and collective trust in the traditions that are passed down from generation to generation. Religion requires a learning and acceptance that is qualitatively different from more easily observable phenomena in our environment.
In a complex and diverse society such as our own, the stronger one believes in their particular religious tradition, the more difficult it is to think about a different religion as being right or acceptable. In many instances, a belief system can be diametrically opposed to and mutually exclusive from the beliefs of a different religion. If I believe that there is one and only one supreme being, I can’t also believe that there is more than one deity. The stronger that I believe that there is only one supreme being, the more likely I am to find an opposing belief system to be wrong, and perhaps worse than just wrong, i.e., blasphemous, repugnant, not human.
Fundamentalists of every religion pose the greatest problem for accepting the differences in people who practice a different religion. They represent the deepest entrenchment in their traditions, which will include a belief system, definitions about the social order, morality, ethics, marriage and kinship practices, and all other aspects of a way of life. Because culture is a complex whole, even in our industrialized and information society. A fundamentalist believes they are right and there are no alternatives. They are the least amenable to accepting difference, because different is, plain and simple, wrong.
Fundamentalists pose a challenging problem for an economically interdependent world, and one which becomes smaller and smaller by virtue of the advances in information technology, transportation, and shared issues, such as climate change, poverty, famine, and health crises. A new deadly virus doesn’t care what religion you practice or what language(s) you speak. Being highly judgmental of a different way of life doesn’t make one a successful trading partner or collaborator to solve the world’s problems. Acceptance and respect start with seeing different as still human and treating difference as such. Fundamentalism poses a challenging problem in the United State for all the same reasons.
While fundamentalism creates barriers to the acceptance of diversity, I also think about fundamentalism as a positive for people in many ways. Another conundrum. I have great respect for people who are able to accept their beliefs with such great conviction in the face of the onslaught of assimilative forces in our society and around the world. Religion serves as an anchor and an important stabilizing force in a society that is experiencing ever increasing and accelerating change. The amount of change and the rapidity of change is cumulative and it is in many respects overwhelming. When I did my dissertation research in the 1970s, there were no computers and there was no internet. I came home from two years of research with 10,000 handwritten pages of fieldnotes on yellow legal pads. I took 3,500 photographs on Kodachrome and Ektachrome slide film. How incredibly quickly the world has changed. My telephone is a more powerful computer than the desktops I was buying just a few years ago. I can do everything with my phone short of finding happiness, peace, and enlightenment.
As the world around us changes so quickly, it is natural and, in many ways, adaptive, that religions lag changes in the other elements of culture. How stable or predictable would our lives be if morals, ethics and belief systems changed as rapidly as computer processors or disc storage technology. We all need the ability to adapt to changes, and for that to occur, they really can’t happen too quickly. If they do, there’s usually mayhem. For instance, our economy has changed so quickly, that more and more people are either unemployed or their wages are not keeping up with the cost of living, because our training and education haven’t kept up with the rapidity of change in the new economy. Our economy has quickly transitioned from a focus on making things to a consumer economy focused on encouraging people to buy lots of stuff they really don’t want or need. I grew up watching a black and white television that had only three channels. Now I can watch infomercials all night long, in high definition color. Progress.
There is much good about hanging on to anchors in a world that changes so quickly. In fact, that’s so much of what culture is all about. A way of life gets passed on from generation to generation. Adapting to rapid and dramatic change is going to have to become a mainstay of culture to succeed in our brave new world. And fundamentalism creates barriers to those adaptations.
I think it is fine to be a fundamentalist so long as you simulate living in a cave and brandishing nothing as lethal as a branch from a really small tree. If you are going to believe that different is wrong and that it shouldn’t be accepted or respected, it would be best if you just kept to yourself. Please don’t try to influence people of different religions or bully them or worse, i.e., like try to emulate Ferdinand and Isabella. Or try to pass laws in the greater society that are based on your religion. We understand why you are threatened by sharia law. Please keep that in mind while you’re legislating based on the morality that comes directly from your holy books. Keeping me from purchasing my sex toys on Sundays is absolutely contrary to the First Amendment.
If your beliefs were communicated to you directly from the burning bush, I totally appreciate your convictions. They are admirable. If those beliefs include proscriptions against homosexuality, that’s a major problem. I didn’t choose to be attracted to women. That just happened to me. I’m pretty sure that’s how this thing works. In fact, I don’t believe anyone has a good explanation as to how sex object choice happens. It isn’t a conscious choice. If a man falls in love with another man and they want to spend their lives together and reap all the benefits society awards to married couples, your religious beliefs need to be kept to yourself. Your religious beliefs should be kept out of the legislative process. To do otherwise is forcing your religious beliefs on everyone who doesn’t practice your religion. And that’s just not nice.
The entire fundamentalism dilemma is magnified by the theology surrounding proselytizing and conversion. I am much more familiar with missionary activity in Christianity than I am with Islam, but it exists in full force in both religious traditions. I have a greater understanding of missionary activity in Christianity because I spent two years of my life teaching social studies in a Catholic mission school on a reservation in Montana. The social studies book I used for my seventh and eighth graders taught the history and significance of the one true religion. The Jesuits made an early move into the northwestern United States and established missions on the reservations across the region. From what I had observed, they did a boom bang job on most of these reservations. How these conversions were done should be the topic of another blog. Suffice it to say for now that all these tribes were perfectly content with their traditional religions, and adoption of a different belief system and a different way of life was most often not accomplished willingly or compassionately.
The operative concept here is that missionary activity, at its core, is based on the simple notion that what I believe is right, and what you believe is wrong. You need to be believing our way or you don’t get to receive the benefits of living our way, i.e., as a real human being.
Fundamentalists are a real problem. Fundamentalists who want to legislate based on their religious beliefs are a problem. Fundamentalists who want to force me to live contrary to what I believe are a problem. Fundamentalists who are going to be unhappy until everyone believes just like them are a problem for everyone who is different from them.
When I worked at the mission, there was a sister who was particularly disturbed by my being Jewish. And it is a good moment for me to recognize that it took some incredible gumption on the part of the Catholic Mission to accept my Jewish wife and myself into the Jesuit Volunteer Corp as teachers and volunteers at the church and school. I had a close friend who was a diocesan priest in Montana who put in a good word for me, and the chairman of the mission school board was a member of the A'aninin (White Clay People) Tribe who had an appreciation for Anthropology. He later became like a father to me during our stay on the reservation. Regardless of the references and the support, it was pretty incredible for the Church to accept us. It also confused the crap out of the people in the community. An older man once observed in a conversation with me that he had been totally unaware that there were Catholic Jews. I smiled and didn’t ask him if he’d ever heard of Jesus.
Anyway, there was a sister at the mission who was all over me about accepting Catholicism as the one true religion. Like, hey, aren’t you reading your own social studies book? I always remained respectful with her, but politely declined her advances. They were persistent. In fact, even after we returned to Ohio, we received literature from her about Catholicism. When she realized that she wasn’t going to make any headway on that front, she retreated to the less satisfying, but better-than-nothing-approach of Jews for Jesus. Her persistence made me think that there could be special bonus points awarded to someone who can snag a Jew.
I’m sure that at some point in the thousands of years of Jewish history, there were people who thought that it would be a great idea if everyone in the universe were Jewish. It would certainly make for a world with a great deal more sarcasm, irony and humor. Whatever those times were, they are long gone. Here’s where Judaism is today about proselytizing and conversion. We’re perfectly fine with you believing in and practicing whatever you want. Please don’t shoot anyone in our families or burn down our villages.
The framers of the constitution and the founders of our country didn’t want for us to become a theocracy because of their history with England. A concern for a theocracy continues as evidenced by the turmoil surrounding John F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidency. He was Catholic and there was very public hand wringing about the possibility of the pope running the country. If I may take some liberties with the thinking going on by our founding fathers (because let’s face it, they didn’t allow our founding mothers to express any opinions about the establishment clause or any other clause, let alone give them the right to vote) … it is likely that the room full of Christian white guys were concerned with one denomination of Christianity taking control over another. It is just hard to imagine that they were thinking about Judaism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Hopi, Inuit or Islam, or that any of these religions were even on their radar screen. George Washington did write a very nice and inclusive letter to the Jews who were living in Rhode Island.
What makes all of this so complicated is that morals, ethics, and norms are shared and most of them in the United States are based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. So many of our laws and ethics derive from the holy books of the Jewish and Christian faiths. But thank goodness, our laws and moral and ethical prescriptions and proscriptions don’t match up against their traditions with any great precision. The ten commandments might (in violation of the first amendment) hang in your county courthouse, but we don’t have laws that derive from them directly. Yes, stealing and killing are against the law. We haven’t, however, made it illegal to covet your neighbor’s wife.
Fact is, there are few black and white moral issues. Most of them are going to exist in the gray and we’re going to be debating about them for the foreseeable future. And the gray gets deeper and darker, in part, because we are such a diverse country, made up of people who practice so many different religions or no religion at all. It would help if we could respect each other while doing so and try not to gun down or blow up people who don’t believe as you do. It would also help if you could trade your gun in for a stick.
I’m not sure we can cure this problem, at least not any time soon. My short-term solution would be to give each fundamentalist group a state, city or village, depending on the number of practitioners, and allow them to bask in the homogeneity of their community. They can experience the pure joy of living a life that is consistent with their belief system and without any interference from different cultures/religions. It would protect the rest of us from their wanting or needing all of humanity to believe and think like them. Caves are too small and there might not be enough of them to handle the load. And even though these people cause so much mayhem, they deserve natural light.
Is it possible to be a cultural relativist and still have a set of morals, ethics and values which guide your life’s journey?
The answer to that question is a resounding yes.
To begin with, I don’t have to make judgments about another culture to be comfortable with what I believe for myself. It is possible for me to accept and respect that people who were raised in a different society will practice a different culture and religion, and that their way of life is as valid and appropriate and acceptable as my own. That they believe differently than me doesn’t erode or threaten what I believe or practice. Their way of life isn’t worse. It isn’t better. It is just different.
More and more people don’t practice any religion in our society, and yet they live highly moral and ethical lives by anyone’s sane standards. That’s pretty much what secular humanism is all about. It describes an increasing number of people in our society who subscribe to this way of life and reject institutionalized religion, perceived by some as the basis for so much conflict and divisiveness in our society. I obviously agree with that perception, and hence, the need to get the most fundamentalist of people moved into some equivalent of a cave.
People without any affiliation with a religious institution and without any religious beliefs involving a supreme being or beings or spirits or afterlife, are law-abiding citizens. They live ethical and moral lives. They are as devoted to family and pass on their morals and ethics in the ways they raise their children. They are concerned for other people and their communities and the world. They are devoted to helping the less fortunate and the stranger. They work to make our world a better place, to heal the world. I know better than to generalize about younger people from my experiences with my children and their friends. Having said that, I am observing that young people tend to be less affiliated with a religious tradition and therefore, less dogmatic and more open to different. Young people do give me hope.
I believe that everything about religion is a human construct, i.e., we make it all up. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t adopted Judaism with great passion. I have. I’ve totally drunk the Jewish Kool-Aid. I was raised in an orthodox Jewish home. My mother kept strictly kosher. I’m still wigged out by the notion of eating shrimp or lobster. (But have no issues about sausage or bacon – go figure). I go to temple almost every Friday night. I’ve belonged to the same temple for 36 years. I was bar mitzvahed. My sons were both bar mitzvahed. I celebrate the Jewish holidays. I observe the yahrzeits and yizkor for Pauline and my father.
I strongly embrace my Judaism, as I embrace my family traditions. I recognize the sacrifices that my family, my ancestors, made for me to be in this country and to have the freedom I do to practice my religion openly, with only a minimal presence of armed security guards and a need to learn karate and wear an armored vest.
I’m just stuck with believing that it is all made up by humans, because as an element of culture, it is all created by humans, and then passed on from generation to generation through learning. Religion is no different from language, politics, economics, social rules, kindship, values … these are all cultural elements, created by humans, shared by the members of a society and learned. And, yikes, arbitrary.
For me, the holy books are literature. Most of them likely began as oral traditions, and then were recorded by men as we developed written language. Some of the stories were based on historical facts, and some were fiction. Prose and poetry. All taught lessons about the rules for living as a Jew. All defined the sacred and the profane. The holy books taught what to believe and all the rituals. They define an entire way of life. (As the Koran does in Islam, and thus is similar to Sharia law). Thousands of men have spent centuries studying, interpreting and analyzing these words. In the grand scheme of things, it isn’t that many words. These words continue to be studied and analyzed and interpreted, and now, women have been permitted to join this endeavor. Progress. Unless you are of the fundamentalist persuasion, and then this activity is not appropriate for the women who you can find on the other side of the mechitzah, if you’re looking (and you probably shouldn’t be looking if you’re a man). If as many people spent as much time analyzing the human body as we have on analyzing and interpreting the meaning of the holy books, we’d likely have cured cancer long ago.
It is easier for me to pull off believing in the way that I do, because of the institutional structure of Judaism. There isn’t much of one. I would characterize Christianity and Islam as being top down, and Judaism as being more bottom up. There are denominational differences within these religions based on complicated historical happenings over many years. But these denominations have institutional structures that involve hierarchies with leaders at the very top who do the analyzing, interpreting and ordaining. The meaning of things and the rules are defined from the top and then disseminated down to the flock.
Every Jewish community since the diaspora has lived as strangers in a strange land. Until Israel was re-established in 1947, the Jewish people had no nation or homeland. We lived within a society that was different from our own culture, and we lived as a minority. Sometimes as a very small minority. We had no army. We lived as citizen guests of the dominant society. At times Jews were accepted and they flourished. At times they were just tolerated, and they coped. At times they were persecuted and they suffered or fled. My family came to America under the latter set of circumstances. They fled during the pogroms, i.e., raping, pillaging, killing, burning down of villages. It was Russia then. It is the Ukraine today. Could be Russia tomorrow.
Judaism also contains different groupings or denominations that, today, one might characterize as being on a continuum of assimilation. The orthodox do things by The Book(s). Reform Jews have interpreted their rituals to conform more to the societies in which they live. Conservative Judaism sits in between. Each of these categories have organizations that serve to support their efforts. They support social, welfare and political activities and they do include interpretive issues. The spiritual leader of any congregation is the rabbi. Each rabbi has tremendous influence over the way rituals are practiced in his or her congregation. Female rabbis are a relatively new thing in Judaism. The ultimate arbiter of how things are done goes to the congregations themselves, because the congregation hires and fires their rabbis. There is a broad set of beliefs and rituals that we all adhere to and that makes us Jews. But there is great latitude in the ways things are done and interpreted. All Jews recognize the holiness of the Sabbath. Just how specifically this recognition is defined and practiced is represented by some considerable diversity between each of these categories and between different congregations.
If I behave in an ethical and moral way, I can be a good Jew without someone dictating to me what I must believe. I go to temple and I listen and learn the stories and the lessons from the Torah portion each week. What meaning I ascribe to them, and what significance I attach to them in my life belongs solely to me.
I haven’t studied the history of this bottom up phenomenon but would venture that it has much to do with the destruction of the second temple and the diaspora. The journey involved in being able to study Torah and practice rituals when there was no longer a central institution (perhaps the top down temple in Jerusalem), and the importance of learning to read (education) to be able to study the Torah as a personal responsibility. Jews could no longer rely on the priestly class at the temple to do all the heavy lifting.
However the bottom up approach happened, it sure resulted in some interesting stuff when it comes to ritual and beliefs in Judaism.
It would be difficult to find another group of people on the face of the earth who possess greater expertise on being the different group than Jews. We’ve been at it for more than a couple of thousand years. To reiterate the point I am beating to death … societies don’t like groups that are different. They often don’t consider them human. Thus, they can be treated as not human. My point explains a lot about human history. If I start a discussion of the history of anti-Semitism, I will be writing this blog for the rest of my life. Thus, I won’t. I have other things I’d like to do. Suffice it to say, anti-Semitism isn’t older than the hills, but it’s one of the older things around. If you believe that Jews own all the banks and media in the world, if you have a visceral dislike of Jews, I implore you to learn something about the origins of anti-Semitism. Please learn about these prejudices and then please reflect on what incredible harm they have caused over so many thousands of years. Or don’t do anything, and please figure out if there’s room for you in one of the cave-towns. Thank you very much.
Interestingly, the mechanisms Jews employed to keep their identities and culture intact as minorities in a dominant society, as strangers in a strange land, likely contributed to their not being liked by many members of the dominant society. Or these mechanisms likely magnified the prejudices that already existed. First, the Jews were different, and seemed to be content to remain different. To maintain the boundaries of this difference, there was a very strong proscription against marrying out. It happened. I know because I watched Fiddler on the Roof. It was very rare and wasn’t accepted in the Jewish community. It isn’t possible to generalize over the thousands of years across all the nations in which Jews lived, because there was so much diversity over time and throughout all these societies.
Jews kept barriers around their way of life while often participating and borrowing from the dominant society. In Eastern Europe, they developed a lingua franca, Yiddish, a form of low German that became a written language phonetically spelled in Hebrew. Hebrew was the language of The Torah – the language of prayer and sacred study. They participated in economic and political systems to the extent they were permitted and oftentimes in roles that were circumscribed and defined by the dominant society. Often, they borrowed literature, the arts, and music. Sometimes they went to schools and oftentimes they were not permitted to go to school and had to attend the schools that were provided in their Jewish communities. Sometimes they volunteered to serve in a nation’s army and sometimes they were forced to serve. My grandfather was conscripted as a teenager into the Czar’s army.
All this work to be different must have really pissed people off in the dominant society. Hey, we hate their guts because they’re different, but they don’t even want to be like us, which makes us hate their guts even more. And our daughters aren’t good enough for them? Well that sucks, even though if any of them came anywhere near our daughters, we’d beat the crap out of them.
The world has treated Jews for centuries as they have because they weren’t human.
Dear Sandy
Once again I really enjoyed your article, even if some passages were difficult for someone like me, whose English is not its mother tongue.
Regarding Religion, I have no doubt not the same point of view as you. As you know, I do not believe in God and have never believed in him. My father was an atheist (communist sympathizer from 1942 to 1978), and my mother is not a believer either. My parents, both teachers in Public School, fought throughout their professional lives against their "rivals" of Catholic schools, very well established in this region of Brittany where I was born and where I live. My father took up arms against the Nazis during the Second World…