Humility and the lessons of history

It’s rare for a religious discussion to remain in our mediaculture for long, but that’s been the case for President Obama’s comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5. Obama gave a speech in which he compared Islamic violence with historic Christian violence. Political opponents expressed outrage. Jim Gilmore, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the remarks “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime.” 

In the speech, Obama said that “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” He then brought his historical analogy closer to home: “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
From what I’ve seen, historians who’ve responded to the claims don’t take issue with his statements. Others, though, don’t like him criticizing Christianity or America. 

This raises a question: Is it valuable to practice self-reflection (and self-criticism) as Christians?
A second question is, Is it fair to even call what was done in the Crusades, the Inquisition and in the American South Christian? Most Muslims would deny that what ISIS is doing reflects Islam.
In a Feb. 10 article at Slate.com, Jamelle Bouie explores the facts behind Obama’s statement about Jim Crow. He makes two basic points: (1) it was worse than we may have thought, and (2) it was a religious ritual.
“In a recent report,” Bouie writes, “the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is “at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.”
He goes on to offer descriptions of a few of these “lynchings” (the word doesn’t capture the brutality of the torture and butchery), which are too horrible to quote here.
Bouie then notes that these lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or “celebratory acts of racial control and domination.” They were rituals. He quotes historian Amy Louise Wood, who writes in her book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940: “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort.”
Another historian, Donald G. Mathews, writes in the Journal of Southern Religion: “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” 

But why bring this up? What purpose does it serve?
Perhaps it’s a lesson in humility and a warning against self-righteousness. Jesus certainly had plenty to say about the perils of self-righteousness (see Matthew 23).
What ISIS has done is horrible—and comparable to what those “Christian” lynch mobs did. But let’s not judge all Muslims by that group. We don’t want all Christians judged by what other so-called Christians have done.
And let’s do some self-analysis as well. Are we not all prone to acts of domination or violence? Can we learn from our past in order to not practice such violence?
Maybe we need to practice confession and repentance on occasion.

The preferred story

Among the major films released this year, there may be none more overtly religious than Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and based on Yann Martel’s best-selling book, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002.

The book and the film, which is remarkably faithful to the book, are about storytelling and about belief. In both the book and film, the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells his story to a skeptical Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall). He recounts growing up in India, where his father owned a small zoo.

We learn how Pi gets his name and follow his religious pursuits as he adopts his mother’s Hinduism, then Catholicism, then Islam. His atheistic father emphasizes the importance of science and reasoning, and Pi adopts that as well. For him, the world is a vast body to be explored with curiosity and love.

Then economic troubles arrive, and Pi’s father must sell the zoo. He books his family and the animals on a cargo ship bound for Canada. A storm sinks the ship, and the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) alone survives among the humans. He finds refuge on a 26-foot-long lifeboat and is soon joined by a wounded Zebra, a vicious hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In a short time, only Pi and the tiger remain.

Their journey together make up the greater part of the narrative, and one of the amazing accomplishments of Martel’s novel is to maintain the reader’s keen interest over such a limited scope. The miracle of the story is that the boy survives his journey across the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. The miracle of the storytelling is that the author pulls this off.

The film does, too, though not as well. There are points where it felt long, and I wanted relief from the tension. But while the book focuses on Pi’s ponderings about life and faith, Lee uses some astounding images to beguile us. At times the water’s surface is like a mirror that reflects the sky so that Pi seems to be both underwater and above the clouds. He also shows Pi’s hallucinations as he struggles with thirst, hunger and fear.

Perhaps the film’s crowning achievement is the digital magic it uses to show a tiger on a boat with a boy. It looks so real, down to the smallest detail. We even see the tiger grow thinner as the food disappears. If this film isn’t nominated for an Oscar for best special effects, something is wrong.

The novelist has come to Pi because he was told that Pi would tell him a story that would make him believe in God—a tall order that sounds anathema to skeptics.

After Pi reaches land and is recovering in a Mexican hospital, two representatives of the Korean company that owned the ship ask him why the ship sank. Pi doesn’t know but tells his story. The two men say that no one will believe that story. So Pi makes up another story that replaces the animals with people from the ship and describes how he alone came to be left.

He tells the men they can choose which story they want to use. The novelist asks him, Which story is true? Pi says, Which story do you prefer?

Life of Pi is a fable about storytelling and belief. We choose the stories we want to believe. Our faith in God is not based on fact but on belief, just as not having faith in God is based on belief, on believing a different story.

I imagine theists and non-theists will enjoy this film for different reasons. Both will enjoy the riveting story of survival and the humor that runs throughout. But non-theists may not like the lesson inherent in the story.

Either way, it’s a well-made film.

Prejudice and religious ignorance

Mennonites are used to being misunderstood, both in negative and positive ways. We often hear others ask about horse and buggies or plain black clothing when they hear we are Mennonites.

On the other hand, some people laud Mennonites for being committed to peace and justice, not realizing the great diversity in our ranks on those subjects.

We all carry prejudices. We prejudge others, make assumptions about them, often out of ignorance about those people and what they may believe.

Much of our media betrays great ignorance about religion—not just Mennonites but many religious groups. And if you spend much time on the blogosphere, you encounter great ignorance as people spout views that are at times hateful, certainly prejudiced and that show ignorance about the groups they are putting down in order to advance their own views.

One of the groups most commonly misunderstood are Muslims, whose numbers are growing rapidly in the United States. And worldwide Islam is the second largest religion.

Nevertheless, it is treated as monolithic and homogenous. As religion scholar Philip Jenkins writes, “Arguably, over the span of its development, Islam worldwide is quite as diverse as Christianity.”

One of the stereotypes about Islam is that it is Arab, yet, Jenkins writes, “Of the world’s eight largest Muslim countries, only one—Egypt—is Arab in language and culture, and it would not be too far off the mark to see Islam as a religion of South and Southeast Asia.”

A recent book, Woman, Man and God in Modern Islam by Theodore Friend (Eerdmans, 2012, $35), is an excellent source for getting to know modern Islam.

Friend, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an award-winning historian, traveled across Asia and the Middle East in order to understand firsthand the life situations of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book relates hundreds of encounters and conversations with people he met along the way.

Friend writes that the reader will find “respect for Islam conjoined with faith in women and in their creative and productive potential.”

Meanwhile the media regularly report bombings by Islamicists but ignore peaceful overtures by Muslims, such as “A Commond Word” in 2007.

Ignorance of religion has enormous consequences, whether it’s a white supremacist killing Sikhs or U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an or the U.S. invasion of Iraq helping overturn half a century of women’s right to be treated as equal citizens in Iraq.

And with the recent rioting over the anti-Islam video reveals religious ignorance going many directions. 

Religious ignorance extends beyond Islam. Every day some media reinforce views of religious groups that are simplistic and fail to build understanding.

One media source that helps counter this practice is Religion News Service. For example, the weekly report dated Sept. 5 included an article on Mormons okaying Coke and Pepsi, one on Seventh-day Adventists arguing about female clergy, a Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the “Ground Zero mosque,” one on Jews in New Orleans, a Q&A with David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, and one on the trial of Amish bishop Samuel Mullet Sr., whose followers forcibly cut the beards of Amish men.

There are many sources for learning about others and their beliefs before we make judgments about them. Jesus’ warning about judging others (Matthew 7:1) is pertinent. Let's take time to understand others' religious beliefs before we make judgments about them.