| By Brian Elroy McKinley |
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All people are not created equal. And even if they are, as
soon as they
are born, some quickly become superior. Some do not. The superior people
run the world, using the inferior ones to generate profits. Superior
people receive better educations. The inferior ones get whatever
education is provided locally. Superior people hold desirable jobs and
receive better pay. Inferior ones fill those jobs least desired.
Superior people raise enough money to become elected officials, working
with the superior owners of business and wealth to direct the lives of
the inferior. Superior people become celebrities, being loved, hated and
respected by the inferior. Superior people receive great rewards, while
inferior ones pay the dues.
However, when superior and inferior people come face to face with the living God, the difference between them become irrelevant, or at least they should. When God said that all of us have fallen short of His glory, and are guilty of sins before Him, He placed us in an equal category - a category of irrevocable need. When God, through the death and resurrection of Christ, extended His hand of hope to this needy human family, He extended it to everyone, the "superior" and "inferior" alike. This is grace, and anyone who wants it can have it. As those who seek hope through God's grace gather in families and congregations, to worship and learn as Christ directed, we might assume that all seekers would be treated as equals. Since each believer hails form the same category - need - all other categories should become irrelevant. Sadly, this is not the case. Having worked with various congregations for the last fourteen years, I have witnessed how churches not only allow inequality behind their doors, but how some actually enshrine it in their teachings. Once we have moved inside God's grace, and have increased our ration of good deeds to bad deeds, we often come to believe we are a better class of humans. We set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity and call it Christian "piety." As a "better class of humans," we easily fall prey to making value judgements about those outside our class, those "inferior" to us. Let me deviate for a moment to explain more clearly how this works. Being somewhat of a science enthusiast, I like science fictions films. A rather large majority are poorly done. A few, however, are well made and even contain an understanding of the human condition. Ridley Scott's futuristic Blade Runner fits this classification. The details, action and photography make it captivating, but a quality more subtle and addicting compelled me to see it multiple times. During my seventh viewing, the addicting attribute finally became clear. A truth about humanity had been slipped under my nose, a mirror-like truth that forced me to see a blot on my own piety. The truth was not revealed in the plot, which was merely a canvas, but through the characters. The film takes place in Los Angeles in the year 2019. Many humans have left to find a better life on other planets, but life still thrives on Earth. A company that makes biological androids has supplied the off-world colonizers with "replicant" humans to do the sordid jobs no real human would want. Noting that replicants occasionally escape and become violent, they are designated as illegal on Earth and are hundred by special police, Blade Runner squads. The newest version of replicants is particularly hard to tell from humans. Six of these escape from an off-world colony and return to Earth. The movie follows one reluctant blade runner while he slowly tracks them. As he catches up and "retires" (kills) each one, he becomes dogged by doubts. He cannot understand what drives the replicants or why they become so violent. The forthcoming truth found in the blade runner's hunt for the six runaways was manifested when I realized that the new replicants were indeed fully human. They loved, dreamed, hungered, aged, hated, and were self-aware as any human is. The characters in the film, however, did not realize this and treated them as less than human. The replicants reacted the way most humans react when treated as sub-human: they become violent. And the humans reacted as most humans react to the violence of perceived "sub-humans": they used force to restrain them. The humans in the movie were not bad people; they simply did not believe the replicants were fully human and treated them accordingly. Likewise, the replicants were not created to be violent; they turned to murder as an answer to their plight. Blade Runner effectively reveals the logic that leads one group of humans to enslave another. It shows how good people can do horrible things to other people they deem less human. It shows how good people can become violent when placed in oppressive situations. The key factor in this truth is the "sub-human" part. For some reason we have ample ability to divide humankind into categories. We use race, sex, age, skin color, ethnic grouping, appearance, lifestyle, monetary value, occupation, language, philosophy, nationality and religion to define the boundaries. But rather than making classifications equal, we tend to feel that people different from us are inferior. The more different a person is, the more inferior he or she is. We end up believing, though often not verbally acknowledging, that there are individuals walking this earth who are less human than we are. This is the very catalyst that leads to fascism. When others are less human than we, quite naturally we take it as a license to exert our will over theirs. Even more than that, we easily convince ourselves that we not only have the option, but the right to impose our desires forcefully. This is what I mean by fascism. When our world view leads us to believe we are better than other, we tend to feel we have more answers, and, consequently, we feel a duty to bring the rest of humanity up to our level, usually enacting tight control over those who refuse. Even in our charity we often go into needy situations feeling we have more to give than we have to receive. We easily fall into the mentality of being "saviors" of the world rather than seeing ourselves as equal members of the human family. As the truth of our ability to dehumanize others and impose our will upon them penetrated my skull like David's stone in Goliath's forehead, I began to realize my own participation in this process: How easily I ignore beggars on the street; how easily I justify my action by believing they are weak, that they will only use my generosity to buy liquor or drugs rather than improve their situation. How easily I avoid contact with leather-and-chain-clad youth, whose wold looking kids with spiked hair and heavy metal rock-band t-shirts that for some reason choose to rebel against the "nice" world we have created for them. How easily I support the use of force against those "inhuman" Arabs, those animals that threaten civilized nations with their demands and their violence. How easily I turn the channel away from programs showing those skeletons with children's faces, the babies of those foreigners that live in the dirt in some far away country whose name I cannot pronounce nor find on a map. How easily I judge atheists and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, Mormons and Catholics as bad because they have not accepted God's grace the way I have. How easily, as a youth worker, I only become friends with those youth who like to sing, who attend my classes, who do not do drugs, who do not have sex, and who look like nice clean-cut, middle-class kids. How easily I discriminate against those who were different that me. I admit here that I did not joyfully accept the truth of my discrimination. Truth is sometimes hard to swallow, and I found it easy to justify my mental "enslaving" of those different than me. It really was not enslaving, I thought. I was simply a way to protect myself from the unknown danger of "different" people. After all, it was quite natural to seek out only those people who are like me, is it not? We naturally divide humans into categories, and we naturally stick with those most like us. But as a servant in the worshipping family of God, I should not be following that which is natural, but that which is beyond natural. I am not called by God to live safely - to live within a safely net of people who will tell me I'm okay because they are just like me. I am called to open my arms to all strangers. This brings us back to the church. When we enter into God's grace, we usually seek out fellowship with others in the process of seeking God. In the Gospels, Christ told us to function as a family, and we usually do. But within that family we do not boldly seek to encourage all to join us. No, instead we usually seek people who fit the categories we have deemed safe. In the churches in which I have worked, we usually sought out "nice" middle-class families with "nice" children to fill up our "nice" youth groups. In one church there was one black family. The daughter told me how church officials had asked her why her family did not go to the "black" church the denomination had established to meet the needs of black believers. In some youth groups for which I've worked, the church leaders wanted us to bar rebellious or even rebellious-looking kids from our activities. One church wanted us to have larger numbers of appealing teens because, so a church leader said, it made the church "attractive to new families." And if that is not bad enough, weekend retreats were often scuttled because the youth choir would be unable to sing in the mail Sunday morning service, thus diminishing the quality of that morning's performance. Performance. Doing all the right things. Saying all the right words. Being all the right people. This is the legacy of many modern churches. Rather than being a family of needy people corporately seeking God's grace, we have become "attractive" organizations where "neat" people like us can worship though our performances. We have become the "pious good people" who do not tolerate non-conformity to our standards. WE have become organizations with Ph.D.'s at the helm and rich donors pulling at our puppet strings. We have become superior in our own minds, unwilling to look at the "refuse" that blows past our doors, reluctant to appear controversial, unable to help those in need and yet satisfied that we are right. How it can easily be argued that organizations, Ph.D.'s, performances and donors are required to get people in the pews and to keep our churches functioning. We need an organized approach for dealing with the large number of people in our modern world. We need educated people to teach and pastor us. We need quality programs that relay the Good News in the vernacular of modern media and entertainment. We need people with a vision of giving toward ongoing ministry needs. None of these things are inherently wrong, but too often our organizations, Ph.D.'s, performers and donors are seduced by the attitude that they have a "corner on the market" of what is right and good. As in the movie, Blade Runner, this mentality precipitates categorization and the feeling of superiority over other needy humans that inevitably leads to discrimination against them. It is the fascism of modern churches.
As a race of needy people, and as congregations that exist solely
under
God's grace, we need to acknowledge that none of us has a right to our
positions. None of us has the right to discriminate. None of us has the
right to judge because all of us are the slave, in Christ's parable,
who should have been willing to forgo his fellow slave's debt after
having been forgiven his own debt by his master. We all are equal under
God's grace. When we fail to extend the very grace extended to us
through his sacrifice, we do nothing less than make a mockery of his
gift. By doing so, we place ourselves in the position of being demigods
rather than servants, effectively trashing our part of God's Kingdom
with our pride, and enslaving others and ourselves to the inequalities
that create so much misery amongst humans.
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Email: el@elroy.com