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"The Us-Them Mentality"
Within a few days of the September 11 attacks, American flags were being flown everywhere - public buildings, private homes, virtually every store front, and even from cars. The phenomenon is national. A cartoon in this month's New Yorker shows car being stopped by the police. In the background every building, home and car is sporting a flag except one vehicle, which has just been stopped by the police. The hapless driver is looking dumbfounded - the ticket is "for being "flagless in a patriotic zone." Someone told me this week that when she stopped for gas recently the attendant asked her where her flag was and felt suspect as a result. An Us-Them mentality seems to be out there concerning the flags.
I haven't seen it recently, but for weeks, a pick-up truck rode around Middleboro bearing a large American flag. Hanging off the back of the truck was an angry sign asking: "Where is your flag? Are you for America or not?" I'm wondering if you saw it, and if it made you just as uncomfortable as it made me. The message of that flag wasn't patriotism - it communicated something more like: "I'm itching for a fight - either you're with us or for us." It signaled anger looking for an outlet - looking closer to home than Osama bin Laden for an enemy.
I felt the same negative energy at work, perhaps even more irrational, after Tom Brady took over the New England Patriots. Think about this: Drew Bledsoe, a quarterback who was considered our franchise player at the time, suffered a life-threatening injury. Relative unknown Tom Brady steps in and goes far beyond keeping the team afloat while Bledsoe recovers; he is fantastic. It's understandable that fans are excited about keeping Brady in place because he's experiencing an incredible and unexpected winning streak. But instead of marveling at the good fortune of the Patriots to possess two great quarterbacks, instead of expressing empathy for Bledsoe, a quality player who was losing his job and displaying nothing but dignity and class, a certain portion of fans exhibit a perverse need to tear him up. This was a moment when fans could bask in feeling good about their team. So why was there so much vitriol spewing over the airwaves on the part of these few?
These are rather minor examples, but they make me wonder whether we, as human beings need to have an enemy, an "other" in our lives - someone or some group to feel superior to or to hate, someone or some group on whom to focus our negative energy.
There is a Biblical story which can be instructive here.
Do you remember Jonah, who found himself in the belly of the whale? He seemed to need an enemy and to have a determination to hate. Although Jonah's story is short, most of us are only familiar with one little chunk of it. The book of Jonah opens with God ordering Jonah to go to the city of Ninevah as prophet and to cry out against their people. Jonah is a reluctant prophet, to say the least. You wonder why God chose this guy, frankly. He hates the people of Ninevah and doesn't want to help them. So he ignores the assignment and takes a ship in the completely opposite direction. But, of course, there's no escaping God's will. A horrendous storm comes up out of nowhere. When the sailors recognize this storm as evidence of God's wrath, they begin to look for the cause of the problem and Jonah confesses. The sailors ask Jonah what they can do to placate his God and then, reluctantly, throw Jonah overboard.
That's how he ends up in the belly of the whale. For three days and nights he prays for forgiveness, and finally, the whale spews Jonah out onto dry land - right back where he started - with God telling him to go to Ninevah! Still reluctant, he obeys. This guy is amazing, if you ask me. He has a direct relationship with God - proven and tested as the real thing - where's his sense of privilege in all this? At any rate, Jonah arrives in Ninevah, which is the capital of Assyria, and cries out his message to the people, "Forty days more and Ninevah will be overthrown!" The king and the people get it - in Jonah's voice they hear God's call for them to change -and they repent. And how does Jonah react? He could be happy that thousands are spared. He could be proud, that he has served so successfully as divine messenger. But he can't do it. To heck with feeling good. He'd rather hate these people. Do we only know if we are "good" if we identify some other group as "bad" against whom to measure ourselves? He doesn't want to love them, and he's totally ticked off that God is forgiving them. He's so mad that he says it would be better for him to die than have no target for his anger..
Jonah goes out of the city to sulk. God grows a bush up over him to shade him from the hot sun. Jonah was happy having the bush, but then God appoints a worm to attack it and the bush dies. The death of the bush upsets Jonah. God then asks how Jonah can be angry about loss of the bush yet not expect God to care about Ninevah, a great city, which he had made? And that concludes Jonah's story. The point of it is for readers to see that Jonah's unwavering hatred of the people of Ninevah is obviously misplaced and does not satisfy the will of God who cares for everything that has been created. There is no evidence, by the way, that Jonah is transformed in his feelings by his encounter with God.
When anger gets hold of us, it's hard to let it go. Anger can come out of being hurt or out of injustice or powerlessness. Anger feels like it wants to right a wrong, fix a problem, or punish a "wrong-doer." But harnessing our angry feelings to the cause of goodness is not easy because our expression of anger can so easily become misplaced. We all know the old story of the man who is mad at his boss, so he comes home and yells at his wife who, in turn, takes it out on their child, who then kicks the dog. Each was first the direct target of misplaced anger and then, in turn, expressed his anger in a hurtful and non-productive way. Misplaced anger will not dissipate.
Aristotle said, "It is easy to fly into a passion - anybody can do that - but to be angry with the right person and to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - that is not easy and it is not everyone who can do it." So true. Jonah couldn't do it. The man in the truck wasn't doing it. And very often in our own march of days, we can't do it. To do that we need to identify the correct source of our anger and a productive way to express it.
In preparing for this sermon I read quite a bit of The Origin of Satan, a work by Christian scholar Elaine Pagels. Following the death of her husband in a senseless accident, she began to notice in the gospels a sub-theme of loss and betrayal. She became interested in how anger and hatred among the Jews was channeled as they divided over who Jesus was. She doesn't word it this way, but she was studying the Us-Them mentality and how it was handled. And she noticed a remarkable thing - in the Hebrew Scriptures Satan was present, but his persona was that of an "adversary" or an "accuser." It is only in the New Testament writings, among then early Christians that Satan emerges as the personification of evil we know as the devil.
Pagels says: "Mark deviates from mainstream Jewish tradition by introducing the "devil" into the crucial opening scene of the Gospel, and goes on to characterize Jesus' ministry as involving a continual struggle between God's spirit and demons, who belong, apparently, to Satan's "kingdom". Such visions... served, among other things, to confirm for Christians their own identification with God and to demonize their opponents.... The diabolical character we know as Satan emerged from the turmoil of the Christian movement in first-century Palestine. What may be new in the Western tradition is how the use of Satan to represent one's enemies lends to conflict a specific kind of moral and religious interpretation in which "we" are God's people and "they" are God's enemies. Such moral interpretation of conflict has proven extraordinarily effective throughout Western history in consolidating the identity of Christian groups; the same history also shows that it can justify hatred, even mass slaughter.... This research, then, reveals certain fault lines in Christian tradition that have allowed for the demonizing of others throughout Christian history." Pagels, a Christian, is disturbed by this aspect of Christian teaching and influence. Islam, by the way, emerged from the Christian religious tradition and has inherited this tendency. Buddhism and Hinduism, like Judaism, is free of this theological tendency.
Pagels work, published in 1995, seems especially relevant right now due to the current political climate. Americans are justifiably angry at the terrorist threat to our national safety. We struggle with an appropriate response to the devastation of September 11. The anger that is abroad in our land right now is a potent force which can be harnessed either skillfully or poorly. It is our national challenge now to be angry at the right people to the right extent and in the right way. And it is the task of our political and spiritual leadership to help us in this.
The referencing of an enemy as evil, which comes naturally to us from out of our Christian tradition, implies immediately that "we" are God's people and "they" are God's enemy. This kind of "mental architecture," as Pagels points out, isn't conducive to reasoned, carefully measured thinking, and can be used to justify hatred and even mass slaughter. We need to be careful because the human tendency is to fall into the "Us-Them mentality" and to dump a lot of misplaced anger there. I mention this here and now very intentionally because the foreign policy statement that have been coming from President Bush in recent weeks are shaped by the Us-Them mentality.
Back when I was a kid the news media commonly used the phrase "civilized world" to refer to the West. I remember, too, that the word "savages" was used to refer to the native peoples of Africa. These expressions fell out of use, I believe, because we came to understand that they were arrogant and egocentric - Us versus Them. President Bush, in his State of the Union address, continuously referred to our side as "the civilized world" implying that anyone not with us, then, is uncivilized. And he referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, and their "terrorist allies" as an "axis of evil." We are being asked, or led, by him, to demonize these entire countries. Is President Bush's language any different from that of Osama bin Laden who refers to Americans as "the infidels?" This kind of language, used by both men, divides the world into good guys and bad guys with a very broad brush. I have no doubt that the regimes that he cites are very dangerous and see the United States as their enemy. No doubt. But what about the peoples within these nations, apart from their leaders? The language being used leaves virtually no room for dialogue or complexity of thinking. After all, one does not sympathize, compromise or empathize with uncivilized evil.
Leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King were very able to identify evil and call it by its name. But they did not use their leadership to foment and channel hatred against peoples. They opposed injustices, and certain actions and policies and brutality and the darkness in people's hearts, but never peoples. Both fought vigorously and creatively in defense of their principles. What they did was try to call all participants - both sides, to a higher standard. Their God, even under most stressful circumstances, remained love.
Don't get me wrong; I am not a pacifist, but know hatred when I hear it preached, and I am hearing it now from some of our nation's leaders.
I am not worried that you, sitting here today, will demonize the peoples in these other nations. Unitarian Universalists have a long history of standing apart from the mainstream, and seeing the world through a complex lens with independent thought. But use of language that promotes such blind hatred on the part of our leaders is deplorable and should not pass unchallenged. We need to speak out.