Two stories that I have read in the New York Times in the last day or so speak of religious minorities.
The first from July 28 relates the horrific shooting in Knoxville Tennessee at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. It can be read at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/us/28shooting.html?scp=1&sq=knoxville%20tennessee&st=cse. Vicki and I were in that church for Lamaze classes more than 30 years ago.
The person arrested for the shooting is from Powell, which is a small community located in the greater Knoxville area. According to news reports, he was dealing with many issues, being unemployed and losing food stamp benefits, that affected him. Yet, one of the reasons he gave for shooting people in that church is their liberal positions on issues, including their acceptance of homosexuals.
The second story was posted on the NYT website today and deals with the plight of Christians in Egypt. It can be read at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/world/middleeast/02egypt.html. In the news account are details of attacks on and the fears of the Coptic Christian community in that overwhelmingly Muslim nation.
I will confess that it is hard for me to understand what it is like being part of a religious minority. While I have often held views that were out of step with many of the people around me, I am pretty much a mainstream kind of guy. Growing up, I was a member of a Southern Baptist church in Knoxville Tennessee. Southern Baptist Convention churches were everywhere in the South. Even now, as a practicing Christian, though part of a significantly smaller association of churches, the National Association of Congregational Churches, and the minister of First Congregational Church in Salt Lake City, where a majority of people are part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I am still part of the majority religion of Americans. I do not have to worry too much about the kind of systemic discrimination described in the story about Egyptian Christians.
The stories in the NYT led to some questions for me. If we believe that religion is a personal matter, why does it bother us so much when someone holds a position emerging out of her religious views that is contrary to ours? Why do some believe that they must "take matters into their own hands" in order to protect the truth, religiously speaking, as they see it? Has religion become just another tribal designation, and do people believe they must "do battle" against the other tribes?
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Religious Minorities
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It is a tough balancing act, to believe strongly enough in something that it can govern your life and your behavior, and yet allow others the freedom to agree or disagree after you have opened up and shared with them. A lot of it must have to do with the quality of what you believe in, for example if your beliefs engender love rather than hate, violence would seem less likely from a faithful practitioner. As has already been pointed out though, there are those who misinterpret the messages of religion and bend them to ends that were never ever intended.
If six sigma statistical quality could be applied to humans, you would expect that there would be 3.4 defects per million, or around 1,000 defects in the US and 20,000 in the world population. Who knows how many of these defects would manifest themselves as crazed mass murderers, but thankfully that process seems to have better than six sigma quality. The whole debate about applying statistical process control to God's creation handiwork is probably best left for some other time.
Back to tolerance and freedom of religion, it is hard to criticize the rest of the world, when the USA was so well founded by intelligent far sighted statesmen of great faith, and yet in 200 years we have been able to completely muddle their intent and turn it into a freedom from religion, when they merely intended to avoid the repression that they had fled. Apparently with all our flaws though, the USA is still the choice of most free people with the ability to immigrate, so we must already be setting the best example on the planet!
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