Monitoring the rhetoric of public discourse in our country, especially among evangelicals, is a sobering exercise. One reads books and periodicals, scans Sunday school materials, watches television programs, listens to sermons, cassettes, and radio broadcasts. As a fellow believer sympathetically analyzing the tone and content of this vast output, one becomes as concerned as impressed. While the sheer volume of gospel-related communication is staggering, its quality varies from the heights of excellence to the depths of mediocrity.
But one clear impression emerges. Much—much too much—of what our nonchurch society regards as religious propaganda is troublingly demogogic. Unfounded interpretations and gross contradictions of careful exegesis are presented authoritatively as God’s very truth. Ideas, opinions, and even political views, dubiously extrapolated from Scripture, are affirmed dogmatically as divinely mandated absolutes.
Perhaps, though, the most troubling aspect of this demagoguery is the frequent repetition of stereotypes and caricatures that imply the inferiority of certain groups of people; and the implied inferiority (occasionally stated explicitly) is not, one learns, only sinful. It is diabolically sinister.
Atheistic humanists, to mention one group frequently assailed, are portrayed as the agents of satanic darkness, plotting to undermine our country and prepare the way for a Communist takeover. To be sure, some atheistic humanists are belligerent enemies of the gospel. Yet is it truthful to stigmatize all adherents of this philosophy as a conspiratorial group who endanger the future of our republic and our faith? That, nevertheless, is the impression undeniably created by some impassioned evangelicals. It seems as if any tactic whatever, fair or foul, can be prayerfully employed to oppose and frustrate this amorphous “secular humanist” group. So as one reads and listens he begins to understand why there are prolifers who bomb abortion clinics, and why some ardent homophobics feel it a righteous act to beat up gays.
Human, No Matter What
How, then, can we who share evangelical and prolife convictions minimize the potential damage of this demagogic rhetoric? One thing we must do is to trumpet the biblical doctrine of personhood.
“We are all more human than otherwise.” In his therapy with disturbed people—some of them bizarrely schizophrenic—psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan followed that guideline with striking success. Probably he did not realize that his dictum was an echo of the truth Paul affirmed at the Areopagus: All nations have the same Maker and are descendants of a common ancestor, Adam. “From one man [God] made every nation of men” (Acts 17:26, NIV). True, the behavior of some people is incredibly irrational and shockingly brutal. There are villainous characters who, in our judgment, seem to be subhuman, more like animals than men and women made in the image of God. Yet in spite of their behavior, all persons, as Sullivan insisted, are more human than otherwise and should be treated with empathic respect. Though morally calloused, mentally limited, physically handicapped, or culturally primitive, all human beings together with ourselves are brothers and sisters belonging to the same family. In this sense, evangelicals gladly confess that God as Creator is our common Father. As Kipling put it, “The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin.”
To this some may say, “No! Non-Christians are not brothers and sisters; they are not in God’s eternal family. Rather, they are ‘children of wrath’ (Eph. 2:3).” And this is true: Only those who have submitted to Christ as Lord are spiritually one with the Father. But in his address to the Athenians, Paul notes that “as some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ” He agrees with this in his next sentence, which begins, “Therefore since we are his offspring …” (Acts 17:28–29, NIV). Sin does not destroy anyone’s humanness. If we set aside the psychotics in the human family, even people with bloody hands reveal by their false justification of immoral acts that as God’s image bearers they are inescapably moral.
Therefore, possessing innate value and dignity, God’s children must never be treated as subhuman, even if they treat their fellow mortals inhumanly.
Pious Arguments For Inhuman Treatment
History bears ample witness that those who wish to treat others inhumanly first dehumanize them. They push others down into a subnormal—that is, subhuman—category. This then gives a pseudo-moral basis for viewing them as “brute beasts, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed.”
An example of this strategy was Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish problem.” As a person made in God’s image, even he was unable to escape dealing with the moral issue, though his justification for what he did was grossly contrived. Rabidly anti-Semitic himself, and aided by fanatics equally anti-Semitic, he launched a gradually accelerated pogrom. A whole population must be whipped into a mood of violent hatred that would motivate support of utterly atrocious policies. German Jews, a highly respected and solidly entrenched ethnic group in that country, were systematically demeaned in order that they might ultimately be destroyed. Thus Jews were defined as non-Ayrans, genetically inferior to Nordic and Teutonic stocks. But if inferior, “the Jew” was a source of racial contamination that would pollute the bloodstream of the master Volk. In his Mein Kampf, Hitler could not have said it more plainly: “A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” But if Jews are monstrosities, why not exclude them from public life? Why not reduce them to aliens? Why not recognize “the Jew” as not only “the foul enemy of mankind” but also the “100 percent enemy of National Socialism”? Why not denounce “the Jew” as “a germ, a bacillus to be killed without conscience,” vermin “to be rubbed out with the heel of the boot, to be exterminated”? And why not claim with der Führer that “this is the will of the Almighty Creator,” a necessary act of racial self-preservation? His language was pious. “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” And thus the country of Luther, Goethe, and Beethoven became the land where concentration camps belched out the smoke of gas furnaces exterminating “bacilli” and “vermin.”
Myth Of The Subhuman Human
We recoil as we turn the pages of Lucy Dawidowicz’s The Way Against the Jew, 1933–1945. But are American hands lily white? Perhaps U.S. schools should require the study of the sickening accounts of our own inhuman practices. Granted that our government has not been guilty of atrocities as ghastly as Hitler’s Holocaust. But what about our treatment of this continent’s original inhabitants? Our national psyche is pervaded by the myth of the subhuman savage whom popular author James Kirke Paulding described in his novel Westward Ho! as “varmints that are ten thousand times more bloodthirsty than tigers, and as cunning as ‘possums’.” Another popular novelist, William Gilmore Simms, agreed that the “North American” is “a mere savage, like all the others, and no better than any savages, but a few degrees removed from the condition of the brute.”
If, however, the Indian was a subhuman savage, elevated only a few degrees above the snake and the skunk, why treat him as God’s image bearer? Sentimentalists—the much-despised Indian lovers—might plead for justice and compassion. They might point out that the Indian, after all, was fighting desperately to defend his homeland against alien expropriators. But such pleas were brushed aside as white settlers invaded the New World. Why show pity to red-skinned scalpers whose claim to full humanity was suspect?
What, furthermore, about our treatment of blacks? That has been a dismal story in the American saga, one not yet ended. Or what about our treatment of “gooks” and “dinks” during the Vietnam War, those Asian people referred to in some official communiqués as “Oriental human beings” to distinguish them, one supposes, from real human beings? The tragic fact cannot be denied. Blacks and Asians have been treated by American whites as, to quote again from Kipling, “lesser breeds without the law.”
Some Christians, to be sure, have protested courageously against this inhumanity. Others, alas, have done more than participate in it. They have done their misguided best to fan the flames of racial and religious hatred. William Dudley Pelley, for example, is largely forgotten today. But in the 1930s he, a one-time Methodist minister, propagandized a virulent brand of anti-Semitism. Urging Christian Americans to rise up against the Jewish degenerates who were ruining our country, he organized the fascistic Silver Shirts. His ultimate intention was expressed in the hate literature he wrote, such as his 1937 Christmas card:
“Dear Shylock, in this season / When we’re all bereft of reason, / As upon my rent you gloat, / I would like to cut your throat.”
Fortunately, Pelley’s movement never gained political power, and he himself wound up in jail. Yet it is sobering to reflect that Pelley, together with other now-forgotten demagogues like Gerald L. K. Smith and Gerald Winrod, enlisted the backing of fundamentalists who by the thousand applauded and supported their Cross and Flag message of white supremacy.
Stop Signs For Biblical Christians
What, then, is our responsibility as biblical Christians? What does it mean to believe that every human being bears God’s image, and as such possesses inalienable dignity? We can resolve to take action, positive and negative alike. Evangelicalism can be a bulwark against the persistent attempts to seduce large elements of our population into embracing a belief in their supposed superiority (ethnic, theologic, and nationalistic), which demeans and can ultimately destroy people.
Negatively, we ought to take these measures, and take them decisively:
1. Stop dichotomizing the world into us versus them; the good guys versus the black-hooded villains; an empire of evil versus a God-fearing republic.
2. Stop boasting about our superior righteousness as though somehow Americans were exempt from the taint of original sin. Our virtues at best are merely on a par with those of other people. At worst they justify the jibe that Americans are hypocrites whose greed is camouflaged by a veneer of religiosity.
3. Stop proudly claiming that the U.S.A. is Number One unless it is first, please God, in terms of freedom, equality, and generous concern for the needy members of our own society and of less-fortunate countries.
4. Stop laying down ex cathedra definitions of isms—such as humanism, socialism, liberalism, Marxism, and anti-Americanism—and pinning these definitions, imprecise and misleading, on people to discredit them.
5. Stop supporting any Christian publication, TV program, or agency that sanctions the use of inflammatory rhetoric calculated to belittle persons.
6. Stop assuming and asserting that Christians are immune from the corrupting influences of bad ideology. The contrary may actually be the case. Precisely because of intense conviction, people may rationalize their prejudices and animosities as being obedience to God’s will. Remember the crusaders and the inquisitors and the pious witch burners. We must start, therefore, examining our own psyches to ascertain what racial and ideological quirks may be twisting our thought processes and triggering malignant reactions.
Green Lights For Christians
Positively, we ought to take these measures, and take them decisively:
1. Start emphasizing that, while all human beings are not members of the same spiritual family—and indeed they are not—they are nevertheless brothers and sisters who with ourselves have God the Creator as their Father.
2. Start realizing what it means to be consistently prolife, battling against abortion but insisting that the sanctity of personhood must be protected wherever, however, and by whomever it is threatened.
3. Start practicing simple courtesy, respect, and fairness in debating non-Christians, nonevangelicals, and even our own fellow believers, refusing to pervert or ignore difficult facts, refusing also to caricature an opponent whose position we are convinced is erroneous.
4. Start to admit our evangelical susceptibilty to black-and-white thinking precisely because we do believe there is a God-anchored distinction between truth and error, right and wrong, goodness and evil.
5. Start joining forces, gratefully and critically, as cobelligerents with non-Christians who share our concern for freedom, justice, and peace. They too are God’s image bearers, who by his common grace abhor tyranny, injustice, and violence as much as we Christians do—sometimes more.
6. Start to develop a less-tolerant stand toward a manipulative demagoguery that adheres vociferously to the fundamentals of our faith while dogmatically advocating, as the sole biblical position, those political and economic views on which Christians legitimately differ.
7. Start monitoring our own rhetoric, paying particular attention to those clichés and comments that may be implicit racial put-downs. Start denouncing the use of demeaning stereotypes that imprison whole groups of people in categories implying their inferiority. Decent Germans who sneered at Jews as money-hungry Shylocks did not realize that the slippery slope of racism would end in the furnaces of Dachau.
These suggestions, if consistently implemented within the evangelical community, would not have any utopian effect, but they certainly would help to lower the heat level of public discourse. When the heat is too high, fire may break out. And fire can be terribly destructive.
