Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993 TAG: 9304120272
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT TURNER JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
HOW TOLERANT CREEDS BECOME INTOLERANT
PERHAPS, like yourself, I've needed to make some sense of three rounds from a .38 revolver that ended the life of Dr. David Gunn.Were the shots merely punctuation in a vitriolic, now savage discourse on the meaning of abortion? Can the quiet voice of compassion ever be stronger than the tendency of human beings to cling with white-knuckled fury to their fragile certainties?
In the history of humankind and its religious fervors, Dr. Gunn's murder is a minor incident. Serbian warriors rape Bosnian Muslim women as a tactic of war. The rise of modern European culture was accompanied by a holocaust during which several million humans were tortured, burned, hanged, etc., by the Roman Catholic Church. It is darkly informative that a high proportion of the Inquisition's victims were women.
So it would seem that the drama of Michael Griffin and David Gunn is, in part, another incident in the ancient, tragic struggle of patriarchal societies to control women and their biological functions.
But could it be that religion itself is the enemy of tolerance? For, it turns out, there is more than the history of burned heretics and populations become moldering corpses in the name of some Holy Crusade or other to support such a thesis.
In study after study of American churchgoers of every denomination, it has been found that frequency of church attendance and other measures of what sociologists call religiosity are positively correlated with racial prejudice and bigotry, including sexist bigotry.
I am familiar with these studies and their analysis since, as a sociologist, I worked on such a research project in the early 1970s. The findings surprised me then, they puzzle me still. (I am a member of a church, and my spiritual path is based in Christian teachings.)
To be sure, the linkage of religiosity and intolerance in American society is a great paradox. For at the heart of all the world religions one finds basic tenents. For example: Do not attack, do not judge, forgive. Students of Christianity may recognize these as corollaries of the first and greatest commandment, love one another.
Harmlessness, non-judgment and forgiveness, however, are also taught in Hinduism, Taoism, the Buddhist traditions; they are emphasized by the Kabbalistic traditions of Judaism and in the Sufic teachings of Islam.
So, if religion plays a significant role in making us the chief predators of our brothers and sisters, how can this be?
For those who are open to such inquiries, there may be a vital clue in another sociological study.
Richard Gorsuch and Daniel Aleshire reviewed the many studies linking religiosity measures (like church-attendance frequency) to prejudice. They found, as we might hope, that there are certainly tolerant people who are very active church members, but that they are, generally, a minority.
The key finding, however, was that "holding a strong value position which allowed one to stand outside of the value traditions of society at large was crucial to adopting a non-prejudiced position."
In effect, whether church-affiliated or not, tolerance is most strongly linked to (are you ready?) . . . non-conformity, or in academese, a "non-conventional ideological position."
So how can this oddity help us make sense of why Michael Griffin made David Gunn a myth-beast (Griffin) to be slain while the doctor named Gunn was not the one with the gun?
The answer may lie in the way people express the culture into which they are born - for both Michael and David were products of American culture. According to press reports, both men might be considered decent, law-abiding people who attempted to be helpful to others, depending on one's frame of reference.
The crucial difference may be understood in terms of the relationship between non-conformity and tolerance. At the heart of non-conformity is questioning. And the fruit of such questioning, however articulated, may well be that a culture (or a local religion) comes to be understood as a human social construction.
When that happens, it occurs to us that our beliefs and values must be held more as hypotheses than as certainties.
In short, the difference between a Michael Griffin and a David Gunn is about degrees of the universal human tendency to ethnocentrism - the tendency to see one's socially constructed world as the center of the real and the true.
For one totally entranced by cultural conditioning, it is possible to imagine one's beliefs to be absolutely right. For one who has dared to question the consensus trance, it soon becomes evident that all human knowing is provisional.
A person who comprehends this, even vaguely, is more likely to be tolerant for the simple reason that he or she feels less compelled to defend any particular assumption by attacking those who do not share it.
So, given the obvious tendencies of institutions to justify and extol their virtues and their "rightness," can there be any hope for our long-suffering species?
Perhaps. In any case, the radical non-conformist from Galilee made these suggestions: Turn the other cheek (harmlessness), do not judge, forgive. It seems that these ideas are more than pleasant ideals; they are principles of consciousness transformation, of what Christians refer to as salvation.
Further, it appears that these paradoxical laws at the heart of the world's religions are, in fact, transcendent of time and history. Yet, things go sour when these teachings are shrouded in the conventions of particular times and places.
For, to confuse culture with cosmos, with ultimate reality (whatever what may be), is to make a local version of timeless insights the justification for rage and fear in the name of compassion and love. It is to make my name for "butterfly" the cause of destroying you because I don't understand your word for "butterfly." It is to assume that "truth" has boundaries formed by my language, my customs, my beliefs.
To the extent that any religious credo participates in that confusion, it contributes to the grotesque paradox of bigotry and even of explicit violence in the name of love.
When any person is encouraged to self-knowledge and to honest questioning, they will discover the need to seek answers to the puzzles of existence, to find meaning and direction for their lives.
We should honor that quest in each other as best we can, for however varied the language and symbol of our efforts to be whole, they mark a common denominator of humankind.
And that common denominator, I suspect, is our only hope for someday dissolving the righteous fear and rage in the hearts of the "Griffins" who are our sons and daughters, our parents and neighbors, our co-workers and our fellow citizens.
Robert Turner Jr. of Blacksburg is a sociologist, artist and writer.