Liberal Anti-Semitism

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

"you f*****g piece of shit jew and your stinking jew woman and inbred jew childrun and jew-lover traiter daughterinlaw deserve to torture die you filth jew liberil america hating jesus hating basterd Lord willing none of us will have to wait long america is too good for dirty jew scum of your family and your commie foundasion" – anonymous email, April 21, 2009

Mikey Weinstein is President and Founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. A Jew, a former Reagan Whitehouse attorney and an honors graduate of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he spends his days fighting back against what has been called an "Evangelical coup" in the U.S. Military. (See Jesus Killed Mohammed 5/09.) Mikey writes letters, makes phone calls, lobbies and, when all else fails, files lawsuits on behalf of religious minorities and mainline Christians who are being subjected to relentless proselytizing from fundamentalist officers and peers. One routine part of the reaction is letters like the one he received above.

Liberal anti-Semitism is more subtle and sophisticated. Even at our worst, we don’t talk about Jews, we talk about 9/11 conspiracies orchestrated by agents of Mossad. We talk, as our medieval Christian and Christian Nationalist predecessors did before us, about undue Jewish control of the monetary system. Mostly we talk about Zionists, and every Jew who has a more complex perspective on the Middle East than Amy Goodman is one.

I’m not a Jew. I am a psychologist. One of the things I learned as a therapist was to respond not just to surface words but also the feelings and implications behind them. As a therapist, you listen to your body–your intuitive emotional response to what is being said, and then use your mind to sort things out.  I can’t say how many comments about the Israel-Palestine situation I’ve read on liberal blogs. What I can say is that the comment threads often make my stomach hurt–and not because of what is going on in Israel and Palestine. Here is the tread that triggered this post.

The plight of the Palestinians is anguishing. And yes, Israel has violated international law and may well be guilty of war crimes. But at a visceral level I often have a hard time experiencing my own pain and moral sensibilities about the Middle East situation. I get so overwhelmed by the flood of thinly veiled anti-Semitism that I can’t respond to anything else.

Let me state for the record: I categorically do not believe that criticizing Israel is inherently anti-semitic. There is plenty of reason to protest Israel’s part in the seemingly endless Middle Eastern cycles of violence and suffering. What I am talking about is a certain quality of this conversation — a distancing from Israelis explicitly or Jews more broadly as people, an exceptionalism that characterizes liberal American disgust at and demands of Jews, a pattern of silence toward some things and outrage toward others that suggest bias. And subtle or not-so-subtle versions of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes that escape criticism (except from offended Jews) on liberal blogs.

Perhaps I am projecting my Seattle experiences onto the net. One sweet, progressive activist neighbor refused to come to a panel discussion I hosted because, along with an atheist, a Christian minister and a Sufi minister the panel included a rabbi. A friend equated the invasion of Gaza with the Holocaust. A political teammate couldn’t see the difference between Obsession‘s bitter flow of misogynist verses and the forged conspiracies in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They do all love Amy Goodman. So maybe my gut is wrong.

But besides gut feelings, there are other indicators that something more than compassion, fairness and yearning for a better world is at play in left of center reactions to the plight of the Palestinians. Several writers (e.g. here and here) have listed factors that in their minds differentiate legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism. Here are the things that caught my attention:

1. The failure to focus on the log in our own eye. Two towers come down and 4000 people die, and the majority of our population (who suddenly feel unsafe) bless the destruction of 100,000 Iraqi citizens, their basic infrastructure, their museums and their schools. Yet we mock the Israelis’ sense of threat and demand inhuman perfection in their reaction. Granted, American liberals have worked long and hard against war in Iraq, but we were more conflicted about Afghanistan. And in both cases the protests lacked the absolutism of our reactions to Israel. I hear the Israeli attack on Gaza described as genocide.  I never hear the American attack on Iraq described that way.

2. Our silence when it comes to the role of the surrounding countries, who want the Palestinians to remain right where they are as pawns in a global power struggle. Palestinians don’t have the option to leave because Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and others don’t give them that option any more than we do. Israeli-Gaza border closures work only when Egypt keeps her border closed as well. Within any group of refugees there are those who don’t want to sacrifice their children on the altar of their politics–who simply want to go away and start a better life. But they are denied resettlement rights elsewhere. The Palestinian people are bandilleras in the flanks of a Spanish bull–goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations.

3. Our indifference to Jewish post trauma dynamics and conditions that reactivate trauma. In Israel, men who spent their teenage years dragging bodies out of gas chambers and burying them in trenches are only just dying off. To make matters worse, threats of annihilation are ongoing. When a woman who has been molested has someone hit on her, she often gets triggered, under- or over-reacting because she is re-experiencing the earlier trauma. When people who have been the targets of genocide hear surrounding leaders pledge their extinction, I might imagine they would get triggered, too. If we Liberals are willing to assume that it takes a people generations to recover from slavery, can we not assume the same of genocide? I grieve at Israeli reactivity just as I grieve when African American young people say that success is White. But grieving and demanding that they be over it are two different things.

4. A double standard for Middle Eastern Countries. When Arabs or Muslims engage in mass political extermination, we say little. The same with smaller cruelties. Yet we hold the Israelis to a higher standard. Why is this? Why do we scream about Israeli rockets and yet we’re mum when Hamas and Fatah are murdering each other? How about the slaughter of the Kurds or on a smaller scale, the execution of female teachers in Afghanistan. (Sometimes I wonder if it is actually a form of racism against Arabs and Muslims, like when we assume that a kid is fated to be a low-achiever and we write them off.) But consider: How would we react if the Israelis treated their women like Saudis do? If they treated their Hindu servants like Omanis do? If they treated their religious minorities like the Iraqis do? If they pledged the extermination of Palestinians the way that Hamas pledges itself to the extermination of Jews?

5. Our lack of comparable passion about other suffering in the world. How come the Palestinian plight taps deep feelings for so many liberals, and yet brutalities in Sudan  or Sri Lanka don’t have the same power to arouse us? To draw an analogy from my work opposing fundamentalism, when Evangelicals cite Leviticus to justify their attitudes toward homosexuals but then ignore the rest of Mosaic Law, something other than biblical literalism is at play. When the suffering of the Palestinian people arouses the kind of venom that seeps through in Liberal blogs while other suffering leaves us cold, something more than compassion is at play.

I loathe the kind of ignorant right wing rant that kicked off this article. But the subtle bigotry of some fellow liberals feels worse. It violates the very humanitarian rhetoric that gives it cover. As a progressive, it shames me. And it makes me scared.

Christians and their cultural descendents have been finding reasons to single out Jews since the First Century. Always there is some social issue that makes the antipathy seem justified to many people in the short run.  And always to date anti-Semitism seems obvious in retrospect.

 We humans are probably hard-wired for tribalism, and we need little excuse to see the "other" as disgusting or evil. But we also are capable of thinking more complexly. One who suffered much, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had this to say: "If only it were all so simple, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Maybe in addition to looking at the dividing lines in the Middle East we could be looking more at the dividing lines in our own hearts.

Posted in Christianity in the Public Square | 1 Comment

If the Bible Were Law, Would You Qualify for the Death Penalty?

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

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Thirty-six different offenses in the Bible qualified for capital punishment. How many of these apply to you? In a Texas murder case that ultimately reached the Supreme Court, a juror brought a Bible into the sentencing process – showing that the … Continue reading →

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Open Season on Christians?

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Valerie Tarico
When Cory Doctorow at Boingboing recently posted a video of deadpanned quotes from fundamentalists, one moderate person of faith lamented that it seemed like open season on Christians. Is it?

Across the web, in bookstores, and recently the theater, criticism of religion broadly and Christianity specifically is ubiquitous. It’s not just the Four Horsemen , or Bill Maher—anti-religious articles appear regularly on political and social blogs. Material that used to be published only at Talk2Action or ExChristian.net now finds a wider audience. Michelle Goldberg offers one explanation:

In some ways, there’s a symbiotic relationship between evangelicals and secularists. The religious right emerged in response to a widespread sense of cultural grievance stemming from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s newly organised atheists and agnostics were mobilised by the theocratic bombast of Bush-era Republicans. More than ever, one’s religion is tied up with one’s political choices rather than family history.

To illustrate, let’s let one of these mobilized nonbelievers speak for himself. This is from “Foetusnail” at BoingBoing (Comment #46):

First, everyone needs to get this straight: Atheists wouldn’t give a tinkers damn about any of these religions if they would mind their own business; if they could mind their own business, they would be forgotten overnight. But they won’t, they can’t. Their holy books demand they interfere with the lives of those around them.

Secondly, Christians are a target in the Western World, because they are the largest and most powerful religion in the Western World. They have been struggling to control the lives of the people and their governments for almost two thousand years.

Now, let me tell you the truth in four words; we are at war. This is an ideological war for freedom from religion and superstition. We are fighting off the last shackles of the Dark Ages. We are fighting for knowledge and against fear and ignorance. These people don’t deserve any more respect than if they were trying to shutdown hospitals, think stem cell research.

Think of the pope and the recent condom/AIDS controversy. Millions of people are dead because these whack jobs don’t believe in passing out condoms; a position supported by my government and financed with my tax dollars. F*** Them.

What is Foetusnail reacting to? Not just the unnecessary AIDs deaths. For the past two decades, Dominionists or "Christian Reconstructionists" have taught that Christians have an obligation to seize control of the reins of power and rule the country according to Biblical principles. Sarah Palin’s candidacy was a part of this movement. The fastest growing segments of Christianity, what is called “The Third Wave” sees this world as a spiritual battleground. You’re either on the side of God as a born-again Christian, or you are on the side of Satan. Literal demons and angels and other supernatural powers are playing out the battle of their realm in ours.

As part of the “Quiverfull” movement, women are encouraged to open their wombs to God, who apparently wants to repopulate this country with devoted Christians and so produces family sizes of up to 14 children. Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist flagship seminary, having booted females out of teaching positions and out of the clergy, has now begun speaking out in favor of this movement. “The New Calvinism”, recently profiled by Time Magazine teaches that all humans are “utterly depraved” until they confess Jesus as savior and are bathed in his blood.

I think that a huge factor on both sides of this fight is the reluctance of Christians to speak out passionately and publically against fundamentalist excesses. Where are the moderate Christians who cry out, not only against the social outrages perpetrated by fundamentalists, but also against the ugly, ignorant, self-serving theologies that drive those outrages? These voices are conspicuously absent in the public square—as rare as moderate Muslims who passionately and publically condemn Wahabism, shariah, burkas, or jihad.

There are exceptions. Anglican John Shelby Spong has been unflinching: Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile & The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love . But in my experience, Spong’s courage and passion on the topic are rare. Modernist Christians have been painted with the same brush as fundamentalists because of their reluctance to say loudly what they know to be true based on a century of inquiry: that the Bible has human handprints all over it, that the sins of scripture are real, that we know the historical lineage of fundamentalist theologies and of the Bible itself, that biblical creationism is ludicrous, and that fundamentalist ideas are not only wrongheaded, they are evil.

The cost of this silence is enormous—not only in the form of “open season on Christians”. Mainline denominations, perhaps the ones who understand this battle best, are losing adherents to both sides in part because even their own members don’t know what they stand for. To stand for something, you have to be willing to stand against something. And if you’re a church, you can’t just stand against social ills like poverty, war, homophobia, or abstinence only education. One job of religions and secular philosophies is to offer a rationale for why those things matter. In religion, that means theology. 

Open inquiring Christians may be loathe to take on theological battles because they are not sure yet what set of theological agreements can replace the fundamentals that have defined Christian orthodoxy since the Fourth Century.  Well, also, because they prize being open and inquiring.  But open inquiry isn’t worth much unless it helps us to see through false assumptions and get closer to what’s real.   As to the uncertainties, science progresses by ruling out wrong hypotheses; theology can too.  Modernist Christians may not be able to assert in unison who Jesus was and what Christianity should become, but they can assert with confidence that our Bronze Age ancestors put God’s name on a whole bunch of archaic moralities and superstitions and misunderstandings about the word around us.  Unearthing an imbedded falsehood can be as powerful and life saving as discovering a hidden truth.


As the middle falls out of the U.S. religious spectrum, fundamentalists and freethinkers are left with no bridges, nowhere to go but the trenches. The alternative to revolution is evolution. That’s what modernist people of faith have to offer. It is the option that is missing when they go silent. Is it open season on Christians? Only if thoughtful believers continue to let fundamentalists speak for their God in the public square.

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Dying Believers Seek More Aggressive End of Life Care

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

Are more social ills associated with religion or a lack thereof?

If you’re honest, your answer to this question probably maps to your belief status. After all, most of us like to think we’re on the side of the elves, not the orcs– that we and our kind are making the world better. In the absence of clear evidence, the religious and the nonreligious both believe this. Every once in a while, though, we actually get a bit of data to mull over, and last week some interesting research hit the press.

One of the oft touted benefits of religion is that it eases our dying. Surprise: According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want doctors to do everything possible to keep them alive."

Religious patients were less likely than secular patients to sign do not resuscitate orders or to create living wills. They were more likely to want ventilators to keep them breathing till the bitter end. They got more ICU care. Doctor Holly G. Prigerson, an author on the study, offers a very benign explanation for this pattern: "To religious people, life is sacred and sanctified," Dr. Prigerson said, "and there’s a sense they feel it’s their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible."

If you are a nonbeliever, set aside your annoyance at her implication that life isn’t sacred for the rest of us. The problem with this explanation is that it simply doesn’t map to the facts of the situation. These patients knew they were already in the final stages of the dying process. They also knew that their use of extraordinary measures was costly, though they wouldn’t incur that cost themselves. Medicare spends one third of its entire budget on people in their last year, much of this on people in the last week of life. In a world where children go without immunization, women go without prenatal care, and young adults can’t afford insurance, the choices these patients made did not increase the sacred and sanctified life on this planet. The opposite is true.

Even for themselves, they may have gained little.  The measures used to prolong the dying process often are associated with suffering and pain above and beyond that caused by the terminal illness itself—leaving a person with little capacity to experience a few more hours or days to experience that which we cherish in life. 

Why might devout believers avoid preparing for death and then want anything medical science has to offer to prolong the dying process? I can’t help but put on my therapist hat here and offer a hunch.

The fact that devout patients more often failed to take preparatory steps like living wills and advanced care planning gives us a clue. It suggests that they were avoidant–coping with the dying process in part by not thinking about it. As a coping mechanism, avoiding works really well in some ways and not so well in others. It can shut out a host of negative emotions, but it also can get in the way of doing what needs doing, on a practical level or an emotional level or both. Then, if an avoided reality breaks through, you’re not ready. Think, for example, about how you avoided studying for exams.

Avoidance suggests anxiety or fear.

We are made to be scared of dying–to fight for life and as the poet Dylan Thomas put it to "rage against the dying of the light." Nonreligious people have to face this head on. They have to wrap their brains around the idea of non-existence, which frankly is rather hard to grok. Emotionally it raises not only fear but anger, confusion and grief. Religion offers a shortcut. Death isn’t really death. It is a transition to the next phase of life. In Christianity, when you die you retain your personal identity and memories. You become either a perfected or perfectly tormented version of yourself. For the Christian believers in the study, this is what their religion teaches, and as believers they expect to be perfected, not tormented.

But very few people believe in heaven or hell the same way they believe in the floor beneath their feet. If they did, as Christian philosopher Ken Himma has pointed out, it would be unconscionable for them to have children and risk the latter. This week a devout airline pilot was convicted of manslaughter, because, in the face of potential disaster he handed off controls to a copilot and began praying. (Sixteen people died.) Cases of this type are mercifully rare; if they weren’t, the devout would not be entrusted with planes. Faced with the prospect of fiery death, usually prayer isn’t quite as trusted as the control panel.

In psychological research, stated beliefs don’t always match what subtle indicators like eye movements, sweating or reaction time reveal a subject’s underlying assumptions to be. Freud was wrong about many things, but he was right that a whole lot of stuff going on in our brains isn’t available to our consciousness. We know this to be true of religion. (Pascal Boyer)

Implications? Even though belief offers a shortcut around anger and fear at the thought of death, it isn’t a perfect solution. At some level, a believer may wonder or even know that he simply doesn’t know, but belief itself precludes the hard work of coming to peace with nonexistence. So, in those hard final days, faith is there, but subterranean fear is too. We are all human, after all.

That is my best guess about what is going on with those cancer patients. Correlation is not causation, and let me caution that my clinical hunch may be quite wrong.  Religion may increase  other feelings that make people want to prolong the dying process.  Fear of death may increase religiosity.  Some other factor may contribute to both.  Given the social costs, these questions seem worth exploring. 

As a society, it is becoming more and more clear that collectively we have to make some hard choices about medical care. We have been living high on the borrowed hog, pretending that we can have it all. But in a world where economic theory meets reality, unlimited access to aggressive life prolonging technologies has an opportunity cost. The tradeoff is less healthy children and young adults because of money not spent on simple preventive measures and early interventions.

Will religion help us make these decisions in the most moral way possible? (Our wisdom traditions, both religious and secular, do archive the best ethical thinking of our ancestors.) Or– will the yearning for eternity make it harder to tend the precious fragile lives that are sacred to all of us here on earth?

Posted in Musings & Rants: Christianity | 1 Comment

Losing Your Religion? How to Talk to Your Kids

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

Comment at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/18/710284/-Losing-Your-Religion-How-to-Talk-to-Your-Kids

Sometimes I get letters from former Evangelical/fundamentalist Christians who are also parents. "What do I say to my kids?" they ask. "I raised them to believe that without the blood of Jesus they are evil sinners. What a horrible thing for them to think! I feel guilty." "All of their friends are members of our old church, so we keep going. I don’t want to tear them apart, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to pretend." "When I try to talk to them they just cry. They think I’m going to hell."

Polls show that more and more of us are questioning our received traditions, seeking to base both our personal lives and our public policies on reason and evidence.  For parents, this brings some extra challenges. Changes that may feel rewarding to us personally can be confusing and scary to kids who love us. No matter what age the kids are, telling them your beliefs have changed or even that you no longer believe can be tricky. Here are three suggestions.

1. Help them to understand your changes as a matter of spiritual growth rather than spiritual abandonment.

The bottom line is that moral and spiritual evolution are very much in keeping with the history of human religion, including Christianity. Every past generation answered our deepest questions as best they could. What is real? What is good? How can we live in moral community with each other? But every generation was like the blind men and the elephant. They were limited by their cultural and technological context – their point in history.  Besides which,  they, like us, were imperfect. By outgrowing the answers that were handed down to us, we honor their quest and continue their journey.

Here is how I explained my own loss of faith to my extended family.

Even if you emphasize growth, both your own and that of our ancestors, your kids will ask about your current beliefs. After all, you’ve probably taught them to think that it’s the answers that matter, not the process. Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian? Do you believe in Jesus? Are you going to Hell? Try to anticipate their questions and think ahead about some simple responses that are both honest and reassuring. But let them know that you are still learning and that you expect to keep learning for the rest of your life. The nice thing about this framework is that it allows your conversations to continue evolving.

2. If your children are still at home, don’t forget that they may need a new community.

As you continue to grow and change, you may find community online or with your spouse or you might simply prefer solitude and good books in this next phase of the quest. But if you have raised your children with religion in the center of their lives, they will have their own need for explicit conversations about religion, spirituality and morality. What should replace Sunday school or Pioneer Girls or Bible study?

On top of this are their social needs. Did your church reach out to kids with fun and music? Your kids may have their friends, their weekend activities, and their summer camps all integrated with religion. It’s not fair to cut them off abruptly just because you’ve hit your own tipping point.

Think about seeking out a moral/spiritual community that allows room for doubt or even atheism. A Unitarian church might be a fit, or a Quaker meeting or Ethical Culture Society. If you were in Christian fundamentalism, you may not know that within Christianity there are traditions that would allow your children access to familiar rituals and stories without feeding the belief that the Bible is perfect and their parents are doomed. Traditions I might look at include United Church of Christ, United Methodist, and Episcopal. All of these recognize the human handprints on the Bible and traditional dogmas—and they allow a humble, inquiring approach to the meaning of Christian faith. However, this very much depends on the individual minister. Openness to interfaith or "interSpiritual" work can be one indicator that a group doesn’t make exclusive claims about truth and salvation. Pay particular attention to whether your children would be offered explanations of the world that seem real and right to you, and whether they would have a group of peers.

3. Trust yourself, even when you are feeling your way in the dark, to be a spiritual guide for your children.

You may feel less wise or less confident than before, but that is because you have moved forward. Don’t be afraid to talk with them about spiritual matters, just because you no longer have a clear set of pat answers. What you do have still is deeply held values and principles that guide your life. What are they? Have you ever put them into words? At the Wisdom Commons or the Virtues Project International or similar sites you can find quotes, stories, and curriculum materials to help you talk with your kids about your moral core.

As complicated and awkward as it may feel to find the right words for all of this, it’s worth it. You have the chance to model for your kids what it means to be a lifetime learner — someone who cultivates the curiosity and humility that can make it actually feel good to realize you were ignorant. Along the way, if you keep asking questions, you will be making some wonderful discoveries, and part of the delight can be sharing them. If you once gave your kids a fish, now you can invite them on a fishing expedition. Who knows what you might catch together!

 

Valerie Tarico is a Psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth; founder of www.WisdomCommons.org; and host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

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