And the truth is, I don't actually know if this person was saying religion was the ice cream or the manure...probably doesn't matter. It still makes a point.
I've been thinking a lot about this topic in the past year though, especially in the context of U.S. news reports such as these:
1.)“In high school basketball games 400 miles apart, spirited rivalry gave way to racial strife when some students chanted 'Trump' as an epithet directed at Latino students...
'During the course of that game, a group of Andrean students produced signs and images of presidential candidate Donald Trump and began to chant 'Build that wall,' at the Bishop Noll team and fans, who are heavily Hispanic,' the Catholic Dioceses of Gary, which oversees both schools, said in a statement.” CNN 3/1/16
2.) “The voices behind racist chants that disturbed black and Latina high school girls soccer players came from Wisconsin schoolchildren, officials revealed.
A friendly soccer match between the girls at Beloit Memorial and Elkhorn High School quickly turned into an ugly, racist mess on Thursday, as three elementary school girls yelled, 'Donald Trump, build that wall!' at the players of color on the field, Jason Tadlock, a district administrator for Elkhorn Area School District, told the Daily News.” New York Daily News 4/11/16
3.)“ROYAL OAK, Mich. — A viral video of middle school students at a Michigan school shouting 'build the wall' during a lunch hour Wednesday has sparked outrage across social media, leading some to demand that school district officials take action.” USA Today 11/10/16
4.)“Election-related taunts of Hispanic students in Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s hometown of Columbus have prompted school administrators to call for civility and respect.
Those taunts have included chants of 'build that wall!' that made some students uncomfortable.” IndyStar 11/12/16
And just this week:
5.)“Canton students and families have begun emailing Hartford's Classical Magnet School to express their regrets and support after a group of Canton High School students taunted Classical's basketball players with 'Trump' chants, which some found racially motivated, during a high-stakes varsity game this week.” Hartford Courant 3/2/17
Reading about these acts of bigotry by children left me aghast and scared.
As someone born in 1977 (13 years after the signing of 1964 Civil Rights Act) these events reminded me of images and stories I'd only seen second-hand of white teenage boys and girls spitting on, pushing, and yelling at African American boys and girls (including elementary school children) after the Supreme Court passed the Brown vs. Board of Education case to allow for racial integration in schools and beyond.
What vexed me further, beyond the report of bigotry itself, was that if you read a little further into most of these news articles, you would read something about the apparent dichotomy between "free speech" and "hate speech"- a debate I am beginning to loathe as it appears to be the only narrow response anyone can think to have.
Do not misunderstand me. I believe the law (or government) absolutely has a central place in these growing number of incidents of bigotry just as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was a necessary step for desegregation.
I also believe that religion may have a pertinent role here too; by either reinforcing civility through both the compassionate teachings of prophets in your own religion (e.g. love your neighbor as yourself in Christianity, the five precepts of Buddhism, or the acts of charity in Islam), and acknowledging the inhumanity of excluding a group of people from the protection of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights based on their religion.
However, I also want to definitively get to the root of why there is a growing number in the first place? AND, how are we as a community going to address it?
I have a hunch, it may have to do with culture.
Culture is something that has always fascinated me since my early undergraduate days as a Sociology Major.
According to Wikipedia, culture:
can be defined in numerous ways. In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.' Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, 'Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.' The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is 'the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.'
Circling back to these new reports of children engaging in bigotry, unlike the law or government which says you can't do something because it is illegal, or religion which says you can't do something because it is a sin, culture asks you to consider your actions within the larger social and historical context- culture is transactional and acknowledges that no single individual and no single idea exists in a vacuum.
So what can be scary about culture?
Consider Rolfe from The Sound of Music.
If you haven't seen this movie or musical in a while, Rolfe is the 17 year-old blonde-haired blue-eyed German boy who starts out as a smitten teenager in love with the eldest Von Trapp daughter, Liesl.
However, by the end of the musical, sweet, wholesome Rolfe has transformed into a Nazi solider loyal to Hitler himself.
I'll tell you, growing up watching The Sound of Music every year on the television, the character of Rolfe terrified me. I didn't understand how:
a.) someone's behaviors could change in such a dramatic way, and
b.) a society would permit behaviors that harmed others.
Now, my simplified answer to both would be: culture.
Off stage, the scary version of how powerful culture can be if it is unattended to, could be the 1983 case of Cheryl Araujo in which a woman was gang-raped by 4 men in a public bar in Massachusetts and nobody intervened to stop it. Her story was later told in the 1988 Jodie Foster movie The Accused.
There may be an upside to culture too though. And that may be a cultural philosophy of spiritual democracy.
What would this look like?
Many years ago I volunteered with an organization that was engaging communities in a project called Community Conversations on Race. The details of the project I'll write about at another time, but what I'm remembering most about that time right now is, oddly, the T-Shirt they gifted me as a thank you on my last day.
Nobody.
Okay, if that is true (and to be clear, I believe that it is), then what happened to Rolfe? What happened to those elementary school girls at the soccer game?
They learned bigotry (discriminatory thoughts and behaviors) from our larger culture which begs the question: how do we as a community address cultural bigotry without merely relying upon The Ten Commandments and/or The U.S. Constitution?
A spiritual democracy.
A spiritual democracy would be closer to what I believe Bono, the lead singer of U2 is talking about when he repeatedly says in interviews that "America is not just a country, it is an idea."
It would be more like a planetary version (yes, I dream big!) of my 7 year-old son's award winning character education program in his public school that is day in and day out teaching, modeling and reinforcing what they call "character ideals" that form the "foundation of the school culture."
(See, there's that word again: culture.)
A spiritual democracy would be more like a cultural philosophy; similar in nature to the impact of the 19th century transformative philosophy of transcendentalism.
By using culture as the container for a healthy democracy, as opposed to strictly manure or ice cream (I mean government or religion), then you would not need court houses or temples to be present at every single high school football field in order for civility, decency and dare I say compassion to reign.
If culture is transactional, as opposed to merely top-down, then this model of pro-social behavior would be more truly "of the people, by the people and for the people."
Therefore, a cultural philosophy of spiritual democracy, in addition to humane laws and religious moral codes, may actually increase our national and global possibility that democracy will be upheld over time.
May it be so.
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