We witness the religiously motivated barbarism of Paris and Bamako and shake our heads. How can anyone think this will advance their religion, if that’s their objective? Random slaughtering innocent people in the name of Allah makes no sense if God by any name abhors evil. Belonging to whatever religion does not justify violence against those of other faiths, at least if the moral codes of major world religions — including Islam — avail. Psychologically, winning converts demands persuasion. Roman parish priest St. Philip Neri said a spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel of vinegar.
But we Roman Catholics do not have an unsullied past in this regard either. Time was when we thought it virtuous to burn heretics and witches. That was not only to punish but to deter people from these errors. That was when error had no rights. A monument stands in Florence’s very public Piazza della Signoria commemorating radical preacher Savonarola’s place of execution. Another stands in Rome where the righteous executed Giordano Bruno. I’ve mentioned in this column the Vatican Museum’s guillotine, used against enemies of the Papal States (750 – 1870) at least 150 times. We too have made the mistake of coercion, misusing the Lord’s parable words, “Compel them to come in!”
To understand — not condone — this kind of extremism, we have to examine the estrangement that minorities feel, isolated by language, dress, diet, culture and more, when they see the majority living in violation of sharia, Islamic religious law, with women driving cars and walking in public unescorted by male relatives with their hair visible. They also see the contempt of many, scorning the noticeable differences, even trying to pass national laws against the wearing of the veil, as they did years ago in France. Who likes being estranged, especially if such discrimination keeps them from being employed by the majority? Hunger hurts, as does the contempt that spawns it.
Psychologists tell us that tribal hostility goes way back. Our brains have long been wired so that we favor those like us and fear those unlike us. It made a life-and-death survival difference back in the days of the caves, after we left the Oldavi gorge, which we all occupied in eastern Africa. We don’t realize we do this, even though we do it every day. Skin color is instantly recognizable. Their kind is different from mine, and I have to be loyal to my tribe. If I am hiring, without realizing it I favor my kind, so that a qualified African American is “prejudged,” from which comes the word prejudice. This is largely why black unemployment is always worse than white.
Differences have divided us. A popular song chided us some 60 years ago: the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles, Italians hate the Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch. In our Lord’s time, Judeans hated Samaritans, so Jesus praised Samaritans on several occasions. But he refused to do what we customarily do, vaunt our tribe at the expense of another. He was dismissed as a do-gooder. His preaching was other-worldly, expecting us to reject what we were wired to do. Confounding the Pharisees and the other doctors of the law, as a mere layman he raised the Leviticus law about loving one’s neighbor to the same status of the Deuteronomy law about loving God. “The second is like the first.” Both laws were already there, but equating them seemed like heresy, as though any neighbor was on a par with God. And we wonder why they executed him.
Being an adult disciple of Jesus is not for the weak. It certainly is more than “getting” sacraments and going though life dodging sometimes obscure Catholic prohibitions. We imagine that if we abstain from meat on Lenten Fridays in dioceses where the bishop proscribes it, we will go to heaven after we die, simple as that. Such a domesticated version of Christian discipleship will never understand why his own immediate friends thought he was mad, flying in the face of conventional wisdom. He actually believed that Samaritans were as good as Galileans like him and Judeans, and that we should relate to them as equals, despite the tribal differences.
We can identify with those dismissive apostles. Jesus wanted nothing less than universal acceptance of everyone by everyone, and that has not happened yet. Religious extremism is psychological tribalism, and however deeply implanted, disciples struggle to conquer it, not each other.
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