Objectifying other people is a dangerous habit we human beings regularly get into. We treat someone as an object when we talk about him or her as a “them.” There are two kinds of people in this world – those who categorize people and those who don’t.
When I triangulate or gossip or objectify one person, I am breaking the 9th Commandment by passing on false information about him or her. I may not even intend harm by speaking about someone, but in separating that person from his or her information, I have started a process that could well unravel that person’s reputation.
The same thing happens on a larger scale. We can triangulate or bear false witness against a whole group of people, corporately ruining their reputations.
When I was a kid, my brother and I had a couple of friends who were brothers and lived in our neighborhood. We were poor and they were poorer. Even worse, they were often getting into trouble, which back in second and third grade in the early 1960s in our town was low-grade trouble. It also sounded like fun to my brother and me. Nevertheless people used to talk about them as “those Brown boys.”
The trouble with brothers is that when they get into trouble they tend to compound their troublesomeness. Meaning that whenever “Fred” did something wrong, it was a mark against both of them. And when “Sam” did something wrong the same thing happened, until each of the boys was in compounded trouble.
On a societal scale, we call this racism. Racism is both ugly and surefire sin. Moreover, it is a direct violation of the 9th Commandment. What is racism? Like gossip on a personal level, it is bearing false witness against a whole class of people. It is triangulating about a group of people without taking time to verify the truth of our statements. It is class action gossip.
For some reason we Evangelicals don’t treat racism as a sin, at least not on the level of the Ten Commandments. We insist on hanging the Ten Commandments in Courtrooms while we violate those very commandments by bearing false witness against a whole class of people who enter those courtroom doors. Jesus had some hard things to say about people who give only lip service to the commands of God.
We see prejudice as a social or political matter, which seems to mean that it lies outside of spiritual concerns, something not to be preached against in church. But, as we do with gossip, we treat racism as harmless something which condemns people to hell. Jesus said it was better for a man to be drowned than for him to cause someone else to sin.
My doctoral research was in part on how a segment of us Evangelicals had practiced the sin of racism in the mid-twentieth century. As happened with a lot of churches, this particular group decided that they had to make a choice between reaching African Americans and White Americans, so like triage in an emergency room, they decided to reach the Whites and forget the Blacks. They, who had been called to preach the gospel to all peoples, had done exactly what Jesus warned about in Luke 17.
We may not intend for our actions to reap such consequences. Yet whenever we treat others as “them”, whenever we pass on individual behaviors in other people as class acts, we objectify a whole segment of this world’s population and bear false witness against our neighbors. We see a person act in a certain way and then classify all those like her as that same way. We see another person else in that group, and in circular fashion we say that is how we are to think this second person. She’s one of them, so she must be like them. Compounded trouble.
We don’t think of racism and prejudice as lying. But in reality that is what they are – bold-faced lies. When was the last time you heard the 9th Commandment preached on in church? When was the last time you heard racism preached on in church? Perhaps it is time to hang the Ten Commandments in the sanctuaries of our nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment