Rev. Anthony David
May 13, 2007
To me, one of the most powerful and profound passages of the Hebrew Scriptures comes from the book of Micah. Micah was a prophet calling the Hebrews back into right relationship with their God. To God, the Hebrews had promised that they would uphold justice and mercy upon the earth; and God, in turn, had promised He would make them prosper upon the land. But as Micah saw it, the Hebrews were reneging on their part of the agreement, their part of the covenant. Justice and mercy? Heck, no. That’s exactly what they weren’t doing. And so comes the passage I love, in which Micah says, “He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). That’s what Micah says. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.
It’s powerful and profound. And even though Micah was supposed to have said it around 700 years before the common era—2700 years ago from today—people still need to hear it. It’s like a yardstick for what it means to be a truly religious, truly spiritual person—ranks right up there with the Golden Rule. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Walk humbly with whatever you regard as sacred, with whatever is worthy of your ultimate devotion, with whatever for you is a never-failing source of encouragement and hope. That’s what religion is supposed to be about. People doing justice and kindness; people walking humbly with their God.
This is the heart of religion. And we need to hear about it again and again, because, clearly, too many people still don’t get it. They just don’t get it. Justice? Kindness? Walking humbly with your God? What? And perhaps the most disheartening example of this is religious bullying. I’m talking about acts of genuine aggression in which the power of institutional religion is used in unethical ways to achieve goals that just have nothing to do with justice being increased upon the earth, or kindness, or with more people feeling connected with the Spirit of Life. There is a fundamental confusion at the core of religious bullying. Fundamental confusion when people style themselves as spiritually faithful and mature and they go on a destructive crusade, they ambush, they intimidate, they hurt, they wound, they bomb, they murder. This is as far away from the heart of genuine religion as you can get. It really is.
Let’s take a look at two brief examples of religious bullying, and then go from there. What it involves, why it happens, and what we can do about it….
The first example comes from William Zellner, a sociology professor at East Central University in Oklahoma. His story begins in the fall of 1991, when a local newspaper asked students, "Who is the worst professor on campus?" One girl, a member of a fundamentalist Christian church, answered, "I don't take Dr. Zellner's classes because he is an atheist." Now when Dr. Zellner found out about this, he was unperturbed and thought, Okay, don't take my classes. Nothing to worry about, because I have never had any problem filling classrooms. But then horrible things started to happen. He started receiving damning notes from students, most left anonymously under his office door. A fellow professor sent him a seven page letter, accusing him of being in league with Satan. Then there were the threatening phone calls made to him at home, insisting that he and his family get out of town. One church made up campaign-style buttons which read "I am praying for Dr. Zellner," and they sold for a dollar each. His car was vandalized to the tune of $543. Worst of all, his daughter, six years old at the time, lost playmates. And his nine-year-old son was physically attacked during a little-league baseball game by two Southern Baptist children.
That’s William Zellner’s story, our first example of religious bullying, and here’s the second. It comes from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. You might know that Colorado Springs is home to some of America’s most powerful conservative evangelical Christian organizations, like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Coming out of the Air Force Academy are many stories of religious bullying which the school does nothing about. One person who’s been collecting these stories is Mikey Weinstein, himself a graduate of the Academy, who at one point served in the Reagan White House. 117 people, he says, have given him examples of bullying, including his own son, who said that fellow students repeatedly called him a *bleeping* Jew and said that the Jews were responsible for “executing Jesus.” Mikey Weinstein goes on to say that, ultimately, out of all 117 complaints he’s heard so far, only eight of them involve Jews. The vast majority of them involve Catholics, American Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists—Christians who are being attacked viciously by other Christians. Christians who feel completely out of place and unwelcome in the Bible belt. Their own book somehow being used against them!
All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Religious bullying. How many of you have ever experienced it? Or your children have come home with their own stories of it?
Let me define what religious bullying is, and then draw out the implications of this definition. Religious bullying involves repeated acts of aggression in which the power of institutional religion is used in unethical ways to achieve fundamentally non-religious ends. This is my definition of it, and I say “repeated acts” because a single act might just be a mistake that the other person regrets and will never do again, or it may simply involve a misunderstanding that gets cleared up. No, religious bullying is persistent in nature, and its expression is not justice and not mercy and has nothing whatsoever to do with walking humbly with your God. It’s contrary to all this, rejects all this, acts out in intentionally malicious ways. Bullying that is verbal, involving name-calling, mocking, hurtful teasing, humiliation, or threats. Bullying that is social, involving eye-rolling, exclusion from the group, subjection to hurtful gossip or rumors, friendships broken up. Bullying that is physical, involving hitting, kicking, shoving, spitting, beating up, stealing, damaging property, bombing, murdering.
Religious bullying can be all this, and more. A child in a playground, being told by his or her peers that if he or she doesn’t become born again, he or she is going to hell. An employee in the workplace, who doesn’t want to participate in a certain prayer and Bible study group, whose job is therefore on the line. Bullying like this can happen to anyone who, from the conservative evangelical Christian perspective, doesn’t go to the right church and doesn’t accept the right kind of doctrine and doesn’t say or do the right kind of things. Happens to Unitarian Universalists and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and atheists. Happens to gays and lesbians, to environmentalists and pro-choicers, to families who don’t toe the traditional Focus on the Family line. Happens even to moderate and liberal Christians who believe in the Bible and believe in Jesus, and yet they are going to hell just like most everyone else….
But now let’s turn to a key question: why? Why does the bullying happen? As my definition suggests, the reasons are fundamentally not about justice, mercy, and walking humbly with one’s God. The reasons have more to do with psychological and social factors. Consider, for example, the psychological and social development of children five-to-seven years of age. At these ages, most children are primarily self-centered and simply don’t know how to look at things from another point of view. Nothing is wrong with them; this is just where they are in their development. And yet it means that they can say cruel things at the drop of a hat, without blinking an eye. In the playground, telling a friend that they are going to hell, because Mom or Dad at home, or people at church, talk like that all the time.
Or consider children seven-to-ten years of age. Developmentally speaking, they are definitely more sophisticated in terms of relationships; and to develop their capacity for this even further, guess what they can resort to? Gossip, snubs, teasing, and fights: all these as a way of testing limits and seeing just how far you can go before the relationship fragments. And so if, in this age group, your religious affiliation makes you stand out from the crowd, others are going to come picking on you not because of honest theological disagreements but because you just stand out. You stick out like a sore thumb, and so you become the test case. How much can I bug you before you snap? Often, it’s just as simple as that.
As for children ages nine-to-thirteen. Generally, children here have a great need to be part of some in-crowd, and this dynamic explains a lot. Make someone an outsider, and you and your friends get to be on the inside, you and your friends get to feel the bliss of togetherness and solidarity. Here, you absolutely count on others being different and going to hell, because it means a here-and-now experience of heaven. Psychologically, you hunger for others being different and going to hell, because, otherwise, how are you going to define who you are?
What I am suggesting by all this is that psychological and social needs can co-opt and steal religion’s power. On the surface, it looks sounds and smells and tastes like religion, but down deep, where the real problems lie, and therefore the real solutions, something entirely different is going on. Bait and switch.
This is critical to remember as we consider yet another motivation for religious bullying. Let me give you a short illustration of it first, and go from there. See in your mind’s eye a ten-year-old boy, who is picked on by two older boys right after school. He walks away from this feeling humiliated and powerless. So what does he do to regain a sense of control? He goes home and pounds on his seven-year-old sister.
That’s right. Perhaps the most generic explanation for religious bullying—especially the kind done by adults—has to do with feeling like you have been bullied yourself, and you need to do something to regain a sense of dignity and control. Religious bullies feel bullied themselves: by a society that does not seem to care for the values they care for, by a world that seems to be going to the dogs, going crazy. They feel bullied to the quick, bullied to the core. They feel fundamentally unsafe. And so an atheist like William Zellner, or fellow Air Force Academy students who aren’t straight arrow Christian conservatives—all become symbols of a world going nuts, and so the religious bullies hit back, and they hit back hard. They use their religion which represents to them stability, tradition, the power of the group—they use it as a weapon, they quote the Golden Rule and they quote the passage from Micah that says “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” even as they do things that are exactly the opposite. Makes no sense at all. But there it is. Welcome to the human condition.
And when it happens in the Bible belt, there can be no greater irony. For the Bible belt is where the religious right is the majority, and the power and influence they possess is unmatched—and yet they still feel oppressed, they still feel persecuted, they still feel misunderstood! There is still the feeling that the other shoe is about to drop at any time. I call it paranoia. And paranoia is at the core of the religious bully’s outlook. Vanderbilt psychologist Kenneth Dodge puts it this way: he says, “Many bullies see the world with a paranoid’s eye. They see threats where none exist, and they take these imagined threats as provocation to strike back. They feel justified in retaliating for what are actually imaginary harms.” That’s what psychologist Kenneth Dodge says. Religious bullying is strength that is really only weakness and woundedness. The shell is rock hard, but the insides are quivering jelly.
That’s a little about why bullying happens—what the underlying reasons or motivations might be. But now it’s time to turn to strategies. How to deal with it. What to do.
First thing is this: Don’t keep it a secret—tell someone who can help. Granted, this might be difficult to do for the very young (children around five years old, for example) since they probably don’t yet have the vocabulary to put their feelings into words. But for people older than this—for people who do have sufficient vocabulary—you may not want to tell because you think that you ought to be able to handle the problem all by yourself, and so telling is embarrassing. Telling would make you feel shame. But it’s best, I believe, to talk about it anyway. Talk about what happened. Tell someone who will hear what you are saying and will follow your lead. Tell someone you respect and trust. Above all, don’t let your anger and pain and sense of outrage go underground and simmer away, fester away, because then it all might explode one day into acts of bullying that come from you! All of a sudden, the bully is YOU. I have seen it happen in Unitarian Universalist congregations, usually in the form of Humanists and Theists bickering away, and the church’s mission to change lives is completely forgotten. Unitarian Universalist Humanists, constantly enduring rejection and marginalization in the Bible belt, feeling even more marginalization and abuse when fellow Unitarian Universalists talk about God or the Bible or Jesus. A fight ensues. And all it does is trigger the deep hurts and resentments of Theistic Unitarian Universalists who also endure rejection and also endure marginalization and also endure abuse in the Bible belt, who also can find no place for themselves out there. Humanists and Theists, fighting about who hurts the worst and whose allergies ought to dictate what words can and can’t be used in church. Going round and round, round and round: religious bullying taking center stage at the Unitarian Universalist church, the church where religious bullying ought to have no place whatsoever, the church—if it be a true Unitarian Universalist church—whose heart ought to be big enough for all. Big enough for ALL Six Sources, not just some.
Let’s not let this happen. Let’s not let our hurts go underground, simmer away, fester away. Let’s bear up each other’s burdens, encourage each other, have a big heart for each other. A big heart especially for our fellow Unitarian Universalists.
That, in fact, leads to the next strategy for dealing with bullying. Be a good listener. If, for example, your child is trying to tell you what happened to them, sit down together. Show with your eyes and manner that you are taking him or her seriously. Wait until later to ask about specific details that are important to you; let him or her say what they need to say first. Follow their lead. And don’t allow personal reactions to derail your listening efforts. For example, as your child is describing what happened, you might find yourself taken back in time to an instance of bullying you experienced yourself, and the rawness of your feelings overwhelms you. Or, your child is describing what happened, and all of a sudden you feel ashamed and find yourself wondering about what your child must have done to cause it, and this only deepens your sense of shame, and once again, you are no longer listening to your child. Your own stuff has overwhelmed you. Finally, you might get so angry at the bully who did whatever they did to your child—or at the teachers who did nothing about it, or at something else—that your child just stops talking because all of a sudden you are the star of the show, and he or she is concerned about you!
The strategies are these: If you’ve been bullied, talk about it. If someone is trying to talk to you about it, be a good listener. And then there’s this: don’t rush in a try to solve it for them. Help them think it through. Once you’ve helped them clarify the problem, then invite them to brainstorm possible strategies. The point here is to give your child or your friend an experience of empowerment, and then to help them own the solution that will work best for them. Sometime it will mean staying calm and ignoring the bullying; sometime it will mean being assertive and saying NO; sometime it will mean using snappy comebacks, as in “You think my shirt is funny? What about the one you have on?”; sometime it will mean intentionally cultivating the power of friendships and groups, because bullying is harder to do when you are surrounded by people; sometime it will mean getting help, or bringing someone in to do an intervention. All these represent things that can be done. But the key point is to empower the person who’s being bullied. Don’t rush in and solve it for them. Help them find their own solution.
And when you do this, you give a great gift to the world. Bullying is contagious and so easily leads to the creation of just more bullies, but when you give the gift of empowerment and hope, you cut right through all that. You disrupt the inevitability of that. You return to a person his or her sense of dignity and control. You show them that there is a way to justice and mercy in life. You demonstrate the brilliant truth of the prophet Micah’s ancient words. You walk with them, right beside them, humbly—and in this way they get a sense and a taste of what it is like to walk humbly with their God. You bless them just like that. Just like that. That’s what you do.
“Hate Radio,” in Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, September 17, 2004 (available: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week803/cover.html)
Elin McCoy, What To Do… When Kids are Mean to Your Child: Real Solutions from Experts, Parents, and Kids (Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest, 1997).
Sikh Media Watch and Resource Task Force, “Helping Sikh Children Deal With Bullying,” available http://www.sikhmediawatch.org/pubs/Helping_Sikh_Children_Deal_With_Bullying.PDF
Matthew Wells, “Religious Bullying at US Academy,” in BBC News, June 17 2005 (available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4091956.stm)
William Zellner, “Deep In The Bible Belt--One Atheist Professor's Experience” in Freethought Today, December 1995 (available http://ffrf.org/fttoday/1995/december95/zellner.html)