Detroit can save itself, if we actually listen to the residents tell us what they want and don't want from us

For the one-year anniversary of the Vanguard Discussion series, Carolyn Ferrari invited all the former panelists back and centered the discussion on race relations, particularly in the city of Detroit.

Specifically, our discussion centered on the commentary in the Focus: HOPE documentary “In Pursuit of Hope,” which features city residents’ reflections on the few-day-long 1967 Detroit riot, including what led up to it and what people in Detroit are doing now to help assure it doesn’t happen again.

The stark picture painted by the residents’ narratives really brought home the eerie similarities between the inner city and the reservations that the U.S. government forced Native Americans onto—Habitable patches of land from which the investment money, resources, and education that could help residents create viable businesses and prosperous communities have been removed, and given to the people in the surrounding areas which were deemed more deserving of them.

One point that really stuck out for me from the documentary was that all the attention (and judgment of Detroit as a failure) has focused on the people who fled the city, leaving abandoned, scary neighborhoods, burned-out buildings, and closed schools. Little attention or credit has been given to the people who stayed, and have been working to stabilize and help their communities prosper.

Focus: HOPE is one organization that has been empowering Detroit residents to help themselves rather than conditioning them to rely on “hand-outs” from “white saviors,” a term UrbanDictionary.com defines as “western people going in to ‘fix’ the problems of struggling nations or people of color without understanding their history, needs, or the region’s current state of affairs.” (For an informative analysis of this devastating socio-political phenomenon, please click here.) Another example is the Artists Village centered on Lahser and Grand River, which I’ve made a couple explorations into (and blogged about here).

The more dialogues I have with people who grew up in and/or still live in Detroit, the more I realize that Detroit is capable of restoring itself if we just let it.

By this I don’t mean cut all ties and just “let them figure it out on their own” in isolation; what I mean is that we need to let the people who live in Detroit have a chance to determine their own fate, rather than more affluent outsiders assuming what should stay and what should go in the city. What many people are lauding as Detroit’s supposed “comeback,” after all, is not so much a self-restoration that could truly be considered a comeback; much of what they’re actually referring to is gentrification—bringing in real estate, dining, retail, and entertainment that most long-term residents of the city can’t even afford to partake of.

That’s not saving Detroit, that’s taking it away from its residents.

All that being said, one thing that can help make discussions about interracial and intercultural reconciliation more productive is to stop insisting on the ideas of “blame” and “fault,” which have always gotten us nowhere.

If, because I'm mostly “white” (my Native American ancestry being invisible to most people), I treated myself like some kind of villain, or allowed other people to view me as a villain because the system favors “my kind” and not “their kind,” then I’m not going to come to any productive conclusions that will do anything other than make me feel defensive, ambivalent about my social position, and uncomfortable talking with anyone who isn’t in the “white” box.

On the flipside, I can say that, as a person who has something that many other people don’t, I have a social responsibility to share.

This mindset encourages me to think, What ways can I help my neighbors or friends who don’t have what I have? How can I encourage them, change my ways of thinking and behaving to help bring about a culture-shift that helps them prosper? What legislation can I support? What greed-based businesses can I boycott? What local businesses can I patronize and promote?

The way to finding these answers starts with dialogue, and sharing what we’ve learned from our conversations. That’s what I strive to do here, and I’ve got more to come next week.

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Image: "One World Heart" by Karla Joy Huber, 2017; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, white gel pen, gold gel pen

There's no such thing as isolated incidents in history...

My November is turning out to be just as inter-culturally and inter-religiously diverse as October was: Last weekend I attended the final 2017 meeting of the Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues (MPC), a panel discussion about race relations in Detroit, and a panel presentation by two Filipino adoptees about their experiences growing up in white American households and then going on successful quests as adults to find their birth families in the Philippines.

The first of these events I’ll dive into is the MPC meeting, which was held at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. This choice of venue was lauded by participants as very timely and apropos given the recent national rise in anti-Semitism, and in ignorant people’s sentimentality for (and defense of) Confederate, Nazi, and other oppressive symbolism from our not-so-distant past.

For the first hour of our gathering, the docent gave us an abridged version of the standard tour, presenting us with an excellent, concise accounting of the main points about how the Nazis were really able to develop enough power to do what they did—for years without anyone really interfering.

I was astounded that, nearly three-quarters of a century after the end of World War II, our society still lives with eerie parallels to the experiences of Germany and its neighbor-states leading up to the rise of the Nazis—and how ignorant most people are of these alarming warning signs.

We fail to see them only because of the surface-level differences: It’s so easy to say that our nation is too powerful (in contrast with the defeat and destabilization that left Germany wide-open for an authoritarian political coup in the years after World War I) or enlightened to ever allow such people to come to power again in the West; but the truth is that there’s nothing random about our current increases in authoritarian religion, authoritarian politics, mass shootings, terrorist infiltrations, human trafficking, institutional-level anti-Semitism, and so on.

Such people have never sprung up in a vacuum, and there’s nothing “senseless” or “pure” about their evil.

In her book My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, Jennifer Teege makes the point that dehumanizing Nazis—or any genocidal hate group for that matter—means we deny responsibility that humans could even be capable of such cruelty. As a misguided form of self-defense, we try to rationalize such experiences instead of think critically about what collective karma contributed to this, and thus identify ways to help prevent that thinking—and those actions—from coming back again.

Instead, we have been taught to disregard and dismiss Nazis as freaks and move on, instead of acknowledging their movement and their actions as symptoms of a much-larger and still-existent problem. We contribute to their re-creation every time we choose such dismissal over honest reflection about the true state of our society—every time we label current politicians and mass shooters and berserk police-officers as random freaks, who should be ignored or quarantined in the hopes that the larger problems they represent will just go away.

After contemplating what I learned last Friday, one thing I realized is that whatever I was taught about the rise of the Nazis and the resulting Holocaust when I was a child was not enough, and I clearly wasn’t old enough to truly understand it as part of the larger context of human experience.

Childhood education gives the impression that large historical narratives such as the rise and fall of the Nazis were isolated incidents in history, instead of as part of a continuum of living history, that hasn’t just abruptly ended to create a new volume of humanity’s evolution.

Recent events have shown that we’re still in the same book we were 70-plus years ago, if not in the same chapter.

Education about long-term historical movements should not stop with grade or even high school, which is why I’m so glad there are such institutions giving tours like this, and organizations such as the Interfaith Leadership Council (IFLC) hosting diversity-and-inclusion educational events for adults. Now that we’re old enough to understand it in its context, my vision is that, this time around, we finally own that because we as a species created this kind of evil, we have the power to stop it.

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Image: "Interfaith Collective 2" by Karla Joy Huber, 2008 and 2015, Prismacolor and Sharpie marker

From Harry Potter to Diwali: Another fascinating convergence of neo-Americana and interfaith adventure in my efforts to be a world citizen without leaving Michigan

Part of my mission for this blog has always been to create a narrative reference guide for otherwise-unknown cultural and spiritual ideas, actions, and groups in our local area that are helping to contribute to unity in diversity. I realized recently that it has also served as a magnet, attracting more and more people into my life who agree with these cultural shifts and are glad to finally meet other people who are doing something to help slowly push them into mainstream consciousness.

One of the marvelous factors of this phenomenon is that I’m meeting these people not only at events focused on interfaith and intercultural exchange, but while doing more every-day or secular things, such as writing in my journal at Starbucks, going walkabout with my best friends in Detroit or Royal Oak, attending performances, talking with vendors at art fairs, or while attending a Harry-Potter-themed event at a tea house in Rochester.

The latter was certainly not an every-day thing, and I had simply expected to have a magical-themed good time there with my best friend Dan, who was treating me to the event as my birthday present. Dan was invited by Tonia Carsten, the owner of Tonia’s Victorian Rose Restaurant and Tea Room, whom he met several months ago after searching for a local tea house near him. He’s been an almost-weekly regular there ever since, and throughout his conversations with Tonia he realized that she is a kindred spirit, whose personal and cultural interests go beyond her own upbringing and running a local eatery.

Tonia too has a personal stake in interfaith and intercultural harmony, being from a Christian background and married to a Hindu man from India. Before she was a restauranteur she worked with an agency helping recent Indian immigrants with their transition to residency in the United States, which is how she met her husband and their circle of friends. I just read on her Facebook page that she has traveled to eleven countries, which is another great demonstration of her commitment to living a life with broader and more inclusive horizons than what’s in her immediate vicinity.

One of Tonia’s visions for her tea room is a variety of different themed parties, based on particular media interests, historical people, or eras that would fit well with the restored Victorian décor and style of her venue—including the several “Muggles & Wizards” dinners she’s hosted so far. She has a Oscar Wilde-themed dinner coming up this weekend on November 12, and Christmas High Tea events scheduled for December, and she mentioned a few other ideas to us. She’s also open to Dan’s idea of considering a Steampunk night, which we know for a fact would be popular in this area.

After the dinner, Dan extended Tonia’s invite to me to join her, her husband, and their friends for their Diwali party. Diwali is a festival originating in India, commemorating a particular victory of good over evil from Hindu Scripture, and also serves as the Hindu New Year festival. Historically, the main decorational tradition of Diwali is the lighting of clay lamps, and many other candles to signify the driving out of evil (darkness) by the light (good). In modern times, while people still light candles, they also light sparklers and firecrackers, and in India the fireworks celebrations rival big-city Fourth of July events in the United States.

We arrived at the house ahead of Tonia (who still had cleanup to do after the Harry Potter event), and were greeted warmly by her husband and their friends. Even though this was the first time Dan and I had actually met any of them, they greeted us as friends and we had free-flowing conversation about both Diwali (giving Dan and I an overview for our first-ever experience of it), and miscellaneous topics of both spiritual and secular interest. After some delicious Indian food (which we had just enough room for after our delicious meal at the Victorian Rose) and good conversation, the parents summoned the children to join us and we all went into the backyard to light sparklers and firecrackers.

If you’d like to read more about Diwali, you can on the Hindu American Foundation’s Diwali Toolkit Web page, a page of “fun facts” about Diwali from CNN.com, and a recent USA Today article about Diwali.

This concludes my three-part series about my colorful birthday-weekend adventures, and in my next post I’ll have something to say about the November 10 Michigan Professional Communicators interfaith networking meeting to be held at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Stay tuned, and, as always, thanks for reading.


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Illustration by Karla Joy Huber, 2011; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, Sharpie pen

Celebrating ten years of WISDOM, with over 20 new examples of how Friendship and Faith can “change the world—one relationship at a time”

People tell me they’ve never heard anywhere else a lot of what I write and talk about, and they can’t imagine how they would find such information and news if someone hadn’t personally presented it to them. For example, a few months ago I showed the book Friendship & Faith to a Buddhist friend, and she replied that she hadn’t even known books like that exist.

Friendship & Faith, which I first read in December 2011, is more than a collection of women’s interfaith friendship stories from the organization WISDOM (Women’s Interfaith Solutions for Dialogue and Outreach in MetroDetroit). The stories are grounded in recent major events in southeastern Michigan or in larger intercultural narratives, such as historic barriers between ethnic and religious minorities whose co-existence in the same communities has been characterized more by ambivalence than by cooperation. Some of the women describe how they even went beyond transcending their differences with individuals to becoming involved with (or founding) initiatives that create organized, systematic approaches to weakening the fallacy that some people are just too different from us to ever become our friends.

Earlier this year, I was informed by WISDOM co-founder Trish Harris that Read the Spirit Books was going produce an expanded second edition of the book in commemoration of WISDOM’s tenth anniversary as an organization of women dedicated to promoting unity in diversity in MetroDetroit.

The second edition of Friendship & Faith includes over twenty new stories, bringing the total from 28 to 51. I was honored to be invited by Trish and by Read the Spirit co-founder David Crumm to not only contribute my own story, but to assist with content-editing for some of the other new contributors. I had the honor of assisting Jeanne Salerno, one of WISDOM’s newest board members who shared her magnificent story about her spiritual bridge-building efforts as a Catholic Christian in Muslim Egypt while working for an international economic development organization, and Victoria Freile, a Baha’i friend whom I’ve been acquainted with for many years and was delighted to finally get to know better through helping her and her husband Pablo share her story. 

I was fascinated to hear that Victoria’s story had some similarities to the one I wrote for the book. Hers focuses on overcoming her family’s initial discomfort when she (and a few other family members) transitioned from being Catholic to Baha’i. My story focuses on my relationships with my Baha’i friends—many of whom have been like family to me for over ten years—when I began spreading the word among them that I had left the Baha'i Faith.

The main narrative in my story is an extended version of what I shared last year in three posts (here, here, and here) about my experience losing the father-figure of my “fr’amily” (friend-family), John Suggs.

There are many things which make Friendship and Faith stand out from other books about building relationships across cultural and religious lines, including that many of them are candid and raw instead of sentimental. The writers “don’t sugar-coat anything,” as I said in my post about the first edition. “In a book about finding unity in diversity, one might expect to find cookie-cutter platitudes that romanticize humanity’s underlying homogeneity as a species. It’s true that human beings are all more alike than we are different, but this sentiment can be taken too far, to the extreme of neglecting the value of the uniqueness of individuals and cultures. . . . Most of the authors talk unsentimentally about how they’ve overcome religious bigotry or racism, and in some cases about how they’ve overcome their own initial prejudices and mistrust of particular types of people.”

With the book’s second edition, I also re-affirm that “I strongly recommend this book for anyone who would like to gain a better understanding of Metro Detroit’s history and what its contemporary interreligious, intercultural landscape is truly like,” and that this book is “a valuable resource for high school and college classrooms as recommended reading for comparative religion or social studies courses.”

I of course also highly recommend it for individuals who not only want to be inspired by heartwarming true stories but want ideas for how to get directly involved, particularly in the metro Detroit area—because it’s where I got a lot of my involvement ideas.


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Image: Left panel of “The Inner World of the Heart” by Karla Joy Huber, 2016; Prismacolor marker, Sharpie marker, Sharpie pen, metallic gold gel pen

Answering the call to "meet resistance with resiliency" as we "build the Beloved Community each day"

After over fifteen years of interfaith participation, I’ve found that the best uses of interfaith dialogue are not comparative-religion discussions or reinforcement of what we have in common as human beings with a spiritual nature. While our similarities as members of the same species are important, placing the emphasis on relying on our spiritual commonalities to validate our connection lacks imagination and doesn’t develop any listening or adaptation skills we need to survive and thrive in an ever-changing world.

If everyone is busy thinking or saying, “Oh, me too!” when hearing people describe their religion, that tends to stunt our ability to really listen to what they are saying or respect their unique perspective and what they have to offer to help broaden our horizons.

The truth behind the idea that “opposites attract” is not that the opposite parties eventually find out what they actually have in common and that’s why they work well together; it’s because each contributes something that the others don’t have, and they build and strengthen their bond through pooling their different perspectives, talents, and energies.

The best and most productive interfaith experiences I’ve had, as I said last week, are those which transcend religion rather than focus on finding the ideological overlaps, or the opposite extreme of disregarding religious differences as irrelevant.

This transcendence of religion takes us a lot closer to true humanism, which breaks us out of the model of over-reliance on God as our unifying force, and also out of the risk of using God as a reason, crutch, excuse, or weapon. That being said, transcending religion or God does not have to mean the invalidation of religion or God; people can strike a middle way between being humanistic and still being God-centered.

One of the most marvelous examples of this middle way is the newest initiative of Michigan’s interfaith community called the “Commitment to be Resilient.” Presented by Interfaith Leadership Council (IFLC) Chairman Bob Bruttell at the January 27th Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues meeting, this initiative represents a collaboration of the IFLC, Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, Jewish Community Relations Council, Michigan Muslim Community Council, Interfaith Center for Racial Justice (ICRJ), and many other faith organizations in the Metro Detroit Area.

The Commitment to be Resilient is both an affirmation and a prayer, and it is the first interfaith prayer statement that I’ve seen that is truly 100% all-inclusive—because it doesn’t actually mention God.

“I believe 
that we are called to lift each other up,
that we are stronger standing together,
that our differences are a blessing,
that empathy and love reveal the path to peace,
and that justice will prevail,
because each of us is Beloved.

Therefore, I commit to
answer intolerance with goodwill,
live by faith and hope, not fear,
seek understanding and friendship whenever I can,
stand with those facing prejudice and injustice,
meet resistance with resiliency as I build the Beloved Community each day.”

Bruttell, who is Christian, said that someone did ask him, “Where is God in this?” His response was, “everywhere!” and in all of it. Coming from a Buddhist perspective, that was music to my ears, because it shows an acknowledgment by God-centered people that what they call “God” is not limited to anyone’s creator-deity personification or creation theology, and truly is everything and everywhere.

To read about the “Commitment to be Resilient” on the IFLC Web site, click here. To sign the Resiliency Commitment online, click here. For a downloadable copy of the Resiliency Commitment that you can print copies of to share with friends, family, co-workers, and fellow members of your faith community, please click here.

Bruttell also made the point that the Commitment to be Resilient is not the intellectual property of any of the participating organizations, nor has it been branded by any of them individually. The point was not to “create another acronym,” as Bruttell put it, and found a new coalition around it. He encouraged everyone to take ownership of it, share it, and live by it to the best of our ability.

I’m blessed to be surrounded every day by people who do already, both inside and outside the interfaith community and my spiritual community; I look forward to us continuing to attract more and more like-minded souls to work together with us to “build the Beloved Community each day.”


(This concludes my five-post series of highlights and insights from the January 27th MPC meeting. To read the other posts, please click here, here, here, and here.)


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Image: "Dove Ascending" by Karla Joy Huber, 2007; Prismacolor marker and Sharpie marker

Some great resources to increase our cultural and interfaith literacy: Upcoming events, newly-published books, and other opportunities for dialogue

In my past three posts I’ve shared with you highlights from the most recent meeting of the Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues (MPC), including about the interfaith community's response to the dark turn our nation's current religious dialogue has taken, insights about finding reliable sources of information in an era where the news media has been branded by some as the "opposition party," and transcending not only religious differences but religion itself to help foster unity in diversity.

The MPC meetings are also an excellent forum for attendees to share about their own or their organizations’ faith- and culture-related work, including newly-launched outreach initiatives, upcoming community-education events, and recently-published books. I’ll share a few of them with you now, including one taking place tomorrow, February 7.

The first event is Luke Schaefer’s presentation regarding topics covered in his and Kathryn J. Edin’s book $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. The presentation, which is part of the 2017 Washtenaw Reads Book Event, takes place tomorrow from 7 pm – 9 pm in the social hall of the First United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor. (For address and directions, please click here.)

While this book’s focus is secular, the topic of poverty and marginalization in America is becoming more and more relevant to religious discussion, apropos of the current increases in prejudice and resource-restrictions against people of particular religious affiliations. Books and presentations about poverty from secular civic and academic perspectives can be good supplements to interfaith dialogue on the topic, especially if used to aid in brainstorming ways to help bridge the gaps between communities that would be stronger if they formed more alliances among themselves.

One such alliance is between the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Michigan Muslim Community Council. Alan Gale stated that the JRC identified a need to connect more with Middle-Eastern—particularly Muslim—communities, and partnered with the MMCC on the Shared Future initiative to help reduce tensions between the Jewish and Muslim communities by working together to address their “shared concerns.”

MPC facilitator David Crumm also made a great point that, while he is “a big supporter of the separation of church and state, there does need to be some re-connection between our groups.” While he was specifically referencing alliances between faith communities and public broadcasting, I take it to mean also forming faith alliances with civic, educational, and other secular institutions that directly impact the lives of people of all faiths.

The second event discussed at the MPC meeting is Diane Butler Bass’s presentation “Relocating Faith: Finding God in the Horizons of Nature and Neighbor,” on Saturday March 25 from 9 am – 2:30 pm, also at the First United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor. Diana Butler Bass is a Christian minister and scholar of American religion and culture, who is has published books about changes religions undergo—or need to undergo—to adapt positively to the times. Her most recent book, Grounded: Finding God in the World—A Spiritual Revolution, is available on Amazon.com.

Another book introduced at this MPC meeting was Miles Barnett’s God Explained, which Barnett explained is the culmination of his interviews with leaders from thirty different religions. What is noteworthy about this book is that, instead being of a collection of clergy members’ presentations about their religions’ views on God, Barnett asked them for their individual interpretations of God, regardless of how that view accords or doesn’t with their faith traditions. The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com and on BarnesandNoble.com.

Read the Spirit contributor Chris Stepien was also in attendance, and briefly described his book Dying to be Happy: Discovering the Truth about Life, in which he discusses the universal theme of spiritual questions that arise from death. While Stepien writes from a Christian perspective, his book may still include inspiration and thoughtful take-aways for readers of other faiths, since we will all die regardless of how we live our lives or what religious traditions we practice.

Last but not least, a wild card presented at the meeting was Janice Leach’s and James Frederick Leach’s ‘Til Death: Marriage Poems, which takes a colorful departure from the typical “romantic” approach to poetry about the union of husband and wife. Janice Leach generously provided me with a reviewer-copy, so, just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ll read it and write about it here before February 14. In the meantime, you can look it up on Amazon.com.


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Image: "From Diversity to Pluralism" by Karla Joy Huber, 2004; mixed media

Creating the Beloved Community by transcending not only religious differences, but by transcending religion itself

One of the strong points of southeastern Michigan’s interfaith social-action dialogues is their transcendence of not only religious difference, but of religion itself. A key theme I’ve noticed in our discussions is an emphasis on our shared humanity, rather than on the idea that we are all children of God.

This isn’t to say that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and others put religious beliefs or God aside to find some common denominator with people who believe differently. What it says is that, while we do bring our different spiritual perspectives to the discussion, we realize that connecting with people’s human experience beyond the framework of our beliefs is more important to our unification efforts than connecting over God or emphasizing commonalities in our spiritual beliefs.

The religious frames of reference represented at the first 2017 meeting of the Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues (MPC) were Catholic and Protestant Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and pagan. The latter in particular struck a chord with me, because it was the first time I know of that a practicing pagan has participated in our circle.

Jane Pierce, a tarot and astrology specialist and member of Pagan Pathways Temple in Madison Heights (who also maintains spiritual ties to her Catholic roots), addressed the subject of paganism’s historical lack of representation in interfaith dialogue. She expressed that she has hesitated to join interfaith initiatives because of potential backlash stemming from people’s misconceptions about paganism.

“It’s hard enough to get the Abrahamic religions to work together,” she pointed out; throw in people who have a concept of the divine that contrasts sharply with the Judeo-Christian father-God—such as seeing creation as the work of Goddess or a collaborative team of deities—and dialogue often stalls.

Pierce made these points without any indication of animosity or resentment, acknowledging them instead only as an unfortunate reality. She made an important first step toward changing this reality by showing up at last Friday’s meeting, and an even bigger step by agreeing to talk with Peggy Dahlberg (president of Women’s Interfaith Solutions for Dialogue and Outreach in Metro-Detroit) about being or nominating a pagan presenter for WISDOM’s next “Five Women, Five Journeys” interfaith panel discussion. I overheard Dahlberg, who is Christian, say that WISDOM has yet to feature a pagan perspective in its community-education programming, so I was very pleased that she took the initiative to invite Pierce to participate and finally get this long-overdue dialogue started.

I wrote a few months ago about turning one of our main sources of division inside out, by acknowledging difference in a good way instead of automatically equating such acknowledgment with prejudice. The point I made in that post against “color-blindness” as a solution to racism can also be applied to seeking to homogenize away religious difference by emphasizing only what we think we spiritually have in common—the “children of God” idea I mentioned earlier. In addition, steering clear of over-emphasis on seeing us all as children of God is especially important when we consider that such emphasis alienates practitioners of religions that don’t envision God the way Abrahamic monotheists do, and those who don’t envision a central deity in their spiritual practice at all.

I think the success of the professional, religious, and social partnerships that have come out of networking with the MPC indicates that this non-incorporated alliance of diverse professionals does in fact see that our differences deepen the pool of resources and value-adding perspectives way more than we would if we treated our religious differences as incidental.

While religious and cultural differences are acknowledged and respected, they are not used to type-cast people of certain groups only into certain roles. For example, a Muslim woman wouldn’t only be referred to work in Islamic community outreach—One such woman was commended by a Jewish colleague to be the coordinator of an inner-city program for at-risk youth, few if any of whom are Muslim.

I’ll share more of the great points made in last Friday’s dialogue in my next post. To read my other posts about it, please click here, here, and here.


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Image: "Welcome of the Trees" by Karla Joy Huber, 2001; colored pencil

Why does our society's sense of morality have to be based on excluding people?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the moral ideas that motivated the political and ideological direction our country has shifted into, and which have plunged our culture and our politics into a moral and ethical setback. While some people see recent events as some sort of triumph for so-called Christian values, I can’t help but think that Jesus Christ himself would be just as disheartened as the rest of us if He was here among us watching and reacting to the news as an ordinary person would.

The main question that comes to my mind right now is, why does our sense of morality have to be based on excluding people? By any traditional American definition of “morality,” it seems that the more “moral” a person is, the more individuals--or entire types of people--that person must exclude and marginalize.

In a previous post, I described the distinctions between commandment-based morality and ahimsa morality, the latter being the moral code more typical of “Eastern” religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The most basic understanding of ahimsa includes the motivation to “do no harm,” or to let compassion and love of humanity be our moral motivation, instead of fear of punishment from an authoritarian father-deity.

Authoritarians have an easy time bending commandment-morality to suit their purposes. They promote an image of an authoritarian, wrathful God, with characteristics that sound conveniently just like theirs, ironically in the name of Jesus Christ who preached about God’s mercy and forgiveness, and whose death was supposed to assure salvation for his devotees from all the horrors that today’s authoritarians threaten us with if we allow gays, Muslims, women who would consider abortion, "liberals, " etc. to have a respectable place and equal rights in our society.

Since authoritarians can’t bend moral ideas based on ahimsa to their will, they preach against such morality as being too “soft” on people, and that the idea of accepting homosexuality, or practicing religions that don’t 100% agree with their religion, or enjoying anything classifiable as “decadent” that doesn’t fit in their narrow catalogue of acceptable behaviors and lifestyles is overly “permissive,” and sure to lead us on a path of moral decline and self-destruction.

Thus, it seems that the uncompromising, loveless version of commandment-morality that is being preached in many churches and by many politicians today only serves a small percentage of the population. It simply doesn’t allow for much human variety, defining morality in such narrow terms that it leaves more people out than it accepts.

When the moral code so heavily emphasizes excluding certain types of people, it’s a short and easy step to cross over into using it to justify discrimination against and deprivation of basic human rights to anyone who is considered by that system as morally objectionable. A “moral” person then has no choice but to reject and marginalize such people, because their moral system does not teach them any flexibility or adaptive skills for relating with people who express any part of the range of human experience that they are unfamiliar with.

That moral code seems to assume that we need to keep such a tight, mistrusting hold on ourselves to avoid totally dissolving into hedonism, as though we human beings aren’t capable of managing ourselves with our own skillsets and human nature to love, without having to be controlled by an authoritarian moral system.

If we really look at the results of this moral system, however, we’ll see that it hasn’t prevented the moral chaos it so fears—It actually created it.

I’ll elaborate on this in my next post.

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Heart illustration by Karla Joy Huber, 2013; Prismacolor and Sharpie marker