Please stop foisting your liberal-religious dissonance on me

Dear liberal theist who wishes to school people in redundant matters pertaining to your good name,

You’re an adherent of one of the various liberal iterations of faith on this planet, which means the odds are you’re more educated than most people. It’s reasonable to assume that I’m probably writing for someone with a brain in their skull (and to trust this sentence won’t be taken too literally).

Perhaps you’re Catholic, perhaps you are not. All the same I’m going to use a source conflict for many liberal Catholics for much of the following, only because this source is so well known. Not because Catholics have a monopoly on dissonance, but because it’s been in the news so much and seemingly so well discussed and understood already. Certainly not because I want to single Catholics out.

So…

You have liberal values at least to some extent.

You may or may not for example, like the idea of gay people marrying. You may or may not agree with the idea of your church giving marriage ceremonies to gay people, but you’ll be damned if you’ll support the notion of the state prohibiting gay marriage.

Perhaps you’re even more liberal than this. Perhaps you don’t have a problem with homosexuality at all. Perhaps you’re unremorsefully gay. Good for you.

You have liberal friends. You have liberal colleagues. Perhaps your life is dedicated to liberal causes. Again, good for you.

On the other hand, in contradiction to your liberal views you’re the member of a denomination that officially opposes the rights of gay people. Say, The Roman Catholic Church, who early in 2009, fell in with the likes of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan in refusing to side with nations seeking to condemn the criminalisation of homosexuality.

You’re the kind of person who finds themselves in an uncomfortable position each time this kind of thing happens. Your Church acts explicitly in contradiction to your values and your conscience prickles and your self-worth and self-identity is understandably challenged.

Perhaps you worry what your friends will think. Perhaps you worry what your colleagues will think. Perhaps you worry that this will undermine your very moral agency.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m entirely unsympathetic, or suffering from delusions of infallibility. I was in a similar state for most of the period of my membership with the Australian Labor Party. Of course, all that ended when I resigned last year.

I made excuses. I’m not sure I’d act so differently if I did it all over again; I did have reasons to stay, but also I did make excuses. Like when I swallowed down my disquiet at the idea of being called a “True Believer”, something that to my free-thinking values was akin to being called an exploitable sheep. I told myself that this was merely my own distaste and that questioning this rhetoric wouldn’t achieve much.

Perhaps you make excuses as well. Perhaps when The Holy See made clear to a UN panel in December of last year that it “opposes all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation which undermines the inherent dignity of the human person… The murder and abuse of homosexual persons are to be confronted on all levels, especially when such violence is perpetrated by the State”, you felt a little salve applied to the irritation of your sensibilities.

More importantly, in light of Uganda (a nation over 40% Roman Catholic) being at the time poised to consider legislation that would enable the execution of gays on very broad grounds, that would also allow the government to execute straight people for refusing to report gays to the government, the wording was pretty unambiguous; no Vatican support for the “kill the gays” law.

Then someone just had to point out the qualifier “unjust” before “discrimination”, before asking what the Vatican could possibly mean by “just discrimination against homosexual persons”. Then someone pointed out that this statement even gives the necessary wiggle room to support the criminalisation of homosexuality, just not with jailing or extermination; a fine would be fine.

You don’t support gays being fined for being gay. You find that reprehensible. Yet your Church repeatedly dodges the issue and now people from outside your faith are giving them hell for it!

The panic sets in. You feel the need to reassure people that you don’t support the criminalisation of homosexuality!

Of course this is a specific example. You can substitute issues of gay rights with things like censorship, heroin safe-injecting rooms and so on and so forth. The point is that your church is doing something that you disapprove of and rather than directly criticise your own church for perceived wrong-doing, you find yourself motivated to prevent your dissonance from being made raw by instead schooling the critics.

This is a problem. I’ll explain it in personal terms.

If I’m in the middle of trying to do whatever little I can to put pressure on whatever organisation is peddling bigotry, or whatnot, or at least enabling it, the last thing I need is my very limited resources being redirected to the task of making you feel better about yourself. I’m sorry (I’m not – that’s the rhetorical “sorry”), but on my scale of priorities, tending bruised egos doesn’t really compare well to criticising failures of civil rights. How incredibly myopic to think otherwise!

You want to worry about how people like me – outsiders to your faith – perceive you? Well have a look at how your insecurity plays out through my eyes at least.

As an atheist, I keep getting told things like…

• “…but I’m not like George Pell!”
• “Muslims have made considerable contributions to Western culture; Arabic numerals, astronomy, medicine, funding the translation of ancient Greek philosophy that would otherwise be lost…”
• “Christians can be secular too!”
• “But I’m not a creationist!”
• “He’s a Christian/Muslim/etc, and you say you’d vote for him.” (e.g. Paul Keating, Obama).

This tirade of redundant advice usually follows my criticism of a religious figure, and almost always in a defensive tone not surprisingly.

This is what you look like to me when you do this.

• If you’re the kind of Catholic who’s really not like George Pell, it’s pretty safe to assume that I already know or have assumed that you’re not. Telling me what I already know, or that I should assume what I’m already assuming, is silly.
• Muslims who were scientists and mathematicians? I did a whopping load of science and mathematics education at Uni, getting a long string of distinctions along the way. I bloody well know where Arabic numerals come from, thank you very much.
• If I thought Christians couldn’t be secular, I’d be criticising Christianity a whole lot differently than the way I do and I know that many Christians are not creationists, even if many are; I don’t leap to conclusions about these things in the case of any given individual Christian.
• And if you think my willingness to vote for a person of faith is incompatible with my secularism, then either you don’t know my secularism or you’re just plain paranoid.

Implicit in these kinds of didacticism-of-the-obvious, is the assertion that I’m some kind of ignoramus! Thanks a heap! I could of course live with this implication if it were grounded in fact, but in fact it is not.

Oh, and let me tell you, it looks even less liberal, even less tolerant, even less progressive when these kinds of assumptions are tied to my membership in the ranks of the godless; if you blithely assume that just because I’m affirmative and atheist, that I’m automatically ignorant in these matters, then you’re got an atheophobia problem.

Maybe you aren’t explicit about it. Maybe you keep it to yourself. Maybe you’re just irritated by that little red A all those godless types are brandishing, and you suspect their motives are dark, and dangerous. Boo!

Or perhaps you’re not quite that much of an arse to begin with.

Back to the point…

Put another way, what response would you expect if someone approached an adult homosexual man and proceeded to give him an impromptu lecture on the anatomy of the human vagina, as if the fellow didn’t already know?

“What? Vagina you say? Never heard of them! Didn’t know that’s what those women-things have down there! Thought they had a great big schlong like normal people! You’ve certainly saved me embarrassment at future dinner parties! All those misguided, heterophobic allusions with cocktail frankfurts between readings of Oscar Wilde! Thank you for amending my ignorant, gay ways! Cheerio!”

(If you can tune the voice in your head in to the tones of Hugh Laurie, the above reads closer to that intended).

That’s how absurd your behaviour looks to me when you start lecturing me on the obvious facts cherished by religious liberals. Indeed, you probably look this absurd to a whole bunch of people when you behave like this, not just godless sorts like me either.

Of course, this absurdity doesn’t take into account your motives, and that’s what I’m writing about, so on to that.

You’ve given a lecture on the finer points of stuff-people-already-know in response to criticism directed at your church from outsiders. You may very well agree with the letter of their criticism, but for some reason it just doesn’t sit well with you that they’re expressing it. They’ve made your state of dissonance more obvious, more dissonant. “But I’m not like that!”

You’ve dreamt up convoluted ways of alluding to them as if bigots, or barbarians, or naive, or ignorant, or stupid, or all of the above just to alleviate the unease that you feel. Dismissing them to whatever degree takes the edge off of your inner conflict, and you could really do with a break from that. It’s hard being a liberal theist.

Tough.

You want people to treat you like a smart, educated person? Well I’m going to treat you like a smart, educated person. I’m only too happy to do so given it’s my default mode of engagement.

Just like the way I got into the Australian Labor Party you got into your current mess with eyes wide open*. Part and parcel of being a smart, educated person, especially a considerate one.

Either through the considered adoption of your liberal views, or the considered adoption of your religious affiliation, you ultimately got to the state of  conflict between the two of your own accord; if it were otherwise; if you didn’t get to at least one side of this coin through consideration, you probably wouldn’t be religiously liberal now would you?

This makes your state of conflict your own responsibility as an informed, consenting adult.

Your responsibility, not mine. Not anyone else’s.

Nobody should have to be politically marginalised, or politically side-tracked, or even merely inconvenienced so that you can soothe your self-induced inner conflict by treating them with contempt. Nobody has to listen to you state the bleedingly obvious just because you’re compelled to treat them like ignorant plebs.

If all you can respond with to criticisms of your church’s engagement with the rest of the world is to engage in spurious allusion, then you’ve given no reason for others to apologise, feel remorse at wrong-doing or be embarrassed. Much less if you actually agree with the letter of the criticisms that highlight your personal conflict!

The only person who should feel embarrassed is you.

What’s more, in this kind of behaviour you may have just opened the opportunity for discussion to move quite legitimately away from criticism of the actions and politics of your church, to the content of both the personal aspects of your faith and of your character.

Presumably this is quite the opposite of what you want, your behaviour, or behaviour like it, can be used to the effect of marginalising people then perhaps it’s worth investigating; “how liberal-religious dissonance makes the religiously liberal, illiberal”.

Maybe you’ve only just started off down this path. Maybe you’ll never be so egocentric that it’ll be anything more than a mild annoyance for those around you not also of your church. If that’s the worst it can get in your case, then good for you and good for your friends and colleagues. Perhaps you can all just joke about it; laugh it off.

But if it gets any worse than that, if you’re really being disruptive; if you act as if people need to cease social/political participation in order to give time to your self-inflicted inner conflict; if you act in a way that forces their hand to give you this time (I’m thinking of especially those with the privilege of a good soapbox to stand on – e.g. journos, politicians), don’t be surprised when they react and criticise you and your faith accordingly; at the very least I reserve the right to do so.

If you foist your liberal-religious dissonance on me, I’ll probably be throwing it back in your face without so much as a shade of regret.

~ Bruce

* Dear psychologist, I didn’t say cognitive dissonance, did I?