Was Jesus Socialist? Was Jesus Liberal? Part 3
In this installment we tackle racism by exploring . . . loyalty??
When the Rebel-Empire Struck Back, I conceded there were a lot of ways our Lord shared their moral convictions. I showed how stringing together a selection of passages can make an ostensibly compelling case. Jesus loves the outsider. Christ taught selling your belongings and having compassion on The Least Of These is your highest calling, so join the revolution and share in his condemnation of crass commercial exploitation of religious piety.
I also pointed out in Part 2 that progressives generally don't see how the three "Religious Moralities" can serve to reduce Harm -- the Left's primary moral catalyst.
Those 3 "religious" right-wing moralities are more subtle: loyalty, purity, and respect & authority (yeah, it's kinda 2 grouped into 1. The more you think about it, the more sense it makes. You'll see).
The excesses of these moralities were definitely things Jesus castigated several times, and we'll explore that in our next & final installment.
But here, we'll address part of a conjoined pair of some of the largest questions about Jesus, the Bible, and even the existence of God: what about slavery? What about racism?
Loyalty
We'll tackle racism & slavery by exploring...loyalty? Huh?
Is this some sort of mistake? It's not. Loyalty is where racism lurks. Not intrinsically obvious.
It's also not intrinsically obvious to those on the right that racism is almost exclusively their sin. But it is.
That's not to say almost all right-wingers are racist. But to say almost all racist problems come from the right.
First let's explain loyalty. It's the indignation triggered when you see someone (or a small group) put their own interests before that of the larger group.
Loyalty is an important morality for social cooperation and cohesion. Without it we might all care about none beyond ourselves, or our immediate family, and all manner of social ill & evil might transpire; with we complicit, complacent so long as our own interests are tended to & protected.
Loyalty to a group is cognitively beneficial at every scale. Individual, family, community, nation.
Yet at global scale, you run out of people to group against. Tho it may seem ideal to simply find the compassion within you to adopt a humanist, globalist value set and love every single one of your fellow humans -- isn't that what Jesus taught? -- the reality of human psychology is that we group together, but we don't all group together.
The scale of social cooperation & organization we've been able to achieve is seriously impressive and unprecedented in nature. Yet it goes against our nature to some extent.
Rodney King was mercilessly mocked in a proto internet meme, when he asked in anguish, "can't we all just get along?"
In all sincerity, it's one of the most eloquent questions ever asked.
But the answer is no, we can't.
And the answer why is, because humans are always the greatest threat to other humans.
Now, that's not exactly true. Infectious disease is. And was before that pandemic. But our brains aren't wired to rally & muster & fight against infectious disease. Not the way we're wired to solidify against a common enemy.
Human enemy.
The same is true for many other animals. Competition over mates and territory is especially pronounced among many larger mammals, even those that form into small groups.
The non-human threats to our lives & livelihoods have long been rendered nearly trivial in comparison. Whether a depraved individual, or a conspiratorial organized group, other humans are the most tangible thing most of us have to be concerned about.
So we ingroup. We signal to each other that we're not a threat. We demonstrate shared values. And from them we build community. And culture. And nation.
But the world is global now. We're grateful for the extra customers. And additional goods & services. But our brains haven't caught up.
Will they? Should they?
Social cohesion -- irrefutably critical to every notable endeavor & advancement, be it moon landing, medical breakthrough, tech startup or church -- is unbelievably valuable. If we could just get everyone to agree, what might we accomplish?
Ah, but there is no impetus for getting everyone to agree, like the threat of a common enemy.
Is it becoming clear how loyalty and racism are linked?
Let's zoom out a little. Racism (which by the way, conspicuously became the worst sin a person could possibly commit, in the past couple decades, which might seem like a puzzling riddle of the human condition, and I could probably write a 12-part series on why that is, but I can make it real simple for you: racism became the worst sin of all because Progressives recognized it was essentially exclusively the sin of their enemy, the Right. Period.) is really just one piece of a broader thing.
Sometimes you see people ask or try to build a fumbling answer for, "can you be racist against a religion?"
Well, yeah. Because racism ain't about skin. And it ain't about belief.
It's ethnocentrism.
So when you zoom out to the level of everything being about ingrouping vs outgrouping, you can see that communities build upon shared values, against threats of outsiders, and that can be ethnic, it can be religious, it can be moral and it can be cultural. Or any or all of the above.
Til very very recently, all of the above generally came in predictable combinations. Berbers are Muslim. Germanic Europeans are Protestant. In China they take naps after lunch (wujiao). India & Southeast Asia love bartering. For Sub-Saharan Africans, wealth is to be displayed.
And conservatives stand for the flag.
And progressives don't know how to explain to you that you should care about people.
See, it's ethnocentrism, but it's really just ingrouping. It's a coarse trope-recognition system that lets in folks who signal enough shibboleths to figure you can trust em, and triggers warning signals to be wary of the folks who don't.
I mean, if you want a case-in-point, look up the very definition of Shibboleth. And then ponder the reason for its very existence. Particularly as a trope itself.
Skin color or ethnicity, or religion are coarse-grain proxies for trustworthiness, because substantially corroborating the trustworthiness of someone (or a group) entails lengthy effort & time, not to mention risk -- indeed, it usually takes a couple violations to really have decent certainty that someone is not worth trusting. Much less inviting over for dinner.
And a couple violations over an extended period of time is costly.
So we judge. We make coarse-grain reductive & stereotypical assessments based on limited information.
And if it ain't clear by now, there's not a significant difference -- morally speaking -- between racism and partisan rancor in politics. It's the same ingrouping exercise. Now, historically there has been an enormous difference in marginalization and impact. Neither progressives nor conservatives have come close to seeing the marginalization and harm wrought by chattel slavery or ethnic exclusionary behavior -- not just slavery & Jim Crow in the US & New World, but Dhimmi under Muslim hegemony, the Vedic Caste systems (Varna), and so on.
And if Caste Systems didn't clue you in, the same ingrouping exercises apply to classes (working classes, elitism, bourgeoisie contempt in Marxism) just as much as in politics, as in religiosity and ethnicity.
So that's all important to point out. I'm not drawing moral or consequential equivalence of these sinful transgressions. We're studying moral categories. To recognize the ills and excesses of what is otherwise not just a useful morality, but a critical one for social stability. Loyalty.
Haidt, who led the framing of Moral Foundations Theory, described social centrifugal versus centripetal forces, that pull us together, or pull us apart. Differing value systems pull us apart. Differing cultural mores -- not only what make us obviously different but more subtle shibboleths -- pull us apart. Shared values pull us together. Ostensibly patriotism or solidarity under a united flag pull us together. But as it turns out, that's not all that particularly strong.
Not in the age of information.
And yet it remains, nothing unites us like a common enemy. So then, the utility of Loyalty, recognized by the Right, becomes more clear.
But also the egregious excesses, of exclusion, rejection, marginalization, even exploitation, suppression, all the way to genocide, are painfully evident. And it's glaringly obvious for the Left. It makes a lot of obvious sense why it's incumbent upon all of us to guard against excessive ingrouping. Racism is just one part, one proxy, of a larger pattern, there.
And we can see it written widely throughout the Bible. Tho it's subtle.
Not only subtle. We have outright ethnically exclusive policies in the Bible. The entire principle of Jewish exclusion from marrying Canaanite women is predicated on this value. It's clear the Canaanite categorization is a proxy for a cultural boundary. Biblical authors recognized a tangible threat to social cohesion from the contemptible value structure of the Canaanites.
But it's also directly conducive to explicit racism and ethnocentric exclusion. In the right power dynamic, that produces marginalization.
And so, with all of the above as lengthy preamble, to lay the foundation for us to explore what the Bible says about racism, ethnocentrism and loyalty, and how social cohesion is exceedingly important while the excesses of such a pursuit can be tremendously damaging, let's turn to scripture.
Let's turn to Christ's words. To highlight how his morality compares to the political divide today. I'll focus in on Slavery in the Bible more deeply at another time.
Lot to unpack here.
But one undeniable takeaway is that ingrouping produces an outgroup, your enemies, and to not love them is to violate Christ's imploration here, and to fall short of the moral standard he's setting.
I've already unpacked the question of whether Christ truly set a higher moral standard for Christians to live by, with passages like this, and the others in the Sermon On The Mount, here: my take is that He's highlighting the moral insufficiency of The Law.
So I'm not saying, He said you gotta love your enemies, so you gotta, period, and therefore Jesus was a lib.
But I am saying there can be no harmonizing ingrouping with that moral standard. And accepting my premise that it's a rhetorical standard, there yet is no harmony with most practical ingrouping and most practical moral standards, lived out, toward enemies.
Building community and fostering relationships is tremendously important. Having outgroups is inevitable, for even if you truly can be willing to lovingly accept every human as your neighbor, many people will yet reject you. So ingrouping is natural, inevitable, and healthy, on a local neighborhood & community level.
But you do have outgroups and you don't love them as your neighbor, much less yourself. And while Jesus didn't say you gotta let every person permanently into your life no matter what (he actually said the opposite), excessive outgrouping is immoral, and it's incumbent upon us all to steward our outgroup relations accordingly.
I mean, you already do. You're already ensuring you don't let your hatred for others fester into genocide. That much I'm certain of. But although I think the man is an unenlightened fool, I can find partial agreement with Ibram X. Kendi when he says it's not enough to not be racist, but one must be "antiracist." When you steward your heart and relations with any outgroup, to merely not hate them is not enough. Be "anti-outgrouping" in the sense that Kendi calls people to be antiracist. Not in the sense of activism and patronizing others, but just in the sense of focusing on your own heart.
That all sounds like a lot of verbal noise that still falls far short of "love everyone," and, well, yeah that's true. And that's one reason why Jesus never said to love everyone. He said to love your enemy, and that's different, because pursuing love for your enemies entails a different path than the ephemeral loving everyone.
So outgrouping bears bad fruit, and even if it’s not genocide, or xenophobia, but just political rancor, or class rancor, we gotta proactively tend to our outgrouping sentiments with intentionality. That doesn't mean loyalty is not a critical predicate for social cohesion, it is. Community building is immensely enriching.
But as for Jesus, were he right-wing conservative, you'd scarcely know it from his treatment of loyalty.
He repeatedly rejected & violated it. He commended the Centurion's faith and did not reject him as an outsider. He invited Levi the tax collector into discipleship (note here that he elaborates that came for the sick, not the healthy, indicating his example here is not merely tolerating their sin as some conclude, but rather connecting with them to guide them out of it).
We then have the parable of the Good Samaritan where the moral protagonist is a foreigner, who models that stewardship of outgrouping by tending to his enemy's needs.
Yet we also have examples of Jesus operating within and proclaiming a loyalty morality. The Parable of the Ten Virgins directly rewards loyalty. He asked, "Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time?"
The Woes to the Pharisees center upon the egregious way in which they put themselves before the good of the community.
When Christ says the first shall be last, he is honoring and venerating humility, which falls within the loyalty framework. Humility is not a strictly ascetic pursuit of individual spiritual enlightenment or righteousness, but a practical attitude for the enhancement of community. That's why even focusing first on the plank in your own eye is a Right-Wing act of venerating loyalty, through humility and not unduly advancing your own interests.
So once again, Christ rebuked the excesses of Right-Wing loyalty, and did not abide by them. Yet he embraced & operated out of the good fruits of loyalty. Today's Progressives do not operate within a loyalty framework. They see the sins of the Right and they reject it as immoral. Ironically, that does not mean they do not outgroup, or that they do not to some extent commit the same categorical transgressions as the worst of the Right. They do this, because humans do this. The moral framework of the Left just happens to reject it categorically on account of the sins of the Right.
Jesus transcends our political vanities. Again.
We'll bring this all to a close in our final installment.