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Privilege is too often unrecognized [1]
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Date: 2022-07-08
When I was a social worker for a state’s Children’s Services in a largely Black and very poor Eastern seaboard city, this agency’s adoption department and even the foster home department absolutely banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses—which is no different from banning the Jewish faith. I’ve been a Unitarian since 1955 and a Universalist since 1965, shortly after our two traditions, always similar, merged into Unitarian Universalism. My faith celebrates diversity, ecumenical mutual respect. I’ve always invited proselytizers into the house if I happened to be home. Even if I’d been doing work of some sort, I wanted to welcome them and it’s good to take a break for a few minutes. I’d listen to their stories, tell them why I love my religion--which began like a movie adventure when, along with others in my college’s Unitarian Fellowship, we were arrested for civil rights activities soon after I joined the Fellowship. I knew I’d found something I’d wanted!
So each visit was a treat, and when they left I gave them UU brochures in exchange for theirs. The most uncomfortable visitors were the LDS (Mormon) missionaries, perhaps because they were all males, so young, always white-skinned with short hair and looking like clones in their starched-collar dark suits, which they wore even in hot, humid summers. I invited them into an air conditioned living room, offered a glass of tap water for each visitor, with ice cubes and perhaps a refill. Most welcomed something that didn’t break any taboos, as perhaps embarrassed trips to the bathroom before departing did to the Mormon youths.
The friendliest were the Jehovah’s Witness missionaries. They included women and people of color. One of them lived in our neighborhood and was a pleasant neighbor, and wherever we moved, which was frequently, I had some good conversations with the Witness visitors. They too were sweltering in the heat but more casually dressed. Of course we sat for a while, guzzled water, traded brochures and one of them, not the neighbor, actually showed up in my church.
Never once did I see any of the Witness groups bring children along—not once. Yet the Children’s Services management staff insisted that the parents brainwashed their children by always bringing their kids on their doorbell campaigns. Maybe they do in some places, but I never saw that. When we moved to Virginia (within the Beltway) I was hired as Music Director by one of the several UU churches in the Washington DC area. I once told the minister where I conducted the music about my open door policy to people who were eager to convert me, but who mostly wanted to get out of the hot afternoon, get a cold drink of water and enjoy a 15 or 20-minute rest in a chair, not be shouted at or have the door slammed in their faces. When I told my minister about that agency’s policy of not allowing Jehovah’s Witnesses even to turn in applications for adoption or foster care, he stomped around. “That’s outrageous. I grew up as the youngest child of officials on the staff of the Salvation Army. Did you ever hear of anyone working for the Salvation Army who got turned down?”
“No,” I said. “And I didn’t know the Salvation Army was a church.”
“It was a sect in the part of the country where I grew up. And I didn’t think you would ever have heard a word against them. They do good advertising, and they are pleasant, too, when they visit. Some churches are a lot louder, pushy and arrogant, aren’t as pleasant as the Witnesses and the Mormon youths and the Salvation Army. But I don’t remember Christmas as anything but boring and painful to my feet. I grew up in the Salvation Army—and my parents dragged me to all the events where they might make a conversion and get a new member, or at least come away with donations. I was there whether it was standing in the cold and ringing a bell outside the doorway of a department store, or knocking on someone’s door for a donation. Kids are cute, and we were told to smile a lot and keep our mouths shut. As for donations,” he added, “the money was carefully managed, but some money went to the adults who were paid for their work at Christmastide, and all year long to my parents who were managers as well as bell-ringers. Since one of their jobs was sorting and showing the furniture and clothing, they were the first to see it and they took the best for our house. It was furnished with donations--for free. That’s one reason why I left the sect. They didn’t think of it as hypocrisy, but after years of the same, I did.”
People have different needs for understanding and comfort, and (as a Surah of the Qur’an puts it delightfully) for competing with each other to do good works for the world. This Surah celebrates ecumenism. My religion does too, encouraging understanding of all beliefs, including skeptical non-beliefs, as vital to the lifeblood of a nation. Theocracy tries to hide its hypocrisy and obvious paranoia behind a belief system of SELF-privilege as power-obsessed white supremacists do, despite the incredible contradictions between what they claim to believe and the words of important judges, prophets, saints and Jesus himself in their Christian Bible. Getting anything from privilege is an often-unrealized sin which the minister’s parents took for granted, and when he could no longer do so, he left. Theocracy can so easily snuff out genuine religion. Whatever our religion, or avoidance of religion, we can’t let that happen. But let’s be considerate of what others often need, discuss it with courtesy, point out contradictions, but never insult it—or those who believe it.
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