One of my first questions after I began working with military veterans was, "Why is the speech and literature of war so full of ethnic-slurs?" The answer was, always the same. "These names dehumanize the enemy and it is easier to fight and kill a dehumanized, impersonal enemy. You hesitate killing people if they still appear to you as human beings." Thus, dehumanization, or depersonalization, is a standard, valued technique in War.
Sadly, this technique has its equivalent in the language of religion as well: Papist, popery, Prod, Hebe, Christ-killer, Dunkard, cultist, mumbo-jumbo, Hairy Krishner, bells and smells, Mooney, Jay Dub, heretic, apostate, Sabbatizer, and Holy Roller. Such terms dehumanize the other person and his religion, making it easier to reject, even hate, and ultimately to persecute. After all, if the other religion is called by a derogatory name, if it is not worthless, it is at least diminished. The base part of our nature tells us this absolves us of all obligations to learn, understand, communicate, or consider the claims of the command, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
Since not only military language but that of religion has a long history of depersonalization, it's not surprising that we have expanded our reach beyond the mere adherents to include deity also. If the use of epithets reduces the followers of a religion we disagree with, are afraid of, and ultimately don't like, why not use the same technique on their god too?
I first noticed this technique when I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, nearly 30 years ago. Salt Lake City is the world headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As I visited with various churches and religious groups, I kept hearing the same sentiments from the pulpit. "The Mormon Jesus isn't our Jesus." "They don't have the same Savior we do." "Their god isn't our God."
While it's clear that we have various ways of understanding or viewing God, some of them substantive and necessarily uncompromisable, these kinds of depersonalizing statements go further than these variations require and add elements that just don't belong. They do this because they contain an edge of judgment, a shoot of disdain, an intent to hurt, and sometimes even to hate. Even statements such as, "The Jehovah's Witnesses' god isn't our God," or "The Roman Catholics don't have the same Savior we do," may have a note of objectivity in them, but in the end they are clearly made on the background of a kind of superiority and religious egotism.
Since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, were intimately connect ed to the attackers' view of their religion, it was inevitable that some Christian ministers would cement the religious connection even further by tarnishing and depersonalizing an entire religions-its people and its faith. In the aftermath, statements of dehumanization and judgment of the Muslim people as a whole became all too common in many quarters.
A seed of distorted truth lies behind many epithets. For example, those who have at a certain point in their experience been forced by poverty and persecution to be very frugal, such as the Scots, may be labeled as miserly. Those who reject the majority-accepted, orthodox portrait of God arid paint an alter native portrait may be accused of embracing a different god altogether. Again, the destructive element is not the fact that we disagree with a given person or group as they present their faith, but that our disagreement turns to disdain, dehumanization, and depersonalization. This simply was not the way of Jesus Christ.
Can dehumanization be justified?
The essential question must come back to this: Are these departures and differing views of God enough to justify the dehumanizing accusation that they worship a different god? From the standpoint of historical continuity, they are not.
For example, the Christian portraits of God, while differing in some ways from the Jewish portraits, are rooted in the same divine/historical events, utilize the same Scriptures, incorporate many of the same religious heroes and symbolism, and use much of the same religious language. The later portrait of God was painted and embraced by people who originated in the earlier faith tradition. The later one grew out of the foundation of the earlier one as a divergent continuance of the worship of the same God a different portrait painted from a different perspective.
Most often, the original followers of a new religion viewed themselves as part, or a continuity, of their parent faith. They saw themselves as having found, a fuller understanding ''of God, or as possessing a more mature understanding of Him. While the resulting tensions with the parent, faith were very strong and led to a violation of some of the principles espoused in this article, when all was said and done, they inevitably recognized their spiritual ancestry even as they espoused a faith different from the original.
Even in the case of Islam, there is a tie of language between its view of God and those of Judaism and Christianity. Hebrew Scriptures use the terms elohim, elowahh, and el to refer to God. Allah is the direct descendant of those words, just as Arabic is a direct descendant of ancient Hebrew. Even as it is important and valuable to note the substantive differences between faiths, so is noting and valuing the substantive and even the "organic" similarities and historical affinities.
While we cannot concede the call of inner conviction or conscience before God, and while, by the nature of those convictions, we are called to share our faith evangelistically, we need to honestly assess not only the arenas over which we disagree or depart from others but also embrace those areas in which we find genuine commonness and brotherhood. If we are genuinely faithful to both sides of this interfaith reality (what we have in common and what we don't), it cannot but enliven and strengthen our evangelistic effectiveness.
For the Christian minister, it is essential to :go deeper than the usual approaches of either indiscriminately embracing the approaches of a given view of God and faith, or blanketly and destructively denigrating it. We need to go, not only beyond prejudice and fear of the unknown but beyond historical and linguistic scholarship as well. We need to go and learn at the feet of the Master Teacher as to how to react to those who have painted a different portrait of our God. So, what did Jesus teach?
Relating as Jesus did
First, He taught us that the call to "love our neighbor" is a call to love and respect precisely those who have a differing portrait of God. In Luke 10:25-37, a Samaritan was the model. A differing portrait of God, an accusation that the Samaritans' god was not God; was the driving force behind the bitter hostility of Jews against Samaritans. Jesus taught His audience that love and depersonalization can not co-exist in our ministry.
Second, Jesus instructed His first 12 ministers not to disrespect those whose portrait of Him differed from their own, the one He had taught them. We find the story in Luke 9:49,50 (TEV). "John spoke up, 'Master, we saw a man driving out demons in your name, and we told him to stop, because he doesn't belong to our group.' 'Do not try to stop him/ Jesus said to him and to the other disciples, 'because whoever is not against you is for you.'" Even those who don't see Jesus our way may be serving "our Jesus." It isn't up to us to pronounce this differing vision as "not our Jesus."
Third, in Matthew 7:12 (TEV) Jesus taught His ministers to treat even those we perceive as our theological enemies as we ourselves want to be treated. "Do for others what you want them to do for you: this is the meaning of the Law of Moses and of the teachings of the prophets."
In coming to grips with that directive, we ministers need to ask ourselves some difficult key questions. Do we want to perpetuate or multiply the mind-set of bigotry, even the bigotry that prompts attacks such as occur all about us in our world? Do we want others to write off our portrait of God as merely a god? Do we wish them to dehumanize us through destructive attacks on our religion? Do we wish them to cut off all dialog by refusing to become acquainted with us? Do we wish to chop up the platform on which they might come to appreciate or even embrace our portrait of God? If we do, one way to accomplish it is to use the technique of denigration and depersonalization on their religion!
The fourth item applies to all of us, but perhaps especially to those of us who take the idea of "Christian warfare" seriously. In Romans 12:20, 21, the Spirit laid down a surprising basic rule of engagement. "As the scripture says: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by doing this you will make him burn with shame.' Do not let evil defeat you; instead, conquer evil with good" (TEV).
Often, I hear ministers from various denominations describe how they use depersonalization to apply the concept of Christian warfare to those with differing visions of God. They sometimes express the sentiment that this is the only alternative to compromising with error.
Evangelizing as Jesus did, does not include insulting and degrading either the faith of those we seek to win or the people themselves. Aspects of our conditioning and culture may seem to demand that. The idea of telling it fearlessly and "prophetically" may seem to require it. But that is a delusion, and besides, it doesn't work very well! We must tell the truth, but it should always be told in genuine love.
As implied in the passage from Romans 12 cited above, there is the way that adheres more closely to the biblical model, the rules of engagement that are worthy of our calling. Even though we cannot in good con science praise a differing vision, we can follow the Romans 12 rules of engagement more closely, treating our differing neighbors with kindness and respect in the Way we talk about our faith and theirs, That kindness may well lodge in their hearts, softening hostility and creating an environment in which true spiritual dialog might some day take place, and on the basis of which they might even be won over.
Depersonalization is, first and last, an invention of this world. It is completely carnal in nature, born of the human temptation to strike out at anything different from ourselves. In 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 (NIV), God cautions us regarding our Christian warfare: "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. . . ." (emphasis supplied).
God's spiritual weapons include not just the "sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God" (Eph. 6:17, NIV), but also the weapons of "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Gal. 5:22, 23, NIV).
