Religious “Bigotry”
Religious “Bigotry”:
By James French
It has become quite common since the beginning of the civil rights movement for dominant groups to claim that criticism on the part of those less privileged constitutes a form of “reverse” prejudice. The element that gets missed in this kind of semantic appropriation is the power dynamic, and the very real material disadvantages that the group against which the charge is being made faces. When the focus of the discussion moves from the sort of body a person inhabits to the ideas they hold in their head and the beliefs in their heart, it tends to get more confusing and less helpful.
The problem with religious bigotry is that it assumes a particular invariable character on the part of a person’s belief system and then further conflates this projected assessment with the person who holds that belief system. It is thus a true “double whammy” of sloppy cognition. To start with, any large religion is going to have multiple variations. Christianity, for instance, is really an umbrella term for dozens of diverse faiths with the figure of Jesus Christ at their center. Attributing anything more than a few generalities to this broad category simply ensures that you will not understand any of its constituents with any depth.
That being said, there are variants of certain religions (particularly Christianity and Islam) which contain demonstrably toxic and even sociopathic beliefs. Whatever the mainstream beliefs of Christianity in our own time, it is safe to say that these have been somewhat diluted by the Enlightenment and other movements of intellectual progress which made any literal interpretation of the Bible intellectually untenable. Why one form of Christianity was the sole religious and political power in Western Civilization, the result was unequivocally disastrous. When Voltaire enjoined his countrymen to “remember the cruelties” he was writing with less than a century between himself and what he referred to.