‘Don’t compare your best with their worst’

‘Don’t compare your best with their worst’ September 18, 2014

Let’s revisit Krister Stendahl’s “Three Rules for Religious Understanding”:

1. Let the believers define their religion, not their critics.

2. Don’t compare your best with their worst.

3. Always leave room for holy envy.

The previous post is all about Rule No. 2 and the untinking prejudice that takes us over when we violate it. White America’s obsession with “black-on-black violence” and supposed black criminality is one expression of that prejudice. Once we decide to reduce others to “their worst,” then we come to see nothing else — and we come to be unable to see anything else.

And thus “they” — regardless of which group it is that we’re They-ing — become someone we can only think of as the very worst we can find, embellish or imagine. They become, to us, their worst and nothing but that.

And then, even more astonishingly, we come to see ourselves as the foremost experts about them, about who they are and what they are like. They may claim otherwise, but we know better. We know what they’re really like, the real ones.

That horrible person doing horrible things — that’s the genuine article. That’s what they are really like. All of them.

Those kind, fair, good people over there? Impostors. They may say they’re part of them, but they can’t really possibly be because they’re not horrible people doing horrible things. QED.

When we break Stendahl’s second rule, in other words, we will inevitably wind up breaking his first — defining others according to our criticism of them and never allowing them to define themselves.

Stendahl wasn’t suggesting that we should naively accept every flattering claim, PR statement or sales pitch. He wasn’t saying we must accept every religion’s claims about itself at face value. (That would get tiresome quickly: Protestantism is the one true religion. Catholicism is the one true religion. Russian Orthodoxy is the one true religion. Sunni Islam is the one true religion. Shia Islam is the one true …)

But we can never understand anyone unless we also understand how they understand themselves.

If you’re sure that you have a truer understanding of another group’s core principles, beliefs and aspirations than that group does themselves, then one of two things must be true. Either you are superior to them. Or else you’ve deluded yourself with a bunch of preconceptions you’re unable to see beyond. (And if you suspect it’s the first one, that may be strong confirmation it’s actually the second.)

But enough about Stendahl’s Three Rules in the abstract. Here’s an example of what they look like in practice.

That’s Libby Anne’s wise, unwavering follow-up to her earlier post on the same subject. Both are well worth your time and attention.

Here’s the alternative to what Krister Stendahl and Libby Anne are arguing:

CassLogo

That graphic is courtesy of Dr. Gary Cass. He’s not somebody you want to end up agreeing with.


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