Just Who Are "They" Anyway?

When people are having fussy self-critical discussions about their own country, my Portuguese friend  Guida always says, “But who are ‘they’ anyway?   Common, ‘they’ are ‘we’.”  She says this so that people will take responsibility.  She knows that people in any culture do not realize the extent to which they make 

up the culture.

When we are talking about a country other than our own, who are we talking about? For example, when someone who is not American refers to that superficial American smile, just who do they think is smiling? Henry Ford?  Or Uncle Sam?   Is the country responsible for the cliché or are the people?

  

I have to confess that for me, nowhere is the distinction between state policy and the people really more confusing than as concerns religion (and all the clichés surrounding it).  Every country has their religious history and current religions practices.  I now live in an historically Catholic country, and I was not personally raised Catholic.  We have a lot of holidays around Catholicism here in France, particularly in the month of May, or, this year, also June if things fall late in the church year.  One of the most important Catholic holidays, in terms of politics and the number of people who have striked recently to keep it a holiday, is Pentecost.  You might not have noticed, because you were on holiday, that yesterday was Pentecost.  If people want to keep Pentecost a holiday, I suppose that is OK.  However, I might be a little more convinced if they knew what it was actually about.  You do not have to be practicing, or humiliate yourself by admitting that you are a Catholic, to know about fire and speaking in tongues.  I think it would just be a good idea to have a few concepts in mind when you strike to keep the holiday safe for traveling and long family meals.  That way if I, as a social psychologist, walk up to you while you are striking and hold out a questionnaire and ask you to quickly tell me what you know about Pentecost, you won’t just be standing there with your placard and boom-box.

In France there is separation of church and state, like in the US.  In Bavaria there is not.  Unless you declare yourself not a practicing Catholic, you will be taxed and the money will be sent directly to the Catholic Church.  And there are crucifixes in public school classrooms.  In Italy, wow, now there is a place where it is really hard to imagine the separation of church and state.   The politics of church and state are way too complicated for me, and you should go read about it if you want to know more.  One thing I do know is that if you are not very careful about how you assign your taxes, the Vatican wins.  You can choose where to donate money, but unless you specify something like the Anglophone evangelical church of Verona, it all gets funneled into the Vatican.

I was impressed, as we all are, by the Vatican when I was first there.   Flashy demonstrations of power and might can be really something.  I tried, but I could not totally push out of my mind, the fact that I was raised Lutheran.  That Lutheranism made the crushing display of wealth more scandalous to me than it might have otherwise, even though I didn’t want to have that reaction.  My upbringing as a Lutheran was not such an easy thing, anyway.  It may be the basis of my distain for religious clichés. 

My father was professor of Homiletics at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC).  LSTC is in a neighborbood, Hyde Park, which is not populated by many Lutherans.  In that context then, my childhood neighborhood, I was (like in France) a little unusual; people did not know what to do about me, and they were even more confused about my father. What is Homiletics anyway and what did he do at work in that “cemetery”?   Homiletics, seminary, Protestant, communion, whatever.  So the solution for many of my friends was to think that my father was a minister (it is true that he was ordained so the thought wasn’t all wrong, and Homiletics is a fancy word for preaching).  Now, being considered the daughter of a minister is not a good thing in high school.  In some states, out in the country, if you are a PK (preacher’s kid), that might have certain quite interesting social advantages.  But surely not in Hyde Park, Chicago.

So maybe I am just sensitive, but I find religious clichés hypocritical and confusing in their insensitivity to the policy versus the practice and to the meaning of the practices to the people doing them. Yes, there is a prayer at American Presidential inaugurations, and American Presidents mention God in their speeches.  Yes, people in France declare themselves non-believers but then enjoy many holidays all in the name of  … who was that again?  The Vatican gets wealthier.  Televangelists in the US are a holy fright.  But when I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem a year and a half ago, indeed when I was in Jerusalem, I realized that accusations about a prayer out of place or a fake holy day were, by comparison to the concentration of fervor in Israel ... well, pretty "lite".  Most US-European clichés about religion are just another empty way to derive pleasure from the act of derision.

Pleasure from derision is something I’ll write about soon.