I haven’t really been following the Mel Gibson thing, but when Elliott pointed to this post and its thoughtful contemplation of repentance and bipolar disorder, I noticed a detail from Gibson’s statement that set off one of my little pet peeves:

Every human being is God’s child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith…

I’ve been through several media controversies over some famous person saying something bigoted, and they have this depressing tendency to turn bigotry from a bad attitude into a quality of being. Probably the paradigmatic case that I remember was sometime in the ’90s when Michael Jackson got in trouble for using anti-Semitic language in one of his songs (“Screw me, Jew me,” or something like that). I remember seeing him denying that the language was racist, and when the interviewer asked him how that could possibly be so, he said, “Because I’m not a racist. I’m not a hater.”

I remember thinking of the peculiar logic behind all this, which goes something like this:

1) The world can be divided between bigots and non-bigots.

2) Only bigots say bigoted things, so if a person says something bigoted, they have revealed their true nature as a bigot.

3) Conversely then, if a person is not a bigot, they cannot say something bigoted, even if it sounds like it.

Now, I don’t think most people look at it quite as simplistically as Michael Jackson did. Evidently Mel Gibson realizes that his basic goodness does not absolve what he said. But that basic scheme seems to underlie a lot of these discussions, as is evidenced by all this talk about whether the comments reflected his “true” self, or whether it was alcohol and/or mental illness talking. It is why, among other things, a simple apology never seems to be enough — if a person has revealed himself to be a bigot, it requires a wholesale change of character.

This reminds me of why I so liked Eve’s post about why she hates the phrase, “a good person.” She sees it through a lens of original sin, but my problem with this goes back before church. For one thing, when I studied social psychology in college it became obvious how bigotry is largely an extension of human traits that are natural and necessary — the way that we sort and categorize the world, our fear of strangers, our tendency to go along with the herd and imitate our parents (a particular factor in Gibson’s case, one would think), our quest for explanations when things go wrong, and so on. The subversion of benign traits to evil is essentially the definition of fallenness.

So I don’t think there’s really a discernable character trait that separates the bigot from the non-bigot. However, many people seem to think it’s the one that Michael Jackson pointed to, namely “hate.” Certainly there are a lot of haters in the world, but I think this makes the issue too individual and emotional. Not everybody who holds negative beliefs about one group or another has a burning hatred inside, especially if they are simply going along with the prevailing opinion in their family or society. I think that this is one reason people keep disclaiming being bigots, even when they say bigoted things: they just don’t recognize themselves in the popular cartoonish vision of a “hater.”

My mother dealt with this when she taught middle school in the early ’90s. Back then (I don’t know if this is still true), the au courant insult among twelve-year-olds was “Jew.” Not surprisingly, my mother didn’t like this, nor did any of the other school authorities. The kids themselves didn’t seem to have any larger anti-Semitic beliefs, however, and didn’t show any particular bad attitude towards the kids who were actually Jewish. They seemed to use it for the venerable twelve-year-old reasons that everybody else was doing it and it got a rise out of the grownups. None of this, however, made it any less anti-Semitic. They were guilty of being blind to a larger evil, which is a sin but such a common one that it hardly makes them different.

There’s some irony in the fact that the fight against bigotry often seem to use the methods of bigotry — that is, distinguishing the desirable people from the undesirables. But the larger philosophical issue behind that is exactly what you think the problem with bigotry is. For many people, the problem with discriminating by race, for instance, is that race isn’t really a good criterion for sorting people. But there might be better criteria – as in Martin Luther King’s famous wish that his children be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” From a Christian perspective, however, I find myself wondering how this squares with Paul’s warnings against judging people’s characters too.

A few months ago in church, Bert delivered a short homily about temptation and then asked the congregation to offer examples of temptations they face in their own lives, and how they resist them. (It’s one of PMC’s more Quakerish traits that it often has these open-mike periods.) It interested me that several people who are involved in political and social causes said they have to grapple with the temptation to demonize their opponents; they have to remember that even people who perpetrate the evils that they’re fighting are beloved children of God also.

This shows the difference between the moral and the empirical dimensions of bigotry. There’s a dimension of fact involved in opposing prejudice — pointing out, for instance, that there is really not a Jewish cabal running the world. However, there is also the moral reality that even if there were a Jewish cabal running the world, Christians would be called to love them just the same. And our urge to sort humanity into the good lot and the bad would still have to be brought to heel.