Thoughts on ‘The Other’ from my time in Berlin

AFBR

I realize it’s been a while since I posted last December and while I have been busy, I know this is a thin excuse. Yet I will list some highlights of my past few months.

I attended my first American Atheist’s National Convention in Minnesota, and it was very fun, informative, and enlightening. I met Seth Andrews, Keith Ellison, Drew from a Genetically Modified Skeptic, Aaron Ra, and the podcaster, Skeptical Scott of Funny You Should Say That. In June we recorded a podcast around some topics in this blog and it should be released in the fall. So, look for that on the Funny You Should Say That podcast.

I also spent about eight days in the city of Berlin with my son and daughter and started thinking of how we Other people and places, how we become an Other, and how this ‘Othering’ is – at least from my point of view – influenced by our collective experiences of Christianity in the West, and my specific experience with this faith growing up.

As a kid from the Southeastern USA and influenced by evangelicalism from the time I started school through to seminary in my 30s, I had internalized the ‘us-them’ mentality that is common, not only in Christianity, but in other faiths and ideologies across history. But the particular expression I am interested in here is the heavy weighted form that emanates from most evangelical experiences, especially mine, before I became an atheist.

Even from mentors, instructors, and peers who sincerely intended to be open-minded, there was a collective belief that we had the secret sauce, the knowledge that we are ultimately IN and that those lost souls who did not (hopefully yet) know Jesus were OUT. There was nuance, or course. Some believed that God would, perhaps, reach out to all souls so that all could be offered salvation. The mentally challenged and the infants who died young would, of course, not suffer eternal hell – somehow a just God would take care for them by a logic we just can’t understand as we can’t understand the infinite ways of God with our finite minds. But, overall, those who were not saved were the Other.

This psychology expresses itself in other ways, too. As human beings have always done, the different is suspect often. The closed mindedness that the faith could inculcate only exacerbated the natural human tendency to put the different, the other, the ‘not like us,’ at a distance.

While in Berlin, we toured the reminders, remains, and monuments of the German state’s various iterations. We studied the influence of Greco-Roman culture, Frederick the Great’s summer palace, the pre-Weimar and Weimar Republics, the Nazi regime, the impacts of the Cold War. We visited Checkpoint Charlie, Humboldt University, Hitler’s bunker ‘gravesite’ (now an average parking lot with no plaque or marker – how appropriate), the Jewish Museum, the last sections of the Berlin Wall. All these left an emotional mark.

As we wandered through each site, I felt the pain of loss that so many visitors do in places of such historical and human importance. I knew my own sufferings paled in comparison to what the victims of the Holocaust experienced, but this was not the point. The point – or at least one of them for me – was to think about how the collective human mental constructions from certain communities need to find an enemy – an Other – against which to push, against which to define ourselves in a negative way. In the ‘we are not like them’ way. The Hebrews and their God did this in the Bible; the Christians and their God did this as a result of the faith’s growth; the Muslims and their God did this as well; and they all still do. As I stumbled through the intentionally off-balancing Jewish Holocaust memorial near the US Embassy, trying not to cry, I thought of how an obvious, yet near impossible, readjustment of our thinking is necessary for the whole human race. I won’t see this happen in my lifetime, I believe. But it is something to strive for, nonetheless.

As an American in Europe, I felt both pride and shame at the same time. English was everywhere – on signs, grocery store tags, spoken by most Berliners. I was proud that my language was the trade language of the region and that it was often used as a tool for communication between two people who spoke different first languages. I was on the Inside.

Yet, I was also ashamed. This linguistic currency came at the price of Othering. The hegemony and imperialism that brought the English language across the world had to exact a toll that excluded others from knowledge, cultural developments, and resources in order to thrive. I wondered how the world might look if the Other was not an oppressive category or marker, but just an other, with a lower case ‘o’ that was non-threatening and left room for acknowledging difference without compromising human flourishing for all.