Diversity in America

I wrote this for a Lay Pastor program with the Presbyterians that I am in.

Assignment: How can we talk about being religious in America that includes more of diversity that represents present day America?

I love the diversity in America, both religious and ethnic. Perhaps it is because I grew up in Detroit in the fifties and sixties. Literally millions of immigrants, both from other countries and native born descended on the Southeastern Michigan area to make a middle class American living in the auto plants. No college needed, not even a high school diploma for jobs on the assembly line. A strong back and willingness to work were the only prerequisites.
I lived right in the City of Detroit and my world was one of Orthodox Jews walking to Temple on Saturday, Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian kids going to “Saturday School” to study about their ethnic origins, languages, their saints, and particular slant on the faith perspective. My world also included the children of Appalachian newcomers who went to “holiness” or in today’s terminology “Pentecostal” churches. Most of them went to Southern Baptist churches. My first church was a Southern Baptist church, full of southerners from Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, right in the heart of Detroit. We said “Amen” and “Hallelujah” in appreciation of what the minister had just said, and had lively southern style gospel music in the service. A neighbor woman once invited me to church with her and her family; I was buddies with her son and grandson. She went to church at a “Holiness” church, full of Appalachians, and that night was a special service. There were men who had just come in from Tennessee and had rattle snakes. There is a verse in the Bible that says if one has faith they will pick up poisonous snakes. Well, these guys picked up rattle snakes and played with them. I went home and told my Mom and did she ever throw a fit! I was never allowed to go to church with those neighbors again!

There was of course Detroit’s huge African American population with its great gospel music and church-centric life style. I visited the Baptist church where Aretha Franklin’s father was the minister a few times when I lived in inner city Detroit, near Wayne State where I attended college, and it was a spectacular service! Wow, did they ever get the spirit!

One of my best friends was a Lebanese Christian, who was third generation Lebanese. Detroit is home to the largest Middle Eastern population in America, including many Muslims. I was a Detroit fireman in the seventies and the last fire district that I worked in, in southwest Detroit ,was populated by Latino Catholics, Muslims immigrants from the Middle East, a few Poles and Ukrainians who were the descendants of the original inhabitants of the neighborhood, and the children of the first wave of Appalachian immigrants, most of whom were adults now. For the most part they got along rather well. This was the seventies though. I remember fights in the fifties and early sixties over words like “Dago”, “Hillbilly” and “Pollock:”, and of course, in Detroit, the “N” word.

I loved that swirl of ethnic and religious diversity. Can our whole country be like that and even better? Yes it can. We are becoming, or at least some of us, more tolerant of other people’s way

Jim Ramelis
World Religion Class

of life and religious values. There is a ground swell of tolerance that exists right along a ground swell of increasing intolerance that exists in America today.

Jesus reached out to the Roman Centurion and healed his relative. The Roman certainly was not Jewish, as Jesus was. Jesus told the parable of the “Good Samaritan”, who helped the injured man lying alongside the road, while others of the same faith walked by and offered no assistance. Jesus told the parable is response to the question “Who is your neighbor”. As an example of our neighbor, Jesus offered an example of someone who was not of the same ethnic or religious persuasion as he or the crowd.

So who is our neighbor that we need to love in modern America? It is Christians of denominations other than our own, it is Jews, it is Muslims, it is Buddhists, it is Hindus and Wiccans too. We need to love then and respect them and their religious views.
Christian “exclusivity” is always a problem in inter-faith relationships. Most people don’t take kindly to the attitude that their faith isn’t valid as ours and that they are going to burn in hell because they aren’t like us. Many “exceptionalist and “exclusivist” attitudes have fallen, are falling, or are being questioned. European exceptionalism, male supremacy, hetreo-sexual supremacy, white supremacy, American exceptionalism,, religious supremacy, are all ways we use to look down on a brother or sister, and make them a lesser child of God than we are. Not a good way to love one’s neighbor, in my opinion. We think the Nazi’s and their idea of a superior race are crazy. But we often share the same basic psyche in that we think our country is better than others, or our religion is superior to some one’s else’s, thus making us “superior” or ‘special”

Even in ecumenical settings, we members of the mainline, usually more progressive denominations, are appalled that some of our Christian, more fundamentalist brothers and sisters, don’t think our faith is as good as theirs, and that we are doomed to hell, because we don’t believe exactly or precisely as they do. Yet many of us can’t see that it is the same thing when we condemn a Buddhist to hell because they don’t believe the same as we do.

Perhaps our best hope for diversity in a modern world is to stop judging. Jesus told us what our job is, it is to love God and our neighbor, it is to help the widow, the orphan, the poor, the sick, the children, and the least among us. We are specifically told not to judge so harshly! So for developing tolerance in a diverse world, our best approach is to stop trying to do The Lord’s job, which is to judge, and to do our job, which is to love!