Defiance Against Dehumanization

It seems to me that the main strategy in any oppressive behavior is to dehumanize the people one wants to oppress. This means that they are treated as less than human with a lack of empathy, compassion, respect, inclusion, or intent to care or understand. It means assuming they have less worth (if any) and so hurting them in any number of ways is inconsequential.

Dehumanizing others makes it very easy to treat them differently and justify it, or simply not care about it. Therefore, deporting, enslaving, trafficking, hurting, imprisoning, ignoring, and segregating them is part and parcel of the oppressors’ repertoire.

Sadly, this sounds familiar to me these days, it kind of looks like what is happening in the US right now. And it is aided by rhetoric that seeks to downplay or hide it. Elon Musk recently said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And, as reported by Jim Wallis, “In a private meeting inside the State Department, evangelical Christian leaders were told not to speak of “consequences” of the USAID cuts.”

Heavens no, let’s not have any empathy for the people are affected by all the cuts and changes, consider what this might mean for them. Certainly we shouldn’t talk the consequences of cutting USAID, deporting thousands of undocumented immigrants, cutting Medicaid and SNAP and DEI programs. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg, as they say.

It seems to me that it would be next to impossible to make these kinds of decisions without distancing oneself from the humanity of these people. Shutting off compassion and empathy. Refusing to see your decisions as actually affecting real people… many, many real people.

So, let’s talk about the story of the feeding of the 5,000. On the surface it looks like a nice fluffy, innocuous story about sharing food, or miraculously multiplying bread and fish (depending on how you want to look at it). But to people of that time, this was a deeply subversive story.

Why? Well, consider that Jesus drew the attention of 5,000 families, so at least 10,000 people. Who do you imagine was in that crowd? Was it only nice, upstanding Jews, all of whom kept kosher and attended to all the laws of their religion? Nope. It had to have been a huge variety of people: poor, dirty, ill, women, children, widows and widowers, foreigners, eunuchs, prostitutes, criminals, spies from the Jewish hierarchy, working and middle-class folks. The whole gamut.

These are people who don’t normally sit together. And for the Jewish men running the show, this broke all kinds of Jewish cleanliness laws about not eating with (or talking with or touching) many of the folks present for fear of being unclean and probably being looked down upon, and losing respect from your own folks.

Jesus defied the dehumanization that the rules of his religion imposed by claiming some were more worthy than others, some clean and some unclean. With empathy and compassion Jesus brought everyone to the table essentially saying (if not in words, then in actions):  Welcome to the Resistance!! Everyone have a seat, greet your neighbor, share food and conversation. We’re all in this together. This is a vision of the Kin-dom of God.

Valerie Kaur, in her book The Sage Warrior, writes, “Throughout the world, the most effective caste systems and social hierarchies kept people apart when it came to the most intimate exchanges – living, eating, loving – and enforced those rules with brutality.  [Eating together] was embodied protest. Radical and subversive. Eating together with people of all castes and creeds meant rejecting with your body and breath adherence to hierarchy… [it] was more than a rebellion: It was a practice for an alternative world of solidarity, dignity, and humility.”

Oscar Romero [1917–1980], Archbishop of San Salvador, was another who refused to dehumanize others, and was gunned down on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass for standing in solidarity with those others had dehumanized and oppressed. As his body lay in state in the cathedral where he had so often preached, thousands of mourners filed past his coffin, many of them landless peasants and field workers, who had traveled miles to pay their respects. 

They came because they loved Romero. During the three years he served as their archbishop, they knew him as a father who stood between them and a death-dealing government. Now that he was gone, they not only felt orphaned, but they were also terrified…. 

[Romero] was accused of many things, including being a Communist, an agitator, a Soviet stooge, a gullible fool, imprudent, unintelligent, and a bad priest. But he was clear in his own mind and conscience that he was doing Christ’s work, not playing power politics. 

In a homily given in 1978, Archbishop Romero said,

People do not light a candle and put it under a basket,” said Christ. “They light it and put it up high so that it gives light” (Matthew 5:15). That is true community. A community is a group of women and men who have found the truth in Christ and in his Gospel and join together to follow the way of truth more resolutely… A community is a family that believes; it is a group where each member accepts God and feels strengthened by the others. In their moments of weakness, they help one another and love one another; they shed the light of their faith as an example for others. When that happens, the preachers no longer need to preach because there are Christians whose very lives have become a form of preaching.  

I said once before and I repeat today, sisters and brothers, that if some sad day they silence our radio and stop us from writing in our newspaper, then all of you who believe must become microphones, radio stations, and loudspeakers—not by talking but by living the faith.

I know I’m preaching to the choir today. We stand strong in a tradition of caring about all people. I know you are keenly aware of the dehumanization going on right now in order to commit multiple atrocities upon the least of these. The harder part of following the Christ tradition, is to meet those doing the dehumanizing with our own light, not dehumanizing in return. Let us resist injustice, let us say “no” to oppression and marginalization and policies and program cuts that harm not only all of us, but our most vulnerable especially, all while shining the light of love, compassion, and empathy. These must not be lost.

Love & Light!

Kaye