Sitting Down and Shutting Up

I want to invite you all into a conversation I’ve been having with my mom. This all starts with a message that she forwarded to her entire address book Monday morning. It’s the jumping-off point for this conversation, so it’s important to start here. What follows is the record of our e-mail conversation. Hopefully, others among you also recognize the need for broad, respectful conversations about the topics we address and will join us as we stake our claims, clarify and explain our opinions, and ask questions that will help us to know each other better. Thanks for taking a look.

So here’s the message that started it all:

This is by a daughter of a murdered couple in Raytown, Missouri who had a Bible and Bookstore on 63rd Street. Just one more example:

When I had to testify at the murder trial of my parents a week ago, I was asked to raise my right hand. The bailiff started out "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
I stood there and waited but she said nothing. She said "Do you?" I was so stunned I blurted out "What happened to "so help me God'?" She came back with "Do you?" I replied yes, but I was perplexed. Then the judge said "you can say that if you want to." I stopped, raised my right hand, and finished with "So help me God!"

I told my son and daughter that when it came time for them to testify, they should do the same. It's no wonder we have so many problems in this country. If I'd had my wits about me I'd have told them that taking God out of the courtroom is only going to result in more criminals and murderers like him being in there! I don't know what can be done about it, but it's time we stepped up and did something.

CNBC this morning had a poll on this question. They had the highest number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls and the percentage was the same as this: 86% to keep the words, 14% against. That is a pretty commanding public response. - I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn't. Now it is your turn... It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!

If you agree, pass this on, if not simply delete.

To which I responded:

We don’t tell the other 14%, like me and my friends, to shut up and sit down because we live in the United States, and we are governed by a set of propositions—the Constitution, the highest authority in the Union—that ensures that no majority, no matter how large or extreme, has the authority to tread on the rights—the inalienable rights of every human being to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—to believe and to practice as we see fit.

I have never been so angry and offended by anything you’ve done in recent history. Why the hell did you send this to me?!

I cannot believe that you hold to this position, and I cannot understand how you thought I would appreciate seeing this.

And later:

I apologize. I flew off the handle, but stuff like this just bespeaks a complete lack of respect for the ideas and values of other persons, and really gets my goat, especially when it comes from people whom I love and respect.

Just imagine, though, if somebody tried to tell you to sit down and shut up because you were in the minority.

So she comes back with:

I would expect them to tell me to sit down and shut up if I knew I was causing a huge controversy. That's what happens - minority or majority - and then things are totally blown out of proportion.

So I finally responded with:

I think it’s especially important to speak up when the topic is controversial—that means it’s important to a lot of persons for a lot of different reasons and that I just might learn something that will cause me to reconsider my opinion. I don’t get to learn anything, I don’t have the opportunity to grow, if I’m told to sit down, shut up, and keep to my place. The only way I have ever learned anything is by asking questions, and now I’m coming to find that asking questions, holding an opinion, asking people questions about theirs and inviting them to ask questions about mine and their own is getting me shoved into a corner. I’m just standing up to be heard, just like those guys on the commons back in Lexington 229 years ago, like those men in the convention hall in Philadelphia later that same year when they told George III and his government in London that would no longer be governed by a system that they felt was trampling on their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, like those other men who met in Philadelphia again eleven years later and framed a document that describes itself as the highest law in the land and created a government in three branches that had the power to balance against each other, like another group of men who met in New York in 1789 and suggested that certain rights in particular, like the rights to speak one’s mind, to ask questions and to express opinion in a public forum, and the right to believe and to act—and not to believe or to act—are so important that they needed to be named out loud for the whole world to see and for all persons to hear, and like those folks in Selma forty years ago, and maybe even like those people in the arenas all across the Mediterranean basin 1800 years ago who thought that their ideas about God and religion deserved to be heard in the open forum of the Roman world.

This country has been grounded in a commitment to freedom and justice for all, and while I admit that the breadth and applicability of that freedom has changed, I think it has expanded in important and valuable ways because people have had the courage to stand up and speak truth to power. They’ve also respected their neighbors enough to stand up and meet them in open conversation. It’s not God that offends me, quite the contrary. It’s my faith in God that helps me write this message. It’s not an open and forthright conversation about religions that worries me. I’m worried that my family and neighbors do not respect me enough to have those conversations with me, that it seems to be easier for them to tell me to sit down and shut up, that I should just close my eyes and my mouth and let the government do as it pleases and reform the very fabric of its history of dissent into a straightjacket of conformity.

I will not simply delete this message. Simply deleting this message is sitting down and shutting up, and neither of my parents raised me to be so accommodating when so much is on the line. This is a big deal not least because it betrays a profound lack of respect for the minds of anyone with the courage to voice an opinion contrary to the dominant worldview, but also because such disrespect tramples on the rights of all persons to be religious as they choose. This right includes the ability to do no religion at all. When the government of the United States establishes through its currency, through its courts, and through its schools that a belief in one God is the necessary condition for full and complete citizenship in this country, every religious belief and practice is threatened because it would be at the whim of the majority. While a Christian majority might now—and might have always—prevailed in the United States, that does not give them the authority to assert their dominion over minorities, other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and other non-Christians among them. To let religion—beliefs and practices—be a function of an electoral plurality or even a majority cuts at the very heart of the plural, democratic, respectful community we, the people of the United States, purport to value.