A pluralistic and diverse society is not easy to manage. One would think with several centuries of ethnic mixing, particularly in a country as diverse as the United States, that people would be used to getting along, or at least tolerating the differences between one another. But that does not seem to be the case. Our society seems to be fragmenting rather than blending.
There are many factors which give rise to antagonism: religion, nationalism, ethnicity, political ideology, and the old Marxist bogeyman, economics. And while we think of ourselves as a melting pot, the degree of mixing which has taken place has recently been called into question. We may co-exist to a degree but inter-marrying is less common.
Daniel T. Lichter recently reported on CNN that “According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, one of every seven new marriages in 2008 was interracial or interethnic — the highest percentage in U.S. history.”
One in seven.
That isn’t a lot. About 14%. And “seemingly overlooked in the Pew Report is the finding that less than 5 percent of all married whites have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. The vast majority of whites today — as in the past — marry other whites” (The Supreme Court ruling that outlawed state prohibitions against interracial marriage did not come about until 1967).
Keep in mind too that some people marry only within the “tribe.” It was widely believed that Swedes and Norwegians couldn’t live together and many European ethnic groups arriving in the United States clustered together, out of need or desire. So even among “whites” there were limitations on the mixing taking place.
Of course, some whites feel differently, seeing even that miniscule amount (because it is rising) as a threat to white America. “Their concerns,” Lichter goes on to say, “are heightened by recent Census Bureau projections that the U.S. will become a majority-minority society by the middle of the century.”
Will the rising tide of immigration and immigrant birth finally complete the process of mixing?
In what can hardly be called a surprise, CNN recently reported that a new poll “indicates Americans have complicated views towards immigrants.”
The poll, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national survey, shows that “the vast majority believe that most immigrants are basically good, honest people who are hard-working. However, nearly seven in ten say that immigrants are a burden on the taxpayer, 62 percent think they add to the crime problem, and 59 percent believe they take jobs away from Americans.”
Ouch. From the descendants of immigrants. Sounds like today’s immigrants are getting the same treatment once meted out to the Irish.
This poll is not referring simply to immigrants from south of the border, though I would be surprised if such thoughts did not influence the respondents. Instead, the poll, released Wednesday, “asks about all people who have immigrated from other countries in the past ten years, and not just about illegal immigrants in the U.S.” Doubtless far fewer immigrants today are “white” Anglo-Saxon compared to when our ancestors arrived from the Old World. Probably, far fewer of them are Protestants.
“The results may explain why most Americans think that the policies that made the U.S. a ‘melting pot’ strengthened the country a century ago but do not make the country stronger today,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
CNN asks whether, taking the “melting pot” metaphor a bit further, do Americans think that immigrants should maintain their own culture, or blend into the existing culture in this country?
The answer: “Two-thirds of whites say that immigrants should give up some important aspects of their culture to blend in; only about four in ten Hispanics, and an equal number of blacks, agree with that view,” adds Holland.
When my great-grandfather Tollef arrived in the Unied States, he did not speak any English. He wrote his letters home in Swedish. Wrote from the ranks of the Union Army during the Civil War. Was he less of an American because he kept elements of his native culture?
And how about Pagans? Paganism is and always has been a diverse phenomenon; all sorts of cultures, all sorts of ethnicities. This is as true today as it was in the ancient world. The common denominator was polytheism. This is not always the case today, but despite a broader interpretation of religion and spirituality, there is still a rejection of the Judeo-Christian idea of monotheism. There is the inclusion of nature, the inclusion of the feminine. There is a lot of inclusion and a lot less exclusion.
But even this rejection of one world view and the adoption of another does not have as a goal the destruction or negation of what is rejected. It adds a voice to the harmony; it does not remove one. It is more a matter advocating an acceptance of alternative forms of religion. The view of Judeo-Christian monotheism is, on the other hand, that all alternative forms of religion are inferior, wrong, and must (and will eventually) give way to the “True” religion.
Of course, we have three competing Abrahamic faiths all insisting they have possession of that exclusive Truth so the religious issue is problematic, especially when the sacred teachings of none of them espouse tolerance. After all, where the capital-T truth is concerned, there is no room for tolerance of what is not true. Even if alternative religionists wanted to join the True religion they couldn’t; there is no way to tell who has it, if anybody does.
The evils of nationalism have been well noted. The First World War is about as powerful a comment as one can make on the subject. The 60s anti-war protests about as powerful a rejection. Now, with the rise of American Exceptionalism, the pendulum has swung back the other way and the “constructed other” is again rejected, not welcomed. Hate and mixing are mutually compatible. American Exceptionalism is as ugly today as Prussian Nationalism was a century ago.
And unrestrained, it may lead us to the same place.
Ethnic squabbles are nothing new. They’re old beyond the extent of the historical record. We can look at the Old World over the past few centuries. We can look at the Balkans today or at Africa. America has had its own share.
But despite all these differences, people can get along. It has been proven. By Pagans. And I would argue that if Pagans cannot manage it today, nobody can. We have our own history to support us. We do not all have to believe the same things, or anything at all, to get along. Because there is no pressing need for others to believe the way you do, the religious equation ought to simply go away.
But how do Pagans cope with increasing polarization in the religious and political landscapes? Ancient pagans might have been drawn together by what they shared – polytheism’s non-exclusivity – but today’s version of religion – largely monotheistic and exclusivist, pushes people apart. Nothing can be shared when each group adopts an exceptionalist stance, be it due to religion or an excess of nationalism, ideology or some other cause.
Fast growing religion or not, Pagans are a drop in the bucket of American diversity. Can what we have in common, in the words of Jan Assmann (Moses the Egyptian 1997:3), “function as a means of intercultural translatability”? Fostering our common humanity, looking for connections, seems far more helpful a course than creating more gaping cracks between us, doesn’t it?
Disagree we might, but if we Pagans cannot tolerate each other, if we can’t translate inter-culturally, how can there be hope for anyone else?
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted July 16-21, with 1,018 adult Americans questioned by telephone, including a special sample of 308 black and 303 Hispanic respondents. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.
Immigration is simultaneously a psychological, familial, and cultural transformation. You are no longer where you came from, but you are not yet where you belong.
My grandparents were immigrants. I am not. I belong where I come from in all the ways that they did not, being immigrants. But I do not belong where they came from, either. I am far more Californian than I could ever be Irish, Scots, Scandanavian, or wherever village they came from.
What I’m getting at is that I am accustomed to diversity differently than they were accustomed to it (or never were). My childhood pals were the children of immigrants from all sorts of places and cultures and such, not most all from the same locale or culture. All of us were tossed together in the course or our enculturation, so that we were diverse learning skills to co-exist with our Californiahood in common.
What appears to have worn away from then to now is the shared conviction that we children of immigrants have much in common with more recently arrived immigrants or with their children. A need to be more same had arisen along with a powerful value of identifying with more sameness and less diversity.
Change is tough to handle!
I grew up as the son of military parents and in a variety of places, as we moved around until I was in second grade, and my friends were Catholics and Protestants. My grandparents were one of those supposedly unworkable Norwegian-Swedish marriages, and my mother traveled to the Old Country(s)and re-established contact with our relatives there. I might have a different perspective than some (just as you do, Pitch, though for different reasons). I have always identified myself as a Minnesotan, however, because I lived there for some thirty years as I grew up, rather than as a “citizen” of whatever state I have been in since. But my “statehood” is less important to me than my nationhood, though I take pride in my being a Minnesotan. We are all of us the sum of our parts, at once the sum and the parts. I do not think of myself as “white” or “Caucasian” (a fraudulent 19th century term as useful as reading bumps on the head) but as Scandinavian, if asked “ethnicity” on a questionnaire.
A very thoughtful and informative piece! I completely agree that American Pagans definitely need to cultivate a stronger sense of kinship with one another. And we also should be thinking about ways to reach out to and develop stronger ties with other non-monotheistic religious traditions in modern American society, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and the Afro-Caribbean religions.
Thank you, Apuleius. I agree, and I have argued before that we need to be willing to extend the term “Pagan” to include other forms of ethnic religion, since Paganism is, after all, ethnic religion.
Judaism, I must point out, doesn’t claim exclusive truth – it claims exclusive truth for its tribe, and only its tribe. I find that a fairly significant difference between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
That was true up to a point in Jewish history, but when they started claiming YHWH was the only god, not just the god of Israel, they laid claim to exclusive truth. And the Hasmoneans persecuted – used ethnic cleansing – on the non-Jewish people of Palestine for that reason, killing, driving out, or forcibly converting those who were not Jewish. Herod was himself an Idumaean (Edomite), whose people had been forcibly converted to the “truth” during that time.
In fact, as Jan Assmann writes, it was the Jews who invented the “true/false”dichotomy in religion, and that is why he calls it the “Mosaic Distinction.” Gerd Lüdemann (Intolerance and the Gospel 2007) makes the same argument, the process coming to fruition in the post-exilic period. There is no essential difference between the end-time scenarios of Christianity and Judaism. In both, the non-believers will be destroyed.
Excepting the fact that any non-believers simply die when they die, as opposed to Jews, being resurrected with the coming of the Messiah. But the Torah is pretty clear in that YHWH is to be the God of Israel, and that while they should fight the people of other gods, the other people should keep to their gods as the Jews should keep to YHWH.
Besides, the Norse claim the same thing about after Ragnarok…
With all due respect, Eran, that’s not even remotely true.
First of all, Jewish believe in the Messiah was about the victory of Israel over the Nations (Gentiles), not about bodily or other) resurrection (that was Paul’s gig). Nor was messianism upiquitous, as has been observed by John J. Collins (The Scepter and the Star 1995).
YHWH is not merely the god of Israel, but the ONLY god. The others are idols. If the Israelites believed others should keep to their gods, the Hebrew Bible would not be full of genocide and ethnic cleansing carried out at YHWH’s command against other ethnicities, nor would the Hasmoneans engaged in such behavior – but they did.
The Amalekites are to be destroyed, the Canaanites (whom regardless of history the Israelites believed to be a different ethnicity), and the Babylonians are all to be destroyed. For and by a vengeful god. Their idols smashed and thrown down. The Hebrew Bible is full of this language.
In fact, Ambrose and Augustine looked back to Deuteronomy for their own justification for oppression and intolerance. As Gerd Lüdemann says,the First Commandment is the ultimate source of Judeo-Christian intolerance.
Ragnarok has nothing in common with the Judeo-Christian end-time scenario. At Ragnarok, there is no vengeful sky god wrecking destruction on nonbelievers. Instead, the forces of chaos are unleashed and the gods try to save the world. The gods themselves are destroyed and the destruction gives way to a new, purer world with a new generation of gods. You simply cannot compare them; for there to be similarity Ragnarok would have to clear the world of all but Heathens, but it does not. Belief, faith, true/false, none of these things have anything to do with Ragnarok. Nor are Heathens to blame for Christian influences in Snorri’s telling of the event.
In conversations on such topics—tolerance, religion, ethnicity, I am often reminded of what a friend said to my husband about marriage. He asked my spouse if, in his marriage, he wanted to be happy or if he wanted to be right.
Over the years, that question, it seems to me, could be applied to much more than marriage. Many of the ones claiming exceptionalism base it on the idea that they are “right.” But they almost never strike me as happy—the “oh so special” they claim for themselves does not bring contentment even to them.
I am pagan, but deeper than that, I am a secular humanist. I want humanity to get along and find contentment and peace. What we have in common in needs and desires, and what we risk as a species so much outweighs the differences, if only we would see it.
Labrys, I would find such a question deeply disturbing…do I want to be happy or right? My ancestors would not have understood it. They would probably have blinked, then laughed.
I agree that many of these people claiming to be right are unhappy. Some of them want to be, like those who push the revival meetings, who claim you have to suffer for Christ, and if you’re not suffering you should be. If you’re already suffering, you should suffer more. I know when I became a Pagan I felt immediately freed of my chains. I was able to live in the world again and not apart from it. Yet secular humanism is a modern heresy, and certain elements in our population are determined to stamp it out.
Contentment and peace are laudable goals. And I don’t think outside Glenn Beck’s fevered imaginings any secular humanist ideals ever fueled a holy war. crusade, inquisition, or witch-burning.
I likewise found the question disturbing—and insulting, to be honest. And yes, lol, “heretic” was the first label applied to me; “pagan” came later. And apparently, those who long to be “right” must label any non-sanctioned peace and contentment as WRONG.
I was never called heretic at least. My family was more understanding than some (and I was an adult) when I became a pagan, but I still have to explain the term 30 years later, most recently to a Jewish girl as I got my hair cut because my Thor’s Hammer had slipped out of my shirt and she recognized the Triquetra on it.
Of course, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told I’m going straight to hell.
I suppose that Conan the Barbarian was often both happy and ‘right,’ given that those who argued with him tended to bleed-out rather quickly if they didn’t die instantly.
The selfishness of the Dominator Culture knows no bounds. “Dominate at all costs or be dominated” seems to be the meta-message at the heart of their ‘holy books’ and organized spectator sports. The Christian Emperors of later Rome did not immediately shut down the Coliseum, nor did they stop feeding people to lions.
During the past Jan-Feb 09 attacks on Gaza by Israel, the kill ratio was something like 14 Israelies (including from the rockets) versus some 1,500 or more Palestinians. A measured response? Many of the IDF Chaplains (rabbis) were quoted as ordering the troops to eliminate all the Palestinians in the way their ancestors did the Canaanites.
If you remember the billionaire villain from the Tom Baker episode “Seeds of Death,” I really think his composting machine should get to meet glenn beck and his buddies first-hand.
My own opinion of monotheism in general is no secret. I’ve posted on it many times. I think it’s a disease and sometimes I feel it’s a case of some phenomenon that makes people insane and some few of us have managed to pull ourselves out of it and now can only shake our heads in horror and/or wonder. I feel like the rest of us are hostages to these people, who hate each other, preach one thing and practice another, and who want nothing more than to own the entire world while the rest of us die. The end time scenario is disturbingly similar in all three. The degree to which the Iraq war resembled a crusade of old is chilling to contemplate. And I sure don’t want to die because three groups of insecure zealots can’t stand each other or want to play a cosmic game of king of the hill.
My brother married a woman from Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) whom he met through work. And before anyone asks, yes, she already had her own (and legitimate!) green card and did not marry him for it *rolling eyes*. They’re happily married for about a decade now and have two beautiful little girls.
The girls speak both English and Spanish fluently, and while mom and dad prefer to speak to them in their native tongues, they can pretty much go either way. Obviously, they were raised very differently, even in regards to their religion (Catholicism). Her family has been very gracious and welcoming to my brother and our family, and the maternal side of our family has to her and hers. It is unfortunate our dad was mean-spirited and highly prejudiced, but he’s been gone now for five years, so a least he isn’t around to make her cry anymore.
I think Jim and Pamela exemplify what an interracial marriage should be. They accept each other unconditionally and learn from each other, but mostly they’re just happy to be human beings > Americans > Californians > San Franciscans. Much to Pamela’s dismay however, Jimmy will still sneak out and grab some Taco Bell on occasion, even know her traditional cooking is insanely delicious. Sometimes, he just wants junk food! haha! Me, I see it as no different than a family going to the Olive Garden for pasta, so as long as they know the food there isn’t all that authentic. ;D
My husband takes it even further and really doesn’t care about his heritage at all and ONLY refers to himself as American. He could care less his mother is Irish or that his father was German, much less where their parents came from or whatever. He considers where he came from to be the neighborhood he grew up in, and that’s that.
As for myself, I acknowledge my heritage, but I don’t have a strong desire to do a genealogy search or learn the languages and customs. But, unlike Ron, I at least have /some/ curiosity, even on the paternal side. More than anything, I am just a curious person by nature. It has me wonder if perhaps *that* is what would bring more people together – to spark their curiosity, which would hopefully initiate at least a platform of tolerance.
Lori, I think that is the cool thing about America, that people are free to embrace their ethnic heritage or not, as they choose, and still blend into the larger culture. People may question the degree to which we are a melting pot, but the simple fact is most of us don’t blink or bat an eye at people in foreign modes of dress, or at their skin color or their language. We take it in stride, and I think that’s a good sign. In my cardiac rehab program we have old white guys, old black guys, little old ladies, a guy with a German accent, even an old Vietnamese guy with a translator. That’s not a bad example of “melting pot” to my eyes.