On Mischaracterizing Steven Anderson

Today's Washington Post features an opinion piece by Colbert E. King in which he cites the recent sermon by Steven Anderson, the pastor of tiny Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, AZ, "Why I Hate Barack Obama." In his sermon, Anderson expresses his fervent prayer that God would harm Barack Obama, perhaps taking him out via a brain tumor (Anderson does not want "another martyr" caused by assassination).

King aligns Anderson's sermon with a number of other anti-Obama expressions, from the heated town-hall meetings that present Obama as Hitler to gun-toting protesters at Obama's speaking engagements to Rep. Joe Wilson, who heckled the President with "You lie!" while listening to Pres. Obama's speech to both houses of Congress on health care. King spends considerable time relating the racist, anti-Obama rantings of George Sodini, the man who recently went on a killing spree in a Pennsylvania women's gym. Speakers like Anderson, King suggests, inflame an already out-of-control far right, making it easy for people like Sodini to take matters into their own hands through violence.

I share King's conclusion that rising cultural tension in the US gives us cause to pray ever harder for the safety of the President. It is a mistake, however, to overstate the similarities between Anderson and other right- and far-right-wing protesters. Moreover, it's counterproductive to lump all anti-Obama sentiment into a single homogeneous group of haters.

I can understand the temptation to do so. Conservative activists have long represented a kind of blind spot for many progressives (by which I mean people who espouse generally left-liberal views). It's difficult for me to understand, for example, how anyone can be so threatened by homosexual people that they declare them a bigger threat to national security than terrorism. But all too often the response on the left isn't to dig deeper but to back away. The left has a lexicon of terms used simultaneously to describe and dismiss their opponents and their beliefs: homophobic, racist, sexist, bigoted, etc. Such labels tacitly suggest that the people they describe are immoral, irrational, or both.

What's wrong with that?

I would not suggest that OK State Representative Sally Kern, who made the gay/terrorist comparison above in 2008, holds a position as moral and as rational as mine. I believe that she is both morally wrong and logically misguided. But because I believe so, I feel it's all the more important for me to investigate her arguments, to get as good a grasp as I can on her worldview, and to respect the fact that, as repellent as I find her stances, she is a legitimate player in the game of democracy along with me. Her ideas may be anathema to me, but clearly a sizable minority (majority, if you're in certain parts of Oklahoma) find her eminently sensible. As much as I'd like to point to some trans-personal Ideal of Right and Rationality in support of my position, I cannot. I do not automatically win at politics simply because I see myself as more ethical or more thoughtful than my opponents.

It does me no good, in other words, to call Rep. Kern crazy or evil. Indeed, doing so renders me less capable of responding to her, less able to account for the fact that she appeals to so many people and less effective at working to change or overcome that appeal. Worse, by engaging people like Kern only to the extent that I attach a dismissive label to them, I replicate the very right-wing tactics that I criticize. The operation of bigotry begins with the refusal to look past a surface label that simultaneously describes and dismisses: femin-nazi, queer, unChristian, anti-God, etc.

Beyond questions of political efficacy (know your enemy), I am called as a Christian to a higher standard: love your enemy. Strive to see your enemy as your neighbor. I underline that I do not mean here that Christians are to legitimize the stances of their enemies, nor do I suggest that the differences that divide me from Rep. Kern or Pastor Anderson are simply matters of taste or opinion on which we can agree to disagree. We disagree in nearly insurmountable ways. In fact, were Kern or Anderson in charge of the country, were their beliefs the majority's beliefs, I would likely find myself in jail or before a firing squad for my sexuality.

Nevertheless, I am to love them. The fact that enemies desire or pursue your death does not excuse Christians from loving them.

For me, love means at least challenging myself to get into their head, to see how they come to their stances. I have been pursuing that challenge for some time in the case of Pastor Anderson. And while I don't claim yet to be an Anderson expert, I can tell how wrong it is to align him with Sodini or Joe Wilson. One example: yes, Anderson expresses hatred toward President Obama. But he is just as vitriolic about former Pres. George W. Bush. In that same "Why I Hate" sermon, he castigates Bush for supporting gay people (a surprising conclusion, to be sure, from progressive LGBT perspectives), for getting the US involved in overseas conflicts (Anderson, like many paleo-conservatives, is fiercely anti-interventionist), and for claiming falsely to be a godly man. This alone distances Anderson from the mainstream Republican right.

Nor, as I mentioned, is Anderson in the same camp as militant right-wingers such as the KKK or one-man-armies like Sodini (or Scott Roeder, the alleged assassin of Dr. George Tiller). His hatred is more theological than political or personal. He regularly criticizes racism as such as unBiblical (which is not to say that Anderson's rhetoric about President Obama is free from what could be called racist overtones).

Again, as I hope is clear, I do not mean to justify Anderson's theology or statements. But neither do I see it as acceptable to mischaracterize or dismiss them. When confronted by overt intolerance--and that's a tricky, tricky term--it becomes all the more vital to press further, to explore in more complicated ways than the label "bigoted" allows.

More tomorrow,

JF