The Beauty in Bigotry

This is my first Daily Prompt post, though lord knows I’ve written up several others without ever hitting the publish button.  The idea of this prompt is to talk about the beauty in something conventionally ugly.  I find bigotry, in all its forms, not only ugly, but utterly dumbfounding.  This post will veer off in a completely different direction than most of my blog posts, but it is something that I feel strongly about, so bear with me.  This is a bit uncomfortable for me as the writer as well I’m sure that it will be for you as the reader.

Dictionary.com defines bigotry as “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own.”  I feel this brief explanation is necessary because often times bigotry is (most generally, rightly) associated with vile and socially contemptuous connotations.  Bigotry can, however, be attributed to someone who staunchly holds an otherwise innocuous belief while being intolerant of differing views.  I’ll be using the word in the most complete sense of the definition unless otherwise noted.

I’m generally a nice person.  I have my convictions, and I stick to them.  But they are my own, and can never entirely be anyone else’s.  I have never been able to understand how some people believe that the rest of the world should hold the same opinion as them, especially on deeply personal issues such as religion, sexuality, and other intimate choices or circumstances.  As a social psychologist, I understand how some people get to such a state of bigotry.  Usually, it can be summed up using the theory of cognitive dissonance (psych-babble, sorry).  When someone experiences cognitive dissonance, they’ve usually devoted a certain amount of resources to their belief, whether it be time, money, reputation, friends, or other valuables.  For example, just to pick on religion a little, the longer someone belongs to a particular religion, the more time out of his or her life he or she has devoted.  Now say someone else comes along and provides hard evidence that the first person’s beliefs are wrong (ok, maybe religion wasn’t the best example, but stay with me, we’re almost there).  The first person now had two options: he or she can choose to believe the new information presented to him or her while simultaneously admitting that the resources he or she devoted to the religion were a foolish and misguided waste, or he or she can choose not to believe the new information.  Option one usually entails the loss of friends, social networks, pride, money, and other goods with very little tangible gain.  Option two is usually the more common choice; after all, there’s no way that you could have been wrong for so long, right?  Option two often involves thinking up rationalizations and justifications for why you’re right and why the new information is flawed (enter the outlandish, bigoted statements you’ve encountered here).

I can relate to this conundrum.  I was raised in a conservative Christian environment.  My parents encouraged my involvement in the church, and there was even a time in my young life that I resented the fact that I was female, because if I was male I would have been able to become a preacher within my church. I loved this church, its teachings and everything else it offered me with a ferocity that I would not experience again until many years later after meeting my (now) fiancee.  This involvement laid the groundwork for a lot of (in my opinion) backwards and distorted thinking.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe that my parents had my best interests at heart.  I was always taught that at the end of the day the only thing that really, really mattered is that you treated everyone how you wanted to be treated: with love and kindness.  I am, and always will be grateful for this experience.  But when I moved away to go to college, I wanted to hear the other side of the story.  I knew that what I had learned in church was only one side of the coin and I wanted to understand what the secular world thought of my religion.  This curiosity lead to a minor in religious studies (NOT just Christian studies).  My first secular class on the New Testament and Early Christian writings challenged every single thing that I had ever “known” about a very deep and integral part of me.  I can honestly say that I have never felt so lost, scared and alone as I did that semester (mix in a dash of first-year-away-at-school homesickness just for good measure).   Choosing the first option hurts.  Choosing the first option is scary.  Choosing the first option is uncertain, and it is very hard.

I don’t blame organized religion for all bigotry, just some of it.  The entirety of bigotry can be explained by an individual’s (or group of individuals’) history of reinforced singular thinking.  Bigots have a lot of reasons for standing behind their beliefs.  And while some bigots are lost causes who will never be swayed, regardless of the pressure to do so, some are not.  I purposefully engage with bigots (at least the ones who aren’t screaming; I can’t handle the screaming) in an effort to find the ones who are like I used to be.  They have their convictions, and will stand by them staunchly.  But deep down, they have a feeling or even a little hunch that there might just be a little more to the whole story.  Bigots have progressively sharpened my life skills.  I have learned how to debate.  I am continually learning how to spot fallacious arguments, sometimes before they even develop.  I have learned where exactly my own convictions lie, and precisely why I hold them.  I have learned better how to read people and understand when it’s time to cut my losses and back out (an incredibly underrated ability if there ever was one).  I have learned how to graciously admit when I am wrong or when I do not understand something, although it is still not easy for me to do so. I have learned to listen intently and critically to something that I fiercely disagree with.  And I have learned that, win lose or draw, the satisfaction of not allowing myself to devolve into name-calling is beyond compare.

I don’t win most of these encounters.  In fact, I have never won a single one during the initial conversation.  But every great now and then, someone will think over something that we discussed and come back to me and tell or show me how I changed their thinking about a certain issue.  Sometimes it’s a profound change, but more commonly the changes occur in baby steps.  And when those changes occur in that person, she or he will take that change back to her or his social network that was reinforcing the belief.  Maybe nine times out of ten nothing changes in that network, or nothing is even said.   But to me, that one other time is a window.  It is a window that is begging to be flung wide open.