In my evangelical experience, particularly when I was young, there was an ever present sense of “the other”. There were people who were saved and people who were unsaved. There were people who were lost and people who were found. There were Christians and there were people of “other” religions.
It might be argued that evangelical Christianity, as it has existed in many churches, depends upon the concept of the “other”.
You might remember interesting pieces of evidence that demonstrated this kind of worldview. Do you remember watching a sporting event or an awards show and noting when the star player or actor made a point of thanking Jesus and speaking of their Christian faith? There was sometimes a reaction of pride to such statements. It was as if they were saying that they were one of us. This moved them from the camp of “other” or “secular” to “believer”. All of the sudden we were in the same camp as us.
Not long ago I was watching an interview of a young family who had survived the terrible hurricanes in the American south. The background of the interview was the devastation from the hurricane, houses flattened and left in pieces as if a small scale model had been destroyed. Anderson Cooper was doing the interview and he conducted it with obvious compassion and humanity. I noted that the couple talked more about Jesus and their faith than they did about the hurricane and its result. On one level this was encouraging. It meant that the couple had a greater hope than trust in their material possessions. On another level I found it a little disturbing. The couple was saying that Jesus would get them through and I was wondering what that looks like if they had lost everything. I did, however, admire their faith in a way.
Another disturbing sense that I picked up (this may not be accurate) was that they were finding a way to declare that they were “not like other people”. Secular people, I suppose, who do not trust in God and therefore cannot count on Jesus getting them through. I winced a little at the possibility that this couple had picked up in church that the most important thing, if they ever had a public platform to do so, was to declare their faith in Jesus. My wincing was because it seemed disjointed. What was evident all around was devastation that did not distinguish between believer and unbeliever and yet such a distinction was still being presented as important.
I have become aware that, to some degree, all of the Christians I have ever known are universalists. The distinctions are just what they were universalist about. The people who emphasized the “other”, saved and unsaved, were universalist about the power of sin and the reality of hell for all who did not believe as they did. Here the power of sin was universal. The people who emphasized the “renewal of all things”, salvation as healing of all creation in Jesus were universal about the power of Jesus.
The theologian who has argued most vehemently (at least in our current day) for salvation as universal is David Bentley Hart. Hart’s book, “That All Shall Be Saved” presents the case and does not back down from disdain for, what Hart calls, the “infernalist” view. One of the concepts that I find interesting in Hart’s book is his examination of the nature of salvation in Christian understanding. Hart argues that individual salvation is not something that is actually Christian.
He says:
“There is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons.”
“And so, it seems, if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be ‘every soul for itself’—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.”
All of this to say, that true Christian faith cannot be understood by emphasizing the “other”, particularly in ways that deem the other as less acceptable, or less saved. Salvation is God’s business, not ours.
Othering is not the exclusive purview of the religious right. It happens from the left as well with moral declarations of someone “being a better person” than someone else who is declared morally bankrupt or “a monster”. If you look for this othering, this divisiveness, you will find it across the political spectrum.
I will understand the true nature of Christian faith, of the way of Jesus, not in seeing what is “other” about the person who is different than me, but rather by aiming to see their humanity, no matter what.
I came across a quote from Abraham Lincoln that puts this in basic terms.
I don’t know the occasion, but Lincoln once (at least) said:
“I don’t like that man.
I must get to know him better.”
Amen.