Our nation needs a revolution of love
A 360 degree response to hate crime must be our goal, the norm in our society.
The video of a Muslim woman challenging hate speech against a Jewish dad and his family coming from a black apparently Christian guy has provoked a lot of comment. You can read more on the BBC here and in the Guardian here.
It is right its being talked about, it’s a great story at every level. Most simply its heartening it’s heartening to see such commitment to challenging hatred when around us there is so much negative stuff going on.
On a bigger picture level, it breaks many stereotypes our society likes to throw around of faith, race and gender. A Jewish man and his children as victims. A black Christian as perpetrator. A Muslim woman as defender.
The simple fact is that human beings are not stereotypical cut outs, they are just that, humans with all the wonder that being human involves. The Muslim woman, Asma Shuweikh said it all:
"Being a mother of two, I know what it's like to be in that situation and I would want someone to help if I was in that situation. When he started talking to the child I thought, 'no, I have to say something'. As a mother of two it's appalling, I can't sit back and watch that happen. To be honest I thought it is my duty as a mother, as a practising Muslim, as a citizen of this country, to have to say something. You can't just sit back and watch that because I felt that it was just getting out of hand. It was really getting too much."
This is a mum, responding as a parent to a parent with children under attack, a citizen being a good neighbour, a Muslim seeking to protect the vulnerable, just as I would as a Christian. Totally unremarkable, just what I’d expect! And we can be sure it takes place many more times than we know of, and simply because its not remarkable the media often don’t pick it up. Fortunately in this case we have social media: “citizen reporter” Chris Atkins put it on a tweet, it went viral and we do know.
But the fact is one of the reasons we don’t see this sort of thing more is because the dominant narrative in the media, and in many cases the actual policy of the media, is to problematise and stigmatise the Muslim community. By contrast this is what I have come to expect from our Muslim community when there are problems. And my Jewish friends, and my Sikh friends, and Hindus, and Buddhists and all. And remembering that good work is not limited to people of faith, from friends with no faith.
In Luton, a town where faith is important to many of us, its what we do. And its what we work to increase.
The problem is that too often faith is called out to mark out “our tribe”, our identity. And when it is it becomes divisive. That has long been the narrative of nationalists, identitarians, the wider far right. And it has become the language of the populist right.
By contrast i would argue that faith, my Christian faith, and other faiths, primarily speak to us in terms of the way we live our lives. They call us to be good people. “To love God, and our neighbour.” (1) To live out what as Christian we often refer to as fruits of the Holy Spirit - joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control, and primarily love. (2)
If they speak to my identity at all, its is that I am a person who is marked out by goodness. If they speak to my national identity it is that my nation is anchored to and marked out by those values.
The trouble is that too often now, based on the idea of faith as identity and tribe, to confront hatred against others is seen to be disloyal to ones own tribe. Every day social media is beseiged with the hatred of those calling out such fundamental goodness to the other as being nothing short of treason..
Our nation needs a revolution of love of the type we saw on the tube in order to banish hatred.
(1) Mark 12.30-31 (2) Galatians 5.22-23