Reclaimed

How Jesus Restores Our Humanity in a Dehumanized World

Andy Steiger

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9780310107231
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

We live in an era of polarizing political and religious disagreement. Despite the lip service our society pays to tolerance, it's becoming more and more difficult to look past our differences and to recognize our common humanity. The way that we treat each other is a direct result of how we see one another, and our culture is full of warning signs that we aren't seeing each other correctly.

In Reclaimed, author and cultural critic Andy Steiger explores the trend toward dehumanization that underlies our fraught times. People on both sides of the political aisle and from all walks of life share a deep desire for better understanding, justice, and human dignity. Yet we're uncertain how to achieve these aims. Steiger points to Jesus as the basis for rediscovering our common ground and our shared humanity.

In Jesus we find not only that humans are unique, valuable, and bearers of rights and responsibilities, but also that our dehumanizing tendencies--our worst inclinations toward inhumanity--can be redeemed and restored. Jesus enables us to be fully human, and it's in him that we rediscover the kind of relationships and society for which so many people today are longing.

PART 1


WHAT IS HUMAN?

1

DIGITAL GENOCIDE

It was a beautiful June afternoon, and although I had just gotten home from work, the bright sunshine compelled me to stay outside and mow the lawn. I had just pulled out the lawn mower and was firing it up when my wife and kids pulled into the driveway. With tears in her eyes, my wife flew out of the car and ran up the lawn toward me. The story spilled out of her: an accusatory post about me had appeared on Facebook, sparking a campaign against me. A mere fifteen minutes after the posting, before I was even aware of the issue, I had been officially uninvited from speaking at a local high school. There was even talk that the teacher who invited me could lose her job or the school could be sued because of me.

As a pastor, I am frequently asked to speak at local high schools and universities on a variety of topics. This time, I had been asked to speak to a grade-twelve class on dehumanization. The class had invited speakers from different world religions, and I was to represent the Christian perspective on dehumanization, explaining how Jesus lays a foundation for humanization. It seemed like a perfect fit, given that my PhD work was on that topic and that a film I had recently created on dehumanization, called The Human Project, had won a number of awards.¹ I had accepted the speaking request months earlier, and the parents had all been notified that I was coming. I was looking forward to sharing my research and experience on the topic and engaging with the students. Now, it had all come to an abrupt halt the night before I was scheduled to speak.

My heart sank. “Why?” I asked.

“Because of the podcast you did,” my wife replied.

The podcast was an interview I had hosted about a new public-school curriculum to support gender diversity among elementary school students. I had learned that not everyone in the transgender community supported this new curriculum, so naturally I was curious why. I invited a trans-identified male on my show and had a wonderful conversation discussing his concerns about the curriculum. Although he is openly transgender and is not a Christian, the LGBTQ community despised him for openly challenging the curriculum. This new online response to the podcast showed me I had failed to appreciate just how hated this man was and how intolerant our culture had become to differences of opinion. Now this hatred was being directed at me.

In the post and its resulting comments section, people had grabbed random statements from my website and other pod-casts I had done and quoted them out of context in an attempt to show what a horrible person I am. Clearly, none of these people knew who I was or what I thought. My name wasn’t even spelled correctly. Apparently, there’s a guy out there named Andy Steigler you should all watch out for.

The post argued that I and the religion I represented should never be allowed in a public school. Dozens of people chimed in. Some risked supporting me, and others hurled insults, accusing me of bigotry, fanaticism, and brainwashing kids. In the end, the school labeled me unsafe. I was told that the students might not feel comfortable hearing from me. How ironic, I thought. I had been asked to speak on how Christianity allows us to love and humanize each other. It was a topic to which I had devoted not only my academic study but also my entire life as a pastor. Yet in only fifteen minutes, I had been reduced to a caricature and vilified as dangerous. Dehumanization, the very topic that this class was studying, was taking place right before the students’ eyes.

HATEBOOK

Dehumanization happens when we see others as less than human. Separating people into groups and then stirring up fear is the quintessence of dehumanization. What happened to me that day in June was small and had minimal consequences. But multiply that interaction by thousands or even millions of people and the consequences change. It’s these small, dehumanizing moments that ultimately form huge cultural movements like what happened in Rwanda or Nazi Germany. If you think such large-scale dehumanization is a thing of the past, think again. In the twenty-first century, nowhere has the path to dehumanization been more evident than in the country of Myanmar.

Myanmar is a predominantly Buddhist country that gained independence from the British in 1948. Since the days of colonial rule, the Buddhist Burmese people have harbored an intense hatred of and discrimination toward the Rohingya people, a small Muslim minority. For decades, the Rohingya have been denied citizenship in Myanmar. They have been denied the opportunity to own land, have children freely, or even travel to the next village. They have been forced to live in camps set apart from the rest of the population, where they don’t have access to education, health care, or even proper food and water. Those things are horrible in themselves, but things have gotten worse in the past few years, and the dehumanization is now spilling over into horrific violence. As of December 2018, the United Nations, the United States House of Representatives, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have all released statements confirming that genocide is taking place in Myanmar. A UN fact-finding mission in the fall of 2018 found that the crimes being committed against the Rohingya include systematic mass killings, mass public gang rapes, burning of villages, forced labor, torture, and regular unexplained disappearances.

The situation in Myanmar is rightly being compared to the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s and the genocide of Jews in 1940s Europe. In Nazi Germany, oppressors used books, pamphlets, and speeches to spread dehumanization and stir the people to violence. In Rwanda, they used radio. In Myanmar, they use something that hits a little too close to home: Facebook.

In 2012, only 1 percent of the people living in Myanmar had access to the internet.² On a world ranking of mobile phone users, Myanmar ranked second last, just above North Korea. Yet everything changed in 2013. Swift political changes opened the country to foreign telecommunications companies and everything exploded. Only four years later, the price of SIM cards had plunged by 99 percent and half the people in Myanmar had mobile phones. Most people were using only one app: Facebook. Cell phone companies had been offering sign-up bonuses that let users avoid data charges when using Facebook, and in a poor country like Myanmar that was a game changer. For a huge portion of the population, Facebook became the sum total of the internet.³ But rather than trivial status updates or pictures of people’s pets, in Myanmar Facebook had become a festering ground for racial hatred and calls to violence. Both the Myanmar military and a prominent group of monks called the Ma Ba Tha have led the charge, spreading anti-Muslim hate speech on social media. Crude memes perpetuate the idea that the Muslim Rohingya are violent and both a danger to the Burmese people and a threat to Burmese racial and religious purity. Monks call for their followers to respond to these threats, and so they do and people die.

Notice what happened to me online and what is happening to the Rohingya online. Both are examples of dehumanization. One is so minimal it’s hardly worth mentioning, and the other is extreme and should be shouted from the rooftops, but both stem from the same root. On Facebook, I was no longer seen as a flesh-and-blood human, a husband and father, but was instead reduced to a stereotype and assumed to be a certain way. I was labeled unsafe and denied the opportunity to speak at a school. On Facebook, the Rohingya are also no longer seen as flesh-and-blood humans, husbands and fathers, and instead are reduced to stereotypes and assumed to be a certain way. However, when they are labeled unsafe, they aren’t just denied the opportunity to speak but are denied the right to life. That’s not as big of a bridge to cross as you’d think.

LESS THAN HUMAN

It might be tempting to think that atrocities like the one in Myanmar are isolated to certain cultures, geographical locations, or times, but they’re not. During the twentieth century alone, genocides took place all over the globe, including in Argentina, Turkey, Germany, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia, and Rwanda. If you expand your consideration to include all types of crimes against humanity throughout history—war, terrorism, torture, rape, racism, and slavery—the scope is truly staggering. There is no group of people on the planet that has not been affected. So how can people be capable of such heinous crimes against one another? The answer is consistent: dehumanization.

Dehumanization is not an optional step on the path to harming each other; it is a necessary step. The truth is that people rarely murder people. That may seem like an odd claim, but before you dismiss it, let’s think about it. First, let me clarify what I am not saying. Notice that I didn’t say that people do not kill people. Clearly, that happens all the time. People do accidentally kill other people, like in a car crash, or someone might kill another person in self-defense. What I’m talking about here is murder—the malicious act of taking another person’s life. That’s just not something people do to other people. Instead, the easiest way to murder, on a large scale or small, is to no longer see them as people at all. This is the power of dehumanization. It enables one’s ability to murder by distorting how one perceives the person they’re murdering. To our eyes it may look like people murder people, but that’s often not how murderers see it. In their minds, whether or not it’s a conscious thought, they see the other person as less than human.

The power of dehumanization was clearly documented in a BBC program on the creation of the Auschwitz death camp. In the summer of 1941, when Auschwitz had not yet become a factory of death, the Germans organized mobile killing units in Eastern Europe. Groups of soldiers rounded up Jews, dug massive pits, and then shot the men, women, and children, watching as their dying bodies fell into the mass grave. The documentary showed an interview with a man named Hans Friedrich, who had been a soldier during this time and participated in shooting Jews point blank. The interviewer asked a question that most people familiar with the barbarism of the Holocaust struggle to comprehend: “Can you tell me what you were thinking and feeling when you were shooting?” His answer was a chilling reminder of the effectiveness of dehumanization. He replied, “Nothing,” and then continued, “I only thought: Aim carefully, so that you hit properly. That was my thought.” The interviewer, clearly frustrated by Friedrich’s lack of emotion, asked, “This was your only thought? During all that time you had no feelings for the people, the Jewish civilians, that you shot?” He took a deep shaky breath and then replied, “No.”⁴

I was outraged! How can that be? If you’ve ever seen Holocaust photographs of emaciated children and adults who have been starved, stripped naked, and murdered en masse, then you can understand the wickedness of these crimes. Yet, apparently, this man felt nothing! It is almost beyond belief. However, I’ve come to realize that asking a Nazi what it felt like to shoot the Jews is like asking an exterminator what they were thinking and feeling while eliminating an infestation of rats. As professor Claudia Koonz explains, “Nazi public culture was constructed on the mantra: ‘Not every being with a human face is a human.’ ”⁵

Oskar Gröning, a Nazi convicted of war crimes in 2015 at age ninety-three for his participation at Auschwitz, explained how the Holocaust was possible, saying, “We were convinced by our worldview that we had been betrayed by the entire world and that there was a great conspiracy of the Jews against us.”⁶ A worldview is the way you see and understand the world; it’s a culturally prescriptive lens that is crafted by your beliefs and experiences. Like most Nazis, Gröning was convinced that the world, and especially the Jews, was against them. Nazi propaganda only strengthened the belief that Jews, and others, were no longer persons in the same way that Germans were. When you no longer see a person, you become capable of acting on your evil desires of murder, rape, slavery—you name it.

Philosopher David Livingstone Smith articulates it this way: “Subhumans, it was believed, are beings that lack that special something that makes us human. Because of this deficit, they don’t command the respect that we, the truly human beings, are obliged to grant one another. They can be enslaved, tortured, or even exterminated—treated in ways in which we could not bring ourselves to treat those whom we regard as members of our own kind.”⁷

If you could go back in time and ask a Nazi who participated in the genocide whether murdering people is wrong, they likely would answer, “Yes! Of course murdering people is wrong. But Jews are not people.” A Hutu man convicted of murdering Tutsis during the genocide in Rwanda illustrated this point, saying, “We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps. I mean a person like us, sharing similar thoughts and feelings.”⁸

Now, please don’t confuse an explanation with an excuse. I’m not arguing that Nazis’ and Hutus’ blindness to another’s humanity justifies their actions. It does not. My point is simply to show that these unfathomable actions are perhaps not so unfathomable after all.

UNBRIDLED

It’s frightening to realize, but once our perspective of others becomes twisted, our actions eventually follow suit. One clear indicator of how we see others is the words we use. During World War II, the Nazis called the Jews “rats,” the Japanese called the Chinese “insects,” and Americans called the Japanese “monkeys.” During the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus called the Tutsis “cockroaches” and “snakes.” Even farther back, the Spanish conquistadors called the Native Americans “talking animals” and “soulless parrots in human guise.”

But let’s not kid ourselves. In the twenty-first century, are we any better?

Today in Myanmar, they call the Rohingya people “Kalars,” a derogatory term referencing their skin color and foreignness. Take a moment to see if you can think of dehumanizing labels we use for people of a different race, size, gender, sexual orientation, education, political view, or religion. I’m sure it didn’t take you long. Most are too foul to mention, and sadly we’re all guilty. We may not think too deeply about what we call people, but these are more than mere words. They are indicative of how we see people and how we will treat them if we view them through these lenses.

Writing in the first century, James, the brother of Jesus Christ, challenged how we talk about people. In a letter that James wrote to churches, he says, “All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.”⁹

Nowhere is the poison of the human tongue more potent than in its ability to put people down. We’ve all experienced it, and worse, we’ve all done it. But how do we change?

The first step to restoring another’s humanity is to diagnose the problem. We need first to understand dehumanization and learn to spot it in ourselves and others. However, this can be a real challenge given the creative lengths we often go to when demeaning others. The difficulty we have in uprooting dehumanizing language can be illustrated with the history of the slur “Monday.” Monday is a day of the week, an innocent word if there ever was one, and yet in 2012 a police officer in New Hampshire was fired for using Monday as a derogatory term for a member of the Boston Red Sox. Many people were understandably confused. But the connection had been explained in the media in 2008, when stand-up comedian Russell Peters performed a routine in which he described a confusing conversation he had with a man from Boston. The man had referred to black people as Mondays and when Peters questioned what that meant, the man casually explained, “Because nobody likes Mondays.”¹⁰

Now, Peters is a professional comedian and he played the situati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Zombie Culture
• Part 1: What Is Human?
• Part 2: What Is the Value of Human Life?
• Part 3: What Leads to Human Flourishing?
• Part 4: How Should Humans Live?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Coauthor