Prejudice

[mdlbear]

This strip from Something Positive showed up in a couple of places on my friends list today. I find it both touching and vaguely disturbing. I'm having a little trouble pinning down exactly why it bothers me, but I'm going to try.

I generally see religion from the outside. My personal views are on the atheistic side of agnostic, filtered through a non-observant Jewish heritage, a relationship of varying intensity with the not-exactly-Pagan Reformed Druids of North America, and a brief stay with a fringe group of the Quakers.

A number of deeply religious people, mostly Christian, have mentioned that they feel out of place in fandom. They feel misunderstood, and even stereotyped. "I'm not that kind of Christian", they say, and I'm sure they're right. They don't like having the unbelievers lumping them in with the right-wing, Bible-thumping nut cases, and they don't like having their noisier and less tolerant bretheren accusing them of not being "true Christians" and lumping them in with us unbelievers.

Welcome to the club. You're experiencing, in a very mild form, what the rest of us feel every moment in the mundane world.

A lot of us got into fandom precisely because it's a community where reason is encouraged, and faith is suspect. Where, if only for a weekend, we can get away from a society in which religion is almost universal, and atheists are pitied, despised, and marginalized. A world where religious beliefs are enshrined in law, from Iran to South Dakota, and where a politician can stand up and say in public that he doesn't think atheists should be citizens, and not have to apologize for it.

A Christian sees that comic and, I imagine, feels something familiar; a bit of sympathy for a shared experience. I see it, and see only a reminder of how profoundly different I am from most of the society I live in.

I'm afraid this has turned into something of a rant; sorry about that. I should shut up and go to bed now.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yaknow what gets me about that comic? He feels the un-acceptance, and he can't find it within himself to do anything about it. Fandom, and filkdom in particular, goes out of its way to be accepting... and along the way we've amassed enough cool points to, say, make something like Serenity happen. Here in Seattle you'll find that kind of acceptance at something with a steeple on top of it; you won't find it in South Dakota.

I think it is that if you want to be accepted by fen, you have to be accepting of fen. (Order of St. Chiros, anyone?)

(I've way more thoughts than time... )

[mdlbear]

It occurs to me that fandom may very well be the first place some Christians encounter religious prejudice. Not surprising that they don't know how to deal with it.