If I were to choose another city in the world to call my home, it would be Vancouver. It’s not just the incredible beauty of the sea to sky setting, but also the diversity of its population and culture. So I was saddened to read this morning of the tension created in the city by the proposed visit of Franklin Graham. A large group of Christian leaders have written an open, graciously worded letter to the organisation planning the event and to Graham himself, asking for the visit to be cancelled or for the speaker not to use the occasion to stir up racial and homophobic hatred, and not to portray ‘the election, administration and policies of the US President Trump as intrinsically aligned with the Christian Church’. I am impressed by the unity of these Christian leaders across the spectrum – Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Mennonite, United Church of Canada and many other smaller denominations. The authors have been condemned in the right wing press as ‘liberal’, but the group covers a wide spectrum of Christian beliefs, including many evangelical churches.
There are many reasons Vancouver Christians may not wish not to have Graham speaking in the city, but the one that struck me this morning was Graham’s advice to Christians to exclude LBQT young people from their homes and gay people from their churches. He does so by instilling fear – allow these people in, he suggests, and they will surely lead you away from your faith, for they are the enemy and their purpose is to destroy your family, your church and even your faith. It is interesting to reflect on the type of faith that can be so easily affrighted.
For here is the thing about fear – fear can paralyse us, blind us and inhibit us. It’s physiological. The threat centre of our brain has evolved to protect us against things that may actually harm us. It developed at a time when we were surrounded by physical threat the moment we left the warmth of our fire and stepped outside our cave. We face very little physical threat in our modern lives, but our parasympathetic nervous system is still aroused by the unknown, the different, and the complex. Our muscles tense, our heart beats faster and our blood pressure increases - all of which is helpful if we need to run or hide from a predator. But the body cannot manage too many processes at once, so while our parasympathetic nervous system is fully engaged, our higher order thinking shuts down, as does our digestion.
We all experience irrational fear – I jump every time I see the garden hose snaking through the long grass, but in a moment that all important freeze, fight or flight reaction subsides, my reason returns and I recognise it is just a piece of harmless hose. But what if someone in a position of authority, someone I trusted, someone who used selected passages from the Bible told me never to go near the long grass because that’s where dangerous snakes hang out?
Engaging curiosity to work through our fear is so important for our wellbeing; it’s a wise approach to our daily encounter with the new, the different, the perplexing. That wisdom is deep in our human folklore, peopled as it is with dragons and other scary things that turn out, once approached and loved, to be harmless.
I find it hard to believe that anyone who sits with, works with and entertains the ‘other’ in a spirit of respectful curiosity can continue to discriminate or call into question the integrity of another human being based purely on difference. Recently, a transgender young person said to me, ‘How can anyone believe I am just making this up, that I am just following a fashion? Why would someone voluntarily put themselves through this?’ Just this week, I sat with a gay Christian who told me through her tears that she would never have chosen this for herself because of the agony caused by the censure she received from her church, but that recently she had reached an acceptance that this was how God had made her and that for her to deny her orientation would be dishonouring to the God who made her.
We all love certainty. Situations where the choice is clear are so much more comfortable. Yet the world we live in in not orderly, not black and white, but messy, complex and colourful. The wise way to approach it, I suggest, is with curiosity:
‘I find the fact that humans are curious creatures profoundly moving. Curiosity has a redemptive quality; it challenges us to think creatively about the world around us, It encourage us be tolerant of things we don’t yet understand and even of things we’ll never understand. Curiosity tempts us to make mistakes and to try again; moreover curiosity encourages us to share discovery and information; interests and goals and this curiosity encourages us to be more generous.’[1]
Maybe Graham should be welcome in Vancouver, maybe Trump should be allowed on a state visit to the UK. I don’t fear either of them, but I am curious. How do these movements grow? What feeds intolerance? What stokes the fires of stigma and discrimination? Understanding is a long way off for me, I must confess. Time to practice a bit more curiosity.
[1] Astrid Alben on Radio 4’s Four Thought 22/02/2017