{"id":21775,"date":"2018-03-11T23:26:28","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T05:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=21775"},"modified":"2018-03-12T15:23:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:23:24","slug":"speakers-confrontation-needed-to-heal-traumatized-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/03\/speakers-confrontation-needed-to-heal-traumatized-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Wheatley lecturers seek path to restore civility"},"content":{"rendered":"
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David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

From left, Gary Mason, Karen Oliveto and Uri Barnea take part in a panel discussion. The moderator at right is the Rev. Matthew Carlton.<\/p><\/div>\n

A Methodist minister from a severely traumatized country warned here last week that America, too, is traumatized.<\/p>\n

The Rev. Gary Mason of Belfast, Northern Ireland, said during the Wheatley Lectures at Rocky Mountain College that those who want to restore civility to public life may have to begin not with their opponents but with people of their own tribe.<\/p>\n

Mason delivered one of three lectures in the series, which honors the memory of Melvin E. Wheatley Jr., who as bishop of the Denver Episcopacy Area from 1972 to 1984 took strong stands for gay rights. The lectures were on the theme \u201cCreating Community in Fracturing Times: Returning Civility to Civil Dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n

All three lecturers had solid grounding in the issue. The Rev. Karen Oliveto, bishop of 400 United Methodist Church congregations in five Western states, including Montana, is the first openly lesbian Methodist bishop.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I enter a church, I don\u2019t know how I\u2019ll be received,\u201d she said during a panel discussion.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

The Rev. Gary Mason goes among the audience during his Wheatley Lecture.<\/p><\/div>\n

The third lecturer was Rabbi Uri Barnea, who was the conductor of the Billings Symphony Orchestra when a beer bottle was tossed through his doorway in 1993. The incident was one of the events that sparked the Not in Our Town movement, which gained Billings national recognition.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo democracy can survive without the will of its members to sacrifice,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mason was the minister of a Belfast church where two Northern Ireland paramilitary groups announced in 2009 that they were laying down their weapons. The announcements helped cool what Mason called an 800-year conflict in the region resulting from a toxic mix of a nationalistic religion and a nationalistic identity.<\/p>\n

The conflict flared from 1969 to 1998, costing 4,000 lives. As a percentage of the population, that would have been equivalent to 800,000 deaths in the United States, more than were killed in the Civil War. In addition, Northern Ireland during that period had the U.S. equivalent of 6.4 million political prisoners, Mason said.<\/p>\n

America has had its share of trauma, too, Mason said in a panel discussion, including its unresolved racial conflicts over America\u2019s historical treatment of blacks and Indians.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>\u201cHow do we move from being prisoners of history to being prisoners of hope?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

One way, he said, is to face differences squarely rather than trying to paper over them.<\/p>\n

\u201cReconciliation presupposes confrontation,\u201d he said. That includes confrontation with those who at least ostensibly share one\u2019s own beliefs.<\/p>\n

For example, the evils of Nazi Germany had their roots in centuries of contempt of Christians toward Jews, he said, including formation of the first ghettos.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Germans didn\u2019t discard the past,\u201d he said. \u201cThey built upon it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most church members, he said, don\u2019t have guns in their hands, but they may have guns in their hearts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was words, not machines, that created Auschwitz,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Oliveto, whose lecture opened the two-day series, laid out the case for the decline in civil discourse. She said America has seen in recent years an increase in provincialism, a tightening of borders and boundaries and a sharp increase in bullying both online and in schools. Fifty-two percent of teenagers agree that a little violent behavior is OK to release tension, she said.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, we see chasms instead of community in America, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is an empathy deficit in our nation,\u201d she said. That includes the criminalization of homelessness and a state of race relations in which whites pretend they live in a post-racial society and black men are caught in a \u201ccradle to prison pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re living in a world where love is in short supply,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She repeated the words of Mahatma Gandhi, who said that poverty is the worst form of violence, and the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who said that the most segregated hour in America is in church on Sunday morning. She updated King\u2019s remark to say that the most segregated time in America may now be the lunch hour.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe eat with people we love,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is how community starts.\u201d While she hoped we might all learn to stay at the table together, she warned against quick solutions. The older one gets, she said, the grayer the gray areas become.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpirituality encourages hard questions, not easy answers,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She lamented that evangelical churches in the United States have been co-opted by the presidency of Donald Trump, who got about 80 percent of the evangelical vote in the 2016 election despite a history of public insults, private misbehavior and contempt for other races and cultures. Evangelical Christians now support policies that demean us, she said.<\/p>\n

In his lecture, Barnea emphasized ways to create community with those who may disagree with us. First, one must acknowledge the humanity of one\u2019s opponents by staying calm and listening. Second, encourage dialogue rather than trying to shut up the other; and third, remain civil and respectful.<\/p>\n

He ended his lecture by quoting a first-century rabbi who said, \u201cLove thy neighbor as thyself. All the rest is commentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

One problem with events like the lecture series, Barnea said in a panel discussion, is that speakers talk mostly to the choir \u2013 to people who already are committed to civil discourse. He urged about 75 listeners to take an active role in overcoming the \u201cprecarious times\u201d in which we live.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica must not become a nation of onlookers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mason said that the peace process in Northern Ireland was spurred not by politicians but by political prisoners who wanted to make something useful of their lives. He related a story of three boys who grew up together in Belfast in the 1960s. One died of a bullet wound to the back; one spent 18 years in prison; the third became a Methodist minister \u2013 Mason himself.<\/p>\n

He attributed his survival less to advanced spiritual development than to the \u201ctheology of luck.\u201d The 30,000 people who went to prison during the unrest were victims of bad religion and bad politics, he said, estimating that 85 percent of them never would have gone to prison if they had grown up in another city.<\/p>\n

Peace eventually came because of Christians who realized that \u201cfaith without risk is not faith at all\u201d and were willing to step into the public arena.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where people of faith need to be \u2013 spilling into the messy public space,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Now the key is to permanently get past the divisions that led to the conflict in the first place, Mason said. He cited an Irish historian who said, \u201cI think we should build a monument to amnesia in Ireland and then forget where we put it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He suggested a similar response to the current American debate over what to do with monuments to Confederate soldiers who waged war against the United States. His advice was to do nothing at all for two years, until there has been time for a serious and substantive debate. Otherwise, he said, the discussion will simply get lost in the \u201cverbal hand grenades\u201d of cable news.<\/p>\n

All three lecturers saw a role for religion in restoring civil discourse in America.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a Christian country whether you admit it or not,\u201d Barnea said. He added, \u201cReligion is part of our lives, and we have to deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Oliveto said that in the Western states many people do not have trust in religion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to earn it by showing up in places of conflict,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Mason said people have hated in the name of the God of love, citing a line from Jonathan Swift, who said we have enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love another.<\/p>\n

He added a quotation from C.S. Lewis: \u201cWhen Christianity doesn\u2019t make man very much better, it makes man very much worse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Methodist minister from a severely traumatized country warned here last week that America, too, is traumatized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":21776,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[6782,6783,333,866,6837],"class_list":["post-21775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-gary-mason","tag-karen-oliveto","tag-rocky-mountain-college","tag-uri-barnea","tag-wheatley-lectures","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21775"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21785,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21775\/revisions\/21785"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}