Good Friday - my annual perplexity [View all]

[yardwork]

Note: This post isn't really about religion. It's about the long-standing misconceptions, hypocrisies and gaslighting that is woven into our nation's culture. These fallacies led directly to the January 6 insurrection and many other terrible events in our history.

I grew up in the rural midwest in the mid-20th century. My community was a homogenous culture made up almost entirely of white Christians, mostly fundamentalist Protestants, including a significant number of rather extreme sects.

Every year on Good Friday, which was not a holiday, the schools were full of the annual accusation that "Jews killed our Lord." This made no sense to me on multiple levels. My understanding was that Jesus willingly sacrificed himself in order to assuage the sins of humanity and assure our passage to heaven. Without this willing sacrifice, the plot doesn't move forward. The whole point revolves around the willing - albeit initially reluctant - self sacrifice. Therefore, our Lord killed our Lord. And on the practical level, it was the Romans who carried out the execution, and they were pagan (later Christian). So the Jews in Jerusalem (who didn't in any case represent all Jewish people, any more than the scary white inhabitants of New York City represented all white people in the minds of the fearful white rural citizens of my childhood), seem to have played a minor role in the whole thing. (Other than the fact that Jesus himself was Jewish, which would seem to elevate the status of Jews, if anything.)

Nonetheless, anti-Semitism and bizarrely irrational accusations against Jewish people persist today, especially in predominately white fundamentalist rural communities in the U.S.

Many members of those communities weren't rational 50 years ago and they're not rational now. They cling to their hateful and fearful beliefs even when they make no rational sense. Their fears and resentment are skillfully exploited by marketers, politicians and other hucksters. Our democracy might not survive this level of meanness, gullibility, and intellectual laziness.