Beyond Bigotry

‘Why’, she wanted to know, in a Church of England school, were we studying Bangladesh?’  I confess that it was with a touch of smugness that I explained to her that Christians believed that God made Bangladesh as well as England.   And in that smug superiority lost a moment where I could have tried to communicate something of the gospel.

 Teachers who choose to work in multicultural inner cities tend to be Guardiansista lefty types who view white working class racism with the disdain that the first century Jews felt towards Samaritans.  I certainly could not wait to rush to the staff room to amuse and horrify my colleagues with the tail of her bigoted ignorance.   But gradually, over the years, I’ve realised that I am no stranger to ignorance nor bigotry. I’m just racist about white working class people, which seems to be more socially acceptable.

 She felt that her country had betrayed her and her kind.  She lived in rubbish housing, her children had no jobs and no prospects and the familiar culture she had grown up in was dying. All her neighbours were Bangladeshi, the butchers were all halal, the shops run by Asians, her street had been renamed with some foreign Muslim name, surely the Church of England for heaven sake, would be the one safe place where her identity would be safe? And here we were teaching her children all about ‘their’ country.  If we had to teach about somewhere foreign, couldn’t it be about somewhere ‘neutral’, somewhere less close to home’?

 It is, after all, quite natural to feel confused and bewildered if your familiar surroundings suddenly change dramatically in ways that are not of your choosing.  Not that that condones racism, but it does begin to explain her fear.  She wanted the church to be a totem of white working class cultural values, with god on her side, protecting her.

 And isn’t that more or less where we all start, with a little tribal god looking after you and yours.  And then, like the Israelites, over a very long time we make the journey from ‘my god’s better than your god’ to simply God, the God of everyone and beyond everyone, the cultural property of none of us.

 So I could have had a conversation with her about what she thought the church was for and what I thought it was for, and I could have suggested we look at how Jesus changes how we think about God, but I took cheap shots at her instead.