Tribal Bible

Several years ago I watched a PBS documentary about the declining number of abortion clinics in the South. The filmmakers interviewed the clinic operators, who bemoaned the community pressure to close the clinics, and filmed (but didn’t interview, as I recall) the protestors outside one of the clinics.

As I watched, I realized how “tribal” personal philosophy often is---all the operators of the clinic were college-educated, sophisticated, well-spoken white women with whom I would have felt fairly comfortable at a social gathering---professional women like the ones I went to college with.

The women protesting outside looked the stereotype of a Deep South Christian fundamentalist—also white, with big hair, Southern drawls and lacking evident erudition (they were yelling things to the young, mostly black women entering the clinic, things like, “Can you hear your baby? She’s saying, Mommy, please don’t kill me!”).

It struck me that, in background, culture and education, I was much more like the clinic operators than the protesters. But in belief, ideology, and “world view”, I was becoming much more like the women outside the clinic, with whom I probably had very little in common culturally.

I was becoming an apostate of the elitist “tribe” that convinces itself that a female’s need for personal comfort and economic security is paramount--far more important than the life of a child, or a woman's own unrecognized need for a moral anchor in a modern sea of unprincipled relativity .

To which tribe would you rather belong, the class-based one, or the ideologically-based one?

Perhaps none of us feel as though we belong to the former type: we’re certain that we've chosen to associate with people based on their ideas and world view, not their similar social class. And, since like backgrounds and experiences often generate comparable political beliefs, it’s not surprising when world view and social class coincide---just painful for those of us who lose friends when we challenge tribal ideology.  Is it equally painful for those who remain in the tribe?  Not painful enough, it seems to me, for extant members to examine and defend their beliefs to the apostate.

The usual response, in my experience, is strained politeness and topic avoidance---unpleasant, but petty compared to the risks undertaken by those who leave the tribe of Islam---a religion that dictates not only spiritual beliefs, but political, commercial and social actions as well.

God bless those brave souls trying to reform Islam from within--modern day Martin Luthers such as Dr. Zuhdi Jasser or Irshad Manji.  May their tribe increase!