Scapegoat alert.(Rethinking Religion)(emotions and perceptions).   

PETER ZVAGULIS, A BRILLIANT LATVIAN MEDIA SPECIALIST AND CHRISTIAN ethicist, has developed a system of Early Warning Markers for measuring the intensity of hate speech that can lead to violence and genocide. He helps us name hate speech when it happens, and works to prevent its effectiveness. He studied Nazi propaganda in the Third Reich in Germany, pre-genocide propaganda in Rwanda, and hate propaganda in the former Yugoslavia. In all three cases the methods of propaganda manipulation "resembled each other in their main characteristics and components.... The Tutsi ethnic group became for the Hutu extremists what the Jews were for the Nazis: scapegoats to blame for everything and an easy cover for the increasingly authoritarian concentration of power in the hands of the leadership.... Even an African version of The Protocols of Zion was created."

Zvagulis's goal is to apply his diagnostic tool in his native Latvia, to prevent hostility between ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians there. His results have direct application to the United States; desperate politicians trying to polarize our electorate as we approach next November's elections could threaten us with hate speech and code words against Muslims.

In all three cases, "The density of the new content loaded into the collective unconscious was achieved by consistent and repeated use of a set of core codewords, symbols, associated images, and popular themes." These were "based on an instinctive emotional response to seemingly threatening social conditions."

The propaganda turned frustrations such as a sense of disempowerment and loss of social identity--especially because of the high unemployment rate among young men and economic deprivation--into blame and hate toward a target group. It stimulated hateful thinking by arousing "two very powerful emotions: fear and anger." These emotions are more powerful than logical, cognitive demonstration of the untruth of the propaganda; to counter them we have to get at the causes of fear and anger.

Similarly, the highly respected neuroscientist Drew Westen has just published a powerfully insightful book that all spiritual progressives should read: The Political Brain. From fascinating neurological research, Westen knows, more than almost anyone, how our brains work. He says what Zvagulis says: our emotions shape what we perceive more powerfully than rationalistic, value-neutral, detached, positivistic thinking. If I were running for president, I would rush to hire Westen as my strategist and speechwriter.

I write as an evangelical Christian. (There are varieties of evangelicals. I plea, dear reader, that you not stereotype us all under one label. I am planning a column soon on some self-corrections, some kinds of repentance that we evangelicals need.) One strength some evangelicals have is that we have not succumbed to the "Enlightenment myth" that our faith should be only rationalistic and should avoid all emotion. We believe people are sinners, and we need conversion. We believe there is a healthy place for passion and emotion in our faith. If repentance for wrong and gratitude to God aren't worth a little feeling, what is? Since emotion shapes perception more powerfully than purely rational cognition does, to combat hate speech we need strong emotional loyalties to the best in our faith traditions. If I, as an evangelical, can contribute just a bit to spiritual progressives, I offer a plea to not think we are so hyper-rational that we must look down our noses at calls for passionate conversion from sinful hate to faithful compassion, and even a radical loyalty to love your enemy and pray for them (Matthew 5:43-48). I'm passionate about that.

Zvagulis uses Rene Girard's mimetic theory with its Scapegoat Mechanism, and James W. McClendon's thesis that people's perceptions are shaped by their "community of reference." If the propaganda arouses enough hate, it "corrupts the power structures. The normal political rules no longer apply; political shortcuts appear instead of the regular political processes.... With the society in crisis, the identity of individuals as members of that society becomes less and less secure. They start looking for opportunities that provide them with a new identity." They join a group that promises a new identity and a group defense against the perceived enemy.

Because the strongest moral defenses are rooted in community membership and community virtue, faith communities "have a strong potential for sustaining and promoting a hate-speech-resisting environment." Sociologists tell us that evangelical churches and more conservative Jewish synagogues often have a stronger sense of group membership and identity than churches and synagogues whose faith has been thinned and diluted by Enlightenment rationalism. Therefore, these faith communities can give the sense of community membership that is a bulwark against ideologies of hate--if these communities are clear that loving your neighbor and being faithful to biblical teachings of compassion and justice are essential to our identity. We all have a huge stake in not denigrating and stereotyping evangelicals and faithful Jews--or Muslims--but in encouraging us all to be faithful to our scriptural teachings of justice and compassion.

And something analogous is true of our sense of American identity. For strong historical reasons, many spiritual progressives have been reluctant to speak in nationalistic terms. I have experienced this in my own Anabaptist tradition and my family's memory of pre-fascist German nationalism that we emigrated from. Many of us have our own ethnic memories of dangerous persecution based in nationalistic ideologies. But we also have strong family memories of seeking and finding freedom from religious persecution in the United States. Our families fled from nationalistic, authoritarian, and militaristic societies to find human rights, the right to religious liberty, and acceptance of our yearning to breathe free in the United States. (Not all minorities found this. We remember especially the original "immigrants," Native Americans, and the forced immigrants, African Americans. These minorities still struggle for a society of human rights, liberty, and justice for all, hoping to see a step or two in that direction one day. We all know we yearn for a society with human rights rather than militarism and propagandized polarization. So we rightly distinguish gratitude for a political system that pledges "liberty and justice for all" from militaristic and racist nationalism. We have a patriotism of human rights that is a bulwark against jingoistic nationalism.

What Zvagulis finds is that membership in a community with a commitment to human rights for all is a strong defense against propaganda-manipulated hate and polarization. Similarly, David Gushee's Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust found that non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Holocaust usually had some healthy patriotic loyalty to a vision of society with human rights for all.

In 1969, when Louisville had become the first city in the South to pass an open-housing law against racist exclusionary real estate practices, I was leaving for a research position at Harvard. We were purposefully about to rent our home to the Dean of Students at Kentucky State University and his African American family. One of my white neighbors came to talk me out of it. I knew he saw himself as a patriotic American because I often saw him flying his American flag. I said, "Jim, this is the United States of America; we stand for liberty and justice for all. This is 1969, we have decided against that kind of racial prejudice." Jim was quiet. He had no response. He ceased his objections. And no other neighbor made any objections. Being American is not all bad, particularly if we define our patriotic membership not in terms of making wars, but in human rights for all. Group membership can be a strong defense against exclusionary hate.

American Muslim immigrants tell me they have found jobs, relative freedom, and human rights in the United States. And with our country's religious liberty, their community members are Muslims because they identify, not because they are coerced. It is a better kind of Islam. So they think there's a reason why mosques in the United States would reject an imam who preached hate, and why the FBI cannot find any al Qaeda cells in this country. Our strongest defense against terrorism is not making wars against Muslim countries; it is our tradition of human rights.

Hate and fear are based in a sense of powerlessness, victimization, and relative economic deprivation. A just peacemaking strategy is to gather together as communities, affirm we have strength in cooperation, and work together for one another's empowerment and participation in our human-rights society. Abraham Lincoln said it: United we stand; divided we fall.

Glen Harold Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics and Fuller Theological Seminary. He has published a number of books, including Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, Living the Sermon on the Mount, and Kingdom Ethics, which won the Christianity Today award for best book of 2004 in theology or ethics.

Note: Peter Zvagulis' article is "Allowing Space for Peacemaking: Measuring the Intensity and Impact of Hate-Speech," in Ethical Thinking at the Crossroads of European Reasoning, ed. Parush Parushev et al (Prague: International Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007), 173-189.