Sunday, September 18, 2016

Respect: Conviction vs. Submission

I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school as a kid. I made my First Communication, got confirmed, all of it. Then, in high school, when I was at mass (which usually meant only when we had mass during school hours), I stopped going to communion. I had come to the realization that I didn't believe in communion; I wasn't sure about whether God existed; and while I believed a man named Jesus had existed, I didn't believe he was God. So, because I had been told that nonbelievers and non-churchgoers were not supposed to take communion, I stopped taking communion. My mom questioned me about it. I saw whispering and shocked facial expressions around me. I was told I was self-centered. And so on.

The thing that I think so many Catholic folks around me did not understand is that I did this out of respect. I took what I had been taught seriously, and I didn't want to make a mockery of their religion by partaking in their practice when I shouldn't have done so. It would have been easy just to go along with everything and keep going to communion. I would have just gone through the motions, finished out my days in Catholic school, and moved on. I knew people who were doing exactly that. But I had been told how meaningful this was to Catholics, and so I wanted to respect their beliefs and their religion, and so I stopped taking communion.

To this day, I get frustrated when I see religious folks -- and in the United States, that largely means Christian folks -- seeking to impose their practices on others, whether those are practices involving birth control, sexuality, expression of belief in God, or any number of other things. It's as if they don't want people to respect their religion; they simply want people to submit to it. Not only does that run counter to my understandings of how liberties in a democracy are supposed to work; it disrespects their own religion as it takes away opportunity for others to respect it.

As I have seen recent discourse surrounding protests during the national anthem at sports events, beginning with and emanating most heavily from the protest actions taken by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, I see something similar happening. I see folks mandating that everyone stand for the playing of the national anthem, often out of what is a problematic appeal to support for the military. It would be easy for Colin Kaepernick to just go along with common practice and stand. That would take no courage and little if any conviction. As Abraham Khan put it so well, the argument for standing to support the military is not the courageous one here; rather, Kaepernick's stance is. Kaepernick chooses to protest, and what so many of critics fail to see is what I think folks failed to see when I stopped going to communion. While those critics argue that Kaepernick's actions are disrespectful, his actions are quite the opposite. He is showing respect for the national anthem by investing it with enough meaning to protest during it. If he really didn't respect it, he wouldn't care and he wouldn't do anything. He'd likely just go along with standing for the anthem rather than expressing his convictions. Like religious folks who would rather people do things out of submission rather than conviction, Kaepernick's critics want him to put aside conviction and simply submit to the action of standing for the anthem. Those critics want submission, not respect, and so disrespect is occurring, but it's Kaepernick's critics, not Kaepernick who are doing it.