The Limits of Dialogue

A long time ago I was driving in Kuala Lumpur and as I came around a corner in a quiet neighborhood I found a man beating a woman on the side of the road. He and she belonged to an ethno/linguistic/religious culture in which I have some expertise and much experience. For that reason in a heartbeat an entire cross-cultural / interreligious dialogue played out in my mind.

I would tell him to stop. He we would tell me that his religion and culture allow him to physically chastise a disobedient wife. I would suggest that he was misinterpreting his sacred texts, and that well-known scholars of his religion and culture would say otherwise. He would assert that he preferred to trust God's Word to a group of academics. 

My fallback plan would be to point out that what he was doing was against the law. He would assert that God's law was more important than human laws. 

I would appeal to his battered wife, but she was likely to tell me to mind my own business. Or to be too frightened of him to say anything at all. 

Finally I would tell him that if he didn't stop I would stop him. He would point out that for me, an American, to tell him how to behave in his own country was the height of colonialist behavior. He might even use a few choice indigenous terms for Americans/Europeans. How would I answer that? 

In the event this dialogue never took place. I got out of my car and told him to stop. He told me to mind my own business. I physically threatened him. He relented and let go of his wife, who ran to my car. I asked her where she wanted to go and we went there, leaving him on the side of the road. 

This kind of thing has happened to me a few times in my life. Once I picked up a young man who had been injured in a motorcycle wreck out in the country. No one would take him to the hospital, or accompany me to the hospital and care for him as I drove. They were afraid of evil spirits if he died. So I verbally intimidated one of them until he came along in the car to the nearest hospital. He was scared. It was a long 60 minute drive with my newly recruited assistant moaning about unclean spirits, possession by the monkey god, and so on. In the end the boy survived and I paid for a taxi to take his friend back to his village. 

Another time I rescued a truck driver who accidentally knocked over a motorcyclist who tried to pass him on the right. The cyclist was okay, but the gang of boys with him had every intention of doing some harm to the truck driver. So I stood them down and took to the driver to the local police. My actions were a clear intervention and violation of local custom. I was siding with the servant of a big corporation over relatively powerless local workers. 

I could go on. My point is simply that there comes a time when dialogue over.  Despite cultural differences, integrity, power structures, colonialism and so on dialogue comes to an end because human lives are more valuable than anything else. They are the only thing that is actually sacred, and thus their preservation is of greater importance than any scripture and any religious teaching and any claim to know God's will. That it what we learn from Christ. 

This doesn't save us from complex moral and ethical decisions where saving one life means abandoning another. Nor does it remove the reality of moral ambiguity in the midst of complex structures of power that makes it impossible to tell who is innocent and who is guilty. It simply gives us a basis for making decisions when it comes down to the preservation of human lives.  

Today I read in the Religious News Service that many African church leaders, and some United Methodist leaders, have chosen to support laws that criminalize LGBTQ personhood and to affirm actions that cause death and physical harm to these persons. African Leaders and LGBTQ Rights In my view these bishops are no different from the man beating his wife on the side of the road. They are no different from the vigilantes ready to kill a man they think is guilty. And when they are silent they are no better than the bystanders waiting for the death of an accident victim. 

If these reports are true there can be no further dialogue. Only whatever effort is possible to save human lives. Respect sometimes means crediting leaders with a humanity they have not yet discovered by refusing to engage them any further until they repent and cease attacking that which is sacred.