If you don’t follow Nathan Pyle, you really should. His output is fantastic. He is the creator of the Strange Planet webcomic. He often captures something in a particularly pithy way. One of my favourite of his cartoons is this one:

Pyle said the following about this drawing:

when I drew this, I wanted the eagle to call him “mr. mouse” to indicate that the eagle actually knew the mouse, as opposed to “the owl” pic.twitter.com/fpLeOn9k8a

— Nathan W Pyle (@nathanwpyle) August 19, 2018

I love it because it neatly encapsulates a problem that we run into all the time. I would be surprised if you have not been involved in conversations of this sort yourself. This sort of facile opinion is everywhere.

I have most regularly run into this mode of thinking when it comes to discussing matters of class or race in the church. If and when I am ever invited to speak about one of these things (usually class or church in deprived places like Oldham both of which incorporate matters of race) I can almost write the script of what will happen.

I will be told by people from the dominant (usually white middle class) culture that these things really aren’t issues anymore. Or, if there is any recognition they might be an issue somewhere, they certainly aren’t an issue here. Nobody in this church would treat anybody any differently at all and raising these sorts of issues is incredibly divisive. We just take people as we find them. Everybody is equally welcome. We don’t do anything that might lead people to feel othered, as less important or any less able to be recognised as leadership candidates or any such thing. I’ve certainly never experienced anything of the like and nobody has ever treated me differently in any way.

It is almost inevitable, if there are any such people present at all, working class and ethnic minority people in that same church will thank me for raising these things and affirm they have experienced most of what is described. They will be grateful that someone is giving voice to their experience and that they have been seen. It often brings a level of hope that being made aware might lead to some, albeit small, changes. I tend not to tell them about the other conversations I’ve already had before they came to speak to with me!

The kind of ‘it’s never bothered me’ attitude so nearly encapsulated in Nathan Pyle’s cartoon often underlies a couple of other issues. For some, it is simply an unwillingness to inconvenience themselves about these things. Because it doesn’t bother me I have no real impetus to concern myself with the issue. It doesn’t affect me so others must be making a meal of matters. This attitude is a difficult one to address – and is not unique to the areas I outlined above – because we all suffer from it much of the time. I, too, am often lazy or just unconcerned about matters that do not negatively impact me. I am often just selfish that way. It is a sin issue many of us struggle with and needs to be addressed as such.

For others, the ‘it’s never bothered me’ attitude stems from defensiveness. Any suggestion that what ought not to be might actually be cannot be countenanced. Rather than things being sub-optimal and, in some cases, profoundly unjust, it is taken as a personal criticism as though we have purposefully setup systems with the primary goal of injuring and holding back others. We can quickly take it as a personal affront. Given the opportunity, we can address this by making clear that is not what we are saying. I do think the attitude of ‘it’s never bothered me so stop moaning’ is unacceptable, and defensiveness when people point out that the way things are is not ideal is rarely helpful, but if we can just let our guard down a little and hear what is actually being said we might discover that no specific fingers are being pointed at us and we are in a position to make things a bit better.

The way things are is not usually a personal attack. Rarely are we the specific people who set things up this way. Let’s be honest, our majority culture has been decades, even centuries, in the making. The idea that we as individuals are primarily responsible for it is not credible. This is just as true in church cultures. Further, more often than not, where others are being injured by existing systems that is not usually a product of a purposeful desire to damage them so much as an unconscious lack of awareness that has made us blind to the issue. The whole point of raising the issue isn’t to point fingers at anyone, it is to say ‘you may not have noticed or experienced this’. In many ways, we expect the ‘it’s never bothered me’ position because you would be more concerned if it had. What we are addressing, then, is not that this is specifically a fault of yours which you have purposefully setup and perpetuated. It is, however, to make you aware of the reality of the situation so that you might be alive to it and then adjust matters as required knowing now what you previously did not see.

I have always approached invitations to speak on these things in this kind of way. It is not with an assumption that everybody in the room hates working class or ethnic minority people. Rather, it is with the charitable assumption that people may not have noticed how the way things are affects others and in the hope that, when they are made aware of these things, they would actively want to do something about them. There is no point in my coming and raising them otherwise. If I think things are as they are because you hate other people, there is no value in highlighting the ways in which these things present when I believe you are fully aware of them and doing them on purpose! If I didn’t think you were prepared to hear the concerns of brothers and sisters and seek to work for their good in response to them, highlighting ways they are disadvantaged or poorly treated won’t achieve much either because I would imagine you didn’t care. To be frank, I wouldn’t bother coming and speaking on these issues if I thought either of those things.

I assume when I am asked to speak about these things, it is because those asking really do want some help to highlight some of their blind spots. They are aware blind spots might exists and they think (rightly or wrongly) I might be able help them see. I believe that is an honest thing they are doing and I trust, when I highlight these things, they are not taken as a personal affront. They are, instead, just a means of highlighting issues we might not have seen before so that we might be more alive to them and seek to resolve them where appropriate.

There will, of course, be times we raise things about class and race and they really aren’t an issue in this particular place. I might highlight a common issue and it really isn’t a live one in this church. But we will know that and it will be apparent when those who might be affected by it affirm this really is not an issue here. We can praise God for that when and where it is the case. It just bears saying, we cannot content ourselves that it is not a problem here just because people from the majority culture said it never bothered them.