I retired for several reasons, but one of them was so that I could work more. I love visiting campuses and classes (it’s teaching without the grading), doing podcasts, and writing. I think I wrote five or six contributions to book collections this year, visited three or four classes, and gave two or three workshops. I made a lot of progress on a new book. That’s what I wanted to do with my retirement. If anything, I’d like more class visits, workshops, contributed chapters, and lectures than I had this year. I’m saying this just to be clear that I don’t object to working, but I object to working when something is supposed to be play.
I signed up for a course that was supposed to be play—about the Inquisition (way out of my area of expertise). It wasn’t play; it was work. The first part of the course was about various heresies in the early Christian church, and it was fascinating, useful, thoughtful, and nuanced. And then we got to the Inquisition. And I dropped the course because it turned into work.
But the way that this class was work is a useful example for something I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining in my writing: how in-group favoritism can seem and feel harmless, since it happens when we’re focused on praising or defending (especially defending) our in-group, and we don’t necessarily mean to do so by denigrating, blaming, or negatively stereotyping some out-group. But it happens. What I have trouble explaining is that in-group favoritism can easily lead into defending the in-group in such a way that problematic in-group behavior gets minimized, redefined, dissociated, and deflected onto the victims, and then it becomes racist.
And that’s what happened in this class. And you see it all the time—people trying to defend Prince Philip end up diminishing (or seeming to justify) his racism, probably out of the impulse to give a very, very old guy a break.[1]
When we admire a person, civilization, or policy of the past, we’re almost certainly admiring something racist, colonialist, misogynist. That’s just how history works. It doesn’t mean that we can’t admire anything or anyone in the past. The false assumption that things (people, institutions, actions) are either good or evil, and that it is an absolute binary—good things are purely good, and anything not purely good is evil—means that we have trouble talking usefully about racism. If we think of racism as an evil, and that no good person has any evil, then we either have to condemn everyone as equally evil, or we have to find ways to say that the in-group wasn’t evil. And so we justify, deflect, and rationalize the racism of people, institutions, or practices that we believe aren’t completely evil.
And then we’re enabling racism.
If we stop thinking about racism as an evil pit in which evil people live, and instead as an unconscious and damaging way that we understand our world, then we can simultaneously say that someone was racist, and that that someone did a lot of good things. We can praise that for the good things, and yet condemn their racism. In other words, condemning racism isn’t condemning a person as a being spit into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—it’s condemning what they’ve said or done. Similarly, condemning an institution for racism isn’t necessarily saying that the institution has never done anything good; it’s saying the institution engaged in racist practices.
And, once we can say and see that someone or some institution we admire has done and said racist things, then we are more open to seeing how we do racist things. And then we can try to be less racist. As long as we refuse to see or acknowledge racism in our in-group, we will not change the actions and beliefs that are racist.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, neither demagoguery nor racism are necessarily intentional—in fact, I think it’s pretty rare that someone believes that they are engaged in demagoguery or being racist and does so anyway.[2] And racism is not about individuals who are consciously hostile to members of other races, or individuals who decide that they will get up today and be racist; it’s often about how in-group favoritism fuels, justifies, or enables us to ignore systemic differential treatment of various groups. It’s about how people only think about this particular policy, person, incident, issue, or case affects us without thinking about how what we’re saying has larger and longer implications and consequences.
And here I should explain briefly about in- and out-groups. In-groups are groups we’re in—they’re groups we use to identify ourselves to others, and whose basic goodness is intermingled with our own. If I believe that my rescuing dogs from shelters is a good thing, then I will think of myself as in the category of people who rescue dogs from shelters—I’ll identify with them, in Kenneth Burke’s terms. And, since I think I’m good for rescuing dogs, then I’m very likely (illogically) to decide that people who rescue dogs are good. (Since I’m good for rescuing dogs, people who rescue dogs are good.) They’re in my in-group, and, if that group is accused of bad behavior, I’ll defend it as vigorously as I’d defend and deflect accusations of bad behavior against me.[3]
That’s what this prof was doing (and what we all do). He was responding to ways that Catholicism has been under attack. And, to be clear, it has. Most of our notions about the torture devices of the Inquisition are 19th and 20th century tourist trap bullshit or anti-Catholic demagoguery. And, like many people defending their in-group, he engaged in textbook in-group favoritism and its attendant deflection and dissociation (in the rhetorical sense, explained below). He over-defended his in-group to the point that he got into very creepy and not okay territory. As do we all. And that is my point in this (very long) post.
Here was his argument about the Inquisition. Initially, the “inquisition” was the first step in someone having been accused of heresy, and it was conducted by the church, and oriented toward persuasion. It only involved “minor” torture (he used that term multiple times), and the vast majority of people expressed sorrow that they had been wrong in their doctrine, and were happy to have been corrected. They were given some minor penance. Only a small percentage were handed over to the secular authorities, who tended toward execution. So “the Church” didn’t execute people; secular authorities did. The Spanish Inquisition was entirely secular authorities. The official position of the Catholic Church was that conversos (Jews who had been forcibly converted or only converted to escape death) could renounce their conversion with no punishment. Many didn’t, and so, when the Spanish Inquisition started—which he was clear was initially completely out of control, and basically a witch hunt—and conversos were particularly victimized, many came forward to prevent being executed, and they blamed their drifting back into Jewish practices on Jews (since they often chose to live in Jewish communities). So, the secular authorities decided that Jews were infecting the state and expelled them. The question of the burning of the Torahs also came up, which he described as, after the initial burning, very minor. As long as authorities didn’t know about the Torahs, they wouldn’t do anything, so, when it happened, it was because another Jew had reported that there was a Torah.
Like much in-group favoritism that drifts into racism, it was thoroughly well-intentioned. He was trying to counter the anti-Catholic demagoguery of the 18th and 19th centuries that created myths we still have about the Inquisition and Catholicism. Richard Hofstadter once said that “anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” and he was right. People opposed to pornography in principle could read descriptions of convents as whorehouses for priests and feel simultaneously pruriently stimulated and self-righteous. Six Months in a Convent and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk were best sellers, after all.
Torture devices attributed to the Inquisition are almost all semi-pornographic (or full-on pornographic) imaginations of Protestants, such as the Iron Maiden (which was never used in the Inquisition). But, there is one device they used (as did the Nazis), the strappado. Since strappado is so horrifying, but I will link to something, and, just all the content warnings. It’s torture. This professor said the strappado was “minor” torture, and that people who were threatened with it were “persuaded.”
So, let’s take seriously what he was claiming (more seriously than he did). If the strappado was minor torture, and someone told, “Agree with me, or we’ll apply the strappado to you” was an object of persuasion and not coercion, then were I to say to him, “I think you’re wrong, so, either agree with me, or I’ll use the strappado against you,” then he would say I persuaded him.
Of course he wouldn’t. But, if he wouldn’t, then his whole argument about the “inquisition” being about persuasion and not coercion collapses.
He could say that people confronted with strappado were facing “minor” torture (and people who were threatened with their holy books being burned was “minor”) because he never imagined himself as the object of that behavior. I want to stop here for a moment, and emphasize this point. He would never have told the story of the Inquisition the same way he did had roles been reversed, and Catholics been treated exactly as Jews and Muslims were. He would never make the claims about the Inquisition had he been the one “persuaded” by the threat of the “minor” torture of the strappado.
In-group favoritism is always a failure of imagination. It means we deflect, dissociate, rationalize, or minimize behavior toward others we would be outraged were that behavior oriented toward us because we are imagining the situation only from the in-group position. We don’t imagine ourselves being the object of in-group action, only the subject.
We are all drawn to defending our in-group, and we therefore do what he did. We minimize the actions of our in-group (strappado was minor), put our behavior in the most favorable possible light (threatening someone with strappado if they don’t confess and renounce their beliefs is “persuasion”), deflect responsibility onto the victims (Jews turned other Jews in—this was an important point for him), engage in the most hair-splitting of rhetorical dissociation (so “the Catholic Church” is not what Catholics, nor Catholic governments do, even if they have officials of the Catholic Church participating, but only [the most rhetorically useful] statements on the part of the Pope).
I want to pause on a point that is easily lost. The Catholic church banned the Torah—he made a big point that Jews were allowed to argue for it not being banned—and so any Jewish community with a Torah had to live in constant fear that they would have their Torah confiscated and burned. He dismissed that condition as minor, and he said a Torah was only burned if a member of the Jewish community reported that there was a Torah.
He may be technically correct that Jews during the Inquisition and throughout the many years of the Torah being prohibited were “turned in” by other Jews. Why make that point? People who want to defend the slaveocracy of the US will often point out that African slaves were initially enslaved by other Africans. Why is that point relevant?
When I’ve asked people, they say, “Well, it’s true.” Well, lots of things are true. It’s also true that the “secular” authorities that engaged in the behavior he wants to deflect and dismiss were Catholic governments, who saw themselves as promoting Catholicism. It’s true that the Catholic church actively venerated the massacres of Jews until the 1960s. Simon of Trent was in the Roman Martyrology until 1965. The cult over the Brussels massacre of Jews was recognized by the Catholic Church until 1968. I could go on. (I could also go on about Protestant abuses of Jews.) It’s also true that conservative white Evangelicals defended slavery (and segregation), and still do.
That some Jews turned in a Jewish community for having a Torah, or that Africans sold other Africans into slavery has no relevance to the question of whether Catholics persecuted Jews or Americans bought slaves. Nor do those facts make the persecution of Jews or American slavery any less appalling and immoral than they were.
So why did he emphasize it?
People who are irrationally committed to defending the in-group shift the question of “did our in-group do this bad thing” to “are we, and we alone, responsible for the tragic consequences of our behavior?” And then we try to find other groups on whom we can fling some of the blame, as though that’s relevant. It isn’t. Whether Catholics who banned and burned Torahs were sometimes assisted by Jews doesn’t change that Catholics banned and burned Torahs. Whether Africans sometimes sold other Africans into slavery doesn’t change that Americans are entirely responsible for American slavery.
What if looking at history wasn’t about defending our in-group, but about understanding what happened? What if the question was one about rhetoric? Instead of trying to deflect, dissociate, and diminish the bad behavior of our in-group, what would it be like if we instead asked a question about rhetoric: how did our in-group–which we want to believe is good–get persuaded into doing that bad thing?
And then we don’t have to blame Jews for Torahs getting burned or Africans for US slavery. We don’t have to have a contest about Protestants v. Catholics in terms of bad behavior. We don’t have to call behavior “minor” that we would be outraged were it to happen to us. We can acknowledge that being a member of our in-group doesn’t guarantee that we’re right. We can be part of the vexed, complicated, and unclear world of doing wrong when we don’t mean to, of failing to think from the perspective of others.
Just to be clear: I think the professor is a very good man, and a great scholar, and almost everything he said was (technically) true—except calling strappado minor torture. That’s just false. Setting aside that (kind of horrifying) rationalization of Catholic practices, I’ll say that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he genuinely had very good friends who are Jews, and he would be outraged, I think, at the implication that he was even mildly anti-semitic. He was very clear that the treatment of Jews under Torquemada was appalling, and he didn’t defend the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at all. He is not hostile to Jews; he doesn’t want Jews expelled from anywhere; he doesn’t want Jews tortured. He’s just very invested in defending Catholicism.
So, I’m not writing about him because I think he is a terrible person—I think he’s a good person. He’s a careful scholar, and a dynamic teacher, and working hard to combat anti-Catholic demagoguery.[4] What I’m saying is that he is us.
We like to imagine that racism is a self-conscious hostility to members of another race, but I think it’s most often in-group defensiveness. People who refuse to think that policing might be racist are more interested in defending an in-group (white police officers) than they are in deliberately promoting violence against non-whites. Regardless of the intention, defending the police to the extent that it involves a refusal to acknowledge racist policing means defending racist policing. People who are committed Lutherans, Republicans, Democrats, vegans, second-wave feminists who are more interested in defending Lutherans, Republicans, and so than we are in trying to make our in-group less racist are racist.
Being Catholic, Republican, or supporting the police doesn’t mean you’re racist. Defending Catholics, Republics, or the police doesn’t make you racist. Being Protestant, Democrat, or criticizing the police doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Supporting our in-group by deflecting or diminishing our in-group racism is racist.
It doesn’t matter if our in-group is gun owners, Lutherans, vegetarians, Texans, Democrats, Christians, dog-lovers, or anything else. Being right means admitting we’ve been wrong. It means not deflecting, dissociating, and minimizing about how our in-group has been very wrong.
The irony of this very good, and I think very devout, Christian promoting narratives that defend his in-group (Catholics) at the expense of his non-in-group (Jews) and his out-group (Protestants) is that he is, as are we all, rejecting what Christ said. He is a good scholar, but he’d be a better one, and we’d all be better people, were we to take seriously: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
[1] Instead of refusing to call him racist, or pretend he didn’t say racist things, it would have made more sense just to say, “Yeah, racist.”
[2] I’m saying rare just because I don’t like all or never statements, but I honestly can’t think of a time. Even racists like David Duke or Adolf Hitler insisted that they were being realists, not racists.
[3] If I slip from believing that adopting surrendered dogs is a good thing to believing that adopting surrendered dogs is what good people do, then I’ll start to denigrate people who do something else, like get dogs from responsible breeders. That’s a different post.
[4] Which, oddly enough, still exists. For reasons to complicated to explain, I recently ran across work by a major figure among fundagelicals who gets lots of churches to support his work to spread “Christianity,” oriented entirely at Catholic areas.