Reverend Terry may want to live in an America full of mirrors, but Mark Greene sure doesn’t.
A few nights ago in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Rev. Dennis Terry introduced Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum by saying the following:
“I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation…There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, If you don’t love America, If you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say – GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”
You can see the video here:
The reverend is not a man who believes in diversity. He is not a man who accepts that others’ views are different but equally valuable. He is not a man who is willing to live among mixed ideologies. He is a strident voice representing a vocal minority in America. Let me be clear, most Americans do not agree with him. What the reverend Terry wants is an America full of mirrors. He wants an America where every person reflects back to him his world view and his values. The fact that there are people who think and live in ways that do not align with his values is unacceptable to him.
I, for one, can only pity the reverend. If I had to live in a self-imposed bubble, surrounded only by people whose cultural, sexual and social experiences mirrored mine, I would probably shoot myself. Seriously. Bang. Because a world where everyone is just like me would not be worth living in. It would be a place of stagnation and decay. A place of tedium and droning repetition. An echo chamber. A dead place.
But more importantly, human beings will never conform to any one set of ideas or values. We are the human race. We surf change. It is in our blueprint to live in a state of constant change and revision. We are designed to shift into new ways of being and seeing. Our DNA guarantees that. It is our greatest asset as a species that we are not uniform in our approach to life. It is our greatest hope that we continually reassess and revise our own view of the cosmos.
The human race is an amazing magical party. Each of us is invited. Those who choose to lock themselves away in their own insular world are missing out on the true joy of being human: that we can discover the divine in the vast range of human experience. So grab your copy of the Bible, or the Qur’an, or the Tropic of Cancer and dive in. Because we’re all in this together.
And reverend? That stuff about how everyone has to be like you? Don’t worry about all that. Cause, honey, that’s just the fear talking.