Faith is another area of identity that contributes to a person’s positionality and unconscious bias. As with everything else, the 19th century Western world, separated the religious experience from the scientific, the rational from the irrational. With little regard for the Faith that perceived as an irrational at home, Christianity was used as a weapon during colonisation. Today we label the Other as a Fundamentalist mind set, essentially it is a Colonising mind set, very close to home.
We live in a secular society that has been conditioned to regard all religion/faith as irrational or extreme. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Reith Lecture addresses this concern by asserting that ‘the story of the text is the story of the reader’. Each individual who interprets the text of the Faith is interpreting, based on their positionality and biases which in turn fuels the biases of the observer. He shows through his own lived experience two very different faiths coming together and existing side by side. “To be loyal to your god, you need not revile the god of another.” History shows how often religion has been manipulated to serve patriarchal violence. (bell hooks speaks of the pornography of patriarchal violence that we are subjected to from a young age).
Faith is built on rituals and practices that are built around food, forms of dress and scriptures which serve a bigger purpose for most people. The purpose, of community and belonging, something that so many young people are deprived of and therefore, alienated in the education system from a young age. Should we blame the young person for the resentment that grows within the traumatised mind, or the system that created the fertile ground for planting the seed of violence? The same system that creates cannon fodder on foreign turf masqueraded as heroism.
There are migrations by choice and there are forced migrations. International students come with a multitude of beliefs. Faith doesn’t sit alone but at an intersection of countless other parts of identity. Again I state that diversity is a fact but inclusivity is a choice. All spaces should be spaces of knowledge exchange and I hope again that the space I facilitate is where conversation, learning and growth can take place through examples of lived experience. I have to be conscious of not perpetuating the fundamentalist/colonising attitude that there is only one way, ‘You are either with us or against us’. With violence being perpetrated today, by members of historically peaceful religions, one has to consider other factors at play in order for a space of Social Justice to exist rather then condemn a faith and alienate people who are peace loving.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z43ds