Source of book: Borrowed from the library
Last year I read and wrote about Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl, a book I highly recommend. The book examines the psychological component of the phenomenon which I described in the opening of that blog post as follows:
I have been saying for a number of years that rural white America appears hell-bent on committing suicide. They consistently reject policies that would help them, and embrace policies that harm them. And they do this because their desire to maintain a privileged position over people of color outweighs their apparent financial and physical well-being.
In addition to the three areas that Metzl examines - gun laws, Medicaid expansion, and school funding - there are many others.
Love Thy Neighbor: A Muslim Doctor’s Struggle for Home in Rural America is all about another issue that I have been raising for years.
Rural white America - and red states in general - are making their communities and states unlivable for the very people they depend on and need for their own health and well being - and indeed their future.
It is no secret that rural health care in the United States sucks badly. There are chronic shortages of doctors, nurses, and other care providers, and attracting and keeping them is difficult.
It’s not just medicine, though. It is lawyers, teachers, engineers, social workers, psychologists, and others.
The problem already existed before Trump, but Trump has made things exponentially worse. Let me explain.
Let’s say you are an educated professional, recently out of school, and are considering starting a family and settling down somewhere. What might you be looking for? Well, rural America has a few things to offer: affordable housing, a slower-paced lifestyle, cleaner air, and maybe a few more.
But what are the drawbacks? Well, distance from the city means less educational opportunity, fewer arts and music events, fewer similarly educated people, worse medical care, lower pay. And - depending on the situation - you might never be truly accepted into the community.
These are already some significant drawbacks, and ones that I think many professionals already consider. Why go work in Podunk, Iowa, where you can’t get a decent taco or pho, where it’s a day’s drive to see a concert or a play, and where your kids will lack access to art and music education?
This is a real reason why white professionals tend to leave rural America rather than return to it.
So who fills these gaps?
More often than not, it is immigrants with browner skin.
Let me tell you a local story: in one of our smaller towns in my county, one with a history of farming and a diverse population, the main primary care physician is a Sikh. He has faithfully and compassionately served the community for decades. My own experience with him (regarding a case years ago) gave me a positive impression, and I know others who feel the same.
Unfortunately, during Trump’s 2016 campaign, a LOT of racism and xenophobia revealed itself in our community. This doctor’s son was physically assaulted and threatened in public - presumably mistaken for a Muslim, not that that specifically matters. I wrote about the incident in relation to Trump, who has made his political career out of slandering and insulting minorities.
Love Thy Neighbor tells a similar story.
Dr. Ayaz Virji and his family moved to rural Minnesota, hoping to enjoy the small-town lifestyle AND bring a much-needed service to an underserved community. He’s one of the good guys, doing his best to love his neighbor and make the world a better place. But he is a Muslim.
Unfortunately, Trump’s election brought out tremendous anti-Muslim hate, from calls for a Muslim registry to swastikas on the sidewalk to harassment of his children at school.
Virji strongly considered moving away, but decided instead to try to educate people. He does this with the assistance and encouragement from his friend, Pastor Mandy France. (Yes, a female pastor! How refreshing!) He starts with a presentation about Islam, which then becomes a regular traveling event.
The book is a combination of Virji’s story and the presentation - “Love Your Neighbor” - that he gives. Alan Eisenstock ghost-wrote the book, and is attributed accordingly. Nothing wrong with that. The book flows fine, and Virji’s voice comes through.
I’ll give a bit of a spoiler: Virji does decide to stay where he is, despite the problems. This is more than that town deserved, so hat off to a good man, one far more Christian than those who go by that name.
There are a number of fascinating things about this book. First of all, Virji knows his Bible far better than most Evangelicals I know. His lectures do quote the Koran, but also contain even more Christian content.
This is powerful, because his argument for tolerance and acceptance comes mostly from the Christian scriptures.
It also lays bare the reality that most of what goes by the name of Christianity in the United States - particularly among white people - is nothing of the sort. It is just a fake-ass “christianity” that is a veneer over racism and xenophobia. Slaveholder Religion as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove calls it.
In contrast, Virji is motivated by his religion to do good in the world, to show compassion, to devote his life to others.
For people like him - and like me these days - this raises some uncomfortable questions. Why does religion motivate people in such different directions? And also this problem, which Virji confronted when a friend told him he was going to hell:
How could an “all-merciful God” create six billion people and, just like that, predestine most of them to go to Hell? That’s not right. That is not what God meant. At least not the God I believe in.
It also is not the God that Christ spoke of, who valued actions over doctrinal purity.
Politics too have raised questions. Virji recounts his sense of betrayal at Trump’s election, something I very much understand.
“We live with these people. How could they vote for him? They’re voting against us. They’re repudiating us.”
This is the truth. The American Right is literally repudiating everyone not like them, from racial minorities to LGBTQ people to feminist women. But who is going to care for them without all of those people?
Qualified white doctors are not flowing into rural America. They’re just not coming. All the doctors I have recruited to join me are people of color, born in India, Asia, the Middle East, Africa. The great irony is that as our new president proposes a travel ban with the intention of keeping immigrants out of our country, immigrants with medical degrees are the only ones coming to care for Americans out in the country.
Indeed. Dying of whiteness.
Personally, I found the lectures to be interesting and thoughtful. I need to read the copy of the Koran I got a couple of years ago, of course, but I am not unfamiliar with the tenets of other religions. (My 7th grader has had to study world religions as part of her social studies this year - something I wish I had done at that age. At least here in California, educational standards have improved from the white-centric focus of the past.)
There is a great passage in which Virji plays “Bible or Koran” with his audience. I will say that I knew 100% - I was an excellent bible quiz kid back in the day, I’ve read the Bible multiple times, and know it better than a number of pastors I had over the years. So yeah, I knew which was which.
But not because the ideas were different. I just knew the exact phrase used. It is indeed interesting how close religions tend to be on so many things. It’s as if humans are pretty much the same everywhere. (Or, if you are religious, you might conclude that God has connected with all humans over all times, not just one particular ethnic group at one time in history…)
Not only do holy books often resemble each other and express the same truths and longings, but there is often more diversity within the interpretive tradition of a single book. Virji notes that Islamic tradition holds that each verse has “between seven and seventy thousand meanings.”
I believe this is important because all holy books have problems. It is easy enough to “proof-text” violence into Islam - as fundamentalists have done. But it is also easy to “proof-text” all the horribles into the Bible. I mean, shall we dash the brains of infants out on the rocks? How about exterminate entire ethnic groups - men, women, children, animals, and furniture? Hell, the Bible was used for centuries to justify slavery and the murder of independent women.
But there are also wholesome interpretations within every religion. Does this one by Virji sound familiar?
“Muhammad said the person who doesn’t want for his neighbor what he wants for himself has no faith. Jesus said love thy neighbor. Love everyone the way I love them.”
I’m going to give Muhammad credit here: he has called out American white “christians” on their fundamental soul-sickness. They have no intention of letting “those people” have what they have.
Virji notes something that I have noticed as well. The deep soul-sickness of white Evangelicalism is due in large part to the fact that they have outsourced their theology and their morality to right-wing media sources like Fox News.
Somewhere between 9/11 and now, a bait and switch happened, where all of a sudden you have been exposed to religious doctrine and teachings from the media - not from scholars, not from people like me.
When it comes to Islam in particular, our media - and that includes the supposedly “liberal” media - has committed malpractice. It has fed the lie that the most fanatical and hateful form of a religion is representative of it. I sure hope, as a Christian, that I am not judged by the KKK - that “fine Christian institution” as they billed themselves.
There are approximately three million Muslims in the United States. (That’s about the same number as Jewish people, by the way.) Contrary to the stereotypes, they actually have higher rates for female education and employment than white Christian Americans. Did you know that? Overwhelmingly, they live in peace here, contributing to their communities. You don’t hear that much from the media, which prefers lurid sensation to clear-headed reporting these days.
Growing up in Los Angeles, I think I have always known Muslims. We used to get fresh pita bread and milk at a local corner store. I have known Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, and probably more since I was a child. Most people, given a stable existence, will seek to live in peace. I am far more worried about violence from MAGA believers - they certainly are more of a threat than Muslims here in the US.
What Virji points out - and what I continually point out on this blog - is that it is the unholy marriage of religion to power, politics, and violence that is the evil we face. ISIL/ISIS (cited by Virji in the book) has murdered, raped, and abused thousands of people. Nearly ALL of whom were Muslim. So, maybe this isn’t about religion, but about power. As Salman Rushdie put it:
“Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It is about power.”
That goes equally for fundamentalist “christianity.”
For Virji, this truth is why he is astounded that the United States is hostile to refugees.
“Only one half of one percent of the world’s refugee population comes here. One half of one percent. We are the richest nation in the world. We have the biggest army in the world. We spend more on our military than the next ten countries combined. And we refuse refugees? We shut them out? We refuse orphans? What kind of message is that? Is that what America is about?”
When I was a child, my parents taught me that a core value not just of being a Christian, but of being an American was that we embraced and welcomed refugees. A core, non-negotiable value.
Fast forward to Trump’s campaign, and suddenly my father is saying that we need to just shut the whole refugee system down and send them all away.
WHAT???
It is impossible to overstate just how much my respect for my father was burned to the ground in that moment. How much of a betrayal of the values I was raised on that was. I walked out of the conversation, I was so appalled.
As part of his lectures, Virji addresses the specific misconceptions about Islam that always come up: terrorism, women’s rights, and Sharia law. The problem he faces, of course, is the Taliban and similar governments. The problem here is theocracy and fundamentalism - a political issue, not a religious one. Today’s Christian Nationalists envision a state similar to the Taliban - just with them in power, so the adage about glass houses should apply here.
The chapter on women was quite enlightening - I learned things I didn’t know. And yes, I have fact checked these, in case you were wondering.
Muhammad lived in the 7th Century CE. At the time, his part of the world was hardly a paragon of equality - it was more like the Roman world at the time of Christ.
Like Christ and Paul and the other apostles, Muhammad actually pushed for progressive reforms. Women were no longer to be married against their will. Married women kept their own property - something that wouldn’t happen in the West for centuries. And - how interesting is this - women had the vote during Muhammad’s reign. This is supported by primary source evidence, by the way.
What happened, though, is a lot like what happened to Christianity. We went from female apostles like Junia, home gatherings, sharing property in common, and a religion that embraced marginalized people to patriarchy, slavery, unregulated capitalism, and hatred for those outside the mainstream.
A similar thing happened to Islam, sadly.
I’m not going to claim that either of these religions is perfect, even in aspiration. But when you start looking at the actual history and context, the “Christianity:good / Islam:bad” paradigm just doesn’t hold up. What does hold up is the brilliance of separation of church and state, religious freedom and tolerance, and always loving your neighbor.
Oh, and another fun bit: in the Bible, Eve eats the fruit first. In the Koran, they do so together. Eve is not blamed in the same way. Interesting.
One more on the subject of women. While I think Virji glosses the problems of modesty culture a bit, he does make a good point that hijab (for women here in the US at least) is a matter of personal choice - and one that risks harassment by bigots. What is most interesting, though, is that he points out that our beauty contests are gross as hell, treating women like cattle.
Perhaps this is particularly fascinating in that the people I know who push modesty culture also voted for Trump - a man who not only sponsored these gross beauty contests, but intentionally walked in on teen girls changing. Hypocrisy much? I guess I am old enough to remember when Trump was still considered gross by Evangelicals - the epitome of what being an atheist supposedly made you become. But, all he had to do was put an (R) after his name and say a bunch of racist shit and now he is their orange messiah.
The book ends with some excellent thoughts on the Trump catastrophe and how it happened. First is a return to the idea that disinformation is at the root of the mistaken beliefs.
I want to focus on the positive. I sincerely believe that the vast majority of people in Dawson are good, decent people. We simply have a disinformation problem. As a rule, people here watch Fox News regularly. As a result, they are misinformed, and when they talk to each other, they are speaking in an echo chamber. If you are fed only garbage, you not only get used to it, you develop a taste for it. Soon you won’t be able to tell when you are actually fed something good, something right, something true.
I rarely watch TV - perhaps one good lingering side effect of my Fundie years - and I certainly avoid propaganda like Fox News. But it is impossible to miss that for most of my former tribe - my parents included - I can trace their moral disintegration in significant part to their consumption of the poisonous garbage that that vile propaganda engine spews constantly. As I stated before, the problem is that white Evangelicals have outsourced their morality to Fox News and similar sources. And their theology, and their politics. I can literally predict what will come out of their mouths about ANY subject by checking what Fox News just said. Every time. It’s uncanny.
Going one layer deeper, though, Virji and I both have had to face the terrifying question:
Yet I see how people defend the hate speaker and I wonder - did he bring out the evil in them?
Or was it there already?
This haunts me about my former religious tribe. Did Trump and Fox News bring out this evil in them? Or were they always this evil and hateful and cruel?
And this haunts me even more about my parents. Were they always like this? Did they just hide their bigotry while teaching me good values? Or were they once better people who allowed themselves to be poisoned by the false prophets they followed?
To circle back to the beginning of this post, while I greatly admire Virji for sticking it out in rural America, I can’t help but think that his book will have a very different result. It confirms - not through lies and propaganda, but through the cries of a heart broken by his experiences of prejudice and hate - that rural white America is so consumed with its own racism, fear, and hate that it is no place for decent people to make a home. Despite all his efforts, all the good he does in the community, his enlightening and impassioned lectures - it is still hate that is winning in Dawson and throughout Red State America.
As I watch anti-LGBTQ legislation pass in state after state, as I see reproductive healthcare criminalized, as Trump continues to be popular with white Evangelicals despite attempting to overthrow the government, I find it difficult to feel that these places will be remotely safe for people like me, let alone my children.
Virji may have decided to stay, but will his children? Will Pastor Mandy’s children? How many of the young people will stay? Probably not many. How many doctors looking for a home will even consider rural America after Trump?
This will repeat across town after town in rural America. There will be that nagging feeling that it isn’t a safe place for people of color, for LGBTQ people, for immigrants, for refugees. A few will risk themselves to do good, but how many will risk their children?
Suicide by whiteness. Suicide by bigotry. Choking themselves on their own hate.
***
Something personal:
My hometown of Bakersfield has a lot of good things about it - a close legal community, a vibrant arts and music scene, proximity to Los Angeles as well as mountains, beach, and desert, and more progressives than its reputation would indicate. Housing is more affordable than other places in California. There is a wide variety of food at reasonable prices. And it’s wonderfully diverse.
But it also has a lot of knuckle-dragging bigots, coal-rollers, Confederate sympathizers, and Trump assholes. The church options are depressing, unfortunately.
There are times when it has been tempting to leave, although it would have significant financial consequences. Also, packing up and leaving is never easy - I made a few moves as a kid, and they were always hard. So we have chosen to stay, enjoy the good, and push back against the bad.
But I have to wonder, if we hadn’t put roots down here before Trump, would we consider moving here? The answer may well be “no.” As it is, our kids do not wish to live here after they graduate.
When we think of the future, if we ever are able to retire, is this a place we want to live? I’m not sure.
But far more than that, we already know we cannot move to a red state, ever. With children for whom sexuality and gender is complicated, we know it will very likely not be safe for them to visit us in a place like Texas or Florida. Multiple states are already places where a child could be arrested for using the restroom.
Let me also mention another instance. My in-laws live in northeastern California, in a part of the state that is loony-bin right wing (as in their department of public health had no plans to distribute Covid vaccines to most of the population - my in-laws had to travel to another county to get theirs.) My in-laws would love for us to move closer, but there is no way that is happening, as much as we love them.
My mother-in-law had a medical emergency a few years ago, and the local hospital completely ignored her symptoms, even though literally any reasonably aware person would have recognized them. She could easily have died. My in-laws literally had to get in their own car and drive the hour and a half to Reno to get competent treatment, and the delay caused some permanent impairment.
My wife is an outstanding nurse, currently working in quality and regulatory compliance after 20+ years in ICU. There is no doubt that she could make a difference in local medical care. But she will not consider moving there, and neither will I.
As good as my in-laws are, there are just too many hateful people there for us to be comfortable. I don’t think our kids would be safe, and I know we would never fit in, as anti-Trump progressives.
I doubt that we are the only people who take a look at communities like that and decide on a hard pass. How many others will drive through, see all the Trump shrines and racist banners and decide to go elsewhere? Repeat this throughout rural white America - which appears to prefer to commit suicide rather than repent of its bigotry.
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