Mel isn't the only sinner

Mel isn't the only sinner

Commentary: What an actor's fiasco can teach us about bigotry

12:39 PM CDT on Saturday, August 12, 2006

By ROD DREHER / The Dallas Morning News

Late last week I phoned the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, trying to schedule an interview about l'affaire Gibson. "We're all Melled out around here," the weary press aide said, "but we're happy to help."

I suspect most of us are Melled out by now, but what lingers in my mind from the whole episode is the spiritual danger of pride – not that of the deservedly humiliated Mr. Gibson's, but that of the rest of us who sit in judgment of him.

I'm deeply concerned about the rise of global anti-Semitism, and found my fellow Christian's drunken remarks appalling. And as someone who loved The Passion of the Christ and defended it in print and online against accusations of anti-Semitism, I felt intensely embarrassed, even betrayed, by Mr. Gibson's Jew-bashing rant. When news of his anti-Semitic diatribe broke, I hurried to my Beliefnet.com blog to join in the piling-on.

Later in the day, my oldest friend, J., e-mailed to say he questioned my judgment in light of the upbringing we'd both had in our small town in the Deep South.

Yes, Mel was wrong, said my friend, but consider that he was raised by a Holocaust-denying kook of a father. Could either of us, J. went on, say with complete certainty that the racism we grew up around had been entirely eradicated from our souls? We think we've put that all behind us, said J., but is it not possible that under the right conditions, either of us right-thinking Southern white boys could shock ourselves by what came out of our mouths – and our hearts?

He had a point. J. wasn't excusing what Mel Gibson said, only cautioning me to beware of self-righteousness.

Mr. Gibson, in his second apology after his arrest, pleaded with the Jewish community for help in "understanding where those vicious words came from." Some dismissed this as psychobabbly posturing, but it's entirely plausible that on the matter of Jew-hatred, Mel Gibson was truly a stranger to himself until his moment of terrible grace on the Pacific Coast Highway.

To live in the South is to understand from experience this paradox: It is possible to be both morally upstanding, as a general matter, and a racist. What sustains the paradox is ignorance, an all-too-human blindness to one's own faults. This lack of self-awareness does not excuse, certainly, but it does explain, and accepting it gives grace the opportunity to do its work of purifying, healing and reconciliation.

True story: About 12 years ago, in my Louisiana hometown, I was writing about a tiny black church that a new, absentee landlord was trying to evict. Appalled white folks had taken up the church's cause – and a good thing, too, because the impoverished congregation had no one to help them. An older woman leading the charge told me offhandedly that it's only natural that white citizens would stand up for the little church. "We've always been good to our nigras around here," she said.

You can hardly find a purer expression of white Southern paternalism than that. Part of me recoiled at her words, yet I knew that the lady meant well, and was a good woman. Having been raised in a certain place and time, she would have been genuinely shocked had someone pointed out the racism of her comments.

I chose not to make an issue of it, because she wouldn't have understood anyway, and besides, she was going to extraordinary lengths to stand up for her poor black neighbors. For their part, the black congregation genuinely appreciated her efforts, though one fellow, noting how the white establishment shut down local black churches during the civil rights era to stop voting-rights organizing, wondered aloud whether white folks would have been so helpful had the landlord been a local businessman instead of an outsider.

In the end, the little church was saved, thanks in large part to people like that white woman. Indeed, it was her belief in the myth of her generation's innocence that made it possible for her to take up the church's cause. We have always been good to our nigras, she said, which meant, We are not the kind of people who would stand by and let black people be treated this way.

However blind she was to historical fact and to her own prejudice, that lady did the right thing for the little church because, however naively, she believed in her own capacity for goodness.

Had I reported her unintentionally revealing remark in the newspaper, the entire campaign to save the church would have collapsed in racial acrimony. I wanted the church saved. I didn't publish her line. So sue me.

What does this have to do with Mel Gibson, whose bigotry was far more malign? Only this: that he might sincerely have been unaware of his anti-Semitism, and that this ugly situation might yet be redeemed if he is not only made to see his capacity for evil – which, if we take him at his word, he does – but also allowed to believe in his own capacity for goodness.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of the Wiesenthal Center graciously held out that possibility, writing in an open letter to Mr. Gibson that if he truly repents, "you can be certain that we will welcome you. You will not find a better fan club than the Jewish community warming up to a foe turned friend."

The episode could be a moment of conversion, too, for all of us high-minded commentators who take comfort in not being like that booze-addled anti-Semite.

Flannery O'Connor, who died 42 years ago this month, was an astute observer of the kind of progressive-minded Southerner who had been educated out of his prejudices, but who in truth traded one form of self-righteousness for a more insidious one. In two of her greatest stories, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and "The Enduring Chill," O'Connor gave us two very similar characters, Julian and Asbury, both of whom were pseudo-sophisticated layabouts who proved their racial and cultural enlightenment by despising their simple-minded, conventionally prejudiced mothers. Both had harsh epiphanies in which they were forced to see that their self-righteousness, masquerading as moral superiority, not only blinded them to the goodness buried under their bigoted mothers' messy humanity but also kept them from seeing themselves as they truly were: prideful sinners in need of mercy.

Both Asbury and Julian were right to reject anti-black bigotry, but they were wrong to rebuke their mothers – out of spite, not love. And they came to no good. When my friend J. dispatched his e-mail epistle to me up on my soapbox, he was addressing my inner Asbury. It's a safe bet that the bloggers and Hollywood celebrities who are whaling away on Mel Gibson have more than a little Julian in them.

Don't we all?

Who among us can say for sure what bigotry and crookedness lie hidden away in our own hearts, concealed from ourselves by our wealth, position or pride, awaiting a moment of weakness or stupidity to manifest?

Who among us, having been laid low by our own vanity and meanness, wouldn't beg for mercy, for redemption, for the opportunity to show the world that there is more to us than our sins and failings?

Everything that rises must converge. Though the Holy Ghost might use this Road to Malibu experience to save Mel Gibson's soul, we should all hope to be spared a humiliating epiphany like that one, in which our secret sins are revealed to the world.

I know, I know, we're all Melled out. But after we've exhausted the topic of anti-Semitism among the rich and famous, Mel Gibson's public disgrace is an occasion for reflection on our own humanity. It's a moment to ponder the prescriptive wisdom in W.H. Auden's line: "You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart."


Rod Dreher, associate editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News, is the author of Crunchy Cons (Crown Forum, $24), a political, spiritual and personal memoir. He can be reached at rdreher @dallasnews.com.