Why "Who is My Neighbor?" is a Bad Question
And what we gain if we reflect on the question "What is Required of Me as a Neighbor?"
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While the bulk of the research that we write about at Relationship 101 corresponds with sexual and/or long-term intimate partnerships, we recognize two potential pitfalls of the tendency to focus only on romance-centric relationships:
Not everybody currently has, or wants to have either sexual partnerships or long-term intimate partnerships.
Long-term relationships serve many functions, some of which include sexuality and intimacy, and many of which don’t, such as elder-care and financial support.
This reinforces the idea that relationships have classifications, with differing levels of importance and significance, with romantic and sexual relationships serving as the most important relationships (even though the assumption that romantic and sexual relationships necessarily coincide reinforces many problems). This suggests that treating different people with differing levels of importance is justifiable.
And while most people may not have the capacity to fully engage with a stranger they pass on the street than they do their intimate partner, it’s quite different to not engage with that person while still acknowledging their human dignity than it is to engage with that person in a discriminatory, belligerent manner.
This is especially important to consider given the rise of far-right movements throughout the Western world. I’ve written before about The Netherlands’ weird obsession with Geert Wilders and his anti-Muslim immigrant policies.
In fact, this is one of the reasons that Julia and I are moving back to the US. The Dutch folks that I talk to seem oblivious to the fact that right-wing sentiments are becoming more commonplace in their national zeitgeist, taking jabs at Wilders’ challenges getting a coalition of parties in the Dutch legislation and ignoring the fact that 53% of the Dutch contingent voted for one of the two right-wing parties in last year’s election. These responses reek of a naïveté akin to an American belief (at least among many White American progressives) that electing Obama as President meant that we had “solved racism”.
I’ll take my chances in the US, where I can more fully and culturally engage in the pushback against anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-woman rhetoric in the US.
Yesterday (6/9/24), the NYT published an article about the continued persistence of Marine Le Pen in France and the Alternative for Germany parties. Matina Stevis-Gridneff wrote:
“Right-wing parties now govern alone or as part of coalitions in seven of the European Union’s 27 countries. They have gained across the continent as voters have grown more concentrated on nationalism and identity, often tied to migration and some of the same culture-war politics pertaining to gender and L.G.B.T.Q. issues that have gained traction in the United States.”
So today, I want to focus on a relationship that everyone has multiple versions of, regardless of whether or not they engage in them. This is also a relationship that Christians have a lot to say about.
Neighbor.
As someone who both studies and formerly participated in Evangelical communities, I’m immediately drawn to the Pharisee asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”, and Jesus responding with the parable of the Good Samaritan.
A lot of attention is given to this question. In my Googling in preparation for this article, I stumbled upon the He Gets Us website. (Yes, the same group that spent millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad that could have otherwise been directed toward feeding the poor, engaging in justice, and paying the salaries of folks who oversee these projects. You know, the shit that Jesus actually asked us to do.)
They have a webpage on their site titled “Who is my neighbor?”, where an anonymous author writes:
“Jesus held a simple and unfiltered belief — everyone is a neighbor. Everyone in every sense of the word, not just the people in our orbit whom we have something in common with but also the ones we don’t notice, the people we don’t value, and those we don’t welcome. Admittedly, noticing people who aren’t loved ones, or a part of our day-to-day life isn’t always top of mind. In a world that often feels more digital than tangible, it’s no secret that our ability to connect is duller than it used to be.”
That’s a fine introduction, I suppose. But then the article spends the next three paragraphs identifying different kinds of neighbor. After all, the question “Who is my neighbor?” places the emphasis on the neighbor, the other. This opens the door for people to classify the other based on a variety of categories, from identifying features (race, orientation, gender, etc.) to behaviors of the individual (presence of mental health issues, family structure, etc.)
In 2019, Wade Cole and Claudia Geist, professors of sociology at the University of Utah, published the paper “Don’t You Be My Neighbor: Perceptions of Homosexuality in Global Cross-Cultural Perspective; 1990-2019” in the journal Socius. Over the course of thirty years, their research team surveyed over 235,000 people in 85 countries to assess if gay people are acceptable neighbors.
Cole and Geist build on the research around “lumping and splitting”, which explores how individuals and communities classify other humans. Simply put, classification, or, to use a social justice word, “othering”, happens in two ways:
Differing identities, such as race, ethnicity, and gender. Who they are.
Differing behaviors, which encompasses everything from family traditions to problematic practices, such as substance use. What they do.
They discovered that, around the world, people are more likely to perceive gay neighbors the way that they would perceive neighbors with substance use issues than they would perceive neighbors with differing ethnicities and races. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa and Muslim countries, although they suggest that this way of demonizing queer people increases with religiosity (and age). Cole and Geist use this data to point out that much of the world still equates queerness as a set of untoward, harmful behaviors, rather than as an identity that people are either born with or sociologically develop.
This research is really important, because it references the propaganda that have been used to stifle queer people (and other people with minority identities) by suggesting that they are more likely to engage in dangerous behaviors. We see this currently with the ludicrous suggestion that drag queens may or may not be grooming children, the latest in a number of efforts in the last 75 years to demonize American queer people. Far-right politicians, and the people who vote for them, have consistently found ways to connect people with differing identities with subhuman behaviors, which creates the psychological thought, “These people are not worth being neighbored to.”
This week, on Relationship 101, Julia and I are going to explore queer theory, which exists exclusively because of the presence of discrimination and violence that queer folks around the world face.
However, we wanted to start this series by thinking about ourselves as relational people. What if we edited the question from “Who is my neighbor?” to:
What is required of me as a neighbor, regardless of the differences of my neighbor?
What if Cole and Geist, and others sociologists who study these trends, had asked participants to answer that question, based on differing identifying features and common behaviors (or behaviors that are perceived to be common)?
It’s important to understand the psychological, neurological, and sociological principles of discrimination, stereotyping, and bias. It’s vital to tell stories and celebrate traditions of different peoples and communities.
But I’m wondering how our world might be different if more attention was directed to our individual, relational, and civic responsibilities toward making the world a safer, happier, more thriving place for all neighbors.
How would you answer the above bolded question? Please let us know in the comment section.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia