Groups have three general participation strategies. They’re generally inclusive, generally exclusive, or, for lack of a better term, default. There are different levels of grouping that may or may not change participation, but I think it’s pretty defensible to say that they all can be described in one of these three ways.
Default is probably the easiest and least worth discussing. If you want a group of all people between the age of 20 and 30 you just need to find everyone born between this day in 1992 and 1973. Someone born in 1985 can’t say, “Nope, I’m not part of that group,” or, “Fuck, no, those 1978 bastards don’t get to be part of this. I guess they could, but it’s not going to work too well. Default groupings are generally external and created by proximity. We can talk about Illinoisans and how they’ll impact the Presidential election and the people who will vote in Illinois won’t be able to say, “Nope, you can’t talk about us like that.”[1]
So let’s talk about inclusive versus exclusive. In broad strokes, I find that most groups are a balance of inclusivity and exclusivity, with exclusivity in general being more likely than inclusivity. I’ve also found that the group’s reported level of inclusivity is generally overreported by its members, unless those members are part of the Westboro Baptist Church or a similar organization.
The problem here is that most groups are identity based. Identity pretty much requires a demarcation between us and them, which requires a group to be exclusive. In some cases this makes sense. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to start an LBGT Alliance group and have a bunch of people show up who only want to bash gay people, then invite them back the next week. It also wouldn’t make much sense to start an Indian expatriates in Chicago group and then only have a bunch of Italians show up to trade pasta recipies.
Interest based groups can have this same problem. You wouldn’t want to create a group of RPG players, then have a bunch of non-roleplayers show up and eat your Doritos for four hours while nobody pretends to be a motley crew of adventurers out to kill shit and take its gold while completely ignoring the larger purpose of the quest in search of ever more XP and ridiculously named killing sticks. That would be silly. But, by the same token, a non-gamer who shows up probably won’t be rejected if they seem interested in the whole enterprise.
The problem isn’t necessarily that some groups are exclusive. Every group, by definition, has to exlude someone on some level. The problem starts when exclusive groups think they’re inclusive. For this, I shall talk about religion, specifically religion and atheism. Stop me if you’re surprised.
Christianity as a whole imagines itself to be an inclusive thing. The practitioners bring out John 3:16 or similar verses and talk about how god loves everybody and everybody is welcome. That’s the whole message of evangelism. “Come in, sit a spell,” they say, “Learn about how much god loves you.”
This is great in theory. As long as you are of the Christian identity or thinking of becoming of the Christian identity they’ll let you hang out and ask questions and try to avoid firebombing your house. If you’re a Muslim and intending to stubbornly refuse to stop being a Muslim, however, the story will change and change quickly.
This, in and of itself, is still a basically neutral thing. Taken in a vacuum, the attitude of, “We’re Christians, so we want to be Christians together,” doesn’t really harm anyone. The harm comes when people in that one exclusionary group begin expecting the members to make decisions on other aspects of their lives based on the same criteria.
Fred Clark’s been doing an amazing series on exactly this. He’s of the mind that Christianity can be inclusive of homosexuals and welcome homosexuals as Christians.[2] His is a long-winded and eloquent defense of the idea, so I’ll break it down to its basic components.
Evangelical Christians have, by and large, decided that everyone’s identity must come from their basic group identity, which can be summed up as, “We must interpret the Bible literally and at its face value.” Their “literal” interpretation of the Bible, however, is anything but and it’s also based on choosing to only literally interpret the parts of the Bible that seem to condemn and/or regulate a very narrow range of human activity while totally ignoring or discarding wide swaths of the Bible that say other, inconvenient things about human activity. Moreover, Evangelical Christians have decided that anyone whose identity does not come from this very narrow idea of what it means to be a worthwhile human being is not only wrong, but a terrible monster.
Fred Clark has chosen the same original base identity, but he’s chosen a far more inclusive idea of what it means to be a member of that group. He’s chosen an even larger and more inclusive definition of what it means to be a worthwhile human being. His entire argument, then, boils down to, “My identity isn’t defined by the haters and yours doesn’t have to be, either.”
This difference in self-definition is where groups tend to get in trouble. There is no single set of values that every human has that leads to their interests or views on what is important. Moreover, there is no set value where belief in Thing A leads inevitably to View B. There is also absolutely no reason to believe that Belief B and dissimilar Belief C can’t actually result in two people coming to two separate but remarkably similar Conclusion Ds.
A lot of Christians get themselves into trouble through this exact type of mistake. They think, basically, that everyone who joins the Christian movement does so out of a desire to find purity and avoid Hell. In Evangelical Christianity the primary way to do that is to not be gay, not have extramarital sex, and also be a witness to Jesus. Because this is important to them, they think that it necessarily follows that all Christians will agree with them and have the same views. This also leads, nearly inevitably, into some crazy beliefs on the infallibility of the Bible and the evilness of learning about evolution and the actual size and age of the universe.
Since I grew up in exactly this sort of situation I am wary of any group that attempts to mimic these attitudes. This brings me to Atheism+. As is my custom.
Atheism+ is an exclusive group, but not in the way it thinks it is. It thinks it’s excluding just the douchebags of the atheism movement[3], but what it’s actually doing is excluding everyone who doesn’t think exactly like its members do. This is a key distinction, especially since I’m a person who thinks in ways that are largely similar to Atheism+.
Let me loop back around to explain. I am remarkably similar to Evangelical Christians in several respects. One of the big ones is the fact that I’ve never had gay sex and can’t imagine having gay sex now or at any point in the future. If you consider not having gay sex to be a major component of Evangelical Christianity, then you could say I’m probably an Evangelical Christian. Of course, I haven’t had gay sex because I’m not in to dudes, but I have absolutely no problem with dudes that are. Still, the end result is that I haven’t had gay sex in exactly the same way that Evangelical Christians haven’t had gay sex.
My motivations are totally different and motivations matter a great deal. The way I came to those conclusions also matter a great deal. For me it’s a combination of fuzzy inclusiveness and general lack of a belief that it matters what other people do in the privacy of their own homes, hotel rooms, cars, or whatever.[4]
By the same token, my lack of dislike for gay people didn’t come from atheism. I was already at the very least uninterested in worrying about the activities of gay people before I officially left the church. Really, as I’ve said before, atheism didn’t create any of the opinions I currently possess. I made my first steps over to the fuzzily inclusive side long before I decided to leave religion.
It’s a fine point, but it’s one that matters. The introduction I got to Atheism+ was equal parts, “You should agree with us because it’s the right thing to do,” and, “You should agree with this because it’s the inevitable result of agreeing with this other thing.”
One of the things that’s probably the hardest in creating any group is realizing that not everyone cares as much as you do about the things you care about and won’t draw the same conclusions you will about them. I am an atheist, but I’m not an Atheist, if that makes any sense. It’s something I am because it’s the logical conclusion I drew from other observations and it seems more intellectually precise than saying I’m agnostic. I’m more likely to say that I’m non-religious, however. I’m far more likely to say I’m a writer, a storyteller, a historian, and a White Sox fan because those are the things about which I actually give a shit.
I’ve hung out around the atheism movement because there are people in the movement with whom I agree about things. Overall I reject any arguments that atheism is a religion because I find those arguments fundamentally silly. What I do find, though, is that atheism is an exclusive group and Atheism+ has a high risk of becoming a closed system. If they want to create a cool kids club that’s fine, I won’t stop them. What they need to realize is that telling me I’m an idiot for not wanting to be part of their cool kids club isn’t exactly a great way of winning me to their side.
And that’s the biggest problem of all. If you’re creating a group you can be exclusive and worry about purity all day long. If you want to have a movement you have to be inclusive. No step in creating a movement should involve intentionally burning bridges with people who agree with you on better than 90% of the things you believe but who came to those beliefs through a different avenue. That’s just bad planning. It's also easily avoidable. Step one: don't immediately dismiss me and tell me I'm stupid for not seeing the world in exactly the same way you do.
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[1]Complicating things, of course, is the problem that even when my address was in Texas I did not consider myself a Texan. I considered myself a Chicagan living in Texas. Further complicating that is the bit where I’ve never actually lived in the Chicago city limits. That’s because I’ve made Chicago a part of my identity as well as a fact of my proximity.
[2]This is an important reciprocal relationship of inclusion. Evangelical Christianity regularly tells homosexuals that they will be welcome in church as long as they stop being homosexual. This is not inclusion, it’s exclusion.
[3]Who, really, could use some good excluding. I mean, really, who wants to hang out with a douchebag?
[4]True story: I have now been in enough situations where I’ve seen two dudes kissing that I think either, “Oh, that’s adorable,” or, “Aight, whatever,” rather than, “Ew, that’s gross.” I don’t know where that switchover occurred, but I do know that there was a point several years ago where squicked out was definitely the way I felt if I saw that.
Default is probably the easiest and least worth discussing. If you want a group of all people between the age of 20 and 30 you just need to find everyone born between this day in 1992 and 1973. Someone born in 1985 can’t say, “Nope, I’m not part of that group,” or, “Fuck, no, those 1978 bastards don’t get to be part of this. I guess they could, but it’s not going to work too well. Default groupings are generally external and created by proximity. We can talk about Illinoisans and how they’ll impact the Presidential election and the people who will vote in Illinois won’t be able to say, “Nope, you can’t talk about us like that.”[1]
So let’s talk about inclusive versus exclusive. In broad strokes, I find that most groups are a balance of inclusivity and exclusivity, with exclusivity in general being more likely than inclusivity. I’ve also found that the group’s reported level of inclusivity is generally overreported by its members, unless those members are part of the Westboro Baptist Church or a similar organization.
The problem here is that most groups are identity based. Identity pretty much requires a demarcation between us and them, which requires a group to be exclusive. In some cases this makes sense. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to start an LBGT Alliance group and have a bunch of people show up who only want to bash gay people, then invite them back the next week. It also wouldn’t make much sense to start an Indian expatriates in Chicago group and then only have a bunch of Italians show up to trade pasta recipies.
Interest based groups can have this same problem. You wouldn’t want to create a group of RPG players, then have a bunch of non-roleplayers show up and eat your Doritos for four hours while nobody pretends to be a motley crew of adventurers out to kill shit and take its gold while completely ignoring the larger purpose of the quest in search of ever more XP and ridiculously named killing sticks. That would be silly. But, by the same token, a non-gamer who shows up probably won’t be rejected if they seem interested in the whole enterprise.
The problem isn’t necessarily that some groups are exclusive. Every group, by definition, has to exlude someone on some level. The problem starts when exclusive groups think they’re inclusive. For this, I shall talk about religion, specifically religion and atheism. Stop me if you’re surprised.
Christianity as a whole imagines itself to be an inclusive thing. The practitioners bring out John 3:16 or similar verses and talk about how god loves everybody and everybody is welcome. That’s the whole message of evangelism. “Come in, sit a spell,” they say, “Learn about how much god loves you.”
This is great in theory. As long as you are of the Christian identity or thinking of becoming of the Christian identity they’ll let you hang out and ask questions and try to avoid firebombing your house. If you’re a Muslim and intending to stubbornly refuse to stop being a Muslim, however, the story will change and change quickly.
This, in and of itself, is still a basically neutral thing. Taken in a vacuum, the attitude of, “We’re Christians, so we want to be Christians together,” doesn’t really harm anyone. The harm comes when people in that one exclusionary group begin expecting the members to make decisions on other aspects of their lives based on the same criteria.
Fred Clark’s been doing an amazing series on exactly this. He’s of the mind that Christianity can be inclusive of homosexuals and welcome homosexuals as Christians.[2] His is a long-winded and eloquent defense of the idea, so I’ll break it down to its basic components.
Evangelical Christians have, by and large, decided that everyone’s identity must come from their basic group identity, which can be summed up as, “We must interpret the Bible literally and at its face value.” Their “literal” interpretation of the Bible, however, is anything but and it’s also based on choosing to only literally interpret the parts of the Bible that seem to condemn and/or regulate a very narrow range of human activity while totally ignoring or discarding wide swaths of the Bible that say other, inconvenient things about human activity. Moreover, Evangelical Christians have decided that anyone whose identity does not come from this very narrow idea of what it means to be a worthwhile human being is not only wrong, but a terrible monster.
Fred Clark has chosen the same original base identity, but he’s chosen a far more inclusive idea of what it means to be a member of that group. He’s chosen an even larger and more inclusive definition of what it means to be a worthwhile human being. His entire argument, then, boils down to, “My identity isn’t defined by the haters and yours doesn’t have to be, either.”
This difference in self-definition is where groups tend to get in trouble. There is no single set of values that every human has that leads to their interests or views on what is important. Moreover, there is no set value where belief in Thing A leads inevitably to View B. There is also absolutely no reason to believe that Belief B and dissimilar Belief C can’t actually result in two people coming to two separate but remarkably similar Conclusion Ds.
A lot of Christians get themselves into trouble through this exact type of mistake. They think, basically, that everyone who joins the Christian movement does so out of a desire to find purity and avoid Hell. In Evangelical Christianity the primary way to do that is to not be gay, not have extramarital sex, and also be a witness to Jesus. Because this is important to them, they think that it necessarily follows that all Christians will agree with them and have the same views. This also leads, nearly inevitably, into some crazy beliefs on the infallibility of the Bible and the evilness of learning about evolution and the actual size and age of the universe.
Since I grew up in exactly this sort of situation I am wary of any group that attempts to mimic these attitudes. This brings me to Atheism+. As is my custom.
Atheism+ is an exclusive group, but not in the way it thinks it is. It thinks it’s excluding just the douchebags of the atheism movement[3], but what it’s actually doing is excluding everyone who doesn’t think exactly like its members do. This is a key distinction, especially since I’m a person who thinks in ways that are largely similar to Atheism+.
Let me loop back around to explain. I am remarkably similar to Evangelical Christians in several respects. One of the big ones is the fact that I’ve never had gay sex and can’t imagine having gay sex now or at any point in the future. If you consider not having gay sex to be a major component of Evangelical Christianity, then you could say I’m probably an Evangelical Christian. Of course, I haven’t had gay sex because I’m not in to dudes, but I have absolutely no problem with dudes that are. Still, the end result is that I haven’t had gay sex in exactly the same way that Evangelical Christians haven’t had gay sex.
My motivations are totally different and motivations matter a great deal. The way I came to those conclusions also matter a great deal. For me it’s a combination of fuzzy inclusiveness and general lack of a belief that it matters what other people do in the privacy of their own homes, hotel rooms, cars, or whatever.[4]
By the same token, my lack of dislike for gay people didn’t come from atheism. I was already at the very least uninterested in worrying about the activities of gay people before I officially left the church. Really, as I’ve said before, atheism didn’t create any of the opinions I currently possess. I made my first steps over to the fuzzily inclusive side long before I decided to leave religion.
It’s a fine point, but it’s one that matters. The introduction I got to Atheism+ was equal parts, “You should agree with us because it’s the right thing to do,” and, “You should agree with this because it’s the inevitable result of agreeing with this other thing.”
One of the things that’s probably the hardest in creating any group is realizing that not everyone cares as much as you do about the things you care about and won’t draw the same conclusions you will about them. I am an atheist, but I’m not an Atheist, if that makes any sense. It’s something I am because it’s the logical conclusion I drew from other observations and it seems more intellectually precise than saying I’m agnostic. I’m more likely to say that I’m non-religious, however. I’m far more likely to say I’m a writer, a storyteller, a historian, and a White Sox fan because those are the things about which I actually give a shit.
I’ve hung out around the atheism movement because there are people in the movement with whom I agree about things. Overall I reject any arguments that atheism is a religion because I find those arguments fundamentally silly. What I do find, though, is that atheism is an exclusive group and Atheism+ has a high risk of becoming a closed system. If they want to create a cool kids club that’s fine, I won’t stop them. What they need to realize is that telling me I’m an idiot for not wanting to be part of their cool kids club isn’t exactly a great way of winning me to their side.
And that’s the biggest problem of all. If you’re creating a group you can be exclusive and worry about purity all day long. If you want to have a movement you have to be inclusive. No step in creating a movement should involve intentionally burning bridges with people who agree with you on better than 90% of the things you believe but who came to those beliefs through a different avenue. That’s just bad planning. It's also easily avoidable. Step one: don't immediately dismiss me and tell me I'm stupid for not seeing the world in exactly the same way you do.
------------------------
[1]Complicating things, of course, is the problem that even when my address was in Texas I did not consider myself a Texan. I considered myself a Chicagan living in Texas. Further complicating that is the bit where I’ve never actually lived in the Chicago city limits. That’s because I’ve made Chicago a part of my identity as well as a fact of my proximity.
[2]This is an important reciprocal relationship of inclusion. Evangelical Christianity regularly tells homosexuals that they will be welcome in church as long as they stop being homosexual. This is not inclusion, it’s exclusion.
[3]Who, really, could use some good excluding. I mean, really, who wants to hang out with a douchebag?
[4]True story: I have now been in enough situations where I’ve seen two dudes kissing that I think either, “Oh, that’s adorable,” or, “Aight, whatever,” rather than, “Ew, that’s gross.” I don’t know where that switchover occurred, but I do know that there was a point several years ago where squicked out was definitely the way I felt if I saw that.
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