Out of Context: Mass Media, Inter-Cultural Dialogue, and Religious Scripture
Nate Hower-Haken Thursday, 31 January 2008
Globalization connects and integrates people. People in Kansas can now intersect with people in Kenya through telecommunications, mass-media, and electronic social networking. There is great potential for advocacy and peace building as a result of these transnational dynamics. However, a secondary (and much more challenging) effect of globalization is that our collective dialogue is becoming fragmented. By relying on the media and internet for information about our domestic and international neighbors, we overhear bits and pieces of conversations without the contextual tools necessary for accurate interpretation. Access to instant (and often incomplete) information can cause a dangerous communication breakdown when there is conflict, real or perceived, between two polarized social groups, and specifically in this instance between Christians and Muslims.
An example of just such a misunderstanding is Muslim uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's comments about Islam during a speech he gave about the incompatibility of violence and religion. Many of the Muslims who were deeply offended by his remarks did not hear the entire speech, know its purpose, or even have a sense of the Pope's intended audience. Many first learned of the speech via mass media, which did not present a complete picture of the Pope's remarks. Muslims therefore focused on the parts of the conversation that seemed to pertain to them, and protested those aspects that sounded threatening. In response, many Christians were surprised and indignant at the perceived unseemly and disproportionate reaction. A large-scale miscommunication took place in part due to splintered information channels and a lack of shared context.
The media clearly exacerbate the dissonance that exists in inter-cultural dialogue in situations like these. Western media especially tends to fixate on the comments of Islamic "extremists" and bemoan the lack of "moderates" in the landscape of Muslim discourse. Although extremists do create a polarizing dynamic in the Muslim world, the majority of Islamic voices cry out for peace and moderation. Indeed "moderates" are speaking out every day in newspapers in the Middle East, such as in Egypt's "Al Ahram" (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/) and Qatar's "Al Jazeera" (http://english.aljazeera.net/).
For Christians, perhaps the most important inter-cultural arena in which appropriate context is frequently lacking is that of scriptural interpretation. Both Christians and Muslims derive much of their direction and identity from their respective sacred texts. I have read both the Bible and the Koran in their entireties, and while I do not by any means claim to be an authority on scriptural interpretation, I believe that in the interpretation of scripture, context is again a critical variable. One group may feel that, based on their sacred texts, their religion is one of peace, while another is violent. Accordingly, we tend to highlight violent passages in the other's holy book while overlooking similar verses in our own scripture. Meanwhile, we overlook those passages in their text which explicitly prescribe peace and reconciliation.
Perhaps we are cognizant of the history and hermeneutics of our faith and feel that troublesome verses do not, in fact, prescribe acts of violence when taken in the context of our scriptures as a whole. However, with regards to the scriptures of the Muslim faith, Christians are often unaware of the contextual caveats and nuances associated with the more inflammatory verses (and vice versa).
As an illustration, consider the following three verses:
You may fight in the cause of God against those who attack you, but do not aggress. God does not love the aggressors.
There shall be no compulsion in religion.
Not equal is the good response and the bad response. You shall resort to the nicest possible response. Thus, the one who used to be your enemy may become your best friend.
A Christian may be tempted to think that all of these pacific messages must be excerpted from the Bible, but in fact they are from the Qur'an (2:190, 2:256, and 41:34, respectively).
By contrast, consider the following three Bible verses, and imagine how a non-Christian would read them without any accompanying context:
Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Numbers 31:17-18)
The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open. (Judges 21:10-12)
Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)
Conclusion
A lack of shared context as well as balanced information precludes international understanding. I do not mean to imply that we should simply refrain from any attempt at inter-cultural interpretation. We need to learn, however, that in an age of globalization, people cannot help but take what others say out of context, a human tendency that is exacerbated by the ubiquity and distortions of mass media. We should try to examine our own words and actions through the eyes of those who do not share our cultural, linguistic, and religious context. Then perhaps we will be able to make progress towards integrating our fragmented conversations in the interest of peaceful co-existence. As Edward Hall says, "Words and sentences have different meanings depending on the context in which they are embedded...No communication is totally independent of context, and all meaning has an important contextual component."[1] Without actively seeking to build up a common context with those who are different from us, as we interact with our global neighbors more and more, inevitably we will end up communicating less and less.
[1] Edward Hall. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 59-60.