On community and hate

In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, Tara Isabella Burton posed the question "Why [do] extremists keep attacking places of worship?" Before this crime, there were the murders at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, the attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the 2008 shootings at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church ... the list goes on.

In these days of frantic campaigning, my quick reads of coverage of even the most dire events are little more than a skim. But I was struck by this:

... the attack on Tree of Life is part of another, wider, and no less worrying trend: the degree to which places of worship have become targets for acts that could be classified as domestic terrorism. In the past decade, houses of worship — from synagogues to Christian churches to Sikh temples — have increasingly become targets for extremist violence. Many of these attacks have been explicitly white supremacist or right-wing in nature, targeting perceived liberals, ethnic minorities, or women.

In each case, the attacks have been designed to maximize emotional effect. By targeting a house of worship, rather than a private home or business, the attacker has committed a powerful symbolic transgression: profaning a space that is both sacred and communal. Attacks on places of worship double not just as attacks on worshippers, but as attacks on the community itself.

In my haste, I read that last sentence as simply attacks on community itself -- not exactly what Burton is saying, but an implication very much there in her thought.

Do angry shooters vent their rage on people gathered in community because, somewhere in the reaches of their hate-addled brains, community itself is the enemy? People coming together for a purpose -- whether as a bowling club or to worship as they choose -- form communities, webs of human connection that sustain and enrich their humanity.

When rage comes to define individuals, human connection becomes difficult, maybe impossible. When elements of the cultural context excuse, even validate, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and religious bigotry, do those who for whatever reason feel themselves outside community feel the need to attack community itself?

So it seems.

Evil leaders mobilize lonely losers for their own purposes. That's how we get fascism -- when the losers for whom community has long failed or been broken accept the leadership of one who offers the false community of shared resentment and hatred. Our webs of human connection, of communal purpose, are our deepest defense against collective evil.