Like cults, our ideologies may oppress
 
By Tom Kerr / Guest writer
The Ithacan - Ithaca College - Ithaca, NY
 
Media coverage of the Aug. 30 arrest of polygamist Warren Jeffs took us into a contemporary American dystopia: the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In Jeffs’ tightly organized cult, girls and women are treated like chattel by men. Cult members believe Jeffs is the prophetic mouthpiece of God, who tells the flock that for men to achieve glory in heaven they should have at least three wives. Jeffs says that women’s only way to heaven is by invitation from satisfied husbands and that wives, including his 50 or so, belong to their husbands for eternity. He also says that he is the prophet and can punish male followers by reassigning their wives, children and homes to other men, and, incidentally, that black people are the devil’s representatives on earth.

CNN reporter Ted Rowlands spent a few days in Colorado City, Utah, interviewing current and former cult members. As he explained on Larry King Live, "They know nothing different and that is why their allegiance is so pure and no matter what you think from the outside, to them the prophet is the prophet and they’ll do anything that he says."

The sympathetic Rowlands took pains to explain how children and adults living in such an insular but sprawling community might well embrace the perverted beliefs and oppressive "lifestyle" of a cult like the FLDS. He emphasized that FLDS members were never presented with choices, never allowed the freedom to choose between world views.

Implied strongly in such an explanation is that the rest of us living in America — freely attending American schools and churches, freely consuming American culture, once upon a time freely supporting war on Iraq, and so forth — live outside of, or beyond, blinding ideology.

The possibility that we, too, might be "living a life of illusion," as the old Joe Walsh song goes, is taken out of play by the contrast between reasonably enlightened us and dark-ages them — between their illusion and ours, which we’ll gladly take over theirs any day. Some ideologies are, indeed, far more oppressive than others.

However, no one can escape ideology itself, which is more or less a system of beliefs about the way the world works. For any ideology to hold, it must include the belief that it is not an ideology, not illusory, but rather a statement of what is real — what is natural and what is true. And it is this dimension of ideology that is most troublesome in education. When serious about learning, one must suspend ardent, unquestioning belief in one’s own version of reality. How long, I wonder, would the FLDS endure were its members, especially its children, presented with competing versions of reality, shown different ways to perceive, think and act?

And what of the rest of us? Shall we reject outright versions of reality or ideologies that compete with those most familiar to us? Hold tightly to what we’ve always known, to what’s comfortable? Dismiss this or that idea simply because it contradicts what we have thought, or been taught, up until now?

In my roles as son, brother or friend, the hardest thing has been offering observations or interpretations that conflict with a loved one’s or friend’s version of reality. Conversely, it’s also hard to hear from someone close to me that what I’ve been doing, thinking or feeling doesn’t align with his or her take on things. It’s easier to keep mouths and ears shut — to live and let live, even at the risk of the relationship stagnating.

Jeffs and his followers believe in a shared version of reality. As the school year gets underway, let’s honor the victimized girls and women of the FLDS by opening our minds to different ways of thinking, to the possibility that our own versions of reality are also potentially oppressive.

Tom Kerr is an assistant professor of writing. E-mail him at tkerr@ithaca.edu.
 
ithaca.edu
Originally published September 14, 2006
 
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