In our current society, wherever you go you are invited to join a club where membership offers you special privileges. A quick look in your wallet will likely show you a slew of cards from various clubs: your supermarket, your gas station, your bank, your health provider and many more. Most clubs are benign because they ask you for support and loyalty in exchange for discounts on items or perks that you may need or want legitimately. And at this level, if your friends happen to belong to different clubs than you, it’s really not an issue.
There are clubs, however, that ask us to join them with a more aggressive and forceful tone. The principal benefit they offer is the certainty that you have been selected for a grand life while those who are not in the club are, sadly, destined for much less. These clubs validate you and give you hope while they condemn others to a miserable existence.
I am speaking primarily, of course, of religious clubs. These clubs have zeroed in on our most basic fear —which is the fear of dying— and offer us a way to neutralize it into something more palatable. Religious clubs offer us a type of logic, assurance and hope. They offer confidence to their members by reminding them that they will be spared the terrible consequences saved for non members.
No other clubs make claims that go this far.*
As a rule, I try to resist joining clubs and I work to foster widespread inclusion. I think it’s the most intelligent way to live. I also think it’s the most challenging way to live because inclusion relies on the belief that no one is special and no one is entitled to special treatment.
Absolutely no one.
This is challenging to live out because it goes against our natural tendency to distance ourselves from others in an attempt to feel confident and hopeful about our own lives. Unfortunately, we can feel validated when we exclude others who think and act differently than we do.
Inclusion is challenging because it means we have to take our place among others and ….stay there.
Clubs who need you to join them and then condemn others that haven’t should be avoided. Pure and simple.
Why, exactly?
Because they are lying to you. There is no good moral reason to join a club that wants to serve a select few. We should be wary of anyone who wants to build walls between us.
No one likes rejection. No one deserves it. We should do our best not to reject others.
Afterthoughts:
• At the start of the 80’s you could buy a jacket with the logo “Members Only.” When first introduced, these jackets were considered cool. But then they became an object of derision. For people to announce blatantly that they held special status just struck us as being stupid! (It is)
• It is children who constantly separate people into camps. It is children who ascribe special qualities to certain people. This is generally agreed to be immature behaviour.
*All clubs —your grocery store to your bank, etc. —extol the benefits of membership and say that you are missing out big time if you do not join them, but the religious clubs really mean it. Their membership is literally a matter of life or death.