Mercy and love: Challenging the “respectable” in our lives, our work, and our libraries

Several weeks ago, the pastor of our church, who often preaches on social justice issues, said that “mercy always chooses love over religious respectability”. Her emphasis was that we often let our quest for religious respectability focus on ourselves, to the detriment of others, and our community. While her sermon, obviously had a religious/spiritual message, I think the message is still true even if we change the words to “mercy always chooses love over cultural or social respectability”.

I’ve been letting this phrase rummage around in my brain, looking for connections both to my work and to issues that are important to me. Several things in the last few weeks have brought home how we often chose respectability over mercy. We often chose mere tolerance over mercy as well, where tolerance is barely above contempt for the other.

Respectability is defined as “the state or quality of being proper, correct, and socially acceptable”. This broad view, even in today’s more permissive and pluralistic society, exerts a control that is often detrimental to both individuals and communities. Depending on where you live, even in the US, it is not respectable to be overweight, poor, homeless, non-white, an immigrant, gay, a Muslim, and the list goes on and on.  Respectability becomes equated with a person’s value or worth as a human. Rather than being an affirmation of a person’s dignity, our personal, religious, cultural or corporate sense of what is respectable degrades the other. Rather than showing mercy and therefore love, we show disdain and disgust.

A recent email “In Defense of Nuance” from Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, echoes a similar sentiment when he notes that “rather than building bridges and relationships based on mutual understanding or shared respect, this oppositional, nuance-averse posture rewards ideological purity and public shame—the very things that scuttle strong working relationships and incentivize people to dig in their heels.”

October saw the LGBTQ community celebrating “National Coming Out Day” and the US Supreme Court discussing if gay, lesbian, and trans people had equal protection under the law. For several weeks I have been reading books on Hawaiian history and culture and how Calvinist missionaries and their descendants who espoused Social Darwinism, in the name of Christian respectability defrauded native Hawaiians of their country, language, and culture. The Jewish community celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, collectively known as the high holidays and a gunman in Germany opened fire at a Yom Kippur service.

Also notable was Indigenous People’s Day, at least here in California; a replacement for Columbus Day and a recognition that indigenous people have suffered inhumane treatment at the hands of the majority. The Social Darwinism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries encouraged imperialism and racism, leading to the conquest and subjugation of many indigenous people. Of course, this was not new, as religious zealotry and bigotry had done the same in the conquests and settlement in North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, and the subcontinent of Asia.

Having spent a lot of time over the past few weeks thinking through issues faced by indigenous people, as well as historically underrepresented groups, I come back to the pastor’s statement. In what ways have we chosen “religious, social, or cultural respectability” over mercy and love?   

The American Library Association has, at times, been criticized for taking stands on issues that some feel are not “library” issues.  Often, but not always, these issues are raised through the Social Responsibilities Round Table, the Rainbow Round Table (formerly the GLBT Round Table), or the Intellectual Freedom Committee. These issues have include LGBT rights, economic discrimination, intellectual freedom, right to privacy, and religious freedom to name a few.  Many librarians have become strong advocates that these are also library issues as they affect the diverse group of people we are trying to serve.

Libraries by nature are not neutral organizations as they exist within the cultural power structures in which they reside. In Western society, they largely reflect white middle class, Christian and heteronormative values.  Until relatively recently, libraries did not collect materials that represented non-white, non-Christian, and non-heteronormative in a positive light or were written by these groups. Our cataloging systems reflect many of these same values, which marginalizes these materials in our collections and makes them difficult to discover. Our HR systems also reflected these same values. Even as we have made progress in being more representative, our quest for normative “respectability” often gets in the way of serving people who look different or think differently from us. The pull of “respectability” is a powerful one.

The Oxford Dictionary defines mercy as “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm”.  If we look at “library values” as they are expressed by ALA, or any number of our libraries, it is doubtful that mercy or love make the list.

You will, however, see statements around “social justice” and I argue that mercy and love are both elements of social justice, especially as they fight against religious, social, and cultural respectability as a method of disparaging and marginalizing others.

As we think of our libraries, I challenge myself and my readers to look at how our own views of “respectability” often prejudices our behavior and our thoughts of others. The challenge is to substitute mercy and love over respectability. It could make a powerful difference in our fractured world.