Chapter 39

Infidel

Discovering Zeugma and other ancient archeological digs was just one of the many adventures in my job with the Turkish Prime Minister's project. Getting to know Turkish women deeply and personally was also an experience I treasure. But these experiences were not always pleasant. No longer a tourist, I had to authentically encounter and make my way in a world as different from my own as I could imagine. I made many gaffes as the only American among hundreds of Turkish professionals who worked on this human development project. But I learned from everything that happened, and I know how lucky I was to get to work with these people.

One particular incident was so powerful that every detail became seared forever in my mind. What started out as a simple lunch with three female co‐workers turned into a profound experience that ended up shaping my attitude toward organized religion everywhere in the world. From this experience, I saw that it was not just about the Nazarene religion of my childhood or the Mormon religion of my adulthood, it was religion of all kinds that ensured that the world would never know peace as long as they existed as separate warring factions.

Here is my account of the “beginning of the end” of my participation in all organized religion:

It was snowing hard in Ankara, Turkey, and I’d been editing web text for the GAP website all morning. Two of my usual lunch partners and a woman from another office planned to meet me at a kebab restaurant downtown after they stopped to buy some office supplies. They took a taxi. I hopped a passing dolmush, one of the hundreds of large, lumbering vans I could ride anywhere in Ankara for just forty cents.

But when I slid into the restaurant booth, only two of my friends were there, rather than the three I was expecting.

“Where’s Zeynep?” I asked, taking a menu from the waiter. After two months in Turkey, I finally knew what every dish on the menu was, could order it in Turkish, and could pay for it without wondering if I had received the correct change.

“Ummmm,” Handan said, obviously stalling, looking at Çala (Challa) from behind her menu.

I grew suspicious of their silence. “What happened to Zeynep?” 

“Zeynep had some other things to do,” came Çala’s lie.

“So she’s skipping lunch?” I asked. “Shall we take her something so she doesn’t starve?” After more silence, I realized I was up against the Turkish custom that regarded anything—even a lie—as better than saying something that will offend or disappoint. “Could you be a little bit more direct, please? Pretend you’re a pushy American for a moment,” I told my friends. “What don’t you want me to know?”

“It’s just that Zeynep is a strict Muslim…” Handan began.

“And you are a…a…an infidel,” finished Çala, cringing at the discomfort she felt in forcing herself to be as brash and direct as an American.

“But we thought you should know so you wouldn’t wonder why she can’t ever go out to lunch with you.”

I could feel my eyebrows rise as my jaw dropped open a full inch. My breath stopped high up in my chest, and a pain radiated from my sternum down toward my stomach, as though I had been smashed there with a fist. The air in front of me was heavy with sorrow and disbelief.

“Infidel? Me?” I whispered, unable to answer the waiter who had come back to take our order. I no longer felt hungry. I was dazed, and the restaurant seemed to tilt to one side. The snow outside seemed to also be whirling inside my head as I tried to make sense of Zeynep’s dismal opinion of my worth as a human being.

A long, empty tunnel suddenly opened before me, and I could see myself ten thousand miles away—back home in Phoenix, Arizona, with a group of Mormon friends. Bits of conversations from different occasions began pinging like a strobe light across my mind:

“You’re going to let her date him? But he’s a nonmember!”

“You know they’re non‐Mormons, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he picks up some bad language over at their house.”

“They’re not members of the church, so they don’t have the same standards as we do.”

“Yes, we call them gentiles since we’re the chosen people. It’s the same term the Jews use for everyone who isn’t Jewish. Jews are the other chosen tribe of Israel.”

“He used to be a good member of the church, but he’s an apostate now so we no longer speak to him.”

“She can’t marry him!  There won’t be any priesthood in her home!” 

And on and on and on.

It was as though I suddenly heard every term we Mormons used for “not us.” I had said these things myself. But here, in Turkey, where I was part of the one percent of the population that is not Muslim, it was I who was the “other.” I wondered, “What does Zeynep imagine might happen if she has lunch with me? Will she lose her faith in Islam? Am I contagious? Unclean? Unworthy?”  I thought back to first grade when I had learned who in my class had cooties and who didn’t. It was the same damned thing—and from exactly the same sort of ignorant, undeveloped mindset. My mindset included.

 At that moment, I felt the deepest, most confusing sense of shame I had ever known. I was the victim as well as the criminal. I felt murderously indignant and horribly guilty all at once. Was calling someone an “infidel” or a “nonmember” or a “gentile” the first step in dehumanizing them? Was using these labels planting the tiniest seed of genocide? Of ethnic cleansing? Wasn’t this the first step that led to the Holocaust?

Had this incident happened back home in Phoenix, I might have blamed a few insensitive people on all sides and promised myself never to personally cause anyone that kind of pain. I realize now that the reason this incident affected me as it did was because I was hearing the same words coming at me from a Muslim that I had used myself in regards to someone who was not a Mormon. This insider/outsider language was what kept it all going. This language created an inflated identity and an overly heightened sense of self‐worth. Just like a taunting first grader, this sort of hate language identified which humans in the world were garbage and sub‐human. From an evolutionary point of view, this language de‐humanized the “other”. This language prepared me to kill these people if I believed that I needed to do so.

But after this incident, I thought this: Here I am living in Turkey where I can find some real answers to my lifelong questions about who God is and the true purpose of organized religion. How fortunate I was to have this incident happen here in Turkey. Here, where most of the world’s organized religions were first imagined. Key religious events that had changed the course of the world forever had happened right here where I was living. Right here in Turkey—just a bus or a train ride from my home in Ankara.

So, instead of attending that awkward little gathering of Mormons in Ankara each Sunday, Gary and I set out to see where and how organized religion was born.  What we found were the lies and distortions upon which all organized religions are based.