Berger Declines To Salute -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 01:4 (Oct 1996)
Article: Berger Declines To Salute
Author: Anonymous


Berger Declines To Salute

When Peter Berger, one of the world’s foremost sociologists of our day, gave the Erasmus Lecture in 1987 on the “Apostasy of the Churches,” he was asked about “inclusive language” in the question-and-answer time following his presentation. The questioner, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, said that some women felt excluded by traditional “male” language in the liturgy. If others feel excluded by inclusive language, that is too bad, but then so did many white Christians in the South feel excluded when Blacks were included in the churches. Following is Berger’s response:

Let me answer this in some detail, because it is obviously a question that agitates quite a few people. If you ask, ‘Does inclusive language exclude people?,’ let me say very personally that it has literally driven me out of a Lutheran church that I attended in Boston. I find that language offensive. It is not what people pretend it to be—namely, a rectification of a past discrimination or exclusion. But it is precisely ideological-political jargon.

A Southern Story

Let me amplify this particularly with reference to the racial parallel you draw, and then I will tell you a story that may offend some people here; but if so, that is too bad. You bring up the South, but you do not bring in the linguistic element which would have strengthened your case. When I had been in America only a few years, I was thrown into the South. I was drafted and stationed in a military camp in Georgia in the 1950s. So I came full-blown into the pre-civil rights, racial system of the American South. One thing that struck me was the language aspect. I do not mean epithets like ‘nigger,’ but for example the very simple fact that whites would always address Blacks by their first names, while the other way around it was ‘mister’ and so on. A few years later I was teaching in North Carolina at the very beginnings of the civil rights movement. In a major department store—obviously white owned and at that point exclusively white staffed—instructions went out for management to call all Black customers ‘mister,’ ‘miss,’ whatever, as a sign of respect. That was, indeed, a revolution in language rectifying an old exclusion.

Racist language is usually given by feminists as an analogy to the so-called generic use of the masculine gender. But the analogy is empirically false. It is false because the racial etiquette of the old American South was consciously constructed in order to degrade Blacks, and this was so perceived by everybody. I talked to Blacks and I talked to whites, when I first went to the South in 1953, and everybody understood it that way. On the other hand, nobody understood these few linguistic things that the feminists are excited about, such as referring to ‘mankind,’ as excluding females...

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