Bob Warring: American intolerance on College Green

Oh, brother.

Brother Stephen was back on the Penn campus this past Friday afternoon performing his usual sermon of hellfire and brimstone (complete with associated dance steps). Only this time he brought a few tools to aid him in the saving of our wicked souls that I've never seen with him before: a Koran and an American flag.

Oh, brother.

His list of the hell-bound remained essentially the same: lesbians and gays, drunks and potheads, whores and whoremongers, animists and witches, narcissists, Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons, unconverted Catholics and unconverted Jews. But this time there was added emphasis on a group that Brother Stephen apparently finds particularly sinister: "Muuuus-liiiims."

Oh, brother.

Koran in hand, Brother Stephen denounced Islam as a "religion of the sword" and called Mohammed "a pervert." He did, however, acknowledge that the Koran was a true text -- that is, whenever it is in agreement with the Bible, he said. By his calculations, this was approximately 75 percent of the time.

Ohhhh, brother.

Penn students, not surprisingly, were having none of it. Passersby shouted "devil!" and the always-funny "homo!" and urged the impassioned evangelist to "Do [his] fire-dance." Those who stopped and stood long enough to hear Brother Stephen's anti-Islam rant could see that it was a fervent but ultimately futile attempt to advance his message at the expense of a group potentially made vulnerable to scapegoating. Onlookers received some free entertainment -- not to mention a sense of superiority for fitting Brother Stephen into their world view as "ignorant" -- but that was about it.

Clearly, his methods were not working and his message was not sinking in. No, not here at Penn, I thought to myself. But what about at...?

Difficult as it is for us to realize, Penn's relatively free and liberal cultural environment may not be as typical of the United States as many of us have come to assume. Brother Stephen may not represent the American "norm," but neither does the multi-religious, multi-racial and multi-cultural environment at Penn.

Instead, they are two very different components of the same America.

There are plenty of places where Brother Stephen's message of intolerance and hatred would receive a far more ambiguous response than the name-calling, head-shaking and "oh, brothers" he elicits here at Penn. These sites aren't necessarily in Arkansas, West Virginia and Wyoming, either, although it's likely Brother Stephen could find large enough audiences in each of these places, too. They're two hours west of Philadelphia, or an hour to the north.

Make no mistake, Brother Stephen is a radical. Not just on the Penn campus but anywhere. The populaces of the small towns off of I-76 and I-476 wouldn't band together to follow him as if he were the Pied Piper, although he could probably amass some active following.

More likely, his xenophobic arguments would garner a not insubstantial amount of that most insidious of allegiances -- tacit support.

Brother Stephen's attempt to make Christianity a prerequisite for an American identity is not his own invention. Throughout American history, what the majority of Americans perceive as "true Americanness" has always had a prominent religious and racial component. Acceptance has grown, but it has come slowly -- slower in some places than in others.

For a portion of America, the Sept. 11 attacks were damning evidence proving what their prejudices already led them to believe: Islam was -- and must be -- anti-American.

We scoff when Brother Stephen calls those that perpetrated the terrorist attacks "true Muslims," or when he refers to the Koran as a "terrorist manual." But we mustn't forget that there is an element within America -- no doubt more sizable than you realize -- that is vulnerable to such rhetoric.

The lesson that Brother Stephen's sermons should implant in us must not be a reminder of our own superiority or even an example of a good, free way to add some excitement to an otherwise mundane weekday afternoon, although I can hardly fault someone for finding Brother Stephen's antics entertaining.

On the contrary, it should be a sobering reminder that the values of tolerance and acceptance are not universal, and that we must remain active and steadfast in our intolerance of intolerance. You never know when you might meet Brother Stephen on a level playing field. Bob Warring is a senior History and English major from Hanover, PA.

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