7/15 - Quote of the Day: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons’

Early in our marriage, my wife and I moved to Minnesota, and I was called as youth pastor at a small church. (It wasn’t a good fit and we were only there for a year.) We first stayed with my brother and his family in St. Paul, but we found an apartment in downtown Minneapolis, just six blocks from the church.

You might be familiar with our apartment building if you were a fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. For the first five years of the show, Mary lived in a house owned by her friend, Phyllis Lindstrom. (The Victorian can be found at 2104 Kenwood Parkway.) But in the final two seasons, Mary lived in a high-rise apartment building, then called Cedar Square West. In the revised credits for the show, the camera would zoom down on an apartment in a bridge between buildings. The apartment we found was the very same one used for the exterior shot of the credits.

When we moved there, the neighborhood and the building had a great variety of ethnicities. There were two Ethiopian restaurants within easy walking distance, an Indian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a couple of bars and a not especially good pizza parlor. We were amazed that in an apartment complex in Minnesota, a complex with hundreds of people, we were the only Andersons (the name we went by at the time, pre-Scrubb). There were people from all over Africa, Asia and south of our border. At the time we enjoyed the diversity. That was 1988.

Ten years ago, when the Scrubbs were on our adventure of visiting a bar and a church in every state, we went to visit our old apartment in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi. The Riverside Plaza (aka Cedar Square West) apartment building seemed devoid of the ethnic diversity it had three decades previously. It seemed to be wholly populated by Somalis. And that bothered me — and it bothered me that it bothered me.

I’m a Christian. One would think that surely a Christian would never judge a group of people. That’s prejudice, the worst possible sin from the modern view. And yet we have no less a Christian than the Apostle Paul making quite prejudicial remarks about a group of people, the people of Crete. Though he was quoting someone else when he wrote, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.”

Why, you should wash your pen off with soap, Paul! How can you stereotype a group of people like that? Of course, he said he was quoting one of Crete’s own prophets.

We could quote a prophet of Somalia today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She has even harsher things to say about how Somalis treat women: “Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.”

I recently saw an interesting statistic about Somali immigrants. In many countries, they are the number one ethnic group to receive welfare. In Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and yes, the United States, Somalis are the ethnicity most likely to be on welfare. (Somalis also happen to be responsible for the highest crime rates per capita.)

All cultures are not equal. All religions are not equal. Some are truer, more moral than others.

This was the Apostle Paul’s full quote about the Cretans from Titus chapter 1:

“For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and that for the sake of dishonest gain. One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” This saying is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the merely human commands of those who reject the truth. To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. They are detestable, disobedient and unfit for doing anything good.”

Surely, there were good individual Cretans. Just as Somalia has its Ayaan Hirsi Alis. But culture can train people to pursue good or evil, and nations should also be judged by their fruits. It’s not only okay, but it’s right to be honest about this.