Quotes about Tribalism

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.

But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.

My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains, — "I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."

A wolf can only curse a lion when surrounded by its peers.

Acting like a crowd of kids/ the mask was a thin thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness/ He was safe from shame or self-consciousness behind the mask of his paint and could look at each of them in return/ They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought"?Lord of the Flies?

His [Ishmael's] hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

Christianity, for some, is neither faith nor reason—just reactive tribalism hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church.

We can recognize, moreover, that a move beyond our tribalism never happens in the ordinary. It takes a miracle, or a jolt, or a gift, or killing (as in Charleston) to awaken us from our tribal numbness, to see and act afresh.