As Christians we must get collectively uncomfortable with the reality that our faith and our Bible has been used to carry out atrocities in Christ’s name. And it’s not enough to know this in a vague sense; everyone who claims the name of Jesus needs to know *the specifics* of what Christians have done (and do now) to people who are different than them.
I strongly encourage you to read this very short article that inspired this post and let yourself be appalled, disgusted, and disturbed. But in case you don’t, I won’t miss the opportunity to tell you:
- Christians kidnapped and sold school-age native kids into the sex trade.
- Christians scalped natives and burned them alive. To kill children, they slammed them against tree trunks and stones.
- Christians cut limbs off slaves who didn’t meet their production standards.
- Christians sliced open the swollen bellies of pregnant native women to kill them and their babies and to terrorize onlookers.
- Christians forced native communities on perilous treks exceeding 1,000 miles which brought devastating morbidity and mortality.
And, after all that violence I can barely comprehend, Christians had the gall to refer to natives as “godless savages.”
Many will read this and say, “But there is a difference between Christians and Christ. Yes, we have been a terrible witness for Jesus, but we are NOT Jesus.” And you know what, I wholeheartedly agree with you. If there is no distinction between Christ and Christians, just throw my faith right in the garbage. I’ll renounce it all right this second.
I don’t want ANYTHING to do with a Jesus that is one iota like the Christians who brutally raped, enslaved, and slaughtered Native Americans (and black people, and Jews, and migrants, and LGBTQ people, and Muslims…). I do think there is a difference – a very stark one – between the Jesus I believe in and the one that has been coopted by white capitalist heterosexist patriarchy.
But – if we stop there, with cries of “But that’s not the real Jesus,” or “Those people weren’t actually Christians,” we aren’t doing enough. We are not sufficiently disturbed. We are letting ourselves off the hook and refusing to be affected by the crimes of our spiritual ancestors.
Think about how all these horrors were experienced by the indigenous people of “our” country. They had no other context for Jesus apart from the people who oppressed them in Jesus’ name. Christianity was forced on them as “the truth” by the people brutalizing them and killing them. The people with Bibles were the people murdering their children.That is their story, that is their truth, and I pray all of us will be deeply humbled by sitting with that awareness. We don’t need to offer explanations, we need to be quiet. When we respond to indigenous people’s immense pain with quips about how their oppressors didn’t know the real Jesus, we minimize what they have suffered. What they still suffer.
Lest anyone think the brutalizing of the rightful owners of this land is deep in the past: they weren’t granted citizenship until 1924. They did not have equal rights until 1968. They were not permitted to practice their own religion until 1978. In 2007 there were still 9,500 native children in boarding schools where they were commonly molested, beaten, and “Americanized.”
Today native people still endure colonization on a daily basis:
- The constant assimilation of their culture, like the Braves’ tomahawk chop and white children’s Halloween costumes.
- A national holiday for a tyrant who pillaged their lands and murdered their people.
- Another holiday around the corner that whitewashes the unconscionable violence we inflicted upon them into an acceptable-for-white-kids version about Pilgrims and turkeys.
- “History” textbooks full of lies that erase their torment and personhood.
We can’t talk anymore about “that wasn’t done in the real Jesus’ name,” or “they didn’t read their Bibles right,” because to do so is, honestly, to miss the point (it’s also incredibly arrogant — we know the “real Jesus?” We read our Bible “right?”). When Jesus walked the earth, that wasn’t the only incarnation. We who claim to follow him incarnate Jesus every day through our actions. And the incarnated Jesus that indigenous people know is one who viciously abused their ancestors in every way and colonizes them still today.
We are the godless savages. Our people, our spiritual siblings, massacred 50-100 million people who bore the image of God. Christians carried out the greatest genocide in recorded history (I’m still linking to that same article because I’m really hoping you’ll read it). And today our colonization looks differently, but it’s colonization nonetheless.
I’d like to leave you with a particular aspect of our modern colonization tactics that evangelicals are especially guilty of: the bold assertion that our way is the right way. Our theology, our God, our concept of afterlife. When we forcefully insist that our doctrines are the correct ones, make no mistake: we participate in the erasure of native people who have their own ideas about the divine (imagine that!). I realize no one reading this has stoned a child or weaponized smallpox. But many of us sing and pray and promote intellectual colonization every day.
Our God is greater, our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other…
The next time you sing that song, consider it from a new angle. The declaration of our God’s superiority is the silencing of indigenous voices who walked this land for thousands of years before us and before Jesus.
“In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive [s/he] who worships the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and the Rain that wets it.” – Eduardo Galeano
Photo credits in order:
- Photo by Patrick Selin on Unsplash (sun)
- Photo by David Dibert on Unsplash (moon)
- Photo by Dylan de Jonge on Unsplash (earth)
- Photo by michael podger on Unsplash (rain)
