Note: This was originally a Facebook post written on October 11th, but it would definitely be more beneficial to my readers.
So grateful that my daughter's school celebrated Indigenous People's Day yesterday. While I'm happy as individual principals, schools, and communities get on board with this, I know that Columbus Day's official holiday remains. So I had a few thoughts on the impact of colonization on our faith. Ready?
Those of us who come from an evangelical background have probably recently heard of the trend of "deconstruction." There are feelings across the spectrum about this, from critique and fear to fully embracing the term and its practice. For those friends of mine deconstructing, I would like to offer another alternative BEFORE deconstruction: decolonization.
The faith and Biblical interpretation (hermeneutics) Christians practice in the US has been heavily impacted by colonization. The depths to which we, as a Christian cultural group, have not yet collectively acknowledged how we engage the Bible, Jesus, and politics have impacted our living faith in practice.
Early colonizers, like Columbus, needed spiritual justification and authority to conquer this land. It needed to be spiritualized to gain acceptance. Read the following from the Doctrine of Discovery:
"Moreover, as your aforesaid envoys are of opinion, these very peoples living in the said islands and countries believe in one
God, the Creator in heaven, and seem sufficiently disposed to embrace the Catholic faith and be trained in good morals. And it is hoped that, were they instructed, the name of the Savior, our
Lord Jesus Christ, would easily be introduced into the said countries and islands."
Also, from the Doctrine of Discovery:
"In the islands and countries already discovered are found gold, spices, and very many other precious things of divers kinds and qualities."
My paraphrase: "We are evangelizing this land to convert them to Christ also by taking their land from them, but by the way, there is also gold there and other cool stuff."
Let's take a brief quote from Manifest Destiny:
"This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the immutable truth and beneficence of God."
Here we have what remains our current issue, the US positioning itself as God's chosen nation or the new Israel.
Euphemisms are a tale as old as time. It didn't start with political correctness. This was a hermeneutic of power, conquest, and supremacy by white colonizers. It was a competition on which nation would win more glory. It was a euphemism for stealing, lying, killing, and in 1493 was the birthplace of our current racial caste system.
Knowing how faith is easily manipulated for power and conquest and how much of our faith's current expressions are centered in whiteness, why continue? Because the story didn't start there, it certainly doesn't end there and is not necessarily the story of all Christians globally. I've written enough today. To be continued...
Note: This post is for Christians considering or going through deconstruction. If that isn't you, it is not to talk about any points contained in this. Thanks!
#decolonization #deconstruction #ColumbusDay #IndigenousPeoplesDay