Histories of Violence

And the Violence of History

(this is a screenshot and not clickable; see the paragraph below for a link to the program)

Tonight Rocky Mountain PBS aired an episode of its show Colorado Voices that focused on my employer and alma mater, the Iliff School of Theology, and a particularly disturbing part of its history. I’ll let the show speak for itself (you can watch it here, and read about it as well), but it centers on a book that was given to Iliff in the late 1800s. It was a book about the history of Christianity, written in Latin, and it was bound in a cover made from the skin of a Native American person. For decades, the book was put on display at the school as a curiosity and a prized possession, and for decades more, it was hushed up and shut away, out of fear that it would harm the school’s reputation. In recent years, under the leadership of a president who understands the moral cost of denial and cowardice, Iliff has been very public about the book, and has sought to enter dialogue and relationship with the descendants of the man whose skin once covered the book—a Lanape man who once lived in what is now West Virginia. The Rocky Mountain PBS show documents part of that dialogue.

This is the end of the sixth week of our ten-week quarter, and I happen to be teaching a class this term that’s titled Introduction to the History of Christianity. It’s just what it sounds like—two thousand years of history crammed into ten weeks. Because of the limits of the schedule, it’s necessarily compressed and limited in its perspective; we mostly stick to the Mediterranean and European histories of Christianity, and their jump to the Americas, and we privilege the Protestant traditions that many of our students claim as their own. This week—week six—we have been learning about the apostolic poverty movement and its key figures (like St. Francis of Assisi) who in the medieval period introduced reforms meant to challenge the church’s accumulation of wealth. It’s a rare bright spot in an otherwise dismal history. You might think a history of Christianity would feel triumphant and glorious, but you would be wrong. Most of our course—most of the history of Christianity—is a lot more like that book that my employer put on display for so many years. It's grotesque, violent, and deeply disappointing.

I have a hunch about this—that I have written up in a short piece that’s published in a few e-books—a hunch about how Christianity developed the way it did. The story begins in the observation that Christianity first defined itself in opposition to Jews and Judaism. Its first way of saying what it was were acts of saying what it wasn’t. “We aren’t Jews,” Christians said, “and that’s what makes us Christian.” If you’re interested in this, I wrote a whole book about Jewish-Christian relations that touches on this history. Sometimes when a group identifies another outsider group as an enemy, it’s called “Othering” or it’s referred to as creating “Others;” Christianity made Jews and Judaism into Others. My hunch is that Christianity learned that skill in its early days—its first two or three centuries—and never forgot it, and got very good at it.

Think about it. After Christianity made an Other out of Judaism, it then turned its sights on itself. Early Christianity is full of theological controversies about bodies, Christology, salvation theory, sexuality, and ritual, among other things. Some people were on the winning side of those arguments, and some were on the losing side. The losers are called heretics, and the winners are called the orthodox (with a little o)—the ones with the right belief. After Christianity Othered Jews, it Othered other Christians too, and it has never really stopped since.

The 7th and 8th centuries saw the rise of Islam, and the birth of another of Christianity’s paradigmatic Others. The Crusades were systematic programs of territorial ambition wrapped in Christian Othering, and in medieval Spain and in other places, conflict with Muslims was frequently bloody and infused with theologies of Othering. When in the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries European powers began colonial projects all over the globe, it was Christian Othering that fueled them. The Dutch in southern Africa, the Spanish in Mesoamerica, the English and French in North America, the French in North Africa, the British in India and east Asia—they all conquered territory in the name of Christianity and then ruled it ruthlessly as extractive Christian empires, built on slavery and the exploitation of resources. For the most part, they did this by making Others of the native people they met. They described them as savages, as primitive people in need of religion and civilization, or as “races” of people especially suited to servitude. The Doctrine of Discovery draped the whole thing in the dignity of religion, and European colonialism was cast as a holy calling.

The same logic fueled slavery in the United States and other places in North and Central America and the Caribbean: Africans were thought of as inferior heathens, and therefore useful for enslavement, but not fully human. They were Other. The same logic, married with capitalist fervor, drove the industrial revolution; if the earth is an Other, and its fate is separate from our own, then it hardly matters what we do to it. Everywhere Christianity went, the practice of Othering went too, leaving missions in California, plantations in Haiti, economic ruin in India, environmental destruction everywhere, Apartheid in South Africa, and too many other legacies to name.

It's hard to peel away a version of Christianity that isn’t hopelessly entangled in Othering and the Christian use of violence. My students try, of course. They look for moments of hopefulness in the tradition, like St. Francis, and many of them look to the Reformations and revivals of the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries in hopes of finding a Christianity, finally, that isn’t violent and mired in prejudice. They always fail at this; Zwingli and Luther and Jonathan Edwards and Barton W. Stone and Joseph Smith were no more innocent than their predecessors, and the 20th and 21st century churches many of my students belong to haven’t fared much better. (It was only a generation or two ago that you could expect many if not most American churches, of any kind, to oppose women in ministry and homosexuality in any and all forms).

All this is to say, the book of Christian history bound in the skin of a Native American man is not really an exception, it is the rule. It is easy to think about a book like this as an aberration, but it’s not really. What’s exceptional about it is that it has lasted into the 21st century and that it has come to light—what’s unusual is that we know about it and that we talk about it. But the violence of Christian history, and histories of Christian violence, are woven whole cloth into Christian tradition. Scratch the surface of any form of Christianity, and you’re bound to uncover atrocities. Start digging into the history of even the most innocuous of Christian denominations, and you’ll find complicity with slavery and hate.

One of the requests that the Lenape people made of the Iliff School of Theology was that we build into our curriculum an ongoing engagement with and education about the Doctrine of Discovery, the papal bulls that authorized European Christian colonialism, and the histories of violence against colonized people. This, I am glad to do, and indeed, we already do it in some ways. In a few weeks, my course will read Inter Caetera by Pope Alexander VI alongside some of the accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas in his work A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. We will read the papal words that authorized violence alongside descriptions of that violence’s effects. The result is devastating, but necessary. For people who want to claim Christianity, and especially for those who want to lead within it, you can’t turn away from the histories you’ve inherited.

There’s still a strong impulse to turn away, and there’s an instinct to disown. That’s not my history, some might say. That’s not the Christianity that Jesus taught. Like it or not, yes it is—or at least, that’s the Christianity that resulted from what Jesus taught, historically speaking. If we want to claim something different for ourselves and for the future, then we have to make that different thing on our own, wringing the evil out of things we have inherited and accounting for the sins of our forebears. It won’t be easy and it can never be facile, but it has to start with honesty and accountability.