Repenting of Christendom: Great Reformation 5.0

Repenting of Christendom:  
This is 1 of 6 on my list of reforms in honor of the 500th anniversary of the protestant reformation.  

Empires are built and sustained by conquering, colonizing, converting and controlling other lands and people. This kind of powerful takeover and oppression needs a partner and religion has made a reliable and effective one for many throughout history. Christianity was named the religious sponsor of western civilization over 1600 years ago. One of the biggest failures of the protestant reformation was its continued acceptance of state power fused with Christianity. Both Catholics and Protestants killed and tortured the Anabaptist’s. The Anabaptist’s were one of the few groups that publically renounced the power of empire, proclaiming it to be utterly incompatible with the way of Jesus. Jesus opposed the means and power of empire. So it seems that getting tortured and killed is a risky side effect of resisting this ring of power.

Conquering, colonizing, converting, and controlling is still deeply fused in the conscious and subconscious understandings of dominant western Christianity still to this day. The ostentatious display of white supremacy groups is a particularly ugly manifestation of a long elaborate system of functional Christendom (even in a country that eloquently espouses the separation of church and state). White cultural hegemony feels threatened, along with its religious sponsor – Christianity. This fear is being used as a catalyst to mobilize those concerned that the essential ordering principles of “the greatest country on earth” are endangered and under attack. It is not uncommon for white people in general, not just extremists, to express the feeling that they are being victimized and discriminated against by forces that, they believe, will ultimately cause the collapse of a great civilization. Where does this existential foreboding come from?

I believe that the fusion of empire and Christianity has created a deep and long implicit bias in white America. A bias that the power of empire is an essential good, as long as, it is in the hands of White people. White people should therefore be in charge of non-white people and their natural resources. This belief is explicitly and implicitly embedded in both the Declaration of Independence (unrestricted ability to take control and possession of native lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, without British interference) and the US Constitution (3/5 Compromise). 

To probe this bias: Power is good so long as it is held by White people (“White people” being those to whom Western Christendom has given birth…i.e. me) I ask myself this question: “Which countries do I feel most comfortable possessing nuclear weapons?”

It is scary how long it has taken me to answer this question with this one word, “None”.

I believe that our love affair with power and domination has corrupted the imagination of what it means to be truly human. It unfortunately has served to create Christian institutions prone to blindly massage the Euro-centric ego and promote a messianic complex of western saviors exported to colonize the rest of the world with some devastating results. I summarize the fusion of empire and Christianity in America as producing this toxic, unconscious, and persistent bias: White people are the best people, they possess the best religion, have created the best country, and therefore have a divine mandate and endowed ability to save the rest of the world. 

Repenting of Christendom is first a word for me, before it is a word for anyone else. I have been coming to terms with my own implicit biases that have been formed and passed on to me from many, many, many previous generations. I have started to dream of what passing on a different spiritual legacy to my kids would look like. I dream of passing on a legacy that, with great conviction, renounces empire and follows the Jesus, who also renounced empire, in favor of governing principles of service, love, compassion and restorative justice.