Decolonizer Jesus.

Or how Jesus invented human rights, despite humans best efforts.

It once baffled me that Christianity is seen as the white man’s religion. No longer. The history of colonization by European empires whose monarch supposedly derived their divine right to rule from the approval of Jesus’ father is long and bloody. Four of the Earth’s continents have borders in the strangest of places, determined as much by the will of some European bureaucrat half a world away as the will of the people who lived there. Europeans from time immemorial up until (at the absolute earliest) 1945 had this nasty habit of viewing themselves as civilized and everyone else as in need of their civilizing.

The irony of course is that being brutally “civilized” by conquering Europeans is something Jesus would have been intimately familiar with. Jesus was born into a world with the Roman Empire at it’s center. There was no separation of church and state in the Roman world. Rome’s legitimacy as a state was upheld by the Pax Deorum, or Peace of the Gods. The peoples Rome conquered were allowed to keep their gods and their temples, as long as they recognized the emperor as equal to their gods. Perhaps some treasures would be taken back to Rome, along with a great many slaves, but the next day, the conquered people would be allowed to live their lives in peace…as long as they didn’t do anything to disturb Rome’s interests in the area.

Most pagan religions found this arrangement tolerable. The Romans believed their gods were powerful, but also fickle and given to many of the same problems as humans. In general they weren’t a faithful people, but rather a pragmatic one. The roman approach to religion reflected this. They didn’t care who you were praying to, as long as it was for Rome.

The Jews were their polar opposite. Religious obligation lay at the center of what it was to be Jewish. The supreme authority in Jewish life was a religious court. Even when Israel was an independent kingdom, the priesthood did not like being told what to do by any earthly authority. Many a prophet was murdered by corrupt kings, and many a king’s legitimacy fell apart because of the condemnation of a prophet.

What’s more, the Jewish conception of God was utterly alien to the Romans. Most peoples assumed the roman gods were stronger than their own, and that was why they had lost in battle. In the mind of a first century Jew, whose God had made the world and everything in it, including Rome, the Romans had only been allowed to conquer their state because they had not been faithful enough to God.

This made Judea much harder to pacify than most conquered provinces. The Romans used a classic colonial tactic that has been employed right through to the present day. They empowered a local strongman named Herod to look after their interests, which he did with ruthless abandon. Between this and the friction between Jewish and Roman religion, Herod and especially his son who followed him after his 63 year reign, was seen as a Roman puppet who was about as Jewish as a side of bacon. Rome tolerated the Jews and their strange religious customs at the best of times. At the worst of times, they crucified people about it.

The moment I “got it” about why Christianity was seen as the white mans religion was the day I learned that Spanish conquistadors would often literally crucify indigenous people and tell them they’re going to hell if they don’t convert to Spanish Catholicism. If the people I love are nailed to these trees with me, and the people doing the nailing are telling me they’re going to heaven and we’re going to hell, I’d want to go to hell. How could I not? I don’t want to be like you.

This was the most my belief that God can love anyone and everyone has ever been challenged. I think I could forgive those who did a great evil to me, maybe those who did evil to others I loved, but to do evil IN MY NAME to someone I wanted good for; to make enemies I did not want and force me to fight people I wanted peace with feels unforgivable. To inflict Jesus’ own trauma on people is cartoonishly at odds with Christ’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. I want to believe that the conquistadors were secretly worshipping Satan, and lied to these natives to try and ensure they’d go to hell with them. However that’s too clean and easy. It doesn’t make me think.

A big part of this thinking is that I’m accutely aware of the fact that I am an exceptionally combative person who has alienated people without meaning to, often over religious questions. I might never have killed a man over it, but I’ve done enough shadow work to know that if I’d been born a young Spaniard, a subject of King Philip the 1st, with the option to sail across the ocean for gold, glory and God, I’d probably have taken it.

Might I have found myself looking at native people crucified in the name of my merciful God, wondering how it had all gone so wrong? Would I have even had that much self awareness, or would the bloodiness of Aztec religion have hardened me to the suffering of those I hurt? Most people don’t have any self awareness about these things. We live lives of profound ignorance and arrogance while chirping about our virtue on social media. Convincing someone they aren’t a good person usually takes a mental breakdown of the sort that forces someone to totally recalibrate their lives.

For many people, this realization forms the basis of their conversion to Christianity. For those of us who grew up in the church, we might not change religion entirely, but we come to realize the truth of the words of Isaiah the prophet. “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”(Isaiah 64:6)

How might a young roman in his beautiful red uniform have reacted to a Jewish mystic telling him those words? Probably laughter and scorn. These silly jews with their one silly god had lost the battle. That was all that mattered to him.

Christ knew better. That’s why he wasn’t trying to tear down Rome. Militaristic fascists though they were, they were also people just like him(or at least his countrymen). Even a successful revolt would cause a thousand new evils. Christ’s war was against the spirit of control and violence that had created Rome’s tyranny. His weapons were not of this world. He saw the soldiers that tyrannized his people as slaves, just as surely as the slaves they took to mine their silver. The emperor was in many ways the single greatest victim of this tyranny.

Those of you who balk at this, looking at the luxury Roman emperors lived in, can’t see the forest for the trees. I don’t care how soft his bed was, because he never got to sleep easy in it. I don’t care how fine his wine was, because he worried that every glass contained poison. Conquered people had to fear the swords of the legions, but the emperor had to fear hidden knives from every Roman, especially the frequently mutineering Praetorian Guard whose job was to protect him. The slave shoveling silver in Spain could at least truly rest when his long day was done. Perhaps his bed was hard, perhaps his food was cheap, but he didn’t have to worry about death with every bite. Heavy is the head that bears the crown. Only fools want to be tyrants. Pity them.

Only a fool would deny the depth of the evil done on this continent. The western hemisphere was a dumping ground for the unwanted people of the world for more than three centuries. People left their homes and found freedom and fortune here, but often at someone else’s expense. We have created a society where every man can be a tyrant in his own small way, and we have called it freedom. What foolishness.

Christ called all, because he understood that hurt people hurt people. There’s an impulse in a lot of leftist circles that demands revenge for the evils of colonization. While I understand this, and have grown to understand it more and more as I have learned the details of what was done on this continent by European colonizers, I also know it will end in hell just as surely as the original sin. Revenge drives the cycle of violence into overdrive. Sincere apologies have a profound power to bind and banish our demons and the demons of those we have hurt. Efforts to make right what was broken, infinitely more so. Real freedom is found when the slaver willingly restores humanity to his cargo. Kill him and his family will swear revenge. Kill anyone who might swear revenge and you will have become every bit the tyrant you once hated.

Jesus was the opposite of a tyrant. He was a minority refugee who didn’t pray like most people in his society. He has always stood with the dispossesed and abused, often against the religious elites doing the abusing.

Decolonizer Jesus.

This challege is not to the people who call Christianity the white man’s religion, but to the church that praise his name. Why should we expect anything else when the Catholic church still celebrates Columbus day and treats his habit of making slaves of the natives as such an unimportant detail of his life that we don’t even teach it in schools? Why shouldn’t young women turn to witchcraft when the church has made such a habit of treating them like second class citizens and sweeping their abuse under the rug? The sad reality is that much of the least Christlike behavior in the world can be found behind closed doors in churches. All have sinned, but we have grown accomodating of sin rather than merely tolerant of sinners in our midst. The people trying to lead the congregation are frequently just as broken as the ones seeking help, but without the honesty to admit it.

We have contented ourselves with talking about Jesus, rather than acting like him. The pastor’s indiscretion and his victim’s trauma are both seen as covered by the blood... rather than swept under the rug. Is it any wonder that church attendance is at a record low in the US when misbehaving pastors are so frequently shuffled off to another church in the same denomination without so much as a slap on the wrist or a footnote on their record? Why wouldn’t Christianity be seen as the white man’s religion when the whitest people on earth can be found inside churches calling everything from music with drums in it to Buddhism to Dungeons and Dragons satanic? They seem to need everything to be as boring as they are, as though they’ve perfected religion. The fools. I pity them.

This is not a knock against loving tradition. If you like your church services traditional and utterly free of drums, you are just as much a child of God as anyone else. The problem comes when we think other people who don’t have our traditions are not children of God. When we start to think this way, it ceases to be about spreading the story of Jesus to the rest of the world and becomes about remaking the world in our image. How much further might Christianity have spread if the British empire had demanded humility of it’s missionaries? They might have learned the nuances of the eastern conception of the world and learned how to explain Jesus to them in the fullness of his mystery and glory, rather than simply demanding allegiance to their way of doing things. How much further might the gospel have spread by now? How many more beautiful ways of praising God might there be?

*A PRAYER FOR GRACE AND MERCY*

God, thank you that your grace covers my sin, but thank you even more that your spirit empowers me to live in the love you died to model. Help me fix what has been broken in this world, especially by the failure of the church, and especially by the failures of MY church.