Native Americans, The Mainline Church, and the Quest for Interracial Justice

David Phillips Hansen

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780827225299
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

The Native American drive for self-governance is the most important civil rights struggle of our time - a struggle too often covered up. In Native Americans, The Mainline Church, and the Quest for Interracial Justice, David Phillips Hansen lays out the church's role in helping America heal its bleeding wounds of systemic oppression.

While many believe the United States is a melting pot for all cultures, Hansen asserts the longest war in human history is the one Anglo-Christians have waged on Native Americans. Using faith as a weapon against the darkness of injustice, this book will change the way you view how we must solve the pressing problems of racism, poverty, environmental degradation, and violence, and it will remind you that faith can be the leaven of justice.

PART ONE

Beginning

1

An Introduction

Mainline Protestant Christianity¹ in the United States cannot be fairly interpreted without understanding its interaction with Native Americans (hereafter sometimes shortened to Native(s), Indian(s), or indigenous peoples).² Similarly, the rapacious nature of white America’s treatment of the nation’s Native American population cannot be explained adequately without reference to Christianity. My more limited focus is mainline Protestant Christianity. Unfortunately, this aspect of religious life in U.S. history³ is often not well understood.⁴ Those of us who are white and who are members of the mainline church, as I am, must understand the church’s contribution to our nation’s anti-indigenous past, so that we can contribute to the creation of a more just and peaceful multicultural society in the future.

Mainline denominations represent the oldest branches of Protestantism in the United States. Although the influence of the mainline church has declined since the end of World War II, H. Richard Niebuhr, a prominent twentieth-century theologian in the mainline church, in lectures given in 1936 at Harvard Divinity School and the next year at Chicago Theological Seminary asserted: “Protestantism is American’s ‘only national religion and to ignore this fact is to view the country from a false angle.’”⁵

Today mainline denominations are ecumenically oriented. They often self-identify as progressive on human rights and matters of social justice. They tend to interpret the Bible in a historical-metaphorical way, rather than a literal-factual way.⁶ Since I am not interested in analyzing individual denominations or making comparisons among them, I use the collective term “mainline church.” When I cite the actions of a particular denomination, it is for illustrative purposes.

Mainline Protestant Christianity has been a crucial contributor to the Anglo-European cultural, economic, and political exploitation and subjugation of Native Americans since the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607. The situation began to change in 2003, when the United Church of Christ self-identified as the first mainline denomination to apologize to Native Americans for its participation in running Indian boarding schools and those harmed by them. Since 2003 other mainline denominations have issued their own apologies.

These apologies signal a desire on the part of the mainline church to end the longest war one people has waged upon another in the history of the world—the Anglo-Christian war on Native Americans. They are also an opportunity for the church to reform itself and to define a new role for itself in our national life. But without the nourishment of a new vision and a vibrant theology that connects this vision to its mission, the energy behind the church’s apology likely will either dry up or be displaced by competing priorities.

Knowing Our History, Defining Our Mission

We investigate our history not for the purpose of blaming our forebearers for their deeds, but rather so that we might free ourselves from their myopia and thereby prepare ourselves for the work before us. Whereas the former mission of the church to “civilize and Christianize Indians” was complicit with the Anglo-European invasion of the territories of Native Americans and the westward expansion of the United States, the apology offers the church the possibility to undertake a future mission that is consistent with the pursuit of interracial justice in a multicultural society. The postapology church could become an important ally in what I believe may be the most significant civil rights struggle of this century: namely, the Native American drive for self-governance.

To fulfill the promise of the apology, we first must and analyze the root causes of Christian anti-Native actions and attitudes. Only then can the church fully commit itself to the urgent task of building a more just and peaceful multicultural society in which the rights of Native Americans, other people of color, and non-Christian peoples are equally respected and honored.

My task is twofold: first, to expose and deconstruct the causes of the church’s war on indigenous cultures; and second, to identify and define key theological, political, and economic foundations for the church’s reformation that will prepare it for our multicultural future. Only by knowing and owning our history can those of us who are white members of the mainline churches be set free from the history of colonial (in contrast to postcolonial) Christianity and be empowered to create a new identity and a new mission for a church that we cherish.

The United Church of Christ’s 2003 apology to Native Americans said in part:

WHEREAS, the American Missionary Society and the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Mission commissioned missionaries who were zealous in their beliefs that Indians had no religion and no souls and were therefore ripe for conversion to Christianity; and

WHEREAS, in the decade following 1869 the Christian denominations began to establish boarding schools with the underlying policy “to kill the Indian and save the man,” and

WHEREAS, the boarding school was of paramount significance in the attempted genocide of an entire people, and the mandatory placement of Indian children in the boarding schools resulted in the loss of hundreds of languages, spiritual beliefs, traditional practices, and the destruction of healthy family life;….

THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED, that the United Church of Christ be the first church denomination to acknowledge, confess and accept its historic participation and accountability for the harm done through the establishment of boarding schools in the United States.⁷

The apology went on to commit the church to work with Native American communities within the denomination and with other communities of indigenous peoples and other allies to combat racial stereotyping, to oppose the subjugation and exploitation of Natives, and to end the destruction of indigenous cultures.

The 1893 World Parliament of Religions is indicative of the ethnocentrism of the mainline church and its disparagement of Native Americans.⁸ The Parliament was a central feature of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was held in Chicago. The purpose of the Exposition was to celebrate the quadricentennial of the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus. The Parliament brought together thousands of people representing a broad spectrum of the world’s diverse faith traditions, but U.S. Protestant Christianity was the main focus of the gathering. While the two African Americans invited to speak to the Exposition openly challenged the triumphal theology of the event, Native Americans were conspicuously not invited to participate. Their presence was limited to mock “Indian villages” intended to represent the evolutionary hierarchy of cultures from the primitive pagan past to the sophisticated and spiritually more enlightened Christian present.

The Columbian Exposition was an unabashed celebration of the ascendance of European and U.S. culture over all other cultures and of the superiority of Protestant Christianity over all other faith traditions. In the spirit of the times, a new magazine, The Christian Century, was launched in 1902. It quickly became the flagship publication of the mainline church. White Protestant America heralded the advent of the twentieth century as the dawn of the golden age of liberal Protestant Christianity in what promised to be the American century.

The banner of Protestant and U.S. hegemonic power did not unfurl as the turn-of-the-century visionaries expected, however. Today we live in a global village of many colors and many faiths. The apologies of the mainline churches to Native Americans are recognitions by these denominations of this reality. When these denominations issued their apologies, they renounced and formally terminated their historic mission to “civilize and Christianize the Indians.” A growing number of denominations has since formally repudiated the long-standing and religiously sanctioned Doctrine of Discovery, which even now serves as the legal basis for federal claims to Native American land. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these actions of renunciation and repudiation, or the opportunity they present for the church to reinvent itself.

These acts of renunciation and repudiation indicate to me that we are entering what Lewis S. Mudge, then Professor of Systematic Theology at San Francisco Theological Seminary, called a “post-Westphalian world.”⁹ In Germany, the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, marked the beginning of the modern secular state. It created a basis for national self-determination by granting the prince the exclusive right to tax citizens of the realm and to raise an army. It also incorporated the principle of cuius region eius religio (“whoever the prince may be, his will be the prevailing religion”), which was established earlier in the Peace of Augsburg, signed in 1555. The latter agreement also granted freedom of religion to subjects who did not wish to conform to the prince’s choice. We can trace the origin of the doctrine of the separation of church and state and the rise of denominational Protestantism to these two accords.

After 1648, nationalism gradually replaced religion as the focus of people’s loyalty and identity. Subsequently Christian theology and church became located in the “force fields” of the state but not co-opted by it completely.¹⁰ On one level, there was a widely shared assumption in Western circles that the growing power of the nation-state would be beneficial for Christianity and that Christianity would be beneficial for the state. On another level, religious freedom meant that faith increasingly “became marginalized, privatized, and individualized in both its conception and its content.”¹¹

The mainline church’s renunciation of its historic mission to “civilize and Christianize Indians” and its repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery indicate that we are approaching the end of the world started by the Peace of Westphalia and the church’s role in it. As such, the church has an opportunity to claim a less culturally compromised identity and to proclaim a less privatized understanding of the gospel.

A Personal Story

A few years after the United Church of Christ’s 2003 apology, Reverend Rosemary McCombs Maxey, an Oklahoma pastor of the Muscogee Creek Nation, invited me to attend a weekend pastors’ class held at the Eagle Butte Learning Center in South Dakota. During a conversation with the Reverend Norman Bluecoat, a pastor and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, he observed that white Christians often expressed hope for reconciliation with Native Americans. Then Bluecoat told me: “We can never be reconciled. Reconciliation assumes that we were once together. We have never been together.”

“Never” implies permanence. As Bluecoat knows, there were times in the past when indigenous peoples and settlers did cooperate. Today every mainline denomination has a Native American ministry in some form. However, historically the church’s mission to Native Americans was not guided by a desire to protect indigenous cultures or to advocate for indigenous peoples’ right of self-determination. With some exceptions, the church’s history has been shaped both by misunderstanding of Native American cultures and mistrust of Native American peoples, as well as by goals of extermination or assimilation. Can we change this pattern? The hope expressed in the United Church of Christ apology is that we can create a climate of mutual respect and understanding in order to create a more just and people-oriented society.

I owe Bluecoat and McCombs Maxey a debt of gratitude. In some respects this book is my response to Bluecoat’s comment, an outgrowth of my experiences at the Eagle Butte Learning Center and my tenure in South Dakota, where I served as the interim pastor of the Brookings United Church of Christ. Members of that congregation and friends at South Dakota State University enriched my understanding of Native American cultures and history.

My family also prepared me for this work. My immediate family includes blacks and whites, Christians, Muslims, and atheists. We are an interracial and inter...