If you feel inclined to choose between reading my thoughts presented below or reading the article and watching the video from APTN, I would recommend the article and video as priority. Note that the place of greatest terror on walking through the school recently, referred to as “hell” by a survivor, is the chapel. If there is any coercion or threat remaining in Christian theology and “evangelism” today (and there is) then we have not yet accomplished the necessary destruction of the terror. I part company theologically with any Christian leaders who speak of wanting “healing” and “reaching out to victims” even as they continue to perpetrate the theology that led to this kind of horror.
Article & Video: Survivor tells APTN about loss and fear at residential school.
I remember years ago attending a pastor’s conference where a writer that I liked a lot was one of the speakers. When I heard Walter Wangerin Jr. present his lecture/talk I was grateful that he was as good or even better as a speaker. I recall a lot from his talk, but one thing that I have considered repeatedly is that he said to us preachers there:
“If you ever talk about sin in a sermon, make sure that you are talking about your own.”
Like many of you, I have been struck by emotion, confusion and disgust in the days since the discovery that 215 children were buried on the grounds of a residential school in Kamloops. I feel utterly unqualified to speak about the terror that something like that happened in our neighbourhood. In seeking to consider the darkness of the crime, I have thought that perhaps it would help to think about what it would be like for the governing and religious authorities to forcibly take your children from you, to then indoctrinate those kids against you and your culture, and then to neglect or assault those kids, sometimes to the point of death, finally burying them in unmarked graves. Of course, the terror would impact generations.
As I have listened to Indigenous leaders speak on the matter I have heard repeatedly that most of what has been discovered recently is not actually new. I have heard a tempered hope that maybe things can change for the better mixed with a realism that the record of the past in terms of such change does not provide evidence for such hope.
One thing that I can ask myself is what role Christian theology played in the crimes. How did an understanding of God, faith, culture and “the other” contribute to such attempted genocide? The fact that in the APTN video linked above, the residential school survivor physically drew back upon entering the chapel and called it the worst place of all should alert us to the sin of terrible theology in our faith. I am usually reluctant to use the word, “evil”, but it is called for in this context. It turns out that us Christians (as Karl Barth remarked) are the ones that we should consider “despicable” in this world.
I am a Christian. I am deeply grateful for my faith. In Christian faith I find identity and community and hope. However, as I think back to what Walter Wangerin Jr. said at that conference I ask myself if the Christian church in Canada has anything at all to say about the wrong or the sin of other people. If we talk about sin, it should be about our own. How can we go on as if the impact of these crimes are only in our past? How can there be any churches left standing that have contributed to such evil? Wouldn’t it be better if our churches liquidated their wealth and seriously aimed to make amends? I ask myself if any church or institution or theology that was part of perpetrating such things is worth saving. There is debate about whether the schools should be bulldozed. It is not my place to take a position on that matter. I am convinced that something must be destroyed; the theology that was a central part of all of this. I have a feeling that much demolition work remains.
When I hear the trope that “some people were trying to do good” it simply affirms to me that the theology was a kind of psychosis.
Christian theology was part of trying to destroy a people. It is clear that what needs to be destroyed is any way of thinking that would ever contribute to such destruction.
When I was a pastor in an evangelical church I would occasionally have people complain to me that I did not speak about hell enough. On multiple occasions I recall being told that “people needed to hear that is where they are headed unless …”
This is the same sick, psychotic theology that contributed to the residential school terror in our country. The woman in the APTN video was told repeatedly, when she was seven years old, that she would burn in hell if she didn’t reject her family, her culture, if she didn’t behave.
We need to be done with this. Leaders who perpetrate this thinking are not strong. They are weak, but when given power they can do terrible damage. This much we have seen.