[Dialogue] 7/15/2021, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Gretta Vosper: When Religion Goes Rogue [Indigenous children/boarding schools/genocide]

Thu Jul 15 07:28:21 PDT 2021

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When Religion Goes Rogue
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|  Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper
July 15, 2021It was over two decades ago that I first heard of the stories told by Indigenous families in British Columbia that unmarked graves of children could be found at the sites of former government and church-run residential schools. At the time, the former United Church minister who had been trying to alert authorities, Kevin Annett, then in his early forties, had already been placed on the Discontinued Service List - stripped of his ordination through a disciplinary process used by The United Church of Canada when the behaviour of a clergy person comes into question. In 1996, Canada’s national news magazine, Macleans, told the story of Annett’s disciplinary process under the title “The United Church Confronts an Activist”[1]. Journalist Chris Wood depicted the proceedings as repeatedly “characterized by rancor and recrimination.” It was the first time in its history that the UCC had conducted such a disciplinary hearing in British Columbia. Annett, incensed by the imposition of the requirement that he undergo a psychiatric assessment as part of the disciplinary proceeding, refused to comply; in so doing, he sealed the action against him and his relationship with the United Church was officially ended. Annett was written off by many as not to be taken seriously. And while he continued to work with Indigenous communities to try to get their stories heard, we continued to not take him, or those stories, seriously. To our ultimate shame.

Recent weeks have uncovered over 1300 graves at the sites of residential schools run by the Roman Catholic Church in Canada for Indigenous children. South of our border, Rep. Debra Haaland, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, has taken up the challenge of exploring the lands of former American residential schools – many of them also run by religious institutions – searching for the graves of children who may be buried there. It is likely that, by the time this article is published, the number of children buried in unmarked graves on either side of our international border, may have risen.

In Canada, it wasn’t just the Roman Catholic Church involved. Both the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church also participated in the residential schools program which, for decades, forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families for the purpose of educating them into the dominant white, Christian culture of the country. The tragic results of the program are evident across Canada where Indigenous families continue to experience the trauma of familial and generational disruption, the religiously and politically condoned erasure of traditional language and teachings, and the failure of government to address the resultant social and cultural inequities and injustices which persist to this day.

A question of nomenclature
It may not seem remarkable that Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church which ran the three schools at which, to date, unmarked graves have been found, has refused to apologize for the deaths or the appalling way in which graves were treated (markers at one site were bulldozed by a Catholic priest in the 1960s during a dispute with a local Indigenous Chief). Some argue that a pope’s apologies are only given in person and that Francis hasn’t yet had the opportunity. He has, however, been invited to Canada to do just that. To date, no appearances have been scheduled.

The question, however, is what would he apologize for? Would it be for the unsupervised way in which certain schools dealt with the deaths of schoolchildren? Would it be for deciding that it was cheaper to bury children at the school than return their bodies to their families? Would it be for not keeping records that would make connecting the remains with bereaved families possible?

Or would it be an acknowledgement of the Roman Catholic’s legacy of genocide? Would it be an apology for what we have all wanted to deny for so long? And would we then feel free to sweep our own apologies in alongside, a national avalanche of complicity?

Genocide by any other name
The word “genocide” gets a lot of hackles up. Coined in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin, the term was the slamming together of the Latin suffix cide, meaning murder, with the Greek prefix genos, meaning tribe or race. Genocide came to mean the eradication of an entire people. Surely a thousand or so dead children can’t be argued to be the eradication of a whole race or even of a tribe when their families were left to live according to their practices as they saw fit. The term genocide seems so extreme, doesn’t it?

Some scholars have argued that the appropriate label for the Canadian government’s intent to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the residential school program is cultural genocide. Others note, however, that the term “cultural genocide” doesn’t even exist in United Nations’ documents. At one time, the term was included in a draft of the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), but it was ultimately removed and the term “genocide” is used exclusively in the final document.

Lemkin, however, the man who originally coined the term, seems to have written with the understanding that genocide meant far more than the eradication of a people by murder or killing. The destruction of culture fell squarely within the boundaries of genocide as he intended the word to be understood.  

The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups. Essentially the idea of a nation signifies constructive cooperation and original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and well-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contribution to the world. . . . Among the basic features which have marked progress in civilization are the respect for and appreciation of the national characteristics and qualities contributed to world culture by different nations—characteristics and qualities which . . . are not to be measured in terms of national power or wealth. [2] (italics mine, gv)

To intentionally silence whole groups of people, by whatever means, is an offence that Lemkin would have named genocide. The practice of removing children from their families, refusing them the right to use their own language thereby undermining, if not destroying, the capacity for intergenerational transmission of culture, naming their customs and spiritual practices evil or corrupt, and refusing them the most sacred of all cultural practices, their traditional burial rituals, is the ultimate depiction of genocide as Raphäel Lemkin originally defined it. White Christians, dominant in North America because of the diseases, weapons, and beliefs they brought to this land, intentionally undertook to destroy Indigenous culture. They undertook a systematic program to do so. No matter what they called the “program”, it was genocide. It is genocide for which the Pope, our governments, and perhaps all white Christians and their descendants, must account and apologize.  

Incalculable loss
We are made rich by what we receive of the heritage of our elders, of nations, and races who have come before us. They people our imaginations, colour our ideas, inform our deepest and best thinking, challenge our rigidities. But they also scare us half to death, strain our understandings of who and what we are, and leave us far more than we might ever have chosen for ourselves: heart-breaking truths; egregious complicities; harrowing cultural roots; blood-soaked family trees; the legacies of cold, marble-carved hubris. The past planted seeds of tomorrows we couldn’t foresee, might never have allowed to grow had we seen them, but they mature, nonetheless. And we must reckon with them. Every today is built on the best and the worst of what has come before. Every tomorrow is fertilized by the courage or insecurities of the present. It is ours to choose those tomorrows, not only for ourselves, but for those who will come after us.

Lemkin knew this. He knew that our beauty and strength were limited only by the breadth of the stories and the diversities of the people who contributed to them. One story offers this understanding; another illuminates it from an alternate perspective. Together, we grow and learn. Together, we are made whole by exercising and testing our relationships with one another. Together, our cultures, our traditions, our ideas are cured over time and we grow into and through them. Eliminate one or another story, and the whole is incomplete. Indeed, eliminate the entire narrative, and the whole that might have been will, simply, never be. It is that simple. Given the breadth of culture we have lost or destroyed over time, is it any wonder that humanity seems more lost than ever?

Using Lemkin’s definition, can we deny that religion, perhaps even Christianity, has been the greatest proponent of genocide throughout human history? Using religious syncretism to override local traditions, Christianity superimposed its story onto festivals and rituals of older, localized belief systems, silencing stories once told by telling bigger, more exciting ones. Our tradition built upon the destruction of ancient libraries, silencing cultural and scientific truths handed down, perhaps, for centuries. Infidels were slaughtered, non-believers tortured, healers burned at the stake, those who refused to convert cursed and driven from their communities. Burning books. Banning words. Smashing obelisks. Destroying sacred sites. Shattering ideas. Genocide by any other name.

Beyond genocide
I cannot define the religious impulse. I cannot claim to understand the pull religion has on some or the equally strong repulsion it holds for others. I do not want to live outside religion’s deepest wonders. I do not want to live within its shameful truths. The arc of human wealth has followed the curve of religious domination as divine rights have been used to claim properties, people, and whole lands. The breadth of the religious quest has stretched the human heart to acts of compassion and sacrifice beyond comprehension. We are struck by limitless wonder. We are mired in devastating truth.

Were I to follow Lemkin’s lead, working to draw us into relationship with one another through and between the world’s myriad religions and beliefs, I wonder if what we might seek together could be called an understanding of the heart, perhaps even in the sense of standing under the protection of another’s heart; trusting that they will protect our story and offering, in turn, a pledge to do the same. Lemkin knew that we must protect one another’s stories. To know one another’s stories intimately, to seek to understand another’s practices, traditions, tests, strengths, burdens, losses, and accumulations of those things held to be dear – this would challenge us to open our hearts beyond our own beliefs, beyond the protection of our own traditions. This is what Lemkin saw and what might be the hardest thing we fractious beings could ever undertake: the need to create space and permission to tell our stories deeply and fully enough that we can hear in each one what our own does not hold; to marvel at a tale told differently; to see in another’s footsteps, not just their journey of discovery but our own. This, Lemkin knew, would mean a world beyond hate. A world in which he would never have had the need to slam together a Latin suffix and a Greek prefix. A world in which the word genocide would never have been coined.   
 ~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read online here

About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here.
 [1] Chris Wood, “The United Church confronts an activist”, September 16, 1996, Macleans. https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1996/9/16/the-united-church-confronts-an-activist.[2] Raphäel Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress, 2nd ed. (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2005), 91. In Cultural Genocide: Facing History and Ourselves, https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-7/cultural-genocide, accessed July 7, 2021.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By Mel

Why are there many books written that Progressive Christianity is a dangerous belief? I was checking Kindle books and I have come across that there are books written about the negative side of Progressive Christianity. I wonder why this is so? Everyone has their opinion and why would people who write these books be judgmental?

A: By Rev. Lauren Van Ham
 Dear Mel,An orientation toward scarcity and separation has informed a lot of the decisions we make as a species.  When we perceive there may not be enough of something, we scramble to be sure we will have what we need, and usually extra…just in case.  This can feed a tendency in us to feel very threatened and concerned about how others are finding ways to be sure they will have enough.  Is their way better than mine?  Is their way posing a threat to my sense of safety or competency?  

Progressive Christianity “affirms that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life.”  For those who have been taught repeatedly that Jesus is the only way, such a statement is very disorienting.  Progressive Christianity “seeks community that is inclusive of ALL people.”  For those who have been encouraged to create community exclusively with people who look and sound like them, this statement invites variety that creates confusion and possible fear.  Progressive Christianity “believes there is more value in questioning than in absolutes.”  For those who have taken comfort in predictability and answers, this statement evokes anxiety and perceived chaos. 

So, Progressive Christianity opens the doors to disorientation, confusion and chaos?  Well, yes! In some ways… And this feels very messy for the parts of us that really prefer comfort, ease, and order.  Progressive Christianity recognizes that being human on this living planet means experiencing diversity, death, and fear while learning to find meaning, love and friendship amidst it all.  Is Progressive Christianity dangerous?  Most definitely if a Christian doesn’t want to recognize their participation in a system that has allowed certain humans to thrive at the expense of other humans and more-than-humans.  The Rev Dr. Cornel West powerfully sums it up with these words, “To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Lauren’s passion for spirituality, art and Earth's teachings have supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism.  Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women; and her work with Green Sangha is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of religious environmental activists from diverse faith traditions across America. Her ideas can be heard on Vennly, an app that shares perspectives from spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. Currently, Lauren tends her private spiritual direction and eco-chaplaincy consulting practice; and serves as Climate Action Coordinator for the United Religions Initiative (URI), and as guest faculty for several schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Did you know that ProgressiveChristianity.org is the repository for all of Bishop John Shelby Spong’s newsletter articles, which he used as the basis for his books? Once he retired, he entrusted us with their care, as well as the continuation of his newsletter, which is now called Progressing Spirit. 

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The Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines, Co-Executive Director 
ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Joseph - An Essential Character in Matthew’s Vision of Jesus

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 5, 2011Christmas has faded from our memory.  The trees are down, the tinsel and the chaos of the day have been cleared away.  The crèche scenes have been stored in the basement or attic for another year.  It is, therefore, a good time to focus on the least understood member of the Holy Family that dominated the Christmas images.  We call him Joseph and he is the strong, silent one, who stands behind the manger in that patriarchal world as the symbol of order.  Who was he?  Was he a person of history or a symbol?  While the Christmas story is still fresh in our minds, allow me to explore the figure of Joseph.

Mythmakers and fantasizes have wrapped layers of legends around him.  A Christmas song from the 14th century, called “The Cherry Tree Carol,” depicts Joseph and Mary on the way to Bethlehem when Mary was “great with child.”   They pass an orchard filled with cherry trees ripe with fruit.  Mary asks Joseph to gather her some cherries, reminding him that she needs assistance “for I am with child.”  To that request Joseph responds in anger, “Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee.”  The tension is relieved, however, when the baby Jesus from the womb of his mother orders the cherry trees to bow down so that Mary can pick the fruit herself and Joseph, seeing this miracle, repents of his doubts.  The 20th century English poet, W. H. Auden, similarly, in his Christmas Oratorio, entitled “For the Time Being,” depicts the temptation of Joseph as an inner debate where he hears a voice say: “Joseph, have you heard what Mary said occurred?  Yes, it may be so, but is it likely? No!”

When we turn to the Bible itself to see what the New Testament says about Joseph, our first response is surprise when we discover how little there is, given the rich legendary tradition. Paul, the first author of any book that is included in the New Testament, writing in the years between 51 and 64, says absolutely nothing about either Joseph or Mary.  He also seems to be totally unaware of any notion about a miraculous or virgin birth.  All he says about Jesus’ origins is that he was like every other human being “born of a woman” and like every other Jew “born under the law.” (Gal. 4:4).  When we come to Mark, the first gospel to be written (ca.70-72), once again we find no birth story and no mention of Joseph whatsoever.  Mark does, however, seem to know that Jesus has four brothers and at least two sisters (see Mark chapters 3 and 6).  They are, however, portrayed as not only negative to Jesus, but also as actually seeking “to seize him (Jesus) for, Mark tells us that people were saying, “he is beside himself,” that is, out of his rightful mind.  Could Mark have avoided the story of a miraculous birth and Joseph’s role in that drama if he had known about it?  I do not think so.

When the virgin birth story entered the tradition in the 9th decade of the Common Era in the writing of Matthew, the second gospel, Joseph makes his first appearance of which we are aware in the Christian tradition.  Please be aware that Matthew’s gospel was written 50-55 years after the crucifixion and thus some 80-85 years after the birth of Jesus.  Joseph is not only introduced into the tradition for the first time by Matthew, but he is also the central figure in Matthew’s birth story.  Here Joseph is portrayed as wrestling with whether or not he should send his wife back to her father’s home as “damaged” goods since she is pregnant before their marriage, but when he is assured of her faithfulness by God in a dream, he becomes the one who names this child, and thus the one who offers both protection and legitimacy to this child.  When this birth narrative ends, however, Joseph disappears from Matthew’s story. Joseph appears in Luke’s birth story also, but in a much less central role than the one assigned to him by Matthew.  When the two birth narratives end Joseph disappears from the entire gospel story.  Joseph never appears in any biblical story about the adult life of Jesus anywhere in the New Testament.

So the first biblical fact to be embraced is that in the New Testament Joseph is only a character in the birth narrative, he is not a presence in the adult life of Jesus.  That is not true about Jesus’ mother, Mary, who is referred to in Mark only once by name, but is referred to as “the mother of Jesus” in a few other places in all of the other gospels. Even so, the fact remains that while Mary’s resume in the New Testament is quite thin, Joseph’s is almost non-existent.

People have speculated that the absence of Joseph, whom tradition has suggested was an old man, is best explained by the possibility that he must have died while Jesus was very young.  That is of course a possibility that must be considered, even though there is no data that gives us anything on which to base that speculative conclusion.  I want, therefore, to propose another alternative for which I suggest there is some supportive data if one knows how to read the gospels properly, that is, not literally, but the way the original Jewish readers of the gospels would have read them.  Perhaps Joseph was not a figure of history at all, but a literary creation originated in Matthew and designed to fill out his cast of characters when he created the first birth narrative.  My reasons for suggesting this arise out of my study of Jewish history.  Let me seek to build this case.

It is a well known fact that there was a deep division in Jewish history between the tribe of Judah, which was also called the Southern Kingdom, and the Ten Tribes of Israel, which were called the Northern Kingdom.  What is less well known is that this division was viewed by the Jews as a division between the descendants of Judah and the descendants of Joseph.  The dominant tribes in the Northern Kingdom were Ephraim and Manasseh, both of whom were said to be the sons of Joseph.  The Bible suggests that this division went all the way back to the patriarch Jacob, who had two wives.  His first wife, Leah, was the mother of Judah and his second wife, Rachel, was the mother of Joseph.  Enmity between these two half brothers appears in the Genesis account of their early life. Judah is portrayed as the brother who was willing to sell Joseph into slavery for 20 pieces of silver. The two Jewish states split permanently after the reign of Solomon in 920 BCE.

The author of Matthew’s gospel wanted to portray Jesus as the messiah who came to bind up all of the divisions in the human family. This unity, for Matthew had to begin in healing the ancient division in the life of the chosen people. He opened his gospel with the genealogy of Jesus that traced his line through King David and the kings of the Southern Kingdom, so Jesus emerged out of the tribe of Judah.   Now, by making Jesus’ earthly father be named Joseph and by assigning to Joseph the role of protector, he incorporated the Joseph tribes into his story.

If this is accurate thus far, then we ask: Where did Matthew get the content that he has assigned to his character called Joseph?  Everything biographical that Matthew relates about Joseph is found in the birth narratives, which constitute the first two chapters of his gospel.  Here we learn three things about Joseph.  First, he had a father named Jacob.  Second, God speaks to him only through dreams.  It was through a dream that he was told to take Mary as his wife.  It was through directions received in dreams that Joseph moved regularly with Mary and the Christ Child until he finally settled his family in the village of Nazareth.  Dreams were essential to Matthew’s portrait of Joseph’s life.  Third, the role assigned to Joseph in Matthew’s narrative was to save the messiah, the child of promise, from death and he did this by fleeing to Egypt.  That is the extent of the knowledge we have in the New Testament about Joseph.

Now look back into the Hebrew Scriptures at the story of Joseph the patriarch, best known in our culture today as the Joseph of the “coat of many colors.”  His dramatic story is found in Genesis 37-50.  When we read that story carefully, we discover three things about this Joseph.  First, he had a father named Jacob.  Second, he was constantly identified with dreams, first as the interpreter of the dreams of the Pharaoh’s butler and baker and finally as the interpreter of the dreams of the Pharaoh himself.  He was even called by his brothers, “the dreamer.”  Third, in this narrative the role that the patriarch Joseph played in salvation history was to save the chosen people from death during a time of famine and the way he did it was to take them down to Egypt.  I do not think these connections are coincidental.  Matthew is going to tell the story of Jesus as the Messiah who came to bind up the human family.  He first must heal the divisions in the chosen people.  So he makes Jesus the heir of King David and thus a son of Judah and then he portrays him as being raised under the protection of an earthly father named Joseph.  Messiah has made his people one so that they could make one the nations of the world.

So the figure of Joseph looks like the literary creation of Matthew and becomes the first interpretative hint of his theme that Jesus came to bind up divisions and to make the human family one.  Recall that Matthew ends his gospel by having the risen Christ give the Great Commission: “go into all the world” go to where people have been defined as different, unclean, uncircumcised, and tell them the message of Jesus, namely that God’s love is unbounded. Assure them that there is nothing anyone can be or do that will separate him or her from the love of God.

Paul captured this same theme when he wrote in Galatians in 52 CE that in Christ, there is “neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free,” but all are one.  To that we add that in Christ there is neither white nor black, gay nor straight, Protestant nor Catholic, Jew nor Muslim, believer nor atheist, conservative nor liberal, but all share in a common humanity.  That is the vision of Jesus that Matthew intends to paint in his gospel and Joseph is a crucial, introductory character, in whom Matthew’s theme is announced.  Perhaps if we ever learned to read the scriptures correctly, escaping the mindset of literalism, we could once again hear the gospel and begin to assert the oneness of all people under the love of one God.  That is the substance of the vision we Christians receive from Jesus.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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