Genesis vs. Genocide

 Originally published to Facebook October 12, 2020

"God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’"
- Genesis 1:28
There is a lot to unpack in this scripture. I'm going to try and be focused. For example, this post is not about misinterpreting the word "subdue" or the idea of to "have dominion" to mean "exploit" or "squander" or treat with cruelty, though that's an important conversation.
As I write this, the world population is on the cusp of 8 Billion people. When I was born in the early 70s it was poised to hit 4 Billion, meaning it has more than doubled in the last 50 years. It is about 20 times what it was at the end of the 15th century. The Biblical commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" has certainly become a defining characteristic of humanity on this planet.
One of many ways to try and unpack the horrors of acts of genocide is to see them as attempts to remove entire peoples from participation in God's purpose for humanity - if a basic characterization of humanity is that we increase, to maliciously and violently cause the precipitous decrease of any population is an attempt to remove humanity from a people.
While the world human population has nearly quadrupled since 1939, the Jewish population since that year decreased by nearly a third in only half a decade, and it has taken three-quarters of a century to recover to close to 1939 numbers. Among so many other ways to describe and attempt to measure the evil of the Holocaust, we can say that it was an attempt to remove them from God's purposes for humanity according to scripture, an attempt that was not carried out to fulfillment but was on pace to do so in less than one generation.
Estimates of the indigenous population of the Americas north of the Rio Grande in 1492 range from 7 to 10 million. As the world population has increased nearly 20 times since that time, the indigenous population of the USA and Canada today are around 7 Million, but to call the population numbers "unchanged" is horribly wrong. Under three centuries of European colonialism followed by two more centuries under the US Constitution, the indigenous population has had to recover from a rate of genocide that topped out around 90%.
The story of European "fruitfulness" and "multiplication" in North America, of policies and actions to "subdue" and "have dominion" over this land is the story of dehumanization of God's beloved children who arrived here centuries before the colonizers, and of the attempt to remove them from God's original purposes for humanity. The fact that colonialism and conquest is still celebrated as a victory for the Christian church to bring the "light of the gospel" to a people who were nearly removed from God's story altogether is - to put it mildly - heresy of the highest order.
If we as the American church claim the story related in scripture of God's plan and purposes for humanity as the story that drives us, we must acknowledge our participation in colonization and conquest as terrible acts against that identity and purpose, and not celebrate the people and movements that inspired and championed it, but rather take a posture of humility and repentance, and be moved to action of restoration and reparation of those evil parts of our legacy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Privilege in the war on drugs

 Originally published to Facebook October 21, 2020 A CNN article released today on the fines and closure of Purdue Pharma, makers of Oxycontin mainly talked about the consequences for the non-biological corporation. At the very end, it talked about actual consequences for biological humans, you know like the humans sitting in jail for low-level, non-violent drug offenses: "The Justice Department also reached a separate $225 million civil settlement with the former owners of Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family. Still, the Sackler family -- as well as other current and former employees and owners of the the company -- face the possibility that federal criminal charges will be filed against them." I think that a just society would either see employees from the top down to "distributors" serving multiple life sentences in prison with sentences proportional to the number and severity of addiction cases and the profit generated by exploiting the addictive nature of their p...
Read more

21st century indulgences

Originally published to Facebook August 11, 2020 The sale of indulgences was chief amongst Martin Luther's complaints which inspired the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. To oversimplify a bit, the practice had progressed to a place where the wealthy could donate prodigious sums to the church in exchange for pardon of particular sins, or for the reduction or commutation of the amount of penance or time in purgatory merited by those sins. As practiced, it also created pressure on the poor who already had so little to transfer more wealth to the church for the sake of loved ones who they were told were suffering in purgatory but could be delivered... if the price was right. In practice it created a religious culture where the wealthy could leverage their resources to act immorally according to religious tradition but still be fully accepted into the life of the church and even held up as models of faithfulness, while the poor had to conform to a much higher standard to app...
Read more