This document discusses the complex relationship between religion and violence throughout history. It notes that Christianity's early history involved using religious symbols and doctrines to identify insiders and outsiders, leading to exclusion and aggression. It examines how the scapegoat mechanism has been used to achieve political and religious unity through violence. The document then discusses the violent conquests of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish in the Americas, and the role Christianity played in legitimizing this violence and genocide against indigenous peoples. It also draws a parallel to the 4th century conquests of Constantine and how Christianity was spread through military domination and force. The overarching message is that religion has often been a tool for hostility and violence throughout history.

2. 2

4. humor
anti-humor

16. Why did the chicken cross the road?
Grandpa: In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken
crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed
the road to get to the other side, and that was good
enough for us.
Albert Einstein: Did the chicken really cross the road, or
did the road move beneath the chicken?
Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest.
Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.
A nun: It was a habit.
Hamlet: That is not the question.
John Donne: It crosseth for thee.

17. Why did the dinosaur cross the road?
What do you get when you cross a chicken with a
cement mixer?
Why did the chicken go to the seance?
What is a chicken’s highest dream?

18. Laughter is one of the ways we cope with
discrepancies in our lives. There is a dream we all
have for this world, and then there is, well, this
world. There are expectations we have of our
religions, and then there are our religions ...[O]ur
capacity to love God, ourselves, people, and all of
life grows with our capacity to laugh....
This ability to laugh in the midst of our
imperfections in the presence of God is what we call
grace.
- Samir Selmanovic
It’s Really All About God: How Islam, Atheism, and
Judaism Made Me a Better Christian

19. Can you imagine Jesus, Moses, the Buddha,
and Mohammed walking together ... not in a
joke, but in reality: in friendship, in
compassionate understanding, perhaps in
honest but respectful difference or
disagreement, embodying toward one another
the principles they taught?
If they could cross the road together, might it
be possible for us to follow them?

20. Where you can’t follow some of my proposals, I plead
only that you pursue - in your own way, according to the
lines of reasoning and imagination that seem right to you -
the benevolence, kindness, and love without which all our
words are noise and we ourselves are nothing.
We are increasingly faced with a choice , I believe, not
between kindness and hostility, but between kindness and
nonexistence. (p. 12)

21. Why Christian identity?
1. I have 56 years of experience with it.
2. It’s the religion claimed by 33% of the world’s people.
3. That 33% controls most of the world’s weapons and
wealth.
4. Jesus said not to try to “fix” others first.
5. Members of other faiths are better suited to deal with
their unique identity issues.

22. Starting Point:

23. We already know how to do 2
things quite well:

24. We already know how to do 2
things quite well:
1. how to have a strong Christian
identity that is hostile toward
people of other religions.

25. We have the only way.
STRONG-
You are going to hell.
HOSTILE
We are God’s chosen.
You worship false gods.
resistance is futile.
you will be assimilated - or

26. We already know how to do 2
things quite well:
1. how to have a strong Christian
identity that is hostile toward
people of other religions.
2. how to have a weak Christian
identity that is tolerant (benign)
toward people of other religions.

27. it doesn’t matter what you believe.
all religions are the same.
all roads lead to god.
only sincerity matters.
doctrines divide.
weak-benign
keep religion private.

28. We haven’t yet learned ...
to have a strong Christian identity
that is benevolent
toward other religions.

29. Because I Follow Jesus, I love you.
I move toward “the other.”
I break down walls of hostility.
i stand with you in solidarity.
you are made in God’s image.
strong-
i am your servant.
benevolent
I practice human-kindness.

30. A Discovery:

31. Misconception:
Our religious differences
keep us apart.

32. Actuality:
It is not our religious
differences that keep us apart,
but rather a haunting religious
similarity ... that we build
strong identities through
hostility.

33. Give people a common enemy, and you will
give them a common identity. Deprive them
of an enemy and you will deprive them of
the crutch by which they know who they are.
- James Alison

34. Can Christians today build a new
kind of identity ... based on
hospitality, not hostility, to the
other?
strong-
benevolent

35. Give people a common enemy, and you will give them a
common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you will
deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are.
- James Alison
Might we discover a new
common enemy - one we all
share -
hostility itself?

36. But how?

37. Four Challenges
2. Doctrinal
3. Liturgical
4. Missional

38. Four Challenges
1. Historical
2. Doctrinal
3. Liturgical
4. Missional

39. Why don’t we all get along?

40. From Follow the Sacredness, by Jonathan Haidt
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/
Despite what you might have learned in
Economics 101, people aren’t always
selfish. In politics, they’re more often
groupish. When people feel that a group
they value — be it racial, religious, regional
or ideological — is under attack, they rally
to its defense, even at some cost to
themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and
politics is a competition among coalitions
of tribes.

41. ... The key to understanding tribal behavior is
not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that
humans developed at some point in the last few
hundred thousand years is the ability to circle
around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god,
and then treat that thing as sacred. People who
worship the same idol can trust one another,
work as a team and prevail over less cohesive
groups. So if you want to understand politics,
and especially our divisive culture wars, you
must follow the sacredness.

42. Our Christian history is, among other things, the
story of how
our symbols, practices, doctrines, and language
have been used as
our “centering idols”
by which we identify who is “of us”
and who is “of them.”
In this way, our religion has been a tool of
exclusion and aggression.
We must face this truth in our history.

43. Farther back, Rene Girard and others remind us,
violence is at the root of all government and all
religion.
The Scapegoat Mechanism explains how we
achieved political/religious unity and identity.
We must face this truth in our history.

44. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating & Sacrifice
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. Priests and Prophets
7. Jesus and the gospels
8. The violent reversion of
“historical/sacrificial Christianity

46. 1495
2nd Voyage Return Cargo: 1600
male and female Taino slaves for
Spain
“It is possible, with the name of the
Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which
it is possible to sell … Here there are
so many of these slaves … although
they are living things they are as good
as gold.”

47. The Spaniards who remained in Hispaniola were
encouraged to take Taino slaves “in the amount
desired.” Columbus himself gave a teenage girl to
one of his crew, Miguel Cuneo, for his personal
“use.” Cuneo wrote that she “resisted with all her
strength” when he attempted to have sex with her,
so he “thrashed her mercilessly and raped her.”
Being given a Taino woman to rape was, in fact, a
popular “company perk” for Columbus’s men.
Columbus himself wrote to a friend, “There are
plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls;
those from nine to ten [years old] are now in
demand.”

48. - An eyewitness in the early 1500’s
As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they
endured, the Indians choose and have chosen
suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed
mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have
shunned conception and childbirth…. Many, when
pregnant, have taken something to abort and have
aborted. Others after delivery have killed their
children with their own hands, so as not to leave
them in such oppressive slavery.

49. Of the estimated 300,000 Taino alive when
Columbus “discovered” them in 1492, about 12,000
remained in 1516, fewer than 200 in 1546, and zero in
1555. What our history calls “the discovery of America,”
Taino history might call “the arrival of the Christian
genociders,” if, that is, any Taino survived to tell an
alternate history. None did.

50. “Here those Christians
perpetrated their first ravages
and oppression against the
native peoples. This was the
first land in the New World to
be destroyed and depopulated
by the Christians.”
--another eyewitness, Bartolome De
Las Casas about Christian invasion
of Hispaniola

51. The 16th-Century conquests of the Conquistadors
The 4th-Century conquests of Constantine

52. From Eusebius’ “Ecclesiastical History”:
“[Constantine] said that about noon,
when the day was already beginning
to decline, he saw with his own eyes
the trophy of a cross of light in the
heavens, above the sun, and bearing
the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS.

53. “In hoc signo vinces”
IN THIS SIGN CONQUER?
CONVERT BY THE SWORD?
DOMINATE?
COLONIZE?
ASSIMILATE?
INVADE AND OCCUPY?
KILL?
TERRORIZE?
53

54. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and
his whole army also, which followed him on this
expedition, and witnessed the miracle… [That night] in his
sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the same
sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded
him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in
the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all
engagements with his enemies.

55. “At dawn of day he arose, and communicated the marvel
to his friends: and then, calling together the workers in
gold and precious stones, he sat in the midst of them, and
described to them the figure of the sign he had seen,
bidding them represent it in gold and precious stones.
And this representation I myself have had an opportunity
of seeing.

56. “Now it was made in the following manner.
A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the
figure of the cross by means of a
transverse bar laid over it. On the top of the
whole was fixed a wreath of gold and
precious stones; and within this, the
symbol of the Saviour's name…”

57. A SPEAR?
Really, Constantine?
A spear?

58. This spear-cross was further adorned with an embroidered banner that featured the
emperor and his family. The finished product, Eusebius said, “presented an
indescribable degree of beauty to the beholder.” He added, “The emperor constantly
made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile
power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his
armies.”
Eusebius, it should be noted, would be considered more of a propagandist than a
historian in the modern sense. For more on Constantine’s life and work, see James
Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews—A History (New York:
Mariner Books, 2001).

60. Serve like this ...
Love like this ...
Reconcile like this ...
Transcend violence like this ...

61. The violent cross of Caesar
The nonviolent cross of Christ
The violent cross of Constantine
Which Cross?

63. Islamophobia Today:
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert
them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and
punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed
German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.
- Ann Counter, National Review
Islam is something we can’t afford any more in the Netherlands. I
want the fascist Quran banned. We need to stop the Islamisation
of the Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more
Islamic schools, no more imams.
- Geert Wilders, Dutch politicians

64. These people [Arabs and Muslims] need to be forcibly
converted to Christianity ... It’s the only thing that can
probably turn them into human beings.
- Michael Savage, syndicated radio host
Islam has attacked us ... The God of Islam is not the same
God.... Islam is a very evil religion. All the values that we as a
nation hold dear, they don’t share those same values at all,
these countries that have the majority of Muslims.
- Franklin Graham, Christian evangelist

65. Sound familiar?
From Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543)
They [rulers] must act like a good physician who, when gangrene
has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh,
veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure must also be
followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all
that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly
with them, as Moses did...
If this does not help we must drive them out like mad dogs.
-Martin Luther (On the Jews and Their Lies)

66. Elie Wiesel:
“All the killers were Christian….The
Nazi system was the consequence of a
movement of ideas and followed a strict
logic; it did not arise in a void but had its
roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it,
prepared for it, and brought it to maturity.
That tradition was inseparable from the past
of Christianized, civilized Europe.”
Quoted in David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
(New York: Oxford, 1992), 153.

67. Indigenous scholar Jack Forbes
writes, “The ‘cosmology’ or
‘world-view’ of a people is
closely related, of course, to all of
their actions. The world-view
influences actions and, in turn,
actions tell us what the world-
view really is!”
Jack Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 20.
Originally published by D-Q University Press in 1979.

68. From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing –
absolutely nothing – to teach Indigenous people about how
to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have
only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong
with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five
centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow
down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma
to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the
religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes
of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of
hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500
years of Christian domination.
- Waziyatawin, PhD, 2012

69. From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing –
absolutely nothing – to teach Indigenous people about how
to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have
only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong
with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five
centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow
down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma
to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the
religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes
of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of
hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500
years of Christian domination.
- Waziyatawin, PhD, 2012

72. what do we do when we
face our history?

73. deny it?

74. defend it?

75. create a new
denomination/ religion?
(disassociate from it?)

76. own it?
be humbled by it?
repent of it?
learn from it?
never forget it?
be “reconverted” in light of
it?

77. review our doctrine,
practice, and mission in
light of it?

78. listen to the voices of
those who were
previously marginalized?

79. 79

80. Four Challenges
1. Historical
2. Doctrinal
3. Liturgical
4. Missional

81. 81

82. A
Are

83. you

84. ready

85. to

86. cross

87. the

88. road?

89. 2 conversations...

91. 91