History and War by Rev. Stephen Schuette, posted June 4, 2007 

 

      I came across an article in Time Magazine recently that was suggestive.  Under the “History” section, it was titled When East Fought West.  It’s description:  “The Indian uprising of 150 years ago was an act of resistance against imposed ideals.”  (You can read the entire article at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1619556,00.html)  It’s about true “Indians,” not First Americans – although that might fit too?  It’s written by William Dalrymple whose latest book is The Last Mughal:  The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857)

            The article doesn’t shrink from asserting that “history repeats itself.”  If you don’t read the whole article, the final paragraph brings home the point…

            “The lessons of 1857 can be seen today on the streets of Iraq. No one likes being conquered by people of a different faith, then being force-fed improving ideas. The British in 1857 discovered that nothing so easily radicalizes a people or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam than aggressive Western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have often been closely intertwined--so much so that thinking of 1857, we might remember the celebrated dictum of Edmund Burke: that those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.”

            Nothing about the war has troubled me so much as the confusion of “Western Imperialism” with “Christian Imperialism.”  The Spanish conquistadors of the 1600’s were sent by the Church to “baptize” the heathen of South America, and were under orders to do so at the point of the sword.  The reasoning was that if their immortal soul was lost without baptism, this life didn’t mean much anyway.  But it was in the encounter itself that the contradiction finally became apparent:  how can you connect the God of the gospel you carry in one hand with the bloody sword of the other hand?  The effort eventually collapsed of its own weight.

And you don’t have to be a democrat to have been uncomfortable with the way the “Right” has wedded itself to Christian Imperialism.  See John Danforth’s book Faith and Politics.

It’s always in the “encounter” that we learn about our own faith.  Just as the Cross showed Rome the terrible, un-godly violence of its empire, the Hindu Gandhi showed the British something powerfully “Christian” in his commitment to non-violence.

Martin Luther King, Jr. studied Gandhi’s ways and saw the inherent Christian values in him, and used them to show us all the unchristian nature of discrimination.  Maybe it’s time to learn again what we should have known:  you can sweep through a territory and claim the high ground and proclaim you’ve won the war, but that’s different than winning the peace.

 

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