Soulforce

Sabotage Christian Supremacy

Assata Dela Cruz

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As the single largest landowner in the world, the Catholic Church has made billions of dollars through stealing from and exploiting Indigenous people globally.  This is money that can and should be used to fund language revitalization programs and pay for infrastructure that has been denied to Indigenous communities as the result of papal bulls, including the Doctrine of Discovery, that declared us without souls and therefore not human.

But instead, in July of 2022, the Catholic Church sent Pope Francis to Quebec City to apologize for the Church’s role in the Federal Indian Boarding Schools.  

An apology from the Catholic Church was only one of the 94 calls to action from the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, and it wasn’t even done adequately.  Pope Francis’ refusal to denounce the Doctrine of Discovery further perpetuates 500 years of erasure and violence that normalizes the dispossession and dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. By upholding the Doctrine of Discovery, the Catholic Church is telling the world that Indigenous people didn’t (and still don’t) count as full human beings, and consequently perpetuates the idea that our murders and abuses weren’t really sins.  The Pope’s refusal to address this is disrespectful at best and a part of a calculated plan to uphold white Christian Supremacy at worst.

The creation of the Indian Boarding School was originally aimed at acquiring collective territories by assimilating American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian people through Christianization.  The United States government wanted to own the land but as Indigenous peoples, we belonged to the land.  It was where we hunted, where our ancestors were buried.  It was what the Creator gave to us for sacred ceremonies.  It gave us life for both our bodies and our spirits.  This was not something Christian colonizers could understand as the foundation of their religion was in wine/water and bread which could be made sacred and transported anywhere.  Our religion was in the land.  To remove us from the land was to erase who we were.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The Indian Boarding School program was implemented for the removal and reprogramming of American Indigenous children. It began with the Indian Civilization Act Fund of 1819 and was made possible by the investment and implementation of 14 denominations within the Christian Church, as listed in the Federal Investigative Report–Catholic, Presbyterian, Quaker, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Jesuit, Dutch Reformed, Evangelical, Mennonite, Protestant, Anglican, 7th Day Adventist and Unitarian.  In the US, there were a total of 497 Indian boarding school institutions, of which 408 were federally funded and/or supported.  This account from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition details what horrors were done to children at the hands of the state and the Church:

“The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.” (US Indian Boarding School History – The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition)

Though we will never have an exact number of children that were taken, by 1900 there were an estimated 20,000 children in Indian Boarding Schools and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. Seventy-three Indian Boarding Schools still remain open today, with 15 being residential schools.

And though the Catholic Church was responsible for the largest number of schools, it is not the only Christian denomination with blood on its hands.  Thirteen other denominations played a part in this genocide: Presbyterian, Quaker, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Jesuit, Dutch Reformed, Evangelical, Mennonite, Protestant, Anglican, 7th Day Adventist, Unitarian.  This is a legacy of white Christian Supremacy, and addressing it requires solutions from all benefitting institutions – including accountability at the denominational level.

It is no coincidence that a settler colonialist government and missionizing church denominations worked hand-in-hand to commit these atrocities on the Indigenous people of the Americas. Christianity has been stolen and twisted by those in power to justify genocide, enslavement, and domination for a very long time.  In this case, Indigenous people were not seen as civilized (and therefore not fully human) because we were not a reflection of the white European Christians that were believed to be the reflection of God.  Christianization is a coercive missionizing strategy to make a population of people more human in the eyes of colonial powers by converting them to Christianity, systematically destroying Native cultures and communities.  This has been a core tactic of colonization in the Western world for centuries.

It’s also important to note that the papal bulls, which were public decrees straight from the Pope himself, also allowed for the Transatlantic slave trade to continue which the Catholic Church profited from immensely through the buying and selling of slaves who were used as labor to create the Church’s billion dollar industry.  At various moments in American history from the colonial era to the U.S. Civil War, the Catholic Church was the largest corporate slaveholder in Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri.  Indigenous and Black repression and oppression are completely intertwined.

At its core, the white Christian Supremacist ideologies behind the Indian Boarding School are the same that promote conversion therapy against Queer people. In both experiences, we are told that we are evil or sick because of an innate and essential part of our beings. We are told that our very nature is sinful and offensive to God. We are told that we need to be fixed or changed or healed in order to be redeemed and to earn our personhood and our basic human dignity. And if we cannot or will not change ourselves to fit into their white Christian Supremacist ideals, we are punished and abused and denied our fundamental human rights… and God and the Bible and “morality” are used to justify it.  

In contorting scripture and Christian traditions to fit their agenda, the colonizers of Turtle Island have warped Christianity into a false ideology that claims that white heterosexual cisgender Christians are the ideal “Chosen People” of God and therefore it is their responsibility to assure this demographic remains in power – by any means necessary.

In this way, what happened to Native children at these schools was the original US conversion therapy.  The original conversion therapy with the Indigenous peoples and the current conversion therapy of LGBTQI people are the results of white Christian Supremacy’s narrative of savagery. Therefore, the injustices of the Indian Boarding School project is absolutely an LGBTQI issue.

At the heart of all struggles for LGBTQI struggles for justice is bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.  In believing that our body is our own, we have the fundamental human right to control what happens to our body, when and where it happens, and how and with whom it happens.  Conversion therapy strips these innate human rights away and must cease, in all of its forms. 

Many Indian Boarding School survivors worked tirelessly for the Catholic Church’s apology and they greatly deserve to feel some sense of relief that it finally happened.  But we can’t stop there.  So much more is needed.  The fatal flaw in “truth and reconciliation” commissions is that it often skips the first step of truth. Even beyond that, reconciliation means to reconcile which implies there were good relations to begin with, which in the case of the US government and Native American tribes there were not. There have never been, and until we address the sins of the past, we never can be.

You can’t unknow this information now.  So what can you do?

First, I strongly encourage non-Indigenous people to not center themselves in discussions around the Pope’s visit and “apology”.  Your religious beliefs should take a backseat to survivors whose voices should be amplified and supported.  There is a resource list at the end of this blog which you can use to have these tough conversations and educate members of your own communities.  More specifically, this is a time for you to have conversations about the Doctrine of Discovery, which is still being used today as the basis for conversion therapy for people in every nation.

Then, learn what land you are illegally occupying.  But please don’t stop at land acknowledgement.  Use that information to dive deeper into local resistance movements as well as calls to actually complete the 94 calls to action.  As of July 2022, only 13 of the 94 calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been completed.  These actions and progress are continuously monitored by Beyond 94.

Lastly, share the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report.  This report was released in May of 2022 with very little media attention and is the first volume of a truth initiative that intends to continue investigating the scope and impacts of the Federal Indian Boarding School policies.  This 106 page report is core to the struggle for bodily autonomy and is an important part of decoding white Christian Supremacy in this nation.

Additional Resources:

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We have now entered the month of June, the month of marketing strategies capitalizing on Queer people in efforts to make us forget we started with a brick through a window and not rainbow popsockets — ooops, I meant LGBTQI Pride Month. As our queer movements continue to grow in strength, countless corporations seek to profit by using messages citing revolution, self-knowing, equality, and boundless love: values that we Queers fight tooth-and-nail to defend every day. This kind of cooptation easily dilutes the purpose of celebrating June, the month that houses the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in our queer liturgical calender, into a palatable rainbow party.

Pride is at risk of being reduced to a false guise of diversity, acceptance, and inclusion that masks complicity in white Christian Supremacy.

The goal of marketing strategies today is to have maximum outputs with the least amount of input.  The focus is on efficiency and consistently finding ways to increase profit at the cost of absolutely anything – salary cuts, compromising on the quality, whatever – the list is unfortunately endless. Once corporations determine there is a marginalized community they can create the illusion they support while ultimately just taking their money, that is precisely what they do. As soon as the selling season is over, the rainbows and the solidarity are tossed out the window just in time to prepare for their next exploitation.

No better current example of this corporate trend comes from Walmart, who released tacky “celebration” ice cream flavors to commemorate Pride and Juneteenth. Our communities said HECK NO to Walmart’s capitalizing off Black culture and the legacy of Juneteenth, which is now being pulled from shelves. Walmart’s terrible track record in labor, racist hiring practices, and numerous lawsuits pending for both employee and customer discrimination don’t scream “revolutionary”.

Furthermore, Walmart has donated over $400,000 this year to the GOP, whose platform for their 2022 state elections focuses on eradicating safe spaces for LGBTQI youth in school and sports, and banning education about racial justice at K-12 programs.

It’s giving “ally”, right? Nope. It’s giving white Christian Supremacy in sheep’s clothing. Why is it that Walmart can “say gay” in their stores, but steal the right to “say gay” from teachers in their own classrooms? (Check out this 2021 article from the Guardian on companies that have been celebrating Pride while donating major money to white Christian Supremacist causes.)

These companies want to turn our pride into a gag: rainbow clothes, flags, accessories – everything that essentially reduces our resistance movements to rainbows and not much else.

Rainbow capitalism promotes a false narrative that because we can see LGBTQI people represented in some stores and commercials, that we have reached an important marker of normalization and acceptance. While parts of that might be true, we must also be aware that the choices of these corporations are motivated by profit. Pride merchandising allows them to operate under the guise of being “woke” without actually using their power to create much needed change for our community.  It allows them to use the month of June to further this false narrative that LGBTQI people have reached this plateau of mainstream acceptance when we are still not welcomed with “open arms” in most places and still not even existing safely in many places, which should be the bare minimum.

If we are not careful, we will fall down the slippery slope of doing white Christian Supremacy’s work. In becoming complacent with seeing ourselves on billboards, we might stop doing the important work that is the foundation of our Pride. We have not truly arrived at a plateau of equality. We have to push back on the notion that the commercial buying power of our allies is what will change our unjust structures. We need to be building political and social power as the Christian Right ramps up their mobilization against us.

The blood of resistance does continue to flow strongly in our community so there are many who are not idly allowing this to continue.  There are groups, such as No Justice No Pride, that have halted Pride parades in major cities in protest of white Christian Supremacy’s exploitation of our people.  So what can you do, Soulforcers, to at least reduce the impact of corporatization? If you do choose to buy Pride-related merchandise, do a little research on the company. Check their track record – have donated to LGBTQI organizations directly working with the community? Do their employee policies actually reflect their equality proclamation? If you can’t find any conclusive answers to these questions (which includes actual supported evidence), then spend your money elsewhere, or donate it to Queer causes, and educate others to do the same. Knowledge is our power. 

Most importantly, as you prance in parades and twirl your rainbow flags, please do remember that you are completely worthy of a fulfilled life where you can express immense pride in exactly who you are. But also please remember that Pride was brought to you by drag queens and trans women of color throwing bricks. It was brought to you by lesbians and queer women taking care of gay men dying of AIDS due to intentional US government neglect. It was not brought to you by T-Mobile.

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This blog post is part of a series called How white Christian Supremacy Stole…Everything, where we’ll unpack some of the sticky feelings so many of us have around some of the US’s major holidays.

The series aims to give a voice to us buzzkills who devote our lives to social justice and have a hard time not feeling like a grinch during every. Single. Holiday.

You’re not alone in your grinchiness! Understanding what is harmful about a cultural phenomenon, or what doesn’t sit right with us, can help us identify how we want to reclaim our agency and observe those holidays (or not) in alignment with our ethics and beliefs. In that way, we hope this blog post feels like spiritual accompaniment.

For the poor and people of color suffering from environmental injustice, every day is Earth Day, and this painful cycle of destruction is exacerbated by white Christian Supremacy. While the visual representation of Earth Day is often dominated by images of white women wearing overpriced organic yoga pants and appropriated hairstyles, those of us who are most impacted by the degradation of the earth are over being inundated with “reduce, reuse, recycle.” white Christian Supremacy erases Indigenous people who are fighting for oil not to flow through sacred lands; it ignores the people of Flint, MI who still can only drink water through a filter. And let’s not forget the millions of water pipes tainted with lead. 

white Christian Supremacy hinges on manipulating Christian theology and scripture to elevate the power and privilege of white people above everything, including nature. European imperialism framed white people as being more righteous and therefore closer to God and fulfilling God’s purpose. As a result, one of the most important tenets of white Christian Supremacy is conquest and control, meaning that a “chosen people” possess a divine right to use people and places at their disposal. This attitude of human dominion, particularly white Christian dominion, is what has carried our civilizations through industrialization and ultimately toward ecological demise.

white Christian Supremacy has justified and reinforced this hierarchical system that places white men at the top, then white women, all people of color, animals, water and the rest of creation all on the bottom. This top-down worldview is responsible for not only the immense damage to the Earth but has also resulted in the detriment of anyone not at the head of the hierarchy.

The “dominion” in Genesis 1:26-28 has been interpreted as God’s permission to human beings to exploit the earth, control its natural resources, and exterminate the creatures in it; this translation does not make sense in the narrative. The word that is used—radah—also means “to take responsibility for something.” It is preposterous to think that after spending six days fashioning every piece of Creation, blessing it, and finding it to be “very good” that God gave the beloved Creation to humankind to greedily pillage and use up for our own material gain.

Rather, God entrusted this cherished Creation to human beings. As the creatures formed in the Imago Dei, we have the most power of all the creatures to create and destroy. And as those who are made in the reflection of the Creator, we should also have the most respect for God’s Creation and our duty to continue the sacred work of tending and caring for the earth and the treasured beings in it.

However, even for those who interpret Genesis 1 of the Bible as a responsibility for stewardship and not dominion over creation, there is still a hierarchical view of humans on top and the rest of creation below. Contrary to this viewpoint were the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi which called humans to live with plants and animals, thee sun, the wind, the rain, etc. not as masters or adversaries but as sisters and brothers created by God. Following this Franciscan ethic of fraternal love and reconciliation will go a long way in remedying our climate crisis.

It is also most imperative that we recognize that racism, spiritual violence and the climate crisis are completely intertwined. To fight racism and spiritual violence, we must fight the climate crisis. And to fight the climate crisis, we must dismantle white Christian supremacy and its arrogance towards humanity and nature. If we want to survive, we must start prioritizing being in good relations with the Earth all 365 days of the year.