Church and Empire: A Deadly Dance

 

         I have a theory about one of the important root causes for the church’s amazing decline in the Europe and North America. It doesn’t explain everything, but it is probably a factor. But before I can get to my theory, I need to tell a difficult story that reaches from the far past to the present: the story of the British Empire.

 

         I've been reading "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire." It is a sad, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book that lays bare what most of us suspect: the only way to acquire and maintain empire is through extreme violence. Think Babylon, the Aztecs, Rome, and so, on. Empires are created through superior armed conflict and once won, are kept in line through the use of violence by the occupiers.

         The British Empire was no different, although it tried hard to bury this truth by promoting the myth of itself beneficent guide charged with "civilizing savages." Yet, the empire sucked its conquered lands dry of resources, and killed (through war or famine or other means) millions of people for the profit of rich Britons and their royals. Read the book for endless examples of this inhuman violence.

 

          Personally, I am most familiar with the British conquest of the independent Boer Republics at the turn of the last century in the so-called “Boer War,” which was actually fought on the backs and what should have been the territory of black Africans. I know of this war first hand since I had a relative (some generations removed!) who died fighting that war. During the Boer War, the British perfected their invention of concentration camps. After first burning their homes to the ground, the English piled Blacks, Boer women, and children onto wagons, brought them to camps, then intentionally starved them in unhygienic conditions. Tens of thousands of Boer women and children and black Africans died in those camps. The Nazis were impressed. 

 

         This war, by the way, was also Canada’s first foreign war. And as brave and patriotic as Canadian soldiers were, it was nevertheless an absolutely unjust war fought solely for the economic gain of the British Empire and especially its ruling class. At root, you see, the Boers, had discovered gold and diamonds in their republics, right next door to British Territory. And so, the British and their allies took it. For profit and because they could.

 

         I remember, from my primary schooling in Canada, classroom walls festooned with world maps marked by British Empire pink. Such a pretty color to remind us that the empire was benevolent. The Empire was educating its “savage,” and “uncivilized,” and “barbarian,” subjects. They were to be brought up to white, British standards, for which they would one day, so the story went, give the British thanks. Ironically, the British never admitted to actually accomplishing this goal anywhere except in its three white colonies! 

 

         We Christians, one and all, drank the myth up. The missionary and explorer David Livingston's famous rallying cry, "Christianity, commerce, and civilization," in defense of empire is typical. Think proselytization, residential schools, and the many ways Western culture has been  enforced as “the way.” And all the while the rich in Britain benefited most. 

 

         And it continues. This past week, King Charles sent his personal chaplain to the First Nation reservation of Tyendinaga, not far from my home, to celebrate the fact that the Mohawks exiled from the United States found shelter there during the American Revolutionary War (I live in Loyalist Township on Loyalist Parkway!). Even the last surviving student of the residential school that used to be there was on hand for the ceremony—why, I cannot imagine. No mention was made of how the First Nations were drawn into these European settler wars, and then abandoned and discriminated after, for hundreds of years.

 

         At the ceremony, the chaplain, Rev. Canon Paul Wright, (his official title is “sub-dean of the Chapel Royal” and “Deputy Clerk of the Closet," which sounds as hilariously impressive as his robes looked ostentatious) went on to note that the king would promote “faith, community, commonwealth, and environment.” After nearly two-hundred years, the royals are still echoing David Livingston. Here, the British church is sticking to the sickbed of British Royalty even while  the Empire’s sick follow-up, the Commonwealth, is in decline. Mentioning the environment is one of those nice, civilized things that just has to be said in this day and age, I suppose.

 

         But now the church decline theory. There is not much to it really. I think that the church's complicity with the whole Beneficent Empire myth, even now, is just another brick in the wall for its decline. As the colonies fought their revolutions all around the world; and as British citizens became more and more aware of the violence and coercion and pain that Empire caused, not to mention their own casualties; and as the scale of the church's absolute complicity in the Empire's horrors became more and more clear, people--consciously or not—rejected the church for its complicity. And they left it. After all, they could not leave Britain, unless it was for another “white,” country, probably equally complicit in empire, one way or another.

 

         The same disgust for national sins with which the churches were complicit contributed to similar church declines in all the major European colonial powers: the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France come especially to mind. 

 

         Felicité de La Mennais was a French-Revolution-era reformer, philosopher, and one-time priest before he himself left the church. He championed the separation of church and state. In doing so, he once remarked that the French Catholic church had lost three generations of believers because it allied itself with the French monarchy rather than the people. As a result of this alliance, he said, the people rejected the church, just as they violently rejected the monarchy, at least in France. People all around the world have often rightly projected their distaste and anger at the State by rejecting its ally, the church.

 

         So what do we modern-day Christians take from all this? Well, while it is fair—and important—for Christians, as citizens, to participate in the body politic just like everyone else, the church needs to go to great lengths not to identify itself with the coercive power of the state, and to refrain from drinking from the trough of any state’s (always short-term) approval or support. It’s a self-destructive behaviour.