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.

The Pieta, The Death of Wolfe, and Remembrance.

     Christian theologians and artists have always been in love with Jesus’ mother, Mary, who they named, Theotokos, mother of God. Liturgies, music, and prayers especially focused on her purity and suffering.

     One of the suffering moments—not actually mentioned in scripture—was when Mary first held the body of Jesus after it was taken off of the cross. This moment is called The Pieta, which can be translated as “The Pity,” or “The Compassion.”

     Here is an early example, the Rottgen Pieta from the fourteenth century. It is graphic and gritty and moves me. Jesus’ wounds still flow. He is emaciated, ugly, broken, just as you would expect a crucified holy man to look. Mary is shocked, on the verge of disbelief.

     The medieval Germans peasants who saw this Pieta in their church knew this kind of suffering for themselves. Medieval life was, as Thomas Hobbes said, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The Rottgen Pieta offered those peasants both a Jesus and a Mary they could identify with.

     But there is another, darker side to this and similar devotional sculptures. The sculpture suggests that suffering is holy. Mary and Jesus’ suffering here justifies suffering as a reality of life peasants had to accept. The Rottgen Pieta—and many more like it--was used by the church to teach, nurture—and control—peasant believers.

     Not so Michelangelo’s Pietá. It served a very different purpose for a very different audience. This sculpture, found in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, is one of the most admired works of art of all time.

     The earthy realism of Rottgen is gone, replaced unearthly Platonic idealism. Mary, even as the mother of a 31-year old man, is still a beautiful virgin, the prototypical perfect woman. And Jesus, even in death, is Adonis-beautiful, too.

     The story here is that Michelangelo was hired by the French Cardinal Jean de Bilheres to create this sculpture for two reasons. It was to serve—and for a while, it did—as Bilheres’ tombstone. But more importantly, Bilhere was in Rome as a French ambassador after a disastrous war between France and most of the small Italian Republics. It was a war marked by the brutal sack of Mordano, about 250 kilometers north of Rome. The French army put all its citizens, including women and children, to death. 

      Now, after this inconclusive but brutal war, Bilhere was supposed to help smooth things over. And so, he tasked Michelangelo, an Italian artist, to use a notably French and German theme, The Pieta, to sculpt a work of Italian marble to place in the French chapel of the first St. Peter’s in Rome, Italy. A peace offering that bound the two peoples together.

     With Michelangelo’s Pieta, the suffering of Mary and Jesus is a passing whisper—as Bilhere hoped the suffering of Mordano and Italy might be soon forgotten, too. The ugliness of war is here swallowed up by the stunning beauty of national reconciliation symbolized by Jesus’ reconciliation of humans to God, through his death. The Pieta is a stunning piece of political theater.







     Which brings us to a modern pieta, Pablo Picasso's Guernica. You've seen this painting. I don't know how to speak to its beauty--it is striking and compelling and abstract, though.

     Here Picasso painted the suffering of the village of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, just before WWII. The Nazi Luftwaffe bombed that little Basque village on a market day. There was no military target. The purpose was simply to sow terror. Two hundred and fifty townspeople died. It was a modern Mordano.

     Thus, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, Guernica is very, very political. But instead of trying to smooth over a war, it puts Nazi war crimes front and center, condemning them.

     And if you look closely, you will see on the far left, a pieta—Mary holding Jesus in her lap. It’s Rottgenall over, but in Picasso’s cubist style. Do you see it? On the left?

     In case you can't, here is a reproduction, done as a sculpture, by well-known American artist
Arthur Lopez, in the Mexican-American Santero style.

     I have one more pieta to show you, Benjamin West’s, “The Death of Major-General James Wolfe.”

     You remember James Wolfe. He was the commanding British officer during the French-Indian war. The French were besieged at Quebec, and tried to break through British lines with a surprise attack on the Plains of Abraham, that failed. The battle only took an hour, but during it Wolfe was shot and died of his wounds.

     The battle led, soon after, to France’s exit from New France. Wolfe has, forever after, been seen as Canada’s first war hero, and the epitome of the British Empire’s fighting spirit and military prowess.




     Wolfe’s painting, of course, is yet another version of The Pieta. West knew Michelangelo’s Pieta well from when he lived in Rome as an art student. Here, West lays out Wolfe as Michelangelo laid out Jesus. General James Wolfe is a sacrificial lamb who died to establish true civilization in the New World jungle. One commentator writes, “This deliberate visual association between the dying General Wolfe and the dead Christ underscores the British officer’s admirable qualities. If Christ was innocent, pure, and died for a worthwhile cause—that is, the salvation of mankind—then Wolfe too was innocent, pure, and died for a worthwhile cause; the advancement of the British position in North America.”

     In contrast to other paintings of Wolfe’s death from the same era, West filled his painting not with regular soldiers, but with military dignitaries. In fact, none of these men were actually there. West added them to add dignity to the scene. One of those watching is a First Nations warrior, looking on Wolfe adoringly—in stark contrast to how most First Nations would have felt about these European wars that kept dragging them in.

     But West has no time for such objections. He is making myths that justify the violence, greed, and visions of world domination that are at the root of all empires, including the British Empire. West here is an evangelist for wars on behalf of the crown and for territorial expansion.

     All of which brings me near to the end of what I want to say this morning. All of these works of art that I’ve shown you this morning served propagandistic ends. In each of them, the story of Mary holding Jesus’ body, a religious theme—was used to score political points.

     The Rottgen Pieta served the churches need to tell the story of Jesus to illiterate peasants who needed comfort, assurance—and who needed to be kept in line. It said, “shut up and embrace your suffering, like Mary and Jesus did.”

     Michelangelo’s Pieta was meant to paper over war crimes. It was an offer of arm’s length, platonic friendship as a substitute for war.

     Picasso’s pieta was exactly the opposite. It served as a condemnation of war by including a very Rottgen-like Pieta that represents the evil of war.

     And the question for us, of course, is this. Will we let Remembrance Day, as well as its rituals and music, use us in a similar way? Or will we see through some of the myths to the fact of war’s evil? To the actual pain and suffering of both soldiers and civilians? Will we, perhaps, use Remembrance Day to organize for no more wars?

     This week, we ought to remember the heroism of our boys; but we also remember Flanders Fields and the poppies their bodies fed. We remember the WWI sacrifices of Vimy Ridge and the Somme and Passchendaele, but we also now understand that ultimately, these battles were fought for the elites of a British Empire against the elites of a German Empire, rather than for any common good or high moral principle.

     We have fought other morally ambivalent wars. The Royal Mounted Police against the Metis. The first overseas deaths of Canadian soldiers in a totally useless Anglo-Boer war that mostly served to make the British Empire richer while brutally erasing Africans. But our boys also died fighting the horrific reality of Nazism in what is sometimes called the twentieth century’s only just war. Our boys liberated extermination camps and liberated my ancestors in Holland. In any case, whether the cause was just or not or just middling—our men were always true and valiant.

     And now I wonder, how will history judge our time in Afghanistan, after the Taliban is back in control, as they seem destined to be? Or our material support for Saudi Arabia and its ruthless war in Somalia?

     I do not know.

     But today, we nevertheless remember the Christ-like suffering of all our military martyrs. In their memory, and to prevent the need for remembering more soldiers in the future, we commit our Remembrance Day not merely to making glorious national myths, but to learning the hard lessons of history, history as objective as we can make it.

     Even good wars are hell. We must do all within our power to avoid falling for heroic myths that want to use us, and instead, as a nation, build lasting peace wherever we can lend a hand.

     I am not naïve. I know that hating war cannot end war. But I plead with you, as followers of Jesus, who gave his own life as a protest against both religious bigotry and Roman military occupation, I ask you, as followers of Jesus to use your social and political and economic gifts and powers to make peace.

     This is the most fitting Remembrance of all.