How Do We End Christian Violence?

In the province of British Columbia, where I live, the hidden remains of two hundred and fifteen children were recently discovered on the property of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Since then, many hundreds more have been found on residential school properties across the country.

These murderous institutions, responsible for “killing the Indian in the child”, were orchestrated and operated by Catholic and Protestant churches in conjunction with the Canadian Government.

When I was growing up the majority of Christians I knew were supportive of the war in Iraq, which saw some 100 000 innocent civilians killed.

Currently, Vladimir Putin is waging an imperialistic invasion of Ukraine and committing war crimes against its citizens with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church.

How does Christianity continually perpetuate violence, when violence is clearly antithetical to the example and teachings of Christ?

It is my assertion that Christianity continues to perpetuate violence because of our insistence on viewing Christ’s death as a transactional appeasement of a violent God.

If we truly believe that our God requires violent sacrifice… it only takes a hop, skip, and a jump to justify our own violence.

I propose that by re-examining our understanding of the cross through a more rigorous Christology we can move beyond the pervasive trappings of religious tribalism, which always leads to violence.

Jesus and the Other

In Jesus’ community, the religious authorities strictly governed the population’s adherence to the ‘law’, a rigorous system for maintaining ‘cleanliness’ before God. One of the central requirements demanded that people refrain from associating with anyone deemed ‘unclean’, which meant essentially anyone outside of acceptable observance of this holiness system.

The forgiveness of sins was directly connected to the authority of the religious establishment and the requirement of blood sacrifice. A concept that was normative throughout Mesopotamia.

Jesus was killed for undermining religious authority by expanding the reaches of God’s acceptance and forgiveness beyond the confines of temple sacrifice, claiming God was working through him.

Jesus ate with the wrong people, healed the wrong people, spoke well of the wrong people, and formed a following of the wrong people. He challenged their concept of clean vs. unclean, righteous vs. sinners, old vs. young, Jew vs. gentile, male vs. female. He also forgave people their sins without slaughtering anything.

When asked to clarify who he considered a neighbour, his parable pointed to a despised ethnic group, the Samaritans. He called a people living under the boot of empire to radically love their enemy and pray for their persecutors (New International Version, 2011, Matthew 5:43–48).

Jesus continually used the most expansive possible language about who belonged to God, claiming that his kingdom would be preached “in the whole world”, a testimony to “all nations”, that his death would draw “all people” to himself, and claims that “all things” have been committed to him by God.

Jesus was extravagantly inclusive and completely non-violent.

Christian Imperialism

The first followers of Christ followed his example of extending the table, preaching his gospel far and wide, taking care of the poor, and peacefully defying structural violence, leading many to their own deaths. However, Christianity eventually shifted from a religion of the powerless to the powerful with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who claimed to see a vision of cross over a battlefield inscribed with three words, “Conquer by this”.

Christianity had been co-opted and warped into a tool for dominance; Jesus, a victim of Rome, had become a sword of Rome. Constantine conquered in the name of Christ instead of Caesar, claiming that anyone who opposed Rome opposed Christ. A few decades later, Theodosius the Great, another Emperor of Rome, prohibited any religious practice other than Christianity on pain of death.

Fast forward to the Crusades, where so-called holy wars were sanctioned by popes and kings, leading to the mass slaughter of Muslims and Jews... in the name of Christ. Christianity was used to justify domestic violence across Europe, the colonial subjugation of indigenous populations across the globe, and the enslavement of African Americans, which laid the economic bedrock for American prosperity.

Brian McLaren synthesizes Christian imperialism this way: “Through all these episodes we can trace a common theme: a profound, almost unconscious union between Christian faith and an imperial or colonizing mind-set, a mind-set that asserts one group of people has been chosen by God to rule over others, which is closely related to the theological conviction that one group of people — Us — carries God’s blessing and favour in a way others do not. Taken further, the chosen become children of God and light; the unchosen the children of the devil and darkness. In the star shadows of that duality, how could hostility not grow?”

Christian Nationalism Today

While Christianity has surely made progress beyond the barbarity of earlier centuries, tribal flaws continue to metastasize in the twenty first century. In Kristen Du Mez’s scathing critique of modern American Evangelicalism, Jesus and John Wayne, she states that, “It was only through the identification of common enemies that fundamentalists were able to fashion a powerful identity.” Evangelicals provided the state with a religious articulation of the enemy, allying church and state behind the powerful concept of Christian nationalism.

As America has become more divided, this rhetoric inevitably made its way into domestic politics, as a powerful way to frame political rivals. Religious sermons regularly use the language of “spiritual warfare” and political rhetoric to rally quasi-Christian warriors against evil political rivals.

It is no wonder, then, that 80% of American evangelicals were willing to rally behind Donald Trump, as a defender of their “values”, regardless of the fact that his character demonstrates a complete lack of Christian virtue.

They were at war, after all, and when at war one needs a bludgeon.

Du Mez explains that “By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their saviour, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates ‘the least of these’ for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means. Having replaced Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way.”

When Trump’s mob descended on Washington to stop the certification of an election on January 6th, 2021, it wasn’t simply run-of-the-mill political anger fuelling them. Jeffrey Goldberg, from The Atlantic reported witnessing “a mass- delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety.”

Donald Trump’s commandeering of American evangelicalism was built upon a Christian supremacy complex. “Caesar is Lord” revisited.

Violent Atonement

So how is it that Christ’s inclusive and peaceful model has been repeatedly warped into a justification for tribal domination and violence? I believe that one of the central reasons comes down to our inability to relinquish our old exclusive and violent conception of God, despite Christ’s repudiation.

Growing up, I was taught one interpretation of Christ’s death: penal substitutionary atonement theory. Put simply, we are sinful creatures and God’s justice demands our blood. Jesus, as God’s divine son, paid our required blood sacrifice so that God could accept us. All we must do is accept that Jesus did this, ask forgiveness for our sin, and follow him. If we don’t, God’s justice demands our eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire.

This interpretation was taught to me as an example of God’s mercy.

However, at a young age I took issue with the contradiction of a loving God requiring blood sacrifice in the first place, not to mention literal eternal conscious torment for my wonderful unbelieving friends.

It is interesting to note that for the first eleven hundred years after Christ’s death this interpretation didn’t exist.

The initial interpretations had to do with Jesus Christ conquering the power of death and sin for all time (Christus Victor) or paying a ransom to the Devil (Ransom Theory). In the Middle Ages, Anselm of Canterbury, wrote a paper called “Cur Deus Homo?” that first introduced this concept of Jesus as the substitution for God’s holy wrath. This view suited the authoritarian attitudes of the day, and became the dominant interpretation of Christ’s death, and the primary interpretation adopted by Catholics and Protestants.

One of the main problems I have with this model is that it maintains a God who requires violence to bridge separation, when Christ’s lived example contradicts this. Christ was killed for forgiving sins without the proper sacrifices.

If Christ is the enfleshed example of the living God, how could he be so entirely different from his violent father?

Another issue I take with this concept is that it essentially functions as another temple wall, a boundary between who is acceptable to God and who is not. Once we see ourselves as a part of the in group, it follows that we view and treat others as a part of an out group.

In Richard Rohr’s (2016) Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, he calls this “immature religion”, claiming that “humans mostly divide the world into the pure and the impure, the totally good, and the totally bad, the perfect and the imperfect. It starts with such totally dualistic thinking and then is never able to get beyond it.” He goes on to apply the wisdom of the psychoanalysts who recognized that we are prone to seeing the worst parts of ourselves in others, describing top-down religions as a training ground for projecting our evil elsewhere.

Non-Violent Atonement

To those of us who grew up with this transactional understanding of Christ’s death as the cornerstone of their faith, it can be hard to understand any other point to the cross whatsoever. However, there are and have always been alternative interpretations within Christianity.

Early Christians understood the message of the cross as God incarnate, triumphing over sin and death, because of his tremendous love for us, not saving us from himself.

Since the introduction of Anselm’s substitutionary atonement theory, Catholic Franciscans have resisted it, maintaining an alternative orthodox position that the cross was a dramatic demonstration of God’s loving solidarity, meant to build trust and love for the creator. Much of the Eastern Orthodox church (the second largest Christian denomination) has viewed this theory as a narrow misunderstanding of what Christ was accomplishing on the cross.

A view I find particularly compelling is Catholic historian and philosopher Rene Girard’s non-violent atonement theory, which reveals Christ’s death as exposing the scapegoat mechanism, the false myth of redemptive violence societies are built upon.

All throughout history and even today, societies maintain group cohesion by projecting rivalry onto some evil other. Having someone to blame glues us together. These others are always deemed guilty and blamed for bringing hardship onto society.

The Gospel story turned the tables of this myth by presenting Jesus as the innocent victim. Exposing the violent reality of religious and state power.

The theologian James Alison describes it like this: “What we have with Jesus is an exact inversion of the sacrificial system: him going backwards and occupying the space so as to make it clear that this is simply murder…What Jesus understands himself as doing in St. John’s Gospel is revealing the way that mechanism works. And by revealing it, depriving it of all power by making it clear that it is a lie.”

Many early Christians followed in Christ’s footsteps. Refusing to worship the Roman leadership and exposing their brutal violence through self giving martyrdom.

Christ’s death and resurrection is ultimately a scandalous and transformative mystery that consolidates all things. A paradoxical God/Man who dies for humanity.

I am not claiming the ability to articulate this mystery.

But I am certain the whole point of the cross is not about perpetuating the sacrificial system within a new religion.

After all it was Christ who instructed us to “go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners”.

So, how do we end Christian violence?

My hope is that Christianity is at a turning point. Many people are waking up to the fact that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of the church today. The old God has reared its ugly head again and again and we must name it for what it is: an anti-Christology that worships a God formed in our own broken image. One that continues to insist on enemy formation and the myth of redemptive violence. The real Jesus is so much better.

The difficult question becomes: how can Christians, of all stripes, create productive dialogue about these issues? Brian McLaren proposes a three-step approach that I believe would be useful. It is in line with traditional credal orthodoxy and draws from the Anabaptist, Quaker, Franciscan, and Celtic traditions.

First, we must seek to understand or know Christ (primarily by reading the Gospels contextually).

Second, we apply this understanding or knowledge to God.

Third, we enrich, challenge, adjust, affirm, or correct all previous understandings of God in light of Christ.

References

Alison, J. (2006). Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In. Continuum.

Armstrong, K. (2014). Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Anchor.

Bell, R., & Golden, D. (2008). Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile. Zondervan.

Bournelis, S. (2018) Anselm of Canterbury’s Satisfaction of Atonement Theory and its relation to Eastern Orthodox Christian Theology. https://tinyurl.com/58f5tbp4

Du Mez, K. (2021). Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright.

Goldberg, J. (2021, January 6). Among the Insurrectionists. The Atlantic. https://tinyurl.com/ywpr9xdp McLaren, B. D. (2013). Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian

Identity in a Multi-Faith World. Jericho Books.
New International Version. (2011). BibleGateway.com. https://tinyurl.com/sc5jnzxj

Rohr, R. (2016). Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. Franciscan Media.

Rohr, R. (2019). The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. Convergent Books.