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Seeking Conciliation, Not Reconciliation

January 11, 2017
Mark Charles

Mark Charles

Calvin College

As far back as the time of Christ, specific groups of people have dominated the world, fighting for land and influence and in the process persecuting and killing those who got in their way, said Mark Charles, a writer and speaker on issues of race, culture, and faith.

Addressing the topic of “Race, Trauma, and the Doctrine of Discovery” at the 2017 January Series, Charles sketched a timeline that saw this push for power beginning in the first- century Roman Empire, which ruled during the early days of Christianity.

“If you lived in the first through the third centuries, there was a good chance you would be persecuted and even killed if you were Christian,” he said.

But that Christian community, said Charles, became divided in many ways when the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire in the third century. This essentially tied Christianity in with a worldly empire. “In creating this empire, they nearly destroyed Christianity,” he said.

After touching on Constantine, Charles traced the actions of the Western empire through the Crusades, launched in the medieval period in the Holy Land against Muslim forces, to wars that raged across Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries that were based on theological grounds.

He paid particular attention to the late 15th century when the Roman Catholic Church devised a justification that Western powers then used to conquer people living in lands they wanted to control.

“This is what is called the Doctrine of Discovery, which is a racist document that assumes the dehumanization of people of color. . . . It is a document that refers to Indians as ‘merciless savages,’” he said.

Using this doctrine as justification, European powers invaded North and South America, killing and displacing millions of Indigenous peoples who had lived there for centuries.

This doctrine was also the basis for “mission outreach” that included the formation of Native American residential schools in Canada. It also included boarding schools, such as the Rehoboth Christian School, that were started and operated by the Christian Reformed Church, in the U.S., said Charles.

“The stated goals of these schools was to kill the Indian to save the man,” he said, referring to educational techniques that emphasized eliminating indigenous cultures for the sake of the gospel. “We don’t teach this history [of the separate schools and other actions involving the oppression of native people]. We teach a mythology that says we have had liberty and justice for all.”

Synod 2016 of the CRC discussed and repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, especially as it applied to the boarding school at Rehoboth. But, said Charles, one of the stories of a person who had attended Rehoboth was removed from the study committee report before it was discussed at synod.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t reject and condemn the Doctrine of Discovery and label it heresy and remove part of the story.”

CRCNA leadership say that the story was removed from the study report for a variety of reasons, but that it was never intended to be swept under the rug.

“In 2003, at the 100th anniversary of Rehoboth school, former students, representatives from the denomination, and teachers and staff participated in a process of healing and reconciliation. An official apology for former wrongs was also given,” said Kristen deRoo VanderBerg, Director of Communications and Marketing of the CRCNA.

“And as recently as New Year’s Day, more than 100 people gathered at Rehoboth Christian Reformed Church in New Mexico for a service of listening and repentance for injustices that occurred at Rehoboth Christian School.”

Although Charles didn’t address these developments, he did say that it is important to continue to look honestly at and deal with the past.

Overall, he said, the U.S. needs to do what Canada did recently when it established a national Truth and Racial Reconciliation Commission to hear the stories of Indigenous peoples, including those who attended residential schools, in an attempt to heal painful aspects of the past.

But, Charles also said, in doing this it is conciliation and not reconciliation that is important.

“Racial reconciliation is a way in which we perpetuate the myth of our nation,” he said, noting that reconciliation assumes a starting point of harmony that people can return to. “This started out bad with ethnic cleansing and genocide. We’re not trying to get back to a place of harmony, but to a new place where we can be together today.”

Important to this process is for the white dominant culture to recognize the trauma they have  experienced from treating and demeaning non-whites as second-class citizens. Only then, said Charles, can a dialogue begin that can lead to conciliation of the sides.