This document discusses the history and legacy of Christianity through a critical lens. It examines controversial topics like the conquests of Columbus and Constantine, and explores how Christianity has been used to justify violence throughout history. The document suggests that Christians must face this difficult history, own it, repent of it, and rethink doctrine and mission in light of it. It quotes Indigenous voices arguing that Christianity has nothing positive to teach given its role in centuries of carnage against Indigenous peoples. Overall, the document prompts readers to grapple with Christianity's relationship to power, violence, and marginalized groups throughout its history.

4. humor
anti-humor

16. Why did the chicken cross the road?
Albert Einstein: Did the chicken really cross the road, or
did the road move beneath the chicken?
Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest.
Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.
A nun: It was a habit.
Hamlet: That is not the question.
John Donne: It crosseth for thee.
Colonel Sanders: Did I miss one?

17. Why did the dinosaur cross the road?
Why did the Texas chicken cross the road?
Why did the chicken go to the seance?
What is a chicken’s highest dream?

18. Laughter is one of the ways we cope with
discrepancies in our lives. There is a dream we all
have for this world, and then there is, well, this
world. There are expectations we have of our
religions, and then there are our religions ...[O]ur
capacity to love God, ourselves, people, and all of
life grows with our capacity to laugh....
This ability to laugh in the midst of our
imperfections in the presence of God is what we call
grace.
- Samir Selmanovic
It’s Really All About God: How Islam, Atheism, and
Judaism Made Me a Better Christian

19. Can you imagine Jesus, Moses, the Buddha,
and Mohammed walking together ... not in a
joke, but in reality: in friendship, in
compassionate understanding, perhaps in
honest but respectful difference or
disagreement, embodying toward one another
the principles they taught?
If they could cross the road together, might it
be possible for us to follow them?

20. Why Christian identity?
1. I have 56 years of experience with it.
2. It’s the religion claimed by 33% of the world’s people.
3. That 33% controls most of the world’s weapons and
wealth.
4. Jesus said not to try to “fix” others first.
5. Members of other faiths are better suited to deal with
their unique identity issues.

21. Can Christians today build a new
kind of identity ... based on
hospitality, not hostility, to the
other?
strong-
benevolent

22. But how?

23. Four Challenges
2. Doctrinal
3. Liturgical
4. Missional

24. Four Challenges
1. Historical
2. Doctrinal
3. Liturgical
4. Missional

25. The historical challenge

26. Why don’t we all get along?

27. From Follow the Sacredness, by Jonathan Haidt
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/forget-the-money-follow-the-sacredness/
Despite what you might have learned in
Economics 101, people aren’t always
selfish. In politics, they’re more often
groupish. When people feel that a group
they value — be it racial, religious, regional
or ideological — is under attack, they rally
to its defense, even at some cost to
themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and
politics is a competition among coalitions
of tribes.

28. ... The key to understanding tribal behavior is
not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that
humans developed at some point in the last few
hundred thousand years is the ability to circle
around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god,
and then treat that thing as sacred. People who
worship the same idol can trust one another,
work as a team and prevail over less cohesive
groups. So if you want to understand politics,
and especially our divisive culture wars, you
must follow the sacredness.

29. Farther back, Rene Girard and others
remind us, violence is at the root
of all government and all religion.
The Scapegoat Mechanism explains how
we achieved political/religious
unity and identity.
We must face this truth in our
history.

30. 1. Imitation
2. Rivalry
3.Violence and Anxiety
4. Scapegoating & Sacrifice
5. Religion, Prohibitions, Ritualization
6. Priests and Prophets
7. Jesus and the gospels
8. The violent reversion of
“historical/sacrificial Christianity

32. 1495
2nd Voyage Return Cargo:
1600 male and female Taino
slaves for Spain
“It is possible, with the
name of the Holy Trinity, to
sell all the slaves which it
is possible to sell … Here
there are so many of these
slaves … although they are
living things they are as
good as gold.”

33. The Spaniards who remained in
Hispaniola were encouraged to take
Taino slaves “in the amount desired.”
Columbus himself gave a teenage girl
to one of his crew, Miguel Cuneo, for
his personal “use.” Cuneo wrote that
she “resisted with all her strength”
when he attempted to have sex with
her, so he “thrashed her mercilessly
and raped her.” Being given a Taino
woman to rape was, in fact, a popular
“company perk” for Columbus’s men.
Columbus himself wrote to a friend,
“There are plenty of dealers who go
about looking for girls; those from
nine to ten [years old] are now in
demand.”

34. - An eyewitness in the early 1500’s
As a result of the sufferings and hard
labor they endured, the Indians choose
and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a
hundred have committed mass suicide.
The women, exhausted by labor, have
shunned conception and childbirth….
Many, when pregnant, have taken
something to abort and have aborted.
Others after delivery have killed their
children with their own hands, so as
not to leave them in such oppressive
slavery.

35. Of the estimated 300,000 Taino alive
when Columbus “discovered” them in 1492,
about 12,000 remained in 1516, fewer than
200 in 1546, and zero in 1555. What our
history calls “the discovery of America,”
Taino history might call “the arrival of
the Christian genociders,” if, that is,
any Taino survived to tell an alternate
history. None did.

36. “Here those Christians
perpetrated their first ravages
and oppression against the
native peoples. This was the
first land in the New World to
be destroyed and depopulated
by the Christians.”
--another eyewitness,
Bartolome De Las Casas
about Christian invasion
of Hispaniola

38. The 16th-Century conquests of the
Conquistadors
The 4th-Century conquests of
Constantine

39. From Eusebius:
[Constantine] said that about noon, when the day was
already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes
the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the
sun, and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS.
At this sight he himself was struck with amazement,
and his whole army also, which followed him on this
expedition, and witnessed the miracle… [That night] in
his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the
same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and
commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which
he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard
in all engagements with his enemies.

41. “In hoc signo vinces”
IN THIS SIGN CONQUER?
CONVERT BY THE SWORD?
DOMINATE?
COLONIZE?
ASSIMILATE?
INVADE AND OCCUPY?
KILL?
TERRORIZE?

42. From Eusebius:.
At dawn of day he arose, and communicated the marvel
to his friends: and then, calling together the workers in
gold and precious stones, he sat in the midst of them,
and described to them the figure of the sign he had
seen, bidding them represent it in gold and precious
stones. And this representation I myself have had an
opportunity of seeing.

44. “Now it was made in the
following manner. A long spear,
overlaid with gold, formed the
figure of the cross by means of a
transverse bar laid over it. On
the top of the whole was fixed a
wreath of gold and precious
stones; and within this, the
symbol of the Saviour's name…”

45. A SPEAR?
Really, Constantine?
A spear?

46. This spear-cross was further adorned with an embroidered banner
that featured the emperor and his family. The finished product,
Eusebius said, “presented an indescribable degree of beauty to
the beholder.” He added, “The emperor constantly made use of
this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and
hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be
carried at the head of all his armies.”
Eusebius, it should be noted, would be considered more of a
propagandist than a historian in the modern sense. For more on
Constantine’s life and work, see James Carroll, Constantine’s
Sword: The Church and the Jews—A History (New York: Mariner
Books, 2001).

47. The violent cross of Caesar
The nonviolent cross of
Christ
The violent cross of
Constantine
Which
Cross?

48. 1 Cor 1
For the message about the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but
to us who are being saved it is the power
of God... we proclaim Christ crucified, a
stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to
Gentiles, but to those who are the called,
both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of
God and the wisdom of God. For God’s
foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than
human strength.

49. ... But God chose what is foolish in
the world to shame the wise; God
chose what is weak in the world to
shame the strong; God chose what
is low and despised in the world,
things that are not, to reduce to
nothing things that are, so that no
one might boast in the presence of
God. (1 Cor.1)

51. the original
Christian
symbol

52. Serve like this ...
Love like this ...
Reconcile like this ...
Transcend violence like this ...

54. Islamophobia Today:
We should invade their countries, kill their
leaders, and convert them to Christianity. We
weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing
only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-
bombed German cities; we killed civilians.
That’s war. And this is war.
- Ann Counter, National Review
Islam is something we can’t afford any more in
the Netherlands. I want the fascist Quran
banned. We need to stop the Islamisation of the
Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more
Islamic schools, no more imams.
- Geert Wilders, Dutch politicians

55. These people [Arabs and Muslims] need to be
forcibly converted to Christianity ... It’s
the only thing that can probably turn them
into human beings.
- Michael Savage, syndicated radio host
Islam has attacked us ... The God of Islam is
not the same God.... Islam is a very evil
religion. All the values that we as a nation
hold dear, they don’t share those same values
at all, these countries that have the
majority of Muslims.
- Franklin Graham, Christian evangelist

56. Sound familiar?
From Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their
Lies” (1543)
They [rulers] must act like a good physician
Text
who, when gangrene has set in proceeds without
mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone,
and marrow. Such a procedure must also be
followed in this instance. Burn down their
synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated
earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly
with them, as Moses did...
If this does not help we must drive them out
like mad dogs.

57. Elie Wiesel:
“All the killers were Christian….The
Nazi system was the consequence of a
movement of ideas and followed a strict
logic; it did not arise in a void but had its
roots deep in a tradition that prophesied
it, prepared for it, and brought it to
maturity. That tradition was inseparable
from the past of Christianized, civilized
Europe.”
Quoted in David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
(New York: Oxford, 1992), 153.

58. Indigenous scholar Jack Forbes
writes, “The ‘cosmology’ or
‘world-view’ of a people is
closely related, of course, to all of
their actions. The world-view
influences actions and, in turn,
actions tell us what the world-
view really is!”
Jack Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 20.
Originally published by D-Q University Press in 1979.

59. From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing –
absolutely nothing – to teach Indigenous people about how
to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have
only demonstrated that there is something profoundly
wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than
five centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow
down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma
to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the
religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the
throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of
hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500
years of Christian domination.
- Waziyatawin, PhD, 2012

60. From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing –
absolutely nothing – to teach Indigenous people about how
to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have
only demonstrated that there is something profoundly
wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than
five centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow
down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma
to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the
religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the
throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of
hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500
years of Christian domination.
- Waziyatawin, PhD, 2012

63. what do we do when
we face our
history?

64. deny it?

65. defend it?

66. create a new
denomination/
religion?
(disassociate from
it?)

67. own it?
be humbled by it?
repent of it?
learn from it?
never forget it?
be “reconverted” in
light of it?

68. review our doctrine,
practice, and
mission in light
of it?

69. listen to the voices
of those who were
previously
marginalized?

71. Four Challenges
1. Historical
2. Doctrinal
3. Liturgical
4. Missional

73. A
Are

74. you

75. ready

76. to

77. cross

78. the

79. road?