Careful examination of the role of the churches in Rwanda as well as in Nazi Germany reveals some heartbreaking truths.
First, it cannot be assumed that the Christian faith is taught in such a way as to emphasize love of neighbor (all neighbors) and respect for human life. No agency on earth has ever been able to control what is actually taught in a local church on a given Sunday morning. A variety of bastardized versions of the Christian message, including hateful ones, have been and continue to be communicated in congregations all over the world. This is true both in churches where authoritative (and sometimes authoritarian) church hierarchies supposedly have great power to control what happens in the local church, and in decentralized communions in which the local minister has the final say. Either way, the teaching of the Christian churches lands all over the map, from richly faithful to blandly mediocre to dreadfully immoral.
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We must move beyond the general to the particular. Certainly there were specific historical factors in Rwanda that contributed to the disastrous involvement and complicity of the churches in the 1994 genocide. The most significant appear to be the following:
The historic participation of the Rwandan churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church, in reinforcing ethnocentric thought and behavior both in public life and in the church itself. This weakened the church’s ability to resist the quasi-fascist genocidal racism that emerged in a sector of Hutu society in the late 1980s and early 1990s and eventually led to genocide against their Tutsi compatriots.
The cozy relationship enjoyed by the leaders of the Rwandan Catholic Church and of several Protestant denominations with the Hutu government. This led church leaders to identify their interests with the interests of the then-current government and its leaders. In the end, the outcome was a hesitation on the part of church leaders to stand up for innocent Tutsis (and moderate or resistant Hutus) and say a clear no to genocide.
The traditional teaching of the churches that the Bible mandates unquestioning submission to both churchly and governmental authority. This teaching left Christians very poorly prepared to resist the genocidal commands of local and national leaders.
The historic social power of the missionaries and churches that brought about the nearly universal "conversion" of Rwandans to Christianity. This nearly universal assent to Christianity, we can now see, was clearly more of a veneer than a living reality in people’s hearts, as observers of Rwanda have noted.
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The churches would do well to give up, once and for all, any hope of great social and political power, including a comfortable embrace by government leaders. The dream of Christian political dominance is alluring, but must be recognized as a demonic snare. And a cozy relationship with government almost always comes at far too high a price either for Christian integrity or for the victims of government injustice. Christians do nothing to protect the victims because we are too busy protecting our privileged position.
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