Somewhere, a man is burning a cross on a Black family's lawn and calling it the work of God.
Somewhere, a man in a white hood is quoting scripture before he ties the knot. Somewhere, a colonizer is planting a flag in soil that belonged to someone else and naming the land after a saint. Somewhere, a slave ship is leaving port with a Bible on the captain's desk and three hundred souls in the hull, chained at the wrists, unable to breathe, while the captain prays for fair winds and safe passage. And his God, apparently, provides both.
This is the Christianity they exported to the world. This is the faith they pressed into the hands of the people they were simultaneously destroying.
Let us speak plainly, because plainness is a form of respect and this subject has been wrapped in too much polite silence for too long.
The cross that ancient symbol of suffering and liberation has been turned in Western hands into a branding iron. They used it to mark their conquests. They planted it in Africa, in the Americas, in Asia, in the Pacific everywhere they went to take what was not theirs and they called the planting evangelical. They called the theft missionary work. They called the murder of entire civilizations the saving of souls. And they did it all with hymns on their lips and the name of Jesus Christ as both weapon and alibi.
The Ku Klux Klan did not hide from Christianity. They wrapped themselves in it. They opened their rallies with prayer. They burned their crosses note that well, they burned the cross of Christ and saw no contradiction. They lynched men on Friday nights and took communion on Sunday mornings. They terrorized children and taught Sunday school. They believed, with sincere and terrifying conviction, that God approved. That the same God who said love thy neighbor had carved out an exception, had whispered to them in the dark that the neighbor, if sufficiently different, did not count.
The slave owners built churches on their plantations. Did you know that? They built churches and forced the enslaved to attend, to sit in the gallery, to listen to sermons carefully selected to counsel obedience. Servants, obey your masters. They took a religion born among the oppressed born in Palestine, among a colonized people, preached by a dark-skinned man who was eventually executed by an empire and they surgically removed everything in it that threatened their power. What remained was a costume. A useful, well-pressed costume that made brutality look like benevolence.
And the enslaved, in their extraordinary genius and spiritual resilience, took that same religion back. They found Moses in it. They found liberation in it. They made it their own in the hush arbors, in the spirituals, in the coded language of Canaan and Egypt and the Promised Land. They rescued Christianity from the people who were destroying it with their practice of it.
But that is a different story. That is a story of survival. What we are speaking of now is the original crime the weaponization of the cross by those who never understood what it stood for.
The colonizers arrived with the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other. There is a saying, attributed variously but true universally: When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible. The transaction was not spiritual. It was strategic. Christianity was the soft instrument of conquest the anesthetic applied before the surgery of dispossession.
They told us our gods were demons. They told us our rituals were primitive, our ancestors were in hell, our names were unworthy of heaven. They renamed us. They reclothed us. They restructured our families, our calendars, our relationship with the earth and they called this civilizing. They called this love. They called this Christ.
Then came the mass shooters so many of them now that we have stopped counting, stopped being surprised, started instead doing drills with our children, teaching five-year-olds to hide in closets in silence. And when they catch the shooter, or find his manifesto, or scroll through his social media, there it is again the cross. The Bible verse. The declaration of Christian identity. Men who walked into churches and opened fire. Men who walked into schools and murdered children and believed, in whatever dark corridor of their minds they inhabited, that God was not entirely against what they were doing.
And the January 6th insurrectionists let us not forget them who stormed the seat of their own democracy with wooden crosses carried aloft, with Jesus Saves painted on their chests, with prayers offered on the Senate floor after the windows were broken and the legislators had fled. They came to overturn an election in the name of a president, and they brought Jesus with them as a co-conspirator. They saw no blasphemy in this. They felt the wind of heaven at their backs.
The misogynists claim the name too. The men who believe a woman's body is a territory to be governed, a resource to be managed, a vessel with no sovereign will of its own they come armed with chapter and verse. The head of the woman is the man. They take the poetry of an ancient world and make it into legislation. They take Paul's letters, written to specific communities in specific crises, and chisel them into permanent law. They silence women in the name of a saviour who if the gospels are to be believed was notably un-silent around women. Who spoke to them in public. Who appeared first to a woman after the resurrection. Who counted them among his most faithful.
But inconvenient truths are easily ignored when the text is long enough and the reader selective enough.
Here is what must be said, and said without flinching:
These people did not misunderstand Christianity. They chose. Every single one of them made a choice the colonizer, the Klansman, the slave owner, the insurrectionist, the shooter, the misogynist they chose which parts of the teaching to honour and which to discard, and they discarded, every single time, the parts that cost them something. The parts that required them to surrender power. To see the other as equal. To love at personal expense. To lay down the sword. To wash feet. To welcome the stranger.
They kept the identity. They kept the label, the cultural weight of it, the social legitimacy it conferred in their communities. And they emptied it of everything that made it demanding.
This is not ignorance. This is craft.
The name of Christ has been dragged through more blood by those who claimed it than by those who ever opposed it. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The conquest of the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade. Apartheid. Colonialism in Africa and Asia and the Pacific. The KKK. The bombing of abortion clinics. The covering up of child abuse in institutions built in his name.
The wonder is not that people have lost faith. The wonder is that anyone, having seen all of this, having read the full and unedited history, still finds in the original teaching something worth rescuing — still believes that beneath the centuries of misuse there is a real thing, a living thing, that the men in the white hoods and the men on the slave ships and the men carrying crosses into the Capitol building did not actually possess, no matter how loudly they claimed it.
Jesus of Nazareth was not a Western man. He was not white. He was not a property owner or an empire builder or a nationalist. He was a poor man from an occupied land who spent his public life among the sick, the poor, the outcast, the foreigner, the criminal, and the despised. He was executed by the state, at the request of the religious establishment, for being inconvenient to power.
If he came back and they say he will he would not recognize himself in what they have built in his name.
He would perhaps recognize himself more easily in the people they built it against.
The cross was never theirs to burn.
The name was never theirs to weaponize.
And history slow, patient, thorough history will make that clear.
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