John Milton Chivington (January 27, 1821 – October 4, 1894) was an American Methodist minister, Mason, and mass murderer. How is it possible that Methodist minister, Mason, and mass murderer are all used to describe the same man? Being a mass murderer is hardly in line with the tenets of either Methodism or Freemasonry. Yet, John Chivington is responsible for the murder of somewhere between 200-400 Cheyenne, mostly women, and their children.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So began the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, written by a slave owner for a slave-owning nation built upon a genocidal war against Native American peoples.
In April of 1994, the government of Rwanda called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill the Tutsi minority. Over the next three months, almost 1,000,000 Tutsis were murdered by their neighbors. Who cannot read Philip Gourevitch’s account of the massacre, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” and not wonder what does it mean to be a human being today?
We could go on, recounting and repeating horror stories from the Nazis, the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman’s mass killings of the Armenians, Stalin’s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians, as well as the nightmares that visited Cambodia, or the tribal wars from every inhabited continent. History is littered with humans seeking the total destruction of other humans.
And we always ask, “How could these people commit such atrocities against other human beings?” The answer is two-fold. First, in the eyes of the aggressors, these were not atrocities, these were acts of virtuous violence. Secondly, the atrocities were not atrocities because the victims were not seen as fully “human.” (See A Descent into Sacred Violence)
In tandem with the descent into sacred violence, the aggressors must engage in a campaign to defame and dehumanize their victims. Rather than being human, these victims are dogs, rats, human filth, enemies of the people, and vermin. Native Americans were not humans created equal by God; they were savages. Africans were not created equal with all other humans and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They were three-fifths human whose purpose was to serve their owners. Jews were not humans to the Nazis. They were rats, filth, and lice. The pattern is the same: Defame, Dehumanize, Destroy.
The logic goes like this: We are not destroying humans, we are ridding the earth of savages, sub-human vermin who carry filthy diseases, commit crimes, defile our women, our children, our culture, our race, and our way of life. The only sensible response is to put them down like a rabid dog or put them in their place beneath us as our inferiors.
These acts of violence may be extreme. Most likely, no one reading these words has directly participated in genocidal mass murder. However, what about that more tamed and domesticated breed of the same worldview that differs only by degree but not in kind?
Is there a fundamental difference between hatred that erupts into murder and the hatred that spews out sexist insults, racial slurs, demeaning and dehumanizing comments all intended for the single purpose of destroying something in the other and placing them beneath you? Jesus doesn’t seem to think there was much of a difference (Matthew 5:21-26).
In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr makes painfully clear how upright citizens with strict personal moral codes will simultaneously comply with and cooperate with oppressive systems and leaders who undermine basic decency and perpetuate real harm and evil, especially toward ethnic minorities, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. Niebuhr explains, “As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic, and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command” (Reinhold Niebuhr, Major Works on Religion and Politics, p. 156).
The desire to exalt ourselves and our group and the desire to dominate and subjugate “them” infects our political, social, and religious worlds. Sadly, even our own homes are no safeguard against the dehumanizing effects of our broken humanity. As evil as racism is, it is only one of many manifestations of this urge for self-exaltation and the destruction of the other.
In Christ, God overthrew and destroyed the body of Sin (Romans 6:6) and created one new humanity (Ephesians 2:15) called the body of Christ. The Gospel overthrows our clamoring for self-exaltation and the subjugation of the other. To participate in self-exaltation and the subjugation of others is not only inconsistent with the Gospel; it is a denial of the Gospel.
My prayer is that we, the body of Christ, become Ambassadors of the Peace and Reconciliation God brings to the world in Christ. We are called to speak the Word of another King and another kingdom. May we be faithful to this task.
Debbie and I serve as the FMI Global Associate Director for MENACA and Europe. We focus on cultivating disciples, leaders, and church planting movements.
