The Winning of the West

We all know now, or should (most don’t), that the west was won through the superior deployment of a single CCR5 receptor. In short a superior resistance to smallpox. We have the scourge of the Bubonic Plague to thank for this.

But we sold the victory as an effect of superior technology. Superior civilization. Superior religion. Divine blessing. Lies we told ourselves to justify thieving conquest and genocide. To justify. To ease our conscience. Eventually, gorged on blood and taking credit for chance, we segued this “victory” to the mythic notion of race and slid from there to the simple lie of racial superiority. We still suffer from these myths today. (It’s no exaggeration to say that these myths made the malicious absurdity of Trump possible). We were the elect, and they were the savages.

But it’s the deployment of Christianity in the service of genocide that most interests me today, the obvious perversion and debasement that was the sine qua non of the conquest, and which has persisted to this day. Not that this was anything new. Christianity may have been born in the suffering servant, but it was reborn in military conquest. Again, as everyone should know but few actually do, the ultimate success of Christianity (as it is now understood and practiced) is due more to the blessing it was given by the Emperor Constantine than to any other event in history. And the Christianity that emerged from Constantine’s invocation of God and his attribution of military victory to God has persisted to pervert the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ ever since.

Just think about how much of the arrogance that power has used in the search for the mammon of wealth and conquest has been made possible by this perversion of the gospel? So much that today the greatest threat to the gospel itself is the perversion that has been and still is promoted in the vain use of its name? This is the true breaking of the prime commandment not to take the name of the lord in vain. What is more vain than justifying conquest and the piling up of wealth and the enslavement of whole continents of people in the name of God? How can you blame those who cannot see past a perversion so gross it is virtually universal? We blame Christianity for the perversion of Christianity because we don’t see any other version of Christianity out there. (But it’s there. The church within the church is there.)

One wonders why a prescient God would send Christ if he knew that this is what would come of it. (But this is not the place to answer that question, at least not today.)

The sin of the church is that it did virtually nothing to oppose the conquest of the Americas, indeed that it happily joined in for the opportunity to evangelize. It wanted to convert the savages. But history revealed again and again the insincerity of that gesture. Indeed it was realized by the “savages” themselves at the very start. It is well documented in colonial times and came to a head at the Trial of Tears. I can’t get out of my head the plea of Frank Baum, the writer of children’s books, blithely calling for the final extermination of this degraded race as the saddest evidence of how saturated was this myth of the racial superiority by then, how thoroughly decay had riddled the body of well-meaning conquistadors, oblivious to their own disease.

This is how nations that were among the most barbaric and militaristic the world had ever known praised and congratulated and deluded themselves into taking over the world. And they’re still not done.

And we have a Roman emperor and a medieval germ to thank for it.