Postcolonialism and Religious Discourse

This may be the first time on this blog that the title is actually more boring than the entry itself. I know, it sounds like the title of a bad graduate-school paper (in fact, I may have written a bad graduate-school paper using that title). But I really do mean for this to be a thoughtful, highly personal piece.

The impetus for this is a comment from a friend on a recent entry here. Ted pointed me to an article in Indian Country Today about the Episcopal Church's repudiation of the "Doctrine of Discovery." My first reaction to the article was that it was interesting, but irrelevant to the life of a 21st-century white Mormon. But with some thought, I saw that this really is the issue that defines the intersection of my religious and intellectual life.

Here's the historical context. At the dawn of the Age of Exploration, as Europeans begin to explore, colonize, conquer, and control large areas of the globe, a new strand of Christian thought emerged. Now, the seed of this is central to the evangelical nature of biblical Christianity--take the gospel to all the world. Once Peter received the revelation permitting the apostolic church to preach to and convert the Gentile nations, Christian spread through Europe, northern Africa, and southwestern Asia. Now, with trade and travel taking merchants and military from Christendom both across the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope, a new version of Christianity was born.

Unfortunately, this version of Christianity bears little resemblance to the gospel that I encounter when I read the New Testament. Gone was the emphasis on peace, forgiveness, and meekness, all of which were replaced by a hyper-evangelical misreading of the Apostles' commission to preach the gospel to all the world. Married to incipient capitalism and military might, this colonial Christianity became the grounds for conquest, slavery, and genocide.

As a graduate student working with literary texts from many of the places most affected by colonialism, I found this history to be incredibly troubling. In a moment of spiritual crisis, I turned to the Book of Mormon, reading it not only as scripture, but as a literary text (a trick I learned in a "Bible as Literature" class I took as an undergrad). The experience, while short-lived (I don't think I got past 1 Nephi before the experiment had run its course), was life-altering.

Much of the value of this reading came from Nephi's vision. After seeing the Tre of Life and some of the other elements of Lehi's vision, Nephi is shown much of what befall his descendants through the subsequent centuries. In chapter 13 we get the postcolonial meat: the Great and Abominable Church (which I understand to be corrupt and worldly Christianity of all denominations) is founded, and the Gentiles arrive at the Land of Promise and scourge the descendants of Lehi (the chapter heading even uses the word "colonizing"). Reading this chapter as a postcolonial text made the events of colonization in the Americas not just historical fact, but prophetic reality. This, to me, was the turning point.

A professor at BYU once told me that sometimes God does His work through imperfect--even wicked--people. Such is surely the case with this history. To defend Columbus, Cortez, Coronado, Onate, and others outright is disingenuous, but to see them as part of a necessary process, of bringing the biblical text--corrupted and poorly interpreted as it was--to the Western Hemisphere, as well as eastern Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, makes sense to me. Joining the sticks of Ephraim and Judah was a necessary part of the dispensational events that form the basis of the Book of Mormon prophecies. Even if men who did wicked or shortsighted things were invovled, it was still

As Lehi puts it in his final words to his children, "there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord." Whether I like it or not, that includes slave traders and criminals, racists and persecutors, colonizers and liars, as well as my own ancestors (some of whom undoubtedly may fit into some of these other categories as well). (As a side note, Dad once posed the troublesome question of whether this meant that Africans sold into slavery were brought by the hand of the Lord, and I think this reading answers that with a resigned "yes," which also means that we have to consider contemporary immigration--even of the illegal sort--similarly.)

All of this is then to permit the multicultural, multilingual, dynamic place that is our nation (and, more broadly, our hemisphere) today. If we look at the migration of Lehi's family as the beginning of a long history of cultural displacement--sometimes through violence--we see that the Book of Mormon truly speaks as a voice from the dust--meaning not only that it testifies of the words of prophets who lived ages ago, but also that it witnesses of the very earth upon which we tread. The land in which we dwell carries the histories of colonizations, both ancient and modern, and the foundational text of Mormonism helps us understand the bloody, messy, complicated history of this part of the globe, and through that, a wider understanding of how God works on the macro level to reveal truth to and bless the lives of His children.