20th century AD

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 8, 2000 by GARY MacEOIN

Blood-and-thunder sermons were a staple of parish life when I was young, but I didn't expect one at the Call to Action convention in Milwaukee. It was George Tinker who delivered it -- with all the appropriate gestures and dramatic pauses -- just as we were winding down Sunday morning.

Did you know we are all in a state of mortal sin? State of mortal sin is something I have understood since I read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man nearly 70 years ago. Of course I had already heard a raft of sermons on the subject, some illustrated with everlasting flames and fiendish torturers. But they were intellectual abstractions. Joyce was the theologian who troubled my sleep with his portrait of an existence abandoned by God.

That is where -- Tinker told us -- we Christians are in the 21st century, and where we have been for centuries.

Who is this Tinker character anyway who has consigned us all to hell? He introduced himself modestly enough as a mixed-blood Native American, an Osage on his father's side, a Lutheran minister thanks to his mother. Actually he is quite a bit more. With a doctorate in biblical studies, he teaches American Indian cultures and religious traditions at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, and he is a member both of the American Indian Movement and of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

VIEWPOINT

I had thought that we had said in 1992 just about everything that needed saying about the historic voyage of Christopher Columbus five centuries earlier and its aftermath. Tinker, however, opened for me new profundities of its continuing impact on us in our understanding of who we are and what are our rights and privileges.

"At the dawn of Renaissance Europe's discoveries in the New World and conquest of the American Indian, Europeans already enjoyed the singular advantage of possessing a systematically elaborated legal discourse on colonialism," Tinker said. "This discourse, first successfully deployed during the medieval Crusades in the Holy Land, and -- I should add -- eventually in the English colonization of Ireland, unquestioningly asserted that normatively divergent non-Christian peoples could rightfully be conquered, and their lands could lawfully be confiscated by Christian Europeans enforcing their peculiar vision of a universally binding natural law. This is to say that for centuries our churches have been involved in the colonization and conquest of the world on behalf of Europe.

"Replace the word Christian with its economic counterpart, capitalism. Non-capitalists can rightfully be conquered, and their lands can lawfully be confiscated by capitalist Europeans, enforcing their peculiar vision of a universally binding natural law. Think of the work of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, of the religious dimensions of what gets called `development.' And we who work in the churches must remember: Our churches are part of this new religious movement called the globalization of capital. You and I are deeply invested in it, so that when we act in resistance, we are acting against ourselves on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the disenfranchised of the world."

Self-perpetuating violence

The Spaniards who came to the Caribbean and the English who came to North America came with clearly preconceived notions of conquest and theological rationales to make it legitimate and self-righteous. The result is a culture of violence that is self-perpetuating. "When a man is abusive toward a spouse, it doesn't stop with just one act of abuse; the battering must continue," Tinker told us. "It is not enough for the colonizer to think that he is right in his abuse of the colonized. He also needs for the colonized to believe that the conquest is just and right. White Americans need for black and brown, yellow and red people to believe that whites are superior to people of color. Men need to have women believe that men are superior to women. Otherwise the conquest must continue until normative divergence is completely wiped out.

"To understand international politics, we need to connect all the dots and put this complex jigsaw puzzle together. We must go from the abuse of women to the globaiization of capital. The United States must say, as Clinton did recently, that freedom can only be measured in terms of free enterprise, free markets. Now that is a leap. But the United States is invested in its economic conquest of the world. So we must tell Third World countries through our wholly-owned subsidiaries, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that they must have free market systems in place in order to do business with us."

The result of this mental attitude, Tinker insists, is that violence has become an American value, indeed an American family value, because "it's what our children are learning from their parents who work in the corporate world. They watch their fathers act with unusual viciousness in corporate takeover policies or in competitive free market enterprises, where the task of business is to put other companies out of business. It's not enough to have a market. They must corner an increasing market share, to sell more this year than they sold last year, to raise their market share from 12.4 percent to 12.6 percent, or 15, or 20 percent, which means your job is to put other people out of business. That's the ,way capitalism works."