Pre-Colonial and Decolonial Christianities
A friend asked me recently, “If money was no issue, what would you do?” I blurted out, “Go study in a monastery in Iraq.”
The monastery of Mar Mattai belongs to the Syriac Orthodox church, one of the branches of Christianity that broke off from the Western church in 451 AD/CE. They follow the West Syriac Rite.
There is even one church that broke off earlier than them, the “Church of the East” who claim Peter came to visit them (in Babylon) as referenced in 1 Peter 5:13. They still speak a dialect of Aramaic, the native language of Jewish people living in 1st century Galilee, i.e. Jesus and his disciples. Western Christendom calls them Nestorians, but Nestorius was only the last representative to specifically interact with the Western churches at the council of Ephesus in 431. Officially the Church of the East was kicked out for a Christological controversy, “Nestorianism,” but it is not clear that even Nestorius believed what the Western churches said he did. What is more clear is that the Church of the East did not tie themselves to the benefits of a violent empire like Western Christendom did. For many years they were larger than Western Christianity. In the 1300s their influence had stretched all the way to Xian, China. In the modern era Assyrian people took on the Church of the East as their own and it became known as the Assyrian Church of the East. Which exists in small communities all over the world. If you go to one you will likely be able to hear someone recite the words of Jesus in his native language.
As I was pondering this pre-colonial church I saw some photos from @joanna_lng of Christians from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, who are currently dealing with a civil war and the worst locust swarms in at least 50 years.
They, along with the Coptic Christians in Egypt the West Syriac Churches and a few others departed from Western Christendom 20 years after the Church of the East in 451 AD/CE. Those churches are collectively referred to as Non-Chalcedonian or Oriental Orthodox Churches.
They also were accused of heresy but I wonder if there may have simply been an opposition to participate with an empire that brought peace through a sword. Whenever I come across these historical churches I am curious to know what their understanding of Christianity is like.
Like many others however, when Christianity is brought up I think of its most powerful versions. After 26+ years of immersion in US Evangelical Christianity I’ve only recently discovered these ancient Middle Eastern and African Christianities. I remain a student of how Christianity came to be such a loud, anti-intellectual, pro-guns, anti-immigrant, pro-war, anti-healthcare, pro-wealth version it is in the US, are the individual actions of some nice people enough to save it? Can we do better? It seems the Christianity that has been dominant, especially the last 40 years, has been discrediting itself, and if my hunches are correct may have begun a steeper decline this year with the failure of their presidential candidate, the adulterous, belligerent, casino-owning billionaire Donald Trump. Who could have seen that coming?
Students of history.
Historically speaking we have no reason to trust those who brought us the dominant religious form in the United States. I’m referring to churches like the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest and most influential protestant denomination in the US) who in 1845 added Southern to their name to indicate their unwavering support to slaveholder missionaries. Needless to say they supported the confederacy against Abraham Lincoln and the Union. There are books written on the Christian, “biblical” defense that they, but not only they, built to justify their power over other races. It certainly was very profitable to have free labor; in developing a justification for slaveholders one might say they “gained the whole world.”
After the civil war most of these Pro-slavery baptists in what we now call the “Bible belt” opposed reconstruction in the South, later many white Christians opposed MLK’s Civil Rights movement whether by saying God separated the races or they just didn’t want ‘forced integration’ or civil disobedience was not ok, or it was Marxist/Communist.
To be fair many civil rights organizers did have ties to various Marxist organizations and MLK’s defense when accused of being a Marxist only said he got his views from Jesus not Marx.
One of the architects of the religious right, Jerry Falwell, got his start as a pro-segregation preacher after the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling against segregation. His Liberty University (claiming to be the largest Christian University in the world from 2012–2018) was started as a private segregation academy. As late as the 1980s he called the anti-apartheid South African Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu a “phony”– the primary reason was that Tutu was working with the Communist-influenced, if not actual Communist, Nelson Mandela, for rights for South African blacks. Together Mandela and Tutu (and others like Farid Esack) ended Apartheid, the Christian right in the US fought against it. It should be no surprise the Christian right is against Black Lives Matter (apparently, they are too Marxist) and enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. The SBC hosted Mike Pence for their 2018 convention. Just this past week the six Southern Baptist Seminary presidents declared the academic work of black lawyers in the 1980s “Critical Race Theory” incompatible with their statement of faith — they claim it is rooted in Marxism.
In 1995 they began apologizing for their racist history, in 2018 they released the results of an internal look through history and admitted that their entire history of theology was white supremacist. To come full circle, I’m not sure if they know that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx exchanged approving letters with each other, but, maybe that would help clarify their arguments. I’m wondering, does Jesus’ mandate to pay attention to the hungry, thirsty, sick, stranger, those in prison finds a better form in the dominant form of Christianity or among their apparently Marxist opponents, Lincoln, MLK and Nelson Mandela. Didn’t Jesus say it mattered less if you call him “Lord, Lord” than if you did the will of his father? (Matt 7:21–23)
This largest denomination of US Evangelicals has had 13 years of decline in membership, the largest one year drop (from 14.8 to 14.5 million) coming last year. The fastest growing religious demographic of “none” has been well publicized, young people in particular are emptying the pews; one might say the Southern Baptists “lost their soul”.
As Western Christendom implodes from not caring about the people it (consciously or unconsciously) exploited, I wonder if those who care will consider the idea that slaveholding Christianity, despite their good intentions, may have been more focused on their top spot in the hierarchy than they were about justice for those left out by society.
The best examples of Christianity may not be the most powerful branches of Protestantism or Catholicism but Christianities that have a longer tradition of resisting exploitation. I bet there is a correlation between these ancient non-western traditions and Christianities from people who were oppressed/exploited, namely African American expressions like that of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, Latin Americans like Oscar Romero and Gustavo Gutierrez, and Womanist traditions like Rosemary Ruether and Dorothy Day, might we be interested in forgotten Native American Christianities like that of William Apess? Christian understandings from oppressed peoples such as these is often grouped under the term liberation theology (be careful though, conservative Christians claim they are, well, Marxist).
Since the 4th century it has been too profitable for Eurocentric men to (consciously or not) compromise with oppression/exploitation and call it Christianity.
What if instead of flashy preachers with cool shoes we did more exchanges with Iraqi and Ethiopian Christians? Read more MLK? I suspect it would involve more criticism of the way we get our wealth and power than we are comfortable with.
This picture is of a minister and his family from the Assyrian Church of the East I was fortunate to sit down with.
His son translated their native language of Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, into English. He had some very valuable things to say about hell, proselytizing, Islam, western doctrines of Christianity… We would do well to center his tradition rather than US fundamentalism.
That would be decolonizing Christianity.
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Some history of these non-western Christianities are described by Baylor Univ. Historian Philip Jenkins in his book The Lost History of Christianity.
Taylor Storey is a former fundamentalist, homeschooled K-12, was on staff at 3 evangelical churches and is an alumnus of 2 private evangelical universities and a Gospel Coalition Seminary. He’s currently trying to make sense of it all at Potsdam Universität in Germany.
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