Religious profiling

I've started to read Philip Gourevitch's book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families: Stories from Rwanda.

It is the story of genocide, of the killing of somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million people in about 100 days. This mass destruction was carried out without weapons of mass destruction. It was performed by soldiers, militias and ordinary citizens by the thousands wielding guns, machetes and clubs.

When I picked up the book I knew that it's longish title came from a letter written by some of those who were killed. But I did not know the specifics of this letter.

It was written by seven pastors of Adventists churches. They were among the hundreds who had taken refuge in the Seventh-Day Adventist mission hospital in the city of Mugonero. Their letter was sent to Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the president and leader of the Adventist church in Rwanda. Here is what it said:

Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirumana,

How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther. We give honor to you.

The church leader is said to have responded, "Your problem has already found a solution. You must die."

Ntakirumana did talk with the mayor, and with his son, a doctor at the hospital. They worked together to coordinate the attack that slaughtered the seven pastors, their families, and nearly everyone else in the mission at Mugonero.

Elsewhere in Rwanda the victims were huddled in churches. Some were in Catholic churches, some in Protestant churches, but all in Christian churches because, you see, Rwanda is a Christian nation.

Gourevitch explores the rise of the Hutu Power ideology as it gathered force in community meetings throughout Rwanda. He traces how the Tutsi "elites" and Hutu moderates were gradually demonized, leading ultimately to the embrace of the final solution that Pastor Ntakirumana described to the condemned in the mission hospital.

Reading this part of the story you reflexively, defensively reassure yourself with all the reasons you can think of that it can't happen here. You do this all the more urgently the more you begin to suspect that maybe it could. You realize that the madness that swept Rwanda did not come about suddenly, but as the result of a thousand small steps in that direction. And some of those small steps seem familiar.

Dave Neiwert makes it his business to notice each of those small steps as they occur. Sometimes when I read his blog, Orcinus, I think that maybe he is a bit alarmist. Or I hope that he is being alarmist. And the more I suspect that he is not, the more fervently I wish that he were. Gourevitch's history — the story he tells of a Christian nation a mere 10 years ago — has me reading Neiwert's important blog with a renewed urgency.

Most people in Rwanda in 1994 were Christians. Most of the victims, as well as most of the killers. Those of us who also call ourselves Christian must somehow account for this.

I can't help but notice that Ntakirumana's Adventist church is the same branch of Christianity that gave us the modern heresy of Darbyism and the premillennial dispensationalism and prophecy mania of Darby's heirs. I have argued previously, many times, that this religious perspective is dangerous and insidious, inspiring a perverse and self-fulfilling hope for cataclysm.

Yet for all that, there is little in Gourevitch's account that suggests that Pastor Ntakirumana and his countrymen were acting from a particularly religious mania. Despite their nominal Christianity, the driving force behind their participation in Rwanda's genocide seems rather to have been their embrace of the Hutu Power ideology that seems to have supplanted their faith.

Ntakirumana's dispensational views may not have caused him to embrace a murderous ideology, but neither did it prevent him from doing so. Like the "two kingdoms" Lutheran theology of early 20th-century Germany, Adventist dispensationalism may have left its adherents ill-equipped to oppose the rise of such evil.

And what of the other Christians of other denominations who participated in and carried out Rwanda's genocide?

One explanation, of course, is that these people weren't really Christians at all. This sounds like a cop out, an easy escape, but it's also exactly what John writes, repeatedly, in his first epistle:

We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. …

And yet.

And yet they called themselves Christians. They went to church. They prayed the "Our Father" to our Father. And then they picked up guns, machetes and clubs and killed hundreds of thousands of their brothers and sisters.

Gourevitch writes with a bewildered horror and unblinking honesty because this happened. This happened and yet the world has never really looked at it, has never really accounted for it.

Nor has the church.