People Kid Themselves: How Religion and Science Can Fail Us

Atheists sometimes pretend that if we all just followed “science,” bigotry and intolerance would cease.

American treatment of First Nation (“Indians”) shows this is false.

Religious people sometimes imagine that if we all became more religious then bigotry and intolerance would cease.

American treatment of First Nations shows this is false.

Most Americans have been Christian from the colonial period to now. American non-Indian Christian treatment of First Nations, including brothers and sisters in Christ in those nations, has ranged from paternalism to hostility. We created religious justifications for our crimes against these folk. To give just one example, some Christians stood up against President Andrew Jackson’s forced removal of Indians, but too few to make a political difference.

There is no doubt that American Christians had a guilty conscience about our stealing of First Nations’  lands, the lies that were told, and even the accidental harm done by exposure to diseases brought by contact between the people groups. This shame was justified, but the Christian reaction continued to lurch toward paternalistic solutions imposed from the outside. We tore apart families through boarding schools and destroyed cultures in wrongheaded approaches to missions.

Christianity provided the ethical and intellectual resources to avoid these mistakes, but non-Indian Christians tended to see the errors after the harm had been done. For patriotic Christians, this guilt produced a tendency to retreat from continued issues and pretend that the whole mess would go away. Why talk about these issues? Christian school curriculum often ignores the history of the First Nations or relegates living cultures to the past.

Was Christianity the problem?

We know it was not, because increasing “secularism” or “scientific” approaches to the “Indian problem” did nothing to improve the situation. Arguably, it took an awful situation and made it worse. First Nations were relegated by “research” and “best science” to a perpetual childhood. American non-Indian Christians had a theology that demanded that they love their enemies and that all people were related. These theological ideas are so central to Christianity that they could never be totally ignored or ignored for long.

“Reasonable” people could outgrow these ideas when “science” showed them that Christian uplift for all people was unnecessary. If Christian charity had been harmed by too much paternalism and failed implementation, secularization allowed Americans to dispense with charity or moral obligations altogether. The government might as well save money, because First Nations were incapable of being educated since “science” showed they were inferior.  Even if “race” was rejected as a category, “scientific” views of culture placed Indian civilization in a dying or inherently inferior role.

Christianity, with roots in the past, is never totally comfortable with “social progress,” but early twentieth century secularists had no such restrains. Old folkways were never hallowed, but always primitive.

However, Christians should not be triumphant at all. Non-Indian Christians quickly folded to the new “science” since it confirmed contemporary prejudice. Too often American Christians held the line on side issues (such as opposition to alcohol abuse in both communities), but secularized precisely where courageous consistency could have helped. 

Both science and Christianity contained resources that led to corrections in both communities, but only after great harm had been done.

What went wrong? What can we learn?

Let’s start with five lessons:

Christians must listen to other Christians. Often non-Indian Christians looked at the “Indian problem,” but if they had listened to First Nation Christian voices, they would have discovered they were the problem.

Scientists of one era should know they have moral blind spots that can twist research. My grandparents’ generation was taught racism as fact. Only religious beliefs stood as any kind of check against barbarism. Science does self-correct (at least as far as we can tell!), but great harm can be done. Just as a totally “free market” might eventually punish malefactors, but only after their pollution and abuse of employees has killed many, so self-correcting science may do great harm before things are corrected.

When it comes to people, we should start with “do no harm.”  Christians and secularists should have assumed some things they believed were wrong or were being applied badly. All people should be much slower about projects and plans, even projects and plans that have noble motives and are “fact” based.

Believing a truth is no protection against self-deception. 

Christianity makes true claims about reality revealed by God and confirmed by reason. This is good, but people apply those truths and people make mistakes. We learn, but while learning we can use the truth to harm other folk.

Similarly, science is one powerful way of finding truth about certain parts of reality. It is (generally) self-correcting and used well, can do great good. However, scientists are people and science is not an ethical program. Attempting to live by “reason” or only on “scientific facts” can easily become monstrous.

Secularism and religion are not science, both can and should use science, but can also corrupt science.

There is no safe haven from deception because religion, science, and secularism are all inhabited by people and people are easily deceived.

Cultures are worth preserving. 

The loss of any human civilization is a loss to every human civilization. Because we are God’s Image, every culture that lasts has something good, true, and beautiful to teach all the rest of us. Because we are all broken, no culture, not even “Christian” cultures, has a corner on goodness. The idea of “progress” is nonsense in many areas . . . we can do more things, but perhaps  many of them are things we should not be doing.

In this political year, perhaps a great loss is our nearly total ignorance of American Indian issues. Those of us who are non-Indians still tend to discuss “them” when something (the name of a sports team?) intrudes on “our” space. We do not listen and so five million souls are made silent.

Even this article, with a focus on past mistakes by the American majority, is too centered in the past and on the actions of the majority. To make progress, the majority should hear the living story of a minority.

We should listen, learn, and do as little harm as we can. Restitution may have to be made, but the past shows that “white guilt” or a rush to help is more dangerous than benign neglect. The United States of America has First Nations as part of our history, our present, and our future (if that is their choice). This is not a “problem” for the majority to solve, but a chance to (finally) listen, learn, and get something right.

If for no other reason, Christians must do so, because we are commanded to do so by the Almighty.