Daily writing prompt

If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?

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I wish I could erase all the cruel words and actions that people, churches, and countries who call themselves Christian have done throughout history. If all the war, persecution, torture, killing, racism, lying, theft, deception, terrorism, genocide, and slavery done in the name of Jesus could be erased, world history would be so much kinder.

I believe that is why individuals, churches, and nations try so hard to sanitize their history by rewriting and reframing it to remove religious ruthlessness and brutality from their story. However, just because Christian cruelty is often left out of history textbooks, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

Honestly and humbly admitting the sin in our corporate history is important. Christians like to celebrate, embrace, and boast in the events that make them proud of their nation’s history even though they personally had nothing to do with those events. Yet, they prefer to distance themselves from the injustices done by their nation and supported by their churches by saying things like, “I had nothing to do with slavery.”

That is a double standard. If we are going to own up to and take pride in what we see as the good things our nation, churches, and ancestors did in the past, shouldn’t we admit and be sorry for the evil that they did while boasting about being Christian?

I’m not just making this up. History shows that it is characteristic of all nations and people groups. Here’s a concrete example. I’m an American. We Americans love to glorify, celebrate, and Christianize our Founding Fathers and our founding documents, even though we had nothing to do with them. We also like to deny the tremendous evil of race-based slavery and the horrible crimes against humanity of widespread genocide against the Native Americans by proclaiming that we personally had nothing to do with those things.

We present-day human beings can’t change cruel historical events. However, we can admit them and be sorry for them. We can learn about the cruelty in the past instead of ignoring it by pretending it didn’t happen or by reframing it as something necessary or even good. We can show kindness, compassion, and understanding to the decedents of the victims. And we should? Why?

By remembering the cruelties done in the past, especially those done in the name of Christ, we can help prevent those cruelties from being repeated in our generation or in future generations. History shows that when past inhumanity is covered up, justified, or ignored, it eventually recycles to the present. We can’t change the cruelties committed by Christians in the past, but we can be reminded by the past not to embrace self-righteous, self-justifying Christian cruelty in words or deeds in the present.