The creator of Veggie Tales takes on the editor of the Babylon Bee and other whited sepulchers. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/NFyuCYH57J— Josh Rosenau (@JoshRosenau) October 10, 2022
damn. and to think the mormons had visionquest themselves into reaching that position of passive aggressive racism. also puts the work of american evangelicals in the third world into perspective.
I guess for some additional context, a lot of white evangelicals believe Catholics aren't saved as well as a lot of white folks who identify as evangelical. They have a very exclusionary sense of what being a "Christian" means. They just feel very untroubled by saying that about an entire group of black folks as well...
If you go back a few centuries in our history down here you have jesuits converting entire native tribes. On some level they were racist, right? They believed that recent converts could never be properly christian. But what mattered was their souls were saved and, plus, their kids and grandkids will be closer to that christian ideal. A professor once called it 'multiculturalism of contempt'. I'm not a super religious person and besides I'm neither catholic nor evangelical. But now I'm starting to wonder if we've somehow regressed.
The story of missionaries and colonialism is a fascinating one but AFAIK no one has actually explored it much from a historical materialist lens. There's a lot there and the missionary work done by Spanish priests in the 16th century was very different from that done by Anglo protestants in the 19th century. Both evil, just in different ways.
Without exposing a whole lot the gist of it is that the portuguese were not above co-opting native leaderships and populations into the colony. This is not because they were less racist or because they were differently racist. It was because colonizers were not a monolith and had conflicting interests. You have the landowner who trades with tribe A to enslave tribe B. You have the government official who marries into Tribe C to have them protect a town from tribe D. You have the jesuit mission which settles members of tribe E who just lost a struggle against tribe F. And then there's a lot of variation within each scenario. Sometimes you have a jesuit priest going to the landlord and chastising them for the slavery, sometimes even 'rescuing' some people. Sometimes you have the priest and the tribal 'principal' growing fat off the people's work and extracting as much value as they can. Sometimes you can find priests and principals working together to call a strike to enforce some sort of serfdom esque 'labor rights'. The more I study it the more I feel that the colonial era was a perpetual state of barbarism where people's and groups' worth was only as great as the political and family alliances they could muster.
damn. and to think the mormons had visionquest themselves into reaching that position of passive aggressive racism. also puts the work of american evangelicals in the third world into perspective.
I guess for some additional context, a lot of white evangelicals believe Catholics aren't saved as well as a lot of white folks who identify as evangelical. They have a very exclusionary sense of what being a "Christian" means. They just feel very untroubled by saying that about an entire group of black folks as well...
If you go back a few centuries in our history down here you have jesuits converting entire native tribes. On some level they were racist, right? They believed that recent converts could never be properly christian. But what mattered was their souls were saved and, plus, their kids and grandkids will be closer to that christian ideal. A professor once called it 'multiculturalism of contempt'. I'm not a super religious person and besides I'm neither catholic nor evangelical. But now I'm starting to wonder if we've somehow regressed.
The story of missionaries and colonialism is a fascinating one but AFAIK no one has actually explored it much from a historical materialist lens. There's a lot there and the missionary work done by Spanish priests in the 16th century was very different from that done by Anglo protestants in the 19th century. Both evil, just in different ways.
Without exposing a whole lot the gist of it is that the portuguese were not above co-opting native leaderships and populations into the colony. This is not because they were less racist or because they were differently racist. It was because colonizers were not a monolith and had conflicting interests. You have the landowner who trades with tribe A to enslave tribe B. You have the government official who marries into Tribe C to have them protect a town from tribe D. You have the jesuit mission which settles members of tribe E who just lost a struggle against tribe F. And then there's a lot of variation within each scenario. Sometimes you have a jesuit priest going to the landlord and chastising them for the slavery, sometimes even 'rescuing' some people. Sometimes you have the priest and the tribal 'principal' growing fat off the people's work and extracting as much value as they can. Sometimes you can find priests and principals working together to call a strike to enforce some sort of serfdom esque 'labor rights'. The more I study it the more I feel that the colonial era was a perpetual state of barbarism where people's and groups' worth was only as great as the political and family alliances they could muster.