This page was created on November 1, 2003
This page was last updated on January 4, 2005

One of my loves is the indoors. Living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, libraries -- I'm a big fan of being inside. Air conditioning, central heating, computers, the Internet -- curling up with a cup of tea and a good book -- that's my idea of relaxation, particularly since I'm afraid of heights, depths, loud noises, and going too fast. This has nothing to do with my column, by the way.

Pastor Gunn ruminates on cultural imperialism and whether or not it's permissible to run roughshod over another culture on the grounds that our culture is superior. This is the quandary for the Christian. Pastor Mike and I both belong to Christianity, which does believe in objective truth and thus we are forced to admit (sometimes with our backs to the wall) that it really does make a difference what you believe: some cultures are better than others, depending on how the culture conforms to the Gospel's vision of humanity, which is our standard of measurement.

And if we were to get in trouble for this, I'd be in deeper trouble because I belong to a Church that not only believes Christian culture trumps all other cultures, but has put her money where her mouth is regarding it. Columbus, Cortez, Balboa, Vasco De Gama, Pizzaro -- yep, that was our banner they were carrying. That was us, out there, the Catholics. Culturally imperializing the New World. Uh huh.

And if I had my back to the wall, I'd still say that wasn't altogether a bad thing, if you go back and look at the history, which many people don't bother to do. Today some people like to slam Cortez for conquering Mexico. But at the time when he did it, Aztec law required the public slaughtering of 50,000 victims per year. In actual practice, the number was probably more. I've seen some modern writers try to bend over backwards to justify this: maybe the people considered it an honor, maybe it was voluntary, etc. -- but come on! Fifty thousand people a year volunteering to be publicly disemboweled with a knife of black volcanic glass? I don't think so!

And Cortez had the courage to do what too many modern Christians might not have the moral stomach for -- march into the city and put a stop to it. Plus, he did this with only five hundred men (making the odds ten thousand to one against him). Plus he did this after scuttling his three ships since he and his men voted to give themselves no escape. Plus their ammunition ran out after a few months, so they won their final battles with fists and swords. Cortez conducted his entire campaign with explicit reference to his Christianity, as when he hurled the idols down the steps of the temple pyramid and set up images of Christ and Mary in their place. If you're not up on the actual account of the conquest, I highly recommend the refresher course available from Christendom Press. (Also see sidebar: "Cortez Foretold?") There were some real bad eggs among the later conquistadors, but if you can get past the Black Legend prejudice (see sidebar: "Demonizing the Spanish"), what they did in bringing Christianity to the Americas and eradicating the more despicable practices was a pretty good thing.

The Spanish are the most flamboyant of the Catholic conquerors, but Catholic Christians have gone about winning the world for Christ in quite concrete ways ever since their beginnings, which is one reason why we've always been so unpopular. The early Christians never tried to privatize their beliefs, which brought them into a head-to-head collision with the Roman authorities. When Christians finally won the struggle to have their existence legalized, it is no coincidence that Christian reforms -- outlawing infanticide, equalizing the status of women, as well laws chipping steadily away at the institution of slavery (see sidebar: "The Church and Slavery") -- appeared in Roman law almost immediately.

Contrary to popular belief, the thrust of Catholic culture is not just making everyone Catholic. It means promulgating the Gospel vision of humanity -- seeing men and women as creatures deserving of dignity, capable of moral perfection, who cannot find satisfaction without God. When we start talking about human culture, Gospel values translate not into religious platitudes but into moral truths accessible to all people of good will.

Conquistadors aside, the Catholic Church isn't for evangelization-by-violence or the wholesale trampling of other peoples' cultures and customs. So long as those customs are enriching -- and not morally offensive, like human sacrifice -- the Church realizes that they can enhance the human experience. This is one of the reasons that the Vatican museums are full of "pagan" art and other artifacts from past civilizations. The first Jesuit missionaries to China even agreed that the Chinese could keep much of their ancestor-worship in their Catholicism, once they understood the ancestors were being treated as departed human souls, not divinities. My guess is the Pope would be on the side of the Buddhists and Hindus not losing their sacred mountain to the tourism industry.

In his 2001 "World Day for Peace" message, Pope John Paul II spoke, as he has on numerous other occasions, about culture -- about the need to be open to other cultures as well as the need to preserve one's own heritage. He condemns "the slavish conformity of cultures, or at least of key aspects of them, to cultural models deriving from the Western world. This is a phenomenon of vast proportions, sustained by powerful media campaigns and designed to propagate lifestyles, social and economic programs ... a comprehensive world-view which erodes from within other estimable cultures and civilizations." [§9]

When it comes to the case of the Nepalese losing their culture to Western tourists, the Pope would probably come down squarely on the side of the Nepalese. He criticizes the Western media not so much for promoting bad morals as blandness and banality: "The fact that a few countries have a monopoly on these cultural 'industries' and distribute their products to an ever growing public in every corner of the earth can be a powerful factor in undermining cultural distinctness." [§11] When various peoples of the earth are turned into mere "markets" for Western products, there is "a kind of dispossession and loss of cultural identity." And that's not a good thing.

While praising and valuing the distinctiveness of culture, the Pope is careful to balance this with holding culture to the Gospel standard: "Western cultural models are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable scientific and technical cast, but regrettably there is growing evidence of their deepening human, spiritual and moral impoverishment.... A culture which no longer has a point of reference in God loses its soul and loses its way, becoming a culture of death." [§9] To read more of the Pope's address, check out the online 2001 World Day for Peace Message.

According to the Pope, should Christians change culture? Absolutely. Should they be careful and respectful when they do it? Definitively.

So unlike Pastor Mike, I think I'll end this response with my feet planted pugnaciously on the Petrine Rock.

I imagine that most people have a knee-jerk reaction even to the term "imperialism." It smacks of destruction, disrespect, arrogance, false superiority. But if, for just a moment, we forget about national imperialism, and take a look in the mirror, we'll see the roots of imperialism, eyeball to eyeball. What do I mean? Well, as human beings, we impose our (very individual) ideals of justice and reason upon people around us all the time. Taking eleven items into the "10 items or less" stand at the supermarket, making the people behind me wait just that much longer, I impose my own standard of justice upon them: imperialism. Stopping to make that not-quite-legal left turn, I impose my own notion of appropriate law-breaking upon the frustrated drivers behind me (imperialism). Dodging onto the right shoulder to bypass that idiot illegally blocking the lane to make a left turn, and swerving into the pedestrian and bicycle paths, I force anyone who wants to escape without injury to follow my rules of vehicular travel (imperialism). The real problem isn't with a nation that generally believes it has everything together and can show all the other nations how to be successful -- as Pastor Mike hinted, it's with a world full of people who can't recognize their own imperialistic tendencies, and egoistically impose their "rules" on those around them.

It's no surprise, then, that nations (which are made up of individuals, for the most part) behave imperialistically. But it's hard to draw a line in the sand to determine when, culturally, imperialism has become damaging or destructive. And it's difficult to accurately measure the supposed benefits of this imperialism in an unbiased fashion. That is, statistics that isolate a few favorable facts can be used to window-dress just about any situation. I mean, it's great that infant mortality is down and literacy is up in many areas of the world, but has that drastically improved the standard of living for the majority of people? Or are those just some great statistics that justify imposed "progress," but are really empty numbers in terms of actual human value? Is there some cosmic balance sheet where we can weigh the benefits and damages incurred in the name of "progress"? And can we realistically determine and tally the internal and external influences that shaped this "progress" to ensure that credit is given where credit is due? It seems not.

Besides -- who's to say our own culture doesn't need a hefty dose of imperialism itself?

Wait a minute! That's kind of scary. I sound like the Pope.

In 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul speaks of Christianity as "the ministry of reconciliation."⁵ By this, he means that the central story of the faith is the reconciliation of Man to God through the blood of His Son, Jesus. Christianity, then, is the ministry of reconciliation because all who claim the name of Christ are ministers -- literally, servants in the Greek -- of God's specific conciliatory purpose.

But Christianity is not only the ministry of reconciliation -- it is the ministry of all things godly. One of the other theological terms applied to the act of Jesus' death on the cross is redemption. In conceiving Hollywood Jesus, David Bruce understood that Christianity is also the ministry of redemption -- and in particular, it is the redemptive hope for our culture: not through legislation, stone-throwing or critical negativity, but through showing us the godly things already embedded in our culture. For God reveals Himself through all that He has created, even the things that we may not particularly like.

After Eden is dedicated to this redemptive vision. We believe, as G.K. Chesteron put it, that "humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea."⁶ That's not a reality we endorse. We'd like to help salvage the gold from the gutter, and rescue the diamonds from the sea.

Mike Gunn is a pastor at Harambee Church in Tukwila, Washington, and was cofounder of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

Regina Doman is a writer, the author of the young adult novel The Shadow of the Bear and other modern stories based on fairy tales; she was also an editor for the late journal Caelum et Terra.

Editor Greg Wright is a writer and ordained minister of the dramatic arts. He is a contributing editor for Hollywood Jesus, and is author of Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter.

Editor Jenn Wright is a writer with degrees in literature and theology. She will be co-writing the Narnia coverage for Hollywood Jesus, which will be debuting the summer of 2004 in anticipation of the first movie's 2005 release.

The Devil's Advocate is a composite personality of our consultants and editorial staff. He may look like someone you know -- and probably thinks like a lot of them.

Hillary
On Climbing Everest

We knocked the bastard off.¹

Roskelley
On Climbing

You've got to know when to turn around.²

Chesterton
On Publicity

It would be a strange world indeed if... the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves and blossoms underground... ³

Shaw
On Tolerance

We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviors for blasphemers.⁴

Cortez Foretold?

Eerily enough, when he landed on the beach in Mexico on April 22, 1519, Cortez was fulfilling a prophecy. The Aztecs themselves were divided over human sacrifice, but the cult of human sacrifice had won out for the past several hundred years. In 987 AD, a priest who opposed human sacrifice was driven out of Mexico and went to live among the Mayans. His name was Topiltzin. A prophecy persisted among the Aztecs that he would return to resume the leadership of his people and abolish human sacrifice. According to the extremely precise Mayan calendar, he would return in his name year, 1-Reed (occurring once every 52 years) on his name day, 1-Wind. 1519 was a 1-Reed year, and April 22nd was 1-Wind day. Topiltzin, like all Mexican priests, dressed in black. April 22, 1519 was also Good Friday, and when Cortez landed on the beach of Mexico, he, like all devout Spaniards, was dressed in black in memory of Christ's death.

Demonizing the Spanish

Demonizing the Spanish people and all their works has been a common American tendency at least since the Spanish-American War. The underlying idea is that Spain=Catholicism-on-the-march, and America, like England (which has been anti-Spanish ever since the Armada incident), has historically had a bias against Catholicism. This continues to surface in tolerance of Spanish stereotypes in fiction. (e.g., the drunken duelist in The Princess Bride: "I give you my word as a Spaniard." "No good. I've known too many Spaniards.") But there's a lot to admire about the Spaniards. Their Christianity might have been choleric and militaristic, but take a look at their history. The conquistadors were warriors who had just won a seven-hundred-and-seventy year war saving their homeland from Muslim invaders. In other words, the Spaniards were at war for three times longer than the United States has existed. I believe that they are the only nation to date to reclaim a land conquered by Islam.

The Church and Slavery

Constantine prohibited masters from killing or even torturing their slaves. He also did away with laws that curtailed the emancipation of slaves, and forbade the separation of slave families (which implicitly gave slaves the right to have families, and not be sexual concubines). Under the influence of Christianity throughout the following centuries, the slave became a person with the essential rights of a person. He and his children could not be killed by their master, he was allowed to have a home, and property, and lead his life as he wished, so long as he took care of the land he was on -- in other words, he became a serf. He didn't yet have the opportunities of the higher classes, but he was well on the road to achieving them. Seeing that slavery has been an inescapable building block of almost every known society -- especially the most advanced -- since history began, this change is remarkable. By the time of the Renaissance, slavery was abolished in the laws and practice of every Christian state, but was starting to re-emerge, sadly, in countries under Muslim rule and influence.

Chesterton
On Perception

It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men... have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.⁷