Unsettling Truths

Book Review (Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah))

This book is, as its title suggests, unsettling. Unsettling in two profound ways, which I'm sure the title is meant to evoke - firstly it is an uncovering of disturbing truths about our past, particularly the history of the United States, and secondly unsettling as an act of resistance to the settling and colonisation of North America.

The book is written by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, though I suspect the weight of the book is on Charles' work. He is a First Nations person with Diné (Navajo) and Dutch heritage, as he explains and locates himself in the introduction.

The main purpose of this book is to explicate and explain the Doctrine of Discovery, and show how this Doctrine is part and parcel of a narrative and an 'imagination', a set of beliefs that make sense of the world and make certain construals of the world possible, which has undergirded the theft of Native lands, the genocide of Native peoples, and the ongoing reality of White Supremacy in North America. It's an uncomfortable tale, but a necessary one.

The Doctrine of Discovery itself, in a nutshell, is a legal principle, born of the 'Age of Discovery', in which European explorers were granted (divine) right to possess lands they discovered, and to drive out or enslave inhabitants. This Doctrine was promulgated in Papal Bulls, applied to Portuguese and Spanish conquests, and in a similar set of protocols, applied to other colonial powers, including England.

[Side note:  For an exploration of the Doctrine of Discovery in Australian contexts, see Discovering indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Robert Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, Tracey Lindberg. Oxford 2010)].

Let's return to our book though. Charles and Rah trace a line of theological dysfunction which historically connects Constantine, and the hagiographic installation of Constantine by Eusebius into the legitimation of Christendom as Empire, to Augustine and his development of Just War theory (especially in the deployment of the state against the Donatists), to Aquinas and the state's responsibility to put heretics to death, to the 15th century Doctrine of Discovery, as well as later developments, such as Anglo-Saxon purity, White superiority, all of which function as a dysfunctional theology which undergirds past and present sins.

(Just to clarify this, the contribution of Augustine is that it’s okay for the state to commit violence against those outside the church, for the sake of the church. Heretics, infidels, and heathens are thus all ‘fair game’. That’s the legitimation of violence/just war in Augustine that sets a path towards the Doctrine of Discovery)

This was unsettling. I happen to like Augustine and Aquinas, and find in them profound theologians capable of supreme articulation and reflection on doctrines of God and the practice of love. But, as the saying goes, 'never meet your heroes'. I'm well aware that all my theological heroes are deeply flawed. One can scarcely find, for instance, a theologian in the early church who opposes slavery (except maybe two or three). As a Christian I can accept that all our great thinkers were also deeply flawed, which means we need to be honest about their failings, at all times.

One element that Charles & Rah do not pick up on, but which is striking to me, is the way that Aquinas developed (I don't think he originated it, but it is definitely prevalent in post-Aquinas scholasticism) the distinction between possession in use and possession absolute. This distinction was weaponised in colonisation, to claim that Native peoples had "the use" of the land, but not "ownership", which then went to the 'discoverers'.

Charles & Rah furthermore trace the way the founding documents of the US, such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Amendments, all embodied and continue to embody as normativity of white maleness, and an othering, exclusion, and denial of Black people, Indigenous people, women, and others. The following chapters trace how this diseased plausibility structure played out in history. Westward expansion, the railways, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, removals, reservations, boarding schools. For me, dimly aware but never truly educated in this history, it is shocking, and a cause for grief and lament.

I particularly appreciated and found unsettling the way Charles & Rah spend chapters 9 and 10 dismantling the myth of Abraham Lincoln. Through careful and deliberate presentation of sources, they show how Lincoln's overriding goal was pragmatic - to save the union, and that he had no personal investment in the end of slavery. They also show Lincoln's clear and culpable involvement in policies and practices that involve large-scale genocide of First Nations peoples.

The book ends on a more sombre note, if that seems even possible. Charles draws on his own experience to articulate the idea of White Trauma - collective and multi-generational damage done to white people by their participation (as heirs, if not perpetrators) in historical injustice and violence. That idea helps makes sense of why it is so hard for white people to confront these (and other) unsettling truths about race and history. In short, Charles and Rah bring the story home by talking about the failures at reconciliation - despite best intentions, there has yet to be a wide-scale reckoning with the past, a process of truth-telling, reparations, and corporate repentance that would pave the way for the dismantling of white supremacy in the present, and the foundations of a better future.

I'm glad for this book, and thankful for its authors, especially Mark Charles, for their courage in writing and publishing it, and speaking up to prophetically denounce the failures of the church in particular to come to terms with long-term systemic sin, in which it has played a major culpable part, and which it continues to fail to come to terms with, let alone recognise at all.

And I’m left with my own questions to figure out. What does this look like in Australia, with Australia’s own history of colonisation, the First Nations peoples here, and the legacy of the churches.