Christians Romanticize Wandering Yet Rendered My People Homeless

HOME. PERPETUAL WANDERING is a crucial aspect of the Christian narrative. Cast from Eden, Christians are forever strangers in a strange land.

But for black and Indigenous people, that means something very different. If the original sin of the colonized West is genocide and slavery, that is not our sin. And yet it rendered us homeless as surely as the apple in the Hebrew narrative. Forcibly uprooted again and again, black and Indigenous people seek to create, and return, home.

Indigenous scholars such as Kim TallBear and Kim Anderson have described the power that the American idea of home has on the minds of people and politics, and the threat posed to that ideal by Indigenous families who did not live in nuclear relationships with women in a subordinate role. Historically, land allotments for settlers seeking to homestead or for Indigenous people were allotted to heads of households based on the size of households; having a wife and children ensured a larger allotment. Indigenous people who were determined to be more than “half-blood” were not given land outright but had their allotment held in reserve because they were not considered capable of managing the land themselves.

The founders of the United States and generations of subsequent legislators defined the home in narrow and specific terms, creating laws and policies that ensured that free blacks, Indigenous people, immigrants, and poor whites were unable to achieve this American Dream. Vagrancy laws separated families and jailed people under vague and arbitrarily written codes. The Homestead Act, while providing land for settler families, required clearing the West of the people living there. People were framed as “nomadic” in order to justify the theft. The practice of redlining, marking boundaries around primarily black neighborhoods, was used to deny mortgages and exclude black families from home ownership.

The homeless, whatever their stories, are still viewed as suspect by Western society. People whose sexuality does not conform to the American ideal have long been described as threats to marriage and family, and many landlords rely on their Christian beliefs to justify denying homes to LGBTQ people. Yet around the world, U.S. media promotes a glowing image of the American home and family—making promises the country refuses to keep.

The church’s role

SO IT'S A strange dissonance in church, singing songs about wandering and seeking a home when, as an Indigenous woman, my homelessness is because of the church’s role in empire and colonization. This was not just complicity, but active engagement, directing the process and benefiting from the displacement and forcible relocation of black and Indigenous people, as well as from foreign wars that destabilize other countries and generate refugees and asylum seekers.

It was a pope who wrote the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, giving colonizers rights over our land; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg cited it to deny an Oneida land claim in 2005. It was the churches who ran residential schools and whose missionaries paved, and continue to pave, the way for capitalism and colonial government by marketing the constructed idea of home as a Christian ideal and model.

In his book Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi notes that before the 1820s, depictions of Jesus in any form were discouraged as idolatrous by the Protestant church. But in the emerging race-based American identity, it was important to associate Jesus with whiteness so that even within the church, black and Indigenous people were reminded of their place in the social order. The American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society all promoted images of a white Jesus in their materials. Every Sunday I sit beside a stained-glass window of white Jesus.

“One in Christ Jesus”

WHAT DOES HOME mean for those whose creation narrative roots them in the place to which Christian wanderers came with guns and laws, displacing and relocating black and Indigenous people again and again? Through these actions, the church created physical homelessness, but in verses such as Colossians 3:11 and Galatians 3:28, and it also creates a kind of internal homelessness. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile ... for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It’s as if our very identity, the way in which we move through the world, is erased as surely as our connection to the place of our creation, our existence as people.

The church practices a kind of Christian colorblindness with these verses. It says that we are not who we are—we are all the same—which in Western society means we are all white or aspiring to assimilate into Eurocentric norms. So we make metaphors from brutal history and sing songs about being slaves, written by people whose ancestors were not slaves. We sing songs about wandering, written by people whose ancestors rendered others homeless. We sing these songs in a state that still allows slavery through imprisonment and continues to displace and relocate black and Indigenous people.

But my identity and history are not metaphors. I don’t stop being a woman when I walk into church, and those verses from Colossians and Galatians have not stopped many churches from having rigid gender roles that exclude women from positions of authority. So why do they render our race and other identities invisible?

Called to live differently

RACE, AT ITS root, is about hierarchies, as are ideas about gender and gender roles, social class, and the way we conceptualize disabilities. Perhaps these verses are about eliminating hierarchies and not identity. Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh give us an alternate way to read the book of Romans in their work Romans Disarmed, demonstrating how Paul inverts the imperial system and its hierarchies and calls us to live differently.

Paul lived in a highly stratified world in which those from different social places did not socialize. Yet, in Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11, he writes that within the church we are all one. He is not ignoring how we move through the world. A slave and a free person would have very different lives outside of the church walls.

But within the church, we are called to live differently, and by living differently within that community, it becomes possible to invert the broader social order and bring about a freedom that does not rely on the sweet by and by. I suggest that we can only do so when we recognize, and reckon with, our own social positioning—when we look at that stained-glass Jesus and see how deeply invested the church has been in maintaining hierarchies rather than inverting them. We have become accustomed to acknowledging our privilege, but the inverse of privilege is deprivation, and we are not accustomed to considering how our position relies on the deprivation of others.

In 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 (which starts with “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ.”), Paul gives us a structure that may help in recognizing and dismantling hierarchies. Paul doesn’t say that every part of the body is the same, erasing our differences. Rather, in this passage he reinforces those differences and tells us to stop trying to be the same. In this passage, he presents those differences as strength. How do we reconcile this presentation of differences as strength with the apparent erasure of differences in Galatians and Colossians? We do this by focusing on the hierarchies that our differences represent in the world.

Michael Krause, a teaching pastor at Southridge Community Church in St. Catharines, Ontario, suggests that when Paul writes about the parts of the body that are considered shameful, he may be referring to those members of our communities who have been deemed shameful by the state—those who are vulnerable because of their race, gender, sexuality, or disability. The church has a responsibility to protect and treat these people with greater honor, because outside the church they will continue to bear the burden of the state’s oppression. Unless the church listens to them and lifts them up, we will never be free from that oppression. Unless their voices are in positions of real leadership and decision-making, we will be complicit.

A white male, perhaps the great Roman nose of the body, needs no protection and, in fact, may need to be willing to step aside. We have no great need for more white male voices in the church, but we do have need for others. We need to hear from those who are descended from slaves, not those for whom the idea of slavery is an appropriative trope. We need to hear from those who have been rendered homeless, not from those whose wandering is a metaphor. We need to hear from those who are fleeing colonial wars and interference and come seeking protection and help. We need to think about how passages, lessons, and songs are heard by those different communities. Do they feel welcomed or excluded; do they feel seen or erased?

We need to hear from them and invert their place in the social hierarchy, not offer them charity from our benevolent place above them. Not give thanks for our blessings, which they have paid for.

By recognizing our own social positioning and learning to see ourselves in Babylon and Rome instead of as Israel and slaves, we will create a place where those who the church has rendered homeless can find a home.