Unitarian Universalists love to claim that they emerged from the Puritan tradition, and have a long history as liberal Christians. Understanding Christianity then would seem to me to be a necessary part of understanding Unitarianism and Universalism. Our religious forebears were participated in the conquest of North America, and sent missionaries among Native American Indians. We should know something of this history lest we become participants in the denial that characterizes dominant culture response to the American genocide.
George Tinker is an ordained Lutheran minister and on the faculty at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, but he no considers himself a Christian. He found that he could no longer associate himself with a Church that was so involved in the colonial enterprise of conquest of the Native American Indian peoplles. Tinker states that 'perhaps the most fearful aspect of the church's complicity in the conquest of the native peoples in the latter sense is that it always happened with the best of intentions.'
Missionary Conquest; the Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide is Tinker's full length treatment of the role of Christian missionaries in the destruction of America's indigenous peoples. He studeies four missionaries; John Eliot, Junipero Serra, Pierre-Jean De Smet, and Henry Benjamin Whipple. These men are held up to this day as cultural heros for white America. But the results speak for a different interpretation, what they did was destructive for communities they impacted, what ever the sentiments they proclaimed.
Tinker examines the policies and the results of those policies and shows how the Christian Church contributed to genocide.
John Eliot, a prominent Puritan, was a full of colonial arrogance, viewing the indigenous culture as inferior to his own, and seeing the Natives as under the influence of the Devil. Junipero Serra's California missions were in an integral part with the oppressive Spanish colonial efforts to enrich Spain. The French man Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit, who was so self involved in his rational, Catholic theology that he thought nothing of mocking the rituals and practices of the indigenous people who he encountered. . Henry Benjamin Whipple, the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, worked to take the land from the Indians in the northern plains so that they would be forced to adopt the European way of life.
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