Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

I know you hate to be reminded of what you call “the past,” but the truth is it’s not past and you need to be reminded of it whether you like it or not. I’m talking about your twin original sins. The brutal enslavement of Africans for the sake of “The Economy” and the ethnic-cleansing of this land’s indigenous inhabitants. You seem willing to acknowledge the sin of slavery. (Though you still have a long, long way to go in righting the entrenched wrongs of racism.) But you appear incapable of acknowledging your other great sin—the sin of genocidal ethnic cleansing. You want to pretend it didn’t happen and get mad when I bring it up. But you’re going to have to face it. I don’t know exactly how you can atone for this sin, but I do know that you have to face the ugly fact that you built your nation on stolen land atop buried bodies. In building your “shining city upon a hill” you became Cain. You killed your brother. You can receive the mercy of God as Cain did, but you have to be honest about what you did to Abel—the aboriginal people who first populated this land. America, you’re my home, but my home is haunted by native ghosts.