Unsettling Truths Quotes

“However, the most challenging comparison is that we—the United States of America, the leaders of the modern-day heretical kingdom of Christendom, one exceptional nation that for centuries has been thriving, growing, and expanding (supposedly) under God—are not that dissimilar from Nazi Germany.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The United States of America does not hold a morally exceptional position greater than Nazi Germany. We are not more just. Our sense of equality is not any superior. Our nation has never been Christian. We have just won our wars. And therefore, for centuries, we wrote our own history. And that has proven to be incredibly dangerous.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“You cannot discover lands already inhabited. That process is known as stealing, conquering, or colonizing. The fact that America calls what Columbus did ‘discovery’ reveals the implicit racial bias of the country—that Native Americans are not fully human.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“When one nation is able to control the telling of their own history for hundreds of years, a mythology forms that allows injustice, oppression, exploitation, and even war crimes to be seen as benign and even to possibly be honored and celebrated.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Many authors, professors, pastors, and social justice leaders and organizations (both Christian and secular) who are considered to be on the forefront on the racial dialogue frequently use the term “white privilege.” However, the word privilege suggests that the inequality that favors white people is actually a blessing which they must learn to share. The term white privilege perpetuates an implicit bias. Whiteness is neither a privilege nor a blessing to be shared, it is a diseased social construct that needs to be confronted.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Repentance is not just sorrow and confession, it is the turning around of wrong behavior towards right and just action. Repentance from sinful corporate behavior therefore requires systemic change. For many, the cost of that repentance may be too high.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“To the white supremacist mind, the most charitable act and the most benevolent blessing they can bestow is allowing those of the lower race to associate with them.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“All worship is contextual, but there may be an underlying assumption of European American primacy in worship and the failure to recognize the captivity of the church to European American norms.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The sin of the Doctrine of Discovery is the determination that the full expression of the image of God is found only in certain races. If the full expression of God’s image is found in the rational common sense mind of the European, then the white European American is elevated above other bodies and minds.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Christendom is the prostitution of the church to the empire that created a church culture of seeking power rather than relationships.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“This 2005 opinion reveals a white supremacist legal opinion written by the United States Supreme Court that reiterates the highly problematic M’Intosh verdict written nearly two hundred years earlier. The opinion in the 2005 case, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., was written and delivered by the iconic progressive Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The implicit bias of white supremacy is alive and well in the United States of America and is a bipartisan value that is perpetuated by nearly every US citizen (or at least every US citizen who owns, or hopes to own, land).”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Whiteness is neither a privilege nor a blessing to be shared, it is a diseased social construct that needs to be confronted.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“  It feels like our indigenous peoples are an old grandmother who lives in a very large house. It is a beautiful house with plenty of rooms and comfortable furniture. But years ago, some people came into her house and locked her upstairs in the bedroom. Today her home is full of people. They are sitting on her furniture. They are eating her food. They are having a party in her house. They have since come upstairs and unlocked the door to her, bedroom but now it is much later, and she is tired, old, weak and sick; so she can't or doesn't want to come out. But what is the most hurtful and what causes her the most pain, is that virtually no one from this party ever comes upstairs to find the grandmother in the bedroom.  No one sits down next to her on the bed, takes her hand, and simply says, "Thank you. Thank you for letting us be in your house.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The United States of America has a white majority that remembers a history of discovery, opportunity, expansion, and exceptionalism.  Meanwhile our communities of color have the lived experiences of stolen lands, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crowe laws, Indian removal, ethnic cleansing, lynchings, boarding schools, mass incarceration, and families separated at our boarders.  Our country does not have a common memory.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The strongest warnings Jesus gives are directed at his disciples when they begin believing that because they are with Jesus they are somehow privileged and better than others.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“To Wink, the powers that be “are more than just the people who run things." They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships. These Powers surround us on every side. They are necessary. They are useful. . . . But the Powers are also the source of unmitigated evils”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Because the more familiar term “racial reconciliation” implies a preexisting harmony and unity, we propose the use of the term “racial conciliation.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The myth of redemptive violence allows Americans to see themselves as having superior intellect and value and therefore the ability to handle weapons capable of incredible violence in an appropriate manner.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The diseased theological imagination (such as Christendom, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the myth of  Anglo-Saxon purity) contributed to a dysfunctional social imagination (white supremacy) that has perpetuated unjust leaders, systems and structures.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The Doctrine of Discovery, first directed towards Portugal then directed towards Spain, affirmed the imperial ambitions of these two European powers.  It gave theological permission for the European body and mind to view themselves as superior to the non-European body and minds.  The doctrine created an insider perception for the European while generating an outside, other identity for non-Europeans; it create an identity for African bodies as inferior and only worthy of subjugation; it also relegated the identity of the original inhabitants of the land 'discovered' to become outsiders, now unwelcome in their own land.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The fact that America calls what Columbus did 'discovery' reveals the implicit racial bias of the country - that Native Americans are not fully human.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“We have embraced the stories of success and exceptionalism rather than engaging the narrative of suffering and oppression.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Where is hope if not in a land covenant with the God of Abraham? We have been trained to read the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, incorrectly. We have been taught to put ourselves in the place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We read the Old Testament as if the United States it eh chosen people of Israel. But in the Old Testament narrative, Americans would be the citizens of the pagan nations. Hope for the United States does not emerge from being the promised and chosen people like the Jews, but instead, we take our hope from how God treats the other nations in the biblical narrative.
The hope for the United States comes from a God who was willing to negotiate with Abraham over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. The hope for the United States comes from a God who pulled Rahab out of the city before he destroyed Jericho. The hope for the United States comes from a God who said to Jonah, "Should I not be concerned" when he protested that God had sent him to prophesy to the pagan city of Nineveh. The hope for America does not come from a land covenant with God - it comes from the character of God. And the character of God is not accessed by our exceptionalism but through a humility that emerges from the spiritual practice of lament.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The Civil War was an internal spat between the North and the South, who could not agree on the best way to keep white supremacy intact.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The victors write the history. And that is incredibly dangerous.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Pratt’s human standard of white supremacy over against Natives elevated his personal standards in the place of God, resulting in the sinful expression of his dysfunctional theology into society. [...]

The elevation of white bodies, minds, language, and culture therefore presents a profound expression of human fallenness with its attempt to take the place of God’s created order.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The myth of American exceptionalism is a bipartisan and unifying theme for most every American. One of the major challenges for a nation that believes in its own exceptionalism but also has a simplistic two-party political system is that when any flaw is uncovered that might blemish the exceptional nature of the whole, that flaw is blamed on the opposing political party (or any other available scapegoat). That way the mythology of American exceptionalism can remain intact.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The captivity to individualism in the West leads many to reject the possibility of institutions and systems inflicting social harm that requires a social response.”
― Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery