American family association – Page 9

Does the AFA agree with Bryan Fischer about Native Americans?

I fully realize there are bigger fish to fry than how Bryan Fischer continues to make the strong case for the American Family Association’s place on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups. However, my mind keeps going back to this matter.

I struggle with the fact that in 2011, Christianity is known for what it is against more than what it is for. I am really disillusioned with the conservative church as represented by religious right advocacy groups. In fact, of late, especially when Bryan Fischer speaks about most things, people run from Christianity. My brothers and sisters, this should not be so.

I struggle with the fact that the American Family Association refuses to be accountable for the statements of people they promote on the radio and their websites. The disclaimer they list on Bryan Fischer’s columns reads:

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)

However, when I asked the AFA if they agreed with this statement from Bryan Fischer, they have not answered.

Had the other indigenous people followed her [Pocahontas] example, their assimilation into what became America could have been seamless and bloodless. Sadly, it was not to be.

Last Thursday, I started calling AFA to discern if this was one of the issues which reflect the views of the AFA. I think the group’s leaders might since they took down the first article on Native Americans but then allowed Fischer’s article on Pocahontas with the above statement in it. Does this self-styled Christian organization really believe that Native Americans didn’t have enough converts to avoid the Trail of Tears? And how can we know since they won’t answer a simple question?

Native American columnist blasts Bryan Fischer’s “ugly article”

Last Friday, Indian Country Media columnist, Steven Newcomb, blasted Bryan Fischer’s column on Native Americans calling it an “ugly article” and saying that it contained “thinly veiled race-purity arguments.”

Newcomb writes:

In other words, the very narrative that Mr. Fischer uses as his standard of judgment against American Indians is a dehumanizing genocidal narrative; that basis alone disqualifies it from being any kind of moral standard of judgment against anyone.

Earlier the Native American Rights Fund said Fischer’s article was “not worth dignifying with comment.”

Expanding on Newcomb’s criticisms, I believe that Fischer’s use of the Old Testament stories involving the promised land as a template for justifying the European conquest of the native peoples here is theologically and morally flawed. His newer article on Pocahontas suffers from a stunning confirmation bias in that only facts consistent with his narrow thesis are presented. I think Mark Noll’s comments in his book on the history of Christianity in the US provide excellent rebuttal to Fischer’s supremacist theory:

Despite the fact that the Cherokees had adapted to American ways with remarkable skill, the removal proceeded with ruthless finality. The missionaries, who had come to the Native Americans as bearers of civilization as well as of Christianity, faced a terrible dilemma. They now were forced to watch their country, supposedly the embodiment of Christian civilization, turn violently against a people that had responded to their message.

Some in the AFA have criticized Fischer but the Pocahontas article remains up on the AFA blog. One can quibble about whether Fischer speaks for the AFA but they are allowing revisionist history about one of the most painful episodes in our history to go unchallenged.

Bryan Fischer speaks with forked tongue

American Family Association Issues Analyst Brian Fischer believes that Native Americans lost their lands because they were “morally disqualified” to keep them. His first column on the subject was blasted by a Native American advocacy group, his enemies and even his co-workers – one AFA attorney called it “wrong and disturbing.” Fischer’s claimed that his readers were not mature enough to handle a discussion of his thesis and removed it from the AFA website.Then last week, Bryan Fischer, found a morally qualified Native American to write about. Fischer claimed that Jamestown’s Algonquian princess Pocahontas showed her fellow Native Americans the way to relate to the British – convert to Christianity and learn their ways. Fischer then asserts that her people did not follow her which led to their demise. On point, Fischer wrote:

It’s arresting to think of how different the history of the American settlement and expansion could have been if the other indigenous peoples had followed Pocahontas’s example. She not only recognized the superiority of the God whom the colonists worshipped over the gods of her native people, she recognized the superiority (not the perfection) of their culture and adopted its patterns and language as her own.

In other words, she both converted and assimilated. She became both a Christian and an American (technically, of course, an Englishman). She melded into European and Christian civilization and made her identity as a Christian and an Englishman her primary identity. She was the first manifestation of what became our national slogan, “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of many, one.”

Had the other indigenous people followed her example, their assimilation into what became America could have been seamless and bloodless. Sadly, it was not to be.

It is true that there was no seamless and bloodless history. But it is not true that indigenous peoples completely rejected Christianity.

According to real historian Mark Noll, the Native Americans were responsive to Christianity after Pocahontas. Prior to 1675, pastors John Elliot and Thomas Mayhew evangelized in Massachusetts leading to converts among the Algonquians and a translation of the Bible into their tongue.

Another example of evangelism described by Noll in his book, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, was the work of Moravian David Zeisberger in Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1748, Zeisberger saw the native people in central Pennsylvania converted and organized into peaceful villages. Fischer clams Native Americans were nomadic. In a way that was true of early Christian Native American converts, but not for the reasons Fischer claims. For instance, Delaware people converted through Zeisberger’s work had to relocate multiple times at the insistence of European settlers. During one move in Ohio, savagery was the downfall of a portion of Zeisberger’s colony, but the perpetrators of the atrocities were Americans who brutally murdered native men, women and children. After this tragedy, Zeisberger’s group found refuge in Ontario and thrived as a Christian settlement.

Fischer’s thesis is most clearly devastated by the experience of the Cherokees in the south after the Revolutionary War. The Cherokees signed a treaty with the federal government in 1794 and then settled into a peaceful period where they built roads and villages. They welcomed Christian missionaries which led to many converts among the Cherokee in Northern Georgia and Tennessee. In his book on American Christianity, Noll describes “a slow but steady acceptance of the Christian faith.” Noll continues the sad tale:

During the administration of President Andrew Jackson, however, the evangelism of the missionaries and the work of selective cultural adaptation by the Cherokees both received a fatal blow. After the discovery of gold in Northern Georgia about the time of Jackson’s election in 1828, the lust of the White settlers for Cherokee land grew even stronger than before. Jackson and his agents for Indian affairs were eager to give it to them. The result was a forced removal of the Cherokees from Georgia to the West. Despite the fact that the Cherokees had adapted to American ways with remarkable skill, the removal proceeded with ruthless finality. The missionaries, who had come to the Native Americans as bearers of civilization as well as of Christianity, faced a terrible dilemma. They now were forced to watch their country, supposedly the embodiment of Christian civilization, turn violently against a people that had responded to their message.

The United States, bearing the gifts of Christian faith and republican politics, destroyed a tribal people that was working to accept those gifts. Some missionary spokesmen, unlike Worcester, Butler, and the Joneses, played a signal part in that destruction. Such spokesmen were good culture Christians. The agents of Andrew Jackson’s Indian policy were democrats. Together they did the devil’s work in the name of the Lord and of his “chosen country.”

Noll’s description is haunting. He repeatedly demonstrates that the Cherokee and other native peoples followed the way of Pocahontas but they were not rewarded with Fischer’s “seamless and bloodless” assimilation. Instead, during the Trail of Tears, men, women and children were uprooted and brutally forced to march hundreds of miles, many to their deaths, because they were Native Americans. At the time, some Christians, seeing the evil, engaged in civil disobedience to try to prevent the forced relocation. In the present, why can’t the American Family Association stop revising history and acknowledge this sad and painful chapter in our history?