It’s an article of faith for the secular and Religious Left
that Western civilization is a pox upon the planet. According to
this not-so-new mythology, the earth and its indigenous peoples
were essentially good. But European civilization, corrupted by
Christian Constaninianism, injected corruption, conquest and
genocide into largely pristine cultures.
In 1990, the National Council of Churches infamously
denounced the impending quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’
“invasion” of America, which brought only “slavery, genocide,
theft and exploitation.” In earlier years, the church council,
whose chief denominations had helped found the United States, had
celebrated American democracy. But the NCC’s ideologues, like
most of the Religious Left, no longer heed Christianity’s
traditional understanding of humanity as fallen. In the preferred
mythology, people are good but corrupted by “systems” primarily
associated with capitalism, patriarchy, and the Church.
This stance recently surfaced in an op-ed
for Evangelical Left Jim Wallis’ Sojourners by Julie
Clawson, author of Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our
Daily Choices. Clawson had visited Taos, New
Mexico, where she vividly examined America’s “sordid history,”
which has amazingly not been “completely hushed up.” She darkly
surmised: “In most of the country it is easy to forget who we
stole the land from, who we enslaved to build initial
infrastructure, and who we oppressed on our path to becoming a
‘great’ nation.” But apparently the truth broke through in New
Mexico.
Or at least Clawson’s fragmentary understanding of truth.
She recalled attending an “emergent” (liberal evangelical) church
gathering at Glorieta, New Mexico, where in 1846 the Mexican army
had “made its last stand against the invading U.S. army” during
the Mexican-American War, only to be “massacred” by Americans. In
fact, the U.S. Army’s conquest of New Mexico was peaceful because
the Mexican Army near Glorieta dispersed, never to reassemble,
and fueling rumors that the Mexican commander was bribed.
“It puts things in perspective to know the history of the
place — knowing who died so we could use a spiffy [church]
retreat center,” Clawson sarcastically observed, apparently
unaware that no casualties occurred there until another conflict,
nearly two decades later, between Confederates and Unionists. In
her truncated version of the Mexican-American War, she remembers
New Mexico as the “land we stole.”
More specifically, Clawson presented a very jaded history
of the U.S. response to a New Mexican uprising in the ancient
village of Taos in 1847. She recounted that “after the U.S. took
New Mexico, local Indians and Hispanics were fearful that the
U.S. wouldn’t honor their ownership of the land and so staged a
rebellion against the U.S. governor in Taos.” In this process,
the governor “ended up dead,” though Clawson declined to explain
how. The U.S. Army “moved quickly to quash the revolt.” During
the U.S. attack, she explained, many villagers, including women
and children as well as “some of the insurgents,” sought refugee
in the Catholic church. According to Clawson’s remembrance, the
“U.S. army burned them alive inside the church.”
Such a horrible scene recalls the episode in Mel Gibson’s
The Patriot, when a sinister British
officer encircles a colonial church and incinerates its unarmed
and worshipping congregants. That scene was a fiction, and
Clawson’s history is mostly fiction as well. The New Mexico
governor was in fact scalped alive and then shot dead in his
house, after an extended appeal to the insurgents at his door.
His wife and children, with help from an Indian servant, and
accompanied by Mrs. Kit Carson, had just escaped by digging
through the house floor. The governor’s scalp (one account says
his whole head) was paraded through the streets by gleeful
insurgents, who also murdered the local judge, the sheriff,
circuit lawyer and other Americans.
Then U.S. Army Colonel Sterling Price is better now
remembered as a Confederate general in the Civil War, and maybe
better still as the namesake of the cat owned by John Wayne, as
Rooster Cogburn, in his Academy Award winning True
Grit. After the atrocities at Taos, Price
marched his force there. He had learned of the rebels’ plans to
“murder all the Americans in Taos, together with those Mexicans
who had either accepted office under the American Government or
were favorable to Americans.” When he arrived, the dead Americans
were “lying about the streets, mutilated and disfigured in every
possible way, and the hogs and dogs were making a repast upon the
remains.”
Mexican and Indian insurgents gathered into the ancient
Taos Pueblo, with many of them in its church. Across three days,
Price’s forces pounded the thick pueblo walls and church with
cannon and explosives, eventually blasting through the church.
One hundred fifty out of possibly 700 defenders were killed.
There were about 50 casualties among the U.S. force of about 500,
which also included some French traders and allied Mexicans. The
next day, according to one account, the women among the defenders
emerged with white flags, and a surrender was
negotiated.
Unlike what Clawson learned during her emerging church
convo in Taos, seemingly no authoritative histories claim that
the U.S. Army torched a church full of women and children. The
church at Taos, at part of a fortification, was full of armed
insurgents and was pierced by cannon shell and manually thrown
explosives. Insurgents, and their accompanying civilians
throughout the fortified pueblo, later surrendered. A handful of
the insurgents were tried and hanged for murder or treason, while
several evidently were acquitted. The rebellion in New Mexico was
squashed, never to be repeated. After conquering Mexico City, the
U.S. ultimately paid more than $30 million to Mexico for the
territories that later became New Mexico, Arizona and
California.
These territories, like virtually everyplace on earth, were
not new to conquest or savagery. In the 1840s, the Mexicans were
still at war with Apaches and other Plains Indians. The Spanish
had conquered the territory centuries before, from tribesmen who
themselves had waged wars of annihilation against each other. But
Clawson remembers only the U.S. conquest, guiltily recalling that
she is “enjoying the benefits of past oppression” originating in
“great evil.” Even some Indians in New Mexico thought it rude to
remember “how the U.S. army massacred their people,” she noticed.
But Clawson had “no choice but to confront the sins of our
collective past.” In fact, she is a “huge fan of going to places
where that history is in your face,” even though it is not “fun
to visit the site of a massacre, or of a firebombing, or the
Holocaust Museum.”
Condemning ancestors for their supposed moral inferiority
can provide smug pleasure, no doubt, especially while attending a
church conference. But moral smugness is not an accurate guide
for history, especially when assuming, as many on the left do,
that human evil virtually originated with Western civilization
and reached its zenith under the United States.
