This past week in class we have been focusing on watching a documentary named “God in America.” This documentary has so far encompassed the journey of Christianity from Spain to New Mexico through missionaries, the Puritan faith and the dissension between John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson, as well as George Whitfield’s entertaining and controversial sermons all across America. What I found most interesting about these three aforementioned cases, however, was the idea of right or wrong and good or evil. In this post, I will only go in depth about the first case I previously mentioned.
In the spread of Christianity from Europe to America, there were two opposing sides - the missionaries and the Pueblo Indians who were native to New Mexico. From the missionaries’ perspectives, the Pueblo Indians would be eternally damned unless the missionaries successfully converted them to Christianity. To these missionaries, Christianity is the true path to salvation because there is only one true God. So from the missionaries’ perspective they were doing the right thing. However, the Pueblo Indians did not want to fully convert to Christianity and forget their cultural religion. From the Pueblo’s perspectives, this was a very fair compromise, as they could still hold onto their heritage and cultural roots while pleasing the missionaries by adapting their religious ways. But when the missionaries’ learned that the Pueblo’s had no intention of fully converting to Christianity, events took a violent turn. Native ceremonies were banned and sacred places of worship were destroyed. Priests became brutal and would beat the Pueblos, and in the priests’ minds, these violent actions were justified, as the Pueblo’s were disobeying God’s words.
Not just in this instance, but throughout history and in the present day we see religion being used as a means of justification for all sorts of actions. Currently, the terrorist group ISIS believes that Allah is urging them to act violently against others and by doing so will reach salvation. This method of justification somewhat parallels the violent actions Spanish missionaries took when the Pueblo Indians wouldn’t fully convert. So in these types of situations, which party is right and which party is wrong? Who is good and who is evil? Is there a limit to how literally we should follow religious texts?
-Adrienne Mitchel
In agreement with what is said above, many conflicts in the past as stemmed from religious conflicts and general disagreement. What often becomes the issue was that religion is often welcoming to everyone. When this is taken to an extreme such as what happened with the Pueblo Indians and the Spaniards, the religious dispute would become serious. In my opinion, I think even till today, people easily confuse the idea of sharing with compliance. Most of the time, many are open to new ideas being introduced to them, however, its easy to confuse that with agreeing and believing with those ideas. Just as what happened with the dispute between the Pueblo Indians and Spaniards, even today not only seen in religion, many are confused with this idea. Such as the current political situation where there are many different believes and opinions that are met with conflict. Therefore, I believe that it's a rather simple case of misunderstanding of religion, not necessarily defined on good or evil. However, although having faith and hope is good, based on previous cases in history, there should be a limit to how literately one follows on religious texts.
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