Contemporary Complicities

There is a history that is whispered, periodically visited, and at times is changed with attempts to erase and rewrite. This history is not a moment in time, nor is it a singular moment that contributes to the events of today. Instead, there are a series of events, moments in time when complicity becomes the default of people who are committed to their own self-interest.

Complicity is experienced in the activity of silence as a mechanism to excuse oneself from the ownership of policies, thoughts and ideas that are destructive to the lives of others. By saying nothing, by doing nothing, by turning away from the realities of historic and contemporary problematic social policies, complicity has accompanied the establishment of authoritarianism, the affirmation of racism and divisiveness, and the identification of people in our communities as less than human. In those moments, people’s lives have been eradicated while the silence effervesces and expands unnoticed.

The church was silent through critical times in history. Silence in the creation, implementation and execution of the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery, then attempting to sweep aside the resulting problems of colonialism and the legacy of Christian supremacy and white supremacy. This legacy is long and lives among us. Silence as the Doctrine of Discovery gave European Christian nations the right to claim land and power from non-Christian native people. Silence in the brutalization of people and land to amass the wealth of a plantocracy to support the industrialization of Europe. The Doctrine was repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church in 2023, almost 500 years later. In those five hundred years those notions of supremacy festered and contributed to the preservation of supremacist notions in the United States, across Europe, and around the world.

Silence is woven into a history of participation with wrongful acts. There are excuses that emerge which seek to explain what happened then with narratives like “people made the best decision with the information they had.” Or, to excuse contemporaries in the retention of harmful practices, there is “that was a decision that was made years ago”, absenting action from affecting change now, furthering complicit behaviors for another generation.

History is replete with the failures of caring for communities that were targeted in society or deemed as other. Indigenous people. Religious minorities. People of color. Persons with disabilities. Sexual minorities. Women. There is a long list of people over the years whose lives were deemed as less than those of others. History is to be read with value given to the lessons to be learned. Instead, history has been dismissed with the casualness of selective amnesia, ensuring a cyclical pattern that can be recognized even in this historical moment when authoritarianism has returned wearing political names and sporting gang colors in nations around the globe.

Contemporary complicities are shaping the history being made today. Silence persists in naming the violence being leveled in indigenous communities around the world. The repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery did not include provisions for returning to non-Christians the land and power that was claimed wrongly and stolen from people. The repudiation of the wrong act does not in any way suggest that what was taken must be returned. Instead, conversations about reparatory justice and reparations, acknowledgement and apology, bump up against faulty theologies of forgiveness, with those who stole land and power refusing to share or relinquish either. Here too, the silence in naming the emptiness of words without restitution and right act is overshadowing the commitments to decolonize the world we live in and actively advocate for a just world for all.

The presence and rise of authoritarianism in the United States and other parts of the world is being met with silence and excuses. The witness of history is humming and buzzing, warning that all is not well, encouraging attention to the stories and deaths, begging that we see ourselves through the lens of previous events being retold in history books of a future time. The journey is paved with choices that are based in self-interest. The church is long overdue for reckoning with what it assisted in creating. Then as now, the silence accompanied the othering of people left to suffer at the hands of empires and regimes without morality. Then as now there was silence and nonchalance directed at the disappearing of the people and the camps that were created to hold them, as well as the conditions that contributed to the deaths of the innocent.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people is perishing from the earth. The death of democracy is shrouded with silence. The losses of freedom slowing accumulating over time, seen in the rearview mirror. The contemporary complicities are perpetuating injustices just as the complicities of history did. Lives are being lost. Civil and human rights are being trampled. The call to justice is a call to preserve the rights of the people. Here, the church can make a difference, the collective voices of a contemporary resistance ensuring justice for all.

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