Thread:
Back in 2007, I TAed Dr. Emmanuel Katongole's course on the Rwandan Genocide. Every session, a student would try to argue that the genocide couldn't have happened if only there had been an *authentic* Christianity among the Hutu who killed the Tutsi ...

who were their neighbors as well as fellow Catholics. The slaughters took place in houses, fields, and even churches–shared churches where the murderers attended with the ones they murdered. So was the faith only genuine or authentic for the victims, or ...

was something else going on? The false tribal narrative promoted by the colonial ID cards had a powerful effect on how people imagined themselves. When radio personalities demonized the Tutsi and called for their slaughter, the ID cards were the markers between people...

Not baptism. Not family. Not church membership. An invented idea. But the week before the killings started, these people were in church together. Did the faith stop being authentic? Did grace have an expiration date? No.

But the decision to allow state politics to give meaning to human bodies displaced the Body of Christ in the people's way of imagining themselves. Right now, a lot of people are tempted to think that the insurrectionists would back down if they had *authentic* Christianity,...