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,...
But they have given over their imaginations about the meaning of their bodies to a particular political ideology. They go to the same churches as people who find their behavior reprehensible and see that their actions are illegal and unhinged.
Don't let yourself off the hook by imagining that your faith is authentic and theirs isn't. We have failed each other in the Church by not teaching people to know themselves as members of the Body of Christ. Without that teaching, that anchor in the physical reality of grace,
people cannot see themselves as otherwise than the version of themselves whoever is most persuasive and tells the most enchanting story. We need to teach faith anchored in the senses so that our imaginations and our lives are shaped by the Incarnate God.
There cannot be generous discussion and difference of opinions in the Church when many people are deluded as the Trumpist conspirators are. Outside of bodily formation as members of Christ's Body, there is no genuine faith & love between Christians.
"Christian" means nothing without the Body of Christ. There is no demagogue who can stand alongside God. But people will only understand the question, "Who is like God?" when they meet God through their senses, when we teach the Incarnation so they know it through their bodies.

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