Prayer and Oppression

This quotation is from Christianity Today, God's Refuge for Missionaries, by Eddie Byun:

"We're all familiar with the term culture shock.  But when it comes to missionaries, we often neglect the impact of culture stress: the regular [and continual] stressors that consciously and unconsciously hit a person living in a different culture.  Culture stress can lead to many different ailments such as anxiety, insecurity, fatigue, lack of joy, illnesses, discouragement, fears, anger, irritability, resentment, and homesickness.

One place I experienced culture stress most vividly was Guinea, Africa, where several of my friends were serving as missionaries.  Guinea is one of the poorest countries in the world.  Before pulling out, the French destroyed plumbing lines, water wells, and all the paved streets, basically crippling the country into poverty and forcing it to start from square one."

This excerpt from Byun is good, but it doesn't go far enough.  He talks about the culture stress for missionaries, but he does not refer to the oppression trauma of the people and culture of Guinea.  The Bible uses the following words to define oppression trauma: crush, humiliate, animalize, impoverish, enslave and kill.  This is exactly what happened under the seventy years of the French colonization of Guinea.  Which included foreign Guinea to be a part of the evil save trade.

If intercessory prayer combined with doing justice was applied to Guinea, could it reduce the oppression and heal the trauma of the people?  If so, this would do more to release the stress the missionaries feel than just praying that the missionaries be sustained during this difficult ministry.


"I, Janet Pickar, have recently been to Haiti a number of times.  The trips, the rough road, the hours spent traveling, etc sound horribly familiar to what Byun experienced.  I noticed he described Guinea as 'extremely poor', but he did not mention it had been extremely oppressed."

To help understand the trauma of Guinea, remember that biblically oppression both smashes the body and crushes the spirit.  It may be one of the most demonic activities that takes place on the face of the earth.

Who was the worst Presidential Oppressor?

Which of the following presidents was the most ethnocentric and oppressive?  Washington, or Jefferson, or Jackson, or Polk, or McKinley?

First some historical background.  The first American colonists were British.  What was happening in Britain around 1550--fifty years before the first British colonists came to American shores.  The Protestant civilized British were brutally conquering the Catholic savage Irish.  The Protestant British thought they were doing "God's Will".  The Protestant British were self-righteous, arrogant, ethnocentric and oppressive.  Some of these very same ethnocentric and oppressive British came to America as colonists.  The self-righteous Puritans, who neglected justice and the love of God, were among them.  They were also ethnocentric and oppressive.

Fast forward to the founding fathers.  They were proudly Anglo-Saxon [British].  They did not reject ethnocentrism and oppression.  Instead, they embraced it with enthusiasm.

Our first presidents--Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and McKinley--were predestined to be ethnocentric and oppressive.  None of these presidents repented of and rejected ethnocentrism and oppression.  Washington, for example, along with this wife, Martha, owned three hundred slaves.  He was our first president and set the precedent for continuing ethnocentrism and oppression.

Jefferson owned two hundred sixty slaves, and first promoted the Indian Removal Act in 1776-1779 when he recommended Cherokee and Shawnee tribes be driven out of their ancestral homelands to lands west of the Mississippi River.  This amounted to genocide and land theft.

Throughout his lifetime, President Jackson may have owned three hundred slaves.  President Jackson signed and implemented the Indian Removal Act in 1830.  Sixty separate removal treaties were signed.  More than ten thousand Native American died on The Trail of Tears.

President Polk owned slaves, he invaded Mexico in a act of raw imperialism.  It was not a just war and he forced Mexico to cede one half of their territory to the U. S.  We did compensate Mexico for the loss of their territory but it was done at the point of a gun.

In 1898, President McKinley, after defeating Spain obtained the Philippines; the U.S. purchased the Philippines from the Spanish.  However the Filipinos had been revolting against Spain since 1896.  They did not want to become the colony of another imperialistic power.  So they revolted against the U.S. army.  In the bitter war that followed probably one million Filipinos died, estimates the Filipino Reader.

Now I ask the reader to choose your number one oppressor.  Rank these five presidents in order of evil, one, two, three, four, five.

Any American that is planning to go to Haiti should first become aware of the wide spread, deeply imbedded history of oppression in the U. S. implemented by numerous presidents.  Then, once they arrive in Haiti, they will automatically raise the question, 'Who were the oppressors in Haiti that caused this extreme poverty? What systems of oppression did they use?'

Miscellaneous on Oppression and Justice

Which of the following statements are true and which are false?

1. One out of every three black males, born today, can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.
2. One out of every three black boys will go to college.
3. Three out of four black men don't do drugs.
4. Seven out of eight aren't teenage fathers.
5. Eleven out of twelve won't drop out of high school.
6. Five out of nine have a job.

According to the NAACP all of these statements are true.  

This is Lowell Noble's summary of the book of James, chapter two:

"Spirituality without justice is not only dead; it is socially dangerous because it is blind to, or tolerates, or actively participates in the oppression of the poor.  Spirituality without justice does not fulfill the scriptural requirement for the church to release the oppressed.   Why?  Because the church favors the rich.  Spirituality without justice is evil, sinful, and dangerous; it neglects both justice and the love of God."

The following is a quote from For God So Love the Third World, by Thomas Hanks:

 

"Translation of the noun thlipsis.  The most authoritative Greek lexicons give oppression as the first meaning.  However, our common English translations never translated by oppression; instead they use softer, more ambiguous terms such as affliction, tribulation, difficulty, suffering.  These weaker translations ignore the social economic nuances in thlipsis."

Intertwined Histories of Oppression

In the late 1700s, both the Haitian slaves and the American colonists gained their freedom--Haitian slaves from their French tyrants/slave masters and American colonists from their British tyrants.
Though the Christian historian, George Marsden, asserts British tyranny was not bad enough to justify a violent revolution.

The Haitian slave revolution, against their French oppressors, began in 1791 and ended in 1804.  This overlapped with President Thomas Jefferson's term which began in 1801 and ended in 1809.

President Thomas Jefferson and all other American slave owners greatly feared the example of the successful slave revolution in Haiti; they feared that American slaves might try to copy the Haitian slaves' success and revolt here in America.  So from its very beginning as a new nation, Haiti was seen as an enemy of America.  Americans sided with the French oppressors during their hundred years of Haitian slavery, and also the following one hundred plus years of French debt slavery.

The following information might explain why President Jefferson sided with the French oppressors in Haiti.

• Jefferson, himself, owned 260 slaves; so oppression, exploitation and  brutalization was not a foreign concept to Jefferson.
• Jefferson raped at least one of his slave women.
• Jefferson approved of the Indian Removal Act designed to remove all Indians east of the Mississippi and force them to live west of the Mississippi.  Though it was President Jackson who implemented the Indian Removal Act, Jefferson fully endorsed this Indian genocide and land theft.  When you combine slavery, Indian genocide and siding with French oppressors, this makes Jefferson an exceedingly evil person.

This history of enmity affects U.S. relations with Haiti even today.  To Americans Haitians are blacks and therefore inferior.  So America treats Haiti as a puppet incapable of ruling itself, thereby legitimating American interference in the internal affairs of Haiti at any time.

In a strange case of twisted moral logic, white freedom-loving colonists denied their slaves their freedom.  Even as Americans enjoyed freedom, they denied freedom and justice to their African slaves.

This deeply intertwined history even enabled the U.S. to obtain the Louisiana Territory which extended all the way from New Orleans to the Canadian border west of the Mississippi.  After the successful Haitian slave revolution, Napoleon no longer needed the Louisiana Territory.  So he ended up selling it to America dirt cheap.  American negotiators had gone to France wanting to purchase New Orleans from the French.  Surprisingly the French offered to sell the whole Louisiana Territory from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains.  What we call the Louisiana Purchase might never have happened had the slaves not revolted in Haiti.  The territory west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains might today still be French and all people living west of the Mississippi River would be speaking the French language.  The western border of the U.S. might not be the Pacific Coast, it might have been the Mississippi River.

Do the rich belong in the church?

Do the rich belong in the church?  Absolutely not, according to James 2.  The rich oppress the poor.  This treatment of the poor make the rich enemies of the poor.  And therefore, enemies of God.

There is one exception, however, the repentant rich, the restituting rich--the ones who sell all they have and give it to the poor, as Jesus told the rich, young ruler.  Do you know any such rich?

The following quotation is from the book entitled, The Scandoulus Message of James: Faith without works is dead, by Elsa Tamez:

"And if we look at the social class of our members, we find that there are more from the upper middle class than there are poor.  The rich in our congregations often take charge, and this is a story that is regularly repeated.  For the author of the epistle the natural members of the congregation were the poor, and he excluded the rich."

"This poses a question to our rich, Christian brothers and sisters today and those who aspire to be rich.  Why is it that from before the time of Constantine, up until our day, the church has opened its doors to the rich and the rich have largely taken control of the church.  This question concerning rich Christians is very serious and very complex.  The gospel response of "sell what you have and give it to the poor", is quite ingenious today, and does not respond to the structural complexity of society."

Oppression creates extreme poverty

Isaiah 1:15: "No matter how long or loud or often you pray, I'll not be listening, and do you know why?  Because you have been tearing people to pieces, and your hands are bloody."

In other words, people who oppress others have no grounds on which to pray.

1. Haitians have been brutalized by French and U.S. oppressors for 300 YEARS.
2. The Bible teaches that oppression TRAUMATIZES. [crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves, and kills.]  Haitian individuals, families, communities, and culture have long suffered and still are suffering from oppression-caused trauma.  In other words, varying degrees of PTSD.
3. Is there a biblical answer to the complexities and difficulties associated with PTSD?  Yes, the biblical answer is justice--JUBILEE JUSTICE AND KINGDOM JUSTICE.  Biblical justice releases and rebuilds; justice releases the oppressed, then rebuilds oppressed communities.
4. The kingdom of God is designed to implement the type of justice that releases and rebuilds.
5. Anyone who wants to help Haitians heal should be deeply grounded in the above biblical teachings.  Go online--lowellnobleswritings--and take the 13 week email Bible study, entitled Spirituality With Justice or Spirituality Without Justice.
6. Christian Community Development is a proven strategy to rebuild oppressed communities.  Haitian Christian Development Fund, directed by Haitian, Jean Thomas, has implemented thirty-five years of CCD in Fond-des-Blancs, Haiti.  For this remarkable story, see the book:   At Home with the Poor.