Indigenous Chic
Christianity & the Cult of Indigenous People
by Mark Tooley
Talk of “indigenous people” is all the rage in both academia and liberal church circles. The current fashion dates back at least to the radicalism of the 1960s, which saw Western civilization as an oppressive imposition upon the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. These, it was believed, were steadfast in resisting the alleged Western evils of capitalism, consumerism, rationalism, environmental degradation, social hierarchy, and Christianity.
Until the 1980s the emphasis on indigenous peoples was linked to the larger leftist agenda of socialism. Liberation theologians and their secular comrades assumed that a great revolution would liberate the indigenous while it destroyed capitalism. Communism’s fall rebutted these liberationist fantasies. But the cult of the Indigenous Person is as strong as ever. Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage,” it seems, has outlived Marx’s notion of the proletariat.
Broken Identities
A fascinating encapsulation of the cult of the Indigenous Person is found in a recent article in Church and Society, a journal of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The author is Liberato Bautista, a United Methodist who heads his denomination’s office at the United Nations.
Bautista is originally Filipino. But he feels victimized by multiple layers of oppression. During the past century, there was the heavy economic and military hand of the United States. Earlier, there was the Spanish subjugation of Bautista’s tribal ancestors. Then there was a third overlay of oppression, the domination by more Westernized tribes over the other tribes more faithful to their indigenous traditions.
Bautista offers a stirring narrative of personal and communal salvation. He portrays himself as an emblematic indigenous person who is fighting to reclaim his lost heritage. While he writes as a Methodist official for a Presbyterian publication, his quest for identity has little apparent relation to Jesus Christ.
“For Indigenous Peoples who have been colonized, minoritized and marginalized, there is the necessary exercise of memory and imagination,” Bautista explains. The indigenous person who strives to reconstruct his broken identity is engaging in a “subversive exercise,” he proclaims.
Now, in the process of recovering the “submerged indigenous person in me,” Bautista admits that only recently has he dared to dream in indigenous ways. He recalls that his father was an Ilocano, a tribe easily assimilated into the “dominant Spanish religion.” His mother’s Ibanag identity and language were repressed. The Methodist high school he attended fined him for every local word he used, to force him to speak the “colonial language” of English, which “could land me to America.” (His education did exactly that for Bautista, who is now a US citizen residing in New York.)
His own personal quest is part of a larger drama of reclamation of indigenous culture, land, and “spiritualities,” according to Bautista. This recovery has long been stymied by racism, colonialism, and, more recently, globalization. But a new world is awakening, and indigenous peoples are on the march, reasserting themselves and claiming what is rightfully theirs, especially the land.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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