I.
What do we do when the frame of meaning that orients world is disrupted, and we discover a violent underside lurking behind what were once meaningful symbols?
My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. I am a follower of Jesus, somebody who believes that Jesus’s teachings, way of life, crucifixion, and resurrection reveal the presence of God in our world. But I also know what it is like to struggle existentially with losing sight of the Good News to which the Christian symbols point. This terrifying loss of apprehension is, as a I described in the last episode, a “symbolic devastation,” a devastation that results from the role Christian symbols have in injustices like colonialism, white supremacy, US nationalism, and the harm these injustices have caused in both the past and the present.[1]
Symbolic devastation is an experience we undergo when the potentially liberating meaning of Christian symbols is lost, and the symbol becomes a religious means to justify domination. The very symbol itself seems to give religious sanction to this injustice. And this raises questions: How do symbols get devastated in the first place? What does it feel like to experience the death of the meaning of the symbols we cherish? And how might we re-encounter the liberating meaning of these symbols after their silence?
In this episode, I want to consider these questions from the viewpoint of one symbol: the cross. We wear the cross on our necks, we gesture the cross while we pray, and crosses are often set atop roofs or burrowed into the ground to mark a building as a church. Beyond that, the cross is an important symbol of Jesus’s crucifixion, it is the means by which the Roman empire tortured and murdered somebody they believed to be a rouser of rebellion. Once a symbol of Roman domination, it had been subverted and remade to signify the Christian conviction that oppression, torture, and murder cannot overcome the love and life of God. Despite the gritty hope of this primary meaning, it is also a symbol that has been weaponized for purposes of domination. Because of this, it is a symbol that often invokes the devastation I’m attempting to describe.
We need to begin in 1492, in the first moments of the so-called discovery of the New World, when European explorers and colonizers arrived on the shores of the Caribbean, only to extend their stays in the mainland of the Americas. It is there that we can begin to see with concrete details of why symbolic devastation occurs.
II.
Columbus was undeterred by the great swell of ocean that separated Europe from the unknown, with its titan size, calamitous waves, and unending bluegrey horizon. A passionate and courageous sailor, no doubt, he took his crew and embarked upon these trepid and punishing waters with every goal in mind to find a route — the route — to Asia.[2] But Columbus did not find Asia. Instead, he charted a path to a world yet unknown to Europe. He landed upon the shores of what we now call the Americas. His captain, Gonzalo de Fernandez de Oviedo, described Columbus as “the prime mover of a great enterprise.”[3] And de Oviedo is certainly correct. Columbus launched the beginning of a European movement across the Atlantic, one that would transform Europe and the Americas alike — drawing them together in an inextricable link of migration, mission, and exploitation. Missionaries, settlers, and conquistadors followed Columbus, equally undisturbed by the risk of ocean voyage, and crashed upon unfamiliar lands, with every intent of making it their own.
Columbus carried the cross with him. This is depicted in an illustration that accompanied a letter Columbus wrote to the king describing his journey to this world yet unknown to Europeans. In the illustration, the ship that sails toward the Americas bares the symbol of the cross.[4]
On his third journey, Columbus planted a cross wherever he visited, proclaiming and, in another sense, enacting Spanish expansion. “I have a tall cross erected on each cape, and I proclaim your Highnesses’ greatness to all the people informing them that you are lords of Spain,” writes Columbus in a letter detailing his third journey across the Atlantic.[5] In the letter he explains with utmost excitement that he has shared the Gospel with the Indigenous peoples. On the one hand, we cannot dismiss the heartfelt seriousness with which Columbus engages his evangelism. He couldn’t do otherwise as an explorer whose self-understanding is thoroughly Christian. But the faith he shares is tainted, obscured by the interests of greed and empire. Earlier in the letter he writes with eagerness about seeing the indigenous people wearing pearls and gold on their necks. “I was delighted by this sight,” Columbus tells us, “and tried hard to discover where they found these pearls.”[6] Evangelism, for Columbus, is tied to plunder. The symbols of the faith join imperial greed and desire for resources. In A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, Luis N. Rivera Pagan says that in the colonial era, “hidden behind the evangelizing cross, faintly veiled, was the conquering sword.”[7] Rivera-Pagan is certainly right in his analysis.
Of course, Columbus is not the only explorer who made use of the symbol. The explorer Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca proclaimed land possession by building a church and erecting a large cross, growing the Spanish empire by drawing regions of Central America into it.[8] And the infamous Hernán Cortés named one of his settlements “City of the True Cross.”[9] When the Spanish wanted to survey South America to get a sense of their newly growing imperial hinterland, maps were illustrated with settlements depicted by simple line drawings of churches with a cross stationed on their roof.[10] Walter Mingolo, known decolonial scholar, points out that indigenous map makers would often paint these church buildings around the edges of the map, an implicit way of signifying the Spanish empire’s ever-expanding reach to grab and take possession of their homeland.[11]
The 16th century intellectual Guamán Poma de Ayala, himself the child of the colonial era, being of both indigenous and Spanish heritage, painted a series of panels depicting this moment in history. One painting feature a map with churches on it, the main feature marking the illustrated buildings being a cross.[12] At first glance, and outside of context, the image appears theologically neutral. It is merely a map. But the neutrality ends the moment one situates those images within the story of ecclesial abuse, which is thoroughly narrated by Guamán Poma in The First New Chronicle and Good Government, his theological history of Inca society before and after the conquests. There, he has an extended treatment on the abuses of the priest. Here is Guamán Poma’s own words on clerical exploitation: “The padres and priests oversee the making of cloth … to sell, claiming that the cloth is for their prelates. They tell their managers to order the poor Indians to make the cloth, employing them without paying them anything at all, throughout the kingdom.”[13]
Like the Spanish, French and English settlers planted crosses as they encroached upon Indigenous lands. This happened on the coasts of Maryland and as far North as Gaspe Bay, in what is now modern-day Quebec. Historian Susan Juster found a testimony from settler colonists that the cross had become so wedded to land possession that indigenous leaders would make a sign of the cross with their hand while pointing to the landscapes they called home.[14] The point? They had learned that for European settlers, the cross was not merely about God, but God and the dispossession of their homeland.
We can search through history and find these moments when the cross becomes deeply woven into a history of violence.
The 19th century saw the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. And today, the flaming cross is their hallmark symbol, provoking an ideology of white supremacy in an ever-increasing multiethnic United States. The flaming cross not only represents the Klan’s desire for a White dominated future, but also draws to mind their nostalgic view of the past, in which the accountability that White people have is only to themselves. Beyond the Klan, the cross has become tethered to a larger White Christian nationalist movement. It has been appropriated to signify the dream of an exclusionary United States undergirded by a Divine power supporting white rule and superiority. Today, it can be difficult to see the cross as anything but the symbolic projection of a White nationalist consciousness.
In Chicagoland, where I grew up, it is easy to think that the colonial history of the cross has nothing to do with the church where I was raised, separated as they are by five centuries. But that fails to account for history’s living consequences. The church itself sits upon the land home to the Council of Three Fires. But to invoke the home of the first peoples, however, is also to invoke an absence, for even if this land is their home, the church has not in any materially significant way recognized it as such. The land of the Council of Three Fires is marked by a violent history of the cross. A white cross is burroughed into the ground and a magnificent church building takes up a cluster of land that could fill a few blocks of a Chicagoland subdivision. So even where there is a seeming indifference, the cross appears to signify the consequences of colonialism by its sheer placement into the earth — it invokes those other colonial cross planters: Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Cortez, and others. We do not have the suburbs, sprawling megachurches, property ownership, and middleclass consumerism without conquest – a conquest marked by the cross.
The symbol of the cross has a history. And part of that history is its use by colonial missionaries and conquistadors who believed in a divine pronouncement that the lands of North and South America belong to them. Burroughed into the soil of the Americas, the cross stood in for power and control, as it became linked to and a signifier for imperial gain. If, for the gospels, the cross represents Jesus’s life and its tragic end by Rome, that meaning has transfigured. In the US, the cross serves less as a reminder of Jesus’s fellowship with the poor into an excruciating death, and more as a reminder of the desire for power and control. I cannot understate the implications that follow from the journey of the cross as it made its way to the New World and how its many interpretations evolved over time.
III.
This history exposes the roots behind symbolic devastation. The cross’s tie to colonialism devastates the cross’s meaning and our ability to apprehend it. As I mentioned last episode, symbols like the cross are potent with liberating meaning for the world, entry ways into discovering the revelation of a God whose love reaches out and embraces all of creaturely life. But access to such meaning is often lost because the symbols which narrate this story are tied so closely to injustice. The “well of meaning,” to use philosopher Paul Ricouer’s language, is plugged by the history of violent misuse, redirecting the symbol’s signification to ideologies of imperial power.
To experience symbolic devastation is to face an abyss that turns a symbol meant to invoke Good News into a sign of death. It is to encounter the distance between a lifegiving interpretation and an unintegrated, desperate, and traumatized past and present to which the symbol points. Symbolic devastation is characterized by closure, haunting indifference, and unmet longing. Resonance disappears in the encounter of an imperial appropriation of what was an anti-imperial symbol.
We end this episode on a sober note. It is important that we move slowly through a history that cuts through language and fills us with grief. Devastation arises from the history of the violent uses of the cross — violence found in Columbus, Cortez, Spanish, French, and British colonialism, the Klu Klux Klan, and the suburban indifference found among many middle-class Christians who worship the God of the cross while forgetting that they do so on the land of the council of three fires.
So questions are raised: how might we recover the meaning of the cross? How might the symbol bear witness to the Good News taught and lived by Jesus of Nazareth, empowered as he was by the God spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures?
We turn to these questions next.
Blessings until next time.
Episode Copyright 2022 - World Outspoken. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.worldoutspoken.com for more information.
Episode Credits:
Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol
Music by Lucas Manning
Producer: Lucas Manning
Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla
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About Colton Bernasol
Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.
Footnotes
[1] Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theology-after-symbolic-devastation-method/docview/2675665905/se-2. These podcast episodes draws on research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis.
[2] J.M. Cohen, “Introduction,” in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Penguin UK, 2004), 12.
[3] Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, “General and Natural History of the Indies by Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo,” in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, ed. J.M. Cohen (Penguin UK, 2004), 27.
[4] Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 8.
[5] Christopher Columbus, “Narrative of the Third Voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Indies, in which He Discovered the Mainland, Dispatched the Sovereigns from the Island of Hispaniola,” in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 251.
[6] Ibid., 213.
[7] Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 9.
[8] Franciso Morales Padrón in “Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Adelantado y Gobernado del Río de la Plata,” in Naufragios y comentarios (1552), by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (Mexico, D.F.L Editorial Porrúa), quoted in A Violent Evangelism, 14.
[9] Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), 207.
[10] See Howard F. Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586,” Hispanic American Historical Review 44, no. 3 (August 1, 1964): 341–74, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-44.3.341, 341.
[11] Walter Mignolo,The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 2003), 306–7, 309.
[12] Mingolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 310.
[13] Felipe Guaman Poma De Ayala, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, abridged, ed. and trans. by David Frye (Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2006), 208.
[14] Susan Juster, “Planting the ‘Great Cross’: The Life, and Death, of Crosses in English America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2017): 241.
