Christianity has indeed been the opiate that has comforted the victims of colonial exploitation, and thus facilitated their captivity. That is one reason I no longer consider myself to be a Christian. Nevertheless, Christianity also teaches strategies of survival and triumph that have greatly benefited those who see themselves as having committed themselves to Christ. Perhaps the most important of these strategies is forgiveness, which in certain contexts benefits the forgiver as much the forgived.
This is hard to believe and very few people who say it actually believe it. Many African-Americans, however, have had numerous opportunities to experience this first hand, for they are constantly presented with opportunities for forgiveness. That is a grim joke, but it’s true. When you are constantly being victimized by a terrible evil, you get lots of opportunities to return good for evil. Lucky You. Am I being sarcastic? Yes. Sort of. No, I wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone who has suffered the evils of racism. (except maybe with Chris Rock, if I was given his extraordinary talent and insight, and not just his money.) But when evil and injustice are thrown into your lap like burning coals, you’ve got no choice but to protect yourself with whatever strategies are available to you.
Many African-Americans have used forgiveness as a strategy, and it has worked for them. Hurricane Carter, who was falsely imprisoned for murder for 20 years, forgave the people who framed him. He argued that those people had stolen 20 years of his life, and he wasn’t going to give them a second more. A former slave interviewed by the WPA oral history project said that slavery did more damage to the enslavers than to the enslaved. He meant moral damage of course, and his point was that moral damage is the worst kind. Coming from anyone else, such a claim would seem preposterous. But this man had lived through slavery, and had experienced the truth of this firsthand. The context made it clear that it was his Christianity that gave him the strength and wisdom to see this difficult and counterintuitive truth in the suffering he endured.
