Customer Reviews

Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda

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Honest. Accessible. Provocative. Challenging.

Katongole's newest book is thoughtfully organized and engaging. His reflections are an important and crucial contribution to the literature on the Rwandan genocide. His own story informs the way he translates what happened in 1994 with a deep investment that ensures an honest narration of the tragic events.

TiTLE: From tragedy to redemption

KEYWORDS: genocide; Hutu; Tutsi; Rwanda; Christianity; church; forgiveness; reconciliation; body of Christ; betrayal; Easter 1994; confused identity!

FULL REFERENCE: Katongole, Emmanuel M. and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, "Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda." Zondervan, 2009.

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In this relatively short and easy-to-read book (176 pp.), Katongole recalls the Rwanda tragedy that pitted the Hutus against the Tutsis beginning, of all times, on Maundy Thursday of Easter week in the year 1994. Ironically, Rwanda is considered to be the "most evangelized [and thus Christianized] country" in the entire continent of Africa. Within a span of 100 days, hard-line [and heartless] Hutus mercilessly killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus throughout Rwanda (pp. 30). Ironically, the killers were, for the most part, neighbors and fellow church members (pp. 30).

While the genocide forms the background for the entire book, Katongole is not dwelling on the massacre itself (except in Chapter 2, "What happened"). Instead, Katongole is more interested in analyzing and understanding the root causes of the conflict, going as far back as the colonial period and even earlier (See Chapter 3, "The story that made Rwanda"). The root cause of the Rwanda tragedy, argues Katongole, is not "tribalism," as widely reported by Western media in 1994 and beyond, but well nigh a case of "confused [and deliberately assigned] identities," in which the Christian church and colonial powers did play a considerable role.

Beyond Chapter 3, Katongole moves from the local tragedy in 1994 Rwanda to the wider scene of the Western world (i.e., Europe and esp. the USA where Katongole, a Catholic priest, currently lives with his family and works as a teacher of theology at Duke University in North Carolina). Using the 1994 Rwanda tragedy as a case study, Katongole proceeds to make an indictment of the worldwide Christian church, and of Christianity, which he calls "Christianity without consequence" (pp. 84).

On this same page, Katongole writes, "Maybe the deepest tragedy of the Rwandan genocide is that Christianity didn't seem to make any difference" (pp. 84). Expanding from this local, African context, Katongole proceeds to a wider generalization, causing him to write on the following page, "The story that made Rwanda is the story of the West. When we look at Rwanda as a mirror to the church [i.e., the main title and thus primary thesis of Katongole's book], it helps us realize what little consequence the biblical story has on the way Christians live their lives in the West [...]. Seeing this, we have to ask: does Christianity make any real difference in the West? The question is not so much whether Jesus' message has been proclaimed in all the earth. The real question is, what difference has the gospel made in people's lives?" (pp. 85).

This is, in my view, the turning point in Katongole's narrative and argument. Here he moves from the particular [i.e., the 1994 Rwandan tragedy] to the general [i.e., the role of the gospel in people's lives and its influence on society], not just in Rwanda, but anywhere in the world where the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached and received. This is where the 1994 Rwandan tragedy no longer remains the tragedy of the Rwandan people, but well night becomes your and my tragedy as well. And this may well explain the "turn-off" reaction of at least one previous reviewer [Debbie from Alpena, AR, United States], who wrote that Katongole should have ended his narrative on page 80. Page 80 [or shortly thereafter] marks the point where Katongole began his expansion from the local Rwandan context to the wider international scene, and, understandably, that could make some people uncomfortable and even upset.

One could ask, "Cruel and tragic as the Rwandan conflict was in 1994, could a similar conflict erupt in Western, so-called civilized countries like the USA, Canada, France or Spain?" Running the risk of irritating or even offending some of the readers of this review, i would answer a resounding, "Yes!"

My late grand-mother used to say, "We are all cut from the same wood!" And so, yes, of course, given the right circumstances and social pre-conditioning, most of us [unless we share the fortitude and convictions of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer] probably would do precisely the same as the Hutus did to the Tutsis in Rwanda, beginning on Easter Thursday of 1994. One has only to look back at what happened in the 1930's and early 1940's in Nazi Germany, "Where was the Christian church [or what did German Christians do] when thousands and millions of innocent Jews [and other undesirables] were systematically exterminated by the Nazis in Hitler's death camps?" Where was the so-called "international community" [or what did it do, including the United Nations] when Pol Pot and his army of Khmer Rouge systematically exterminated millions of innocent Cambodians in the "Killing Fields" during the late 1970's?

That is what makes Katongole's book so irritating to read. As well-bred and well-behaving Christians, we think and believe ourselves to be above the fray. "How could they do that? Aren't they not Christians, or followers of Jesus? i could never do that!" In pointing our accusing index finger at the Rwandan people responsible for the tragedy, we are, in fact, pointing three fingers back at ourselves.

Katongole, however, is not content with simply pointing out the problems facing Rwanda and Western Christianity. Instead, Katongole is quick to move on to proposing solutions, and devotes two full chapters to that purpose, namely Chapter 7 ("Making a prophetic posture possible"), and Chapter 8 ("Resurrecting the church").

Even though Katongole's book started with the narration of death and suffering (Chapter 1, "An Easter season of bodies), the book ends on a note of resurrection hope (Chapter 8, "Resurrecting the church"). I particularly like Katongole's last sentence, which epitomizes the entire thesis of his book, "The world is longing for such new and odd communities in our time [...]. I pray the time is now and that the resurrection might begin with us" (pp. 170). Crucifixion turned into resurrection and new life. Tragedy turned into redemption and hope.

NOTE: Should you have any comment(s) and/or suggestion(s) about this review, I can be reached via email at <[...]>. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Did you know that Rwanda was one of the most Christianized nations in Africa? I didn't. I picked this book up because I was in kindergarten in '94 when the genocide occurred. I didn't get to see the news reports or watch the world drop the ball on the situation. Now, I am a theology student with time for some summer reading. I would recommend this book to any Christian wanting or needing a serious challenge (and from Katongole's book, I think we all need a serious challenge). Are we as Christians really making a difference in the world? Katongole is both a scholar and a serious Christian who asks some hard questions about how Rwandan Christians can begin Easter week on Sunday by celebrating the resurrection of Christ and be slaughtering their fellow church members in the churches where they worshiped together by Thursday. I was shocked as I read this and wondered how this was possible myself. Katongole, a native Ugandan with Rwandan parents, offers us some insight.

This is not a collection of graphic stories meant to shock your socks off. This is an analysis of spiritually potent stories that are about more than just Rwanda. Katongole's point is that the genocide in Rwanda has to do with the Church at large. I agree.

Also--what I liked most about the book--he does not just rant about the problem; he offers a solution. And his solution is no quick and easy fix--he isn't selling something. When reading the thesis he offers in the first couple of chapters, I thought, "Oh no, I hope he doesn't sit there and repeat himself for a-hundred more pages." He doesn't. Just when I thought I had a handle on what he was saying, it got better. He gives us a very real solution that has left me both challenged and prayerful. I have been challenged by this book to ask some hard and serious questions about what it means to be a Christian. Again, I would fully recommend it.

Seventeen years after the genocide, Rwanda still grips the world's attention. Following the horror that enveloped the "land of a thousand hills" in 1994, many academics, journalists, aid workers, and theologians have sought to explain the 800,000 deaths of Tutsi and `moderate' Hutu. Today, the literature has transitioned away from making the genocide intelligible to examine life in post-genocide Rwanda, observing with great interest the government's pursuit of transitional justice in a country still largely dependent on foreign aid.

In Mirror to the Church by Emmanuel Katongole, Associate Professor of Theology and World Christianity at Duke Divinity School and the co-director of the Duke Center for Reconciliation proposes a vision for the Rwandan church (and indeed the global church) for living in post-genocide Rwanda. Katongole notes that before the genocide, Rwanda, with a population that was said to be 85% Christian, was largely considered a "model of evangelization in Africa" by most missiologists. However, the genocide, which began on the Thursday of Easter week, Christians killed Christians in a slaughter that lasted 100 days between April and July 1994. Such an event has led Katongole, born of a Tutsi father and Hutu mother to ask the question: "what difference does Christianity make in Rwanda?"

In exploring this question, Katongole provides a popular account of Rwandan history, during which he briefly describes the antecedents of the Rwandan genocide. During the genocide, Katongole suggests that "Hutu killed Tutsis in 1994 for no other reason except that the Tusti were viewed as enemies who had to be eliminated as a final solution to Rwanda's problems." Thus, for Katongole the root of the genocide is identity--a particular kind of identity that has been fashioned and informed by a narrative with its genesis in the colonial European "imagination." The story that shaped Hutu and Tutsi as identities, Katongole argues, is based largely on the philosophy of German, G.W.F. Hegel, who characterized Africans as "primitive," and British officer and explorer, John Hanning Speke, who used the story of Noah's curse against his son Ham to be the servant of his brothers to "justify the enslavement of black Africans." In reality, Katongole argues, Hutu and Tutsi functioned as "fluid" and mutable identities--the primary origin being a "basic division of labor." Instead, in collaboration with the church, the Belgian colonial administration inscribed Tutsi as the "advanced" Semites and Hutu as "inferior" Hamites into the colonial legal system as "races" after 1933 census. It is this racial narrative that ensnared the Christian imagination of Hutu and Tutsi, allowing the "blood of tribalism to run deeper than the waters of baptism" in 1994.

Interestingly, Katongole correctly perceives that the Rwandan identity crisis can serve as a mirror to the identity issues facing the Western church today. In so doing, Katongole gestures at two "silences": history and geography. First, Katongole argues that often, "we" [Westerners?], simply presuppose anthropological categories like tribe, race, ethnicity or political realities like terrorism and gang violence are natural. That is, instead of asking about the historical nature of these anthropological and political realities, "we" think these things "just happen." Second, Katongole contends that Westerners often view Africa's problems as "tribal" and "over there," yet Katongole insinuates, in the form of a story, that his Western readers might maintain some tribal identities of their own, namely, Republican and Democrat. After briefly drawing a connection between Hutu and Tutsi and Democrat and Republican, Katongole very briefly discusses two stories that have captivated the minds of Western Christians: the narrative of democracy as understood through the lens of Thomas Hobbes in his work Leviathan and capitalism as articulated by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

In the chapter "The Stories That Form Us," described above, Katongole insightfully gestures toward several important ways in which Christians in America are shaped and held captive by the stories of democracy and capitalism. Yet, ultimately, Katongole's evaluation is incomplete for two interrelated reasons. First, Katongole provides an oversimplified account of democracy and capitalism that ignores the complexity with which both of these institutions were conceived and the ways that these institutions manifest themselves in the actions and lives of Western Christians. Second, despite Katongole penchant for asking historical questions he ironically fails to ask the question: how have Christians in the West uncritically accepted and or integrated the narratives of capitalism and democracy into their Christian theology?

Katongole is correct in pointing out the narrative behind Adam Smith's capitalism is largely incompatible with the political economy of the Kingdom of God, particularly the focus on pursuing self-interest. While Katongole was clearly not trying to provide a detailed account of capitalism or democracy, his case would have been stronger had he discussed the ways in which these institutions have captured the imaginations of Western Christians in a fashion similar to his description of how Hutu and Tutsi became racialized. That is, if the narratives of capitalism and democracy are strangling the minds and vying for the identities of Western Christians today, as Katongole suggests, a fuller analysis of capitalism and democracy that moves beyond simply stating these institutions are self-interested is required. Instead, Katongole seems more content to complain about capitalism than he is interested in providing a fuller treatment of the subject: "No one really questions whether we really need so many options on the bread aisle." In so doing, I think, Katongole missed the opportunity to admonish Western Christians, and failed to point out specific ways in which the complex institutions of capitalism and democracy have subjugated their social imaginations and compete with their Christian identity.

Mirror to the Church is at times brilliant and at times frustrating, because Katongole does so well to create a situation where Western Christians can reflect on the stories that shape them, yet one cannot help but feel his ideas regularly were underdeveloped and or insufficiently articulated.

A Rwandan raised in Uganda, Katongole asserts that evil spiritual forces (from a biblical, not an animistic perspective) were at the heart of the genocide and sees other factors such as tribalism, socio-economic tension, politics and colonialism as the outworking of that evil. He laments that it was unprecedented for church members to kill fellow Christians in their places of worship and fears that current expressions of concern "miss the fact that Christian mission is not so much about delivering aid or services as it is about the transformation of identity." Nevertheless, he blames the colonialists for dividing a common culture into separate ethnic groups that had not previously seen each other as enemies. The declaration of Rwanda as a Christian nation in 1945 receives special attention because the East African Revival of the early twentieth century showed that "sincerity and passion were not enough to ensure faithful social engagement" (and thus prevent genocide). After evaluating reasons for the genocide, Katongole addresses "Christian" nations, where he fears that lessons from Rwanda have not yet been learned. For example, many Christians fail to differentiate between patriotism and biblical values and thus fall into the same trap as Rwandans did; loyalty for or against the government of the day is stronger than faith. His continual question is what difference Christianity actually makes in a national crisis, whether it occurs in Africa or in the West. His summary is that Christians must take seriously the memory of the tragic history of Rwanda and the church's failure to act, use Rwanda as a mirror to see where we need to change patterns that are assumed to be normal, and be involved in a mission to question our allegiance to national, tribal, ethnic or racial identities that may come before the gospel.

The author is a Rwandan who grew up in Uganda who is now a Catholic priest. He has spent six years (as of the writing of this book) as a professor at Duke University.

The first half of this book is about the Rwanda genocide and the history leading up to it. The information was good, but the author tended to skip around in time and digress into side narratives that made it difficult for me to follow his main point. That point seemed to be: Hutu Christian slaughtered Tutsi Christian neighbors--people they worshipped together with in church--and American Christians abandoned Tutsi Christians. So, he says, to avoid this we must ask ourselves if our identity as Christians is stronger than our loyalty to other cultural labels. It's a good question, and I would have recommended the book if the book stopped at page 80.

However, in the first part of the book, the author says that the Belgians came to Rwanda, made faulty categorizations of the population after only a brief stay in the land, and that this lead to the genocide. Yet, in the second part of the book, he tries to neatly place American Christians into categories based on what he's seen during his relatively brief stay here.

Based on my own lifetime of research, none of his explanations for our American cultural identities seemed accurate to me because they miss the nuances. Also, I don't know a single Christian who fits into the neat categories he makes for us. Basically, I rather felt he was making the same mistake that the Belgians did of trying to categorize a culture and failing because he missed the many nuances.

I also felt like he made several assumptions that I couldn't agree with. First, he doesn't seem to recognize that we live in a sinful, fallen world. In the second half of the book, his argument seems to suggest that if everyone in the world just picked one identity and we were all loyal to that one identity above all others, then all divisions--and therefore all evil, pain, suffering, starvation, etc.--would be eradicated.

The problem I have with this is that people need to be transformed by Jesus in order to not act self-first like they did in Rwanda. Just calling ourselves Christians and shedding all other identities won't work. Having one unifying national identity has been tried before with no success. Even if everyone who called themselves Christians were totally transformed by Jesus and dropped all divisions, the world isn't made up totally of Christians. Evil would still occur.

Basically, his points in the first half of the book are good, but, in my opinion, the book falls apart in the second half because it fails to recognize the true source of the problems in this world.