Episode 8 - Indigenous Responses to Christian Zionism

Today, on the 78th Nakba Day (May 15, 2026), we welcome Mark Charles, Shadia Qubti, and Rev. Dr. Robert O. Smith to the podcast, each representing different Indigenous perspectives on the problem of Christian Zionism and what can be done to give people alternative theological positions to grab ahold of. In Season 1, Episode 4 of the podcast, Rev. Emilee Walker-Cornetta said that, “we’ve been disciplined to not seriously engage our own history of settler colonialism, genocide, and enslavement…and that we’re still enchanted by our own narrative of Manifest Destiny” and that’s what we’re going to focus on in this episode. How has the United States’ refusal to seriously critique our own foundation story impacted people’s willingness to look past the suffering of the Palestinian people? It’s so easy for people to look abroad and see horrors in far away places, but to admit the same in our own backyard is more difficult for people encultured within “American exceptionalism.”

FOSNA Nakba Day 78: A Solidarity Toolkit

Resources Mentioned

• Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery purchase via InterVarsity Press
• More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism purchase via Oxford University Press
• Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison purchase via Augsburg Fortress Press
• International Solidarity Movement (ISM)
• Now I walk in Beauty, a Navajo Prayer, English version here
• The Kairos Documents
  • South Africa
  • Kairos Palestine I
  • Kairos Palestine II
• Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther: Engaging Texts of Terror(ism) purchase from Routledge Press

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:04

Hello and welcome to Bad Theology Busted, where we challenge the dangerous theology of Christian Zionism in all the places that it hides. This is the podcast of the Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism. My name is Jesse, and I'm joined by my co-host and my friend, Dee.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Thanks, Jesse. Today we welcome Mark Charles, Shadia Kupti, and Reverend Dr. Robert O. Smith to the podcast, each representing different indigenous perspectives on the problem of Christian Zionism and what can be done to give people an alternative theological position to grab a hold of. In season one, episode four of the podcast, Reverend Emily Walker Cornetta said that, quote, we've been disciplined to not seriously engage our own history of settler colonialism, genocide, and enslavement. And we're still enchanted by our own narrative of manifest destiny, unquote. And that's what we're going to be focusing on today. How has the United States' refusal to seriously critique our own foundation story impacted people's willingness to look past the suffering of the Palestinian people? It is so easy for people to look abroad and see horrors in far away places. But to admit the same thing in our own backyard is more difficult for people and cultured within American exceptionalism.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

If you enjoy the show, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you find something of particular interest or challenging in our conversation, I welcome you to leave a comment either on YouTube or whichever platform you are listening on. We'll be back with our guests after the break to discuss what Christian Zionism looks like within indigenous context.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Someone once said in the beginning God created his own image, and then it'll be and I think today many and the same thing.

SPEAKER_04 3:52

In 2012, Mark hosted a public reading at the U.S. Capitol of the Buried Apology to Native Peoples in the 2010 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill given by the 111th Congress. He is the co-author of the book Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. And you can check out more of his writing at WirelessHogan.com and WirelessHogan.substack.com. He is a co-founder of the Would Jesus Eat Fry Bread College Conference Series and has served on the boards of the Christian Reformed Church of North America and the Christian Community Development Association. In 2020, Mark ran as an independent candidate for the presidency of the United States, advocating for a truth and conciliation commission, a formal and national dialogue on issues of race, gender, and class. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. In your research, you have highlighted the racist and settler colonial DNA of the Declaration of Independence, the foundational text of the United States. On your website, you have a quote which reads, quote, Healing begins when deeply entrenched beliefs are unsettled. Can you share with us and our listeners about the deeply held beliefs of this country that need to be diagnosed and reckoned with so that this healing can begin?

SPEAKER_05 5:16

Well, Jesse, indeed, thank you so much for inviting me. It's an honor to be on your show today and to be with the other guests. I'm excited for the conversation we're gonna have. Before we begin, let me introduce myself traditionally. So, Yat eh, Mark Charles Yunushia, Tsinbeke Dinah Schle, do Toyhidlini Bash Chin, Tsinbeke Dina dasha Che Dot Chitni Dashanella. In our Navajo culture, when we introduce ourselves, we always give our four clans. We're matrilineal as a people, and our identities come from our mother's mother. My mother's mother is American of Dutch heritage, and that's why I say Tsinbeke Dine. Loosely translated, that means I'm from the wooden shoe people. My second clan, my father's mother, is Tohigli, which is the waters that flow together. My third clan, my mother's father, is also Tsinbeke Dnea. And my fourth clan, my father's father, is Tochitney, which is the Bitterwater clan. It's one of the original clans of our Navajo people. I also want to acknowledge that I am speaking to you today from what's now called Washington, D.C. I moved here with my family from the Navajo Nation about 11 years ago. And these lands where I live currently are the traditional lands of the Piscadoe. The Piscadoway, they're the nation that they were living here, hunting here, farming here, and fishing here, raising their families here and burying their dead here long before Columbus got lost at sea. And they are still here. So I want to acknowledge that the Piscadoway is the host peoples of land where I'm living. I want to thank them for their stewardship of these lands. And I want to just state how humbling it is to be living, moving, breathing, existing on these lands today. So my Piscado relatives, a Hiaha, thank you for your stewardship of these lands. Jesse, the question you asked, it goes back to what I wrote with my good friend and co-author Sung Chan Ra in our book Unsettling Truths, The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. I want to highlight a few things about our foundations. And the challenge we face as a country is most American, U.S. citizens don't read our founding documents. So they know the Declaration of Independence begins with a statement that says we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, but they don't read much further than that. They know our Constitution begins with the words we the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, but they don't read much past that. And so when you actually read these documents, you begin to understand the worldview, the paradigm of the founders of this nation. 30 lines after the statement all men are created equal, they refer to natives as merciless Indian savages, making it very clear the only reason the founding fathers used the inclusive term all men, because their definition of he was human, of who was human, was incredibly narrow. The Constitution starts with the words we the people. Article 1, Section 2, the part of the Constitution that determines who is and who is not a part of this union, who is and who is not covered by this constitution. If you read Article 1, Section 2, you have to note, first of all, it never mentions women. Second, it specifically excludes natives, and third, it counts to African just three-fifths of a person. So 1787, you take away women, you take away natives, you take away black people, who's left? While you're left with white men. And technically, to be a voter, to vote, you had to be a landowner. You see, our Constitution wasn't designed to establish justice and equality for all. It was designed to protect the interests of white landowning men. Now, again, people say, well, we've corrected that. We have a 13th Amendment. Again, they've never read the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment has a clause in it. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, whereas the party has been duly convicted shall exist. The 13th Amendment doesn't abolish slavery, it redefines and codifies it under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system. 2026, slavery is still 100% legal in the United States under the jurisdiction of a criminal justice system. You have no civil rights under the jurisdiction of a criminal justice system, especially if you are a person of color or a woman. And this is important to remember. In 1823, there was a Supreme Court case, Johnson versus Macintosh. It's two white men of European descent. They're litigating over a single piece of land. One of them got the land from a native tribe, the other of them got the land from the government. They want to know who owned it. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. 1823, the John Marshall Court, considered one of the greatest Supreme Court jurists in our history, they had to determine the legal precedent for land titles. They ruled it was a discovery that gave title to the land. Then, because that might possibly imply that natives had some sovereignty or right to the land, they go on to state that we're savages and our occupation is uh comes from the forest. And so we are mere occupants of this land. Like a fish occupies water, our bird occupies air. And that precedent, established in 1823, gets referenced as the doctrine of discovery by the Supreme Court in 1823, 1984, uh, and recently the last one in 2005. You see, people don't know that beneath our founding documents, we have what's known as a doctrine of discovery. The doctrine of discovery is a series of papal bulls, edicts of the Catholic Church, written between 1452 and 1493. This is essentially the church in Europe saying to the nations of Europe, wherever you go, whatever land you find not ruled by white European Christian rulers, those people are left inhuman, and their land is yours to take. This is the doctrine that let European nations go into Africa, colonize the continent, and enslave the people. They did not see them as human. It's the same doctrine that let Columbus, who was literally lost at sea, land here on Turtle Island and claim to have discovered it. So as a nation, we have to read our founding documents and we have to study the history and understand what's behind them, and we have to begin to dismantle this worldview which was established by the church to dehumanize anyone who is not European, Christian, and white. And that is the DNA that we need to struggle against if we're gonna wrestle wholeheartedly with this notion of Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Sharik Kupti is a Palestinian-lived theologian exploring how different communities understand land, identity, and faith. Born and raised in Nazareth, she has had the privilege of learning from both her own Palestinian Christian heritage and her work focusing on creating conversations between Palestinian and North American indigenous perspectives, using approaches like contrapunctal reading to help marginalized voices speak with rather than about each other. Growing up in a Baptist church, Kfti describes her faith during her formative years as giving her a place of belonging, especially when growing up with the identity of a minority in a minority as a Palestinian Christian and citizen of Israel. Through her research and upcoming book from Fortress Press, she hopes to contribute to more inclusive theological conversations that honor the wisdom found in both Palestinian and indigenous traditions. You can learn more about Shadia's work by visiting her website at www.shariakupti.com. Shadia, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and energy with us today. By way of an introduction, can you describe for us the process, the how and the why of what drew you as a Palestinian Christian scholar and activist from Nazareth to a comparative study of indigenous spiritualities in Vancouver? Can you share with us a bit about what continues to motivate you day in and day out to continue to speak boldly on behalf of your community?

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Thank you for having me. And before I begin, I also just want to acknowledge that I'm uh speaking to you from the unceded and traditional territories of the Musculum or Kosalish people here, what is known as Vancouver. And I think, you know, even just to do the land acknowledgement as a Palestinian who's displaced, who is currently experienced the height of scepter colonialism there, I am here. And one of the things that are essential and crucial in being in another's stolen land is to look at that relationship and what does it mean to advocate for Palestinian liberation in another settler colonial context. And by way of just kind of bringing in these tensions and these dynamics, I think part of what drew me to engage with indigenous ways of being and ways of knowing. I think part of it is coming from Israel-Palestine and working in peace building, especially within the church context. I think I've been disillusioned in so many levels of what are the root causes that are at hand in historic Palestine that we're seeing the heights of them right now in terms of the genocide or the current Iran-Israel and US war. And I think, as uh Mark, as you were sharing, I mean, a lot of resonance to my context. A lot of these questions is my way of trying to understand what is it to be a Palestinian Christian navigating colonization on different layers, whether it's from Jewish Zionism but also Christian Zionism as well, that is constantly active in dehumanizing us. I mean, not fully human. How have we seen this happen in the last two and a half years of dehumanization of Palestinians, especially in Gaza? And this idea of the logic of eliminating them because they are deemed not having any commodity in the current capitalist system, right? Or exploiting or not even exploiting them at this point. And I think in many ways, just my journey, right? My paternal ancestry is Coptic, maternal ancestry is Greek Orthodox, but my parents were practicing Baptist, Southern Baptists, to be exact. And there's a lot of work, decolonial work to do there too, because that Southern Baptists have been taking a lot of lead in the current US policy, whether it's in the US ambassador in Jerusalem or the House Representative, or even the pastor in Minneapolis who is also working for ICE, right? These are all Southern Baptist ministers who seem to think that what is happening here, the violence is sacred and partly coming from a strong Christian Zionist perspective. And as someone who's been immersed in the Christian Palestinian community, falling on the footsteps of giants who have really identified Christian Zionism and have worked to dismantle it, I'm at this point where I'm asking myself, what am I other than identifying my relationship to Christian Zionism? What is Palestinian? What is it to be a Palestinian Christian? And I think one of the ways that I've found, and I'm trying I'm still in the journey of uncovering that for myself, is to engage with indigenous methodology, indigenous ways of being, indigenous experience, right? As someone who grew up very much immersed in evangelicalism and indigenous people, indigenous, even if I were to say Christians are even in that radar. They don't exist. Another form of Christianity is there. And I think for me, my research, my writing is trying to look elsewhere. And I think part of it is reclaiming my spirituality because of how much it's teaching death. It's teaching this hierarchy of certain people are more favored to God than others, and that's really not the faith or not the God that I see. And I think it's my process is to try to reclaim and come up with just looking at Palestinian and indigenous ways of being annoying and observing it, really. It's already there. I'm not again discovering anything, it's just uh noticing it.

SPEAKER_04 16:41

Yeah, no, thank you so much uh for sharing Shadia. And I too want to acknowledge that I am on the unceded Ahloney territories, otherwise known as the California Bay Area. Turning now to our next guest, uh, Reverend Dr. Robert O. Smith serves Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago as Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs. Dean Smith is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. A broadly experienced minister, theologian, and administrator, Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar who deploys the methodological lenses of critical race theory, decolonial theory, and political theology to better understand the historical sources of contemporary political dynamics. His pathbreaking work on the political ideology of Christian Zionism exemplifies this approach. Smith is the author of More Desired Than Our Own Salvation, The Roots of Christian Zionism, and his co-editor of Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison. Robert, thank you so much for being here with us today, and also for your article in the latest edition of the Journal for the Study of Christian Zionism, titled Gaza and the Christian Zionist Present. And that's available at studychristian Zionism.org. Robert, can you describe for us some of the experiences that led you to pursue the topic of Christian Zionism as a field of study and how your identity as a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation influences the approach you take in your research?

SPEAKER_03 18:18

Sure. Well, what a joy to be with y'all in conversation today and to also have this important inflection of indigenous perspective into this conversation on Christian Zionism, but also on the Israeli-Palestinian topic uh as a whole. This is a wonderful gathering, and I'm so happy to be part of it. The Chickasaws were designated one of the so-called five civilized tribes in the southeast of the United States. And uh that word civilized just rubs us all the wrong way. Uh it it is everything we don't want to be. Because part of that designation of being civilized was the acceptance of Christianity and participation in the plantation economies of settler colonialism, including holding African descent people as slaves. So that that is very much a part of the heritage of the Chickasaw Nation and something that our tribe is still continuing to struggle with how to speak truthfully about, how to speak fulsomely about. And that's part of what I'm trying to do in many parts of my work today. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Chickasaw Nation and the other five tribes of the Southeast, designated as civilized, were ethnically cleansed out of that area into what was designated as Indian territory. Now that process was tied to the doctrine of discovery process in the Marshall Court that uh Mark Charles mentioned earlier in this conversation. So right at the same time period and when that jurisprudence was occurring was when our removal came to pass. Now, following the Civil War, that land uh that it was designated for the Choctaw that the Chickasaw took part of when we came into Indian territory, that land was again divided into private ownership instead of tribal possession before, which is the further destruction of our tribal land base. We've gone through many seasons of loss, including experiences comparable to what Palestinians call the nukba, this forced dispersal, this loss of land. And since that time, the state of Oklahoma and the US federal government have done all they can to limit, even extinguish tribal sovereignty, despite that sovereignty being recognized in the U.S. Constitution. And so our tribe, along with many other 500 other tribes in the United States, are using every legal tool possible to protect and expand that sovereignty every chance we get to protect the right of our people simply to exist. I was raised in an evangelical Pentecostal megachurch in Oklahoma City. So being a white native, where Chickasaws have had white people marrying into the tribe since the 1700s, I was raised basically in a white middle class environment in Oklahoma City. And that was the megachurch that I was a part of. In in 1980s, evangelicalism, that environment was a steady diet of the prosperity gospel, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the centrality of the state of Israel. So it's not a stretch at all to say that I was raised within a fully Christian Zionist context. And for several years, in my uh young adulthood, I stepped away from any connection to Christianity. I knew that that was not serving the needs of for me or the world. And so I needed to just get away from it. I returned to Christian identity uh through the Lutheran tradition, and that's how I wound up in seminary in the late 1990s. And surprisingly, the first degree. I completed at that Lutheran seminary was in Islamic studies. But it was Islamic studies formed as understanding Muslims as friends, as dialogue partners, not as opponents and enemies. And I finished that degree just before 9-11 happened. And afterwards, because of all the work that I did speaking in congregations after 9-11 tried to explain to upper Midwest Lutherans who Muslims were, uh, I had my first chance to travel to the Holy Land. And that was in November of 2002, right in the middle of the second Intifada. I joined a Lutheran pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine with very little comprehension of what I would find there. I thought I was just going to go and walk where Jesus walked, uh, which happened. But I was also trained in nonviolent direct action by the founders of the International Solidarity Movement in Beit Sahur. This is Hassan Andoni and George Rush Maui, uh, who were training us and sending us off in the northern West Bank to confront settlers and the Israeli military as they rip trees out of the ground to make way for the separation barrier, this apartheid wall that's now been built. Uh and so that was my introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian context. I was in direct confrontation with the IDF. I got shot at with live ammunition uh for the first time in my life uh by Israeli soldiers. So whenever people ask me, Are you afraid to go to Jerusalem, afraid to go to Palestine? I say, well, sometimes, but it's never the Palestinians uh who make me afraid. Uh and so my awareness just on that first trip in 2002 was that the church teaching of my childhood was in direct opposition to what I was experiencing and the lives of the people who were hosting me uh when I was in Palestine for the first time. And even in this group of Lutherans, we had these debates about well, what do we think about the end times? We were we were debating these evangelical categories in a Lutheran space where really those categories don't belong. And what I said to my group at that point was this way of interpreting the Bible that is the dominant form of American Christianity is killing people. And we just saw them. And so we must rethink what our theological and ethical systems are so that they can never be used to harm anyone. We've learned that lesson about some groups of people, but suddenly realizing that some groups were exempt from our concern, and we must never operate with that level of double standard. So that's what brought me into an awareness. But eventually I went on to Baylor University to study with Jewish liberation theologian Mark Ellis. And it was it was really Dr. Ellis who pushed me forward. He's now uh passed on. It was Mark Ellis who fostered my critical study of Christian Zionism. But what he was always concerned about is that I not study Christian Zionism only to assert that another form of Christianity is wholesome and pure and without fault. He wanted us to understand that the entire spectrum of Christianity is implicated in these crimes of history. And again, not just implicated in crimes against Jews, but crimes also against Muslims and very specifically Palestinians, as Palestinians bear the brunt of this weight of Western Christian history. So that's what I learned uh from Mark. And I carried that with me into my work with the ELCA and eventually into living for four years in Jerusalem, uh, working uh very closely with Palestinian friends, Christians and Muslims, and and also many Israeli friends, because when you're in that context, you you don't have the choice, right? You're you're working with your neighbors at all times. And that uh that changed my perspective forever. So I I bring a transformed experience. And it's directly inflected with my Chickasaw identity, understanding that we too have a story that connects to human suffering as a result of the hierarchies of Western Christian teaching uh that we must dismantle today. So I'm thank you for letting me be here today.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

I'm coming to you all today from what is known as Atlanta, Georgia, the ancestral lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee nations. And I think all of us here can agree that when Christianity is connected with empire, the faith is weaponized against communities that are viewed as lesser than. In our original music for the podcast, in the speech featured by Reverend Dr. Muntar Isaac, we hear that, quote, someone once said, in the beginning, God created us in God's own image. And since then, we've been returning the favor, unquote. Starting with Constantine, the church began to support the just war theory that saw military aggression against non-Christians as an essential part of evangelizing. Since then, we've seen the Christian faith as well as other faith traditions distorted and used to justify cruelty towards other human beings. Our scriptural text even has moments where violence, including genocide, is justified. Yet a common thread in all of our episodes of this podcast this season is that of seeing the other as the divine image of God, as the amago deity. That if we can just get to a place where truly loving our neighbor, we might be able to get out of this mess that we've created. So the question is how does or doesn't this framework of seeing the other as the divine image of God help inform us?

SPEAKER_03 28:06

Well, thank you for that very important question. A lot of times people refer to the land of Palestine as the fifth gospel. In my sense, however, it's important to understand that the history of Christianity itself is also a fifth gospel. We need to be honest about how Christians have approached non-Christian neighbors uh throughout Christian history. And so while we might might want to lift up images like Imago Day and metaphors like Imago Day as a principle, we risk basically reasserting another liberal principle like all men are created equal. And and we can rally behind those great ideas, but that rallying is only justified when we fully intend to achieve those ideas. So nobody would say that liberal, classical liberal concepts like equality and liberty are are bad things. We we all know that those are wonderful things. But when structurally we are convinced that not everybody will participate fully in those ideals, we have serious problems. And that that's exactly the issue of the U.S. legal system based on these enlightenment liberal ideals and stated in the Declaration of Independence in the U.S. Constitution. Well, you say we the people, but who are the people? And Imago Dei then can be understood as part of a solution to that problem, but it also is just as susceptible to being sucked into the same problematic of asserting a principle with no intention to truly live it out. And so I I I I see the benefit of that in the text, but the text tells us so much else as well. The text at different points can be used to fully justify genocide. The text at different points can be used to fully justify settler colonial land theft. The text at different points can be justified to talk about the extinguishing of one religious community now that another has arrived. And so I say yes, we can lift this up as a principle, but I also think we have plenty of warnings in history uh that tell us that we aren't always so good at truly living up to our ideals.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Well, the more I think about it, the more it's um it's it's not as straightforward as as it seemed at the beginning. Because I I do agree with the premise that if we see the divine in each other, we are more likely to treat each other with more humility and more respect and more more love, right? But um, I mean I think there's within that presumption, there's an a binary embedded in there. It's right, what if you don't see them as the divine? Does that then mean you can treat them like they're not like you? I mean, right? What makes humans have that authority to decide who gets to be seen in the image of God and who doesn't? But I f from what my my learnings and and delving into in indigenous ways of knowing and looking at that same story, creation story, I think we need to look at it in a more larger scope and not just the relationships between humanity, but all our relationships. How can we demand from each other to treat each other well when we are exploiting the land and we're destroying the same land that we claim this is God gave us this land? There are a lot of contradictions here. And I think just learning from uh indigenous wisdom of the harmony in creation and what it what it does make us unique as humans. I mean, we're very vulnerable in the hierarchy of creation, so that's not necessarily that we are the strongest, but I think maybe it's our ability to ensure or the responsibility to ensure everyone has the ability to co-create within what has God given to them. So I I think I I agree to the premise, but I I'm also just looking at the world right now and you know, the idea that if I were to come and talk to my brother or sister who's a Christian and say Palestinians are also created in God's image, is that supposed to create this transformation that be like, oh, right, sorry, when violence is being committed against Palestinians, it has been committed for more than 70 years. And the rehumanizing element is it's too simple to say that it's because Palestinians are seen as equal humans, uh, created in the image of God. There's more there, and we need to dig deeper into that. And I think it goes to asking questioning a lot of the systems and worldviews that we are bringing into our perception.

SPEAKER_05 32:49

Well, thank you. Uh, that's an interesting question. And well, once a year on my social media, I post a statement, just a simple statement, where I say white people are not superior. And the first time I did it, I was called racist because we're used to tweeting and posting things like Black Lives Matter, Native Lives Matter, LGBTQ lives matter, and so on and so forth. And it's absolutely important that we talk about the the raising up of the people who've been marginalized. But the problem with the lies, it's not just a one-sided lie. It's not saying that people of color are less than, it's saying that white people are greater than. Yes, we have to lift up those who have been marginalized. We also have to reduce those who think they're greater than. And the challenge I have with the Malio Day is by saying I'm gonna see the divine in others, acknowledges I see the divine in myself, which isn't in and of itself a bad thing, but it creates a separation between maybe humans and everyone, everything else. And so if you Google the definition of the word nature, and you'll find the first result that will come up is by Oxford Dictionary, and it's defined as the phenomenon of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creation. Western society, Western culture does not see itself as part of nature, it does not view itself as part of the food chain. We are a part of the food chain, we're a vital part of the food chain. We need nature to survive, and nature needs us to survive. And so by putting ourselves separate, we're starting down a slippery slope. So now because we're human, we're above nature. Now because we're Christian, we're above other religions, now because we're male, we're above other genders, now because we're of a certain race, we're above other races. I would much rather just say, why don't we just start acknowledging the fact that we're all human and we cannot exist without nature, and nature cannot exist without us. And that's going to humble a lot of people. It's gonna lift up those of us who are referred to as savages and less than human. But I think we need to start by can we see everybody on the same plane of humanity? And then can we see humanity on the same plane as the natural world and the environment around us? So when I when I read this definition, that's the Western worldview, that's the Western paradigm. That paradigm makes no sense to indigenous peoples. That's a foreign concept that humans and human creations would be separate from the natural world. And so let's just say we have all been created by creator. We've been given this incredible world, this beautiful ecosystem, this universe that we're a part of. And let's just learn, as my novel people would say, how to walk in beauty.

SPEAKER_04 35:45

Thank you, all of you. I think this has been a beautiful insights that help complicate the narrative, I would say, of the Imago Dig. Where I think, on the one hand, there are places where there are those people and context saying, I am better than this person. I am civilized and they are uncivilized. I am protecting Western civilization from the barbaric masses out to destroy our way of life. And so using a concept like Imago De, I think, can come up and say, like, no, you do not have an innate superiority. And yet, this brings me back to what Mark talks about, pulling back to the Declaration of Independence, where, you know, that's very similar to all men are created equal, but it's very narrow, it's very limiting. And you have to dig further and realize, oh, actually, so much of this document is about the fact that the American settlers want to keep colonizing and the British Empire said, sorry, you can't go past this line. The fact that that is such a core of the actual conflict that developed, although it's couched in all of this beautiful human rights language, it's this sense of complicating the narrative. Why is it that these Western liberal democracies forming in Europe become some of the most violent colonizers of the rest of the world? This is the core of the post-colonial theory and research. And so I asked this next question that as we think about Palestine, Christian Zionism, and the various theologies of liberation that exist, how might indigenous voices and experiences complicate the narrative? And we'd love to hear from each of you about what ways indigenous stories can challenge destructive paradigms or bear new insights on situations of injustice and oppression that might otherwise remain hidden. What lessons can Palestinians or the Palestinian solidarity movement as a whole learn from the wisdom of other Indigenous communities?

SPEAKER_00 37:42

Yeah, I think as someone who's who's engaging in that, I think one of the things that I can think about, I think it's how much the more I learned about indigenous experience in Toro Island, the more it burst my bubble and understanding of the myth of the land of the free and the myth of democracy. Because until you intentionally look for the indigenous experience, you won't find it. You won't find it in many disciplines, especially in theology. And you know, as someone who's who's tried to research uh theology of land, I mean, uh, you don't find indigenous writers engaging in that in that discipline when their experience of dispossession has been weaponized using biblical white language of chosenness and and promised land and whatnot. And I think in in some ways that carries forward in the myth of Israel being um, you know, the David against Goliath and what that theology entails in it. So I think in one and the initially it's complicating the narrative in the sense that it's not as simple, it's not as um, you know, walk-in-whike narrative that mainstream theologies make it so. And and I think in some ways, even if you look at many Palestinians who want to go to America, right? That's kind of our go-to place. We want to escape the occupation, we want to escape the apartheid system to go to the land of the free. But we don't realize that the land of the free is also built on stolen lands that had doesn't acknowledge, that doesn't sit with that discomfort of what does it mean, what whose indigenous lands is this dream built upon? And I think that's a big element of especially Palestinian diaspora in North America have to locate themselves within and think about what does that mean to be on stolen lands and theologically as well, because the narratives, right? Stephen Zelaita talks about the transmission of the Holy Land story from the US now back to Israel, right? And Mark, you mentioned it in your book as well, how Netanyahu relies on this American exceptionalism and carries the stories to gain uh American support for it. And I think as Palestinian Christians, we have rightly so talked a lot about Zionism and its impact on our day-to-day lives, on our relationship to the land. But I don't think we talk enough about Christian superiority and Christian colonialism on our ways of being and our spiritualities. And I'll just phrase it in the question is the only way we can dismantle the master's house is by using his tools. A lot of the ways we speak, the ways we communicate theology as Palestinian Christian is very much embedded in Western discourse, Western uh academia. And my answer is personally, it's not the only way. There are other ways to learn from it, is to sit among majority world contexts who know, who have a similar experience. And again, we're not here just to talk about our relationship to harmful theologies, but what do our indigenous theologies teach about each other? What can we learn from each other aside from that?

SPEAKER_05 40:43

Thank you. Uh, that's a great question, Shadi. I appreciate your answer. Two of the hardest chapters to read in my book on selling truths are chapters nine and ten. Chapter nine, we deal with Abraham Lincoln, who is largely considered to be the greatest president in the history of the United States. And chapter nine, we deal with the fact that the victor writes the history, right? So if you win a war, you get to write about the war, and no one really refutes that. That's pretty well commonly accepted. The challenge is that the United States of America has never really lost war that matters. And as a result, we've written our own history. So because of that, people have no clue what our history is, and we have no clue who Lincoln is. So, chapter nine, using his quote, everything from how he introduced himself in the Lincoln Douglas debates, where he said, I have no intention of making voters or jerseys of Negroes or allowing them to hold office or to intermarry with white people. There's a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races of living together in terms of social and political equality, but as long as they must remain together, there must be the distinction of superior and inferior. And I, as much as any other man, said Abraham Lincoln, believed that the superior position belongs to the white race. Abraham Lincoln was a blatant, unapologetic, self-proclaimed white supremacist until the day he died. Why do you think our 13th Amendment keeps slavery legal in prison? He did not have any intention of allowing black people to be a part of society. Chapter 10 looks at Abraham Lincoln's policies towards Native peoples. Abraham Lincoln oversaw genocide after genocide, massacre after massacre of Native peoples, starting with the hanging of the Dakota 38 and the Dakota removal from Minnesota, going on to the Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone in uh northern Utah and southern Idaho, going on to the long walk of the Mescaloro Pauchi and the Navajo people, my people in the southwest, and concluding with the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne Arapaho in eastern Colorado. A week after that last massacre, he pretty much said we're gonna complete Manifest Destiny. Confidently. Why did he know this? Well, if he put those massacres on a map and he traced out where the initial routes of the Transcontrolver were gonna go, he was literally ethnically cleansing the northern, central, and southern routes of the railway. The Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone in northern Utah and southern Idaho was a stone's throw from where the golden spike was eventually laid. When my people signed a treaty to come back from Busque Redondo, the death camp that they placed us in, there was a clause in our treaty that stated we would not oppose the building of a railroad. Not only was Abraham Lincoln a blatant, unapologetic, self-proclaimed white supremacist, but he was also one of the most genocidal presidents in our nation's history. And we consider him to be our greatest president ever. He actually had a higher genocidal rate of Native peoples than Hitler had of Jews in Germany. The primary difference between Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler was technology. Hitler had more and better technology to massacre and commit genocide at a higher rate and better than Lincoln did. And so we have to understand how native presence, native voices change the narrative. Most people would say that slavery was our original sin. And while slavery was abhorrent and horrible, it was not our original sin as a nation. Colonization needs to Press people to survive. I traveled to Israel decades ago, several times. My second time there, I had the privilege of sitting with the Bedouins. We never hear about the Bedouins. At the time, I was living with my family on our reservation in a Hogan six miles off the nearest paved road on a dirt road. Our community had no running water, no electricity. We lived in a 25-foot diameter hogon with a log walls and a dirt floor. We had an outhouse about 50 yards away from us, and we were living there on a sheep camp. And as we sat with the Bedouins in a very similar environment, it took us the better half of a day to convince them that our lives in the United States were not much different than theirs, down to the herding of sheep and the sitting in the dirt. And the Bedouins are truly a pawn in that conflict. When Israeli settlers take a piece of land, they move the Bedouins. When Palestinians take a piece of land, they move the Bedouins. It helped me think about that conflict in a different way because if the Israelis and white people are those in power, and the Palestinians and the black people are the marginalized majority, then the Bedouins and the Native peoples are the silently oppressed that no one wants to talk about because their very presence in the dialogue complicates it beyond belief. And that's the challenge. It's not just about do we do what's just for the Palestinians, we have to do what's just for the Bedouin. It's not just do we abolish slavery and do what's just for black people. We have to also do what's just for Native peoples. And that's where things get very, very tricky and very, very complicated. And that's why I always try to take my dialogue down to the most foundational level that I can so we can actually start at the base and begin to have a much more constructive dialogue.

SPEAKER_03 45:38

Yeah, I appreciate all that my fellow panelists have offered today. And I think when I come back to this question of, you know, what lessons can indigenity and indigenous consciousness bring uh to the conversation around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I and not not the conflict, but of course the settler colonial invasion of Palestine. One thing that comes to mind is we hear a lot about the need of the state of Israel for others to recognize its right to exist. Right? How many times have we heard that in political discourse in the US? That's an interesting question, but it demonstrates a great deal of existential anxiety. But the state isn't sure about how it exists. It needs others to validate its existence. That anxiety produces a tremendous amount of violence. When you're not grounded in yourself and you don't know what your basis of existence is, and you demand that recognition from others so you can feel secure, you're living in deep anxiety that produces violence. Indigenous communities, even when they're seeking governmental recognition, never need to ask anyone else's permission to exist. In fact, as Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel observed, Europe only became Europe in its encounter with indigenous peoples, with Los Indios. And so Palestinians, in the same way, are the constituting reality of the state of Israel. Palestinians are the ground of Israel's being in the same way that Los Indios formed the foundation of Europe's being in 1492. And Palestinians, as with indigenous peoples in what is now the United States, are simply the people of the land. They simply are. No matter what labels placed on them or what empire rules over them, Palestinians are there, have been there, will be there. And this Western Christian presumption of domination and supremacy. Oh yes, that comes and goes. But Palestinians know in their bones that their mirrored continue their mere continued existence is their resistance. All these attempts at domination and erasure, the fact that Palestinians still exist is their form of resistance. And so I think that we together must begin with existence, with being. And being always being in relation with others instead of buying into this hierarchical domination system. So we've heard a lot of that in this conversation today. But I I think, yeah, the fact that the Navajo, the Danay, the Chickasaw, the Palestinian, and all of the diversities of what Palestinian means still exist today. That's where we stick together as Indigenous peoples, not needing to ask anybody else's permission to exist.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Thank you all so much for all of that. And before we move to our final question, I'll just share that for me, this is bringing up something I experienced this past weekend when we hosted the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Dr. Riyadh Mansour. And he said that our job, speaking as Palestinians, is to simply continue to exist on the land. That is our job. And your job, meaning us, me, primarily people that look like me, Western white Protestant folk, our job is to do something, right? To help that. And it doesn't matter how big or how small, how significant or how minor that something is, just to consistently wake up every single day and do. And I think that that has really been what is generating for me from this conversation is that those of us who are deeply embedded and implicitly complicit in settler colonial realities, it's our job to do something to help dismantle those systems of harm.

SPEAKER_04 49:52

No, I just wanted to thank you all for that conversation. And to name, especially when you, Mark, uh, mentioned the Bedouin. As listeners will know, I lived in Lebanon for about seven years and got to see different aspects of Lebanese society and how they interacted with each other. And I got to spend a week actually at a camp for Bedouins and just be part of that community. And I've just got to thinking about as we record right now, my heart is very much with Lebanon, the Lebanese people, and the fact that the whole southern third of the nation and a third of the city of Beirut is under evacuation orders, ethnic cleansing orders. These are ancient, deep communities with deep histories, just under the hell of bombs coming in from the sky, being told you have to get up and leave. Millions of people. And I just wanted to name that reality as someone who has deep emotional ties to Lebanon. That is happening right now, again, with US permission and US arms. And the Bedouin are very much in that embedded in those communities as well, and often don't have access to the even the same resources that the Lebanese have in their exile.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Yeah, thank you for naming that. It's so important to note that all of these things are deeply connected to one another. And so, in our closing moments, as a chance to get some closing comments here from you all, from your perspective within the social location that you inhabit, what do you see as being effective and authentic ways to counter the destructive influence of settler colonial theologies that we've been discussing?

SPEAKER_05 51:40

So thank you. First of all, I want to name what that is. If you read the Bible, Genesis starts with creation, creator making the heavens and the earth. Later, creator becomes known as the God of Abraham, the God of a man. He tests Abraham's faith by asking him to kill his son. The God of Abraham destroys the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The God of Abraham abandons, tells Abraham to abandon Ishmael. Later, if the God of Abraham becomes known as the God of Israel, the God of Israel frees the people of Israel from slavery by killing the firstborn of every Egyptian. The God of Israel threatens to kill the people of Israel when they worship a golden calf upon Mount Sinai. The God of Israel kills the Egyptian army by destroying them in the Red Sea and then tells the people of Israel to go into Canaan and commit genocide against the Canaanites. After they complete that, in the book of 1 Samuel, the people go to their judge, their prophet Samuel, and say, We want a king. We want to be like the gods of the nations around us. And Samuel goes to God and laments and says, They're rejecting me as their prophet, they want a king. And God comforts Samuel by saying, They haven't rejected you as their prophet, they've rejected me as their king. So in the book, the divine goes from creator to the God of a man to the God of a nation, to calling creator's self king. And the further the character of God gets from creator, and the closer the character of God gets to king, the more violent, the more vindictive, the more abusive, the more genocidal, and the more nationalistic the character of that God becomes. Now, the majority of that story happens in the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, and Biblicus Numbers in Deuteronomy. Books claimed by scriptures of three faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Israel has nationalized Judaism, the US has nationalized Christianity, and Hamas has either nationalized or institutionalized, depending on your viewpoint, Islam. And right now there's a war in Gaza, and all three nations are using their scriptures to justify unthinkable violence against people they consider to be their enemies. That's the problem. We have corrupted this view of creator and made creator into a king, a god of nations that is violent and vindictive and genocidal. One of the most transformational processes I've gone through of my own theology and spiritual life is I started 25 years ago doing what my ass should have done for hundreds, thousands of years, which is waking up every morning, going towards the east and greeting the sunrise with my prayers. I have been learning about who creator is, not from a book. Not that the book is bad, but if you want to know creator, why read a book when you can sit in creation? And after 25 years of communing with creator in creation, I can now look at those texts and look at those books and look at those stories and tell you with utmost confidence that is not creator. That story is not creator. That characteristic defined there is not creator. That text does not know who creator is. It's not that you throw up the book, but you read it like you would read anything with discernment. And my challenge to people is to find a point of nature: a river, a lake, a field, a tree, a sunrise, a sunset, and go there three to five days a week. Sit there for five to ten, fifteen minutes at a time and commune with creator in creation without your book present. You can read it other times during the day. And then come back to me in 25 years and tell me if your understanding and paradigm of creator has shifted from what your book tried to teach you. And I think, if you're honest, just like with myself, you'll begin to recognize there's some things you can't learn about creator from a book.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

A very helpful for my reminder for the bibliophiles amongst us.

SPEAKER_03 55:14

I think uh so in my social location is leading a seminary within a US mainline denomination that is primarily white in character, middle class in in socioeconomic orientation. I need to remind my people that they read from that white middle class perspective and what they've been fed over these past decades is very much the lie that that Mark is trying to expose. And and that that is the the lie uh that they are living in. Now, part of what we find in this white middle class environment is a hesitancy among churches to transgress what they've been told as a separation between church and state, where they have been made to believe that religion and politics should not mix. And so part of what I've tried to do is reverse engineer that presupposition and point out all the theology that's present in the political discourse already, it's not up to you to separate it, you can't separate what's already interwoven. When leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu use the image of Amalek to destroy not only the people of Gaza, but the people of Iran, and are just transposing this genocidal language, and and when uh Christian Zionist presuppositions infuse both leaders like Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, and Bill Clinton at the same time, we need to pay attention to how Christian Zionism operates across part of the partisan divide in the United States. And if you think that it's your job to uphold the separation of church and state and religion and politics, you've abdicated the field when in fact your responsibility is to call out the extremism and the abuse of theology that we find in our political discourse. So that's what I can do, I think, best from the perch that I presently inhabit.

SPEAKER_00 57:17

Yeah, I can think of uh two things. I think, right, if you identify it as settler colonial theologies, then you're in the right path. But I think many people are still debating whether this is the right paradigm to describe what is going on and where we're at. And if you're on the fence on that, I would definitely encourage you to. And one way to examine it is to actually read some of the Kairos documents that uh came as a result of dismantling uh settler colonial theologies, not only in Palestine with the recent one, the second Kairos Palestine document, I think Truth in the Shadow of Genocide. But actually, the first time I read the South African Kairos document, I cried, right? There's a lot of it help it helps to kind of unpack what we're talking about and to start with, or even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's uh calls, uh calls to actions as ways to see how to counter settler fully theologies in the same way. And I I think, you know, Robert, you were mentioning uh Iran and uh scriptures. I think there's a lot of uh conversation in in Israel about the story of Esther because it was during Qurium. And I recommend uh reading uh Sarajani Nadar's book on Gaza Gender and the Book of Esther, text of terrorism, which it was beautiful timing to read that book as we see how it's being weaponized, how the story of Esther is being weaponized on an ongoing war. And I'll end with just a few questions that you as a listener can answer them to yourself. You know, how do you read the Bible? With whom do you read the Bible if you do? And also whose books or whose interpretations do you engage with? Do you consider uh your primary sources of interpretations? And I would definitely encourage you to look at other scholars, different scholars, whether Indigenous, Palestinian, majority world uh scholarships in terms of specifically how they read the Bible, because I think we need that diversity and that experience to impact how we understand our theologies. Because in simply if your theology is telling you there's bad guys and good guys, and there's chosen people and not chosen people, and there's a just or unjust war, I think you need to start naming what is causing these uh binaries. And for here, there's a lot of people around you that can help you take the brave step of just starting to burst those bubbles.

SPEAKER_04 59:40

It's an unfortunate reality that people of faith have become the greatest cheerleaders, as well as political and financial supporters for the evils of apartheid and forced displacement experienced by the indigenous Palestinian people. The great tragedy of this being that many believe this is what the Bible commands. But thankfully, it does not. For this reason, I've developed a new resource, The Bible is Anti-Zionist: 40 Reflections on the Greatest Moral Crisis of Our Time. As a collection of short meditations, this new study series was designed to catalyze new ways of thinking about and responding to the greatest moral crisis of our time. As a tool for discussion in churches, study groups, action committees, or individual contemplation, I am seeking to reclaim the Bible and its message from those who are actively weaponizing it to exploit and harm others. Ultimately, I invite you to read, contemplate, pray, and come to your own conclusions. But most importantly, however, I hope you will find it useful in the pursuit of justice, liberation, and peace. You can pick up a copy of The Bible as Anti-Zionist, 40 Reflections on the Greatest Moral Crisis of Our Time at Fosna.org slash anti-Zionist Bible. It's available for purchase or as a free PDF download. Thank you each for giving your time and expertise to this important and necessary conversation today. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in today. We'll be back next time to talk about what Christian Zionism looks like within Asian and Asian American communities.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:21

Our original music, The Path Forward, was written and produced by Carl St. Lucie and Danny Fry, featuring sampled speech by Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac. ISCZ is a project of Friends of Sibyl North America, a nonprofit Christian ecumenical organization seeking justice and peace in the Holy Land through education, advocacy, and nonviolent action. To learn more about ISCZ and to donate to our work, please visit us at study Christian Zionism.org. Until next time, thanks so much.