Hey I’v been reading your

Hey I’v been reading your blog from quite some time now and I just wanted to say keep up the good work.
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Hello Jarrod, I live in

Hello Jarrod,

I live in Brisbane.

Here is something I wrote…….”Babylon and the Christian Church in Australia”
http://unlearningtheproblem.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/babylon-and-the-chr…

The Australian church, even liberals and radicals, have tried to incorporate Aboriginal Australia into a white framework of social justice. What the church has largely been ignorant to is the fact that God has been in relationship with this country and the people of it for thousands of years, longer than the biblical history of the Hebrews.

The Middle Eastern Dreaming stories of the bible have a lot in common with the indigenous stories of this country, but they are not the stories of this country. The Roman imperial church has gutted middle eastern indigenous stories and re-configured them into a religion of European empire and colonisation. It is the imperial religion that the missionaries brought to this country. It is the imperial religion by which liberals and radicals perceive Aboriginality and Aboriginal oppression today.

Australia’s anti-discrimination laws are perhaps the greatest achievements of social justice movements, yet the racial discrimination act only gives Aboriginal people the right to be white. It is illegal to treat an Aboriginal person in ways that you would not treat a white person. However Aboriginal rights and interests, such as land rights or time off work for sorry business for example, are not protected in the racial discrimination act, in fact the act makes them illegal because they involve rights and interests that white people do not have and are therefore discriminatory.

The Greko/Roman notion of citizenship is what informs the racial discrimination act and white notions of social justice, not an affirmation of Aboriginal culture and law.

Social justice too has been a colonial imposition in that welfare is considered to be the appropriate response to Aboriginal Australia. The blatently assimilationist campaign of “Close the Gap” is simply a strategy to pump more money into dysfunctional white modes of health care. Aboriginal notions of healing and health care are not part of mainstream health care and as such mainstream health care is genocidal because it perpetuates Aboriginal ill-health.

Aboriginal health and Aboriginal land
http://unlearningtheproblem.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/aboriginal-health-a…

But the main problem with the welfare paradigm is that it does not ask the question, how did this happen? What system or structure has to be undone to solve the problem? Welfare just assumes disadvantage and ill health is an unfortunate given that we must try and put a band aid on. Like mainstream health care, welfarism just treats symptoms and ignores causes. The treatment of symptoms is to just make them go away. In West End, the community that I live in, the homelessness workers are equally, if not more, responsible as the police in cleaning the homeless off our community’s streets. The homeless are not offered appropriate or secure accommodation but are herded into a cycle of emergency accommodation options simply to keep them off the street where they can annoy shoppers. They get sick and die at the same rate as when they live on the street, but in the welfare paradigm the problem is solved when someone is in an emergency shelter (or perhaps a park in another suburb).

Jesus mission was to proclaim the Jubilee in Israel, to return land to its original owners, this is the strategy to eliminate poverty, this is the good news for the poor. If we are to learn anything of the middle eastern dreaming stories it is that principle must be applied here too. The big difference between the bible stories and Australian Aboriginal stories is that the bible is full of the stories about invasion, colonisation, slavery and domination - and the faithfull’s response to these things. This culture of war never came to this country until 200 years ago.

jesus did not set up welfare organisations and charities, did not write social justice reports for the religious and state authorities to consider, did not set up any Hebrew consultative committees to advise Caesar. He procalaimed the Jubilee which undermined Caesar’s claim to any of the land of Abraham’s covenant. This is what the people of God must do in this country too, and we have the middle eastern histories to give us some direction as to how Jesus confronted poverty and colonisation.

White christian liberals who write social justice reports or work in welfare agencies all live on stolen land, land drenched in the blood of martyrs killed in order for these white people to have a place to live.

Even if we have a self sufficient organic vegie patch in our back yard, the very soil that we grow food in is the decomposed bodies of thousands of generations of Aboriginal people who are one with this land.

No matter what we think of social justice, our very existence in this country is a manifestation and fulfillment of the genocide. We are the empire’s occupation force.

Until we can embrace jubilee principles and return land and wealth to Aboriginal people then all our rhetoric of justice is meaningless, all we do is occupy ourselves in the band-aid industry.

Just like the rest of the third world. Aboriginal poverty and oppression cannot be remedied by any other way but land reform, to return the material and economic basis for life that God gave to them - the exact same economic base that today sustains the invader society.

Jarrod, these comments are not aimed at you or Peace Tree. I have read your writings and am impressed, you are obviously lead by the spirit and have an unusual advantage of an open mind. ( I heard a tape of your alter call and I don’t like alter calls though). I have googled you and Peace Tree and am aware that you have connections with Aboriginal people. It is a relationship with Aboriginal people that is central to tackling Aboriginal oppression, or else they just become objectified as statistics or ideology.

The liberals and radicals I speak of are those of my own generation (I’m 47) who have not explored very far beyond Roman imperial notions of Christendom or white notions of citizenship in their social justice and welfare strategies.

Even radical christian anarchists have in some instances imposed their own colonial theology onto Aboriginal dreaming resulting in much conflict, e.g. Jabiluka plowshares action.

I am inspired that the yoof are exploring these issues today. I fear my generation has let you down terribly. The Howard years un-did every Aboriginal gain of the 20th century. In the white-wash of it all, those of us who fought for those gains in the latter part of last century have remained silent and passive while all the damage was re-done.

You will find little leadership from the white church if you are to pursue the Jubilee implications in this country. There are a few burnt out old farts around but they tend to keep their distance from the institutional church. Our generation did not break much new ground in the church anyway. Anything we learnt about Aboriginality was from Aboriginal people mainly outside of the church.

But there is a terrible vacuum in the white church that needs to be filled and I hope over time that you will be a part of that filling.

The various autonomous Aboriginal groups within the mainstream churches are great, but the rest of the church has simply referred Aboriginal issues to them and carried on in their merry white way. The core issue for the church is not “Aboriginal issues” but rather our own issues as members of the invader/coloniser society. it is not appropriate for a range f reasons to simply pass the buck to Aboriginal people to solve.

It is nice to be inspired by Aboriginal prayers and statements and some churches have had some amazing litergies that include Aboriginal ceremony. But we cannot simply be a parasite on Aboriginal spirituality, consume it in books or observe it on stage or at church. We must engage with it in God’s creation, and in so doing find our own dreaming and spirituality, to embrace that which is our business. To set an agenda for the white church based on self activity rather than detatched commentary.

Just as the gentiles, tax collectors and centurians joined Jesus’ jubilee movement, the gentile church in Australia has a place in the kingdom of god on this continent too. We must join the people of the covenant in this country just as the gentiles had to join, and receive the blessings of, Abraham’s covenant in Israel to be in the Kingdom of God.

Anyway, I’ve ranted too much.

All the best

JT