Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (review)

To claim, as some have, that the 1994 slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda was a brainchild of Christianity is probably an overstatement. Nevertheless, while apologists for the churches have 'denied institutional responsibility, blaming the participation of Christians in the genocide on individual sinfulness' (p. 7), Longman's book offers a provocative yet dispassionate narrative of how and why even church-going, God-fearing types 'came to mass each day to pray [and then] went out to kill' (p. 3). For answer, Longman turns to the ambivalent role of religion in public life: 'if religious institutions become too closely tied to state power,' he hypothesizes, 'they have the capacity to legitimize abhorrent states' actions' (p. 323). Translation in context: 'The churches in Rwanda helped to set a moral climate in which participation in genocide was an acceptable behaviour. . . . As the genocide unfolded, church members heard nothing from their leaders that would contradict the established belief that targeting Tutsi ibyitso was consistent with Christian belief' (p. 322).

Longman, who stayed in Rwanda for 'two extended periods' (p. 27), first in 1992-3 and then in 1995-6 as head of the Human Rights Watch office, develops his argument into ten chapters grouped into two main parts along with a long introduction and a short conclusion. The introduction sets the stage by recalling how the 1994 'carnage in Rwanda clearly qualifies as genocide by even the most restricted definitions' (p. 4, fn. 1) and how, in this 'overwhelmingly Christian country', 'the church buildings . . . served as Rwanda's primary killing fields' (p. 4).

The first part of the book revolves around the contention that, from the earliest days, instead of ally[ing] itself with the 'poor and disenfranchised', church leadership 'repeatedly reiterated the commitment to alliance' with the powerful state 'patrimonial structures' and ethnic politics (chapters 3-5). In Part 2 of the book, the author turns to a more localized account embedded in empirical findings from a comparative study of two Presbyterian parishes: Kirinda and Biguhu. The Kirinda chapter 'aptly demonstrates the historically dominant disposition of Rwanda's churches as instruments of the powerful' devoted to 'helping to create a local elite and maintain its dominance over the general population through a patrimonial network' (p. 201). In contrast, the Biguhu chapter illustrates the ways in which 'the church presented a challenge to the dominance of local elites', resolved as it was to 'ally itself with the less powerful, to seek to create opportunities for the marginalized and to break the local system of patronage and privilege' (p. 201). It thus comes as no surprise that, as the author strives to show in Chapter 9, 'the church in Kirinda was at the centre of the genocide there, while the church in Biguhu was regarded as a hindrance and targeted by the genocide' (p. 201).

In the final instance, Longman concludes that the involvement of Christian churches in the Rwandan genocide finds its explanation in Gramsci's prediction according to which a period of crisis allows alternative configurations of power to attempt to assert themselves within civil society. For the Rwanda flock, the outcome was straightforward: 'The ruling classes sought to reconfigure their power and reassert their dominance by co-opting some people who were challenging them, which they did using ethnicity as a wedge, and by using coercion, using violence against not only Tutsi but also some moderate Hutu' (p. 300).

Overall, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda is a book that deserves to be widely read. It is both an insightful account of past failures and a call to the very churches that stood by while a million were slaughtered in 1994 to now rise to the occasion and make sure that it never happens again.

Still, there are a few areas of concern that readers should keep in mind when reading this book. First, while the contrasting experiences of the Kirinda and Biguhu parishes are fascinating and important, Longman's presentation of such a clear-cut...