AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND THE GNADDENHUTTEN MASSACRE

One of my favorite books as a teenager was Zane Grey’s The Spirit of the Border.  I was thrilled by this tale of quiet courage in Moravian Christian missionaries to the Native Americans of the Ohio River Valley set against the earthquake valor of the famous Indian fighter, Lewis Wetzel, at the close of the American Revolution.  Nearly all the characters are historical realities excepting the twin brothers, Jim and Joe Downs, the sisters they love, and some of the Indian leaders.  A key element is the destruction of the missionaries’ Village of Peace – they called it Gnaddenhutten – by Indian warriors incited by American renegades while an equally real band of American militia looks on because they are not large enough to interfere without bringing certain destruction on themselves.

As an adult with leadership responsibilities in the Christian community – the American Christian community – I recently re-discovered this book and did a little research into its historicity.  I discovered the truth that the Christian Indians were massacred by that very body of American militia led by David Williamson whom Grey depicts as helpless to intervene.  The band – actually twice the size reported by Grey – gave the Indians a night to pray and prepare themselves for death before bludgeoning and scalping them into eternity.  The missionary leaders, David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder, were not present.  They were later captured by the British and tried and acquitted of treason against Great Britain.

The historical incident should be as shameful to our people as it was thrilling to the heart of the fourteen-year-old boy reading the fictionalized account.  It becomes more horrific by the very attempt to sanitize it.  Yet in either version it seems to spotlight the struggle for us Americans – since the beginning – between the God-breathed opportunity to build a shining city on a hill and the human demand to build a city in the image of our warrior and entrepreneurial tradition.  Reality is both sides of the American character are exceptional and have been used by God to temper and activate each other.  Reality is that the city on a hill metaphor – whether spoken by Isaiah or Ronald Reagan – reflects our God-given nature and needs to be in command when we strike out into the wilderness on the shoulders of the other side, the Wetzel side.

 

  Our God is a God of quiet courage in the middle of sacrifice, forgiveness, and mercy.  He revealed His plan for every social and political institution we hold dear in words uttered in His Name from New England pulpits that gave rise to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.  He shaped our character and identity as a nation in the first three Great Awakenings.  He also gave us the spirit of aggressive courage that invents the plow that breaks the Great Plains and feeds the world – but also breaks people and fights tooth and nail to preserve an institution as foul as slavery until other people – fueled by that same spirit of courageous aggression – put an end to it.  Both spirits are of God, but the latter must be the servant of the former if we would be the people we have always been called to be, just as we Christians say the flesh must become the servant of soul and spirit.  And we need to remember that God’s unimaginable power is released only in submission to His known will, however counter-intuitive it may seem.  At that point we become people of redemption, restoration, and resurrection.  We become the only nation in history to re-build nations like Germany and Japan after having defeated them in war.  We become uniquely transparent in acknowledging the areas in which we fall short – such as our treatment of Black and Native peoples – and in seeking to fully right those wrongs.  And we become the first to come to the rescue of even those nations that despise us when they are in distress.

The American track record in caring and generosity – not to mention mercy and forgiveness – is unmatched among the nations.  We are not perfect.  But we do not need to paper over events like the Gnaddenhutten Massacre.  We need to address them in repentance and humility.  And we need to remember the words of the only King we will ever need.  “Remain in me and I will remain in you.  No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine.  Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.”  This is not a call to the nation first; it is first a call to the people of faith on whom the nation rests.