Empire and Christianity
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Cherokee theologian Randy Woodley contrasts Western Christianity’s emphasis on salvation through doctrine with the healing work of Jesus:
People who believe themselves to be at the top of a hierarchy must find ways to maintain power. Doctrines can be a handy tool for doing so. If you can convince the masses that a reward awaits them in heaven, you’ve got a way to keep the restive crowds a bit quieter, more compliant. And if you can convince them that they’re actually sinful through and through—and that as sinners, they’ve got to keep themselves in line in order to have a chance at God’s grace—well, you’ve got it made. Your power can continue to expand.
One such doctrine was the belief that all people are born sinful. This is often called the doctrine of original sin … [which] fits nicely with the dominant church’s presumed authority to either grant or withhold salvation….
What Christian theology calls “sin” Native American understandings often describe as imbalance, or broken harmony. These different terms point toward the same spiritual reality. Salvation then, is restoring the harmony and imbalance through healing.
By reducing the idea of salvation to a series of formulas, or disciplines, or prayers, or creeds, the Western church missed the whole point. Salvation … was not something that could be bought with money, power, or obedience to words in a creed. Salvation is about one thing: healing. And not healing for later, in the by and by, but healing for right now.
Even today, many people allow doctrine to determine their idea of salvation rather than understanding salvation as the way God heals us all, including the rest of the community of creation. I would love to see people grasp this important concept: that healing is a much better way to think of God’s greatest gift than salvation is.
Woodley describes how Jesus offers collective healing rather than individual salvation:
When we look at Jesus through the lens of Indigenous and Hebrew understandings rather than imperial American and Roman frameworks, we see that his ministry was fundamentally about restoring wholeness, healing bodies, bringing outcasts back into community, challenging unjust systems, and mending broken relationships…. Healing is the bigger picture of God’s vision that Western Christianity calls “salvation,” and healing is for all of us now.
Perhaps most importantly, healing language better reflects the Creator’s heart for shalom: that comprehensive peace and abundance in which all creation coexists in harmony. Shalom, and the Indigenous visions of harmony, contains a justice and wholeness that extends far beyond individual souls to encompass whole communities, cultures, and the land itself.
The path forward must be about stripping away the imperial distortions to reveal the Jesus who heals rather than conquers, who restores rather than erases, who empowers rather than overpowers. In this understanding, salvation becomes what it was always meant to be: the healing of all things.
With thanks to Linda Carnegie for sharing.
