People will stridently defend their Sunday-school version of Christianity the Good. My mum was raised in the Salvation army surrounded by genocidal missionary zeal. She became a United Church Sunday school teacher. She taught us about how great and good Christianity and Christians are.
Christian Churches ran residential schools until 1969. The United Church publicly admitted that their residential schools were evil in August 1986, when I was 22 and long past tolerating church. The last residential school in Canada was closed in 1997, when I was 33. By then I think my mum had stopped going to church, she had certainly stopped teaching Sunday school.
I was being “taught” in Sunday school while children were being tormented and killed by priests and nuns and ministers and Christian school administrations. My mum was a 50 year old Sunday School teacher when Churches had been filling the mass graves her entire life. And it went on.
It was near the turn of the century when it was in the news a lot when I first talked to my mum about the atrocities of the Canadian Indian residential school system. And she said outright that that could not be true. That could not have happened. It could not have happened because she believed the Sunday-school version of Christianity the Good that she had learned and then taught.
It is a lie.
