Jesus had it coming to him: An Epistle to Pharisees in Training

“We know all about it, Kevin. The only problem is you wrote a letter about it.” – United Church official Brian Thorpe to the author after his firing without cause for exposing child murder in the church’s Alberni Indian Residential School, March 1995

“Christianity sounds like a wonderful idea. Somebody should try it sometime.” – George Bernard Shaw 

If I were you, I wouldn’t read this. After all, you’ve been warned about me. For unwanted truths are like mustard seeds: they can take root anywhere; even in the hollowed (hallowed?) halls of Christian seminaries.

Fortunately, I’m not you, though not for want of trying. I once sought fervently to be a terminally nice Canadian Christian. But germs of subversion lingered with intent, even on my first day as a fresh fish waiting to be fried at the Vancouver School of Theology (VST). And that was even before I saw Professor Jim “Lard Ass” McCullum shove his considerable bulk to the front of the smorgasbord line at the hog fest in the VST chapel.

For one thing, I wondered why everyone at VST smiled all the time. It felt like I was an orderly again among the overly sedated inmates on Ward Two West of the UBC Psychiatric Hospital. After my first day as an official pious bunny, my jaws ached, for woe betide any of us who didn’t compulsively grin back at complete strangers. When in Rome, after all.

The official greeting to us bright-eyed Tartuffes was delivered by a guy who had Sleaze Merchant written all over him: VST Principal Bud Phillips, a former public relations whiz kid who had found his true calling teaching pre-clergy how to serve both God and Mammon. Bud Boy let rip with a homily that, while not exactly scriptural, hit all the right points required by career conscious clerics, beginning with something Bud called “paying the rent”.

“You can’t do anything in ministry without paying the rent first, like in any family,” the guy said with a flashy, Fortune 500 smile.

A few years later, when I was older and slightly wiser, I would have lobbed back a wry quip about the futility of paying rent on a condemned building. But I was still stupid back then. I even put money in the collection plate on Sunday mornings.

Nobody ever explained to me or my fellow seminarians who we were to pay the rent to. I had to find that out for myself the hard way, starting from old Bud himself. For that same year, he sacked two VST staff members, both single moms, to free up the funds to pay for the renovation of his private residence. Being Canadians, nobody at VST objected, except me, of course. But that’s another story. 

The other term El Jefe spouted incessantly at us like it meant something was “the church family”, or just “the Family.” His constant repetition of it like a monastic mantra evoked in me images of Don Vito Corleone and his clan from The Godfather, and of their goombahs making late-night drives to the local body dumping grounds.

I didn’t realize at the time how accurate the comparison was.

Be that as it may, and it usually is, I knew after only a week in Lotus Land that I was not only being conned but deliberately groomed into automated compliance with something unseen and grim. As Lard Ass McCullum instructed us in our Church Ministry class when he wasn’t stuffing his face with pastry, 

“Everyone has their own personal notions of God and ministry. But those become secondary and unimportant once you become a paid accountable minister in the Church.”

It wasn’t just our own “notions” of God that we were to trash. Also to be nicely terminated were our ideas of ethics and justice, as well as the law itself: especially when it came to covering up all those church crimes and cadavers that nobody ever wants to talk about.

It all made sense from a Pharisaic point of view, I suppose, for the same reason that it remains the policy in the Catholic Church and every other denomination for child rapists and killers to be protected and victims silenced whenever the filth surfaces. Clearly, God, like Don Vito Corleone, cannot tolerate a snitch.

Sixty thousand dead Indian residential school children can’t be wrong.

“But what does all that have to do with innocent, evangelical me?” I can hear you budding pastors quibble. 

Give it time. You’ll find out.

In the meanwhile, in the way of a pause and speaking of Jesus, let me bow out for a moment to offer this apt theological insight from my good friend, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. For all you non-literati, Kurt had the personally aggrandizing experience of occupying a ringside seat at the incineration of 40,000 fellow human beings by Allied bombers at Dresden, Germany in February 1945, which helped him sell a lot of books and get rich and famous.  

“The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.

“The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, “Oh, boy! They sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!”

“And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.



“The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a real pain in the neck to people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

“So, the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.



“And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this:

“From this moment on, I will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections."

Ah, if only it were true, eh? But then you’d all be out of a job as future, gainfully employed Pulpit Pounders.

Luckily for all of you, God remains on the side of the biggest battalions, to quote Napoleon. And that's one of the reasons why you never hear about me anymore or all those sliced and diced aboriginal children. And why Jesus, that itinerant nobody, clearly had it coming to him, like I did, for causing such an unpleasant disturbance in the Temple that one time.

Now go whitewash a tomb. And say hi to Caiaphas from us.

…………………

Kevin Annett is a graduate of the Vancouver School of Theology (May 1990) and a former ordained clergyman in the United Church of Canada. He was fired without cause in January 1995 and then “defrocked” without due process and publicly blacklisted after he exposed the murder of Indian residential school children and the theft of native land by the United Church and its business partners, the B.C. government and Weyerhaeuser Ltd. 

In the words of former government minister and church official John Cashore, “We couldn’t let Kevin upset the applecart over the Ahousaht land deal.” (March 3, 1997)

Since the spring of 1995, Kevin has led the campaign in Canada and globally to expose and prosecute genocide and crimes against children by governments, churches, and corporations. He has been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Order of Canada. In 2004, Kevin was adopted into the Ojibway indigenous nation in Winnipeg and given the name Eagle Strong Voice. He is the author of twenty-two books and the award-winning documentary film Unrepentant (2007).

Kevin Annett’s work and witness is chronicled at www.murderbydecree.com and www.republicofkanata.org and on his weekly blog program, Sundays at 3 pm pacific on www.bbsradio.com/herewestand. 

For a complete history of this campaign see: Understanding the Present Tyranny: The world’s oldest and greatest Crime, and the man who has brought it to light since 1992 An exclusive, illustrated interview with Kevin Annett – Murder by Decree. 

Contact Kevin at angelfire101@protonmail.com 

“Kevin Annett is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past. What has been done to him is outrageous.” – Dr. Noam Chomsky, August 11, 2002

“Kevin’s actions spoke louder than words. He put everything in his life on the line for our people but that made him a lot of powerful enemies. Kevin’s the only white man I’ve ever trusted.” – Ahousaht traditional elder George Hamilton, Port Alberni, May 13, 2005

“Kevin Annett made us all sit up and take notice.” – Member of Parliament Gary Merasty, March 21, 2008

“If there’s one man who’s exposed genocide in Canada and brought about justice for thousands of people, it’s Kevin Annett. He’s what my people call a righteous soul.” – Civil Rights veteran Colia Clark, New York, January 6, 2014