In 1994, the small East African state of Rwanda was torn by one of the century's most brutal waves of ethnic and political violence. In a three month period from April to June, the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), working with trained civilian militia, systematically massacred as many as 1 million of the country's 7.7 million people. The primary targets of the violence were members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, who were chased from their homes, gathered in churches and other public buildings, ostensibly for their protection, then methodically murdered, first with grenades and guns, then with machetes and other traditional weapons. In the weeks that followed, death squads carefully hunted down and killed survivors of the large-scale massacres. While the exact portion of the Tutsi population killed in the genocide cannot be accurately determined, it seems fair to estimate that at least 80 percent of the Tutsi living in the country lost their lives.(1)

In the aftermath of this horrific bloodbath, Rwanda's Christian churches have faced extensive criticism. Many journalists, scholars, human rights activists, politicians, and even some church personnel have accused the churches not simply of failing effectively to oppose the genocide but of active complicity in the violence.(2) According to a report by a World Council of Churches team that visited Rwanda in August 1994, "In every conversation we had with the government and church people alike, the point was brought home to us that the church itself stands tainted, not by passive indifference, but by errors of commission as well."(3) My own research in Rwanda in 1992-93 and 1995-96 confirms these conclusions. According to my findings, church personnel and institutions were actively involved in the program of resistance to popular pressures for political reform that culminated in the 1994 genocide, and numerous priests, pastors, nuns, brothers, catechists, and Catholic and Protestant lay leaders supported, participated in, or helped to organize the killings.(4)

As the contents of this volume indicate, that religious institutions should be implicated in a genocide is not exceptional. In Rwanda, however, unlike the genocides of Armenians in Turkey, Jews in Europe in World War II, and Muslims in Bosnia, and to the genocidal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in India and Christians and various Muslim groups in Lebanon, religion did not serve as an ascriptive identifier to demarcate a social group as an essential "other."(5) Both Catholic and Protestant churches in Rwanda are multi-ethnic, and the genocide in Rwanda occurred within religious groups. In most communities members of a church parish killed their fellow parishioners and even, in a number of cases, their own pastor or priest.

Although religious identities did not separate perpetrators from victims in Rwanda, my research indicates that religion was nevertheless an essential element in the Rwandan genocide. Contrary to the claims of some church authorities,(6) the involvement of the churches went beyond a simple failure to act in the face of atrocities or the individual transgressions of church members. As I will attempt to demonstrate in this paper, the culpability of the churches lies not only in their historic role in teaching obedience to state authority and in constructing ethnic identities but also in their modern role as centers of social, political, and economic power, allied with the state, actively practicing ethnic discrimination, and working to preserve the status quo.