Orson Scott Card's fascinating science fiction book, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996), is the story of how a team of scientists living in a future when the Earth can no longer sustain human civilization decide to erase their hurtful past by creating an alternate history. The team identifies the discovery of the Americas by Columbus as the axial moment when their own past went sour, and it sends three of its members back into the past to prevent Columbus from returning to Spain and to build up the Indian cultures of the Caribbean so that they are the equal of Europe. These three also recreate their Caribbean empire in ways that are more just and less violent than would otherwise have been the case.Pastwatch is not only a speculative novel proposing an alternate history. It is also a work of theology proposing a different kind of Christianity. As Card makes clear, the Christianity Spain brought to the Americas was entirely able to preach a gentle Christ while visiting the horrors of exploitation, slavery, and violent racialism on the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Card's Pastwatch team consciously seeks to create a different kind of Christianity, one that integrates local religious ideas into an adapted Christian faith that actually reflects the teachings of Christ. Card cleverly works his theology into the story so that it does not seem preachy or churchy while successfully driving home the point that our modern American society is built on the huge injustice Europeans visited on indigenous peoples. It also drives home the point that the Europeans used a sordid form of Christianity as one weapon in their violent arsenal. Card's theological message is that things didn't have to be the way they were had so-called Christian societies actually practiced Christ's teachings with other peoples and faiths.
And that is food for thought.
