Updated with missing Dean Blackwell info.
Wovoka, the Northern Paiute prophet also known as Jack Wilson, received his defining vision during the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889. He reported dying, traveling to heaven, speaking with God, and returning with a commission: live morally, work peacefully, and dance a traditional round dance so that the dead would return, the land would be renewed, and a new age would begin. In the letters he sent to visiting delegations he wrote that “Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud.” Many of those delegates—Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and others—took the words literally. They understood Wovoka himself as the physical return of Christ, the long-awaited Messiah who would restore the ancestors and sweep away the catastrophe of reservation life. Some later accounts describe him displaying marks on his hands and feet. Wovoka himself, speaking later to the ethnographer James Mooney, presented himself as a prophet rather than as Christ incarnate. The distinction mattered less to the people who had traveled hundreds of miles to hear him. They needed a Messiah who spoke their language of loss and renewal.
Wovoka’s message was already a synthesis. Raised after his father’s death in the household of the Presbyterian rancher David Wilson, he absorbed English, Bible stories, and millennial expectation. He also knew the earlier 1870 Ghost Dance associated with the Paiute dreamer Wodziwob, Great Basin round-dance ceremonialism, and elements of the Indian Shaker Church. The resulting religion was neither a simple borrowing of Christianity nor a purely Indigenous revival. It was a Paiute response, in Christian vocabulary, to the collapse of the old world. The dance spread because it addressed immediate hunger, disease, and dispossession, not because participants first consulted a table of nations.
He did not always claim to be Jesus. In later interviews with ethnographer James Mooney he described himself as a prophet who had received a revelation. However, he spoke of Jesus being “now upon the earth” and appearing “like a cloud,” referenced resurrection of the dead, and in some accounts allowed or encouraged stigmata-like marks on his hands and feet. Visiting delegations from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Plains tribes frequently interpreted him as the physical return of Christ—the long-awaited Messiah who would restore the ancestors, renew the land, and remove white settlers. Some accounts quote him identifying with the Jesus who had earlier been rejected and killed by whites. This tribal reading turned a relatively pacifist Paiute teaching into a more apocalyptic hope among groups facing reservation confinement, buffalo collapse, and cultural pressure.
The resulting Ghost Dance spread rapidly. Participants danced in circles, sometimes for days, often around a central pole or tree representing the Messiah. Among the Lakota it acquired “ghost shirts” believed to offer protection, an intensification Wovoka himself did not originate. U.S. authorities viewed the movement as a threat; the tensions contributed to the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890. Wovoka later expressed sorrow that his message had been reinterpreted in ways that brought violence.
This episode sits inside a much longer pattern of Christianity among Native American peoples. Catholic missions began in the Spanish and French colonial periods; Protestant missions expanded in the 19th century. Conversion was sometimes coerced, sometimes pragmatic, and sometimes sincere. Over time many communities produced hybrid forms rather than simple replacement of older ways.
Examples of blending include:
Armstrongism for some strange reason had never made any attempt to recruit native Americans, though the church had many in the Arizona/Utah strip. It certainly would never have had any historical or organizational tie to Wovoka, the Ghost Dance, or widespread Native messianic movements. Armstrongist literature did occasionally mention native Americans in the British Israelism mythology. In our literature Native Americans were instead identified as descendants of Tiras, son of Japheth (Genesis 10), not as Israelites.
Dean Blackwell promoted and identified American Indians as descendants of Tiras, a son of Japheth listed in Genesis 10:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:5. The 1957 WCG reprint article “Where Did the American Indian Come From?” argued that Tiras’s descendants migrated from Asia Minor through the Black Sea region and eventually reached the Americas. It linked tribal names such as Tarascan, Tinné (Thyni), Amazons (near the Amazon River), Mayas, Dures, Turas, and others to Tiras. Physical descriptions from ancient sources—reddish-brown skin and long black hair worn in a crest—were said to match Native American features. Some traditions of an eastern origin across water were cited in support. Blackwell’s presentations aligned with this framework rather than originating a separate theory.
Blackwell worked within the narrow myths of Aremstrongism that treated Genesis 10 as a finished ethnographic map of the post-Flood world. In that framework every people must descend from one of Noah’s sons. The American Indian, whose presence in the Western Hemisphere seemed to leave a blank in the Table of Nations, was assigned to Tiras, the last-named son of Japheth. The argument, circulated in The Plain Truth and Ambassador College materials, ran as follows: Tiras settled in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea (the river Tyras/Dniester); his descendants appear in classical sources under names such as Tauri, Thyni, Carians, and Amazons; those same names, or close variants, reappear among Native groups (Tarascan, Tinne/Athabaskan, Maya, Amazon); therefore the main migration into the Americas came east-to-west across the Atlantic rather than west-to-east across Beringia. Skin color on Minoan frescoes, the Nahuatl root atl (“water”), temple names like teocalli, and traditions of bearded white culture-heroes were offered as supporting links.
Wovoka’s message was already a synthesis. Raised after his father’s death in the household of the Presbyterian rancher David Wilson, he absorbed English, Bible stories, and millennial expectation. He also knew the earlier 1870 Ghost Dance associated with the Paiute dreamer Wodziwob, Great Basin round-dance ceremonialism, and elements of the Indian Shaker Church. The resulting religion was neither a simple borrowing of Christianity nor a purely Indigenous revival. It was a Paiute response, in Christian vocabulary, to the collapse of the old world. The dance spread because it addressed immediate hunger, disease, and dispossession, not because participants first consulted a table of nations.
He did not always claim to be Jesus. In later interviews with ethnographer James Mooney he described himself as a prophet who had received a revelation. However, he spoke of Jesus being “now upon the earth” and appearing “like a cloud,” referenced resurrection of the dead, and in some accounts allowed or encouraged stigmata-like marks on his hands and feet. Visiting delegations from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Plains tribes frequently interpreted him as the physical return of Christ—the long-awaited Messiah who would restore the ancestors, renew the land, and remove white settlers. Some accounts quote him identifying with the Jesus who had earlier been rejected and killed by whites. This tribal reading turned a relatively pacifist Paiute teaching into a more apocalyptic hope among groups facing reservation confinement, buffalo collapse, and cultural pressure.
The resulting Ghost Dance spread rapidly. Participants danced in circles, sometimes for days, often around a central pole or tree representing the Messiah. Among the Lakota it acquired “ghost shirts” believed to offer protection, an intensification Wovoka himself did not originate. U.S. authorities viewed the movement as a threat; the tensions contributed to the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890. Wovoka later expressed sorrow that his message had been reinterpreted in ways that brought violence.
This episode sits inside a much longer pattern of Christianity among Native American peoples. Catholic missions began in the Spanish and French colonial periods; Protestant missions expanded in the 19th century. Conversion was sometimes coerced, sometimes pragmatic, and sometimes sincere. Over time many communities produced hybrid forms rather than simple replacement of older ways.
Examples of blending include:
- The Ghost Dance itself, which used Christian millennial language and ethics inside an Indigenous ritual frame.
- The Native American Church (Peyote Road), which treats peyote as a sacrament given by the Creator, often compared to Communion, while teaching a moral code that overlaps with Christian commandments and emphasizing prayer, family, and sobriety. Some branches explicitly call it the Native American Church of Jesus Christ.
- Indian Shaker Church, another 19th-century movement that combined shaking/healing rites with Christian elements.
- Local practices such as Native-language hymns, powwows dedicated to Jesus, dual participation (attending both church and traditional ceremonies), and Catholic or Protestant services that incorporate kinship values, generosity, and land-centered spirituality.
Armstrongism for some strange reason had never made any attempt to recruit native Americans, though the church had many in the Arizona/Utah strip. It certainly would never have had any historical or organizational tie to Wovoka, the Ghost Dance, or widespread Native messianic movements. Armstrongist literature did occasionally mention native Americans in the British Israelism mythology. In our literature Native Americans were instead identified as descendants of Tiras, son of Japheth (Genesis 10), not as Israelites.
Dean Blackwell promoted and identified American Indians as descendants of Tiras, a son of Japheth listed in Genesis 10:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:5. The 1957 WCG reprint article “Where Did the American Indian Come From?” argued that Tiras’s descendants migrated from Asia Minor through the Black Sea region and eventually reached the Americas. It linked tribal names such as Tarascan, Tinné (Thyni), Amazons (near the Amazon River), Mayas, Dures, Turas, and others to Tiras. Physical descriptions from ancient sources—reddish-brown skin and long black hair worn in a crest—were said to match Native American features. Some traditions of an eastern origin across water were cited in support. Blackwell’s presentations aligned with this framework rather than originating a separate theory.
Blackwell worked within the narrow myths of Aremstrongism that treated Genesis 10 as a finished ethnographic map of the post-Flood world. In that framework every people must descend from one of Noah’s sons. The American Indian, whose presence in the Western Hemisphere seemed to leave a blank in the Table of Nations, was assigned to Tiras, the last-named son of Japheth. The argument, circulated in The Plain Truth and Ambassador College materials, ran as follows: Tiras settled in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea (the river Tyras/Dniester); his descendants appear in classical sources under names such as Tauri, Thyni, Carians, and Amazons; those same names, or close variants, reappear among Native groups (Tarascan, Tinne/Athabaskan, Maya, Amazon); therefore the main migration into the Americas came east-to-west across the Atlantic rather than west-to-east across Beringia. Skin color on Minoan frescoes, the Nahuatl root atl (“water”), temple names like teocalli, and traditions of bearded white culture-heroes were offered as supporting links.
In a 1979 Bible study on Acts 17, Blackwell referenced Psalm 74:17 ("Thou hast set all the borders of the earth") and explained that God designed different groups for specific regions: "God really made the Blacks where they were best to dwell on the rich continent of Africa and God made the Orientals by their features, they're the best qualified to dwell in Asia; and God made the Shimites whereby their features, they're the best able to dwell in the territory that He put them in." Native Americans were implicitly placed in the Americas under the same principle of divinely assigned borders.
Blackwell presented WCG's racial teachings to many congregations in the 1970s. According to accounts of those presentations, the church's oral tradition (shaped by British Israelism) placed descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh-identified as the British and American peoples-at the top of a hierarchy that would rule other nations eternally "for the good of all humanity." Other groups, including people of color, occupied lower positions. Blackwell cited Deuteronomy 32:8-9 as support: God divided mankind and set boundaries "according to the number of the sons of Israel." Critics of the teaching have noted that the verse more likely refers to "sons of God" in older textual traditions and that Blackwell's application extended it into an eternal political arrangement. He also applied Isaiah 19 in ways that emphasized service to Israel. Afro-American members, he claimed, accepted the explanation once given. Native Americans, as descendants of Tiras (Japheth), fell into the category of Gentile nations under this scheme.
These views were part of WCG's mid-20th-century interpretation of prophecy, the Millennium, and the Kingdom of God, in which converted members of "Israelitish" descent would serve as rulers and teachers. The teachings treated racial and national differences as God-ordained rather than purely cultural or environmental
The method is characteristic of Armstrongist ethnology. It privileges name resemblance over systematic linguistics, treats isolated classical notices as tribal genealogies, and assumes the Bible’s silence on the Western Hemisphere must be filled by the one remaining Japhethite. Daniel G. Brinton’s 1891 The American Race is quoted for the Tarascan god Taras, yet Brinton himself was recording surface similarities, not writing a migration history. “Amazon,” “Maya,” and “Tinne” belong to unrelated language families (Tupi-Guarani, Mayan, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) and are not demonstrably the same words as the classical ethnonyms. Nahuatl teocalli (“god-house”) and Greek theos are coincidental. The Atlantic takes its name from the Greek Atlas, not from an indigenous atlan. Limited pre-Columbian contacts—Norse in Vinland, possible Polynesian traces in South America—do not account for the founding populations of two continents.
Modern evidence points the other way. Archaeology, craniofacial studies, and especially genetics place the primary ancestry of Native Americans in Siberian and East Asian populations that crossed Beringia in the late Pleistocene, with later Holocene movements and modest extra-continental admixture. Mitochondrial haplogroups A, B, C, D and X, and Y-chromosome haplogroup Q, form a coherent New World pattern whose closest relatives lie in Asia, not the Aegean or Thrace. Josephus identified Tiras with the Thracians; later commentators linked the name to Sea Peoples (Teresh/Tursha) or Tyrsenians. None of those Mediterranean groups match Native American genomes or the deep time depth of American linguistic diversity.
Wovoka himself sits awkwardly inside the Tiras scheme. A Northern Paiute of Mason Valley, Nevada, he inherited Great Basin ceremonialism, the 1870 Ghost Dance, and Christian language absorbed while living with the Wilson family. His 1889 vision spoke of the return of the dead, the restoration of the land, and a moral code that mixed Paiute ethics with images of Jesus and coming judgment. The dance spread because it answered the catastrophe of the 1880s, not because dancers believed themselves descendants of Black Sea Tauri. Armstrongist writers who later mapped all Indians onto Tiras were doing, in reverse, what Wovoka had done: folding a living Native prophet into a closed biblical genealogy so that no people would be left outside Scripture. The difference is decisive. Wovoka's synthesis grew from Paiute experience and the crisis on the ground. The Tiras identification grew from a mid-twentieth-century need to complete Genesis 10.
The contrast illuminates two different afterlives of the same vision. Across Indian Country, Christianity took root in many forms-Catholic missions, Protestant churches, the Native American Church with its peyote sacrament and Christian moral language, Indian Shaker practice, Native-language hymns, and dual participation in both church and traditional ceremony. Today a majority of Native Americans identify as Christian while continuing to honor language, kinship, land, and ceremony. These living syntheses, like Wovoka's dance, grew from particular histories of loss and endurance. The Tiras theory, by contrast, was an attempt to make that history fit a table of names.
In short, Wovoka's movement is one vivid late-19th-century example of how Christian ideas of a returning Messiah, resurrection, and a renewed earth could be received and recast inside Native frameworks. Many Native people have since made Christianity their own while retaining heritage; Armstrongism remained a separate, Europe-focused interpretive system with only passing ethnographic interest in Native origins.
Wovoka's letters still speak more directly than any later ethnology: Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are alive again. Dance, live cleanly, and do not be afraid when the earth shakes. That message was heard, reinterpreted, and danced by people who already knew who they were.
Modern evidence points the other way. Archaeology, craniofacial studies, and especially genetics place the primary ancestry of Native Americans in Siberian and East Asian populations that crossed Beringia in the late Pleistocene, with later Holocene movements and modest extra-continental admixture. Mitochondrial haplogroups A, B, C, D and X, and Y-chromosome haplogroup Q, form a coherent New World pattern whose closest relatives lie in Asia, not the Aegean or Thrace. Josephus identified Tiras with the Thracians; later commentators linked the name to Sea Peoples (Teresh/Tursha) or Tyrsenians. None of those Mediterranean groups match Native American genomes or the deep time depth of American linguistic diversity.
Wovoka himself sits awkwardly inside the Tiras scheme. A Northern Paiute of Mason Valley, Nevada, he inherited Great Basin ceremonialism, the 1870 Ghost Dance, and Christian language absorbed while living with the Wilson family. His 1889 vision spoke of the return of the dead, the restoration of the land, and a moral code that mixed Paiute ethics with images of Jesus and coming judgment. The dance spread because it answered the catastrophe of the 1880s, not because dancers believed themselves descendants of Black Sea Tauri. Armstrongist writers who later mapped all Indians onto Tiras were doing, in reverse, what Wovoka had done: folding a living Native prophet into a closed biblical genealogy so that no people would be left outside Scripture. The difference is decisive. Wovoka's synthesis grew from Paiute experience and the crisis on the ground. The Tiras identification grew from a mid-twentieth-century need to complete Genesis 10.
The contrast illuminates two different afterlives of the same vision. Across Indian Country, Christianity took root in many forms-Catholic missions, Protestant churches, the Native American Church with its peyote sacrament and Christian moral language, Indian Shaker practice, Native-language hymns, and dual participation in both church and traditional ceremony. Today a majority of Native Americans identify as Christian while continuing to honor language, kinship, land, and ceremony. These living syntheses, like Wovoka's dance, grew from particular histories of loss and endurance. The Tiras theory, by contrast, was an attempt to make that history fit a table of names.
In short, Wovoka's movement is one vivid late-19th-century example of how Christian ideas of a returning Messiah, resurrection, and a renewed earth could be received and recast inside Native frameworks. Many Native people have since made Christianity their own while retaining heritage; Armstrongism remained a separate, Europe-focused interpretive system with only passing ethnographic interest in Native origins.
Wovoka's letters still speak more directly than any later ethnology: Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are alive again. Dance, live cleanly, and do not be afraid when the earth shakes. That message was heard, reinterpreted, and danced by people who already knew who they were.
13 comments:
As far as I can tell, all religions have miracle stories, divinely inspired men, visions from some god, and fulfilled prophecies. None of it can really be proven unless the "proof" comes from believing the stories passed down from "witnesses" who cannot be cross examined because they died decades, centuries, or millennia ago.
Awesome! Thank you for the additional insights into the history of our shared country, and the shared Christisn experience as well!
BB
Yeah, but in this case, I find what the Native Americans have to say to be much more credible! Us white guys have ancestors who broke all the treaties. Read up on "Trail of Tears". If you have any Native friends, ask them about "boarding school".
Whenever native groups get brought up in regards to Christianity, I always refer to the interaction on the island of Malta with Paul in Acts 28 which is vastly different from the Columbus story. The natives thought the viper snake would take Paul out, but he was protected by God. Of course the healing miracles followed, and many of the natives were healed even though they didn’t share the same faith.
Anyhow the idea of being one with nature or the idea of having great respect towards the land was always associated with the natives. The native Americans had that connection to the land and respecting God’s creation with its animals. Some of those qualities continued where they could. People should read Columbus's letters when he first encountered the natives.
Tank
Excellent essay. If I can add my two cents. I hold the opinion that the Nineteenth Century was a time of great religious turmoil on the North American continent. It ran about 100 years and began in 1790. It was called the Second Great Awakening. It covers the emergence of the Millerites about midway through and its final chapter was written among Native Americans in the form of the Messianic Ghost Dance movement. American society was stressed and Americans began to look for deliverance. This quest for deliverance then metamorphosed into apocalypticism. Out of this roiling cauldron was poured a number of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century religious movements such as Armstrongism.
Back when I was a good Armstrongist, I thought there was evidence that the Tribe that I belong to was descended from Tiras. I used the Hoeh methodology of identifying similarities in names. The Deity of the Tribe was called Tirawa. I thought this was just another form of the name Tiras. The word for buffalo was Taraha which is similar to the Greek Tauros and suggests that maybe the Tribe came out of the Greek sphere like the classical Tirasians. When you hang out with silliness you become silly. The genetics presented in this fine article doesn’t lie.
Scout
Fascinating post. This is very new for me, as a non American. The US certainly has a varied religious history. And that shows on our religious broadcasting here in New Zealand. Mainly from the US, with some local content also. What they all have in common is the almost continuous call for funding, for offerings, or your love gift. By check, credit card or PayPal now, just pick up the phone now or send those dollars in. Some of the programs are from the seventh day Adventists. Like watching a rerun of the old wwcog services, and especially their prophecy updates. Keep these posts coming. Cheers.
The very 1st Church of God bulletins of the 1860's mention native Americans roaming about member cabins in the Dakota's. (alrhough the reprimande grandma Johnson gets "for smoking the pipe" are more interesting). Also coupke of COG's in the Oklahoma Territories late 1800's.
In Mexico I visited "local" Catholic Churches.... A Catholic Vibe yes..... Yet many customs and "dolls" that definitely were not "Catholic" but indigineous.
Most of WCG ideas about native Americans entered through "Dr" Rhea..... and as most WCG extra biblical ideas were nothing more than rehashed 33rd degree Scottish rite Masonry.
Nck
Key thing to remember is that Wovoka was the exception when it comes to the Ghost Dance. It originated in and developed from American Indian spiritualism, not any form of Christianity. This fellow simply rolled some Christian imagery and terminology into it.
I explained this to “Scout“ when he posted his little comment discussing this stuff. He never did get back to me there. Apparently that comment led to this writeup.
Interesting that these Indians were praying for the end of the force that had ended their repeated cycles of conquest, rape, and enslavement. However, they have apparently understood now the benefits of their arrival of the White man. They serve in the American military, and they tend to vote conservative.
“For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. Take note, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, ‘Look! He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look! He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.” (NRSV, Matthew 24:24-26)
A sidebar. First, let me say, I have great sympathy with what happened to Native Americans in the loss of this continent. I am not saying that I approve what their society was before it fell to the Europeans. Like all the human societies I have ever read about, the sins were great. The enmity and division between Native American tribes is something that I witnessed in my early years. The Caddoan people, to which I belong, disliked and distrusted the neighboring Siouan. The Siouan people had the same view of the Caddoans.
I just sympathize with the sheer human suffering. Native Americans experienced what the Armstrongists are fond of describing as the near future of the United States. Native Americans experienced the Apocalypse. They were invaded by swarms of strange people bearing magical weapons and spreading bizarre diseases and a few decades later they had been nearly exterminated. It was like Gerald Waterhouse and his fictional, grisly description of the Assyrians invading the United States. Only it really happened to Native Americans.
My main point is that Armstrongists are victims of George Santayana’s famous statement: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Armstrongists and other modern-day apocalyptic Millerites don’t seem to have learned anything from the Great Disappointment of 1844 or the Ghost Dance event among Native Americans. So you have the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the Waco Siege in 1973 – both cut from the same false Parousiac cloth. But I must admit, when I was an Armstrongist, I was just as naïve.
Scout
There was quite a bit of "soft" racism prevalent at Ambassador College while I attended, nck. We had any number of ministers born and raised in redneck areas, and they really embraced the "times of the gentiles" and "minds of wild animals" teachings. Students who were not from Western European backgrounds had to listen to their heritages being slurred, (by the ministers in the classroom!) and when some students did not seem to like all of the rules, others would make remarks like "Oh, that's because he's Italian!, you know, mind of the gentiles!" Or, "Did you know that she's got a lot of Indian blood? They are just very unstable by nature!" But it seems that the feeding frenzy got around to everybody. Remarks would be made that so and so's IQ was so high that God cannot work with him during this era. And, of all things, Herbert used to say that he had never met a truly converted Jew! Fathom that! (I think that Stan the man remodeled Herbie's mentalities in that regard later in the game) Blatantly racist jokes were told in Ambassador Club! Dr. Martin Luther King certainly got trashed. The prevailing attitudes were just so provincial, and systemic that they became a part of the whole, and have persisted in the minds of stalwart Armstrongites, and even in the minds of some who have left the organization and still have Herbie owning part of the real estate inside of their skulls.
"Symptom of the times?" you might ask. Yes, partially. But the problem is that the doctrinal approach supported and prolonged those antiquated attitudes and inaccurate stereotypes much longer than they should have existed. You would have thought that "God's True" anything would have spread enlightenment, been part of the solution, ahead of the curve. Oh well. Much of this is moot, because we have political leaders who are actively working to reverse and dismantle the monumental progress in race relations and understanding that our country had made over the past 5 decades. With all the garbage that's come out of the woodwork, I don't know that we'll ever get back to the sweet spot. We've returned to a time and space when daily experience will be teaching some very hard lessons, lessons which had already been learned and properly applied, but are now forgotten, or worse, rejected.
The dissertation which has prompted our comments is educational, and will be embraced by some, possibly following further investigation. I expect that others will react in much the same way as we observe Bob Thiel evaluate solid evidence which counters his Armstrongite beliefs, and the personal embellishments he has added. There will always be people who cannot be educated away from their lifelong mindsets. In Armstrongism, one of the guiding paradigms always was that if what we teach you does not appear to be working, it's because you just are not practicing it vigorously or thoroughly enough! Einstein's definition of insanity notwithstanding!
BB
Smallpox, Measles, Influenza and the Whooping Cough (Pertussis) were not benefits but quite the opposite. But to you, you consider these benefits. Of course they must have also enjoyed the firewater. They did serve in pretty much all the wars though. You mentioned the arrival of the white man. Is it the white man that’s from Spain, or is the white man from Germany, or is it the white man from Italy, or is it the white man from England, or is it the white man from France, or is it the white man from Ireland? Being on reservations now, what choice do they , what does it matter what they vote with their population. Is them voting conservative going to change their situation? They are the Natives Lee, the white man is not native.
I agree BB, Armstrongism offers an unhealthy mindset in how you view “others” if that’s how you view them. That’s why Ghrist had to give the vision to Peter three times before his baptism of the Gentiles. But since armstrongism is so steeped in the old covenant it can’t properly from the heart view “outside tribes” properly because they are/were Ephraim and Manasseh.
Then you include the 13 colonies (13 tribes), the native americans and others are Canaanites pseudo promised land doctrine, well then you have what you have. Just sprinkling Jesus Christ on the outside of the package doesn’t make it apostolic christianity. The apostles weren't on that.
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