Quanah Parker, Comanche War Chief
The Hornet Promise
Classical Armstrongism and its Confusing Native American Policy
By Huckleberry
Back a few decades ago, my wife and I were eating in a restaurant with a WCG couple in a large city in the American Southwest. He was a long-standing deacon and prominent in the congregation. We were just beginning to eat when he went off on a tirade about Hispanics and Native Americans living in the State. The summation was that those people did not belong in the United States and this land was not theirs. It was Israel’s land and they should have been driven out. His wife, fork in hand, said in an emphatic voice, “God said to wipe them out!” My heart sank for three reasons. First, I am of Native American descent. Second, the couple knew I was of Native American descent. Three, I had heard this view expressed many times before but it always surprised me. You don’t often hear someone blatantly advocate genocide when you were expecting to enjoy a little “Christian” fellowship in a leisurely setting. The deacon later became an avid Trump follower. And this little tawdry piece of WCG history furnishes the backdrop to this essay.
Misidentification of Native Americans as Canaanites
For those who are still trying to hawk Herman Hoeh’s ideas, their nemesis is the science of genetics. I will not go into detail but, in general, genetics demonstrates that Herman Hoeh was dramatically wrong about the identity of races of people and their migrations. Hoeh asserted that Native Americans are descendants of Canaan and this was a nice fit with British-Israelism. Native Americans became the inhabitants of the land that “Israel” was to inherit, North America, and their role in “Israel’s” national destiny was described in the book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 7:1-5).
But scientists now know that Native Americans are a combination of early Eurasians (who looked like Europeans) and East Asians. And these two groups of people mixed before that invaded North America from Beringia. They also know that there is genetic continuity between the Canaanites and the later Phoenicians and finally the modern-day Lebanese. Hoeh had Native Americans and many other peoples profoundly misidentified. For more on this, see:
https://armstrongismlibrary.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-patriarch-canaan-classical.html
A Patchwork Dogma
It is difficult to say what the Armstrongist dogma on the Native Americans actually is. Publications issued from the Armstrongist press are at odds with what is believed in the Pulpit and in the Pews. And WCG leadership seems to have made no effort to reconcile the Press, the Pulpit and the Pews. Perhaps, no effort was made to achieve consistency because it just was not an important topic. Or maybe the Press had a public profile to be careful about and the Pulpit and Pews did not so they followed separate courses.
The Armstrongist Press published a very empathetic article about Native Americans in the February 1973 issue of the Plain Truth Magazine. It offered Armstrongist solutions to social problems but it was positively inclined to Native Americans. The July-August 1973 issue of the Plain Truth Magazine condemned genocide as a great evil and cited the decimation of the Native Americans in support of this view. Garner Ted Armstrong, in a personal letter to me, stated that he had never heard his Dad say anything negative about Native Americans. Herbert W. Armstrong was of Quaker background and it is worth mentioning that the Quaker colonists always had a special interest in helping Native Americans and fared well with Native American tribes while other early American colonists, such as the Scots-Irish, did not. Later, President Grant turned over the operation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Quakers in certain territories. Finally, at a Friday evening Bible Study back in the Seventies in the Field House at Big Sandy, Ronald Dart received a question from the audience. Someone asked if Native Americans should have been exterminated. Dart promptly answered, no, that if God had wanted that he would have sent a prophet to the President in Washington, D.C. and would have informed the President of that.
By contrast, in the ministry and laity of the WCG, one found a different disposition towards Native Americans. I have many anecdotes like the one that begins this essay. I will add one more. I was at a Bible Study in the WCG congregation in a large Midwestern city. A Pastor and a Local Church Elder were giving the study on stage in a large auditorium. The LCE went through an explanation of how God wanted the Canaanites to be destroyed so the Israelites would not follow after their gods. This he then applied to Native Americans and further explained that they should have been exterminated by European settlers of North America so that people would not adopt Native American religions. He made some reference to totem poles. This struck me as being very unusual because European settlers brought their religious package with them and there is no history of Europeans adopting Native American religions. Native American religions typically died a swift death after the European contact. But the really odd aspect of this is that the Pastor did not correct the LCE regarding this outlandish view. So, the audience received a message of necessary genocide with tacit acceptance from the Armstrongist Pulpit.
Overall, the idea of exterminating Native Americans was never published, that I can find, by the WCG Headquarters Press. But it was fairly widely believed in the Pulpit and the Pews. It is difficult to believe that Headquarters did not know about this unless there was rigorous control of information flowing from the local areas back to headquarters.
The Hornet Promise: Armstrongism Misses the Mark
The Pulpit and the Pews were also burdened by a misinterpretation of scripture on this topic. The ministry and the laity, in my experience, always seem to resort to the argument that the early European settlers of North America did not exterminate the Native Americans as God intended and this was a part of their national sin for which God would punish them. This was a nicely parallel to the Old Testament scenario of the settling of the Promised Land by ancient Israel. And this view clearly emphasizes the need for a violent genocide. And it seems to justify how Native Americans were actually treated by the early European settlers. The idea being that the Native Americans got treated badly but they really should have been totally exterminated so they got off easy. I heard a similar explanation to this in Spokesman Club. But this approach does not agree with the Biblical scenario.
God did not originally intend for the Israelites to fight against the Canaanites. And he did not intend for the Canaanites to be exterminated. This is pointed out in the Jewish Study Bible in the gloss for Deut. 7:2. The gloss refers the reader to Exodus 23. Exodus 23: 27-29 (ESV) states the Hornet Promise:
“I will send my terror before you and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you.”
But something happened between the time of the Hornet Promise and the entry into Palestine:
“Then I said to you, ‘Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.’ Yet in spite of this word you did not believe the LORD your God (Deut 1: 29-32, ESV”
The outcome is that the Israelites are in the Book of Joshua full participants in the conquest. God instructs all the men of the Trans-Jordan tribes to cross to assist. When they descend on Jericho, the Priests and the people form the invading host. The Hornet Promise was that Israel would just be observing. Now, after their unfaithfulness, they must shed blood. The violence is a punishment not a tool of righteousness.
The focus of the Armstrongist Pulpit and Pews is on the fact that the Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites and thereby sinned. The focus should be on the fact that the Israelites did not trust in God so that they would not have to fight at all. The call for genocide from some quarters should have been a call, instead, for trust so that genocide could be avoided. The Armstrongist who espoused these ideas did not go back far enough in the chain of cause and effect. They stopped short of God’s original intent. And this cloaked the real issue of trust in God and made it look like the destruction of the Native Americans was a justified and maybe even a patriotic action in American History (the connection to patriotism was also something I heard is Spokesman Club).
Overall, it is difficult to say what the actual Armstrongist dogma on Native Americans actually was. If we had a time machine we could go back and conduct some interviews so we could establish what people actually had in their hearts beyond what writing has come down to us. I would characterize the dogma as being inconsistent.
The Scope of the Advocacy of Genocide
I have heard many WCG members speak favorably about the extermination of Native Americans. I have no idea what percentage of Armstrongists held this view. I heard it often enough to believe it was common. Moreover, this essay draws upon views circulating during the period of Classical Armstrongism. I have no idea what the various small denominations derived from the old WCG currently believe on this topic. In the Classical Armstrongism period, I never actually understood if proponents of genocide actually knew what they were saying. To be sure, they did not see a role for the WCG in such a campaign. They saw it as something that European settlers should have done. The WCG understood that the ministration of death had been vacated. But if someone believes in their heart that the ethics of the Old Testament requires and approves genocide and this is a guideline even yet for the modern people of “Israel”, is that not in some way horrifically corrupting? Does it not evoke hatred when Jesus said if you hate someone you have murdered them and this is not to be for Christians? I used to comfort myself by thinking that people in the WCG who blithely advocated genocide just did not understand what they were saying. But, in the last analysis, I do not know how far in the direction of “holy” violence some of these people would go. When Armstrongists delve into politics, it is surprising how extremist some will become.
Summary Argument
Native Americans are not genetically Canaanites. The people of Lebanon have genetic continuity with the ancient Canaanites and they are also, incidentally, very closely related to the Jews. God promised an evacuation of the Promised Land that would involve using hornets to chase the Canaanites out. But because Israel lacked trust in God, Israelites eventually were required to have a role in the blood-letting and the killing of men, women and children. Likely, the Canaanites were a contributive cause by stubbornly hanging onto the land. They actually had many overseas colonies and could have relocated over time. God did not want them to leave suddenly anyway. The decrees given by God to Israel governing the expulsion of the Canaanites should not be applied to Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Maoris, South African Blacks or Laplanders (none of these people are Canaanites) in order to concoct a gratifying fit with British-Israelism. Moreover, anyone who is a Christian should focus on the problem of lack of trust on the part of the Israelites as the object lesson of the conquest of Canaan, rather than some latter-day, unloving, un-Christian and callous invocation of genocide.
