Naming the Names:Kevin Annett-Fired by United Church
Fourteen Years Later, I'm Still Here, and So Are We
by Kevin D. Annett
I was fired from my job as a United Church minister in Port Alberni fourteen years ago today, by a weasly little bureaucrat named Art Anderson.
Art's action ended my livelihood, marriage, and employability, and at the time, he must have figured that he had won. But I don't think Art could have grasped what a favor he was doing me, and thousands of native people who somehow survived the tortures and murder his church inflicted on them at so young an age.
This is a thank you to Art Anderson, and to all the other mean spirited church gnomes who did their unwitting job of exposing their crime of genocide for all the world to see.
They know who they are, but hell, let's name them all, since this is the time to start naming names:
Foster Freed and Phil Spencer, my friends and fellow ministers, who went through seminary with me and often came to my home for dinner, and who then worked behind my back to have me secretly "investigated" by a special church court set up by a few officials in the Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery;
Oliver Howard, senior United Church minister and former skipper on the church mission boat Thomas Crosby, who knew of the Alberni residential school murders, the grisly experiments at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, and local pedophile rings, and who made the motion in the Presbytery Executive to have me dismissed after I spoke of the Alberni murders from my pulpit;
Bob Stiven, Cameron Reid, and Colin Forbes, Presbytery officials, who kept the decision to fire and defrock me completely hidden from the wider Presbytery, and who authorized their illegal act;
Brian Thorpe, top B.C. Conference executive officer, who encouraged and worked with my ex-wife, Anne McNamee, in her divorce proceedings against me after I was fired;
Jon Jessiman and Iain Benson, church lawyers, who planned and executed my firing without cause and my defrocking without due process, pocketing over $150,000 in the process,
Phil Spencer (again), who arranged to have the church pay Anne for her divorce costs, exceeding $35,000, and who engineered an extensive smear campaign against me;
Fred Bishop, Anne Gray and Wendy Barker, my parishioners, who worked with the Presbytery clique to fire me without cause and blacken my name in Port Alberni;
Bill Howie, local church official and associate of accused murderer Alberni residential school Principal Alfred Caldwell, who advised and encouraged Presbytery in its actions;
John Cashore, United Church clergyman and provincial government minister in 1995, who instigated my firing after I publicly challenged his government and church's involvement in the theft of ancestral land of the Ahousaht nation on Flores Island, and
Dozens of church officials, policemen and lawyers who cooperated in this criminal conspiracy to destroy my life and conceal murder and other crimes by the United Church of Canada.
Thank you, all.
It's thanks to you, after all, that I began learning about your church's secret crimes from the residential school survivors. It's thanks to you that I learned that 50,000 children had died under Christian care. It's thanks to you that I wrote the book Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, and produced the film UNREPENTANT. And it's thanks to you that your church has been exposed as an agent of genocide, dragged into court by survivors, and started down a long road to oblivion.
Just imagine if you had have done the decent thing, and not tried to stamp me out of existence? Think of all the money you would have saved, all the reporters you could have avoided! How much of your wrongdoing would still remain concealed; how little of the real crime would now be known.
Of course, being part of that crime and its legacy, how could you have done the decent thing?
But be that as it may, I'm curious, guys: was it some unconscious death wish that drove you to try to do me in? Did you know that I would not cave in and crawl away and die somewhere, as you hoped - according to Phil Spencer, at least, who claimed that I would do so? Did you really think I would stay silent, and worry more about myself than all those murdered kids? Or did you know that I was different than all of you?
Maybe you were all just plain stupid.
I prefer the latter explanation. There was such little intelligence in your actions, after all. And such tactlessness. I mean, how much finesse was present when, the night after I was fired, Phil Spencer (again) called me up at my home to gloat, and explode at my mother over the phone,
"Kevin had this coming to him! So go ahead! Go ahead and try to sue us!"
It's true, poor Phil had been drinking again, that night. But you'd think church bureaucrats would get, I don't know, some kind of legal advice now and then? Or communication skills training?
The truth is, when one chooses to professionally belong to an organization like the Christian church that's founded on an immense historical duplicity, and whose closets are crammed full of skeletons and dirty secrets, then you learn pretty quickly that there's only one virtue that's rewarded: loyalty to a Big Lie. But that kind of loyalty needs to be tested regularly, which means that church clergy are expected to make a whore out of their own conscience and humanity in order to secure their pension, and rise through the hierarchy.
Foster Freed and Phil Spencer won their reward for their foul betrayal of the truth, and of a friend. Foster subsequently became President of the B.C. Conference of the United Church, and Phil, somehow, got to be President of Presbytery. They proved themselves, through their capacity to serve the Lie.
That's why I'm still here, and they aren't.
Even more generally, that's why the residential school survivors are still here, and the United Church is crumbling. For whoever serves the Lie will be destroyed by it, regardless of their money or professional slickness or public legitimacy. And whoever stands simply on the truth will be raised by it, past every torture the Lie and its servants can inflict on them.
That's some of what I've learned, on the ground, in fourteen years. It's more than a lesson, though: it's that pearl that Jesus used to mention, the thing that's worth losing everything else to win.
We survivors of church torture have been given this gift, that special something that the religious experts and professional liars will never have. So why, in Jesus' name, do we still look to them for accountability, or "healing", or justice? Do we really expect the dead to be human?
When will we finally accept the lesson of our own agony, won over so many long nights and after so much loss and sacrifice? When will we leave the dead to bury their dead, and walk into the land of the living?
The government and churches of Canada, and the tottering culture they represent, can do nothing but commit the same crimes, over and over, all the time pretending they are not. We will win justice and a new life quite apart from them, once we have exposed them for the Big Lie they are, and walked away from them.
Fifty Thousand children can't be wrong.
January 23, 2009
Squamish Nation territory
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