Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda provides an in-depth look at an aspect of the Rwandan genocide that is sorely missing from the literature—namely the role that the Christian churches played in the carnage that killed more than half a million people in the spring of 1994. The question of church involvement goes beyond wayward leadership. As Longman points out, churches were sites of mass killings across the country. Killers, moreover, sometimes held mass before going out to kill or “paused in the frenzy of killing to kneel and pray at the altar” (p. 7). Why did killers' Christian faith not keep them from slaughtering fellow parishioners of a different ethnicity?

There is no one better to answer this question than Timothy Longman. He arrived in Rwanda in 1992 to conduct dissertation fieldwork and he could not have arrived at a more propitious time. The country was in the midst of social, political and economic upheaval, which eventually culminated in genocide. Longman returned to Rwanda in 1996, this time working for Human Rights Watch, under whose auspices he researched major sections of Leave None to Tell the Story, the authoritative account of the genocide by Alison Des Forges (Human Rights Watch 1999). It was during this period that Longman was able to conduct additional research for this book. Longman thus writes from a unique vantage point—as someone who was on the ground right before and right after the genocide. The author uses this distinct perspective to his advantage.

Longman organizes the book into two parts. In the first part, he examines the Catholic and Protestant churches in historical context, and in particular, their relationship with the Rwandan state. He convincingly argues that, the Christian churches were political actors from the start. Upon arrival, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries made it their policy to align themselves with those in power, be it the Tutsi monarchy in the precolonial period or successive Hutu presidents in the post-colonial period. Church leaders also took an active hand in shaping the state itself. It was Monsignor Classe, for example, who helped to orchestrate the removal of the recalcitrant mwami (king) Musinga and replace him with one of his more church-friendly sons.

In addition to their state-building efforts, the churches also helped to racialize the categories “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” Church leaders viewed Tutsi as a superior race to the Hutu. They helped to institutionalize these “racial” differences through preferential treatment of Tutsi in schools and seminaries.

During the period of decolonization following World War II, the Catholic leadership and colonial authorities began to take a more progressive stance toward the heretofore oppressed Hutu. Church and state helped to bring about the installation of a Hutu republic. This move, however, as Longman does well to point out, was not evidence of a radicalization of church leadership; it was a move toward state-building. Once the revolution was over and a Hutu republic installed, the churches went back to preaching obedience to authorities.

In the second part of the book, Longman looks at church-society relations in two rural Presbyterian parishes. The two parishes present a telling contrast. One is a mirror of elite politics at the national level. Church leaders dole out material and spiritual resources to their favorites, creating a pronounced gap between rich and poor. In the other parish, church leaders live simply and do not engage in such practices. Through their actions and words, they engendered an “egalitarian ethic” that reinforced notions of solidarity and neighbors taking care of one another (p. 247).

It is in the first parish of Kirinda that genocide proceeds with no obstacles. Local parishioners participate with the moral sanction of church leaders who have clearly and openly aligned themselves with the pro-genocide state. In the second parish of Biguhu, by contrast, church leaders preach against the genocide and do not morally sanction participation in the violence. This creates an obstacle to local participation in the genocide and forces genocidal leaders to bus in outsiders to kill the local Tutsi.

In his analysis, Longman does not pull any punches. He argues cogently that the churches were complicit in the genocide. The churches did not just get out of the way; they did much more. They gave moral sanction to ethnic violence through their refusal to condemn the arrests, assassinations, and mass murders that occurred before the genocide; and they never distanced themselves from the regime that was behind this violence, even when their own priests were targeted. At the local level, churches became sites of massacres precisely because local church leaders and political party elites (who were often one and the same) made it morally acceptable to commit violence against fellow parishioners in the buildings of their own church.

Why would the churches be on the side of a genocidal state? Longman argues that church leaders had the same interests as their state counterparts—they saw the democratizing forces within the church as a threat to their power. Democratization from within would unseat them once and for all. The politics of church, it seems, were the same as the politics of state.

Longman's book is an important contribution to the emerging micro-level literature on the genocide. It benefits from Longman's long association with the country and his extensive research on the genocide for Human Rights Watch. He uses sources that few scholars have tapped into, namely the communal archives which consist of letters and reports that local authorities wrote to higher ups at the time of events. In addition Longman conducted interviews with church leaders and parishioners throughout the country. What is missing, however, is any discussion about the precise methods he used for these interviews or the conditions under which he conducted his research. One wonders how much people were willing to say in the lead-up to the genocide and its aftermath when tensions were presumably at their highest.

Knowing who Longman interviewed would also help the reader evaluate his argument that church leaders in Kirinda were able to manipulate their parishioners. It is not clear what the evidence is for this claim, particularly when Longman himself points out the wide range of motives that killers had for participating (p. 306). Manipulation implies that parishioners were easily led into committing genocide, which may have been true, but the evidence Longman presents is unclear on this point.

These questions do not diminish the value of Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda in any way. Longman's analysis present a clear and incontrovertible challenge to church apologists who claim, for example, that the genocide was the sin of a few individuals and not that of the church as an institution, or that the killings are proof that Christian beliefs never took deep hold in Rwanda. The beliefs took hold, Longman argues, but the type of Christianity that was preached and promulgated in Rwanda was a “politicized, conservative, and discriminatory faith” (p. 197). The steadfast analysis of Church involvement in the genocide in Longman's book is a clear indictment of churches as political institutions that provided sites for promoting and carrying out genocide at every level of society.