The story of Molly Brant (Konwatsijayenni) forces American Christians to face our devotion to nation and to our human family.
The Feast of Mary (Molly) Brant (Konwatsijayenni)
Matthew 19:28–30
One of the hardest things for us to wrestle with is the family or tribal impulse. To protect our own, to gather in community, to work together toward common goals—these are the height of what it means to be human, to be God’s creation, to be children of the living God.
It is also the source of fear and anxiety: xenophobia and tyranny. Fear of the outsider and the insider. Our zeal for patriotism, for inciting a devotion to a common cause can lead us to destroy the outsider…and transform our neighbors into outsiders, too.
History
Listening to the life of Molly Brant, I’m reminded of growing up in a town with a name derived (in part) from Ottawa. I would look out across the vastness of Lake Huron and know that there was land many miles to the east. A whole other country.
My parents grew up in Detroit, so we would take many day trips on visits. Canada was not just “our neighbor to the north. For us, it was to our east. Sitting to our right.
I went to school at Huron College in London, Ontario. My experience of this Anglican identity was formed by my presence in an adopted home, among a people so nearly the same as my family. But their church wasn’t formed in the midst of revolutionary war and departure from common cause with England. Their partriotic impulse is entirely different—because it bears the complexity of staying when ours was leaving.
For many of us in the United States, understanding the virtue of trying to transcend boundaries for common cause is deeply challenging and entirely foreign. And it is this division that makes the Americans into the bad guys in Molly’s story.
Family
It’s also why many of us have such a hard time with Jesus’s description of family. He often describes our families as a source of conflict and that division from them is necessary. This cuts at the heart of American culture, which idolizes the nuclear family and shames those families which don’t stay together.
But Jesus’s message, even as he claims to bring division to the world, is not division for the sake of division. For division is neither his purpose or his actual work: it is the consequence of bringing truth into the world. Of bringing justice into the world. The coward and the fascist hate truth. The unjust thrive on preventing justice.
Jesus comes with a message that will no doubt upend the nuclear family, but more fully embodies the chosen family. It is perceived as a threat to tribal and national identities, because it encourages a more basic and fundamental human identity. Much like our baptismal promise to respect the dignity of every human being.
So it isn’t just that we root for our team because we are born into it—we root for the team with love and justice and mercy in its heart. That’s where we place our affection.
This was instilled in me by my parents; by my proximity; my church; my imagination; by my faith. For many, it went the other way. And in a sense, it could be that I’m just lucky.
But the greater purpose is how our families can be less about our blood relativity and more of that significant and faithful chosen family. The story isn’t about who we were born as, but who we become. As in Christ, a new creation. Full of compassion.
Something we all can celebrate.