Rediscovering God in Rwanda

Dear Reader,

This essay contains detailed descriptions of the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 which took place in Rwanda. The essay is not to be missed, but do prepare yourself.

—Wayfare Staff

---

The effect was almost magical. The church pews were dappled with sunlight shining from above. In any other context it might have felt like a wink from the Creator, a reminder of God’s presence. But there wasn’t anything divine about this place, lit by broken beams streaming from countless holes in the corrugated metal roof. The jagged holes had been created by shrapnel from grenades thrown into the church where huddled, starving masses once sought sanctuary.

I stood staring at the altar cloth still stained with blood spilled thirty years earlier. At the pews, piled with the soiled clothing of the ten thousand—ten thousand—women, men, and children who died in this ordinary sized church. At the tabernacle that once housed the sacramental wafers, the doors blown open with a bullet. I had to turn away from the baptismal font where infants were baptized in blood by ruthless men who dashed their heads and bodies against the solid stone.  

I couldn’t breathe. 

I gasped for air, sobbing hot, ugly tears. I knew in that moment that my mind would never be free of that church, where the blood of the body of Christ was truly shed.

If you do not wish to witness the evil that humans are capable of, do not visit this deconsecrated Catholic church that now serves as a genocide memorial in Nyamata, Rwanda.  Nor should you go a few kilometers down the road to the smaller church in Ntarama, where “only” five thousand were butchered. There, bodily remains still straddle the pews, macabrely serving as the place’s permanent parishioners. Do not stare at the metal still sticking out of one of the skulls. (Did a piece of the machete break off from the force of the blow?) Do not visit the kitchen where the bodies of women and children were incinerated with the palm oil they used to cook community meals. Or the Sunday school building next door, where a large stain on the wall marks where children’s bodies were smashed, one by one by one.

If you do not wish to contemplate the depths of human depravity the likes of which Augustine, Luther, and Calvin could scarcely imagine in their theologies of fallen humanity, do not stare at the wall of names. It is a genealogist’s nightmare. The killing was so thorough that entire groups of families and friends were entirely decimated, leaving no one behind to name most of the dead.  Do not descend into the mass graves, where coffins—each holding the bones of upwards of thirty people—are stacked from floor to ceiling, row after row after row. Do not peek into the partially open caskets, where a jumble of skulls and femurs and ribs mock the idea of death with dignity. And whatever you do, do not visit the national genocide memorial in Kigali, where mass graves house the remains of a quarter million people…and are still being filled as bodies continue to be discovered.

It will take your breath away.

In Rwanda from April to July 1994, Hutu soldiers and militias killed approximately one million Tutsis in the world’s worst genocide since the Holocaust, and perhaps the most concentrated genocide in all human history. How do you kill a million people in one hundred days? Not even the Nazis, with their cold bureaucratic efficiency, could match the speed of slaughter in Rwanda.  Hutu extremists roved the country systematically murdering any Tutsi they could find. Most of the killing was done hand-to-hand, face-to-face. Bullets did their normal work, but machetes, clubs, and ordinary garden implements were the weapons of choice. Neighbors hacked neighbors to death. Women and girls were often brutally raped first. State radio broadcast the whereabouts of Tutsis hiding in homes, businesses, and churches. It was a systematic campaign to eradicate an entire population, who were most frequently referred to as “cockroaches” needing to be exterminated.

What happened in Rwanda in 1994 was the very definition of genocide. It was the greatest failure of the international community since World War II. It was the perfect storm of colonialism, racism, mass media, and identity politics. It was all of those things. But it was also deeply and authentically satanic.  

I don’t remember the last time I used that term. It chafes against my modern sensibilities; it seems so medieval. But what other word can account for the heartless massacre of so many innocents?  What other word can describe the complete inversion and utter perversion of the Christian faith that the vast majority of the population—Hutu and Tutsi alike—shared?  How do you throw grenades into a crowded church? How does a priest direct bulldozers to demolish his own church, with two thousand of his own parishioners trapped inside?

If ever the devil’s work was done, it was in Rwanda in 1994. I couldn’t help but think, “Where was God?”

I have always been a believer. The quality and intensity of my faith in God waxes and wanes in what are probably normal human cycles, but belief has never left me. The real and serious and difficult issues that send other people into faith crisis have forced me to reevaluate and reshape my faith, but none have ever seriously threatened it. What I saw in Rwanda, however, came close.

For thousands of years, theologians of all persuasions have grappled with what is commonly called “the problem of evil,” which can be succinctly stated: If there is a God, and that God is both all-powerful and all-loving, how can there be so much suffering and evil in the world? A loving parent understands that a certain amount of pain and struggle is necessary for growth, but they still hate to see their children suffer needlessly. If I, as an imperfect father, saw one of my children inflicting serious harm on another—let alone trying to murder them—I would immediately intervene. No one would think I was a good parent if I said, “Let’s see what lessons can be learned from Child 1 hacking at Child 2 with a machete.” Gods can only be truly worthy of worship if they are morally and ethically superior to the best human you can possibly imagine. So if humans go to heroic lengths to stop needless suffering, why doesn’t God?

But, you might protest, God does prevent suffering through miracles great and small. I believe this. I witnessed firsthand an honest-to-goodness miracle when my wife’s life was literally snatched from the clutches of death with no medical explanation. And it’s not just the big stuff. I believe in a personal God who intervenes in the details of people’s ordinary lives. I believe that God really helps people find their car keys sometimes. To put it simply, I believe in the stories of a loving, powerful, personal God of which the scriptures attest and that my fellow believers testify of over the pulpit.

This is precisely the problem. While God was saving the life of my wife, who died twice on that surgical table, it’s a statistical near-certainty that at the same moment another woman somewhere else in the world died in childbirth. Why was Melissa saved and not that other woman? If I were to go back and re-read my journal from April to July 1994, I could surely find the hand of God intervening in the life of a comfortably situated high school senior in Sandy, Utah. But why didn’t God respond to the far more urgent prayers of the million-plus Rwandans pleading for their lives at the same time?

In the wake of the Holocaust, Richard Rubenstein, a Conservative Jewish rabbi and scholar, asked, “How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?” Other Jewish and Christian thinkers followed suit. Jewish scholar Irving Greenberg wondered whether we could “dare talk about [a] God who loves and cares without making a mockery of those who suffered” in the concentration camps.¹ The movement of theologians wondering aloud whether the biblical God survived Auschwitz became so pronounced that Time magazine famously ran a cover in April 1966 featuring the question, “Is God dead?”

In their pre-Christian cosmology, Rwandans spoke of how Imana, the supreme creator god, wandered the earth during the day before coming home to Rwanda to sleep at night. I have never been to Auschwitz, but after visiting Nyamata I couldn’t help but wonder, “If not dead, for those hundred days in 1994 was God asleep?”

No religion has ever come up with a fully satisfactory theodicy, or explanation of the problem of evil. God’s loving providence is abundantly manifest for those with eyes to see, but it seems hard to square with why innocents suffer, sometimes at mass scale.  

Latter-day Saint attempts at theodicy usually come back to the idea of agency. In this view, human agency is so central to the eternal plan that God will permit great wickedness to occur so that the moral growth associated with choice can proceed more or less unimpeded. God does not cause evil, this theodicy surmises, but merely allows it.  

One version of this theodicy is found in Alma 14 in the Book of Mormon. Alma and Amulek are forced to watch as a group of believers are put to death by fire. Amulek wants to invoke the power of God to stop the terror, but Alma says no. God will receive these martyrs into glory, he proclaims, and their deaths will stand as a witness against the evil perpetrators at the final judgment (Alma 14:8–11). 

I read that chapter the morning that I went to Nyamata. It rang hollow. What loving parent would allow—let alone stand by and watch—one child kill another? It seems even worse to do so simply to compile evidence about that child’s murderous disposition to be presented in a future court of law. Wouldn’t the loving parent intervene, not just for the sake of the victim but also so that the would-be perpetrator is prevented from committing such a morally ruinous act? It’s a fine line that parents walk, protecting their children versus allowing them to have hard experiences that promote growth. But responsible parents keep the sharp knives out of reach and the guns locked in a safe.

Returning to Irving Greenberg’s question, is it possible to believe in a loving, powerful God without making a mockery of Rwanda’s million dead? Staring at that altar cloth at Nyamata, I wasn’t sure. In the ensuing days, I was thrown three lifelines.

The first came from the deposit of faith we have in scripture. As I stood there weeping over the dead, my mind turned to Moses 7, one of the Restoration’s great revelatory gifts. Thanks in large part to Terryl and Fiona Givens, “the God who weeps” has assumed greater prominence in contemporary Latter-day Saint religious culture. We sometimes forget, however, the specific reason why God wept in Enoch’s vision: “Unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood (Moses 7:33).” When Enoch saw what God saw, he also wept. There was nothing I could do in those places of memorial and mourning but to see, remember, and weep.  

To weep over our hate for one another is a godly act. Such weeping participates in the life and being of a loving God of radical, infinite, and eternal empathy. But is God so powerless in the face of human evil that weeping for and with us is the only divine response? Is ours a compassionate but ultimately weak God?

My thoughts turned from the weeping Father (and surely Mother) to the incarnate Son. In Jesus, God chose to be weak. God chose to suffer. God chose to be tortured—not just emotionally and vicariously, but bodily and actually. God chose to accept some of the worst, most heinous, most painful punishments that the powers that be of his day could conceive. God chose forsakenness. God chose death. Not a noble, heroic death, but an excruciating and lonely death of despair.

With this in mind, I don’t think God was asleep in Rwanda in 1994. Rather, I believe God died—a million times over. For those hundred days, the satanic god of this world contended forcefully with the God of love. However inexplicably, the true God chose not to prevail in that time and place, but instead to suffer and die.

I encountered the God who weeps at Nyamata. I also came face to face with the God who suffers and dies. The God whose infinite empathy comes from his willingness to be tortured. The God who condescended below all things so that he could be at one with us in all things—even unfathomable evils like genocide. I do not pretend to understand the calculus of why God miraculously preserves some and not others. To those whom God does not preserve, Jesus offers his own tortured body in solidarity. In Jesus, God subjects himself to the very forces of death and evil that he sends us to be subjected to in mortality.

To those who ask, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?,” Jesus stretches out his arms (Matt. 27:46 NLT). To Auschwitz, Rwanda, and all the world’s horrors, God does not offer full answers. Instead, he offers his broken body.

“He is not here” (Matt. 28:6). As I stared at the mass graves, the angel’s words to Mary echoed in my mind.  God was not in this place.

Our visits to the genocide memorials weighed heavy on our entire group who had come to Rwanda on a Utah State University study abroad trip. Some of us gathered one evening to reflect on what we had seen and felt. One of the students, Max, threw me a second lifeline.

Max recounted that when he and his family visited Jerusalem a few years earlier, he had anticipated having a powerful spiritual experience at the garden tomb. He walked into the rock cavern, looked around, waited…and felt nothing. Disappointed, he turned to leave. As he exited and began to walk into the light, his mind lit up with the words, “He is not here.”

As he walked in the mass graves, with coffins piled all around him, Max said he felt the same emptiness and despair that enshrouded each of us. But as he climbed the stairs and emerged into the light, the words came to him, “They are not here.”

Jesus’s tortured, broken body did not remain in the grave. He is not there anymore: “He is risen.” The promise of Christianity—the good news—is that the victims of genocide similarly are no longer in those mass graves. It requires faith to say, “They are not here; for they are risen.” But if we believe in God enough to question his absence at the time of their death, might we also leave open the space of belief wide enough to trust in God’s power to conquer that same death?

To affirm the resurrection is not to solve the problem of evil. It does not explain why God’s power seems so arbitrarily displayed in this life. Those who witnessed Jesus’s resurrected body were never provided rational explanations for his—or their—suffering. They were not offered understanding. Instead, they were given a witness. In the end, those who gazed on his body, who put their hands in his wounds, did not acquire understanding. Witness was enough. Good Friday only became “good” after Easter Sunday. To gaze uncompromisingly at Friday and still believe in Sunday is perhaps the greatest act of faith.

Cecile threw me my third lifeline.

One of the most remarkable things about Rwanda is what has happened in the three decades since the genocide. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa, and one of the smallest. Even after a million people were killed, there was no place for people to spread out. Neighbors had killed neighbors. Now those neighbors—survivors and perpetrators alike—had to learn to live among one another again.

The country began one of the most audacious experiments in social reconciliation ever attempted. The most grievous genocidaires were tried in formal courts. But the killing had been performed by so many that existing jails could not hold them. It would have taken literally decades to prosecute all the perpetrators in Western-style trials. So the Rwandans devised a novel system, based on their own traditional customs. Each community held its own trials in what were known as gacaca courts; seventy percent were led by women. After those responsible for the killings confessed their crimes or had evidence brought against them, the gacaca courts decided their fate. It might be imprisonment, but more often it was some form of restitution—for instance, a perpetrator might have to rebuild a widow’s home and support her family. 

Because so many homes were destroyed, the national government also started a social experiment called “reconciliation villages.” Survivors and former perpetrators were given homes in these villages if they promised to live together in peace. Survivors were not forced to forgive anyone. Yet an ethic of forgiveness and reconciliation suffused the country as a nation figured out how to move forward in the wake of unspeakable atrocities, the memories of which were fresh in everyone’s minds and the reminders of which were as tangible as the bodies regularly discovered in wells, fields, and the sides of roads.

It sounds pollyannish and hopelessly naïve. Perhaps you can forgive the destruction of your home and farm and theft of your property. But the wanton murder of everyone you knew and loved…by a neighbor you thought you knew and trusted?

We visited one of these reconciliation villages. A couple dozen elders from the community greeted us and invited us to sit with them under a shaded canopy. Two representatives, one survivor and one former perpetrator, spoke to us. Cecile’s husband and children were murdered. She lost everything, and barely survived. She was resettled in this village with the promise of a fresh start. But how could she forgive? She admitted it wasn’t easy. She resisted it. The pain was too real. It took years. Eventually, she said, with God’s grace she was able to forgive.  

Sitting next to Cecile was a man who, based on his eight-year prison sentence (the maximum for those who eventually confessed and apologized), had killed many people. He admitted his guilt, without divulging details. Maybe not Cecile’s family, but others like them. He didn’t look like a monster, but he had done monstrous things. In prison he wondered whether forgiveness was even possible. He hesitated to accept a home in the reconciliation village because he didn’t think he would be accepted. But there they sat, right in front of us, side by side, teasing and joking and laughing. Their friendship was palpable and real.  

Still hobbled by doubt, I asked Cecile, “You said that God had given you the strength to forgive. Where do you think God was during the genocide?” Without hesitating she simply answered, “God was always here. But he was not in people’s hearts.”

I will never forget the wall of the Sunday school, the tabernacle, the baptismal font, the stained altar cloth. I will always remember the piles of clothes on the pews and the coffins piled upon one another in mass grave after mass grave.  

I don’t think I was wrong to wonder where God was during those hundred days in Rwanda. Just as God showed Enoch the worst that humans do to one another, God wanted me—all of us—to see it too. Seeing the world for what it is led Enoch to ask questions. God is not afraid of my questions. God wept more tears over the genocide than I did. Maybe for those hundred days, God couldn’t breathe either. 

I didn’t come away from Rwanda with any grand theodicy. I haven’t solved the problem of evil. I’m not sure my understanding is any greater. But my witness is.  

What Jesus, Max, and Cecile taught me is that God was not asleep in the hour of Rwanda’s greatest need. God was always there—if not in the hearts of murderers, then in the experience of victims and survivors. They did not choose to be tortured and die. But he did, precisely so that “he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:12). He suffered exquisitely so he could be infinitely and eternally at-one even (or especially) with those who have suffered most (see Alma 34:10). The body of Christ was present in Rwanda—so present that it was beaten, tortured, raped, and killed. The blood of the body of Christ was spilled across the walls and altars and red clay soil of Rwanda. God was not in the killing, but among the killed. For a hundred-day Friday, it seemed that satanic forces had prevailed. God was not in their hearts.

Finally, the killing stopped. Bodies—those that could be found—were laid in tombs, carved deep into the soil that soaked up their blood. Their remains are silent reminders of what it looks like when humans hate their own blood. But they are not there. Read the names on the wall. Gaze at the pictures hanging in the memorials. “Genocide victim” is not who they are; it was simply the last, tragic thing that happened to them. Descend into the mass grave, stand as a witness of that unspeakable horror, then come out again into the air and the light. They are not there.  

Time did not stop in July 1994. July turned into August. 1994 turned into 1995, then 1996, then 2024. Some survived. Refugees returned. Many of those who lived had children. Over half the country’s population is under the age of 30. No one is unaffected. Every person in Rwanda is directly connected to a victim, survivor, returnee, or perpetrator—sometimes all four. They do not want the cycle of violence to continue. They know they have to learn to live with one another. Forgiveness is a key element in the process. It is not perfect, but it is working. In villages throughout the country, reconciliation is real and ongoing.

In Rwanda I sought understanding and gained in its place a witness. The God of Friday wants me to look. When I stare at his broken, bloodied body—in Jerusalem or Nyamata—I am convicted that this is not the world I want. I will tend to his wounds and accompany him to his grave. And then I will wait and watch and work. I will witness of the hope and rebirth that comes on Sunday. Not just that one Sunday so long ago, but every Sunday since and hereafter. Sunday neither erases nor explains Friday. What Sunday offers instead is hope that new life is possible and real.

In Rwanda, resurrection is happening before our very eyes. It is enough to take your breath away.

Patrick Q. Mason holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. He has written or edited several books, including Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict.

Art by Henry Munyaneza. This artist is a native of Rwanda, where his family experienced firsthand the difficult history of his country. Henry expresses his evangelical faith through his work. Please find more of his work at Lion and Vine and on Instagram at munyaneza_h and lionandvine.

Audio by Christopher Walters.

1. Israel Shenker, “In Search of God at Auschwitz,” New York Times, 9 June 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/09/archives/in-search-of-god-at-auschwitz-theholocaust-was-radical.html.