We’ve seen throughout history the bloody impact of people setting off to kill some new group of “Amalekites.” Puritan leaders justified the genocide of Native Americans in the colonial period of what is now the U.S. by comparing the Native Americans to the Amalekites. As John Winthrop gave his sermonon “a model of Christian charity” to Puritans heading to the new land, he invoked the command for Saul to kill Amalek. That’s the same sermon famous for his line about the new land being “a city upon a hill.” The speech frequently quoted by politicians today to cast the U.S. as a divine city on a hill (instead of what Jesus said about the city being his followers) also includes the theological foundation for genocide against Native Americans. It’s not so shining of a speech after all.
“In America, thinking about Amalek in the 18th century also was refined through the coalescence of an ideology of America as a ‘redeemer nation’ called to defeat evil wherever it threatened Christianity,” historian John Corrigan wrote in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America as he warned about the “rhetoric of extermination” that came from the use of the Amalek story. “And the transition from colonial status to new nation lent a particularly urgent and pointed tone to the Amalek rhetoric, as Americans made efforts to explore the continent, draw and defend boundaries, and situate themselves as the dominant power in North America.”
More recently, the rhetoric of Amalek was used by some Hutu preachers in Rwanda to justify the genocide of Tutsi people there in 1994, and it was invoked by U.S. preacher John MacArthur to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Theology can be deadly.