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The Racial Imaginary at Work

On February 26, 2012, an unarmed African American teenager named Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was detained by police, questioned, and then released claiming self-defense under the state of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws, which justify the use of lethal force in an altercation if believing one is in danger. Zimmerman did admit, however, that he had followed Martin, and that he had initiated the contact between the two, as evidenced by a call he made to the 911 emergency operator, who had instructed him to cease following Trayvon.1 Exiting his car after speaking to the dispatcher, Zimmerman initiated the altercation that ended in Martin’s death at the hands of Zimmerman. Zimmerman was charged with murder six weeks later only in response to public outrage. On July 13, 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges, including those of second-degree murder and manslaughter.

This case received international media attention and the judgment sparked intense debates in American society surrounding the intersection of race, violence, gun laws, profiling, and the criminal justice system. It served to make visible a slew of killings of unarmed black males, many by police. Names such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray became part of the growing list of the deceased. These killings were often accompanied by a lack of indictment or prosecution of the officers responsible. Riots in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and in Baltimore, Maryland in 2015 hearkened back to the civil unrest after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. In a supposedly “post-racial” twenty-first-century society, strongly-held and often unstated assumptions about race boiled just beneath the surface of American public discourse. Many citizens and activists saw in the Trayvon Martin case a clear-cut example of a white man profiling an unarmed black youth. Resistance to this view was swift, most often pointing to “black-on-black” crimes or cases in which a white person had been the victim of violence at the hands of an African American person. Four and a half years after the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States of America, the public discourse of the nation was embroiled in tense disputes about the role of race in societal relations and commutative justice. Paradoxically, the election of Barack Obama served to strengthen the resolve of those who contended that there was no longer any such thing as a “race problem” in the United States. Such voices presented the media coverage surrounding Martin’s shooting as a ploy to stoke the flames of racial discord anew or to covertly advance anti-gun or other “liberal” agendas.

During the days of Zimmerman’s trial, my wife Leslie, in her position as School Leader of an urban public charter school, attended a civil rights learning expedition in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was privileged to interview Ms. Thelma Mothershed-Wair in her home. Ms. Mothershed-Wair was one of the leaders of the Little Rock Nine, the group of African American students who in 1957 integrated Central High School in the face of intense persecution by community residents, students, faculty, administration, and government officials. The entrance of the Little Rock Nine to the school was aided by armed protection from the National Guard under mandate from the federal government. As Leslie entered the home of Ms. Mothershed-Wair, she was greeted by a man who subsequently excused himself in order to continue watching “the Trayvon Martin case” in the next room. While Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s trial were not discussed during the interview, Leslie could not but recognize the parallels for this man between his care for Ms. Mothershed-Wair, who as a teenager had been subjected to violence because of her ethnicity, and his interest in the proceedings surrounding the violence committed against Trayvon. When reflecting on this parallel in her portion of the report about the civil rights expedition, my wife was encouraged by several of the “progressive” staff who had planned the expedition to refrain from referring to the Martin case. While their primary concern was that Leslie not form connections not made explicit by Ms. Mothershed-Wair, the staff leaders did not seem to want to draw attention to the contemporary political ramifications of an interview with a member of the Little Rock Nine being conducted with the sounds of the Trayvon Martin case playing in the background. While both staff leaders preferred that she remove the reference altogether, the African American staff person “did not disagree” that the two events may be related while the Caucasian staff person did not seem to recognize the correlation. Leslie persevered in including the reference but was obligated to leave it as an observation about the interview’s setting and to draw no conclusions about its significance.

My reflection upon the shooting of Trayvon Martin is intrinsically linked to the place in which I live and the community of which I am a part. I am a white pastor living and ministering in an urban community that is primarily black and white.2 The primary focus of our church, our lives, and our education has been reconciliation across ethnic lines, particularly across the black–white divide, or what W. E. B. DuBois called “the problem of the color line.”3 We are a community struggling to experience Christ’s reconciliation as it is embodied in a new sociopolitical order in which old kinship networks give way to new and unlikely claims of familial connection. Joining to one another is not something to be “had” or “accomplished”; it is a journey, fraught with difficulties, messiness, misunderstanding, and beauty. After a decade of fostering deep and intentional connections with “unlike” others, I am still often perplexed about what to say or what to do when faced with ignorance in myself or others, misunderstandings in relationships marked by a historical power disparity, and injustice within societal systems.

Being mentored by a prominent African American Bishop in our community and pastoring a church which strives to be representative of the diversity of our community at every level of leadership brings abundant opportunities for correction, redirection, and affirmation. As I write this, I am reflecting on being confronted recently by a fellow leader in regard to a set of assumptions that I had unwittingly displayed through my comments at a board meeting. While at times it would undoubtedly be more comfortable to not place oneself in a position of displaying one’s own ignorance and prejudice, a continual journey of repentance and growth entails having sisters and brothers who participate in one’s salvation.

I am introducing myself as narrator neither to indict nor to pardon myself. I do not intend my reflections to be an exercise in self-flagellation or in self-referential exculpation. While I am aware that positioning oneself is a common introductory move within various works dealing with identity politics, I read the majority of said statements as displaying a self-conscious hermeneutic that may tend to confine the author within his or her own perspectivism.4 While a full Christian doctrine of creation necessitates that we view ourselves as bounded creatures shaped by particular contexts, the doctrine of redemption affords transcendence that can deliver us from being sealed in static identity silos. I introduce myself to make apparent how I have been led to interacting with the works of the theologians who ground my research into a theology of race and place and how my questions have led to the constructive heart of my thesis: the lived problem of racial reconciliation. Before I introduce their works, however, it remains to articulate the difficulty I faced when reflecting upon and explicating the racial vision that animated the death of an unarmed teenager and the acquittal of his murderer. I was convinced that a similar racial vision had enabled the exclusion of particular children from specific schools fifty years earlier. How could it be that what was taken for granted by Ms. Mothershed-Wair’s caregiver could ostensibly be hidden from so many others?

The resistance my wife faced to drawing seemingly obvious parallels between Martin’s death and the historic exclusion of black children from white schools served to remind me that history vindicates the oppressed only years after the unpopularity of standing in the place of resistance has faded. It also served to call me to the necessity of utilizing my platform as pastor, scholar, community leader, and activist to speak clearly about the reality of a society founded upon the subjugation of non-white bodies and the underlying racial calculus that determines the seeming disposability of the life of a young person of color. The immediate and strong reaction against my careful public comments, particularly from people of faith, was a bit surprising to me. While this reaction did not come from members of the faith community which I pastor or from people who have invited me into ecclesial and relational structures not my own, and while I had expected that my statements would not meet with universal approval, the strong resistance to what seemed to be straightforward conclusions about our society’s racial sight and its embodiment in the justification of violence was quite perplexing.

My initial statements, which took place several days before the verdict, had been on social media and immediately received a flood of comments from many loved ones and acquaintances who claimed to not understanding how the killing of Martin or the reaction of the public could have had anything to do with race. I was told that the facts of the case did not make it clear that Martin was not killed in self-defense, that race was not involved because Zimmerman was in fact not white but of mixed white and Hispanic racial ancestry, and that it is our constitutional right to carry arms and our legal right to “stand our ground.” I was forwarded a news story about black youth shooting a white woman and her baby, with the added comment that there were no “White Panthers” protesting that occurrence. The ironic fact that said youth were not acquitted seemed to escape the recognition of that view’s proponents. As “evidence” that race was not a factor in this case, I was sent one of the few speeches the press could find given by a black man in defense of Zimmerman. An historically controversial African American pastor told his New York congregation that if they would only look at this situation “through the blood of Jesus” instead of through their “black eyes” they would see that Zimmerman was justified in killing Martin, whom he named a “pot-smoking munchies, paranoid 17-year-old boy.”5 I was accused of being “taken in” by the “racist left” and was demanded to explain how I, as a Christian, could speak out for justice for Trayvon. What was most saddening about these interchanges was that most of my interlocutors were self-avowed defenders of “Christian morals.”

After several days, I noticed that, of the hundreds of people who had responded, every person who had challenged me was white. People of various ethnicities had shared a sense of concern or outrage at the manner in which the trial was progressing. When I publicly noted this observation, I was chastised with the “post-racial” assumption that we now live in a “colorblind” society in which the ethnicity of a view’s proponents means nothing. What matters is whether or not a person’s observations are “right.” Invoked to bolster this view was Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would be judged not by “the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”6 It seemed to me that this utilization of King appropriated his words out of context and insinuated that while ethnicity meant nothing, the innate character of the nonwhite other was readily discernible.

I was told that to talk about race as playing a substantial role in ethical discourse serves to stoke the flames of racial division and strife, turning back all the “progress” we have made as a society. How was I to interpret these critiques from “good” people about a society that has presumably “gotten over” ethnic division? Were it not for my experience of the racial calculus that operates reflexively within contemporary theological and ecclesial formation, I might have more seriously questioned my assumptions about the death of a black youth and the acquittal of his killer.

While I had long recognized problematic aspects of my own formation in regard to the assumed universality of what were highly culturally-constructed theological, aesthetic, and ethical frameworks, it is through the works of Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter that I began to link things I had observed, but not been able to connect or explain in a coherent fashion. What had been troublesome in the way “reconciliation” was imagined within the ecclesiological frameworks I had received was explicated in their texts in a cogent manner that purposed to expose the inception of the racial vision and its subsequent masquerade as universality. Jennings’ and Carter’s related genealogical accounts present whiteness as a sociopolitical order that must be maintained and invested in so as to be given life.7 As such, whiteness as a comprehensive way of life can function as a challenge to the Way of Life embodied in the One who is the Way. It will become clear throughout this study that what I am referencing as problematic is not the particularity of European experience, but the particularity-as-universality that is whiteness and which competes with the reign of Christ as it invites all flesh into its sociopolitical order.

The major portion of this book pursues an in-depth analysis of the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter. Taken together, their works form an emerging school of thought that finds the genesis of the modern racial imagination to be the racialized scale inaugurated by colonization and coming to maturation in the structure of Enlightenment. Jennings, in The Christian Imagination, explores the colonial underpinnings of whiteness while Carter, in Race: A Theological Account, reads modernity as the evolution of this way of being in the world.8 Jennings and Carter contend that the trajectory of “whiteness” as sociopolitical order is enabled by a supersessionist tendency that undervalues the particularity of the work of YHWH through the chosen people Israel in favor of a universalizing framework characteristic of European hegemony. In other words, Occidental dominance functions within a problematic theological legacy in which the particularity of the Jewish body of Jesus Christ is of little importance. This minimizing of the particular locus of salvation can be seen as underemphasizing the particularity of all people groups. This loss of particularity is experienced as a loss of the importance of place—tangible, local space—in the constitution of a people. Without a spatial constitution, bodies are called upon to stand in for place and are accordingly racialized along a hierarchical continuum. Racialized bodies are then understood to be drawn into the telos of whiteness as the salvific hope for those trapped within the taint of dark flesh, which stands as signifier of a more primitive nature. This configuration of thought and practice bars genuine joining of peoples except through assimilationist motifs in which European aesthetic, ontological, and ethical constructs are held to be the norm toward which all of creation is maturing. This book will explicate in much more detail how Carter and Jennings build this sequence of arguments.

Returning now to my experiences following Zimmerman’s acquittal will allow me to illustrate my claim that whiteness is a sociopolitical order that demands continual maintenance. On the second day of the jury’s deliberations, the jury found Zimmerman “not guilty” on all counts. Having lived and ministered for a decade in my inner city neighborhood located on the “color line,” I had seen countless African American male youth faced with a sense of nihilism at the hopelessness of resisting the forces of categorization, exclusion from empowering education, police profiling, and a criminal “justice” system which has functioned to effectively eliminate the threat of the nonwhite body through mass incarceration. I had watched as tender young boys were streamlined down the pipeline from ghetto school to state-of-the-art prison. I had seen sensitive young men waived as adults and hardened by several years of warehousing in the prison industrial complex. I had witnessed adult men with fates largely predetermined as they faced a daunting job market with little formal education, branded with the scarlet letter of “felon” for crimes that would have been ignored or received a slap on the wrist in suburban or rural contexts. I had witnessed on my street several of the young men who spent time in our home or Bible studies as children now finding the easiest option to be one of violence in the face of seemingly pointless resistance. Defying this predetermined fate was the experience of only a few young men who had the good fortune to experience a convergence of: being afforded the possibility of non-traditional educational opportunities, connecting to a strong local faith community, receiving the approbation of multiple caring adults who intentionally and sacrificially invested in them, and possessing an uncommon mix of self-esteem, tenacity, and an extroverted personality that won favor in the eyes of those with whom they came in contact. This seemingly serendipitous confluence was the exception and not the norm and took massive amounts of effort on the part of all involved to maintain, largely because it brought one into direct conflict with the principalities and powers.9 When Zimmerman was declared “not guilty,” I realized that I was at a loss regarding what I could now tell these young men. Could I tell them that if only they made sure to do the “right” thing society would protect them? How could they have any confidence that if they, like Trayvon, were walking home with a bag of Skittles and a soda, their lives would be viewed as being worthy of protection? Could I assure them that if they attempted to avoid conflict and yet were attacked, the trial of their murderer would not turn into a judgment based on society’s perception of their “character” and relative worth?

As I lay in bed that evening, I choked back tears and prayed that the grace of God would keep our local community and our country from taking ten steps backward in our ability to know and trust each other. While it was a foregone conclusion for my brothers and sisters in the black community that in some way every aspect of this tragedy had been about race, and while I took comfort in the strength I borrowed from them, I was not sure how I would be received the next morning. Zimmerman was acquitted on a Saturday night and Sunday morning I would be standing to preach before the joined black and white community that makes up the congregation which I pastor. I needed to put into words the sadness and outrage which we felt, while clinging to the hope that mutuality is possible within the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened was not what I expected. The building in which we worshiped was full and our members, black and white, were there and ready to worship. The African American members of the body experientially led our congregation, including those of a lighter hue, into an affirmation of God’s goodness in the face of injustice. Even after having lived and ministered in my community for years and after having availed myself of many autobiographical, theological, and sociological resources related to the struggle for black liberation upon the soil of the New World, I was existentially unprepared for the familiarity of the black worshipper with exalting the name of the Lord while walking through the valley of despair. While I was able to speak to the deep sense of betrayal we as a community were experiencing, the maintenance of an affirmation of God’s goodness did not rely primarily upon me. We had together formed a bond strong enough that we were able to be vulnerable with each other in the midst of our pain instead of alienating each other because of the perpetration of evil. I will never forget the heroic posture of my black brothers and sisters that morning as those of us who had not been on the receiving end of racial profiling were invited into the shared experience of lament and celebration.

There can be no “proof” that George Zimmerman targeted Trayvon Martin because he was black. To frame the issue in this manner radically misunderstands the nature of the racial imagination as inaugurated by whiteness. The point is that both Zimmerman and the contemporary church and academy often operate within similar evaluative frameworks: the former judging the intentions of a black youth and the latter posing ethical and aesthetic theories and submitting non-Western cultural forms to those judgments. While I identify Zimmerman as “racist” in ways that many Christian theologians are not, it will be my task in this book to demonstrate the ways in which a similar racial imagination enlivens both overt racism and the dominance of many “white” forms of Christian community and theological inquiry.

Within rhetoric of ethics and beauty, the racial imagination has tended to align both criminality and immorality with blackness while aligning guardianship and goodness with whiteness. Zimmerman’s 911 call, in which he maintained that Martin was “a real suspicious guy” who “look[ed] like” he was “up to no good” illustrates this contention in an overt manner. “He’s got his hand in his waistband and he’s a black male” linked a judgment about Martin’s personal intentions with a categorization of Martin as a typological character: “These assholes they always get away.” This assessment was not primarily about Martin, but about what Martin represented. As a young black man in a hoodie walking through a gated community he became one of “these assholes.” Run as he might, Trayvon would be overtaken by Zimmerman, who had been warned by the 911 dispatcher not to follow Martin. What happened from there, while being hotly contested, is of little consequence to the “facts” of the case or their theological significance. It is indisputable that Martin ran away at the sight of Zimmerman (Zimmerman: “Shit he’s running”). The blood from Zimmerman’s head and nose suggests that he was beaten after he followed and accosted Martin. Why this fact changes anything is beyond comprehension. If the tables were turned, it is unthinkable that a white youth fighting back against a darker–skinned assailant would effectively be put on trial as an aggressor.10 It is likewise absurd to imagine that if a darker-skinned armed man had followed and confronted an unarmed teenager forty pounds and several shades lighter than him, he would ever have been acquitted based on a claim of “self-defense.”11 The essential point is that before the final altercation, Trayvon had already been tried and found guilty. The judgment of guilt was made the moment the descriptive glance of whiteness discerned Trayvon’s nefarious purposes as member of a suspicious type. That this judgment is theological in nature is evidenced by Zimmerman’s later reflection to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “it was all God’s plan” for him to kill Trayvon and that he could neither “regret” nor “second-guess” anything he did that night.12

If, as I am claiming, an observatory stance which categorizes based upon a racialized hierarchy is at work in our collective Western imagination, the debate over whether Zimmerman was white or of white and Hispanic mixed racial ancestry is of little importance. As we have seen, the pervasiveness of the racial gaze is such that an African American pastor in New York can succumb to the same reflexive disdain for blackness. Zimmerman as white male or as Hispanic male can be interpreted as functioning within this social imaginary. While the orientation of whiteness was historically inaugurated by those of lighter skin, whose re-ordering of the world produced such a descriptive stance, all flesh has been forced into this manner of categorization. It has often been the case historically that those who are “nearest” to being white are those most effective in policing the lines of racial purity, as their own identity depends on it. The popular debate about the purity or lack thereof of Zimmerman’s ethnicity is indicative of the classificatory structure of whiteness. Much in the same way that naysayers declared that Obama the candidate was not truly “black” because his mother was white, defenders of Zimmerman were quick to point out that race could not have been involved in this case because Zimmerman was not truly “white.” This obsession with genetic makeup is reminiscent of sixteenth–century laws related to “blood purity” and drastically underestimates the force of the racial imagination. The racial imagination sees in lighter skin a potential for “civilized” behavior and in darker skin the existence of “savage” instincts. Within the racial gaze of whiteness, people are reflexively assigned a spot somewhere along this continuum. Those who ride the fence between racial “types” are often forced to decide with which group they will identify. In much the same way that lighter-skinned persons of African descent are often looked upon more favorably by both white society and black communities, and in much the same way that “mulatto” people historically survived in the marketplace by claiming to be of some other ethnicity,13 a black teenager named Trayvon Martin was measured on the scale of whiteness and found wanting.

Those who looked primarily for a clear sign of “racial animus” in this case were not looking deep enough. While it is certainly not the case that racism (as a matter of the will) has been eradicated, what I am describing here is the gaze that animates the ability to make racialized judgments. It is this gaze that is not primarily dependent on the conscious choice of an individual in a moment of hatred or discrimination, although it does serve to produce such animosity. It is this gaze that Jennings and Carter contend must be named, recognized, and resisted. Our contemporary public rhetoric, with its laudable emphasis on rooting out racism, is able to address only clearly defined acts of discrimination in an attempt to discern the prejudicial intentions of the perpetrator behind said bias. Paradoxically, the almost exclusive focus on racism as a matter of the will can distract from the underlying problem. This could be one reason why the racial judgment was purportedly so difficult for white persons to discern in the Martin/Zimmerman case. Yet for those who have experienced both sides of the objectifying gaze of judgment that assumes the transparency of the nonwhite body, the racial imaginary can be seen in the assumptions made about Trayvon’s intentions. Although the only language available to observers of these legal proceedings was the language of racism, many black and white Americans intuitively understood that there was more at stake in this case. I am making a hermeneutical judgment here. Yet I must stress that it is not a hermeneutical judgment that proceeds primarily from my “will”; it is a judgment that is inescapable because of the reality of being joined with those whose daily experience and historical reality directs and instructs me. Fundamentally, it is a judgment from outside me: encouraged by my position before black and white congregants as we stand together before the throne of Jesus Christ. It is the judgment of divine grace that affords us the opportunity to transcend a static ontology while remaining grounded as particular creatures.

The State of Theological Race Studies

These reflections on Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal have exposed common responses of many contemporary Christians, as well as the strikingly different response of my local worshipping community, shaped by intentional joining amidst diversity. This contrast suggests several different ways of theologically engaging with race. This diversity of perspectives may be demonstrated by surveying the field of contemporary literature surrounding the intersection of race and theology.

I read the theological school of race theory initiated by Jennings and Carter as both a culmination and a redirection of the field of theological race studies. Academic theological race studies have often been produced in the form of liberation theologies or reflections on identity politics. Beginning with the work of Gustavo Gutierrez in A Theology of Liberation, a “preferential option for the poor” began to be invoked as a framework within which to understand the liberating work of Christ.14 Developing this impulse, James H. Cone’s work almost singlehandedly inaugurated the field of black liberation theology through works such as Black Theology and Black Power, A Black Theology of Liberation, and God of the Oppressed.15 Cone famously combined liberation theology and identity politics with his identification of African Americans as “God’s poor people” and his assertion that “God is black.” Shaped by the spirits of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, Cone’s sophisticated texts set the trajectory for theological race studies for a generation. Vine Deloria Jr. is often mentioned alongside Cone, his works on religion and Native spirituality emphasizing the opacity of being and presenting Native religious frameworks as offering a more satisfactory account of creation than that articulated by Christian theology. In books such as Custer Died for Your Sins and God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Deloria Jr. offers wry and astute observations on the confluence of Christianity and colonization.16 Deloria Jr.’s purpose is not so much to essentialize race as it is to suggest an intrinsic link between land and a people’s self-understanding. This observation distinguishes Deloria Jr.’s account from the general trajectory of identity politics.

Early theologies of liberation focused on race or socioeconomic status have been followed by identity theologies dealing with gender and sexual orientation.17 While not discounting the important anthropological insights and hermeneutical practices advanced in these works, it will become apparent throughout my treatment that I read the general trajectory of identity politics as locked within an essentialization of identity that reinforces the very strictures it seeks to overcome. While it is not within the scope of my work to address this theme as it is related to theologies of gender or sexual orientation, suffice it to say that the trajectory inaugurated by Cone tends to reinforce a hermeneutic of suspicion and has difficulty moving beyond reification of identity distinctions. The telos of such an intellectual arrangement does a disservice to theologies of race by allowing them no distinction from theologies of sexual orientation, for instance. While Jennings and Carter clearly enumerate the connections between the hierarchical arrangement of modern racialized bodies, modern gendered bodies, and the body politic, I read both scholars as together striking out upon a new path not locked within the hermeneutical ghetto within which theologies of identity have often been consigned.

Scholars such as Charles H. Long, Albert J. Raboteau, Dwight Hopkins Jr., J. Deotis Roberts, James Noel, William R. Jones, and Angela Sims have all made important contributions in the fields of religious studies and African American church studies. While Hopkins has focused primarily upon early Afro-Christian slave religion18 and Sims is well known for her seminal work on Ida B. Wells, The Ethical Complications of Lynching,19 Noel has published more generally regarding African American religion.20 In Is God a White Racist?, Jones details his “conversion from black Christian fundamentalism to black religious humanism,” eschewing the God of orthodox Christianity in favor of what he calls “humanocentric theism.”21 Through classic texts like Liberation and Reconciliation, Roberts drafted a black theology in response to Cone, emphasizing the need for liberation and reconciliation to be experienced through active nonviolent protest.22 Of these scholars, the two who arguably have had the greatest impact in the field of religious studies are Raboteau and Long, with whom I will interact in some detail in my treatment of Carter in chapter 1.

In the realm of public intellectualism, scholars such as Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have influenced contemporary rhetoric and debate surrounding the role of race in society, economics, and politics.23 While not strictly doctrinal in their theological approach, the works of West and Gates cannot be underestimated in their impact in shaping the role of race in America in the twenty-first century. While intersecting with the historical focus of scholars such as Hopkins, Sims, and Noel, and while being sensitive to the general trajectory of scholars such as West and Gates, the works of Jennings and Carter will be seen throughout this analysis to be distinct from the field of religious studies in several important ways, most clearly exhibited by their resistance to the essentialization of identity characteristic of comparative religious analysis.

At the level of popular missiology, perhaps no other organization has published so widely about racial reconciliation as the Christian Community Development Association. The CCDA is a network of several hundred urban ministries which are guided by John M. Perkins’ framework of Relocation, Reconciliation, and Redistribution. Perkins, who has stressed incarnational relocation to communities not one’s own, primarily post–industrial inner–city neighborhoods, founded the CCDA in 1989 after a lifetime of work focused on racial reconciliation and community development. Perkins was active in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the late nineteen–sixties, experiencing his brother’s murder and his own imprisonment and torture at the hands of white police officers. Perkins has been extremely influential in advancing both dialogue and praxis surrounding reconciliation and justice. As a grassroots organization of practitioners, the theological vision of the CCDA has been somewhat limited.24 While often acknowledging the links between “community development” and colonizing sensibilities and seeking to resist the latter, the CCDA’s invocation of relocation tends to be framed in a unilateral manner that too strongly reads the “relocator” into the place of Christ, suggesting a latent supersessionism in the CCDA’s implicit Christology. The mutuality often experienced in CCDA ministries (of which my local church is an organizational member) tends to be had at the expense of the systematic integrity of its “incarnational” Christology. At this point Jennings could be a helpful conversation partner for the CCDA as his theology of place and particularity provides a more sufficient framework for considering the joining of diverse peoples. While the CCDA is invaluable as an unlikely community of diverse practitioners joined together as advocates with those on the margins, it is not first and foremost a theological school.

Somewhat more sophisticated works have been produced recently which share similar theological sensibilities to those of the CCDA. From the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice have edited a series called Resources for Reconciliation, in which they pen Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing.25 Katongole and Rice attempt to move beyond truncated visions of reconciliation often expressed in Evangelical circles by expanding those accounts into a holistic vision of the reconciliation of all things in Christ. Likewise, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explores a practical theological vision of reconciliation in his semi-autobiographical account Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line.26 Wilson-Hartgrove reflects on learning to “hear the Gospel in a new key” as he was welcomed into a historically black church in Durham, and what this journey has meant for his understanding of identity and ecclesiology. While referencing Jennings and Carter as his teachers, and acknowledging their works as an important emerging “school” in “American theology,”27 the genre of Wilson-Hartgrove’s text limits the scope of his explorations of the theological genesis of the racial imagination.

In many ways, the intersection of religious thought and race in contemporary American public discourse can be shown to be inextricably linked to the dual legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. As Cone demonstrates in Martin and Malcolm and America, the divergent emphases of Martin and Malcolm, which were heading toward greater convergence when the life of each religious leader and activist was violently snuffed out, demonstrate two distinct yet interconnected ways of viewing relationships across lines of ethnicity.28 As demonstrated through MLK’s collected papers and speeches in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.29 and the two preeminent accounts of Malcolm X’s life, Alex Haley’s famous interviews with X entitled The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the recent acclaimed biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable,30 the trajectories of both men overlapped in ways not acknowledged in common conventional accounts of their legacies. While MLK is famous for his invocation of “the beloved community,” he died somewhat of a pariah for his outspoken resistance to militarism and the systemic nature of poverty in the modern capitalist West. Likewise, while X is famous for his resistance to the evils perpetrated by the “white devil,” his religious experiences through his pilgrimage to Mecca and his theological insistence upon particularity as a path toward universality marked a later more inclusive shift that would cost him his life. Neither man advocated mutuality without justice. Both paid the ultimate price for resisting the sociopolitical order of whiteness.

Two of the most recent works relating to the intersection of theology and race are Brian Bantum’s academic text Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity31 and John Piper’s popular text Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian.32 The former is sensitive to the theological sensibilities of Jennings and Carter, while the latter exemplifies the manner in which the race antinomianism of supersessionist logic is often refracted through popular Christian works. Bantum’s review criticizing Piper’s manner of envisioning racial reconciliation by rendering ethnicity inconsequential clearly draws from the works of Jennings and Carter.33 While I will interact in some detail with each text at key points in this treatment, I introduce them here so as to indicate the ways in which they converge with or diverge from the theological school of Jennings and Carter. Bantum, as a student of Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School, had the opportunity to learn from both Jennings and Carter and aims his theological reflections in roughly the same direction as that inaugurated by the two latter thinkers. In my constructive Conclusion, I will utilize Bantum’s Christological reflections on hybridity to orient my ecclesiological focus. At that point, I will enumerate what I read as Bantum’s dual relationship to the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter and the classical retrieval impulse of Hauerwas. My intention is not to exaggerate Bantum’s divergence from Jennings and Carter, but rather to indicate an inclination in his work not entirely at home in their theological trajectory.

I do not read Jennings and Carter as opposed to theological retrieval; their work is much more open to engaging with the “tradition” than that of many other scholars who write about identity issues. At the same time they do not uncritically incorporate the tradition; they recognize the fallibility of the luminaries of both orthodoxy and liberalism. They contend that it is within orthodoxy itself that supersessionism took root. Appeals to tradition as the preeminent theological norm can obscure this reality. Much like Kierkegaard and Barth, Carter and Jennings recognize that each generation must engage afresh and anew with the word of God. In their theological race theory, neither tradition nor liberalism alone is sufficient to this task.

I read Piper’s Bloodlines, which is a non-academic theological work, as evincing a manner of imagining racial identity which is utterly divergent from Jennings’ and Carter’s vision. In short, Piper’s work represents a popular way of enfolding concerns about race into justification of a narrow doctrinal system. Piper utilizes race to buttress his American Reformed tradition. Ironically, he proclaims an end to ethnocentrism through a “colorblind” appeal to the theological legacy of the Puritans. Piper’s reflections on black flesh can be read as opportunities for theological self-defense. What appears to be anti-ethnocentric is in reality radically assimilationist.

The Theological Race Theory of Jennings and Carter

The theological race theory of Jennings and Carter was forged in a particular space. While Jennings reveals that the soil with which his mother worked is perhaps more constitutive for his understanding of place and race than is the academy of which he was a part for years,34 it is not inconsequential that Duke is the space within which scholars such as Jennings, Carter, and Bantum were joined. It can be assumed that Jennings’ interest in Jose de Acosta was influenced, at least in part, by his interactions with Walter D. Mignolo, the scholar of cultural studies at Duke who wrote the commentary on the new translation of Acosta’s Historia, published by Duke University Press.35 Additionally, it is probable that an environment in which questions are being asked about the centrality of Jesus Christ in a cosmopolitan milieu encouraged space for the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter to take root. These are the sort of questions asked by a wide range of prominent theologians at Duke, such as Stanley Hauerwas, Gregory Jones, and Richard Hays, although their answers differ from those of Jennings and Carter.

It is significant that Jennings mounts an implicit critique of the theological atmosphere of Duke in his critical read of Alisdair MacIntyre and “traditioned moral enquiry.”36 Given Duke’s public reputation as a center for reconciliation studies, it is as if Jennings is suggesting that the “best” contemporary Christian talk about reconciliation often falls prey to objectifying views of the “other” made possible by supersessionist patterns of theologically imagining identity. Jennings is not singling out Hauerwas for criticism nor is he suggesting that Duke is susceptible to the racial imaginary to a greater degree than the Christian academy in general. Rather, he is demonstrating that a reclamation of the “tradition” in the face of liberalism is not free from being a carrier of the virus of racialization. Jennings’ and Carter’s thesis would grant Hauerwas, MacIntyre, and theologians such as John Milbank their conclusion that the language of liberalism is not the best way to describe reality. Stated differently, Jennings and Carter would agree that theology can make truth claims and that it is intellectually viable for divine revelation to be the epistemological center. In this sense, theologians who appreciate the role of tradition contra the hegemony of modern liberalism have been important voices in the conversation. However, Jennings’ and Carter’s contention is that the racial imagination was birthed from within the “tradition” during late medievalism, rendering a reclamation of scholastic orthodoxy a bit more problematic than originally supposed. Jennings and Carter are content with neither unqualified appeals to the “tradition” nor modern liberalism. Throughout this book I will describe this contention in detail before, in the Conclusion, moving to what I hope will be a more satisfactory way of imagining reconciliation along the lines of the theologies proposed by Jennings and Carter.

I will demonstrate that, unlike Cone and the fields of identity politics in general, Jennings and Carter more radically engage race through a more rigorous theological engagement than that employed by the available literature. This contention is substantiated by the key themes from their works which I have hinted at in my analysis of the murder of Trayvon Martin. At this point, I will briefly acknowledge several themes which I will develop throughout my treatment of each scholar. My aim, therefore, is to introduce my text around the structure of my introductory narrative.

First, the racialized scale inaugurated in the colonial period and maturing in modernity is identified by Carter through his interaction with the racialized architecture undergirding Kant’s Aufklarung and by Jennings through his interaction with the racialized imagination of Acosta in his sixteenth century theological narration of the New World. It is this descriptive hierarchy that allows a white-Latino man to discern the morality and intentions of a black teenager with a glance. It can also be seen in my early struggle to theologically imagine black-white relations in a way that does not foreground assimilation.

Second, that the racialized scale is theological in nature is demonstrated by Carter in his close reading of Kant, whose rationalized “religion” was the engine of Enlightenment, and by Jennings in his careful analysis of four Christian thinkers engaged in intercultural interaction in a world re-shaped by colonization. These forms of “pseudotheology” find voice in Zimmerman’s confession to a television news host that the purposes of God can be discerned in the killing of a non-white “other” and in the religious right who finds no discrepancy between the Way of Jesus Christ, Israel’s Suffering Servant, and a legal system in which “Stand Your Ground” laws, funded by the gun lobby and justified by an anachronistic reading of the supposedly infallible Second Amendment, are upheld. I personally experienced the theological draw of supersessionism several years ago as I was writing a reflection on the second chapter of Ephesians, relating to Paul’s invocation of Jesus as the peace between Jew and Gentile, making one new being out of the two,37 as a way to narrate the reality of my ecclesial community. I ran up against my inability to biblically frame white-black relations as anything other than a hierarchical relationship between Jew and Gentile. It was at this point that I gave off writing because I intuitively recognized that this manner of framing the issue was inherently prejudicial. It was soon thereafter that I read Jennings’ The Christian Imagination and Carter’s Race: A Theological Account and understood the depth of the theological deformities I had inherited.

Third, Carter finds whiteness to be the heretical ordo which, as a distortion of the Christian doctrine of creation, invites all being into its static ontological categories. Similarly, Jennings elucidates whiteness as the orienting structure behind the displacement enacted upon various peoples through the reordering of creation by colonization. The resultant static mode of being can be seen to have influenced Zimmerman’s recognition of Martin as one who threatened him simply by being “a black male.”38 Blackness was the bottom of a static ontological structure into which Martin was escorted by Zimmerman’s gaze. The static ontological designations assigned to various peoples by whiteness are also those which would keep me as pastor-scholar trapped within the bounds of my white male subjectivity. While I certainly cannot supersede my spatially-oriented status as a particular creature (which is a key element of Jennings’ thesis), Carter suggests, through the work of Maximus the Confessor, that creation in the image of the One who is Trinitarian relationality, and recreation through the Jewish body of Jesus of Nazareth, renders being itself as ekstasis. It is this ecstasy of being that can be experienced through resisting the strictures of whiteness through a process of miscegenation in which non-white subjectivity is superabundant.

Fourth, Carter and Jennings both identify that the “best” of contemporary theological ways of imagining identity fall short of diagnosing what is most problematic about modern and early-modern Western theological anthropology. While Carter interacts with the Radical Orthodoxy of Milbank, and Jennings with the virtue ethic of MacIntyre and its theological deployment by Hauerwas, they are interested in the manner in which such ways of imagining Christian identity are refracted more broadly through intellectual and spiritual formation in the academy and church. Just as Jennings’ and Carter’s targets are not strictly Milbank and Hauerwas, but rather what they represent, so my aim in this text is not to discount the many positive contributions of each scholar. Rather, I am rendering explicit Jennings’ and Carter’s critique so as to censure myself and caution confessional Christians about the limitations of uncritical appeals to tradition or the narrative of the Christian West. I take Hauerwas’ critique of modernity as a given—and as an important development—but suggest that moral formation in the academy and church has tended to introduce Christians into paternalistic ways of pursuing reconciliation and pejorative patterns of imagining the “other.” While I do not believe that liberalism has fared much better, I am suggesting that Jennings and Carter offer a way forward distinct from this gridlock.

Jennings’ and Carter’s analyses suggest that an emphasis on the church as radical counter-culture does not sufficiently take into account the ways in which whiteness was the outgrowth of the collusion of Christian theology and its attendant late medieval and early-modern politics. Just as it was not a “secular” Empire alone that instigated the racial imagination, so modern secularism should not be seen as the moral antithesis of the Christian tradition. While anti-modern polemics may serve to alert the novitiate to the problematic nature of moral modernity, they tend to retain white male subjectivity as the normalizing pole in aesthetics and ethics. Through appeals to “tradition,” such accounts tend to reassert and reimagine Occidental prominence in the face of “multicultural” (or “pluralistic”) contact. While I would not suggest that the responses I received to my reflections on the Martin-Zimmerman case were specifically influenced by virtue ethics, I am suggesting that both are invested in the maintenance of white subjectivity in similar and describable ways. Neither exhibits a fundamental openness to learning from those on the “underside of modernity.”39 This intransigence was exhibited in the resistance of Christians of “moral” character to recognizing the racial gaze within themselves when confronted with it in Zimmerman.

Fifth, Jennings and Carter both demonstrate that modern liberal discourse is not better at articulating a satisfactory analysis of race. Jennings and Carter identify the modern disciplines of cultural studies and religious studies as heirs of the racialized vision that took root within Western scholasticism as it engaged with colonization. While Carter offers a critique of the religious academy, Jennings presses beyond modern cultural studies to demonstrate the theological character of the origins of race. This methodology suggests that, while orthodox Christian belief has been a carrier of the virus of racialization, orthodoxy (as an expression of the particular salvation event centered in Jesus of Nazareth) is not to be jettisoned in favor of the humanistic spirit of the age. In this sense, the methodology of this book and that of Jennings and Carter (this is especially true of Carter) is not completely at odds with that of retrievals of orthodoxy. I contend that Jennings and Carter point to moments within the tradition that shed light upon a Faith more authentically Christ-like than the dominant narrative of the tradition. I will demonstrate several ways in which Carter and Jennings subvert the methodology of retrievals of tradition by radicalizing it.

As the shared genealogy of their theses suggests, the problem is that the supersessionism maturing in Occidental hegemony was embryonically present in the early Hellenization of the Faith. Jennings and Carter read liberalism as a modern maturation of the tradition of Western philosophical rationality. One can see the inability of liberalism to sufficiently analyze this problematic legacy in the manner in which race is commonly framed within public discourse. As was demonstrated by the FBI report which attempted to find some evidence of “racial animus” or its lack in Zimmerman’s past,40 modern ethical discourse is characterized by an obsession about the will of the individual. Interestingly, the Christian right has imbibed the ideal of the autonomous moral agent, tending to argue ethical issues as universal moral imperatives (on this point, virtue ethics is to be preferred).41

As I discovered when criticizing the injustice of Martin’s murder, it was not only the Christian right that defended the legal process and its outcome. As a friend committed to atheism in the face of the “irrationality” of the Christian faith commented, modern legal standards are the only thing keeping humanity from devolving into “angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.”42 Apparently, the irony of an armed vigilante being defended by the modern legal system was lost in this commenter’s view. I could only suggest that optimism about “human progress” is misplaced. Jennings and Carter suggest that race has functioned precisely within this evolutionary logic. Anecdotally, most of my more “progressive” friends have not proven themselves more committed to a posture of humility in forming relationships of trust with others unlike them than have conservatives.43

Sixth, place is a primary theme addressed by Jennings and alluded to by Carter. While Jennings views the displacement enacted by colonization as the genesis of modern race as flesh was called upon to represent identity, Carter alludes to the necessity of the “impure” and scandalous sharing of space as the antidote to racialization. Place can be seen to be a factor in Trayvon’s death as Zimmerman found it to be his duty to protect certain types of socialized space from the “other” assumed to be transgressing that space. As a “neighborhood watch volunteer” claiming spatial authority over a gated community, Zimmerman assumed that a young man of color walking to his family’s house had no business being in that place. Modern space as private property is understood to be an ownable commodity appropriated for the use of some and the exclusion of others by the authority of “white” legal rationality. This contention warrants a brief excursus.

In Christ, Power, and Mammon, Scott Prather draws on the work of Jennings to explore the commodification of place in a “free market” system and its alignment along the lines of socioeconomic status and racial classification.44 Prather contends that contemporary capitalism is driven not by a “free” market but by the collusion of various socio–political forces. Prather contrasts this market “freedom” with the Barthian notion of freedom as freedom for the “other,” demonstrating that the concept of freedom employed by modern capitalist ideology is “a notion of independence through personal acquisition and upward mobility through social competition.”45 In this sense, “[t]he human condition presumed by capitalist freedom is socio–economic war.” The work of Jennings aids Prather in exposing the connections between socioeconomic identity and racialized identity. Since Mammon and the racial gaze function in the modern world as mutually articulating realities, the existence of commodified space makes specific claims upon bodies. Rather than an organic connection between land and identity consonant with the Christian doctrine of creation, space as modern capital issues demands upon people, demands that illuminate race as “the primary matrix through which Mammon flexes its muscles of social division.”46

When the boundaries policed by these demands are assumed to be transgressed, surveillance and disciplinary action are often the result.47 Jennings demonstrates that the reordering of creation initiated by manifest destiny has reached its apex in the contemporary ability to keep the “other” out. When Trayvon as “other” transgressed the boundaries assigned by modern spatialization, his life became forfeit. Jennings’ and Carter’s invocation of the scandalous sharing of place is an assault on racialization. I found that I had underestimated the power of scandalous space-sharing as on the Sunday morning following the Zimmerman verdict I again stood in awe at its healing work in my local worshipping community. Living where we should not, each in close proximity to the unlike other, we were together able to experience the theological promise of what Jennings calls the “transgress[ing] [of] boundaries of real estate.”48

Seventh, while their language differs, Jennings’ and Carter’s accounts invoke ontological “impurity.” What Jennings identifies by the term “joining” is similar to that which Carter calls “miscegenation” or “speaking in tongues.” This mutuality, afforded by a vulnerability characteristic of the Incarnation, is best expressed in erotic imagery. Jennings’ central image is two unlike bodies in desire for one another becoming one flesh in the body of God.49 Remembering that miscegenation or intercultural joining was often occasioned by the rape of the non-white other,50 these terms are being used to subversive effect. Aware that the “mulatto” child was the progeny of what was considered to be “impure” desire for the “other,” Jennings and Carter are redeploying language of oppression to break “the pseudotheological backbone of whiteness.”51 Both theologians hesitate to use the term “reconciliation” because of its misuse in modern missiology and ecclesiology, beholden as they are to colonial-modern distortions. As Jennings explains:

I could speak of this gift in terms of reconciliation. But I have purposely stayed away from the theological language of reconciliation because of its terrible misuse in Western Christianity and its tormented deployment in so many theological systems and projects. The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating the negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation.52

“Reconciliation” in its extreme familiarity often supposes a motif of assimilation which reenacts relational dynamics similar to those experienced in the American slave plantation and the modern criminal justice system. However, for all its exploitation, a rich Pauline notion of reconciliation is that which Carter and Jennings are rearticulating as the antidote for racialization. In relation to Zimmerman, one cannot help but theorize what effect the racialized scale’s resistance to “impure” relations may have had on the psychology of a person of mixed racial ancestry. As pastor of an “impure” community, I am existentially aware that it is necessary to consistently combat such a psychology.

The Structure of This Text

In the Conclusion, I will build on a sympathetic engagement with the works of Jennings and Carter as I flesh out some of the practical entailments of an ecclesiology of joining. The body of this text will exposit the works of Carter and Jennings by highlighting their positions in relation to two poles within the religious academy: a liberal relativizing and universalizing tendency in studies related to religion and culture and a conservative nostalgia for a virtue-based reclamation of Occidental subjectivity. Carter and Jennings read both of these trajectories as bound to the racial imagination of whiteness in important ways. Neither scholar is content with the identity politics of modern religious studies or the centrality of the European body in retrievals of virtue. I will analyze the works of Carter and Jennings in turn by positioning them between and beyond modern religious studies and Western “classical” scholastic theology.

I begin in chapter 1 with a brief summary of Carter’s Race: A Theological Account before unpacking his central assertions in contrast with those of the modern religious academy. Through his interactions with Raboteau, Cone, and Long, Carter demonstrates the ways in which he is both heir and foil to the African American religious academy. Raboteau the historian, Cone the theologian, and Long the scholar of religion each contribute something to Carter’s argument while Carter must ultimately disavow significant portions of their philosophical infrastructure as tending toward reification of race. Carter maintains that such essentialization tends to further harden the ontological categories of whiteness and renders static the anthropological designations introduced by it. I read Carter’s ordering of his text as evincing increasing divergence with the black religious academy. While he borrows quite a bit from Raboteau in his shared interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and while Cone’s volleys against whiteness have been helpful in allowing Carter to break a hole in the wall of racialized identity, Long’s relativizing “universal religious primordium” does little more than reenact the objectifying gaze of whiteness. Throughout chapters 1 and 2, I also intimate Carter’s relationship to early Afro-Christian sources, in whose autobiographical treatises he finds the intuitive moves necessary to undermine the anthropological objectifications perpetuated by European rationality through both cultural studies and theology.

In chapter 2, I position Carter in contradistinction to a popular contemporary way of theologically imagining identity. While I have noted Milbank’s positive contribution in demonstrating the viability of theology over against sociology, I read Milbank’s nostalgia for an Anglo-Catholic virtue ethic as a subtle reenactment of several characteristics of the theological architecture of British imperialism. While Milbank astutely diagnoses the impotence of liberal “secular” sociology to construct a satisfactory ethic, I read his revival of a “classical” Greek philosophical framework as suggesting insecurity about the decentering of the European tradition in the face of an ethic of “multiculturalism.” Carter criticizes the soft imperialism of Radical Orthodoxy through his counterintuitive read of the similarities between Milbank’s and Kant’s theological anthropologies. Much like his read of Milbank, Carter reads the religious moorings of the Kantian Enlightenment project as grounded in Kant’s insecurity about the relationship of white and non-white bodies vis-a-vis European conceptions of rationality and progress. Carter reads Kant and Milbank as constructing their systems out of their respective perceptions of the ascension or loss of white male subjectivity. While Radical Orthodoxy stands in explicit opposition to the Kantian project, it appears that the driving force behind both trajectories is the relation of the European subject to forces beyond that subject’s control. As I close chapter 2, I briefly explicate Carter’s invocation of Maximus the Confessor in order to demonstrate in concrete terms how he reads the Christian tradition against itself so as to offer a new way forward for theological discourse.

Chapters 3 and 4, in mirroring the treatment of chapters 1 and 2, present my argument in symmetrical fashion. In these chapters, I investigate Jennings’ The Christian Imagination by structuring my analysis similarly to that which I performed in relation to Carter’s Race. I first delve into Jennings’ relationship to the discipline of cultural studies, of which he evinces several similar sensibilites, before finishing with Jennings’ critique of a Mac­Intyrean virtue ethic.

In chapter 3, I begin with an overview of Jennings’ key moves by locating them within the autobiographical narrative he offers in his Introduction. Jennings uses his own life story to introduce the themes he explores throughout his text. Because this methodology is unique, I spend a bit longer introducing Jennings’ argument than Carter’s. Jennings’ methodology has influenced my use of a similar structure in my Introduction. I have attempted to join with Jennings in exemplifying the sort of vulnerability needed to question the assumed objectivity of European subjectivity while not collapsing into a hermeneutic of suspicion. Jennings’ use of autobiography as an opening to theological analysis suggests that a first step toward undermining whiteness is vulnerability through joining. In the body of the text, I do not overtly place my own experience into my analyses of Carter and Jennings because I recognize the importance of hearing their voices on their own terms as much as possible. It is not until the Conclusion that I again introduce several personal ecclesial experiences so as to theologically describe the practical entailments of an ecclesiology suggested by Jennings and Carter.

After explaining Jennings’ thesis by analyzing his introduction, chapter 3 delineates Jennings’ relationship to the disciplinary atmosphere of cultural studies. For each of the four historical characters Jennings utilizes (Jose de Acosta, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Olaudah Equiano, and Bishop William Colenso), I choose several of the key scholars in cultural studies consulted by Jennings. While the literature surrounding each of these four figures is plentiful, the theological significance of each thinker has been largely overlooked. Jennings contends that this “oversight” is due primarily to the ways in which each figure exposes the imperialist grid of early-modern Christian theology.53 Jennings largely accepts the narrative of events as chronicled by each scholar. However, his conclusions necessarily diverge from those of the ethnographic resources he consults. Whereas the disciplinary confines of historiographic treatments limit the scholar to conclusions little more revolutionary than a relativizing comparative analysis, Jennings as theologian is able to locate these seemingly disconnected narratives in a story of distortion, disconnection, and hope. Jennings retains hope that the Gospel, the story of YHWH inviting various particularities to join one to another in the particularity of Israel through the particular body of Jesus Christ, is neither an imperialistic nor assimilationist vision. He maintains that it is the Incarnation that allows for a new cosmopolitan body politic. I close chapter 3 with an intimation of what I call Jennings’ Christology of joining. Jennings demonstrates the ways in which the philosophical infrastructure of the religious enterprise undergirds the modern missiology of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew F. Walls, who propose a “translation” of the universal Gospel message into various particularities. As Jennings demonstrates, this translation is a unilateral one that introduces the non-white body into the ordo of whiteness.

In chapter 4, I turn to an in-depth analysis of Jennings’ use of Acosta as the paradigmatic figure exhibiting early-modern theology’s assessment of place and people (hence the title A Theology of Race and Place.) Jennings’ choice of Acosta as primary interlocutor aids in understanding his criticism of the philosophical system of MacIntyre, its theological outgrowth in Hauerwas, and its inculcation through the theological academy. Whereas I read Radical Orthodoxy as buttressing European hegemony through its invocation of the “guiding virtuous elite,” I read Hauerwas’ anti-Constantinian ecclesiology as showing initial promise in transitioning the theological imagination from its collusion with Empire to embodiments of mutuality in local communities of faith. However, I contend that the initial promise of a Hauerwasian ecclesiology is limited by the manner in which it presents intellectual and spiritual formation within a MacIntyrean reclamation of virtue, thereby reenacting the pedagogical structures in which European colonialism flourished. Through Hauerwas’ aesthetic, ethical, and liturgical vision, he tends to undermine the counter-cultural promise of his radical ecclesiology. After I detail Jennings’ divergence from Hauerwas, I briefly align Jennings’ theological anthropology with that of Barth and Bonhoeffer. I likewise demonstrate how Jennings’ Barthian theological anthropology differs from that of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, the intellectual palette from which colonialism painted the world.

Jennings’ “Christology of joining” is the starting point for my Conclusion, in which I expand upon the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter by proposing a consonant “ecclesiology of joining” oriented around the practice of eating together in shared space. This text ends in much the same way as it began, with an autobiographical narrative that proposes a way of life informed by Jennings’ and Carter’s theological visions. While the Introduction proposed an identification of the problem, the Conclusion proposes an account of reconciliation that aims to resist the distortions of the racialized Christian imagination.

1. Throughout this text, I will be referencing the transcript of the call Zimmerman placed to 911 that evening. Zimmerman, “Full Transcript.”

In reference to Zimmerman being told not to follow Martin after Martin saw Zimmerman tailing him and responded by running away, the text reads as follows: Zimmerman: “Shit, he’s running.” Dispatcher: “He’s running? Which way is he running?” Zimmerman: “Down towards the other entrance to the neighborhood.” Dispatcher: “Which entrance is that that he’s heading towards?” Zimmerman: “The back entrance . . . f**king [unintelligible].” Dispatcher: “Are you following him?” Zimmerman: “Yeah.” Dispatcher: “Ok, we don’t need you to do that.”

2. While family stories hold that my great-grandmother’s father was Sioux, and while there are aspects of claiming that heritage that have influenced the way I perceive the world, my light skin and community of origin mean that I functionally exist in modern society as a white male.

3. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 15.

4. See Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation, 1–2.

5. Pastor James David Manning’s problematic view of blackness as taint was on display as he preached: “You have not changed yet. You’re black . . . So why do you blame George Zimmerman? Why? Because you’re black, that’s why. You’re not saved, you don’t know nothing about Jesus and you’re full of hate . . . There ain’t no truth in you, ain’t no Jesus in you, condemning George Zimmerman, ain’t no Jesus in you. You’re black, that’s all you’re ever gonna be” (Blair, “Pastor Calls Trayvon Martin . . .”).

6. King, “I Have a Dream . . .”

7. Although I will use the term genealogy to describe both Jennings’ and Carter’s methodology, I must qualify this categorization: Carter’s archeological account is a sort of “anti-genealogy” to theological retrievals of Hellenic virtue while Jennings’ historical methodology is consonant with Stephen Greenblatt’s “New Historicist” account. See Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism.

8. Jennings, Christian Imagination, and Carter, Race.

9. I use this phrase to refer to what I take to be both a spiritual and political reality (Eph 6:12; Wink, The Powers that Be.)

10. There was an effort on the part of some white folk to take offense at the testimony of Rachel Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon who was on the phone with him while he was being pursued by Zimmerman. She testified that Martin was aware that he was being followed, was fleeing, had communicated to her his fear of the man following him, and had described the man as a “creepy-ass cracker.” In the days following her testimony, many people found Martin’s description of Zimmerman as evidence of Martin’s racism. However, such a judgment drastically misunderstands (or misrepresents) the phrase used by Martin. First, Martin’s description of Zimmerman came from the underside of modernity, from the bottom of the power structure. The term “cracker” was historically applied by African Americans to the white masters who “cracked” their whips at the backs of livestock and black slaves. It was a term of resistance, subverting the impossible load of subjugation whiteness had forced others to bear. A white person referring to a person of color with a derogatory racial slur and Martin referring to Zimmerman as a “cracker” are not as similar as often assumed. While it is undoubtedly the case that neither terminology encourages the sort of mutuality toward which Jennings and Carter are pointing, it is important to remember that the former was that which classified and kept others “in their place,” while the latter was defense against such categorization. Second, it should be remembered that to “creep” is to surreptitiously maneuver oneself so as to avoid detection, usually for nefarious purposes. Tracking a person in a car certainly fits this definition. It turns out that perhaps the phrase “creepy-ass cracker” is not an altogether inappropriate designation for a white man with a gun trailing a black youth running in fear. Either way, the outrage over Jeantel using this term seems to be hollow or manufactured.

11. Consider the Florida case of Marissa Alexander, who, one year before Zimmerman was acquitted in the same state, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for firing a shot into the air, from a gun she legally owned, as a warning to her husband, who had a history of abusing Alexander. Alexander stated that she was afraid that her husband was going to seriously injure or kill her. While she neither shot at nor killed her husband, the jury deliberated for only twelve minutes before finding her guilty. Alexander is black.

12. Capeheart, “George Zimmerman.”

13. See, for example, Williams, Life on the Color Line, in which Williams’ father, Buster, passed himself off as Italian in order to be able to run a business. The majority of this story took place in Muncie, Indiana, the town in which I live and minister, in the 1950s and 1960s.

14. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation.

15. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power; Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation; and Cone, God of the Oppressed.

16. Deloria, God is Red; and Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins.

17. See Reuther, Sexism and God–Talk; Reuther, Gaia and God; Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her; Schussler Fiorenza, But She Said; Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self; Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body; and Loughlin, Queer Theology. This is not to say that there have not been advances in critical queer theory toward resisting gender essentialization. One example of a post-structuralist account of gender is Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. While I am sensitive to the manner in which Sullivan builds her case, I am resistant to her overly tidy conflation of race and gender identity and am unconvinced that her conclusions hold up theologically.

18. See Hopkins, Shoes that Fit Our Feet; Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over; and Hopkins, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue.

19. Sims, Ethical Complications of Lynching.

20. See Noel, Black Religion; Noel, “African American Art”; and Noel, “African American Religions.”

21. Jones, Is God a White Racist?

22. Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation.

23. See West, Race Matters; and Gates and West, The Future of the Race, among many other works. The public impact of neither author can be limited to his publications. Countless interviews, articles, public statements, and television appearances mark the career of each scholar.

24. See Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down; Perkins, Beyond Charity; Perkins, Restoring At-Risk Communities; Gordon, Real Hope in Chicago; Gordon, Making Neighborhoods Whole; Lupton, Compassion, Justice, and the Christian Life; Lupton, Theirs Is the Kingdom; and Fuder, A Heart for the Community.

25. Katongole, Reconciling All Things.

26. Wilson-Hartgrove, Free to Be Bound.

27. Ibid., 18.

28. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America.

29. Carson, Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

30. Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X; and Marable, Malcolm X.

31. Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto.

32. Piper, Bloodlines.

33. See Bantum, “Bloodlines,” where he states that “Piper’s Christ is a raceless God-man, focused intently on a violent sacrifice that achieves the salvation of our souls with the happy consequence of taking our bodies along for the ride.” Bantum lauds Piper’s desire to foster a diverse Christian community, but laments that in excluding voices from outside of his own trajectory (especially liberation and womanist thought), Piper has pre-determined that his ecclesial community will take the shape of his own theological convictions and tradition without leaving room for “sincere dialogue.” The process envisioned by Piper arguably has very little to do with reconciliation.

34. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 1.

35. Acosta, Natural and Moral History.

36. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 71.

37. Eph 2:11–18.

38. While this could be interpreted as a natural descriptor for the purpose of aiding in apprehension of the person Zimmerman perceived as being dangerous, such a reading may not take into account the full text of the 911 interchange. Zimmerman had already been asked earlier in the conversation to identify the race of the individual whom he decided to pursue and had responded by claiming “he looks black.” It was not until Martin took notice of Zimmerman tailing him and ran away that Zimmerman categorized him as a “black male” and as one of “these assholes.”

39. Dussel, Underside of Modernity. Carter regularly utilizes this phrase in Race.

40. See Robles, FBI Records.

41. Jennings and Carter are not content with either option. Carter, in his criticism of Kantian deontological ethics, tends to work within a modified virtue ethic due to his early affinity with Milbank (although he is not at home in this trajectory). Jennings, in his criticism of Aristotelian virtue ethics (and his recognition of the insufficiency of teleological ethics in general, including the utilitarianism of liberalism), tends to favor a modified Barthian divine command modality, albeit a divinity encountered in a new body politic forged by joining with the unlike other.

42. A militant posture against faith as irrational has been canonized in the works categorized as the New Atheism: See, among others, Hitchens, God is Not Great; Dawkins, The God Delusion; and Sam Harris, The End of Faith.

43. Much research suggests that more liberal communities are often some of the most segregated communities in the United States. Trends seem to suggest that there is a constellation of factors influencing these divisions, including socioeconomic status, educational affinity, occupational similarity, and cultural preference. The net effect, however, is that all the same people tend to cluster together, thereby reinforcing racialized identity. See, for example, Dahmer, “The Harsh Truth about Progressive Cities.”

44. Prather, Christ, Power, and Mammon.

45. Ibid., 228–29.

46. Ibid., 232.

47. My thought in this regard has been influenced by Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

48. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 287.

49. Ibid., 288.

50. Ibid., 79–80.

51. Carter, Race, 156.

52. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 9–10.

53. Ibid., 115.