Hence, the racial imagination (the first step) proved as well to be a racist imagination of white supremacy (the second step). Within the gulf enacted between Christianity and the Jews, the racial, which proves to be a racist, imagination was formed.59
Acknowledging that, in a post-civil-rights era, public discursive ethics both do and should hold racism to be improper, Carter believes that this limited diagnosis falls short of recognizing the more critical problem. By and large, ethics, the social sciences, the humanities, and theology still operate within a racial imagination while often explicitly denouncing racism, which Carter reads as the outgrowth of “man” being rendered a racial being. Carter contends that racism is an inevitable development of the racial imagination, which reflects the key theological deformity of the West: supersessionism.
Carter’s analysis of supersessionism and its dual offspring of racialization and racism (which he refers to together by the shorthand “the theological problem of whiteness”60) is presented in three distinct stages. First, he describes the Enlightenment as the maturation of the racial vision, interpreting the oft-identified philosophical distortions of modernity (Cartesian epistemology, decontextualized universalizing rationalism, secularism, the myth of human progress, among others) as the apex of whiteness as a substitute for the Christian doctrine of creation.61 For Carter, many analyses of modernity’s deformities leave intact its aberrant theological underpinnings. While many treatments of contemporary Christian identity or race may make important claims, most focus on symptoms alone. The core engine of modernity’s “civilizing” project is the racial imagination.
Diverging from the common theological habit of describing modernity as “secular,” Carter demonstrates why it is preferable to think of Enlightenment as inherently religious, or “pseudotheological,” in nature. Carter’s analysis suggests that the organizing motif (metanarrative) of modernity is whiteness as ground and telos, whiteness as beginning and end, whiteness as proton and eschaton. Many “postmodern” religious critiques of Enlightenment focus on the rationalistic tip of the iceberg while leaving the subaquatic theological body of whiteness intact. Carter buttresses this contention by utilizing Foucault’s genealogy of race to identify how the formation of “man” as homo sexualis contributed to the conception of the human as the bearer of biological race as homo racialis. While Foucault’s analysis is an important introductory move for Carter, the meat of his diagnosis is to be found in his presentation of Kant, which I will analyze in more detail in the next chapter. Engaging Foucault allows Carter to expose the racial character of the modern project while engaging Kant allows Carter to demonstrate the religious foundation of modern anthropology in the hope of whiteness as telos. The human as homo racialis is that which undergirds Enlightened humanity as homo religiosis and homo politicus.62
Second, Carter turns to reading the black religious academy’s attempts at dislodging the racial imagination. He identifies important advances made by Raboteau and Cone while also demonstrating the ways in which they are beholden to, and in some sense trapped within, modernity’s methodological, and thereby racialized, schemas. While Carter is sympathetic with both scholars and acknowledges that his work would not be possible without theological pioneers such as Cone, he must ultimately disavow significant portions of their theses in order to more precisely aim at the racial imaginary that remains to influence their work. Specifically, Carter maintains that neither Raboteau nor Cone sufficiently theorize Gentile identity and its theological place within the Judaic salvation narrative. While Carter reads both scholars as making important steps in this direction (in Raboteau’s iconic and thereby incarnational focus and in the early Cone’s Barthian and thereby particularist Christology and theological anthropology), he interprets them both as collapsing into universalizing motifs characteristic of modernity qua whiteness. Raboteau’s historiographic method tends to skip over the particular on its way to the universal, interpreting “faith” as an ahistorical primordium that must find particular historical “expression,” while the later Cone’s Tillichian insistence on a decontextualized “ground of Being” invites slippage into the universalizing abstraction of white theology. A third scholar with whom Carter interacts in this second section is Long, from whose program of “ontologizing blackness” he evinces the widest possible divergence. Carter reads Long’s work as being inextricably bound to the presuppositions of modern religious studies, and thereby sharing little common ground with his own overtly theological (and primarily Christological) focus. While he identifies himself as an heir to the work of the black religious academy, Carter finds it insufficient to address the racial problematic.
Third, Carter moves to his constructive work. In so doing, he discerns a similarity between the “theological sensibilities” of New World Afro-Christian faith, as embodied in several writers of antebellum America, and that of certain pre-medieval Eastern patristic voices.63 Carter excavates the writings of Briton Hammon, Frederick Douglass, and Jarena Lee in the third part of his book. By literarily positioning Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor respectively as prelude, interlude, and postlude to the entire work, he points to an implicit connection between early Eastern Christian voices and early African American Christian voices. This methodology is wonderfully iconoclastic as Carter discerns in Hammon, Douglass, and Lee (voices whose theological sophistication is characteristically underemphasized by the contemporary religious academy) an embryonic intuition about the contrast between the Judaic nature of the Christian faith and the white supersessionist creation of the modern racial imaginary.
One final word must be said about how Carter uses terms such as white and black that are commonly associated with essentialized views of race. For Carter, “white” and “black” are not primarily designations of skin color. While whiteness certainly originated as the sociopolitical order of lighter, European peoples, and while blackness, as the photo negative for this order of whiteness, was a designation given to peoples of non-European ancestry on a hierarchical scale of civilizing potential evidenced by skin color, Carter defines the existence of whiteness and blackness as evidence of “a political economy, an ordo or a social arrangement . . . an oikonomia.”64 Restated, this means for Carter that the ordos of whiteness and blackness are anthropological distinctions that are distortions of the doctrine of creation. In contrast to this essentialization of identity, Carter contends that humanity was created with an intrinsic relationality as particular creatures in the Divine image.65
In redeploying the Christian faith to subvert the regnant religious and social order, Carter utilizes the voices of those on the “underside of modernity”66 to criticize these modern anthropological tendencies while not dispensing with what he sees as the confessional center of Christian faith: the incarnation of Jesus Christ as a continuation of YHWH’s covenants with Israel. Unlike the general methodological trajectory of modern religious studies, Carter does not throw the theological baby out with the racialized bathwater. In other words, while embarking on what is admittedly a sort of anti–theology, Carter is asking what he identifies as his “fundamental question”: “What kind of discourse should Christian theology be?”67 Carter does not position himself as a disinterested critic of theology, as would be the tendency of comparative religious studies. Rather, he intends to be only a faithful Christian theologian, acknowledging the missteps of modern racialized theology.
Carter and African American Religious Studies
In explicating Carter’s relationship to the African American religious academy, no attempt is being made to present the “black” academy as monolithic. There are several influential and “canonical” scholars who represent various trends within the fields of African American cultural studies, theology, religion, and church history