A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper

Surely calling hair “kinky” is itself a value judgment that assumes straightness of hair to be “normal.” While descriptive words need not be as pejorative as “kinky,” description as a form of analysis is not exempt from making aesthetic value comparisons. In the descriptive project, the self-articulation of the “described” person is necessarily muted. Carter’s work leads to the conclusion that the discipline of religious studies would do well to recognize its limitations.

      It is worth noting that Long’s religious studies methodology seems to have begun from a posture of vulnerability. He reveals the situatedness of his own inquiry as he relates that his “concern for the meaning of the religious reality of black Americans” stemmed not only from his “scholarly discipline” but also from his “desire to make sense of my life as a black person in the United States.”247 He found the “history of religions” to be “the only discipline” that “responded to the . . . expressions of my origins.” He purposed to “not begin with a methodology of pathology, one of the primary . . . cultural and social scientific languages about blacks.” Yet Long’s religious studies trajectory does not as sufficiently resist the problem of race as does Carter’s theological focus. As a discipline, religious studies remains beholden to the modern methodological stance that introduced conceptions of pathology into the academy. While Long admirably laments that “the actual situation of cultural contact itself is never brought to the fore within the context of intellectual formulations,”248 his epistemological humility collapses into the assumed objectivity of the disciplinary posture into which he is so clearly invested. Contrasting with Long, Carter presents a vision of mutual dependence in his language of miscegenation and linguistic interpenetration. Carter finds the methodological stance of religious studies to be central in the maintenance of the sociopolitical order of whiteness.

      Long and the New God

      Carter contends that Long’s relegation of theology to the role of answering discipline does not decenter Western primacy. Rather than an Enlightenment schema in which Christianity is the apex of a hierarchy of religions, Long has substituted an Enlightenment schema which identifies a universal humanist religious impulse undergirding all cultural expressions. Longian religious studies has retained and redirected the rationalist aesthetic of modernity.249 It is this stance that assumes a Kantian religious rationality which Carter will implicate in the construction of race. In this section, I will suggest that the religious studies enterprise is a reaction to deformities in the Christian tradition and offers a less satisfactory anthropology than Carter’s invocation of theology done on the underside of modernity.

      Gavin D’Costa’s Theology in the Public Square is helpful in this regard.250 While D’Costa’s vision of a reenactment of classical “Christian culture”251 is problematic in ways that Carter identifies in his treatment of Milbank, D’Costa’s critique of secularization as the only acceptable public discourse is helpful in understanding Carter’s critique of Long. It provides a way to understand how Carter can implicate both religious studies and virtue ethics in the maintenance of whiteness. D’Costa maintains that a post-Christian ethos of secularization is not more open to other modes of thought than is the Western rationalized Christianity of modernity.252 Both are tied into the Enlightenment in ways that Christian theology need not be. D’Costa suggests that it is precisely from particular convictions devoutly held that genuine dialogue and mutuality can be had. It is genuine openness to the other in which true plurality is found, not in a universalizing religious impulse that rounds off the corners of religious doctrine in favor of a bland pluralism. What D’Costa defines as “the ideological nature” of “secularism” can be loosely correlated with how Carter reads Long’s religious studies discipline. It suggests that pluralism as a dogma is static in ways that a thick theology of the Incarnation resists. D’Costa’s recognition of the genuine encounter made possible within a Christian theology shaped by epistemological humility, over against the cultural imperialism of secular religious studies, bears similarities to Carter’s invocation of Christian theology as a mode of “weak thought.”253

      Carter reads Long’s approach to religious studies as a reaction against a Christianity that had already long been distorted by supersessionism.254 Long gives a genealogy of religious studies in which he traces the development of the discipline from Max Muller, the eminent linguist and progenitor of modern religious studies, through Rudolf Otto, Joachim Wach, and to Eliade (his colleague).255 Long relates Max Muller’s opposition to Adolf von Harnack, the influential modern liberal historian of dogma. Long extols Muller’s approach and continues his criticism of Christian theology as unable to take seriously the study of other religions based on the merits of their own accounts. Long relates that Harnack was opposed to the establishment of the history of religions as a discipline because he “felt that such study would lead to dilettantism and that those who wished to study other religions should study them through Christianity.”256 Long maintains that Harnack viewed Christianity as “the absolute religion” by which all other religions should be evaluated. Long suggests that Muller’s approach, which posits a sensus communis undergirding all linguistic forms, leading to an experience of the sacred known as the sensus numinous, was a liberating alternative to Harnack’s absolutism.257 Long presents his genealogy of religious studies as the progression from the sensus communis to the sensus numinous, “that capacity for the experience of the sacred that has always been the same for every human being.”258 For Long, Muller’s quest for a “new primordium for Western culture” has now been realized in “the nature of experience itself as expressive of a primordium of human consciousness.”259 Long maintains that “religion is a practical social concern” whose “objective pole,” while needing to “be validated by communal consensus,” is “a mode of release from the entanglements of the social” and “the awareness of an objectivity that lies beyond the social and the existential.”260 Religious studies is a quest to ascertain the universality of the human spirit. In this quest, a transcendent god is irrelevant. A religious primordium is substituted for deity. For Long, it is the death of God261 and his replacement by the universal sensus numinous that Long celebrates as the rise of a “new god” who, while unable to be expressed in “the older theological languages,” has evoked a “new beat, a new rhythm, a new movement.”262