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