Can "White" People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission (Missiological Engagements Book 12)

by Willie James Jennings

We are convinced that the current moment of demographic change, manifest concretely in the election of the first African American president in 2008 and 2012, represents a similar moment of rising White fear and backlash against what is perceived as an imminent loss of White social dominance.20 In other words, the open bigotry of “Trumpism” is not so much a disease that is resurrecting xenophobia’s dark and bitter past; rather, it is a symptom of the disease pathology of racism. Thus, evangelical fear of Larycia Hawkins and broad evangelical support for the present Republican administration—whether consciously or unconsciously animated by Hawkins’s social location and the president’s openly racist rhetoric and governing agenda21—can both be seen as of a piece. Both responses are congruent with the ebb and flow of civil rights advances and reactive bias retreat, and both function to discredit evangelical witness among people of Color and other outsiders.22 This is not to label all evangelicals so implicated as bigots or racists, but it is to worry aloud about how fear of living in a radically multiethnic country is strong enough to drive members of the body of Christ to embrace profoundly un-Christian behaviors and actors. It is to worry that racism is tightening its grip on the evangelical psyche, resulting in idolatry of the first order.23 It is our hope that this book can help inoculate our beloved evangelical church from such viral strains of fear of the other.

In 1788, the First Fleet transported not just convicts but also a new social system: a class society based on the accumulation of capital, the exploitation of wage labour, acquisitive individualism, hierarchy and inequality. In contrast, Aboriginal society was egalitarian.

Religious ideology has been central to the maintenance and origins of racialization and whiteness embedded in the European project inasmuch as gradations in skin pigmentation coincide with religious, geographical, and cultural divisions that segment the world into colonizers and the colonized.29

In this volume, the authors advance the current prevailing academic dialogue of race and whiteness beyond a mere focus on past ills of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries of European colonialism, toward a positive intercultural missiology. Though the essays do not hesitate to situate contemporary race relations in their proper historical context in terms of global and local social forces, the authors do not stop there or prioritize deconstructing, excusing, or simply explaining how the church, its orthodox theology, and its kingdom building missiology contributed to the abuses, racism, and prejudices against women, Blacks, and non-European cultural values. Each essay presses forward by offering a positive vision toward building a new intercultural missiological imagination and practice. The interdisciplinary dialogue we offer in this collection incorporates an interweaving of theological, historical, womanist/feminist, postmodern, and cultural psychological as well as sociological analyses of racism and the whiteness enterprise.

Over the years, theorists have debated the wisdom of defining racism in terms of the way it provides unequal access to social privilege or the levers of social power for those in the group at the top of the racial hierarchy.35 The authors in this volume who discuss the contours of racism all opt in favor of seeing privilege as the critical resource mediated in racist societies, defining racism as the ideology that operationalizes race in social institutions involving belief (whether conscious or unconsciously held) in the congenital superiority of one race over others, resulting in privilege for those atop the racial hierarchy and unequal treatment, exclusion from legal protections, exploitation, and violence for those lower on the hierarchy.36

As one of our contributors notes, intriguingly, these goals can actually function as a way of perpetuating the racializing effects of inequalities embedded in society.38 Indeed, some accounts of postracialism are synonymous with colorblindness as a response to racism, a commonly held value among evangelicals that rejects attention to race in society as a way of eliminating racial discrimination. Yet, in calling for an end to racial categorizations without first recognizing and eradicating historical, persistent, and ongoing differentials between racial groups in terms of access to housing, employment, education, wealth, health care, political representation, and more is to render racial inequities permanent—in effect, it perpetuates “racism without racists.”39 As with some forms of postracialism, colorblindness allows people to espouse egalitarian values while continuing to enjoy the benefits of unequally ordered social arrangements that advantage Whites and disadvantage people of Color.

When the church preaches salvation of souls while matters of physical and social well-being are ceded to outside institutions such as government and dedicated charities, the result divides salvation into two separate spheres—physical and spiritual—that subvert the original multilayered concept exhibited in Peter’s explanation to the socioreligious authorities in Acts 4. This bifurcated ideology creates, nourishes, and maintains fertile soil for the whiteness project to prosper, and we maintain that this whiteness project (signified by our use of the phrase “White” People in the title) cannot be saved! We who have benefited from the whiteness project, whether by the color of our skin or by our unconscious biases in favor of white norms, white institutions, and white culture, are like that man lame from birth in need of walking again. Having benefitted economically, politically, and socially, we are lame because of the weight of the sins of the system that have accrued to us. We need the healing of Jesus to make us whole.

wherever racial categorizations are rooted in society, they function to render some peoples outside of the category of human. As one of our authors puts it: “Racialization is the process by which the marker between human and nonhuman is biologized.”46 As we collectively maintain herein, race, racism, and white supremacy together define a spiritual condition that shapes and orders our lives and worship, consciously and unconsciously, much more than many of us know.47 But these discourses are undertaken not simply for the purpose of indulging in navel gazing or intellectual gymnastics but for the purpose of building a new missiology for race relations in the twenty-first century—an intercultural, interconnected missiology of race relations grounded in mutuality. Instead of making the locus the past, our eyes are on the future, a future that belongs to the Holy Spirit. This intercultural missiology of race is grounded on Holy Spirit kingdom building, a kingdom of the Spirit that upsets a “bullock-cart” type of missiology as named by the Indian theologian Sttīphan.48 Sttīphan defines bullock-cart practice as that which involves an everyday person’s enterprise. The missiology toward which we aim is neither the enterprise of empires nor the work of the everyday person; it is the work of the Holy Ghost, done with, from, and through the common person. We are aiming toward a missiology that goes beyond a focus on the postcolonial past and instead sets its eyes on an apocalyptic fut...

Many people collapse Christianity and whiteness into one thing, loved or hated. They cannot see two things, two mutual interpenetrating realities, the one always performing itself inside the other. On the other hand, there are just as many people who do not see this as a deep problem or even as a problem. They have made whiteness an irreversible accident of history or even an attribute of creation. That whiteness is a problem remains an elusive point to get across because too many people have no idea what to do with such a concept. Beside bewilderment, the typical response I get to the idea that whiteness is a problem is a mixture of guilt and anger, and of course the inevitable pushback.

It is an ironic truth of Christian life that most people perform a faith, embody a faith, far more complex than they articulate. There is a vastness to our lives in faith that we cannot adequately capture with our words. The difficulty with racial existence, and with whiteness in particular, is that it has woven itself into that vastness, making seeing the fusion and seeing our way beyond the fusion very difficult work.

To speak of whiteness is not to speak of particular people but of people caught up in a deformed building project aimed at bringing the world to its full maturity. What does maturity look like, maturity of mind and body, land and animal (use), landscape and building, family and government? Whiteness is a horrific answer to this question formed exactly at the site of Christian missions. So in this essay I want to explore whiteness as a deformed formation toward maturity, along the way to consider some of its affective (emotional) dimensions, and finally to suggest how we might begin to separate whiteness from Christianity by forming places that offer a different building project toward maturity.

The pedagogical goal of missionaries and others was not simply to bring New World peoples into the reality of salvation, but it was fundamental to that salvation to change their ways of seeing the world so that they too would see themselves rightly as centered selves who project meaning onto the world and who may bring nature to its full purpose and use. This crucial educational hope was to disabuse Native peoples of any idea that lands and animals, landscapes and seasons carried any communicative or animate density, and therefore any ethical or moral direction in how to live in the world. Instead, they offered peoples a relationship with the world that was basically one dimensional—we interpret and manipulate the world as we see fit, taking from it what we need, and caring for it within the logics of making it more productive for us; that is, we draw the world to its proper fulfillment. This is crudely put, but it captures the trajectory of how humanity’s imperial position as stewards of the creation was most often interpreted in colonial contexts.

The problem is not that things change. Things do change. We could even say things evolve. Nor is the problem the impulse to transform. Transformation is not inherently evil. The horror here is the colonialist’s denial of the voice and vision of peoples who inhabit a place, denial that defies the logic of life together in a place as the basic wisdom that should shape change and transformation. The horror here is the emergence of a form of creating that destroys creation. This is not the logic of breaking eggs to make omelets, recognizing that some destruction is always inherent in creation. This logic destroys the life of chickens by distorting their bodies to maximize egg production. This logic drives creation toward death.

let me state it clearly. No one is born white. There is no white biology, but whiteness is real. Whiteness is a working, a forming toward a maturity that destroys. Whiteness is an invitation to a form of agency and a subjectivity that imagines life progressing toward what is in fact a diseased understanding of maturity, a maturity that invites us to evaluate the entire world by how far along it is toward this goal. Most people have a sense of what agency is—to be the source of one’s own actions and decisions and to claim immediate control over one’s body. Subjectivity is a more recent addition to our thinking about a self, and in this regard what I mean by subjectivity is the narrative form one gives to one’s life.10 Subjectivity is the way people imagine their negotiating of the positions and roles they occupy, the circumstances and situations they must traverse, the pleasures they seek, and the pain they wish to avoid. Subjectivity is created both by that which is placed upon us and by the drama we form to make sense of the world we inhabit. White agency and subjectivity form as people imagine themselves being transformed in three fundamental ways: (1) from being owned to being an owner, (2) from being a stranger to being a citizen, and (3) from being identified with darkness to being seen as White. It should also be clear at this point that anyone can enter White agency and subjectivity.

It all comes back to the land. From the sixteenth century forward, as more and more land is seized, enclosed, and turned into private property, labor is fundamentally transformed—people are placed on a trajectory that is inescapable—you must see your own body as raw material just like the land. The body stood at the center of this powerful commodification of the New World, and no one escaped.

Flourishing life was reserved for ownership.

These three imagined transformations, from raw material to owner, from stranger to citizen, and from darkness to whiteness, formed at the site of hope for these Christian settlers who did not simply want to make the New World their world but wished to make them the way the world ought to be.

We have to talk about whiteness in relation to affect and feeling because how whiteness feels is how whiteness thinks. Agency and subjectivity form in how we feel and think as one single reality of personhood. So the questioning of whiteness feels terrible in two ways to many people. First, it feels as if we are abandoning the goal of progress, and, second, it feels as if we have become obsessed with matters of identity and have lost a sense of common purpose.

this is what Christian mission at its best was always aiming at—following Jesus into new places to form new life, life together. So am I advocating compelling people to live together across all the lines of formation that divide us and have habituated us to be comfortable with those divides? Yes, because I want to turn us from a formation that is yet compelling people to aim their lives toward a vision of maturity that is bound in death. I want to save us from becoming or being White people.

The history of missionization to Indigenous peoples in the United States has been simultaneously the history of Indigenous genocide.

critical race theorists have argued, raciality is not simply a result of unfortunate stereotypes from peoples of different cultural backgrounds but the fundamental logic by which certain peoples are placed outside the category of the human.1 Or to quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”2

These understandings move us away from thinking about race as a noun in terms of set people groups such as African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, Asian Americans, and so on to racialize as a verb that can impact different peoples across time and space. Racialization is a process by which the marker between human and nonhuman is biologized even as who gets racialized and the markers of racialization may change over time and space.

Native peoples can only attain humanity by no longer being Native.

The presumed inability of Native peoples to work thus rendered them in a perpetual state of childhood (childhood being marked by the period of life in which one cannot be a proper worker). The colonial project then consisted of forcing Native peoples to mature into adulthood through work as defined by capitalism. For instance, the Dawes Allotment Act, which divided indigenous lands into individual allotments, was deemed necessary because only through individual property ownership could Native peoples have a need to work.

As a result, as George Tinker notes, Puritans in particular often did not bother missionizing Native peoples unless it was politically expedient because they did not see Native peoples as peoples at all.9 Rather, as many Native scholars have noted, Native peoples were seen as biblical Canaanites. Albert Cave and others have demonstrated that Christian colonizers often envisioned Native peoples as Canaanites, worthy of mass destruction.10 As an example, George Henry Lokei wrote in 1794: “The human behavior of the governor at Pittsburgh greatly incensed those people, who according to the account given in the former Part of this history, represented the Indians as Canaanites, who without mercy ought to be destroyed from the face of the earth, and considered America as the land of promise given to the Christians.”11 As Canaanites, Native peoples had a one-way destination to destruction to allow for the “New Israel” of whiteness in what would become the United States.

Thus, when Pratt founded off-reservation boarding schools, his rationale was “Kill the Indian in order to save the Man.”17 Essentially, Native peoples could be saved only if they were no longer Native. Unfortunately for Native peoples, this policy put them in the position of being subjected to systemic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Children died in mass numbers through torture, neglect, disease, and starvation. Most of the dysfunctionality in Native communities today can be traced to the first generation that was forced to attend boarding schools.18 Thus, Christian missionization, rather than conveying the gospel of life to Native peoples, enacted policies of physical and cultural genocide.

Thus, what many Native peoples identify as colonial in biblical texts is not necessarily the text itself as it is the colonial translations from the text. This is not to say that colonial interpretations of the Bible do not also influence Native peoples. Indeed, Western Christianity has so successfully normalized the whiteness of biblical interpretation that even Native peoples take this paradigm for granted.

Warrior argues that the Bible is not a liberatory text for Native peoples, especially considering the fact that the liberation motif commonly adopted by liberation theologians—the exodus—is premised on the genocide of the indigenous people occupying the Promised Land—the Canaanites.

That is, by conceptualizing ourselves as oppressed peoples who are to be delivered at all costs, we necessarily become complicit in oppressing those who stand in the way of our deliverance. Instead, Warrior argues, we need to reconceptualize ourselves as “a society of people delivered from oppression who are not so afraid of becoming victims again that they become oppressors themselves.”41

the NAIITS [North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies] Journal ran an article by Jonathan Dyck and Cornelius Buller that calls into question the notion of a promised land. They contend that the notion of a promised land “is always also a vigorous ideological assertion of entitlement without regard for other inhabitants. Land may be given by promise but it is taken by violence.”46

Jacobs echoes the analysis of many Native organizers and scholars who state that decolonization requires a transformation of governance, not only for Native peoples but for the world.

Part of building a new world involves not only challenging structures of oppression but transforming the way all of us have been shaped by these structures. As Rita Nakashima Brock notes, the “myth of innocence” is a colonial entrapment that prevents communities from engaging in internal self-critique.66 That is, the logic of innocence says that suffering is only bad when it is inflicted upon those who are innocent. Those who are viewed as “less innocent” somehow deserve oppression. White people often flock to reservations to help “poor Indians,” whom they romanticize as perfect victims. When they discover the amount of violence and dysfunctionality that exists in Native communities, they become disenchanted, no longer want to work with Native people, and decide Natives are getting what they deserve. The fact that there are no innocents does not justify oppression; rather, it means that oppression is unacceptable regardless of the innocence of its victims. Furthermore, when oppressed groups are liberated from constantly having to maintain the image that they are innocent and perfect victims, they can take responsibility for the oppression that exists within their communities. We can finally be viewed as moral agents who will often make mistakes but who do not deserve oppression regardless of the mistakes we make. When we no longer have to prove ourselves innocent, we can engage all of our community in the struggles for justice without writing off some sectors as hopeless s...

some would argue that decolonization requires the end of missionization altogether. But missionization is fundamentally structured around sharing beliefs one holds strongly with people who do not share those beliefs. Missionization is thus an inescapable part of life because we live in a world where not everyone agrees with us. The answer is not pretending we (whoever we are) do not have the convictions that we do. The answer is decolonizing missionization so that we fundamentally respect, and understand, that the people with whom we engage are our relatives—that they are fully human, even if they are never convinced by what we say. We need not require people to become human/White in order to hear the gospel. We must decolonize our perceptions of Christianity by recognizing how Western imperialism shapes what we think the gospel is. In doing so, we save not only others with whom we wish to share the gospel, but we save ourselves as well.

Mission and evangelism are central to the Christian faith; however, the intersection between race and mission in Africa is a subject that is often ignored or glossed over by theologians, missiologists, and church practitioners. Beyond emotive and sensational responses to Christian mission in Africa, it is imperative to understand the layout of a complex terrain and tease out the paradoxes of missionary engagement in Africa. The pattern that emanates from discussion on race and mission is not monochrome. It evokes several dimensions and colors. The veritable linkages between mission and race in this paper are situated within some key developments, events, and circumstances in African Christianity.

According to Lamin Sanneh, Christianity is not a garment made to specifications of a bygone golden age, nor is it an add-on whimsical patchwork rigged up without regard to the overall design. Rather, Christianity is a multicolored fabric where each thread, chosen and refined at the Designer’s hand, adds luster and strength to the whole.4 This has always been an integral part of the ebb and flow of world Christianity. The universality of the gospel calls for multiple voices and perspectives. From its inception, Christianity has flourished because of its universal character. In light of its innate polycentrism, Christianity cannot develop a phobia for such a subject as controversial and vast as race. Christianity is not a religion of cultural conformity. In its expansion, it has vigorously demonstrated that it belongs to all races and cultures.

The heroic story of the African woman known as Kimpa Vita (a.k.a. Donna Beatrice) is an exciting example. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Vita advocated for a more spirited and emotional expression of faith in the face of the cold, formal, and legalistic Roman Catholic Church in the Congo. Kimpa led a protest movement against the imposed Christianity that coupled the Christian faith with whiteness and white supremacy. She preached that Africans should do away with the White Jesus presented by Catholic missionaries in favor of a Black Christ who sided with Africans through his suffering.31

Crowther’s favorite prayer up to his death was that “God who called me first from among my people to the important post of His service, may give me grace to set a good example for others to follow.”33

The essence of the moratorium debate lay in missiological partnerships and cooperation between the West and Africa. It was not based on a total repudiation of mission; rather, it was an utter rejection of the patrimony that characterized missionary work in Africa in the nineteenth century. The moratorium debate was not a brazen attempt to repeal and replace mission but a concrete effort to add mutuality and reciprocity into the lexicon of missiological ventures. Mission remains the raison d’être of the church. The challenge is how to develop the capacity to create an elastic space for its modalities and actualization. Rather than treating the debate as the angst of a toothless bulldog, it is more pragmatic to think of it as a response to an ingrained sense of hubris and lopsidedness in mission. It was a call for Africans to engage in mission on their own terms and to design theological templates that were suitable to the African context. An African proverb states that “as long as you sleep on a mat that belongs to someone else, you will never sleep easy.” It was imperative to develop missiological and theological categories that emanated from the African worldview.

the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, that is, “a person is a person through other persons.” The essence of this African aphorism is the understanding that we are contingent beings. In our discussion of mission and race in Africa, we would like to posit the idea of an Ubuntu kenosis missiology as a response to the normative gaze engineered by the Enlightenment philosophy in its reification of White superiority as a universal norm.

As I am using the word racism, it excludes internal reflections and considerations about the other; racism is about power at an institutional level. Institutions perpetuate ideologies and practices that give expression to this exclusionary power. Roots of the sin of racism become the white supremacy of today. White supremacy is defined by Robin Harvey Gorsline as “the operation of social practices by individuals and institutions, including political and economic mechanisms, to achieve and maintain the political, social and economic dominance of white people and the subjugation of peoples of color.”10

Mark Hearn speaks of colorblind racism and theology and how these relate to the practices of the church. He describes colorblindness as a method of racism today, involving “the false assumption that all people begin from the same starting point, when in reality they do not.” He posits that “refusing to acknowledge the effects of color in society contributes to the meritocracy argument and thus an attitude of superiority over those who have not achieved the same,” adding to the negative perceptions of persons of Color and placing them in subordinate and marginalized places.13 It is racism that “otherizes softly (‘these people are human too’).”

During the nineteenth century, manifest destiny was a philosophy with a theological underpinning that was used to rationalize the expansion of the United States into Mexican territory and that included the removal of Native Americans from their lands.20 This belief justified the Anglo-Saxon mission to civilize and expand into these territories in order to establish what was thought to be a superior society because it brought forth the full potential of the land and the people by way of developing political and economic institutions to further liberty and progress. Manifest destiny was undergirded by social theory, science, and theological/biblical understandings. Americans in the United States were God’s chosen people, and as such they were destined to take the land. God’s creation, natural and human, existed for the benefit of the chosen nation. Expansion and slavery fed on each other. The philosophy of manifest destiny was founded on an understanding of the god of Protestantism—the chooser was this god.

Part of the history of displacement, including lynching of people of Mexican origin or descent between 1848 and 1928, is documented by Carrigan and Webb.39 During this period the lynching rate was 27.4 per 100,000 of the population. During the same time period, the highest rate of lynching for African Americans was in Mississippi with 52.8 victims per 100,000 of the population.40 Lynchings of persons of Mexican origin and descent were rarely investigated except under federal pressure after some years of diplomatic pressure by the Mexican government. President Porfirio Diaz’s efforts to facilitate trade links between the two countries finally led to the documentation of injustices and abuse along the Texan border. The US government would not respond to the reports until 1890, when the lynching of four men in a courthouse square took place before the men were brought to trial.

In this transition between the Middle Ages and modernity, one aspect that guided Spain was the concept of purity of blood. Spain adhered to statutes about purity of blood, which originally served as a mechanism to exclude converted Jews from participating in important positions in government and in ecclesiastical positions. In other words, color was not the main element in racial identity but religious difference; Spaniards were more intent on excluding people on the basis of their Jewish heritage. In actuality, the purity statutes were directed mostly toward conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity).4

Strong’s perception of the Anglo-Saxon race as superior and as having a divine command to Americanize or civilize the world played a crucial role in the imperialist discourse of American expansionism. The theme of white supremacy was present in all his theology, which represented the Darwinian position of “the survival of the fittest.”57 He wrote: “Some of the strongest races, doubtless, may be able to preserve their integrity; but, in order to compete with the Anglo-Saxon, they will probably be forced to adopt his methods and instruments, his civilization and religion.”58

Throughout this paper, I will make the claim that whiteness is best understood as a religious system of pagan idol worship that thrives on a mutually reinforcing circularity between the image (the ideal or the form) and the social constitution of those who worship it.3 As idolatry, whiteness must be dealt with like any such cultic system: its high places must be torn down and its altars laid low.4 The purpose of this paper is to offer a few concrete practices in which White folks must engage to begin casting down our White idols.

For whiteness as idolatry to be cast down, White identity (traditionally European particularities) must be decentered and not held as normative.

Reconciliation is not reconciliation if the normativity of whiteness is left uncontested.

it should be obvious that liking White things (skinny jeans, indie rock, green bean casserole, and John Milbank, for instance) is not in itself the problem. The problem is that said particularities have been elevated as universally normative and theologically central, all the while being cloaked in conceptions of neutrality. I am attempting to demonstrate, as a White scholar-pastor being remade through joining, what it means for White people to work against whiteness. Theologically speaking, whiteness will not be overcome through uncritical reassertions of tradition but in learning to accept, by grace, a marginal seat at Christ’s table. It is only in the decentering of White identity that White particularities will be included in the body of Christ in a redemptive manner.

Toward this end, I propose five practices in which White folks must engage to resist the sociopolitical order of whiteness: first, repentance for complicity in systemic sin; second, learning from theological and cultural resources not our own; third, choosing to locate our lives in places and structures in which we are necessarily guests; fourth, tangible submission to non-White ecclesial leadership; and fifth, hearing and speaking the glory of God in unfamiliar cadences.