A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper

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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 СКАЧАТЬ