On Linguistic (In)Justice

This article is from the Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

“‘NO SPANISH!’ she bellowed. ‘You were all told that in your classroom! There will BE ONLY ENGLISH SPOKEN on the school grounds! Do you boys understand me!’ […] ‘I told you, NO SPANISH!’ yelled the teacher, grabbing Ramón by his shoulders and shaking him […] And she slapped him across the face, once, twice, three times.”

This excerpt, taken from Victor Villaseñor’s memoir, Burro Genius (2004), describes, in painful detail, the experiences of Victor as a young boy growing up in Carlsbad, California in the 1950s. Schools all across the country, especially in states with high populations of Spanish speakers, enforced a strict English-only policy. In Blackwell, a segregated school in Texas designated for children of Mexican ancestry, a symbolic burial of the Spanish language was performed. During the “Burial of Mr. Spanish,” students were asked to write notes of their favorite Spanish words that were then inserted in cigar boxes and buried at the base of the American flag[1]. It was, as if, to achieve true “Americanness,” students had to literally bury parts of their identity. More than half a century later, the English-only rhetoric continues to find a home in U.S. society. Students are still reprimanded for speaking Spanish in schools, families are attacked for communicating in Spanish, and English continues to be seen as the only legitimate U.S. language.

In many respects, the U.S. has adopted a replacive attitude of language learning. This posture supports the idea that, in order to learn English, one must forget Spanish or any other language. Yet, God created us with the amazing ability of learning multiple languages. We don’t have to forget a language, to learn another. In fact, monolinguals[2] are the minority (40% of the world). Bilingualism is not only normal but also greatly beneficial. In addition, there are many cognitive, socio-emotional and interpersonal advantages associated with bilingualism. For example, while bilingualism doesn’t prevent dementia, it does delay its onset by approximately 4-5 years, and a recent study[3] found that bilingual patients who had suffered a stroke were twice as likely to achieve full cognitive recovery compared to their monolingual counterparts. In short, multilingual people’s brains and worlds are expanded as a result of their linguistic abilities.

The overwhelming evidence supporting bilingualism is not only ignored in the U.S., but bilingual individuals are often seen as deviant. Thirty-four million viewers watched as Jennifer Lopez recited a Spanish line of the Pledge of Allegiance during her performance at President Biden’s inauguration: “Una nación, bajo Dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos!”. While this gesture was embraced by many viewers, especially those of Spanish-speaking heritage, many others took offense to this and expressed their dissatisfaction publicly. “This is America. We speak English,” “No idea what J.Lo just belted out in Spanish. Try communicating with EVERYONE,” and “Speaking Spanish at the American President Inauguration? Not everybody speaks Spanish! It was sad and shows a low education,” were some of the reactions posted on Twitter. Despite the fact that the U.S. does not have an official language at the federal level, that 67.3 million people in the U.S speak a language other than English at home[4] and that Spanish is a recognized language spoken by 500 million people worldwide, the assumptions revealed by the Twitter posts were that English is the official language of the U.S., that English is spoken and understood by everyone in the U.S. and that Spanish is spoken by uneducated people.

Language ideologies are implicit assumptions about a language and language varieties that are highly influenced by sociopolitical and cultural factors. For example, the idea that the French language “sounds romantic,” is directly linked to the perception that individuals have about French society – “sophisticated, romantic, elegant” – and these notions directly influence the manner in which the French language is perceived. Similarly, certain linguistic varieties of the same language are rendered more desirable and even appropriate based on the perception that society has of the people group that is associated with that variety; British English is “better” than Ghanaian English; Spaniards speak “correct” Spanish whereas Dominicans speak a defective variety (note that the Dominican Republic has a significantly high Afro-Latina/o population); African-American English and Latino English are substandard varieties in need of correction, etc. If you want to identify the languages and linguistic varieties that enjoy the most and least prestige in any society, it is sufficient to analyze racial and class status. In Mexico, for example, the Spanish spoken by indigenous people is often stigmatized and considered “ugly,” and in Italy there is a predilection for the Italian spoken in Milan over the one spoken in Sicily (Sicilians tend to be darker in complexion and Milan is wealthier). We may believe that language attitudes are mostly formed by inherent truths about languages and dialects; in reality, they are, to a large extent, shaped by power dynamics that sustain certain racial and class hierarchies.   

Language ideologies affect racialized bodies in different ways. I often hear from my White students, “I wish I had learned Spanish as a child” and “I always knew that bilingualism is beneficial.” They’re initially confused when they learn that bilingualism is not always encouraged and at times, even punished. In non-White bodies, bilingualism is often seen as a liability, a menace against the English language, and an assault against “Americanness.” No John Smith has ever been told, “Speak English, we’re in America” but when Spanish is spoken by a Miguel Rodriguez or Korean by a Hayun Kim, suspicion quickly arises.   

My son was ten years old when he told me that he didn’t want to speak Spanish because he was, “an American.” “El español te da de comer, mijito (Spanish feeds you),” I told him sarcastically, reminding him that our income was generated by my ability to teach Spanish. In reality, the idea that Spanish did not belong in this land nor could it exist in the mouths of “real Americans” was not his own; this message had been transmitted to him at a very young age. Admittedly, I had gone through a similar phase. I remember feeling secretly ashamed that my parents spoke Spanish, and when they attempted to speak English, I quickly intervened, not because I was trying to help them, but because I felt they would embarrass me with their “poor English.” Feeling ashamed of your family, your language, your heritage is incredibly damaging. It is imperative that we carefully examine the ways in which we might be inadvertently perpetuating linguistic notions that serve to further victimize communities of color.

It is amazing that God gave the ability of multilingualism to Jesus, who spoke Hebrew and Aramaic[5]. We know that Jesus did not come to this earth as King but as a Brown man from the margins[6]. As a Galilean Jew, Jesus did not speak the prestigious variety of the religious elite[7] and his non-standard accented speech[8] emphasized his status as a marginal subject. Our savior came to this world to deliver the message of salvation using a linguistic variety that, given linguistic prejudices, might have been considered “ugly,” “undesirable” and “unintelligent.”

Multilingualism is a God-given gift that must be cherished and celebrated. Every language you speak gives you access to a particular group of people and allows you to form deeper bonds with those individuals. My languages are the bridges that enable me to traverse paths that would otherwise remain unknown to me. My languages give me the possibility to understand the sorrows of my neighbors and share the joys of my friends. Through my languages, I can speak of Jesus in a way that is understood by multiple communities. ¡Gloria a Dios! Glory to God!

About Dra. Meduri Soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto's work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel

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Footnotes

[1] Bacigalupo, Chantelle (2019): https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-04-29/no-spanish-allowed-texas-school-museum-revisits-history-segregation

[2] Monolinguals are people who only speak one language.

[3] Alladi, Suvarna, et al. “Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Outcome After Stroke.” Stroke, vol. 47, no. 1, 2016, pp. 258–261., doi:10.1161/strokeaha.115.010418. 

[4] Center for Immigration Studies (2018)

[5] According to Dr. Jonathan Katz of the University of Oxford, Jesus may have also spoken Greek, as cited in https://www.history.com/news/jesus-spoke-language

[6] See Robert Chao Romero’s book, “The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity” (2020).

[7] See Virgilio Elizondo’s book, “Galilean Journey: the Mexican-American promise” (2000).

[8] It is important to note that we all speak with an accent. Accents are contextually determined; for instance, people from England might think Canadians have accents and vice versa. “Standard” and “non-standard” accents are not “scientifically” determined; instead, they are based on social perceptions.

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The Rocks Shall Cry Out! Why not the Dust, Too?

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. . . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken” (Acts 2:2, 4–6).

“Listening to wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 48) 

“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’

‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out’” (Luke 19:39–40)

From the moment of birth, children begin the amazing journey toward speech. The process, frankly, remains a mystery to us all, even the most dedicated of researchers. Fresh to the smells, sights, and sounds of the world, most babies simply offer the most basic of speech: the utterance of cries. Yet over time the communicative cries give way to thoughtful attempts to shape words. But from where do these words come? Unlike the disciples in Acts 2, babies do not receive the Spirit of obscure tongues never before known in their communities. Rather, babies listen, process, and eventually repeat. That is to say, their language is a function of their place. People all around them speak, and they speak out of their places and speak the formation of places. In a more modest sense than God’s acts in Genesis 1, people form the world around them through the simple-yet-complex utterances of language. People utter words from a prior place of reception, for we all began as babies. The cycle repeats, bringing forth new communicators taking on the languages of their places and adding to the descriptions of their places, both through the fine-tuning that happens in places and through the interactions that occur between places. We were born to form words drawn out of our places and to utter words that continue to form our places.

What I want to explore is the connection between words and places—a connection taken for granted in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures—and the malformation of places when that connection is lost. Our lives exist in the intersection of words and places, for we are communicative beings taken from the dust of the ground who live in a communicative world and who were brought into being by a communicative God who began it all with a simple, “Let there be!” Places and words are intimately connected. We know places through our acquaintance with the language(s) of a place, and we know each other within those places and through our shared (or differing) tongues. These languages are those of people but also of the earth itself. When we lose the connection between place and words, we are doomed to do violence to both people and the earth. Before turning to the violence, though, we should first turn to what we take for granted: people belong in places.

From the dust of the ground

Often seen as two “tablets” of creation, Genesis 1 and 2 present two different yet complimentary accounts of creation. Genesis 1 provides a genealogy of creation moving from heaven to earth (Gen. 1:1) while chapter 2 moves from the earth to the heavens (Gen. 2:4). The Bible persistently sees “heaven” as the abode of God, while the “earth” is the abode of humanity. The first tablet is the account of God’s movement from his abode into his formation of the abode of humanity, so the account fittingly culminates in the creation of the creatures of the earth as bearers of the image of the heavenly Father on and in the earth. The parallels of the six days of creation further clarify the movement. Days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6 parallel each other, where the first day in the couplets presents creation through separation (e.g., light from darkness, water from firmament, water from land) while the second day of the couplets narrates God’s formation of places and population amid the same realms (e.g., celestial bodies, fish and birds, animals and humans). The final description is the creation of humanity to be creatures of the earth alongside animals, but the special commission to humanity is to be the presence of God in the earth and amid the creatures of the earth. Humanity was made to be God’s image.

Meanwhile, the second tablet takes up the task of describing the place of humanity, specifically the work of making places and doing so around the presence of God. Humanity was to be a species of priestly gardeners and caretakers, cultivating life in the earth encircled around the Tree of Life, which sat in the middle of the Garden (Gen. 2:9). That life was a life of promise and nourishment: in the Tree, the fruit of God’s lips joined with the fruit of the earth to be a source of life in its fullest for all the creatures of the Garden. Physical and spiritual nourishment were one in that tree at the center of the Garden. The earth received its life from God and was sustained in that life by God’s life-giving presence in her midst. Humanity’s priestly task was to direct all of creation to its fullness in God by encircling it around his place of joining. Humanity was perfectly equipped to the task, for humanity was a creature of the dirt yet received life from the breath of God himself (Gen. 2:7).

Of course, tragedy enters the tale in Genesis 3, where creation is undermined by the priestly humans enclosing creation around the false promise—the lie of the serpent—which brought death. All of creation suffers because the one who belonged to the earth betrayed the earth. The place of life in the presence of God became the place of shame and hiding. The whole earth felt the effect, for her own priest and caretaker enclosed her around death. The same space teaming with life was now the site of two places: the possibility of life through the joining of the earth and the abode of God, the heavens, and the new reality of death through the separation of the earth from God’s presence. An act equally fit for judgment and mercy, God bars the path to the possibility of life. The earth was no longer fit, for the time being, to occupy the place of life. With the fall of humanity goes the fall of the earth because the two belong together. Humanity belongs to the dust of the ground, but now facing toward death, humanity will lose its life and dissolve back merely into the earth, devoid of the breath of God.

The biblical story only just begins with the fall, though. Throughout the pages of the Bible, the people of the earth and the life of the earth remain intertwined. In Genesis 3, the earth is cursed with humanity. In Genesis 4, the earth is stained with the blood of Abel and thus protests by refusing to yield crops to Cain. In Genesis 6, humanity becomes so horrific that days 3 and 6 of creation must be undone—“baptized” according to Peter (1 Pet. 3:20–21)—as the waters submerge the earth and all its life. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, “wild beasts” signal echoes of the loss of Eden, foreshadowing Revelation, where the lion and the lamb rest together. God provides an image of a new Eden in the giving of a land flowing with milk and honey to a new humanity, the people of his covenant through whom he will bring redemption, yet in their disobedience, they too are sent out of the land and away from the presence of God. Indeed, as Jesus, the last “Adam”—meaning “person of the dirt”—proclaimed in Luke 19, the rocks cry out. Humanity and the earth belong together, so much so that Revelation culminates in the image of a new Eden with a new Tree of Life nourishing the creatures of the earth.

In the contemporary world, our imaginations are not shaped toward awareness of our being creatures who belong to the earth; nonetheless, our daily lives demonstrate this reality. Our lives are characterized by technologies that obscure the dependence: we mostly live and work in buildings with climate control systems that keep our bodies in relatively narrow bands of atmospheric conditions; we traverse space primarily in automobiles, hovering over the earth and with their own climate controls; we board public transportation and walk through cities wearing headphones and earbuds that block our auditory connection to our places. Our food travels great distances by land, air, and sea before reaching sanitized supermarkets with more climate control.

Yet the fact remains that we are creatures of the earth. Our food, from wherever it comes, is the fruit of plants, the meat or eggs of animals, or a factory combination of both through processing. Our growth from womb onward depends upon nourishment from the earth. Our muscles gain their strength from the protein in the food and the gravity of the earth, their energy from the sugar in plants, and their health from the vitamins and nutrients in the sun’s rays and earth’s soil. Despite the environmental systems of buildings and cars, the air we breathe is the air that permeates the earth, a living sign of the Spirit that hovered over the deep and filled the lungs of the first gardeners and first apostles (Gen. 2:7; Jn. 20:22). Our skin bears the marks of the soil in which our ancestors experienced differing intensities of the light and heat of the sun. Our finger nails bear the dirt of the earth that we grasp in our hands. Our bodies take their form at least partially from their terrain: people of the mountains have thicker and stronger thighs, farmers have stronger arms and hands, while ocean dwellers have bleached hair.

Our cultures are constantly changing ways of life in tune with particular places and its particular people. Indians beget Indians in more than genetic ways. Yet Indians of the village beget Indians with different sensibilities than Indians of the city, who are different from Indians in diaspora in the United States. The same can be said of Puerto Ricans. American soil and its places provide new earth in which to learn how to be Indian and Puerto Rican, as do the interactions of Indians and Puerto Ricans on American soil. We bear customs borne of the joining of places, taking customs that reflect local practices into new places, new soil, thereby creating new ways to be in the earth that are both true to the soil that bore us and to the soil of the place in which we set new roots. There is, perhaps, no better image of this exchange than language, for we are creatures of language who become audience to people and places and the earth each with their own languages. In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, we become “audience to conversations in a language not our own.”[1]

Name the animals

Contemporary philosophers have noted that language only works for communication because it enables the formation of shared ideas on the basis of generalities that create common expression. For example, take the word “apple.” For speakers of English, the apple is so basic to our perception of the world that we rarely think twice before qualifying it. We simply say things such as “I love apples” or “I hate apples” or “buy some apples at the store.” In fact, whereas we might qualify something much less basic to our lives, such as “I like action movies but not romantic comedy movies” or “I can tolerate salmon but have no interest in catfish,” we usually do not think twice about the simple designation “apple.” No one would assume that “I hate apples” would be a way of denouncing a group of people. Yet, as I learned early in my marriage, a lot more is taken for granted in the simple designation “apple” than my wife or I realized. One day, she sent me to the grocery store with a list, and atop the list was “apples.” As a child, my mother bought red delicious, granny smith, and golden delicious apples, and by my late 20’s, I had firmly settled upon a preference. I had had other apples, but in my mind, the choice was rather clear: in the store, I would look for the red delicious apples and then move on to the next item on the list. I do not recall even noticing other kinds: my childhood, my house, my family had formed the language of “apple” in a specific way. When I returned home, my wife was appalled at my decision to bring those “spongy” things into the house (a decade later, I still don’t know what that means). For my Canadian wife born in a different place in a different family and country, red delicious was not remotely on her radar. She wanted pink ladies! Rest assured that the simple designation “apple” did not appear on a list for a long time thereafter.

A second example will solidify the point. For several years, I taught on a summer study abroad program that took primarily Euro-American college students to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany for two months of immersive learning. In Germany, we stayed in a youth hostel, and every morning, we would begin the day together with an open breakfast. Among the offerings was a bowl full of fruit. Many students were accustomed to eating fruit with their breakfast but were thoroughly bewildered at the offerings before them in the hostel. Rather than the waxed, rotund, symmetrical apples that American chain grocery stores sell, the students encountered small, asymmetrical, unwaxed apples with skin blemishes. Rather than juicy and sweet, the German apples had a much more subtle taste to them. I had one German student for whom everything seemed in order, but the American students could be heard complaining, “What kind of apples are these?”

In both examples, “apple” turned out to bear far more meaning than it initially seemed. For all of its ability to present a general category, the word “apple” gained meaning only insofar as it connected to people in their places. Apart from its connection to places, “apple” means little more than “snow” does to one who grows up in the Sahara and “heat” does to the Alaskan. The ideas of “apple,” “snow,” and “heat” bear little meaningful significance apart from life in places. We receive a hint of this joining of language and place in Genesis 2, where God tells Adam to name the animals. Actually, the situation is more enigmatic, for God first reflects that it is not good for Adam to be alone, and then tells him to name the animals. While the text does not reveal the names that Adam provided, given the close connection between language and place, we can begin to understand the divine rationale. As a gardener and a caretaker of the animals, Adam knew Eden as his home, the way that a gardener or zoologist knows her place today. Naming generally reflects some sort of intimate acquaintance, for it says something about the person or thing being named relative to the one(s) doing the naming. As caretaker, a degree of intimacy between Adam and the animals is taken for granted. His act of naming took place amid the type of acquaintance with the animals that taught him about companionship. He experienced the intimacy that a hippo shared with another hippo yet could not with him. He saw that for all his familiarity, none of the animals could take his own name. After this exercise teaches him what he is missing, God gives him “bone of [his] bone, flesh of [his] flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam names her from his intimate understanding of his position within his place. She is like him in a way that the rest are not. Not surprisingly, they are then together to fill the place and serve it as gardeners and caretakers. Word and place belong together, and people are creatures of both.

The rocks will cry out

So what happens when people and words lose the significance of their birth from places and earth? What happens when people forget that ideas are borne out of places rather than supervene over those places? What happens when people miss that ideas are generalities that are communicative shorthand for those practices, discursive practices, and encounters borne of and taking place in the earth? Modern history is marked by colonialism, where the normalcy of one place and its ideas, language, and practices borne of their earth imposes itself as the universal mark of “civilization” upon another. The nature of universal claims is the removal of all local specificity: it is communication in generalities. The “essence” of the apple—that is, what joins competing local understandings of apples—is the idea that is simultaneously no particular apple at all and the core of what unites all apples. The problem here is not that we have the language of “apple” that enables communication. Rather, the problem is the forgetfulness that none of us become acquainted with or know “apple” independently of the particular apples that we encounter. The generalities of language helpfully enable communication, but when we are hungry, we want an actual physical apple. That physical apple—no less than our stomachs—has no interest in universal, general claims. The truthfulness of the apple is in the particular apple before us that can satisfy our hunger.

In colonialism, though, the idea of the apple reins, but as we have seen, the idea is nothing other than the image of an apple that belongs to one group of people in one place. Yet that people has forgotten that their particularity has shaped their understanding of the universal. In that forgetfulness, they impose the “true” idea of “civilization”—goodness, beauty, nobility—upon another. Rather than listening to the language(s) of a place, rather than taste and feel the distinctives of a locale, they impose the developments of goodness, beauty, nobility, and truth of their places upon the other as though the language of their own places were universal. The colonizer often genuinely believed he was doing a good thing, for he was a theological agent of perfecting nature according to the logic of his place. In the process, though, the beautiful truth of Pentecost in Acts 2 fell away.

After Jesus ascended, he sent his Spirit to fill his disciples, and the immediate manifestation was their speaking the languages of all of those present in the court around them. What the disciples learned in that instance—even if it took thirteen more chapters for it to sink in—was that the message of Jesus was capable of taking up the specificities of any language. Everyone present heard in his or her own tongue. Indeed, the beauty of their wondrous news was the transfiguration of all peoples and places. It was the message of the return of the possibility of Eden, where every people and place—with their languages—could now receive life by being encircled around the new joining of heaven and earth. Jesus, the second “Adam” or “dirt-person,” was also the man of heaven (1 Cor. 15), and in him, the heavens and earth met in intimate union again. But the joining did not destroy the languages of people and earth. Instead, Pentecost provided an image of the transfiguration of all the languages. That is to say, the earth in all its beautiful complexity was capable of bearing the presence of God in Jesus the Christ.

Conversely, modern colonialism destroyed places, imposing the conquering nations’ languages, clothing, agricultural systems, conceptions of beauty, and systems of discipline, and they did all of this in the name of Jesus. Note, for example, the way that the world is largely divided among English, Spanish, and French speaking countries, despite some contemporary parallel efforts to form the world according to Russian or Mandarin. The modern colonizers believed that their “Christian civilization” needed to be replicated everywhere in order to bear the infinite. The logic of Pentecost was destroyed, and one by one, the potentially rich mosaic of languages foreshadowed in Acts 2 began to lose possibilities, with languages falling away.

Equally significant was the loss of speaking the languages of the earth itself. Modern colonialism views the earth as commodity, raw material to be shaped. One could refer to this as the McDonald’s effect, where the goal is rarely sensitivity to the language of a place but instead the imposition of a form of maturity upon a place. Wherever we go, we can be sure that McDonald’s is basically the same because its ingredients are produced centrally and exported to its various locations. The earth is terraformed according to the imagination of economic ideas, all of which arose from particular philosophical meditations in a particular part of the world, abstracted for the terraforming process of colonialism. The earth was no longer a collection of people speaking local languages derived from their being in the earth. It was now an idea—a “globe”—that enraptured bodies from the earth and brought them into the imagination of those who had ceased to hear the languages of the earth itself. Local languages began to die: both the languages of cultures and the languages of intricate ecosystems. The earth became raw commodity to be conquered, developed, and sold.

There is a larger tale to tell deep within the wounds. We could speak of the formation of identity. If Eden saw identity intimately binding together in life the heavens and the earth and humanity as creatures of the earth commissioned by the God of heaven, the expulsion from Eden necessarily signals identity formed in ways bound by death. We could speak of the dirt-people’s loss of ears to hear the languages of the earth and the subsequent ravaging of the earth. We could speak of the colonized pulled away from the earth such that bodies no longer received definition from being in and from the earth but instead from cultural markers of distance from the colonizers and their universal “ideas.” We could speak of racial formation amid the same colonizing and terraforming processes, as people who called themselves “white” and named others “black” and others somewhere in between established rules for who could migrate into “whiteness.” All of these are significant aspects of the tale of the modern world. But before we tell these stories, we need to listen. The rocks really do cry out—in distress, in hope of renewal, in worship. Why not the people of the dust, too?

About Ashish Varma

Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, IL. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. He is a regular contributor to the God Here and Now substack of Princeton Theological Seminary's Center for Barth Studies. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

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Further Reading

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, reprint 2003.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012.

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Footnotes

[1]Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48.

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Radical Sanctification and Resisting White Supremacy

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

We fight the power of sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. This simple and uncontroversial claim at the heart of the Christian doctrine of sanctification contains radical power, since the Spirit also accomplishes the most radical human transformation—from death to life. Furthermore, scripture’s commands to walk by the Spirit imply that the Christian is to live a life marked by this radical transformation. It is in this demand—of radical transformation—that this simple claim finds its complexity, its challenge, and its resistance even among the most pious.

This article makes another deceptively simple claim—white supremacy is sin. This claim is, like the first, apparently uncontroversial. Most Christians would not hesitate to affirm it. However, many Christians would be hard pressed to accurately define white supremacy, locate its historical or present manifestations, or trace its effects in their own lives. Worse yet, some have so limited the scope of the problem of white supremacy that it is hardly discernible after the U.S. Civil Rights Movement apart from the most explicit instances. Under such conditions, the claim that white supremacy is sin becomes an almost meaningless platitude, a theological answer in search of a question. 

If the above premises are true--that we fight sin by the power of the Holy Spirit and that white supremacy is sin--then white supremacy should be radically resisted in the lives of Christians by the power of the Holy Spirit. But precisely how do we fight sin by the Spirit’s power? What does it mean to call white supremacy sin? And what might it look like to radically resist white supremacy in our lives? Before attempting to address these important questions, however, it is necessary to define what I mean by white supremacy.[1] This article understands white supremacy to be a globally expressed racialized social system, within which those deemed “white” generally enjoy disproportionate material and social privileges in relation to those deemed “non-white.”[2] In what follows, I take this definition for granted and explore some of its features as they support my argument that white supremacy is sin and should be radically resisted by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How the Spirit Reveals Sin

Part of the Spirit’s power for fighting sin is the Spirit’s role in identifying it. The Spirit helps us to identify sin through at least three means: scripture, circumstance, and community. In scripture we find a standard of personal and social goodness in Christ and in the kingdom of God to which we have never lived up. We also find various examples of social and individual evil by which we can evaluate our own shortcomings. For example, when the epistle writer says “you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?” (James 2:6, NASB), we should ask ourselves critical questions about how sin has infected our understanding of wealth, poverty, and the ways our decisions serve to dishonor the poor and elevate the rich.

The Spirit also reveals sin through circumstance or, in other words, through history. If, as we saw above, the Spirit reveals the sins of partiality and oppression of the poor through scripture, historical circumstance teaches us that wealth, poverty, and oppression of the poor exist today along explicitly racial lines.[3] Colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and imperialism were and are racial projects as much as they are economic ones. Globally, many of the countries considered “third world” (or worse) are filled with people deemed “non-white” by the Anglo empires who have exploited them and their resources for centuries. Therefore, one of the features of this racialized social system which the Spirit reveals to us as sin is the historical reality that it was accomplished and is maintained through exploitation, through the oppression of the poor.

The Spirit also reveals sin through community. In scripture it was most often the voice of the prophets urging God’s people toward repentance for sin. In our own day, the Black Church has long provided a prophetic voice in opposition to the sins of white supremacist society. Take for example, Frederick Douglass’s recognition of the incompatibility of slaveholding piety with the Christianity of Christ, James Cone’s reflections on the practice of lynching and the lynching of Jesus, or Kelly Brown Douglas’s call to action regarding the racialized implications of “stand your ground” laws.[4] Regrettably, these and many other cries of oppressed humanity have been largely ignored under the spell of white supremacy. Instead of graciously receiving correction and repenting of sin, many Christians have grieved the Spirit by dismissing the cries of the oppressed as exaggerated or untrue. In this way, white supremacy has silently flourished in the hearts, minds, and hands of countless Christians.

The Kinds of Sin the Spirit Reveals

If we have spent any amount of effort resisting sin in our lives we know that there are levels to this. On the surface, there are behaviors which we should discontinue. On another level there are impulses and motivations underlying our behaviors which also need to be interrogated and transformed by the renewing of our minds. Jesus communicated this truth in his sermon on the mount when he raised the standard for holy living from the level of action to the level of the impulses and motivations of the heart (Matt. 5:21—48). We can say, then, that the Spirit reveals both overt and covert sins—the outward expressions of sin as well as the sins working quietly below the surface.

This dynamic is also true of white supremacy. Many today only discern white supremacy in examples like the murder of the Emanuel Nine or the El Paso mass shooting when the assailants explicitly claim white supremacy as their motivating ideology. But these incidents, along with other explicitly racist activity in our society are examples of the white supremacist sin that sits overtly on the surface. In addition to these, the Spirit is revealing the deeper, covert layers of white supremacist sin. As one example, while the apartheid Jim Crow policies of the last century enforced de jure segregation in the U.S., the post-Civil Rights era has seen de facto racial segregation across the country. Some have noted how “current residential segregation has roots going back at least to the Great Depression” through means such as federal redlining practices, restrictive covenants enforced by neighborhood associations and realtors, and even mob violence.[5] When we consider the fact that where one lives in our society determines the quality of education, medical care, and daily nourishment one will receive, the racial configuration of our neighborhoods takes on a more sinister character. Furthermore, where one lives determines the kind of police surveillance one will experience on a daily basis and one’s criminal history (over)determines one’s economic and social prospects.[6] In this way, racial segregation has far-reaching effects which disproportionately harm those deemed “non-white” in our society. The insidious nature of white supremacist sin takes this reality a step further by attempting to justify this situation by ceaselessly blaming “non-white” communities for their own disenfranchisement. In this example (and through many others) we can see how the realities of covert white supremacist sin may lurk just beneath the surface of our actions. However, through the voices of the oppressed and through the work of pastors, theologians, historians, philosophers, and many others, the Spirit is revealing just how prevalent the insidious sins of white supremacy are in our world.

The Spirit and Radical Transformation

So, how does the Spirit call us to address the sins of white supremacy in our lives? The same way we are called to address all sin—through radical transformation, even daily death. The Spirit enables us to plumb the depths of our actions, impulses and motivations, even the ones that are infected with the insidious evil of white supremacy, and to walk in newness of life and liberation. Concretely, this means that we must (1) rely on the Spirit to reveal white supremacy in our lives through scripture, circumstance, and community, we must (2) rely on the Spirit to show us not only our overt sins but to dig deeper to find the covert workings of white supremacy in our own lives and communities, and we must (3) rely on the Spirit’s help to radically root out the sins of white supremacy from our lives by dying to ourselves daily and living into the new life that the Spirit makes possible.

About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke completed a bachelor's degree in Urban Ministry from Moody Bible Institute and a master's degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Theological Studies program at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. He is interested in race, pneumatology, and theologies of liberation. In his (hypothetical) free time, Michael is either working on a new playlist, watching a movie, or trying to remember how to play basketball. He is married to Chelsea and their first child, Jay, was born in December.

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Further Reading

Lopez, Ian Haney. “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice.”

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited.

Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History

Comblin, José. The Holy Spirit and Liberation.

Zahl, Simeon. The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

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Footnotes

[1] It is important to note also that white supremacy does not exist in a historical vacuum; a long history of social, political, and theological factors have resulted in its current configurations. For more on this, see the recommended reading list at the end of this article.

[2] My definition here relies heavily on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Bonilla-Silva writes: “When race emerged in human history, it formed a social structure ( a racialized social system) that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the peoples who became ‘white’) over non-Europeans (the peoples who became ‘non-white’). Racialized social systems, or white supremacy for short, became global and affected all societies where Europeans extended their reach. I therefore conceive a society’s racial structure as the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege.”

[3] This is likely to be the most contested premise of this article; however, this claim cannot be sufficiently defended in the space allotted here. See the following resources for evidence supporting this claim: Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017); Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010); Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Race in America (2011); Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019)

[4] See Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave; James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree; and Kelly Brown Douglass’s Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.

[5] See Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism.

[6] See Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores

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God's More

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

One side of my family originates from the Philippines. The other side originates from the rugged desert regions of the Southwest, the borderlands. Water buffalo, rice terraces staggered across hills, the dialects of Cebuano and Tagalog, jungle foliage, and the city of Manila, once the Spanish empire’s trading capital of Asia; the arid droughts of Texas, the linguistic conflict of Spanish and English, living between and across a not-yet militarized border, and a midday sun ascending into the Southwest skies – these are the worlds my family came from, the worlds they carry in their bodies, and the worlds that touch upon my own. But they are different from my world. I am familiar with Chicagoland: freshly mown lawn, quick and slang-filled English, single-family homes, coffee shops, super stores, the aroma of asphalt on summer days, and neighborhoods largely segregated by race and class.

I inhabit what literary theorist Homi Bhabha describes as a “hybrid” space, a metaphor meant to signify how the history of European colonial expansion and an increasingly interconnected global economy have brought once separate worlds into proximity. In my family, the trading routes of merchant marines brought my father to the docks of Texas, where he then took a flight to Chicago in search of work. There, he met my mother, whose family moved from Texas to Missouri and finally to Illinois for farm work. Their marriage gave birth to not only me and my brothers, but to a hybridity in our family life: waking up to my mother and grandmother speaking Spanish but being unable to understand them, eating eggs and chorizo for breakfast, eating chicken adobo for dinner, hearing my parents argue over whether home was in the Philippines or home was here in Chicagoland, and living within largely white suburban communities that were indifferent or hostile to the hybridity in their midst.

Being raised in the church, I have tried to take seriously that God — who journeyed with Israel and is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth — is somehow present in everyday life. So, I have always wondered: How is God present within my “hybrid” life? Who is the God that abides in the presence of multiple communities as they struggle to survive and live amidst this hybrid context?

Biblically speaking, there is good reason to think about God’s relationship to those who are living in hybrid situations as my own. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Exodus specifically, the biblical text tells us that a “mixed crowd” journeyed alongside the Israelite community after God’s Passover and Israel’s liberation from the violence of Pharaoh. The Hebrew Bible scholar Terrence Fretheim suggests that this passage on the mixed crowd implies two things: (i) that Israel herself is mixed, “consisting of more than the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob”; and (ii) that God’s liberation of Israel had a kind of burgeoning effect. As Fretheim writes, “the benefits of freedom have a fallout effect on all those whom [Israel] comes in contact, whether they are people of faith or not.”[1] Exodus, then, tells us that God looked directly upon the nightmare of oppression experienced not only by the Israelites, but non-Israelites as well. Seeing this nightmare, God acted for their salvation, and in one sweeping act created a new community of a liberated mixed crowd.

In the New Testament, Jesus acted in consonance with God’s liberation of the mixed crowd in Exodus. In other words, his ministry was also hybrid oriented, in the sense that Jesus’s mission to the Israelites flowed into and upon the lives of non-Israelites. This is seen in Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, in his celebration of the Syrophoenician woman’s faith while dining, and in his healing of gentiles such as the Roman centurion’s son. Such actions are part of what Willie Jenning’s describes as Jesus’s “reorientation” of Israel’s “kinship network” to include non-Israelites.[2] By acting for the well-being of not just Israel, but non-Israelites as well, God opens up a fellowship between Jewish and non-Jewish peoples. This expansive kinship of Jesus is on display during Pentecost, when God’s Spirit fell upon Jesus’s disciples and enabled them to speak in the languages of other peoples. Describing this Pentecostal beginning, Jennings says that “the Spirit creates joining” through immersing the disciples in the “mother tongues” of others. And by being immersed in the language of others, the disciples take on a Spirit-filled hybridity. As Jennings suggests, they are joined to the “voice, memory, sound, body, land, and place” of others.[3] Whoever the disciples are called to be, they must now consider their faith in relationship to the cultures, languages, and histories in which they were baptized.

These brief scriptural meditations suggest that God works in the material realities of multiple peoples. So, what could this mean today that God is acting among and for the salvation and liberation of multiple peoples? I want to answer this question by turning to my family history.

My family’s migration to Chicago is connected to a painful history of US colonization. Fifteen years after the end of US colonization of the Philippines, my father was born. Economic instability from World War II, the murder of his father for petty cash, and after working some time as a merchant marine, he decided to settle stateside.[4] Growing up, my father described this resettlement as a kind of choice, the will of the individual to secure the American dream. Really, the truth is more complicated. He settled mostly because a history of colonization, war, occupation, and consequently impoverished social conditions unsettled him. My mother’s story is one of more stability, but nonetheless contains the roots of an imperially induced migratory epic. From what I’ve been able to discern between her and my grandmother, my grandparents were migrant farmers who managed to secure farming land in rural northwest Illinois. From there, they raised their children, spoke Spanish and English, and worked regularly with seasonal migrant farmers and white farm owners. How they managed to secure this land while other migrant workers continued to travel for low- paying labor could be the result of their handle of the English language, English being an access point to dominant White communities and the language they encouraged their children to learn. I am not sure. At root my parents are what journalist Juan Gonzalez describes as the “harvest of empire.”[5] They were farmers within an imperial regime whose political ambitions stretched across the Pacific and US Midwest, the result being my family’s victim to colonial domination, their struggle over their heritages, the loss of languages among my brothers and I, and continual wreckoning with what it means to be mixed.

But within this history of US empire as it touches immediately upon my family, one confronts the relevance of the good news in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel. God is not indifferent to today’s regimes of violence that continue to oppress many peoples. This God was active in the liberation of a mixed crowd in Egypt, was active in the creation of a mixed crowd speaking the languages of many peoples during Pentecost, and this same God is active today in those communities who are joined together by the wide grip of the empire. In the hybrid space of my family, this God sustained my father, who farmed on land his family did not own; this God sustained my mother, a little girl who was encouraged to speak English over her Spanish.[6] The presence of a God who liberates a mixed crowd is a divine affirmation of the cultural hybridity of my family and a prophet denouncement of all claims of political, economic, and cultural domination.

About Colton Bernasol

Colton is from Plainfield Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He is a graduate from Wheaton College with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Biblical and Theological studies. Currently, he is a student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where he is pursuing a Masters in Theological Studies with a concentration in Theology and Ethics. He is interested in questions at the intersection of theology, race, and colonialism.

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Further Reading

Homi Bhabha, The Locations of Culture.

Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theologies and the Origins of Race.

Willie Jennings, Acts.

Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto.

Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator.

footnotes

[1] Terrance Fretheim, Exodus, 143.

[2] Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, 265.

[3] Jennings, Acts, 28-29.

[4] Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America, 175.

[5] Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Kindle Addition.

[6] Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, 84.

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Reclaiming Spiritual Formation for the Mestiza Body

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

Whether we realize it or not, we all exist at the intersections of differing realities. For me, I exist as a Second-generation American-Filipinx, heteronormative female, and this is hardly an exhaustive picture of who I am and what constitutes who I am becoming. All the elements of who I am, come together in my body in a way that reminds me that I straddle various realities always at once. I am Mestiza. The same is true of several bodies today. With the rise of globalization, the internet, and other sweeping factors that are beyond any singular person’s control, we all find ourselves straddling the lines of various realities, a world of mestizaje, not by race or by blood, but by history and by experience. Many of us hold this mestizaje in our bodies, and while mestizaje by blood might manifest itself by the mixed color of skin, that which we inherit by history and experience is far more subtle, but nonetheless significant.

As a Filipina woman growing up in America, I was made ignorant to my people’s subjugation first by the Spanish and then by the US. Especially since the history I was learning was disseminated by our conquerors. However, even despite such ignorance, there still existed in my body a trauma for which I could not account. I moved about my space as though it didn’t belong to me, and no affirmation of inclusion could quell the voice that whispered: “You don’t belong.” It wasn’t just the lack of brown faces in the crowd that taught me this, nor was it solely the micro-aggressions I suffered at the hands of well-intended people—although these did not help. No, that voice came from something deeper; something like my very DNA (the stuff that made me me) seemed to communicate this. My body didn’t fit the world it was born into, or at least the world it was born into did not make space to fit my body.

As it turns out, trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. Recent psychological advancements have found that trauma can intricately affect the DNA of future generations. Thus, the particulars of my mestizaje brings with it not just difficulties in the present, but traumas of the past as well. As an Asian American woman, I am affected by the centuries of sexualizing the “exoticized” Asian female body. As a Filipina, I am impacted by the lifetimes of colonization. The older I get, the more I believe the historic trauma of subjugation, violent misogyny and racism affect my very body. They accumulate and bear what at times feels like actual weight on my body. I feel it in my shoulders. It is hard to form a person spiritually, when the body feels burdened physically. I was in need of a spiritual formation that involved and included my body.

For this reason, as a member of the church, I often find myself asking: What does spiritual formation look like when it includes my body? This question is now a key lens for how I listen to a sermon, take spiritual direction, and participate in church community. I would argue that this was a key lens for me, even before I could articulate it. Whether we realize it or not, since we are products of a violent history, we will eventually seek out a spiritual formation that heals all of who we are.

Being that we are mestizas in our own respective ways, a good question to ask is what does it look like to involve the reality of our mestizaje in our ministries? Most assume spiritual formation is an individual’s concern, and they treat it as a task of personal work that must be done by each Christian. However, I would caution the minister from absolving herself from responsibility for the spiritual formation of her community. In my personal experience, I would not know to look into my communities shared traumatic history, had it not been for visiting preachers of various backgrounds, considering book recommendations from mentors, and penetrating questions from my friends. My spiritual formation was and is complemented by thoughtful ministers.

In this way, I implore ministers to be aware of the possibility of their role in a mestiza’s spiritual formation, and in the same meticulous way she brings thought to her exegesis and hermeneutics, space can be made to explore the wide range of spirituality and spiritual teaching that exists in the greater body of Christ. The church is in need of a communal consciousness that recognizes its reality as a mixed people. Who better to awaken this consciousness than the ministers who provide our spiritual guidance? For this reason, ministers must begin to engage deeply the diverse breath of scholarship and voices that exist on the topics of race, gender and diversity (to name a few). Engaging this diversity within a ministry might begin to spark the curiosity of her congregants and begin the important work of discovering the intersections of their reality.

Moreover, learning to ask the right questions also aids in holistic spiritual formation. How do we invite this sort of inquiry into our ministries? Where in your body do you hold trauma? Where do you hold pain? What parts of your given reality do you feel like the pain stems from? These are good questions to begin asking yourself, and as you become more acquainted with your own histories you will learn better the questions that help encounter fellow mestizas. We begin the work of learning what the right questions are by letting ourselves be self-critical, knowing that we have probably asked many of the wrong questions. The right questions begin in introspective humility.

These are simply starting points to reclaiming spiritual formation for the mestiza body, and it cannot end here. If it is true that we hold our given realities in our bodies, then it must be true that any spiritual formation must include the body. What does this look like in the church setting? If we are to be honest about who belongs in our church, then our pulpits and stage must reflect this. The body as it presents itself looks to what’s similar to follow and to belong. If there are congregants in your seats that cannot find anyone on the stage that even remotely resembles themselves or their journeys, they might be hard-pressed to feel like they belong. The voice that has followed me my whole life might haunt many of your congregants as well. Perhaps it is time to invite other voices and other faces to the pulpit to preach, to read scripture, and to share. Reclaiming spiritual formation for the mestizo Body must include the whole of the Church Body.

As you look to the ways of introducing the intersecting realities of your congregations and ministries, know that you are not alone. Your particular body cannot be all things to all people at all times. There are limitations that our bodies put on us. It is good, then, that our Body extends beyond our singular selves. It is thus a question not just of our own humility but also our spiritual agility. There is a whole cloud of witnesses, mestizo people, whom we can learn from and lean on and invite. There is no time like the present to begin this important work.

I still remember the first time I encountered a minister who looked like me. It was pivotal, not just because I could then perceive myself in ministry, but because I knew there was someone in ministry who might understand and see in some part my particular experience of mestizaje. For the first time my Filipina American body could rest in the belief that I belonged. This began a journey of spiritual formation that sought to grasp all of who I am as crucial to the Body of Christ. For this reason, I am convinced that the invitation of another and of someone different is how we begin to reclaim spiritual formation for the mestizo Body.

About Jelyn Leyva

A Second-generation Filipina born in Tampa, FL, Jelyn Leyva graduated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago on May 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Women in Ministry and an Interdisciplinary in Theology. She is currently in Los Angeles, CA pursuing an MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary with her emphasis in Christian Ethics. Having lived in various places in the US, Jelyn’s interest lie in the complex history and multi-ethnic life of the Protestant Church in the US. Her hope is to serve this church and its many colors with the consideration of traditional and contemporary theological scholarship.

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Neighbor Love and Reading CRT

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

When we attend to the cries of suffering people, we reflect God—not Pharaoh.

Buckling under the weight of generational systematic subjugation, Israel cried out to God and God listened. “And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant…And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition” (Ex. 2:23-25). When God called Moses, God emphasized hearing Israel’s cries: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians…And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you” (Ex. 3:9-10). Exodus contrasts this attentive divine listening to Pharaoh’s callous indifference. When God brings Israel’s cries to Pharaoh through Moses, Pharaoh increases Israel’s labors and suffering. Israel responds by crying out to Pharaoh, not God. But Pharaoh again entrenches in injustice (Ex. 5:15-19).

In the New Testament, Jesus and the Apostles also stress the paramount importance of listening to the cries of suffering, subjugated people. Consider, for example, Jesus’s parables of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10) or the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16). Or recall James’s declaration that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jm. 1:27). Godliness requires listening to and caring for suffering people in their affliction. Worldly defilement does not; it fosters entrenchment in unjust sins of commission and omission—like Pharaoh’s worsening Israel’s plight and ignoring their cries.  

Impediments to Godly Hearing when We Read

Godly attentive listening follows from love. In Exodus, God’s love for the people of Israel and their covenant ancestors motivates God to liberate them from physical, political, and spiritual bondage. Jesus’s parables and James’s declaration about pure religion reflect the biblical vision of how neighbor-love motivates godlike attentive listening. Sometimes this love-infused listening is literal; we hear the cries of those suffering around us. Other times this listening is metaphorical; when we read about the suffering of others, we “hear” them through the page. Therefore, when we hear people’s suffering through reading, we imitate God.

But, as with physical hearing, impediments often obscure our ability to hear suffering people’s cries when we read. One impediment is applying the wrong kind of reading practice to a text. C.S. Lewis, for example, distinguishes between reading practices that use a text from those that receive a text. When we use a text, we treat it as a means to information or distraction. This is fine when reading a menu or a joke; it is inappropriate when reading a love letter, petition, or religious text. These works require we read to receive—that we humbly approach the texts with a willingness to let them confront and change us.     

C.S. Lewis notes another obstacle to hearing suffering through a text: We are socially located readers and thinkers socialized to hear and see some things and not others. Lewis writes: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing [and hearing] certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” James Cone makes a similar point. “There is no place we can stand that will remove us from the limitations of history and thus enable us to tell the whole truth without the risk of ideological distortion.” To minimize or avoid these social and ideological limitations, Cone instructs us to “listen to others outside of our own time and situation.” Likewise, Lewis encourages us to read “the old books,” because they help us recognize and adjust for “the characteristic mistakes of our own period.” 

Sadly, Lewis’s and Cone’s proposals cannot guarantee that we hear the suffering voices around us when we read. Sometimes the old books are silent about or obscure our current challenges. The Bible says nothing about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act or its continued impacts on China and the United States. Moreover, many older histories lie about the United States.

Reflecting on the rise of intentionally false narratives about U.S. Reconstruction (1865–1877), W.E.B. Du Bois writes:

I stand at the end of [ writing Black Reconstruction in America], literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field…[these histories are] useless as science and misleading as ethics… [and they show] that with sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes, the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.

What Du Bois chastised in Reconstruction histories, Leon Litwick, president of the Organization of American Historians, applied generally to U.S. historians: “No group of scholars was more deeply implicated in the miseducation of American youth and did more to shape the thinking of Americans about race and blacks than historians.” Most in the U.S. continue to inherit these false histories and their accompanying ideologies. We suffer these injustices. Moreover, receiving these unjust histories obstructs our abilities to hear the stories of how our neighbors and we suffer from white supremacy. This impediment is especially dangerous, for as Cone observed, “When people can no longer listen to other people’s stories, they become enclosed within their own social context, treating their distorted visions of reality as the whole truth.”

Hearing Our CRT Neighbors

Enter critical race theorists. Scholars such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Robert A. Williams, Jr. (Lumbee), Gary Peller, Mari Matsuda, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Imani Perry, and Laura E. Gómez write essays aimed at helping us see how U.S. law and legal institutions have maintained and perpetuated white supremacy and hear the cries of non-white and white communities and individuals suffering from these racist evils. CRT scholars do not claim to stand-in for these communities or individuals. Like Ada María Isasi-Díaz, they would say, “Though I do not speak for them, I speak with them and on behalf of them.”

As they speak, CRT scholars remind us of legal decisions like these:

Power, war, conquest, give rights, which, after possess, are conceded by the world, and which can never be controverted by those on whom they descended. –Chief Justice John Marshall, Worcester v. Georgia (1832) [This is still official U.S. Federal Indian law]

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument. –Chief Justice Roger Taney, Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)

All people under U.S. jurisdiction have the same right to make contracts and pursue business opportunities “as is enjoyed by white citizens.”—1866 Civil Rights Act [This is still official U.S. law]

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the US...I allude to the Chinese race.—Justice John Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) referencing the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

Most of us are unfamiliar with these quotations and the painful, subjugating roles they have played in shaping communities and individuals. We do well, then, to engage CRT texts, working to receive rather than use them, in order to hear these truths and the cries they amplify. These practices will help us imitate God, not Pharaoh. They will help us heal from injustice. And they will help us care for Jesus and our neighbors (Mt. 25).

About Nathan Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside.  He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic. For more about hermano Nathan, visit his website.

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Forming Just Reading Communities

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

Does not wisdom call, and understanding raise her voice? -Proverbs 8:1

The past year has taught us that understanding the problems we face is not as easy as one would hope. We are stuck in the irony of having more information available to us than ever before but not knowing who to trust. This past year begs the questions, “how do we best love our neighbor,” and “what is just?” To complicate matters further the pressure has revealed deep disunities in our homes.

We need to invite people to understand more—to heed the call of wisdom. But how does one begin? One way is by creating space where we can slow down, focus more deeply on engaging resources that have studied the issues, and process questions together.

What follows is what I have gleaned from participating in and leading reading groups. I offer a theological framework of the goals and practices of these groups as being an exercise in biblical wisdom. For it is within the practice of wisdom that we will find our first steps in justice. First, I overview certain aspects of wisdom that form the method and goal of our reading communities. Second, I show how these aspects of wisdom are best exercised by reading in community. I conclude with how these practices differ in approaching justice than our broader social context. For justice is wisdom moving towards love.

Reading for Wisdom

To know wisdom and instruction, to discern the sayings of understanding, to receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice, and integrity. Proverbs 1:2-3

Wisdom is the understanding by which the Lord has ordered creation. The personification of wisdom in Proverbs chapter 8 tells us that she was beside God “as a master workman.” Scripture presents us with an invitation into wisdom by revealing who God is and what God has done. In this revelation, wisdom is shown to be God’s gift to us. God graciously reveals Godself and God’s purposes to invite us to enter in. In recognizing that wisdom is a gift from God we understand that our practices to enter wisdom are not acts of positive contribution to our own improvement but a withdrawal to allow the triune God to begin, progress, and accomplish the work within us.

Our invitation into God’s wisdom is to recognize our relation to that which the Lord has made. The fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom is to rightly understand this relation to the Lord and the rest of his creation. It is a recognition of the way of life that God has set before us to cultivate shalom in a fallen world, in other words to know justice. This recognition is a humble locating ourselves as the aids, not the originators, of bringing peace into the world. It is recognizing our finitude and the immense complexity that challenge the peace of the kingdom of God today.

Recognizing our finitude should lead us into constant formation of wisdom instead of chasing the illusion of mastering these issues. This means that we are constantly cultivating questions. We ask questions, seek out the answers, and then ask better questions. This process resists settling for simple answers to complex problems. I believe this is displayed in Proverbs 26:4-5. In these verses we are given two apparently contradictory responses to similar situations. Wisdom is not found in knowing the responses but in the ability to discern when to employ them.

From these above points-- understanding wisdom as God’s gift to us, recognizing our relation to God and creation, and leaning into our finitude amongst complexity-- we should recognize that wisdom shapes us primarily to be excellent listeners and secondarily as speakers. God calls his people to listen to his statues and cherish his law (Deut 4:1, Ps 119). James 1 advises us to be quick to hear and slow to speak. Proverbs repeatedly asks the reader to listen. Jesus constantly ends lessons with “those who have ears, let them hear.” It is only in listening that we begin to understand the complexity of our contexts and be better equipped to participate in God’s shalom. 

Reading in Community 

Iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17

Reading in community helps cultivate these aspects of wisdom in practical ways. The presence of another person changes the way in which we interact with a text. The three things I want to highlight are how reading together forces us to find and enhance our questions, encourages us to internalize the process of our thinking so we can communicate clearly, and exercises our ability to share the space to think.

Whenever our group begins a book, we always start with a set of questions. We start with basic questions; why do we want to read this book? Why did the author think it was important to write about this topic? This prepares the group to look for certain things. We can come back to those questions and start to answer them. We can modify the questions to be more specific and to reflect how we are progressing in our understanding. Why does Augustine stress the indivisibility of the trinitarian persons in God’s economic actions? Why does Willie James Jennings stress a people’s relation to land in trying to understand race? The questions propel us forward and remind us of our place as learners-- recognizing how we do not yet fully understand.

Not everyone in the group will have the same experience with reading texts or thinking through certain problems. This is a benefit to everyone in the group. Encouraging and prioritizing questions should help everyone feel free to pause the discussion and ask for clarification. It forces the group to slow down and find another way to communicate the argument. This helps us further internalize the concepts and find meaningful ways to communicate to help people understand. It forces us to focus our listening so that we can better aid our neighbors in their process of understanding.

When we read in a group we are also sharing the space to think. One person can certainly monopolize the group’s time with their thoughts. Reading in a group helps us exercise an ability to think with as opposed to for one another. We consider each other’s questions. We hear how each other processes and makes sense of a topic. We practice disagreement in a way that shows we respect and love the other person. When we fail to do so, we have a space to also repent and continue the work.

Cultivating Wisdom toward Love

At this point, you may be wondering how this understanding of wisdom and these practices of reading in groups helps us become more just. I take it to be obvious that in our time of social media and the commercialization of information in our news sources that practices contrary to wisdom are being cultivated. Complex issues are reduced into simple binary options in order to mobilize political bodies to expediency. We receive positive reinforcement for our speaking on any given issue and thus want to speak more and more. These things are not bad in themselves but when left unchecked they do not foster the type of wisdom that is reflected in Scriptures.

The above practices force us to slow down and listen to our neighbors, especially when we disagree with them. We ask questions when we recognize we do not understand. We are forced to find better ways to communicate that which we do understand. We allow issues to be complex and we find better ways of engaging in the ways that we can. This is what we do with those we love-- we continue the conversation because we care about the other and are trying to understand the ways in which shalom is broken. This is a small part of justice. This is a small part of growing in wisdom-- understanding to love our neighbor.

About Sam Keithley

Sam Keithley is a husband and father of two. He is located in Des Moines, IA where he leads a theological reading group. He has an MA in Systematic Theology from Wheaton College and hopes to pursue further academic work researching pneumatology, philosophy of language, and the doctrine of Scripture.

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For further reading

Daniel J. Treier, Virtue and the Voice of God: Toward Theology as Wisdom

John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason

Matthew Lee Anderson, The End of our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith

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Articles like this one are made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate today and help us continue to produce resources for the mestizo church.

Imagining Una Iglesia Mestiza: Vision Amid Crisis

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

Middle-America is currently facing a years-long identity crisis.

The March 2018 issue of National Geographic includes an article by Michele Norris titled, As America Changes, Some Anxious Whites Feel Left Behind. Its subtitle reads: “Demographic shifts rippling across the nation are fueling fears that [white] culture and standing are under threat.” The story centers on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an old coal mining town transformed by an influx of Latin Americans, particularly Afro-Latinos from the Caribbean. White residents – themselves children of European immigrants to Hazelton – repeatedly told Norris during interviews they now felt “outnumbered.”  She writes about white residents no longer participating in the town’s fall parade because it “became too scary. Too uncomfortable … too brown.” White Hazletonians were feeling, perhaps for the first time ever, the cultural collision, el choque, that has shaped the borderlands of the US for over a century. Their reaction to this encounter is unsurprisingly defensive:  

“With Hazleton’s changing demographics and persistent economic decline, the community began to see itself as white. The city reasserted its identity as white.”[1]

The realities of the US borderlands are no longer bound to the outer edges of the country, and Hazelton’s identity crisis exemplifies a common response. This crisis, and the fear stemming from it, marks wide-reaching debates about racial justice and the role of the evangelical church; it raises questions about who US Americans are and what must be conserved as things change. Few evangelical leaders are addressing the identity question inherent to the growing tensions in towns like Hazelton. Fewer still are asking if a non-white community identity can help congregations bring peace between neighbors. Ironically, the very people whose presence is cause for Hazeltonian suspicion produced a theological category and identity from which to imagine this peace. US-Latin American theologians reimagined the meaning of a racist identifying name and in doing so created a good tool to use according to the guidance of the Spirit. This article explores the US-Latin American use of the “mestiza y mestizo” identity as a tool to resolve the crisis and move toward peace.[2]

A Brief History of “Mestizaje”

During their colonization of the Caribbean and Latin America, the Spanish developed a system of racial classifications to assert their superiority. Sanctioned and perpetuated by the church, these racial categories became the hierarchical and ordering arrangement of Spanish colonies. Those designated “blanco” (white) were given the full rights and privileges of a colonial citizen. The Spanish system included 14-20 official classifications of racial mixture to distinguish between greater and lesser “whiteness” and provided measured rights and privileges accordingly. These racial categories were fluid but rooted in phenotype (e.g. skin color, hair type, etc.). Some people managed to move up via the accrual of wealth, becoming a priest, or being appointed to serve in government, and they received certificates of racial purity as they arrived at “white” status.

Mestiza/o was one of the official classifications of the Spanish colonies. It was given to those mixed children of Indigenous and Spanish blood. This designation would later become the leading self-identity for several Latin American countries attempting to establish their own peoplehood. Mexico, for instance, under the guidance of philosophers and politicians like Jose Vasconcelos, attempted to encourage (often by force) the mixing of remaining African and Indigenous people in the land, so they could become one “mestizo” people. Cuba, Colombia, Brazil, and other nations had similar blanqueamiento (whitening) programs that were justified according to racial improvement logics.[3] The goal of these programs was to move the people further up the scale toward becoming “white.”

In the 1960s, along the borders of the US, Latin-American pastors, poets, activists, and theologians reappropriated the word mestiza/o to describe the experience of Latina/o diaspora. That is, the term now described the bi-cultural tension of Latina/os born along the border who felt neither fully of the US or the country of their parentage. These Latina/os felt they belonged to both and neither at once; They were, as one writer would say, living “on the hyphen.” These borderland mestiza/os made mistakes in adopting such a term for their purposes, yet their use of mestiza/o reveals a way of imagining belonging that can be useful to the church. Here are three ways the mestiza/o identity can serve the church’s witness to a US in crisis.

1) Rejecting the Purity Myth

By definition, mestiza/os are impure. They are the byproduct of colonization by Spain and US-empire expansion. The former produced people of literal mixed heritage. The latter created the circumstances in which the already mixed person experienced a second-level mixing of culture, theology, and race. Gloria Anzaldúa would call this second mix a product of a “choque” (collision) that created dissonance for the Mestiza/o. This dissonance, what Anzaldúa calls “mestiza consciousness,” stands in stark contrast to “the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices.”[4] Because the mestiza must operate between worlds that neither accept nor include her fully, she can better handle ambiguity and develops a tolerance for contradictions. She learns to participate as a partial exile in worlds borne of conflict. To say it plainly, mestizas are disinterested in the claims of objectivity and purity used by whites to protect and insulate themselves from others.

Consider the way the Hazeltonian reaffirmation of whiteness animates retreat by its residents; they flee from that which they cannot understand. They wish to retain the “purity” of their vision for Hazelton. They accuse their Afro-Latina/o neighbor of distorting, deforming, and breaking the town fabric. Anzaldúa demonstrates the irrationality of this purity myth. Her ideas press the Hazeltonians to see themselves as equally impure byproducts of their collision with new lands and exile from former European roots. Their practices are not more true, good, or beautiful. Both “white” and non-white exist as impure products of a violent history, mixtures born from empires.

2) Accepting a Non-Innocent History

The complexity revealed in the mestiza/o identity echoes a truth long affirmed by the Church: no human is pure and innocent (Rom. 3:23). Whiteness, understood as a purity claim, records a history of innocence that reifies that purity. The default for whites is innocence, not guilt; racial purity is equated with moral purity. This began with the endorsement of the church on the racial arrangement of colonies, and it persists in many respects today. This self-defense is only possible through organized forgetting – “the intentional, repetitious omitting of certain facts, narratives, and artifacts, and the repetitious presenting of other facts, narratives, and artifacts, [by which] communities form themselves to know some things and to overlook or disremember other things.” Any attempt to disassociate from historical (and present) racism is conditioned by this form of forgetting. The normalcy of the forgetting is what makes it possible for “whites” to feel innocent regarding racial systems. They simply do not know what they do not know. Once more, whiteness moves away from sound doctrine, and the mestiza/o identity offers a corrective.

Theologian and church historian Justo Gonzalez, referring to Hispanics and their inherited history, writes:

Our Spanish ancestors took the lands of our [Native] ancestors. Some of our [Native] ancestors practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. Some of our Spanish forefathers raped our [Native] foremothers. Some of our [Native] foremothers betrayed their people in favor of the invaders. It is not a pretty story. But it is more real than the story that white settlers came to this land with pure motivations, and that any abuse of inhabitants was the exception rather than the rule. It is also a story resulting in a painful identity.[5]

Anzaldúa expands Dr. Gonzalez’s line of reasoning. In a world deeply marked by conflict, Anzaldúa believed mestiza/os could serve as mediators because the mestiza consciousness “serves as a mode of self-critique.”[6] Anzaldúa resisted the idea of simple two-sided conflicts where one group is oppressor and the other is oppressed. She believed “no one is exempt from contributing to oppression in limited contexts.”[7] These scholars echo truths of Scripture. The historical church acknowledges it is not beyond the guilt and crookedness of this violent world. The identity of God’s people is always simul justus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and sinner). As those who confess their non-innocence, Christians engage ministry differently.

3) Inverting the Scale (Life in the Middle)

Mestiza/os must make a choice: (a) attempt to move up the scale toward whiteness or (b) as mediators and ambassadors, pursue justice for all those negatively affected by the scale. If Dr. González is right that the mestiza/o identity is a “painful identity” marked by inherited guilt, this must include the ways mestiza/os have made attempts to move up the scale to white. Surely mestiza/o history does not stop with the earliest ancestors. Those blanqueamiento (whitening) programs meant to produce mestiza/os demonstrate the ways Latina/os perpetuate racism. On the other hand, shaped and informed by theology, mestizaje offers a vision for ministry rich with gospel implications. This vision begins with the subversion of the scale all-together. In other words, it begins by resisting whiteness’ invitation toward preferential treatment of the powerful (James 2:1-13). Instead, mestiza/os are invited to take up God’s missional focus on the poor.

The mestiza/o who prioritizes those affected by racial injustice also approaches their ministry methods with deep humility. In their work, they acknowledge their impurity and non-innocence; they are aware of the real risk for self-contradiction. These three lessons inform the church’s approach to the identity crisis poisoning towns like Hazelton. Rejecting whiteness is about remembering collective guilt, acknowledging shared impurity, and prioritizing the inverted scale.

“It is in the very way of Jesus that mestizos find their mission: to create. In this is both the excitement and challenge. God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers…” the culture-makers.[8]

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About Emanuel Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken and cohost of the Mestizo Podcast. He is committed to serving bi-cultural Christians facing questions of identity, culture, and theology. He also serves at The Brook, a church on the northwest side of Chicago, along with his wife Kelly.

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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Footnotes

[1] Jamie Longazel, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, as quoted by Norris.

[2] The words “mestiza, mestizo, mestizaje” and related variants have unique meanings in various Latin American countries. The focus in this article is the specific use of the word(s) by Latin Americans in the US.

[3] See PBS documentary Black in Latin America (2011) for more information on forced miscegenation political programs.

[4] Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Cantú, and Aída Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 99.

[5] Justo L. González, Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Abingdon Press, 2010), p. 40. As a point of observation regarding non-innocence, it is worth noting the exclusions in Gonzalez’s comments about Hispanic heritage. It could be said that Gonzalez is guilty of exclusion of the African in his historical account, and in so doing, is non-innocent regarding their erasure.

[6] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), p. 25.

[7] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera, p. 8.

[8] Virgilio Elizondo, Davíd Carrasco, and Sandra Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition, Revised, Subsequent Edition (Boulder, Colo: University Press of Colorado, 2000).

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Articles like this one are made possible by the support of readers like you.

Donate today and help us continue to produce resources for the mestizo church.

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