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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Do We Have To? Engaging Pro-Trump Family

Many black and brown people faced a familiar dilemma in 2020: To engage or not to engage; that was the question. Since so many of our friends, family, and co-workers have been “doing the work,” reading (or at least buying) the bestselling books and watching carefully curated “Representation Matters” collections, we feel we have a responsibility to engage conversations about race, politics, and justice. These conversations are always exhausting, often infuriating, and sometimes they make matters worse. 

But is it ok not to engage? Especially for Christians, isn’t the burden of hard conversations the necessary price for “gospel unity?” Sometimes, maybe. In the wake of 2020’s presidential election, a previous World Outspoken article gave an example from the gospels of why Latin@s, for example,  should engage Trump-supporting family members. But every conversation with a Trump-supporter and/or racist is not a conversation with a Zaccheus. In this article we present three gospel principles for not engaging conversations about race with those who are committed to ignorance, misunderstanding, and white supremacy.

1) Scope Out the Situation: “Who All Over There?”

As any black potential party-goer will tell you, the wrong answer to the question “who all over there?” may result in the unfortunate response: “I’ll let you know” (i.e. definitely not going). The thought of interacting with a certain person or people is enough to detract from any potential good the party might have to offer. The situation must be scoped out. The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:6 express a similar sentiment. Jesus says, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” 

While we might hesitate at the thought of naming friends and family members dogs or pigs, the idea is this: discernment must be exercised before deciding who to give the gift of conversation, relationship, and some of the most personal aspects of our existence. Not just anyone can presume to have access to our time and energy. And we need not feel guilty about saving these precious pearls for those who know how to value them. We gotta scope out the situation before deciding whether to go.

2) Shake It Off: “Aight Imma Head Out”

Many of us—whether subconsciously or not—still feel like we’re inconveniencing people when we talk about the problems of white supremacy. In reality, we’re offering a gift, a miracle really—freedom from the burden of whiteness and an invitation to a better form of life together. When this gift is treated as a burden by those who can most benefit from it, we sometimes find ourselves begging for their attention. But Jesus has a word of advice for those with a miraculous gift to give when they are not received: shake it off and head out like the Spongebob meme.

In Luke 9:5 Jesus says, “And as for all who do not receive you, when you leave that city, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” Those with stiff necks without ears to hear from their fellow humans about the realities of injustice and oppression do not deserve more attention; they deserve less. And those of us with a gift to give can exercise the confidence and resolve of Spongebob. There’s no reason to stay in that conversation. Shake it off and head out, fam.

3) Don’t Even Try: “Woooooooow…. ok.”

Sometimes the ignorance is appalling. It’s not even funny. You hear something like, “Hasn’t every culture had slavery? What was so different about America?” and you start looking around for hidden cameras and Ashton Kutcher. The levels of empathy, education, and attention that would be needed to have anything like a fruitful conversation are so absent that the invitation to engage almost seems patronizing. In such a circumstance, sometimes all you can say is “woooooooow…….ok.”

Jesus faced a similar situation in Mark 6:6. Faced with crowds who couldn’t believe that he was who he said he was and came to do what he said he came to do, Jesus refused to give in to their patronizing. When the passage says that Jesus “could not do any miracle,” it was not a reflection on his ability. The clue is in the next verse, “he was amazed at their unbelief.” Jesus effectively said “woooooow…….ok” and worked his miracles only among a select few. With the rest of them, he didn’t even try. It wasn’t worth his attention. And it’s not worth ours, either.

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of potential responses to interactions about race, politics, and justice. The earlier article gives a good example of when and how we might choose to engage. But we should know that engaging is not the only gospel response possible. Many who pretend to want to learn and grow don’t deserve our precious time and attention. And we do not always endanger gospel unity when we choose to withhold our engagement. Like Jesus taught, we might need to scope out the situation, shake it off, and sometimes, not even try.

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About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke holds a degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School in Illinois. He thinks and writes at the intersection of race, history, and Christian theology with a view toward a liberative and antiracist future. He is married to Chelsea and their first child will be born in December.

What's in a Name? A Personal History

My maternal grandfather was born in 1895 and my grandmother, his wife, in 1916. They both died before I was born but I heard about them from my mother, Andrea. My grandmother, I gathered, was a sturdy woman, a loving and responsible mother of 13 with little patience for backtalk. My grandfather, it seems, was a warm and well-liked gentleman with kind eyes, soft hair, and the fair skin typical of those on the island with Carib blood. Although unrelated, both were Lavilles, indicating some French influence either through ownership or marriage. Both were Roman Catholic. Despite knowing all of this, I only recently learned their first names. Della and David. For whatever reason, their names were never given, and for 27 years I never thought to ask.

I’m not sure what prompted the realization that I never learned their names. It may have been my studies in historical theology. The study of history often results in a desire for tangible personal connection with the past. The names of countless strangers, their geographical and cultural settings, their dates of birth and death, all become crucial windows for meaning, however opaque. Skipping across the centuries in search of ideas and their consequences, the names of people in their times and places remind us of our finitude and our mutuality, of our own relationship with the dirt and our bond with those who have already returned to it.

In the historical study of race, though, it is dangerous to care for names. Necessary, to be sure, but dangerous. So many names lost, so many others denied. So many, as Ellison knows, invisible to the eyes of history.[i] My grandfather was not born in the United States, but he was born during that period of U.S. history called the nadir. This period began upon the failures of reconstruction immediately following the Civil War and is considered by many historians the worst period of anti-black racism in our history. From 1877 well into the 20th century the terrors of mob violence and lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and various expressions of white supremacy flourished. Hatred, violence, and death reigned. Meanwhile, in the room of a home somewhere in a village on a small island in the Lesser Antilles, a baby was given the name David.

Long before the nadir in the U.S., the racial economy was in development on a global scale. No later than the 18th century in the Caribbean, “black” Caribs were already distinguished from “yellow” Caribs, Kalinagos distinguished from Garifunas and Taínos. Enlightenment racial schemes already exported to the indigenous people of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. To some degree classification is unavoidable, especially as people groups strive to maintain their own cultural particularity. But the seeds of a vile pigmentocracy were already being sewn, whiteness already laying claim to preeminence. What was at stake, the true commodity, as Willie Jennings notices, was the power to name.

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Grandma Clementine

My only living grandparent is named Clementine and her late husband’s name was Harold Hubert Hazelwood Yorke. While my other three grandparents represented France, Harold represented the British side of the colonial contest for Dominica. They named their son, my father, Anthony Roosevelt Yorke, and he gave his name, in some form or another, to all of his children. Harold was born in 1919 and Clementine in 1930. Again, both were born in the Caribbean. Harold was born the same year that the 19th amendment passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States. Fully ratified by all states in 1920, the 19th amendment was a step toward recognizing the inherent dignity of women. Unfortunately, Harold hadn’t gotten the memo. The few stories I heard of my paternal grandfather involved his mistreatment of his wife and family. My grandmother faced what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality—the cross-section of her identities as black and as a woman which forms a complex matrix of oppression. But Clementine was a praying woman. A Baby Suggs type, holy.[ii] And several of her children, including my father, became answers to her deepest prayers.

Not every generation is an outright improvement on the one before. If it were, the world would be utopia by now. Still, because of Clementine’s prayers, Anthony is a better husband and father than Harold was. When I got married I wondered if I would be a good husband and, eventually, a good father. My grandfather, after all, passed down not only a name but genetic information. What limitations, thought patterns, or propensities did we share? Which insecurities were ours to manage? And which of these would I pass on to my own children? Then, about a hundred years after Harold was born, and about 2500 miles away, my wife Chelsea and I faced infertility.

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Chelsea and I constitute what our racialized world names an “interracial” relationship. It is a tragic-redemptive name for particular kinds of coupling. On the one hand, the names, in our case “black” and “white,” point to and reiterate the same biologically essentialist logic that provides the foundation for white supremacy. While skin pigmentation is, no doubt, a function of biology, the names “black” and “white” are not reducible to biology alone. They must be observed through the prism of history. The names mark levels on what Jennings calls an “abiding scale of existence” that places whiteness on top and blackness at bottom. Whether we recognize it or not, these names still function this way. The pigmentocracy is no longer as explicit as it once was; few people in our day use names like “quadroon” (one quarter black) or “octaroon” (one eighth black) to describe themselves. But the gap between the names, what Eddie Glaude calls the “value gap,” remains alive and well. If you don’t believe it, imagine a “black” neighborhood. Now imagine a “white” neighborhood. For either, don’t think of the exceptions. Now choose where you believe you will have access to adequate levels of safety, comfort, and opportunity. To be said to be participating in an “interracial” relationship, then, carries insidiously racialized connotations. It subconsciously signifies the impossible coming together of fundamentally disparate realties. It is tragic.

On the other hand, the names “black” and “white” point to and reiterate identification with particular communities. Especially for racialized minorities, this self-identification points to what Ian Haney Lopez calls “community ties,” familiarity with and concern for the interests of one’s community of origin. Understood through the lens of community ties, “blackness” does not signify the bottom of a racial scale of existence, it signifies dignity, strength, and participation in a beautiful community of people bearing the imago Dei. It signifies those who have gone on existing, and beautifully, despite every effort against them. Historically and sociologically speaking, the community to which “white” identity points has been the community of the oppressor, the community who took the power to name themselves and others. Those who are named “white,” then, have the difficult task of reckoning with this identity, of bearing the name, while working to dismantle its meaning and renounce its power. In this way, to be said to participate in an “interracial” relationship may be understood as redemptive. It may represent a supernatural work of reconciliation between communities who have redefined, relinquished, and/or redeemed the names they were given or that they gave to themselves. It may represent submission to the power of God in Christ by the Spirit to name, rename, and redeem for God’s own purposes.

This latter sense of the name “interracial” was, and is, the case for Chelsea and me. And we looked forward to thinking through this complex identity for and with children who would represent physically what we now understood about our relationship. A kind of visible sign of an invisible reality. In this context, the verdict of infertility named not only our inability to have biological children; it also suggested the improbability of naming a new way of being in society, a new way of relating to one another in a racialized world. So, Chelsea shared in the longing of Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth. For these women of canonical fame, longing for children proved to be holy longing; they desired to participate in the story of redemption to whatever degree they understood it as such. On this side of Pentecost, we long to participate in the redemption of a society ravaged by those who would claim the ultimate power to name. The redemption itself has already occurred and is occurring, however improbable. Even improbability kneels in the presence of God; dry bones come to life. Even a virgin could become theotokos, mother of God.

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Chelsea had learned some years before of embryo adoption. In truth, Chelsea and I decided independently, even before we dated, that we would someday adopt children. Upon marriage, we thought of it as a future endeavor, something to pursue after starting a biological family. Somewhere in the midst of our grieving the verdict of infertility, though, the memory of adoption returned. In waves, over time, joy and hope returned, too. Our conceptions about family and biology challenged, we took heart again. Ultimately, we pursued embryo adoption, in which the embryo of a donating family is carried and delivered by the adoptive mother; the child grows in the womb and is delivered by the adopting mother but carries neither of the adoptive parents’ DNA. In the United States, there are currently over a million embryos in cryopreservation. Over a million embryos waiting to be named.

From their biological father’s side, the embryos that Chelsea and I adopted are half Kenyan. Because of the “one-drop” racial logic of the U.S., they will be racialized as black even as they are simultaneously racialized as mixed.[iii] Our children will change our names. We will now be mother and father. Further, I will be named a “black” father and Chelsea, a “white-mother-of-black-children.” These names carry complex meaning and emotion, in fact, the same tensions inherent in the name “interracial couple.” Tragic-redemptive.

It is tragic that one effect of racism and socio-economic disenfranchisement on black families has been the paradigm of the absent black father. Tragically, this hasn’t resulted in proportionate praise for the paradigmatic strength and resilience of black mothers. It is tragic that the narrative of black male absenteeism has become, for many, the cause and not an effect of socio-economic disenfranchisement in black communities. The blame is shifted and all responsibility for social action is placed back onto the black community. It is tragic that the fetishization of black men and black children by white women is an historical reality and has even become a trope in popular culture. It is also tragic that many women named “white” who happen to love men named “black” and parent children named “black” and/or “mixed” may be seen to perpetuate this fetishization.

It is redemptive to know that the active, present, loving, sensitive, strong black father is not an anomaly. It is redemptive that countless men and women across the country and across the world have always fought on the side of anti-racism without reduction. It is redemptive that countless interracial couples around the globe lean into the complexity of their joining, bringing all of their names with them, and considering together what kind of world our children should inhabit.

From their biological mother’s side, our child(ren) are part Cajun. The name Cajun is laced with racial history. French Canadians born in Louisiana during the late 18th and 19th centuries increasingly felt the need to distinguish themselves as “white” in contrast to those French Louisianans with darker skin, those who came to be known as Creoles. This racial distinction predictably and increasingly corresponded to socio-economic disparity. While the names in themselves—Cajun and Creole—do not inherently point to race, they have been made to conform to modernity’s racial logic.

Still on their biological mother’s side, our child(ren) are also part Honduran. Honduras, like many Caribbean islands, is paradigmatic in the colonial and neo-colonial history of the west. It is what O. Henry named a “banana republic,” a socio-politically unstable community. These banana republics were exploited for their rich natural resources, their societies forced to yield to capitalistic visions of time, space, and relating. Honduras’s prolific land attracted “namers” who would try to bring the land into submission; it would become what Pablo Neruda called “America’s sweet waist.”

It will be our task as parents to pass down what we know of these histories, in all of their beauty and complexity because our child(ren) will be named “mixed,” and this name will be truer than the namers know. It will seem as though our child(ren) are the mixture of Chelsea and myself—and they will be that, too—but they will be so much more. They will be the mixture of the stories of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. They will be the mixture of the past and the present, of already but not yet. They will be the mixture of histories with History. Ultimately, they will be the mixture of human sinfulness and redemptive grace.

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This is the reason that the Son, eternally begotten of the Father, took on the name Jesus in a particular time and place. Submitting himself to Mary and Joseph, the God-man allows himself to be named and to grow in favor with both God and people. In his ministry, Jesus exercises his own power to name—Simon is named Peter, servants are named friends. Not knowing sin himself, Christ took the name “sin” so that many might have the name “righteous.” Upon his resurrection Jesus instructs his disciples to baptize into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, the followers of Jesus are named the Church, sinners are named saints, those who were once not a people are named a people for God’s own possession. For this reason, Christ has been given the name above every name. Christ has assumed, and therefore, redeemed humanity’s power to name which was broken at the fall. This power has been abused by those who have the name Christian, but there is redemption for this, too.

So, our child(ren) will have names. They will have names which identify them as individuals who bear the divine image, each one a “Thou” existing alongside others in what Martin Luther King Jr. named an inescapable network of mutuality. Names signifying particular finite lives in time and space for whom the infinite God, in Christ, opened eternity.

And the names will be given by us, their parents. Not in domination, but in love. This given-ness points to our contingency, to our dependence—along with all of creation—on God for life, breath, and being. It points to our unity with those who came before us and it means that we carry their lives and stories with us. We carry the names we’ve been given. This, after all, seems to be the point: that because of the love of God in Christ, it may be a beautiful thing to name and be named.

About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke holds a degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School in Illinois. He thinks and writes at the intersection of race, history, and Christian theology with a view toward a liberative and antiracist future. He is married to Chelsea and their first child will be born in December.

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Footnotes

[i] Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man

[ii] Morrison, Toni. Beloved

[iii] According to Winthrop Jordan, “In this country, the social standard for individuals is superficially simple: if a person of whatever age or gender is believed to have any African ancestry, that person is regarded as black. Basically, by this social rule, a person was, and is, either black or not. Any person of racially or ethnically mixed descent who has some ‘Negro blood’ has been or still is regarded as ‘colored,’ or ‘African,’ or ‘Negro,’ or ‘black,’ or ‘Afro-American,’ or ‘African American’—whatever designation has prevailed by convention at the time.”

Works Referenced and/or Consulted

Bantum, Brian. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, et al. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man

García-Johnson, Oscar. Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South

Glaude, Eddie S. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

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

Jordan, Winthrop “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Lopez, Ian Haney. “Community Ties, Race, and Faculty Hiring: The Case for Professors Who Don’t Think White”

Morrison, Toni. Beloved

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

Do In Remembrance

Introduction

“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable”. These words, penned by novelist Marilynne Robinson and articulated by Gilead’s protagonist, the reverend John Ames, provide a helpful analogy for the way that memory works to form our present selves. It is precisely the memory, interpretation, and evaluation of our past “civilizations” and the ways that they interacted with the world in which they existed that provides the necessary material to build our current “civilization” which will be under construction until eternity. As our memories help to form us, they also impact the way we form the world around us. Our memories inform the ways we construct our systems and build our cities.

Of course, there are faithful as well as irresponsible ways to remember, and the integrity of our civilization depends, in part, on the quality of the material used to construct it. Memories which faithfully, honestly, and constructively reflect the realities which were once their present are quite useful and burst with potentiality for the present and the future. John Ames, in writing his own memories for his son, hoped to form him into a particular kind of person. However, the reader gradually becomes aware that Ames does not always remember well and thus, his own formation is also compromised. In the end, there is redemption for the old preacher, and this redemption speaks of the hope that Christ might work even our faulty remembering together for the good of those who love him.

Sacramentality in Gilead

In the ruins of the old church building, a young John Ames received half of a biscuit, blackened with ash from his father’s hands, and he took it and ate it. A now elderly John Ames recalls this moment in a letter to his young son to be read when he is older and his father is dead and gone. The aging reverend remembered the moment with his father and the half of a biscuit as a kind of communion, a eucharistic moment, and in turn, the moment has truly become for him, sacramental. This recollection of a moment of spiritual and relational intimacy between father and son against the backdrop of singing saints rebuilding their broken edifice would become more than a fond memory; it would result in an entirely altered hermeneutical lense through which to remember the past, act in the present, and hope for the future. But this is just the way it is with memory. There is a creative power in the act of remembering that is illustrated beautifully in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. As John Ames anticipates that twinkling of an eye when he will put on imperishability, he considers eternity and cannot bear the thought that we might forget the beauty of the world and the drama of this life once we are beyond it. Robinson writes in the voice of the narrator, “In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.” Ames believes that eternity will, at least in part, consist of remembering humanity’s past and thus engages in a sacramental act of remembrance in the form of a letter to his son. Robinson’s Gilead illustrates that the act of remembering is meant to be an act within time which not only anticipates the remembering of this life that we will do in eternity, but is also meant to form the interpretation and embodied performance of the present.

The plain beauty of the Iowan prairie provided the setting for much of Gilead. This plainness allowed Robinson to draw out the wonder of nature and to consider at length humanity’s interaction with the natural world. In this way, Gilead is a very ‘earthy’ book. Even the sacramental language in the novel seems to emphasize the temporal and human qualities rather than the lofty and eternal realities to which they point. Baptism, significant in its imaging of our union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, is taken up by Robinson, through John Ames, to highlight the way that water makes this eternal reality temporally meaningful. It is the cloak and shimmer of the water dripping off of the Baptists, or the electrifying touch of the Congregationalists’ wet hand that makes the difference for Reverend Ames. Likewise, the chief eucharistic symbol in the novel is the half of a biscuit covered in soot presented to a young Ames by his father. Earlier in the story, the elderly Ames would be made to sip water out of a honeysuckle flower by his young son, conjuring images of a congregant sipping wine from a cup in the hands of an administrator of the elements. This eucharistic meal has an earthly quality to it which is not meant to diminish the eternal significance. These glimpses of love, provision, and joy between fathers and their sons is meant to enhance our understanding of our participation in things which are in many ways, too lofty for us, the things that we do in remembrance of Christ.

The very act of remembering is just such an ordinary phenomenon in Gilead. The narrator zips back and forth between memories of the past, musings on the present, and thoughts of the future. These thoughts of future are sometimes expressed as thoughts of his own eternal future once he puts on imperishability, sometimes they are thoughts of the temporal future of the loved ones he will leave behind. Other times they are the thoughts of an even further future, in which he and his loved ones will be united in eternity. It is in this ultimate future that the reverend Ames cannot imagine that “we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.” This hope of eternal remembrance carries significant implications for the way we think and move in the present.

Memory as Formation

In “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past”, the Roman Catholic church considered the task of evaluating history for the purpose of present and future reconciliation and ethical responsibility. In a portion of the paper dedicated to the historical and theological judgment, the authors work to disaggregate the process of ‘historical hermeneutics’ or, the interpretation of history. They write, “The past is grasped in the potentialities which it discloses, in the stimulus it offers to modify the present. Memory becomes capable of giving rise to a new future.” The act of remembering is formational. The fact that we are able to be formed into different kinds of people because we remember, gives rise to new possibilities for the future. In other words, “The encounter with the past, produced in the act of interpretation, can have particular value for the present, and be rich in a “performative” efficaciousness that cannot always be calculated beforehand.” It not only matters that we remember; how we remember is of crucial importance. In Gilead, and perhaps in our world too, the act of remembering carries implications that ripple into eternity.