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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No Context, No Gospel

“If the gospel is not contextualized, the Word of God will remain a logos asarkos (unincarnate word), a message that touches our lives only tangentially.”—C. René Padilla 

Una Tradición

For over fifty years, Latin@ theologians have stressed that divine-human relations, theologies, and Christian practices are culturally laden. For example, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier writes, “the nature of God is contextual and bearing witness to [the] gospel is a contextual matter.” When considering theological education, Conde-Frazier adds, “The loci of our theological education are the lakes and oceans of our lives, the intersection of the practical and the theoretical as we move toward pastoral action. Our theology never comes from a blank space.” Thus, Conde-Frazier echoes a tradition of Latin@s including C. René Padilla, Ada María Isasi-Diaz, Orlando Costas,  Justo González, and Elsa Tamez.

Like many Latin@s, I knew nothing about this tradition for most of my life. No one shared it with me; no one passed it down. In an effort to break this cycle of erasure, let me share some of what I have learned by listening to the Latin@ call for contextual theologies. 

The Word Became Enculturated 

The Son of God’s incarnation is one of the great mysteries Christians celebrate. The Son is the one “through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6); the “appointed heir of all things, through whom [God] also created the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2); and the “first born of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:15-16). Put succinctly, the Son of God is the Word (John 1:1-5). And this Word “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). The Son of God became Jesus of Nazareth.

When the Son assumed human flesh, the Son assumed a cultural identity and context. As René Padilla writes, “The Word became flesh. It was acculturized, since humans are cultural beings.” Understanding or proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ necessarily requires referring to a human culture. Again Padilla: “The climax of God’s revelation is Emmanuel. And Emmanuel is Jesus, a first-century Jew! The incarnation unmistakably demonstrates God’s intention to make himself known from within the human situation. Because of the very nature of the gospel, we know it only as a message contextualized in culture.” Padilla’s point about the necessity of a culture for people to know the gospel echoes Orlando Costas’s insight about revelation. “Biblical contextualization is rooted in the fact that the God of revelation can only be known in history. Such a revelation comes to specific peoples in concrete situations by means of particular cultural symbols and categories….Theology in the Old Testament appears as a culture-bound, historically situated reflection on the God who is known in human language. In the New Testament, however, this revelation reaches its peak: God is known in human flesh.” We can summarize Padilla and Costas thus: The Son assumed a first-century Jewish culture and revealed the image of the invisible God through it (Colossians 1:15).

Scripture equips us to say more about God’s enculturation in Christ. When the Son became Jesus of Nazareth, the Son became a colonized a Jew under Roman imperial occupation in the northern lands of Galilee, a backwater region far from Rome and Jerusalem. Moreover, some regions of Galilee were seen as worse than others. Nazareth is a case in point. This small town was a backwater within a backwater. Hence when Nathanael received an invitation to meet “Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth,” Nathanael mockingly asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Nathanael asked this question without knowing that Jesus and his parents were poor and former refugees. As René Padilla observes, “The offering Joseph and Mary [Jesus’ parents] brought on the occasion of his presentation in the Temple was the one that the Old Testament stipulated for poor people—namely, two doves or pigeons (Luke 2:23). Quite early in his life Jesus was a refugee.” The Son of God did not assume a privileged culture. He assumed a multiply marginalized one. Emmanuel carried a culture forged in oppression. And within this culture he “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). 

All Theologies are Culturally Shaped

If the incarnate Son of God assumed a multi-oppressed culture, it is also true that people can only know him from their own particular cultural locations. Consider the practice of reading Scripture. Justo González observes that all theologies arising from an interpretation of Scripture “are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective.” González notes that this truth follows from another: “If there is anything we have learned during these last decades of modernity, it is that knowledge is always perspectival.” We all read scripture from a certain perspective, a particular place. And as Oscar García-Johnson argues, “the place in which theology is formed matters. Place matters because language, culture, and traditions are never neutral carriers of ideas; they always shape what they receive according to the values and inclinations of that place and its people.” In the U.S., for example, many Anglo evangelicals summarize “the gospel” in four words, “Jesus in my place.” Translation: “Jesus taking my (substitutionary) legal place.” This linguistic shorthand neglects many components of the gospel, including its cosmic scope. Paul writes: “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). Jesus of Nazareth’s redemptive work accomplished creation’s liberation from the curse of Genesis 3. U.S. Anglo evangelicals carrying the truncated conception of the gospel in their interpretive tool kit are likely to misread or overlook passages that stress the gospel’s cosmic breadth.

The previous example illuminates how traditions mediate readings of Scripture. Oscar García-Johnson writes, “theology develops in a particular place out of the interaction, not simply between the Scriptures and culture, but between some version of the Christian tradition and the indigenous traditions of that place—both cultural and religious.” The “Jesus in my place” conception of the gospel that many Anglo evangelicals in the U.S. champion is common among U.S.-based, historically white Baptist denominations; it is largely absent in the U.S.’s historically Latin@ or Black Catholic communities. Hence, members of these different Christian traditions bring contrasting tradition-shaped lenses to their readings of Scripture and the theologies constructed from them.

Because everyone engages Scripture and constructs theology from particular cultural and tradition-shaped perspectives, Justo González argues that we should beware theologies that fail to note the social locations from which they arise.

Precisely because perspective cannot be avoided, when it is not explicitly acknowledged the result is that a particular perspective takes on the aura of universality. Thus it happens that theology from a male perspective claims to be generally human, and that North Atlantic white theology believes itself to be “normal,” while theologies from the so-called Third World or from ethnic minorities in the North Atlantic are taken to be contextual or perspectival.

There are no “universal” interpretations or theologies from nowhere. Presumptions that there are correlate strongly with historic modes of racist and nationalist hegemony. They also correlate with interpretations that fail to confront mammon.

James’ epistle frequently chastises the materially rich and offers encouragement to the materially poor. Chapter 2 is a case in point. “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?” (James 2:5-7). Elsa Tamez notes that the “poor” in 2:5 are the πτωχοι (ptochoi), “those who have absolutely nothing, not even a job; they depend on alms.” C. Leslie Mitton neglects this basic point in his commentary. Instead, Mitton identifies the poor as the spiritually devout and claims that this term refers to “the class of people for whom prosperity means little since obedience to God means everything.” This reading cannot account for the Greek term’s actual meaning, nor the role that meaning plays within James’ discussion of how the materially wealthy oppress the materially poor. And as Tamez writes, “Only someone with a job, food, and shelter could affirm such a thing. The hungry, the exploited, the jobless want at least to satisfy their basic necessities, and they turn to God with those hopes.” Many “universal” interpretations of Scripture are corrupted artifacts of the middle to upper-middle class that fail to account for God’s special concern for the poor.

Nothing we have considered excludes the possibility that a particular contextualized reading is evil. It may be. A self-conscious proponent of machismo may note this commitment and offer a misogynistic reading of Hagar’s experiences. Of course, flagging this commitment prepares readers for what they will find and keeps their claims out of a “universal” register. Interpretations or theologies with unconscious contextualization perform neither of these functions. Moreover, they consistently prove divisive. As González writes, “Unconscious contextualization…will certainly lead to fragmentation, because it is by nature sectarian, not recognizing that it is but part of the whole.” González continues:

What leads to fragmentation is not the existence of a black theology, a Hispanic theology, or theologies that explicitly take into account the theologian’s gender. What leads to fragmentation is the lack of recognition that all these theologies, as well as all expressions of traditional theology, are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective.

As M. Daniel Carroll Rodas’s puts it, we must strive to be “self-aware contextualized interpreters” and theologians. Such awareness, Conde-Frazier writes, requires an ever-growing consciousness of “the cultural blinders and ideological filters through which we interpret the world.” Though such self-awareness is insufficient for an accurate reading or theology, it is a key component of Christian discipleship and the Christian commitment to resisting and remediating oppression. As Ada María Isasi-Díaz argues, “Who I am, where I am coming from, and where I wish to go shapes the method and content of my theological work. Though such self-revelation is always dangerous, I have entered upon it because I believe that the pretense of objectivity by theologians indicates complicity with the status quo, a status that for me and my Hispanic sisters is oppressive.” 

Contextualizing with and for Latin@ Eyes 

Latin@s should be particularly aware of the need to consider the oppressive influences that shape people’s reading of Scripture. The Iberians who colonized present-day Latin American championed biblical interpretations and theologies that justified imperial conquest and murder. The Spanish’s El Requerimiento makes this clear. And it confirms Elizabeth Conde-Frazier’s liberating insight: “Colonizers presented their own readings as the only possible readings, and it can seem that disagreeing with colonizing readings is disagreeing with the Bible itself. But this is not so, for there is a gap between the colonizers’ interpretation of the Bible and the Bible as the living Word of God.”

Of course, what is true of the Iberian colonizers is also true of twentieth-century missionary endeavors in Latin America. Again Conde-Frazier: “The seeming inflexibility of the interpretation of the Word beyond the ‘truths’ prescribed by the missionaries has created confusion for the Latin@ church in a time of crisis for the community as well as many changes in the present society, including generational changes of perspectives within her own families.” Many missionaries to Latin America proclaimed and formed Latin@s in imperial, Euro- or U.S.-centric, middle-class, whitewashed conceptions of the gospel. Yet they perpetually failed to see the cultural baggage they added to the gospel and discipleship. For them, what they offered was Christianity, pure and simple. Similar patterns hold for Latin@ evangelicals in the U.S. Most reside in congregations, parishes, and denominations draped in ropaje anglosajón with U.S.-style imperial, nationalist, racist, classist, and sexist embroidering. Even Latin@ evangelicals who avoid fellowship in these ecclesiastical communities face the reality that they dominate Christian publishing, Christian radio, and Christian film and television media. “Even if we have not come from Anglo-run church structures,” Conde-Frazier writes, “the theological ideological structures still proliferated throughout our lives.” Regardless of its pervasiveness, ropaje anglosajón is not the gospel nor a part of the biblical witness. Moreover, it is unfit for the task of helping Latin@s faithfully navigate the distinctive challenges they face. Indeed, it typically baptizes and advances beliefs, narratives, and images that legitimize these exact challenges.

Despite this evil legitimizing function, Latin@s and Latin@ communities frequently find it difficult to shed and resist ropaje anglosajón. For them, the cultural clothing is the tradition through which they understand Christianity. As Conde-Frazier observes, “The tradition has become the filter through which we read the Scriptures. When the Spirit breathes new life into the interpretation of the text, we are not always ready to hear what it says to us. If it doesn’t sound familiar, we are quick to believe that it is unorthodox or not sana doctrina (sound doctrine).” Who will shed or resist what they believe is sana docrtina? Some recognize that interpretations and theologies covered with ropaje anglosajón are not sana doctrina. Yet they also recognize that prominent people, communities, and institutions advancing these interpretations and theologies hold a disproportionate amount of money and power. Consequently, parting with the ropaje is likely to land these individuals and communities in an extremely vulnerable position. Still others are willing to take this risk, but they hesitate because they have internalized beliefs about their inferiority that decorate the ropaje.

René Padilla spoke of the Latin@ challenge to redress the problems of ropaje anglosajón in terms of “theological dependence.” He writes, “An examination of all these aspects of our church situation will show that our ‘theological dependence’ is just as real and serious as the economic dependence that characterizes the countries of the Majority World.” For Padilla, this dependency is profoundly problematic. Speaking about the gospel, Padilla declares, “as long as the gospel does not attain a profound contextualization in the local culture, in the eyes of people in that culture it will continue to be a ‘foreign religion.’” This point returns us to the epigraph. “If the gospel is not contextualized, the Word of God will remain a logos asarkos (unincarnate word), a message that touches our lives only tangentially.”

The Latin@s in the tradition we are listening to call upon Latin@s and Latin@ communities to construct interpretations and theologies that, informed by the truths about the Son’s enculturation and the contextualization of human knowing, contextualize the gospel and biblical witness to their particular social locations. These theological constructions must account for what Ada María Isasi-Díaz calls lo cotidiano—the everyday lives of Latin@s and Latin@ communities. The goal, Padilla explains, is to have ecclesiastical communities that “through death and resurrection with Christ [embody] the gospel within its own culture.” This does not entail that the gospel differs across groups, nor exclude listening to and learning from the Church catholic. Padilla is clear on both counts.

This is not to say that the message of the gospel should be one thing here and another one there. It has been given “once and for all,” and its proclamation is faithful in the degree to which it manifests the permanence of the revealed data, either here or there. Nor am I suggesting that there is a need for an “indigenous theology” characterized by local folklore and completely conditioned by the historical situation. Even less would we wish a theology that, in an effort to “contextualize” the gospel, superciliously ignores the results of long years of work in the field of biblical research carried on by theologians in Europe or North America.

Padilla and the other Latin@ theologians we have heard encourage us to learn from the Church catholic and other sources to determine the particular contextual “relevance of biblical revelation to our culture, the relation between the gospel and the problems that the church is facing in our society.”

Some will object that the emphasis on contextualizing the gospel and bible to current, concrete cultures and situations will produce syncretism—a settling for something that is the mixture of pure Christianity and a polluted culture. To this argument, Padilla offers this reply. “When there is no conscious reflection on the form that obedience to the Lordship of Jesus Christ must take in a given situation, conduct can quite easily be determined by the culture rather than by the gospel.” The resonances between Padilla, Isasi-Díaz, and González are striking. 

Una palabra final 

Latin@ theologians have taught me that we all love, follow, and learn about the enculturated Son of God from a particular context. They taught me of the need to be a self-aware interpreter and theologian working to contextualize the gospel and biblical witness to my social location and my ecclesiastical community’s. They taught me I must do this work en comunidad. And they taught me that C. René Padilla is right: “The contextualization of the gospel can only be a gift of grace granted by God to a church that is seeking to place the totality of life under the Lordship of Christ in its historical situation.”

About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. 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.

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The God Who Hears

God is a liberating listener. I first grasped this truth while reading Walter Brueggemann’s classic The Prophetic Imagination. In the opening chapter, Brueggemann unpacks a key contrast in the book of Exodus: Pharaoh does not hear Israel’s cries; God does. Pharaoh ignores Israel’s pleas for liberation from slavery, exploitation, and oppression. He is a cruel ruler who orders Egyptian slave drivers and overseers to worsen Israel’s misery (Ex. 5). God, however, hears Israel’s cries and enters into their sufferings. “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). Likewise, when God calls Moses to liberate Israel, God connects hearing Israel cries to calling Moses. “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). Pharaoh’s refusal to listen reinforces and extends Israel’s oppression. God’s listening initiates Israel’s liberation.

Brueggemann is not the first Christian to spot this contrast. Scholars such as Eddie Glaude, Jr. and J. Laurence Cohen have detailed myriad ways African Americans identified and employed the difference between God’s liberating listening and Pharaoh’s oppressive non-listening before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War. Yet as Delores Williams argues in Sisters in the Wilderness, many of these interpretive traditions have proven male-centered, principally conceiving of God’s liberating actions in terms of Moses. Such interpretive traditions obscure another tradition that highlights the biblical witness about God’s hearing, speaking, and liberating oppressed women. This second tradition begins with Hagar.

A Sister in the Wilderness

Whereas Exodus 1-15 recounts Gods liberating Abraham’s descendants from Egyptian slavery, Genesis 16-21 recounts God’s liberating Hagar, a female Egyptian enslaved in Abraham’s household. It is likely that Hagar became enslaved to Sarah and Abraham when the two were “Abram and Sarai” and living in Egypt rather than the land to which God called them (Gen. 12). During this time, Pharaoh believed the false report that Sarai was Abram’s sister—a lie Abram crafted to protect himself despite Gods promising to protect him (Gen. 12:2-3)—took Sarai into his harem, and lavished Abram with “sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels” (Gen. 12:15-16). Perhaps one of these slaves was Hagar. 

Either way, Genesis 16 recounts that Hagar became enslaved to Sarai and the victim of sexual assault. Desperate to have the divinely promised child, Sarai blames God for her barrenness and persuades Abram to have sex with Hagar so that Sarai “can build a family through her” (vv.1-2). Sarai seizes Hagar and gives her to Abram to be his wife. Abram then forces Hagar to copulate with him, and she conceives a child. Throughout this grievous process, Sarai and Abram treat Hagar as little more than sexualized chattel capable of producing their children. This is unadulterated domination.

Sexually dominated, exploited, and pregnant, Hagar despises Sarai. Sensing Hagar’s righteous rage, Sarai complains about her to Abram and calls upon God to judge Abram if he does not rectify the situation. Despite being his pregnant wife, Abram calls Hagar “your slave” when speaking with Sarai. Rather than protect Hagar or their unborn child, Abram tells Sarai “Do with her whatever you think best” to both. For Abram, Hagar is not bone of his bone or flesh of his flesh (Gen. 2). She is Saria’s problem—Sarai’s slave. Within this evil family structure, Sarai again abuses Hagar, who resists her oppressors by fleeing to the desert.   

In the desert’s bareness, God visits Hagar. Unlike Abram, God addresses Hagar by name. Unlike Sarai and Abram, God invites Hagar to talk, to disclose her sufferings. Unlike Sarai and Abram who dominate and plunder Hagar, God blesses her. Indeed, God’s blessing upon Hagar is similar to the Abrahamic blessing: “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count” (v.10). God then names the child in Hagar’s womb Ishmael—“God hears”—emphasizing, “the LORD has heard of your misery” (v.11). God sees, hears, validates, and enters into Hagar’s sufferings. These are divine acts of liberation.

A Liberation Delayed

Though the LORD hears, sees, and speaks with Hagar, the LORD does not yet fully liberate her. Preceding Hagar’s divine blessing is a divine command: “Go back to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9). Hagar obeys. After bearing Ishmael, Hagar and Ishmael live in servitude to Sarah and Abraham for over fourteen years (see Gen. 16:16; 21:5, respectively). The text never suggests Hagar’s treatment improves. Despite God visiting, blessing, and renaming Sarah and Abraham, we only read of the patriarch’s affection for Ishmael (Gen. 17). Hagar’s abusive marginalization continues.

Sarah eventually conceives and bears a son, Isaac. Sometime later, Abraham celebrates Isaac’s weaning with a party. During the festivities, Sarah sees Ishmael mock Isaac. Outraged, Sarah commands Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac” (Gen. 21:10). For Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael are potential threats whose names—one of which is God-given—she still does not utter; Hagar is the “slave woman” and Ishmael the slave woman’s “dangerous” son; they are not family; son personas desechables. Sarah’s old patterns of dehumanization and domination persist. So do Abraham’s.

After God assures Abraham that Ishmael will become a great nation, the chosen patriarch sends Hagar and Ishmael out from his household. We read nothing about Abraham voicing concern over Hagar’s fate—not even a parting word of sorrow or blessing. Abraham still does not see nor treat Hagar, his long-time wife, as bone of his bone or flesh of his flesh. In his eyes, Hagar is the slave woman, a disposable commodity.

A functionally divorced and single mother without social support, Hagar quickly faces the unspeakable: She may witness Ishmael’s death, for they have run out of water. Desperate and profoundly grieved, Hagar and Ishmael cry. God hears them and intervenes, providing them water and dwelling with them throughout their life-long pilgrimage. This is the path of Hagar’s final liberation from Sarah and Abraham, her cruel, exploitive oppressors. Its parallel with God’s care of liberated, sojourning Israel are striking (see Exodus 15, 17).

Listening Like God   

Delores Williams is right: God “made a way out of no way” for Hagar. But this way was long and painful. And unlike Israel’s bondage in Egypt, the source of Hagar’s oppression was the covenant community, those chosen by God to bless the nations. Abraham and Sarah never utter a word of blessing to Hagar. Instead, they ravage her in word and deed. Together, Exodus and Genesis teach that sometimes nations rage against the people of God, and sometimes the people of God rage against the vulnerable in their midst.

Yet Exodus and Genesis also reveal that God hears the cries of these victims, of oppressed communities and individuals. God enters into their sufferings. And God, the liberator of the oppressed (see Ps. 9:9; 10:18; 68:5-6; 103:6; and 146:3), promotes their freedom.

God’s liberative listening and work culminate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Abraham who is a greater liberator than Moses and defender of enslaved and sexually abused women. In Luke 4, Jesus publicly declares in the backwater, colonized town of Galilee that he came to usher in a new age of justice—the ultimate Jubilee year. As C. René Padilla writes, “the mission of the Messiah [i.e., Jesus of Nazareth] in the power of the Spirit is oriented toward the most vulnerable persons in society: the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed.” Jesus announces that he came to preach good news to the poor, proclaim freedom for prisoners, provide recovery of sight for the blind, and release for the oppressed. As Padilla again observes: “Jesus was convinced that his ministry was to promote radical socioeconomic changes big enough to be regarded as signs of the coming of a new era of justice and peace—‘the year of the Lord’s favor,’ the Jubilee year (Lev 25)—a metaphor of the messianic era initiated in history by Jesus Christ, in other words, the Kingdom of God.” The saver of sinners like Abraham and Sarah is the listening liberator of oppressed communities and individuals like Israel and Hagar.

Jesus calls his disciples to enter into his divine work of liberation. Christians are to listen to and act for and with the least of these—those with whom Jesus identifies (Mt. 25). We are to care for widows and orphans in their distress (Jas 1). Like God, we should meet Hagar in the desert. Like God, we should listen to oppressed peoples and champion their deliverance from evil systems and regimes. Let us hunger and thirst to participate in the divine life through these Spirit-empowered works.

For more about hermano Nathan, visit his website.

About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. 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.

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Taking Off Ropaje Anglosajón

This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

I sensed a call to ministry from very early in my life, although I had no idea what that meant. Hoping to find clarity about this calling, I moved from Costa Rica to the United States to attend Bible college. Among all the options that crossed my mind about what ministry would look like, being a theologian was never one of them, mainly because I had never heard of Latinos doing theology. Until this point in my life, the only theologians I had heard about were American or European, so I subconsciously assumed they were the only people with something worth saying in this area. When during my first semester, a professor told a group of Latino students and me that Latinos in theology were not saying anything white people haven’t said before, I felt like I had no option but to believe him. Then, I came across The Story of Christianity by Justo González in my Christianity and Western Culture class. In a meeting where I expressed my surprise and joy at seeing a Latino name among my reading list for the semester, my (non-Latino) professor was the first person to tell me about the valuable voice of Latinos in theology. He encouraged me to find my voice in this theological legacy and recommended I started this journey reading González’s Mañana.

Mañana was written in English, but this was theology in a language that I was able to understand more than just cognitively; it was theology con sabor Latino. After two years in Bible college, I was not sure I wanted to be a Christian anymore. I could understand English perfectly, yet I was learning about God in a foreign language I could not grasp. The Euro-American theological language offered me dichotomies and neatly organized categories that didn’t resonate with the faith I had inherited - a faith that didn’t fit into the complementarian versus egalitarian or Arminian versus Calvinist debates. Recovering my faith meant going back to my theological hogar to sit with my theological foremothers and forefathers and discover the rich well of theology the Latino community has to offer.

Mañana was the starting point of my journey back to my theological home. To my surprise, the next stop in this pilgrimage was a look into the Catholic roots of Latin American Christianity (an unexpected place to begin as an evangélica). I wrestled through the role of the church in colonization and the pain my Spanish ancestors inflicted upon my indigenous ancestors, all in the name of Christ. In this, I discovered the second church that formed shortly after the arrival of the colonizers. In the 16th century, this second church was led by people like Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas. These Spanish missionaries devoted their lives to the true gospel that protected the dignity of the indigenous peoples, even when this meant being persecuted and rejected by the church of the hierarchy. In the following century, the mestiza Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz spent her life educating herself in theology, philosophy, literature, and more, becoming “the first Latina feminist intellectual and theologian of the Americas.”[1] Sor Juana was forced to write a statement of repentance for her views a few years before her death, but not satisfied with that, those in the church of the hierarchy that felt threatened by the truth she spoke, suppressed her works for three hundred years.[2]

Later, in the 20th century, we encounter the birth of liberation theology in 1968. This movement that has expanded and adapted to contexts outside of Latin America has as its hermeneutical hinge the perspective of the poor. In other words, liberation theology is concerned with providing pastoral and theological answers to the issues of injustice and oppression that riddle this world. Liberation theology is deeply concerned with the historical dimension of salvation, with how Christ’s salvation is reflected in the here and now through material liberation.

The next stop on my journey opened the door to a movement within the iglesia evangélica, the tradition I call home. With similar concerns to those of liberation theology but from an evangélica perspective, the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (FTL) was formed in the 1970s. The theologian Ruth Padilla DeBorst explains that the founders of the FTL “were people who sought to remain faithful to Scriptures and, at the same time, incarnated in the Latin American socio-political reality.”[3] The FTL proposed a vision of misión integral (holistic mission), a practice that “integrates the proclamation of the Kingdom of God and its justice with the demonstration of its presence in history through the action carried out by the people of God.”[4] In this way, misión integral offers a paradigm that transcends the false dichotomy of gospel proclamation versus the pursuit of justice and liberation for all people.

One of the challenges I faced during my first year learning theology in a different language was the repeated message I received from several of my professors who believed true theology is not affected by or even concerned with life experiences. In other words, they proclaimed there was such a thing as universal theology, while every other expression of theology that considered the experiences of people was a contextual theology. Justo González explains that in this framework, “North Atlantic male theology is taken to be basic, normative, universal theology, to which women, other minorities, and people from the younger churches may add their footnotes.” He adds, “White theologians do general theology; black theologians do black theology. Male theologians do general theology; female theologians do theology determined by their sex.”[5] On my journey back to my theological hogar, I found Latino theologians recognize that, in fact, all theology is contextual, and so they seek to faithfully honor their contexts by producing theology that speaks to and from them.

Padilla DeBorst argues that the radical evangélicos of the FTL, “…recognized the need to differentiate between biblical content and the ropaje anglosajón (anglo-saxon clothing) in which North-Atlantic versions of the Gospel were wrapped and exported to the rest of the world.”[6] The journey to recover my faith led me to evaluate the ropaje anglosajón I had been trying to fit into. This process of evaluation was the second of the three conversions Orlando Costas identified in his own spiritual journey. Costas’ first conversion was when he first came to saving faith in Christ, the second when he rediscovered his Latino cultural roots, and the third when he experienced a “conversion to the world” that led him to become an advocate for justice and to work towards a holistic theology that would account for the necessity these three conversions.[7] My third conversion began when I found my calling in the academic practice of theology. I found my hogar in the legacy of Latinos who have been doing theology for over 500 years, and I am humbled and honored to join this “great cloud of witnesses” from de las Casas and Sor Juana to Ruth Padilla and the FTL. I will not pursue a supposedly universal theology that speaks a language I cannot comprehend, but a contextual, specifically Costa Rican theology, a theology con sabor Latino, which is what we, Latinos in theology, have been doing desde hace rato.[8]

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About Wendy Cordero rugama

Wendy is a Costa Rican theology student and WOS Instructional Designer. Her life in the US has brought her to reflect more deeply on issues of race, gender, and Latinidad. Wendy is passionate about studying how theology impacts all areas of life, especially through its intersections with the social sciences. She hopes to become a theology professor and, through that, build bridges between the academy and the church, inviting students to do scholarship embedded in their particular places.

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Footnotes

[1] Chao Romero, Robert. Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. IVP Academic, 2020. 97

[2] Ibid. 97

[3] Padilla DeBorst, Ruth. Integral Mission Formation in Abya Yala (Latin America): A Study of the Centro de Estudios Teologícos Interdisciplinarios (1982-2002) and Radical Evangélicos, 2016. Boston University, PhD dissertation. 29

[4] Padilla, René qtd in Padilla DeBorst. 54

[5] González, Justo L. Mañana: Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Abington Press, 1990. 52

[6] Padilla DeBorst. 45

[7] Escobar, Samuel. “The Legacy of Orlando Costas.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 2001. 50.

[8] For a long time.

Jesus and John Wayne Review

White Masculinity and Theology

It was in graduate school that I first heard the phrase “contextual theologies.” I was intrigued since context - both cultural and historical - is crucial to understanding theology. While reading the assignment, I realized that contextual theologies are essentially theologies with an adjective placed in front: feminist theology, womanist theology, latinx theology, LGBTQ+ theology, liberation theology, black liberation theology, etc. You may notice (as I did) a couple of categories that are missing from these “adjectival” theologies: white theology and masculine theology. The reason is that these are assumed - the “mythical norm” of theologies, as it were.[1]

Since white, masculine voices have been privileged in the field of theology for centuries (or since voices were assumed to be white and male, regardless of the truth of that assumption), any attempt to equally privilege latinx, black, female, LGBTQ+, Asian, Indigenous, or any other perspective alongside those voices is often resisted. “Those'' voices, it is argued, are too influenced by their own subjective viewpoints and focus too much on one or two aspects of theology to be taken as seriously as the other (white and masculine) voices that have dominated for centuries. As if these white, masculine voices are not equally subjective and focused on particular issues.

What Kristin Kobes du Mez accomplished in Jesus and John Wayne is tracing a history of American white, masculine, evangelical theology and to identify the historical, cultural, and political forces that influenced, guided, and focused its theological emphases for decades. In the book, Kobes du Mez draws back the curtain on the assumption that American evangelicalism has developed its theological emphases and ecclesial ethics in some sort of vacuum outside of cultural influence - that it is not just as “adjectival” as any other sort of contextual theology. Kobes du Mez argues that the guiding force behind white evangelicalism for the last 50-some years has been a “militant white masculinity.”[2]

In a fascinating study that follows, Kobes du Mez traces the history of how “militant white masculinity” has always been the guiding force behind American evangelicalism and how it was shaped by and utilized symbols such as John Wayne, William Wallace, and other “rugged, masculine figures,” the Republican party, consumerism, and even the American military as an ideal force for good in the world.[3] Kobes Du Mez takes her readers on a dizzying journey through historical periods of evangelicalism that, despite its comprehensive nature, can only really scratch the surface of white evangelical subculture and all its manifestations. Beginning her history as far back as the 1890s, when the Victorian “model of manly restraint had begun to falter” and the new economy of the early twentieth century demanded a different type of “softer” work than toiling in fields or factories (and as women began to attend college with more regularity), Kobes du Mez records that a call for a new type of more aggressive masculinity emerged.[4]  

Christianity as White, Militant, and Masculine 

Kobes du Mez’s primary argument in Jesus and John Wayne is that this “militant white masculinity” has been the guiding force behind evangelicalism for decades. In so doing, she highlights more effectively than any theology textbook I’ve ever read just how contextual white masculine theology is. Perhaps one of the most devastating moments in her book is when she outlines how white evangelicalism was used to perpetrate segregation through church polity, Christian private education, and through both its constituents’ silence about and active railing against the Civil Rights movement. She does point out that “evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement.”[5] Kobes du Mez uses Billy Graham as a prime example of one such evangelical leader who even personally removed ropes between white people and black people at his crusades and invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York City Crusade.[6] However, she also points out that he distanced himself from backing activists when they began to engage in civil disobedience, and that many white evangelicals responded similarly, finding it “hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history.”[7]

She argues that this lack of willingness among white evangelicals to continue standing by civil rights activists coupled with their silence about the demand for continued segregationist policies among their fellow white evangelicals had devastating effects. One of these was using private Christian schools to continue segregation and revealing that ultimately, white evangelicalism was more concerned with continuing its own political purposes than fighting for its black brothers and sisters. Kobes du Mez states, “Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, many southern evangelicals and fundamentalists who persisted in their unreconstructed views of race would find common cause with more ‘tolerant’ evangelicals on issues like social welfare policy and ‘law and order’ politics that would carry clear racial undertones.”[8]

Millennials from white evangelical spaces will recognize that similar patterns emerged in the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Refusal to support that statement - “Black Lives Matter” - was defended by many white evangelicals because they claimed that the movement had ties to a more liberal political agenda and that the civil rights activists within the movement were anti-police. This movement drew fault lines across white evangelicalism that, for some, resulted in splitting away from the evangelical church due to its refusal to support what they viewed as a basic civil rights issue. These divisions only became more pronounced when Donald Trump was elected as the Republican party’s candidate for the 2016 election. What was not widely recognized, however, was that these patterns had been present in white evangelicalism from its very start. The widespread reception of Jesus and John Wayne by those of us who grew up (or are still part of) white evangelicalism has been a resounding agreement that the book puts its finger on exactly what felt off as we grew up, particularly surrounding issues of race, “family values” voting, and the strong connection to the U.S. military (which is brilliantly outlined in Chapter 12, entitled, “Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo”).[9] 

Where are the Women?  

For me, one of the most eye-opening chapters of Kobes du Mez’s book was Chapter 11, provocatively entitled, “Holy Balls.” While some readers may be drawn to other chapters, this chapter described the period of my life when my faith was becoming my own. I found my heart feeling twisted as I realized how whole-heartedly I had swallowed certain parts of toxic masculinity because I truly believed Scripture demanded that I did, and because much of the Christian culture around me absolutely encouraged me to do so. Kobes du Mez begins the chapter with some less common examples of militant masculinity, such as churches hosting MMA viewing parties and Christian mixed-martial arts groups, but speaks to the heart of what was happening at the time by saying, “As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.”[10]

A poignant example of this collapsing of the margins into the mainstream is the support New Calvinism gave to two “fringe” voices in the early 2000’s: Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson. Kobes du Mez writes more in-depth about these two men and the way that they were given platforms and endorsements by the leaders of New Calvinism despite many of them expressing discomfort with their crass talk, sometimes violent focus, and even, in one case, denial that American slaves had been treated with brutality.[11] This, to me, was the gut-punch of the chapter. These two men were endorsed by other men who were at the heart of founding various church-planting networks and conferences that were wildly popular among me and my peers during college specifically, and their endorsements meant a great deal. While these organizations and coalitions claimed to hold the gospel message as the most important thing, Kobes du Mez points out that the unifying factor among many of these very doctrine-conscious men was not solely the simple gospel message, but “gender and authority.”[12]

“It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.””

These two examples most brutally highlight her point about gender and authority trumping simple gospel messaging within white evangelical alliances, but so does the lack of female leadership in many churches that ascribe to this New Calvinism. Sure, there are shining exceptions, but the question I was most often asked when I stepped into a new church in the early aughts is most illustrative - “Why do you want to study theology?” which was code for “Do you want to be a pastor?” It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.

One area of critique that I have for Jesus and John Wayne is the book’s claim to analyze how white evangelicals got to where they are today, while women are conspicuously absent from many of the chapters as perpetrators of this “militant white masculinity” that Kobes Du Mez describes. It was not simply men advocating for patriarchal norms in churches, nor was it only men leading the “family values” Christian Right, but women were crucial in the formation of and enforcement of this “militant white masculinity,” and one place the book falls short is in fully demonstrating that. A notable exception is Chapter Two (entitled “God’s Gift to Man”), in which Kobes Du Mez highlights women such as Marabel Morgan and her The Total Woman course, Anita Bryant, Elisabeth Elliot, and Phyllis Schlafly. Kobes du Mez continually documents Schlafly’s influence among white evangelicals (particularly politically) throughout the book, which is utterly engrossing for anyone (like me) who had not known much about this woman before. However, Schlafly appears to be the sole woman whose contribution to “militant white masculinity” is traced throughout the entire book. While I think it is important to include white women’s culpability in the propagation of “militant white masculinity,” Kobes du Mez has recently announced that she will be publishing a new book about evangelical women called Live, Laugh, Love, and I believe she intends to address much of what she left out in Jesus and John Wayne within that book. I, for one, look forward to reading it. 

Christianity, Consumerism, and a Dangerous “Culture-Making”

One poignant observation Kobes du Mez makes in Jesus and John Wayne is the way that white evangelicals harnessed consumerism to propagate their cultural message.[13] By doing so, they created their own culture and provided a weapons store for the culture war that consumed much of their recent history. This culture was created through celebrity culture (particularly as pertained to pastors, radio stars, and motivational speakers), radio ministry, Christian television shows, the Christian music industry, Christian films, the Christian book publishing business, and Christian bookstores.

Andy Crouch has written much about culture and culture making. In For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, he describes how Genesis informs our understanding of culture making by demonstrating how God was the first culture maker and cultivator - planting a garden, which Crouch calls “nature plus culture.”[14] He describes the call of those in the Church to create good and beautiful art and other such cultural contributions. Crouch speaks of culture making as a creative, positive endeavor that the Church ought to participate in joyfully, creating art in and for the Church as well as for the world. Through the creation story, he highlights that the problem with culture making occurs when Adam and Eve no longer wait on and partner with God, but “...take and eat, and set in motion the process by which everything that God had originally given as a gift, a sign of relationship and dependence, will be twisted into a right, something grasped from a world presumed to be threatened and threatening, something that insulates us from needing relationship or dependence.”[15]

“Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.”

In this description of the Fall, Crouch illustrates precisely what Kobes du Mez identifies as problematic with white evangelicalism’s attempt at culture making. White evangelicals took the gift of cultural creation given by God and twisted it into a utilitarian tool used to fight a culture war - usually shouting about rights rather than gifts (whether second amendment rights, rights to gather around a flagpole at a school and pray, rights to not have to pay taxes to support people “on welfare,”, rights to defend “traditional family and cultural values,” etc.). By taking that gift of cultural creation and fashioning it into a weapon, white evangelicalism lost sight of the gift of relationship and dependence on other Christians. The reverberations of their culture war drowned out the voices of brothers and sisters who had something to contribute to the conversation about culture, and their warring cost them the opportunity to participate in culture-making alongside them.

This was not the only negative effect; when white evangelicals invited siblings of color into their spaces, they acted as gatekeepers to the culture making of that space. While siblings of color were invited to contribute to the worship teams, lead the youth groups, and act as outreach coordinators, rarely were they given roles of actual leadership to set the priorities of churches and organizations. If they stepped outside of white evangelicalism’s priorities for culture making, they were instructed to “get in line” or get out. Many chose the latter after years of being silenced and abandoned by those in leadership. Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

So, What Now?

Jesus and John Wayne provided for me the context of what was happening backstage during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The reason the book resonates so strongly with so many (particularly white) evangelicals is that it gives answers to questions we never knew how to ask. It also articulates what our young minds may not have yet had the maturity to say about the culture wars we lived through, and in many cases, were even used as agents in.

Kobes du Mez successfully articulated a succinct, utterly readable account of the last 50-some years of white American evangelicalism, and whether you agree with her thesis or not, the book’s already astounding cultural impact will force you to grapple with it in your churches, schools, and institutions. And this is a very good thing, because so many of the historical and recent events that she brings to light have needed to be wrestled with for a very long time in a way that accounts for the historical context surrounding them and without making apologies for being bold enough to articulate what was wrong about those events.

Kobes du Mez’s historical account of white evangelicalism and how we got to where we are succeeds in highlighting a theological point: all theologies are contextual theologies. Even (and especially) white masculine evangelical theology, though the way it is often taught in many university, seminary, and Sunday school classrooms over the years may argue otherwise. Just as feminist, black liberation, womanist, latinx, or any other “contextual” theology has a cultural and historical context, so does white theology and masculine theology. More than any theology textbook I’ve read, Kobes du Mez demonstrates the danger of prioritizing one viewpoint as normative, simply by laying out the history.

So, is there hope for white evangelicalism? Kobes du Mez seems to think so, ending her book by saying, “What was once done might be undone.”[16] It all depends on us. If we as white evangelicals and former white evangelicals react to her description and critique of how we got here with defensiveness and a plugging of our ears, we are only doing more of the same. However, if we begin to consider Crouch’s culture making and what Makoto Fujimara has called culture care, perhaps we can find a way forward. Any way forward must involve focusing on relationship and dependence once more - not just including diverse voices at our tables in minor roles, but in submitting to those voices humbly (even if they no longer trust our tables and have built their own). It must also involve putting in the long hard work to earn back trust, and eventually, culture-making together again, joyfully participating in creation with one another and with the God we serve together.

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About Luci Frerichs Parrish

Luci Frerichs Parrish is a Midwestern native living in the South. She lived on the South Side of Chicago for seven years, working in various non-profit and church ministries. She has an M.A. in Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School with an emphasis in Systematic Theology. Her current areas of study include systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and ecclesiology. She is a coffee enthusiast, independent bookstore fanatic, and Pittsburgh Penguins fan. She is passionate about doing theology to serve the local and global church.

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Footnotes

[1] Audre Lorde defines the “mythical norm” as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

[2] Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[3] See Ted Cruz’s now-infamous quotation of William Wallace at CPAC 2021 for a relevant current example of this exact point. See also Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 37.

[6] Ibid., 37-38.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39.

[9] Ibid, 205.

[10] Ibid, 187-188.

[11] Ibid, 202.

[12] Ibid, 204.

[13] Though white evangelicals are certainly not the only American Protestants to do so!

[14] Andy Crouch, “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience?” in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, ed. W. David Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 32.

[15] Ibid, 34.

[16] Kobes du Mez, 304.

Cuida tu testimonio: A public theology of repentance

When I was a child, my mother would always say to me, cuida tu testimonio (watch, or take care of, your testimony). Whether she was dropping me off at school or going to a friend’s house, this dicho served as a reminder to always be on my best behavior. As the years have passed, this saying has become a guiding principle in my life, and my understanding of it has grown more profound. While as a child it only meant to not do anything that would embarrass myself or my parents, today it represents living in a manner that is worthy of my God. Mi testimonio is my Christian witness. It is the evidence of the supernatural work of Jesus in my life and my most powerful evangelistic tool for a suffering world in need of a Savior.  Mi testimonio is an expression of the image of God in me. It is my attempt to live as God’s royal representative on this side of eternity. 

I have also come to believe that while this principle applies to individuals, it also applies to collectives such as businesses, organizations, and even religious institutions. When an individual or institution fails to abide by the principle cuida tu testimonio, the integrity of their testimony is compromised, and often discredited. I believe this is the crisis of the evangelical church that has resulted in the loss of the credibility of the Church’s prophetic witness in the public square today. Ed Stetzer observes that, “tempted by power and trapped within a culture war theology, too many evangelicals tied their fate to a man who embodied neither their faith nor their vision of political character. As a result, we are finally witnessing an evangelical reckoning.”[1]

My mother also used to say, dime con quién andas y te dire quién eres (tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are). The apostle Paul similarly warned the Church at Corinth, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’”[2] In the evangelical church’s desperate attempt to gain power, influence, and control through the veins of American democracy, it has lost the hearts of its people and in turn, compromised its public witness. And while not all evangelicals have engaged in these practices, we collectively bear the name and consequences of those who have. How then can the evangelical church regain its credibility so that it can once again be a transformative agent for the American conscience and the public square? I believe the answer lies in a public theology of repentance. 

The reality of the saying, cuida tu testimonio, is that while we seek to live in a manner worthy of God, there are times that we fall short of Gods calling on our life. In the same way, just as individuals sin from time to time, so also do religious institutions, as they are comprised of individuals. To this, mi iglesia pentecostal (my Pentecostal church) taught me that the Church’s altars are always open for anyone and everyone who is willing to repent for their sins, and that Jesus is ready to meet them in that sacred place to renew and restore them once again. It is in our brokenness and not our perfection that the confidence of nuestro testimonio lies. 

For the individual, the decision to repent from one’s sin is a central element of the gospel message; it is necessary to transform the human heart. For the collective, it serves to jumpstart the process of systemic and institutional change, which can be theologically understood as a form of “social sanctification.” The evangelical church’s adoption of a public theology of repentance has the potential to result in the restoration of the integrity of its public witness by living consistently with the very message it proclaims: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”[3]  

I imagine some Christians might have reservations about the evangelical church taking a position of humility by acknowledging its sins as counterproductive to the Church’s witness to the world. After all, the Church is meant to reflect the Kingdom of God as holy and set apart from the world. Therefore, to admit any type of fault would tarnish its character. However, I believe there is no act more Christian then that of repentance, whether individual or communal. In fact, the majority of the Bible is about a loving God who restlessly calls a rebellious people to repent from their sinful ways. Furthermore, if the Church does not model the central message of the Kingdom of God to this world, how then will the world ever learn what it means to repent from one’s sins and believe in Jesus Christ? 

Therefore, the most Christian response the evangelical church can practice to cuidar su testimonio and the credibility of the gospel message it proclaims is to repent. It must repent for placing its hope in false messiahs and partisan politics, for neglecting and suppressing the cries of black, brown, and minoritized communities, and for its companionship with white supremacy and its supporting leader(s) as exemplified at the Capitol insurrection. In embracing a public theology of repentance, the evangelical church has the opportunity to demonstrate to the world what it means to turn from sin, and even teach the world how to acknowledge and address its own historical evils through Christ’s message: “repent and believe.” In doing so, the evangelical church creates room for the Spirit to renew the credibility of the Christian message, restore the testimonio of the evangelical church, and enable the gospel message to produce spiritual transformation and social change. 

The people of Israel demonstrated this firsthand, as they knew that their public repentance would lead to the spiritual and social transformation of their community. It was only the righteous kings of Israel who were brave enough to acknowledge and properly respond to Israel’s sinful condition by removing the high places, tearing down the idols, cleansing the temple, and reestablishing their covenant relationship with God. This in turn led to the restoration of their community and the blessing of their nation. Repentance attained through the purging of evil, and belief proclaimed through the renewal of covenant relationship, the message of Christ to “repent and believe” is a timeless characteristic of what it means to be a Christian community. Should the evangelical church receive the call to “humble themselves, pray and seek God’s face, and turn from their wicked ways,”[4] perhaps then, the world will believe the gospel message they proclaim as good news indeed.

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About Daniel Montañez

Daniel Montañez was born in Visalia, CA to a Mexican mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is a Ph.D. student at Boston University in the area of Theology, Ethics, and Philosophy, and an adjunct instructor for the Latino and Global Ministries Program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the founder and director of Mygration Christian Conference, a non-profit organization that seeks to explore God’s heart through the stories of migration in the Bible. He is also the national director for the Church of God Migration Crisis Initiative, a ministry that seeks to provide church leaders with the biblical, pastoral, and ministerial preparation to positively and proactively respond to the crisis facing our immigrant communities in the United States. Daniel is dedicated to serving his Latino/a community at the intersection of the Church, the academy, and the public square.

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Footnotes

[1] Stetzer, Ed. “Evangelicals Face a Reckoning: Donald Trump and the Future of Our Faith.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, January 11, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/01/10/after-donald-trump-evangelical-christians-face-reckoning-column/6601393002/?fbclid=IwAR2rJ3hrI0ld4HHRUCok788ZvoPD6B7k3lkbU3UylAVed17ZAT9NUYNchJ8. 

[2] 1 Cor 15:33 (NIV)

[3] Mark 1:15 (NIV)

[4] 2 Chr 7:14 (NIV; paraphrased)

What We Forget

Advent is the season encompassing the four Sundays which precede Christmas. Traditionally for Christians these weeks mark the beginning of our year and are defined by themes of remembering and waiting. While these weeks are latent with meaning for all Christians, I want to suggest that, for white Christians who are growing to care deeply about racial justice and reconciliation, Advent can provide an especially helpful starting point for our discipleship.

Remembering and waiting. We remember the lineage of faith to which we belong, including the generations of God’s people who anticipated the coming of the Messiah. We hear the longing in Isaiah 40:10-11, “See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” And we wait as a people who expect our Savior’s return. We understand that life as we know it in a world groaning under sin will not last forever. A day will come when the will of God will be done on earth as in heaven.

What is it about these Advent themes that can help white Christians grow in our commitment to racial justice and reconciliation? Before exploring this question, we ought to acknowledge why so many of us need to mature in these areas. For as long as there have been white churches and Christians in this country, there has been a deficit in our discipleship. Time and again, we chose racial exclusion over embodied solidarity with the rest of Christ’s body. The segregation in our churches today is not the benign result of personal or cultural preference; its roots run deep through the soil of racism and racial supremacy.

Of course, this isn’t how most of us think about ourselves or our churches. But over the years, many Christians of color have warned us about our captivity to segregation and complicity with racial injustice. For example, in 1898 Rev. Francis Grimke, the African American pastor of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., pointed to the silence of most white Christians in response to the lynchings that ran rampant throughout the country. In his sermon he asserted, “Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister… This is the charge which I make against the Anglo American pulpit today; its silence has been interpreted as an approval of these horrible outrages.”

Why has it been so hard for white Christians to confess our conformity to this wicked status quo? In large part, it has to do with what it meant to become racially white. When my ancestors arrived in this country, they did not think of themselves in racial categories. They were immigrants from Sweden and Germany and they brought with them the particularities of their histories, culture, language, etc. But upon landing on these shores, they faced a new racialized reality in which those who were white had the greatest access to the American Dream. On the other end of that hierarchy were African American and indigenous people, those most likely to experience racial oppression.

In order to assimilate, my ancestors had to discard their cultural characteristics and pick up the more recent social construct of race. They had to become white. This exchange away from cultural particularity to racial homogeneity carried innumerable consequences. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, “Each new immigrant had to figure out how and where to position themselves in the hierarchy of their adopted new land. Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority.” Because the country’s racial hierarchy was built on the plunder and exploitation of Black and Native people, newly arrived immigrants internalized these forms of racism as a necessary feature of the path toward the country’s promises. But there were other implications as well which bring us back to Advent.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

When my ancestors became white, they were engaging in an act of forgetfulness. They set aside some of the important attributes which had defined previous generations in order to access power and privilege. This was the price of admision required by the racial hierarchy and it continues to exact its toll today.

We see this legacy of forgetfulness in how many white people struggle to talk about race and racism. When I facilitate racial reconciliation workshops, it is always the white participants who stumble when asked to describe their racial identity. The difficulties only increase when we begin considering the impact of the racial hierarchy. Rather than coming to these conversations with curiosity and humility, white Christians have often reverted to defensiveness, deflection, and denial: I never owned slaves! I have Black friends! I don’t have a racist bone in my body! We’re all Christians so we shouldn’t focus on our differences!

The forgetfulness of our race engenders a false sense of innocence. Because we have not remembered the cost - to ourselves and to our neighbors of color – of becoming white, we interpret our society with the kind of boot-strapping possibility only available to the privileged. If we think about racial segregation and oppression at all, it’s with a vague evaluation of someone else’s choice. We certainly don’t assume responsibility in this story; we are but innocent bystanders.

Only we’re not. And as Christians we ought to be quick to confess not our innocence but our susceptibility to sins of all kinds, including pernicious racial ones. As Isaiah admits in another common Advent passage, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” (Isa. 64:6) Why, for a people whose hope is so rooted in the grace of God which meets us as we confess our sins, is it so painful to acknowledge that we have, in the Apostle Paul’s language, conformed to the pattern of the world? We have forgotten.

Advent, with its invitation to remember, is the antidote that many of us need. As we approach our Savior’s birth, we are reminded of the danger posed to our faith by forgetfulness. We hear the stories of those like Simeon and Anna who recognized God’s Messiah precisely because they remembered. We hear the prophets pleading with God’s people to remember who they were - a sinful people in need of God’s comprehensive salvation.

If we listen closely enough, we’ll also hear the summons to remember our own troubled stories and histories. Advent beckons us to cast off our innocence and self-righteousness, to be done with the defensiveness, deflection, and denial which keep us from unity and solidarity with our sisters and brothers of color.

Remembering is not easy; there are reasons we’d rather forget. But as with every generation who has preceded us, when we choose to remember our histories – the losses, the complicities, the sins – we will also encounter the God has not never forgotten his people, who remembers his covenant with us. And with this memory newly refreshed, we can resolutely turn to the work of justice and reconciliation, freed of the forgetfulness and false innocence which has long kept us from our family in Christ.

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About David W. Swanson

David is the founding pastor of New Community Covenant Church, a multiracial congregation on the South Side of Chicago. He also serves as the CEO of New Community Outreach, a non-profit organization working to reduce causes of trauma and raise opportunities for equity.

David’s book, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Discipleship, is available now. Read more from David at his website, dwswanson.com.

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.

A Word on Trump-Supporting Latinos

It should already be common knowledge. It should not need repeating. Still, the obvious truth of the “Latino community” was, for lack of a better word, discovered by many on election night. With surprise and disbelief, political analysts spent the days after the election discussing a simple truth: Latin@s are not a monolith. We already know this. It was not news to us, but what the election did reveal was the deep divisions disintegrating the Latin@ community. Some news outlets were quick to simplify this division, pointing to generational distinctions to explain who voted for Trump or Biden. Others proposed it was a difference of regionality. A few thought it could be reduced to nation-of-origin. In all cases, these simplifications are reductions of reality that prove more about the analyzing world than they do about nuestra gente.

I am not going to explain why an increased number of Latin@s voted for Trump. Political scientists and sociologists will do enough of that in their writing. My concern is for those Latin@s who are feeling betrayed by these voters. Among our supporters and friends, fellow activists, and nonprofit workers, many are angry. In the moment, many of my colleagues were tempted to fury, and some took to social media to lacerate their familia with “prophetic speech.” I understand this frustration well. For a decade now, my work in Christian Higher Ed has been in entrenched, white, evangelical spaces. Many of the Latin@s I meet along the way are actively working against the pursuit of justice, and at times, I retaliate too. There is, however, a person the Spirit keeps bringing to my attention since the election. His story is worthy of reflection because it is a story of empire, betrayal, and Christ’s response to both.

Passing through Jericho

Of the four gospel writers, Luke stressed the upside-down Kingdom of God and revealed Jesus as the liberator. Jesus came to “proclaim the Good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Lk. 4:17). Jesus subverts the religious and political establishments of Israel and Rome. Like Moses, He is a deliverer. On His way to Jerusalem to make His ultimate sacrifice, Jesus passes through a borderland city named Jericho. At the time, this border city served as a customs station, an outpost of the Roman empire. The shock of Jesus’ passage through Jericho was who Jesus visited while there.

Luke tells us that Jesus stopped for one person in Jericho, Zacchaeus. He was a rich man, the chief tax collector, a publican. Zacchaeus was responsible for the extortion of his own people. Therefore, he was hated and despised by most Israelites and barred from religious practice because of his betrayal. In fact, Jesus’ words at the end of the story suggest that the Jews considered Zacchaeus’ sin so severe, he was no longer one of them (19:9); They disowned him. Yet despite his service to Rome and his role in oppressing the Jews, Jesus called Zacchaeus down from the tree to dine with him in his home. The scandal of Jesus’ choice caused the crowds to grumble. How could Jesus welcome this man? Worst, why would Jesus choose to dine in his home?

¿Y que con el Publicano?

Many of my ministry friends think of Trump-supporting Latin@s as modern-day tax collectors. Their view is that Latin@s in power have reached their position by following the path of Zacchaeus. By aligning themselves with the empire, they are elevated from among their own, only to support a structure that oppresses their people. And indeed, some have done that. But the story of Zacchaeus is instructive for our moment. Jesus’ words to the Jewish crowd bear repeating to the angry Latin@: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (19:10). What transformed Zacchaeus was not judgment – of which he got plenty from fellow Jews – but kindness. Jesus did not resist Zacchaeus, He welcomed him. His welcome changed this man. The minute Zacchaeus’ feet hit the ground, he reversed his injustices, paying back what he stole beyond what the Law required.

This Thanksgiving we have an opportunity to bear witness to the gospel as we (virtually) dine with Trump-supporting family. Our welcome and embrace, despite their betrayal, is an echo of Jesus’ love for Zacchaeus and His love for us. As we pray prayers of thanksgiving, pray as non-innocent tax collectors, not self-righteous Pharisees (Lk. 18:9-14). Remember what Paul asked self-righteous Jews later in Rome: “do you presume on the riches of [God’s] kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Rom. 2:4). It’s kindness, not judgment, that transforms the tax collector.

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ABOUT EMANUEL PADILLA

Emanuel Padilla is President of World Outspoken, a ministry dedicated to preparing the mestizo church for cultural change through training, content, and partnership development. He is also an instructor of Bible and Theology at Moody Bible Institute. Emanuel is committed to drawing the insights of the Latina/o church for the blessing of the wider church body. He consults with churches on issues of diversity, organizational culture, and community engagement.

The Future of Evangelicalism is Mestizo

As an Indian adoptee raised in Northeast Wisconsin, I grew up in a world of white faces. I was caught in between two communities, benefiting from the privileges of a white family, yet often sitting alone as the only person of color in a crowded room. Surrounded by white pastors, educators, and friends, my perception and imagination of the world were inherently shaped by a white lens. By “white,” I don’t mean to speak only to ethnicity, but imagination. Whiteness, in this way, is a theological and sociological construction in which people of all ethnicities and cultures may imagine the world. In this system, goodness, success, and power, are seen in approximation to how close one may come to mirroring this white identity. 

An honest analysis of American history reveals how whiteness is deeply embedded in evangelical practice. Since the first colonists arrived on the eastern shores, the evangelical church has borne witness to a nation governed by this white imagination, yet has intentionally remained silent and complicit. Through national genocide of First Nations people, the transatlantic slave trade, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and even in our current moment, this expression of evangelicalism has little to say about seeking justice and reparations for those who continue to be marginalized and oppressed in our nation. Instead, white evangelicals have embraced a faith centered around Christian nationalism. Rather than reckoning with our history, many have continued to believe the lie that America is a “beacon of light,” “a city on a hill” that will carry the Gospel into our modern world. 

As this history becomes more widely recognized, many scholars have argued it is necessary that we “follow Jesus out of evangelicalism” and into a “new Christianity.” This, of course, is one of many answers to the question frequently asked in recent years: is evangelicalism worth redeeming? 

In short, I do believe that the evangelical tradition is worth redeeming from its cultural heritage; and I believe evangelicals are already equipped with the theological tools to acknowledge and repent of our historical patterns of sin, both individual and systemic.

““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.””

— Virgilio Elizondo

However, any future for American evangelicalism requires more than a simple denouncing of whiteness. In return, it must reconstruct something new. If evangelicalism seeks to be redeemed from a history of racism and nationalism, we must ask what it is being redeemed towards? In other words, to exclusively deconstruct evangelical practice is to eliminate evangelicalism as a tradition and move on to a new Christianity. To reconstruct, on the other hand, is to critique our tradition without abandoning it. It is to both claim and reckon with our history so we may be released into new possibilities — a new reality. As Brian Bantum summarizes, “This is important because in rightly seeing the de-formation, we can also see the lines of re-formation. We can see the textures of humanity and its possibilities in Christ’s person and work.”

This reality, I am convinced, is a mestizo evangelicalism: a tradition that is centered around a theology of belonging and community. This multi-ethnic vision is not antithetical to the theological commitments of evangelicalism, but rather it is a greater living-out of our core beliefs: the truthfulness of Scripture, the central, atoning work of Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the importance of evangelism. This, I believe, can be our evangelical witness for centuries to come: that we may be known as a faith that crosses racial and ethnic lines because of our shared unity in Jesus Christ. We may be known as a faith that disrupts dehumanizing racial binaries by embracing a Galilean Christ. 

In this reconstructing project we must remember, as Virgilio Elizondo wrote decades ago, this mestizo reality does not happen overnight. “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.”

By God’s grace, this culture-shaping work was already begun by the saints who have gone before us. While white evangelicalism has centered around political dominance and cultural influence, the overlooked mestizaje of evangelicals in minority communities has been one of diligently sowing gospel seeds in the margins of society. This is the silent work of evangelicals serving in underprivileged neighborhoods, homeless shelters, prison ministries, and food pantries. It is the thousands of evangelical ministers who took up Martin Luther King’s call to march in Selma. It is the work of evangelicals who have faithfully sought to emulate the leadership and activism of those who have gone before us. It is evangelical pastors willing to condemn white supremacy and anti-blackness from the pulpit. It is the work not broadcasted on the news or written in headlines. It is the long-suffering work, the costly grace, of Christian activism.

In practice, this future looks like shared power and equity within vibrant, multi-ethnic communities.  As Dr. Eric Baretto notes, this future “puncture[s] the myth of scholarly objectivity and demonstrate[s] the persuasiveness and power of contextual theologies and readings.” In other words, hearing the Gospel preached and theology taught from a diversity of ethnic communities has the power to awaken evangelicals to a world of Christianity that extends far beyond their church buildings. This communal reading of Holy Scripture from beyond the reaches of the white imagination invites American evangelicals into the global practice of our tradition.

This vision looks like Black theologians tracing the themes of God’s liberative action alongside Latino/a theologians juxtaposing the experience of Jesus, a Galilean Jew, with “Mexican Americans living on the geographical and cultural margins of the borderlands.” It looks like reading Scripture corporately, not only in English but in Spanish, Hindi, German, Arabic, Latvian, and Greek. It is bringing our bodies, our full, ethnic self, and orienting ourselves toward one another in hope and faith. 

This is the work of moving from blindness to sight; from darkness to the full spectrum of color. It is in this moment that the world takes on a new form, words take on new meanings, and one’s perception of the world is seen in proximity to the greatness of the world around them.  

In America today, the events of 2020 have opened the eyes of many evangelicals. The dirty mud of whiteness has been wiped from their eyes and they are moving from blindness to sight. White evangelicals are listening to a theology that speaks to the terror Black Americans, Asians, and Latin@s continue to face in our nation. They are entering into something greater, a global tradition of evangelicalism that has stood for centuries. They are reimagining Christianity by reading God’s inspired word alongside their neighbors. Just a taste of this community leaves many craving more.

I have hope for my tradition because this work is faithfully being done. Across our nations, evangelicals at the grassroots are speaking up in their churches, their communities, and their institutions. As we protest, raise our voices with charity and grace, and love our neighbors as ourselves, may the tide of evangelicalism slowly turn away from whiteness and into the mestizo, Christ-centered tradition we have been called to. 

Amar D. Peterman is a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing his studies on American religious history. He is a featured writer at Ideos and his work is published in Sojourners, The Christian Century, Faithfully Magazine, Fathom, and more. Amar holds a B.A. in Theology from Moody Bible Institute. You can follow his work on his website or on Twitter: @amarpeterman

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Reconstruct

“As a Latino growing up as the son of an undocumented pastor in the Midwest, my experience was much different from those who surrounded me. I wanted to believe in what my family and church taught me as truth but I slowly drifted away from my beliefs as a result of the testimony I received from the Anglo church and their members. Even to this day those same Protestants refer to us as ‘wetbacks, beaners, and spics.’ I find myself conflicted with my identity.”

I received this note from a student last year and it broke my heart. I, and so many others, can identify with this identity conflict in the current historic moment where racism and white nationalism have been so blatantly wedded to the church in the United States. It’s a painful place to be, and this conflict of identity has launched millions of us on a journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction.  In my observation, social media and the metaphorical bookshelves are filled with ideas—good and bad—about how to deconstruct. Almost nothing exists, however, to help us reconstruct in a healthy way.  If I may be so bold, I’d like to propose five thoughts which have helped me in my journey of Christian reconstruction over the past two decades.  

Lament

My wife Erica poignantly defines lament as “honesty in suffering.” In the path towards healthy reconstruction, the first step is to be completely honest with God. Talk with God and with friends. Let it all out. Journal. Scream if you have to. God can handle it. Don’t hold anything back. Your reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect, and your theology doesn’t have to be all figured out. Jesus understands. The Psalms are a great model, and in fact 40% of the Psalms are reflections of lament. Psalm 22 is probably the most famous: 

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest. 
Psalm 22: 1-2 ”

Healthy Models

As the writer of Ecclesiastes declared, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). In this difficult moment, it’s easy to feel alone and to think that we are struggling by ourselves. If we dig a little deeper, however, we’ll find that we’re not alone because the Brown Church has been deconstructing and reconstructing faith in the face of racial injustice for five hundred years. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bartolomé De Las Casas, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Justo Gonzalez, Orlando Costas, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Alexia Salvatierra, René Padilla, and Samuel Escobar are just a few examples of those who have walked this journey before us, and whose lives and writings we can study to find healthy models of reconstruction. 

The Bible vs. “la ropa anglo-sajon”

As part of the deconstruction process, the Brown Church has always had to distinguish between what the Bible actually says and racist colonial interpretations.  Power will always try to justify itself through theology and civil religion. Every single time throughout the centuries, Brown theologians have risen up to say:  “No. The Bible does not teach that. You’re just trying to justify your greed.  You are in violation of 2,000 verses of Scripture which speak about God’s heart of love and compassion towards immigrants, the poor, and all who are marginalized.” 

“Radical evangélicos” René Padilla and Samuel Escobar put it this way: We need to learn to tell the difference between what the Bible actually teaches and the “ropa anglo-sajon,” or Anglo-Saxon cultural clothing of the gospel which has been exported to Latin America and the U.S. Latino church.[1]  And how do we know the difference? That’s why we need to know the Bible better than anyone.  

As a professor of ethnic studies at UCLA for fifteen years and a community organizer, I want to offer a warning from the other side as well. There are great things to learn from ethnic studies and secular activism, but we need biblical discernment to sift the helpful from what could be ultimately damaging.  To simply replace “la ropa anglo-sajon” with secular activist principles leads us down another path which is not the kingdom, or “kin-dom” of God. 

Reconstructing Jesús of Galilee and a Holistic Gospel 

As part of its healing process, the Brown Church has also had to decolonize its Christology and reconstruct a full-bodied, holistic gospel. As Latino theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo and Orlando Costas have taught us, Jesus was a “Galilean.” Galilee was far from the center of religious, political, and economic power in Jerusalem. Galileans like Jesus were poor, bilingual, and spoke with an accent. They were oppressed by Roman colonizers, as well as by the elites of their own people.  They were shunned as cultural “mixed breeds” or “mestizos,” and their cultural and religious purity was often called into question. Galilee was the “hood” or “barrio” of Jesus’ day, and our Lord was a Galilean. To put it another way, Jesus was “Brown.” 

As a marginalized Galilean himself, Jesus understands the suffering of our Latina/o community in this present moment. And the “good news” is that he came as Lord and Savior to make us and the whole world new. Nothing and no one is left out. Jesus transforms us as individuals to be more and more like him, and then he sends us out as agents of transformation of all the brokenness and injustice of our world. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar call this misión integral: “the mission of the whole church to the whole of humanity in all its forms, personal, communal, social, economic, ecological, and political.”[2] 

Spiritual Practices 

In my experience, personal transformation in Christ and healing of colonial wounds[3], come through specific practices. For me, the big ones have been Scripture reading, therapy, spiritual direction, and intergenerational community. 

It may sound simple and old school, but for me, reading through the Bible once a year is the central spiritual practice which sustains me. I’m on my 19th time, and the more I read, the more I find healing and hope. And also, the more I find that I have so much to learn. As Dr. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier tells us, it is within the Bible where we find hope and wisdom for the daily realities and hardships of life, and in the Scriptures where we encounter the living God who brings liberation.[4] 

Therapy and counseling have also been critical for me. I bear the scars and open wounds of machismo deep within my soul, and have gone to counseling for two decades in order to better understand myself and break free from destructive emotional patterns. 

Spiritual direction is another key practice which has helped me to reconstruct my faith and heal from racism in the church.  According to David Hoover: “The task of the Spiritual Director is to honor the questions that have no right to go away.” As Erica has shown me, “God is always present, loving and working in our lives, but sometimes it’s difficult to listen by ourselves. A spiritual director, or companion, helps us to notice and connect with the Real Director, who is God.” 

Finally, it is common in activist circles today to hear it said that we should seek the wisdom of the ancestors. I could not agree more. And as Latina/o Christians, we have so much to learn from the 500-year justice tradition of the Brown Church. This tradition of our ancestors represents a treasure trove of God-given community cultural wealth which is invaluable for our reconstruction process. But this community cultural wealth is not found just in books. By God’s design it is also deposited in the intergenerational community of the local and global church: 

“When we refer to the Church, we should define the word a little. We mean the whole Church, the Church as an ecumenical body spread around the world, and not just its particular form in a parish in a local community…That Church is one form of the Presence of God on earth, and so naturally it is powerful. It is a powerful moral and spiritual force which cannot be ignored by any movement.” César Chávez. [5]

ABOUT DR. ROBERT CHAO ROMERO

Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005.  He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley.  Romero is award winning writer, publishing 15 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion.  

In addition to being an attorney and professor, Robert is an ordained pastor.  Together with his wife Erica, he is the co-founder of Jesus 4 Revolutionaries, a Christian ministry to activists, as well as board member of the Matthew 25 Movement in Southern California.

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Author’s Note: For more resources on lament visit Soul Care with Erica.

[1] Ruth Irene Padilla DeBorst, “Integral Mission Formation in Abya Yala (Latin America): A Study of the Centro de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (1982-2002) and Radical Evangélicos” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2016), 45; Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020), 156.

[2] Tetsunao Yamamori and C. René Padilla, eds., The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission (Buenos Aires: Kairos Ediciones, 2004), 9.

[3] Oscar García-Johnson, Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 3-4. 

[4]  Loida I. Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado-Pérez, and Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Latina Evangélicas: A Theological Survey from the Margins (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 35,36.

[5] Romero, Brown Church, 137.

Between Plainfield and Barrio Three: Theological Reflections on Home and Belonging

This article was first published in Issue #69 of Inheritance magazine, and can be read at here.

I spent my childhood and teenage years in a small suburban village just on the boundary of the Chicagoland area, Plainfield. Memories from that time flow with a thick, childlike belonging, a sense that this place — its people, cornfields, dilapidated business strips, skateparks, prairies, and forests — was my home, a space where I was loved, a space that I loved. This isn’t to say that I lived shielded from the ill-shaping forces that decimate this world. I am an immigrant’s son, aware of my family’s fragile and strange presence in a place of mostly white families. Still, this awareness comes with the fact that I discovered those wonderful parts of life like joy, laughter, friendship, and community in the only place I ever knew.

My parents were deeply Pentecostal, so I learned to think of home through vibrant religious language, the biblical stories of the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. Plainfield was home for me, not simply because of my attachment to this particular place, but because of the feeling of a quiet and personal presence sustaining this attachment: a suggestive whisper witnessing to the reality that God loved me, loved my family, loved my neighbors, and loved the world we inhabited. Even still, I always had a nagging sense that my father struggled to belong, struggled to make this outskirt village his home, as much as it was mine. ‍

Memory of Fracture

My father is from Barrio Three, South Cotabato, the Philippines.[1] When I was a child, he’d tell me stories of this island he was from, always with an erupting pride. In one story, he recalled an early morning responsibility he had to feed his family’s water buffalo. He was supposed to feed it a tiny proportion of the already eaten grass but had accidentally fallen asleep to the gentle heat of dawn and the slow graze of the animal. He spoke to me of the clear and pristine water that swayed between the islands and of the blooming and blossoming density of foliage that clothed Mindanao’s mountains. As I reflect on it now, I sense he felt rooted. He managed to feel at home in Barrio Three, at home enough to rest on top of a grazing animal.

Still, this sense of home does not take away from the tremendous difficulties that accompanied my father’s childhood. His parents — my grandparents — ranked among the lowest classes of Filipino society. Their house was pieced together by scraps of cardboard, sheets of metal, and plastic, built on land they did not own. In size, their house was probably equivalent to today’s suburban one-port garage. They had learned to keep anything nice in plastic bags because a rainstorm would soak their little house thoroughly. In tears, my grandma would send my dad off to school with tattered clothes, muddied flip flops, and a measly handful of rice for lunch.

This poverty was caused by the colonial history my father was born into. In the late 1500s, the Philippines was conquered and colonized by the Spanish empire. For a short period in the late 1800s, Filipino revolutionaries managed to overthrow this colonial regime. But after a few years of independence, the United States sent an army over and waged war until they gained control of the islands. From then until 1946, the Philippines was an official colony of the United States.[2]

“This U.S.-centered education engrained within many Filipinos the idea that what was good, true, and beautiful was possessed only by those who declared themselves to be white. If Filipinos were to gain any sort of status in the eyes of their colonizers, they’d have to adopt and mimic their ways of life — everything from the language they spoke, the food they ate, and the extent to which they could lighten their skin.”

The most sickening consequence of colonization was the establishment of a society organized around white supremacy. One of the ways the United States did this was through the development of an education program known as the “Pensionado program”. Through this education program, the U.S. sent Filipinos to colleges and universities in the United States, and then sent them back to the Philippines as teachers to aid in the transformation of Filipino society around U.S. cultural values. This vision was rooted in the desire to make Filipinos “educated and civilized”, according to the then-U.S. President William McKinley. This U.S.-centered education engrained within many Filipinos the idea that what was good, true, and beautiful was possessed only by those who declared themselves to be white. If Filipinos were to gain any sort of status in the eyes of their colonizers, they’d have to adopt and mimic their ways of life — everything from the language they spoke, the food they ate, and the extent to which they could lighten their skin.

This colonial legacy affected my father. The first time he went to school was the first time he encountered someone with much lighter skin. He was bedazzled by the fairness of this light-skinned person. In his memory, he recalls them being clean, kept up, and having nice clothes. The tragedy is borne out of the comparison he begins to make after seeing them. His skin is dark, deeply dark because of his work out in the tropic sun, and he recalled it as being scorched and dirt-crusted, signifying everything that fair skin is not: poverty and inferiority.

This inferiority became a driving force for his immigration to the United States. After working some time as a merchant marine, he decided to move to Chicago to prove that he could become everything the color of his skin seemed to deny. And for some time, it appeared to work. He started a family, managed a successful business, sent his children to good universities, and semi-retired at the age of 50 to focus on humanitarian work.

But this kind of success did not exist without a slow wounding alienation. He worked 20-hour shifts, was diagnosed with a blood disease due to high levels of stress, strained his marriage, attempted multiple failed business ventures, and slowly grew distant from his sons and family. In it all, I’m sure he was ever reminded of this infinite chasm that separated his instability from the stability of those white families that surrounded us. In the shadow of this alienation, I could sense the looming belief of inferiority become more real to him. In his eyes, the stability of white families, the size of their houses, and the ease with which they appeared to navigate Plainfield only magnified the instability of our family, the struggle to pay for our house, and his failing business ventures. The tragedy of comparison was back, and this drove him to work with greater intensity. During this time, he started taking trips back to the Philippines for longer periods. First, one month; then two months; then four. I saw him less, talked to him less, and his presence slowly faded to absence as he delved deeper into his attempt to become what he saw in those successful white individuals.

Eventually, my father returned to the Philippines because he decided he couldn’t live here. When he left, he told me that he felt he could either be Filipino or human, and that in the United States, the former was incompatible with the latter. That is what colonialism and white supremacy do. They crush the possibility of belonging either through poverty or shame, which forces you to leave a place you once learned to rest in; they teach that only white people belong in certain places and have the authority to make a place like Plainfield home. Such alienation can plunge a person so deeply into a pool of confusion, anxiety, and crippling pain that one wants out in any way possible; we don’t realize how these forces can strangle the souls of those caught in them.[3]

Belonging Amidst Fracture

My father’s alienation must be close to what the exiled Israelites must have felt so far from Jerusalem. Like the Israelites, my dad’s sense of belonging was fractured by forces and powers he could not control, and he found himself searching for life within the swirl of this violence. The Israelites were forced into such a position as the Babylonian empire invaded their land, pillaged villages, and decimated Jerusalem and the temple, the dwelling place of God. The survivors were then sent into a foreign land, and this exilic state is all the more extraordinary that even in Babylon, they continued to affirm the idea that their creaturely existence on earth meant that God had not abandoned them.

Scholars believe that the Old Testament was collected in today’s form during this traumatic period of Israelite destruction.[4] In the ashes of a destroyed temple, away from the promised land, Jewish readers gathered around to listen to prayers: “O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!” Despite the shadow of their devastation, they pray on: “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hands are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.” In their view, there is no relationship to creation that is not mediated by God. All of creation lives in the palms of God. And if God is the liberating God whose divine will is for Israel’s flourishing, exile cannot undo this fact. So long as they were creatures in creation, they exhaled God’s promise with every breath they took, signifying a freedom that at any point could dawn. This was both a comfort and a call: If it were true that their bodies signaled liberation, then they had the responsibility to witness in their actions to this liberating end.

The New Testament heightens and expands this liberating promise. The gospels, for example, declare Jesus to be God-in-flesh and liberator of the world. But Jesus wasn’t just any god, nor was his message of liberation quite what Israel expected. He threatened the religious establishment, denounced the corruption of the temple, and proclaimed a new kingdom oriented around love for those who were oppressed.[5] His message entailed a promise of freedom and flourishing to those who found themselves to be outcasts of societies — Gentiles, the sick, the dying, the poor — everyone who the Jewish elites and the Roman Empire ostracized from community. In other words, Jesus formed a community of the alienated and lowly, oriented around his message that the kingdom was near. He opened up a space that centered love of neighbor and justice as essential actions.[6]

A High Responsibility

In truth, my dad’s story is just one among many. Though existence exhales the promise of liberation, this breath is often brutally cut short by colonialism and white supremacy’s annihilation of life. This can be seen in high rates of infection and death among Black and Latinx communities and by the ongoing racialized police violence, highlighted in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. That Kyle Rittenhouse could kill two people protesting in solidarity with Blake only stresses the extent to which white supremacy ensnares us all. We remain trapped in the myth that this land only belongs to those who are white.

But this land is also God’s pasture, a space opened up to be a place of belonging for the exiled and alienated, for racialized minority communities, for my father, and for myself. Christians, then, are here imbued with a high responsibility: We must — whether in protest, policymaking, writing, community organizing, teaching, or pastoring — bear witness against white supremacy and colonialism to God’s liberation, to Jesus’s kingdom of the alienated, and make a space for all to belong. If colonialism and white supremacy are witnesses trying to proclaim my father’s inferiority, then scripture is an equally powerful counter-witness. No matter where I or my father choose to claim as home, I pray that we might bear witness to the reality of belonging, and trust that quiet but liberating whisper of love.

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. Read more at his website. 

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[1] See Godofredo Bernasol, Jr. “Fresh Milk is Like Heaven: A Walk with God and a Life of Missions”. Stories from my dad are drawn from my memory and his memoir. I admit that I have a complex relationship with this book. On the one hand, it was written 11 years ago, when his business was successful, and he believed that he fulfilled both God’s will and the American Dream. They were equated in his mind. On the other hand, this book highlights the struggle of a Filipino immigrant in the United States. It’s a treasure of stories told from the perspective of someone I not only love, but also someone searching for meaning in an immensely beautiful, painful, and complex life. 

[2] For a short and accessible survey of American colonization of the Philippines, see Erika Lee, “The Making of Asian America: A History”. See also Anthony Christian Ocampo, “The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race”. 

[3] See Willie James Jennings, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race”. This book has been immensely helpful in thinking about the relationship between colonialism and white supremacy and how these forces have alienated us from place.

[4] See Jacob L. Wright, “The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible”.

[5] For classic accounts of God’s desire to liberate creation, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, Caridad Inda, and John Eagleson,“A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation". See also James H. Cone, “God of the Oppressed".

[6] For a reading of how Jesus creates a new community of belonging, see Willie James Jennings, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race” and his commentary “Acts”.