What's Next, part III

I am continuing the thoughts that I started over the last two weeks, in response to the Next Church national gathering in Seattle. 

I recently reviewed the book, Burying White Privilege, which has the profound subtitle, “Resurrecting a Badass Christianity.” The author, Miguel De La Torre, is a professor of social ethics and LatinX Studies at Iliff School of Theology, where our own Jennifer McCullough is currently enrolled. While speaking of “white Christianity,” I am going to use the pronouns “we” “us” and “our” in this essay. I am doing that, not because every person who is a part of St. Mark is white, but because our congregational culture is largely shaped by what De La Torre means when he speaks of “whiteness,” or “white Christianity.” It is an identifier that is meant to raise consciousness, not an accusation meant to raise guilt. 

One argument that De La Torre makes is that white Christians are unaware of how culturally specific our way of doing Christianity is. Let me see if I can illustrate with a recent experience. After the horrific attack on worshippers at the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, many New Zealanders performed – as an act of solidarity and healing – a traditional dance called the “Haka.” I was impressed with that tradition and looked it up on Wikipedia to read about it. Part of the essay said this: “From their arrival in the early 19th century, Christian missionaries strove unsuccessfully to eradicate the haka, along with other forms of Māori culture that they saw as conflicting with Christian beliefs and practice. Henry Williams, the leader of the Church Missionary Society mission in New Zealand, aimed to replace the haka and traditional Māori chants (waiata) with hymns. Missionaries also encouraged European harmonic singing as part of the process of conversion.” 

In other words, these missionaries saw harmonic singing – a specific cultural expression of music – as a Christian expression of music. Perhaps I should say, “as the Christian expression of music.” If I may use the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content,’ hymnody was the cultural form in which the missionaries had experienced Christianity, so they proceeded as if this cultural form was necessarily bound to the content of the gospel itself. Given how heroically and sacrificially many missionaries went about their task, I can only guess that most of them genuinely saw no difference between the message of the gospel that they wanted to share and the specific form of expressing that gospel that they knew. De La Torre, by using the phrase “white Christianity,” enables us not to make that same mistake. 

The phrase “white Christianity” is a description, which can be neutral. The phrase “white privilege” is not neutral and points to the ways that white Christianity has used the Christian message to enrich and empower itself. Let’s see if we can get from one to the other. 

“White Christianity” can refer to a number of traditions that are harmless enough in themselves (and which fluctuate over time): Worship services that begin precisely at a certain time; one-hour time limits on worship; jello salads at potlucks; reading back and forth during worship; standing and sitting on cue; pipe organs; stained glass; wooden pews (which might explain the one-hour time limit); etc. Some of these traditions are deliberate and scripted; some are assumed and inherited. 

“White privilege” is a different matter. It happens when we privilege “our way” over other ways, such as assuming that chants are pagan and hymns are Christian. Privilege can also be radically inconsistent when legitimizing itself. Think of all of the arguments that white Christian missionaries made when demanding that native women from some cultures cover themselves. It’s interesting that many white Christians now reject those same arguments when we insist that women ought not to wear burkas or veils. In both cases, we are insisting that our cultural approach to attire gives us the warrant to critique a different cultural approach to attire. 

White Christianity can be a neutral matter when it comes to jello salads or wooden pews. It can be somewhere between repressive and oppressive when it comes to liturgical styles or “proper attire.” But, white Christianity also has a long history of outright evil masked as Christianity. When Europeans (and later Americans) were colonizing “new” lands, Christian missionaries were sailing on the ships alongside of traders and soldiers. When white Christians came to the Americas, the Christian message provided legitimation for “Manifest Destiny,” that encouraged them to eradicate natives and take their land. When the U.S. was building an economy based on slave labor, instead of liberating the captives, white Christians were trying to make them “Christian slaves.” We could see all of those actions as wrong-headed, but confined to the past. Or, we could see how those past traditions continue in the form of establishing “sweat shops” in other countries, scapegoating and underpaying farm workers in our own country, or snowplowing our children’s success by buying their way into elite universities. 

In the end, I need to continue studying Miguel De La Torre’s critique of “white privilege.” It is not about inflicting guilt. It is about liberating us – us! – from captivity to a cultural form that has arrogated itself as if it were the gospel itself. While part of that liberation is the awkward task of evaluating “white Christianity,” the hope is that the real power of the gospel can be found in us. I feel as if I am taking tentative baby steps on a long journey. Let’s do this together. 

Mark of St. Mark