Willie James Jennings: Theology and the origins of Race

The Christian Imagination (2010)

A different story of race needs to be told, one that helps people grasp the depth and power of racial perception. Many theorists and historians are trying to tell the story of race beginnings, of the origins of a concept of race. Some believe race conceptuality has its determinative origins in the Enlightenment and in modernity. For my part, I join the chorus of voices that spy out racial formation before the Enlightenment, before common notice of modernity's beginnings, and in the earliest moments of modern colonialism. Yet I want to draw attention not simply to a medieval beginning but also to a theological beginning. There is more here and in my position than an alternate beginning of the race story.

The story of race is also the story of place. Geography matters for race as well as for identity, vision, and the hope of how one might live life. It is this deep connection between place and identity that will be difficult for many to grasp, needing to activate their imagination to comprehend the lives of others. People have been formed in a world in which such connections are only imagined, only fictions enabled solely by volition and market desire, the parents of private property. We cannot go back to a different world where animals, landscape and people together form identity, collective and individual. But the first task of this text is to try to illuminate the power of the racial imagination as exactly a power that draws its life from copying a centered existence between animals, landscape, and peoples. That power found expression through theological voice that gave shape to racial anthropology and nurtured its power to stand in for landscape in its facilitation characteristics.

There is no mystery to race. But until we reckon with its substitution for place and place-centered identity, its power will remain and remain mysteriously ever renewing with each generation of race-formed children. In truth, it is easy to imagine a time and place in which race will not matter. But the elimination of race is beside the point. The world has changed. The earth has been taken from us and given back to us changed, and our lives suffer right now from a less helpful freedom – freedom from the ground, the dirt, landscape, and animals, from life collaborative with the rhythms of God’s other creatures and from the possibilities of imagining a joining to other peoples exactly in and through joining their lives on the ground.

Any imagined post-racial future requires an intense consideration of the formative power of whiteness. Whiteness must be analyzed not simply as substantiation of European hegemonic gestures but more precisely in its identity-facilitation characteristics, its judgement constituting favored qualities and its global deployments of visions of the true, the good, and the beautiful. To analyze whiteness requires nothing less than a theological consideration.

Theology, however, needs a different narrative. First, it is crucial to locate a theological account of the colonialist movement, a reflection that can aid in our analysis of the world that has come upon us. It can also reveal the redemptive elements buried inside the colonialist operation, elements that can open up possibilities of a new world beyond the tragedy of this remade one enabling a clearer grasp of the machinations of death and the demonic at work in the world. Theological reflection also opens up the possibility of a conversation that has yet to happen: a Christianity born of the colonialist wound; a Christianity speaking to itself in its global reality, pressing deeply inside the miracle of its existence; a Christianity battered, bruised, marginalized, yet believing, loving, Christian.

Second, it is also important to begin to restore to theology a richer sense of its identity from the colonialist movement forward. Sadly, Christian theologians live in conceptual worlds that have not in any substantive way reckoned with the ramifications of colonialism for Christian identity. I yearn for a vision of Christian intellectual identity that is compelling and attractive, employing not only the cunning of reason but the power of love that constantly gestures toward the desire to hear, to know, and to embrace.

Thirdly, it is absolutely necessary that I narrate Christian identity from within the Gentile-Jewish relational matrix and specifically the epistemological implications of Gentile existence for the social performance of Christianity. Only by analyzing the visions of life from within white supremacist imaginings can one begin to discern the precise nature of Christian hubris. Rather than the emergence of spaces of communion that announce the healing of the nations through the story of Israel bound up in Jesus, our communities reflect global networks of exchange that echo colonialism’s racial hierarchies and divisions.

If it is true that race and theology require this kind of narration in order to grasp some of our current difficulties, then what remains to be seen is how these different narrations might help facilitate a different social imagination. I anticipate some resistance to the fundamental claim of this work: that the Christian social imagination is diseased and disfigured. It may be. But that can change. I want my readers to capture sight of such a loss, a loss that points not only to deep psychic cuts and gashes in the social imagination of Western peoples but also to a mutilation of a Christian vision of creation and our own creatureliness. I want Christians to recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscape, animals, place and space, leaving such realities to the unfriendly designs of others.

To change one’s way of imagining connections is no small thing, yet I am convinced that such a change is not only necessary but now stands before human communities as the only real option for survival in a world of dwindling natural resources and tightening global economic chains. To imagine along this direction would be nothing less than a theological act, a Christian act of imagining. And if, as I believe, Christian life is indeed a way forward for the world, then it must reemerge as a compelling new invitation to life together.

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Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School where he previously served as academic dean.

Coming Next: Francis Chan: Fear Not! - Forgotten God: Reversing our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit (2009)