Rejecting the Christian Legacy of Intolerance
Dr. Kay Higuera Smith embraces a Latinx hermeneutics
Glass House by Tom Fruin. Source: LakeNona
This world is fractured.
The intolerance that I see around me takes my breath away. Daily, I read articles about anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment. U.S. Christians are often at the forefront of perpetuating this intolerance.
As a Latina Christian, I ask, How did we get here? Is there a way to think otherwise?
When thinking about ethical behavior, we naturally draw from the resources within our tradition. Our Latinx tradition gives us resources to challenge this intolerance and help mend the world.
Christian intolerance is not new
Unfortunately, cultural resources can be ambiguous. Intolerance goes way back in Christian tradition, showing up against Jews as early as the New Testament (Matt 27:25), and intolerance of Jews is well documented in writings as early as the second century CE.
The Epistle of Barnabas, dated from this era, claims that the Jewish people “were to be given up… ‘to destruction’” (Chap. 16). This legacy of intolerance would lay the groundwork for anti-Jewish legislation, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and ultimately, the Shoah, or destruction of European Jewry under Hitler. Such intolerance shapes the way we read Scripture and can even cause us to turn a story of hospitality into one of exclusivity. Thus, intolerance is a part of our Christian legacy that we must face and consciously reject.
Image: “San Bernabé o San Mateo” by Juan Martín Cabezalero, ca. 1640, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain
“A Latinx interpretive lens rekindles those values of welcome and hospitality in the text that have been extinguished by Christian tradition.”
A Latinx reading of the Bible
Although intolerance shapes much of our Christian legacy, a Latinx perspective offers us resources to combat this legacy and to help us further develop the ability to think otherwise. There is a story in Acts that has traditionally been taught to sound open and inviting but has been, in actuality, reinterpreted as a story of intolerance throughout Christian tradition. By facing the legacy of intolerance and by reading through a Latinx interpretive lens, we can turn the traditional reading of this story on its head from one of intolerance to welcoming and hospitality.
The story is found in Acts 15. Paul and Barnabas have been accused of accepting gentiles into the community of Jesus’ followers without requiring the proper entrance rituals. James, chief among the leaders, rules in favor of Paul and Barnabas, and, in doing so, extends radical hospitality to the gentiles, removing the entrance requirements for them to join the community of believers. James’s actions here reflect his sense of collective identity and hospitality. He speaks for one people group that welcomes and embraces another people group, despite radical differences in their ways of being.
Latinx Christians get James.
Hospitality is central to our Latinx identity: “mi casa es su casa”. Collective identity, rather than individual identity, shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. A Latinx reading of Acts through these core values thus reads the text as a story of disparate people groups trying to figure out how to live together, en conjunto.
A Latinx reading of this text might also offer a way to underwrite our value of hospitality toward those who cross our borders from different countries, bringing their own cultural ways of being and doing. We can read this text in Acts as a story of Jews who, while maintaining their own identities, benevolently extend gracious hospitality toward gentiles.
Unfortunately, while the classic, traditional reading of this text indeed focuses on James’s hospitality toward the gentiles, it does so by throwing the benevolent and generous Jewish believers under the proverbial bus. Here, Christian tradition turns a text of radical hospitality on its head, into one of restrictive intolerance of the quintessential Other—el otro. In the traditional reading, it becomes a story about radical rejection of difference, in which the Jews, not the gentiles, are the ones who have become the despised outsiders.
Early anti-Jewish epistles only reinforced this reading, which became embedded in Christian tradition. Martin Luther, for instance, wrote that these narratives demonstrate that those who kept the law practiced “foolish unwisdom to all the world.” In Luther’s reading, James has overturned the practice of biblical law for both Jews and Gentiles, and those who practice it are no longer to be tolerated. In other words, now that gentiles are the dominant group, and only gentile Christians get to define what unity looks like⎯a unity that has no room for Jewish ways of being.
Coloniality itself has been built on this legacy of intolerance.
This traditional reading, however, doesn’t hold up in the rest of Acts. Acts 21, for instance, shows that the law-keeping Jews and Paul agreed that his new entrance requirements were only for gentiles and not for Jews. In Chapter 21, Paul and his fellow Jews attempt to prove that Paul is not instructing Jewish believers to abandon the law—but he is, isn’t he? Isn’t this precisely what Luther and other traditional readers of Acts have claimed? They have corrupted it into a text that today appears to sanctify intolerance of difference. Such a reading turns the hospitality of the early Jews toward gentiles into intolerance against all Jews, unless they abandon practices central to their collective identity. Such a reading is alien to Latinx traditions of hospitality.
A Latinx interpretive lens rekindles those values of welcome and hospitality in the text that have been extinguished by Christian tradition. In this light, we bring valuable resources to help others read the Bible with fresh eyes, enabling us to work to mend, rather than shatter, an already fractured world.
