Toward a Critical Theological Imagination, Part 2: Collective and Individual Meaning Making
César ‘CJ’ Baldelomar demonstrates how theology remains an epistemologically white discipline
Ye'ii tapestry, ca. 1920-1930. The Ye'ii (Holy People) figures shown are supernatural beings closely connected spiritually to the Diné people and their natural environment, and help maintain all aspects of Navajo daily life. Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay, McNay Art Museum
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For many, the clash of imaginations becomes most transparent during college and graduate classes, particularly in the humanities. Just as I was about to prepare this author’s note, a friend recommended that I read a piece by Ciarra Jones titled “Not Just the Syllabus, Throw the Whole Discipline In the Trash.” Jones takes issue with the rhetorical question often uttered by white male professors and students: “Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater?” According to Jones, it surfaces whenever a student of color questions the validity of some theological (or other academic) work that, at best, disregards race or gender or, at worst, advances a racist or sexist agenda. I, too, have heard this phrase, but from nonwhite professors and colleagues, whenever I apply a decolonial lens to criticize, for example, Hannah Arendt’s lack of racial awareness or Thomas Aquinas’ poor consideration of women. And similar to Jones’ experiences, the response to any of my criticisms is that I should be more “charitable” to these thinkers because they were creatures of their context—of a time when whiteness was simply assumed as the center of experience and intellectual activity.
While I am not ready to insist on throwing out all theological thinking—especially liberation and queer theologies, problematic as they also are—I share in Jones’ mission to push “back against the infantilization of white Academia and the ways in which we grant white academics ample leeway to remain canonized even when their texts are rife with historical, sociological, and biologically racist errors.”
I share her frustrations with academic theology’s insistence on focusing solely upon the works of male European and Anglo theologians, i.e., the church fathers, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Rahner, Jurgen Moltmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Stanley Hauerwas. Even Latin-American liberation theologians—whose methods are largely European (specifically German)—have much in common with these white male European theologians, as evident by their uses of traditional theological concepts, such as Imago Dei and a linear salvation history. Gustavo Gutiérrez, widely considered the father of liberation theology, pursued graduate theological studies in Louvain, Belgium and Lyon, France, where he engaged traditional European theology. Queer theologians have cautioned against liberation theology’s disregard of gender and sexuality as essential to analyses of power.
During college and graduate school, I had to develop separate reading lists to engage the Black, Latinx, and queer theologians professors only mentioned in passing, if at all. But I believe that throwing out an entire academic discipline is unrealistic, given that even radical theologies build upon traditional, orthodox theological thinking. I am more in favor of continual deconstruction, and even retrieval, of traditional sources.
Since I am most familiar with theology, I am interested in demonstrating how theology remains an epistemologically white discipline. Part II of this three-part series discusses Christian theology’s role in constructing white supremacy and thus centering whiteness. The discussion also calls to task universities—still one of the main sites of knowledge production and consumption—for their roles in colonial expansion, the slave economy, and now the lynching of minds. While I am not prepared to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater,’ I am ready to call for a fundamental shift in theological imagination that decenters traditional theologies built on white male perspectives. Such perspectives privilege the epistemologies—the imaginations—of a limited few, with harmful consequences for the ontologies of nonwhite, nonmale, nonheterosexual peoples. If this call is not taken seriously, then perhaps the only remaining solution is indeed to press the restart button on the entire theological—and by extension, academic—enterprise.
Part 2: Collective and Individual Meaning Making
Academic disciplines, through their narratives, have contributed to the corruption of imagination, lynching of minds, and epistemological and ontological deaths.
The sins of academic disciplines are not surprising, given that most of these disciplines originated in European—and later, American—universities. As centers of enunciation that determine the validity and worth of knowledges, these institutions function as epistemological and hermeneutical gatekeepers—that is, as absolute arbiters over what matters. Indeed, scholar Walter Mignolo observes that “[e]pistemology and hermeneutics, in the Western genealogy of thought, investigate and regulate the principles of knowledge…and the principles of interpretation. Both strains are embedded in the self-proclaimed universality of Western cosmology and act as its gatekeepers.”
Universities remain the main sites of knowledge production, and perhaps of consumption, in the world. Yet universities are also inextricably linked to colonial expansion. Historian Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy underscores the complicity of early universities in America’s colonializing project and in the slave trade (both events underwritten by a religious narrative of manifest destiny). Universities, including the likes of Harvard and Yale, were rooted in and depended on slave economies and their propagation of narratives—stylized by scholars as “scientific”—about the racial inferiority of nonwhite peoples, particularly of Black populations. And as is well documented, many American universities admitted only white male students until well into the mid-1940s, effectively barring the epistemologies of entire communities, including women.
While critical legal and critical race theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgalgo have called attention to the white supremacist, Euromerican imagination that has shaped American law and jurisprudence, from the Doctrine of Discovery to Citizens United, critical race theorists themselves should pay more attention to the role of Christian theology (as both an academic discipline and as reflections on lived reality) in limiting perceptions of reality, especially within communities of color.
The majority of Americans perhaps see theological studies as a fledgling academic discipline, a remnant of medieval metaphysical speculation with little practical (read: economic) value in today’s neoliberal market. Yet, as with other humanities-oriented disciplines, theology has also contributed to the ossification of various narratives harmful to nonwhites and women, such as the racialized narrative of a white Jesus that equates whiteness with divinity, or the sexualized narrative that equates virginity with purity.
Indeed, the field of theology, like philosophy, remains the bastion of socioeconomically privileged white males. After all, can less economically privileged Black and Latinx students afford to earn degrees in disciplines focused on producing knowledge, when such disciplines rarely pay more than practical STEM- or business-related disciplines?
Hosteen Klah, Navajo Whirling Log Ceremony sandpainting tapestry by Mrs. Sam Manuelito (niece), c. 1925. Source: Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ / Wheelwright Museum Collections, Santa Fe, NM.
Diné weaver, artist, and medicine man (believed to be intersex) Hosteen/Hastiin Klah was born in 1867, when most Navajo people were held as prisoners of war by the U.S. Klah avoided attending government school and received training in ceremonial practices from an uncle.
Navajos portrayed the sacred Whirling Log emblem—often mistaken for a swastika—based on the legend of a hero’s knowledge journey and representing abundance, prosperity, healing, protection. In 1940, after the emblem was co-opted by Hitler’s regime, the Navajo, Papago, Apache and Hopi signed a proclamation renouncing their use of “a symbol of friendship among our forefathers for many centuries…desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.”
Theological roots
Boston College theologian Shawn Copeland argues that, in its first thousand years, “Christian theology was international and catholic [all-embracing], intercultural and pluriform, and included contributions from women.” To buttress her point, she mentions Augustine, Origen, and Tertullian as examples of significant early North African theologians. These thinkers, however, were operating under a colonial logic, writing mostly in Latin for an educated imperial audience.
Consider Tertullian, for instance. Influential historian Justo Gonzáles calls Tertullian “the founder of Western theology” due to his prolific writings of Christian apologetics and polemics against heresy. Tertullian described heretics as weak, unwise, inexperienced, crafty, rebellious, and mischievous. In attempting to delineate correct thought (epistemology), Tertullian sought to control the ontology of third-century peoples. He committed epistemological injustice by using his authority to foreclose other possible knowledges of Christianity and the world. Tertullian is hardly the model of a “pluriform” thinker; he is, as Gonzáles notes, the founder of a tradition imagined, and later controlled, by men of a rather singular epistemological lineage.
“Modernity” on a mission
Copeland does note that, following the establishment of Europe as the world’s center in the 1500s—after the “discovery” of America—“theology now settled down firmly, perhaps even comfortably, within the universities.” Theology entered the era of colonization and fervently affirmed colonial expansion through a worldview that saw all foreign lands and peoples as ready for the taking, all in god’s name. Mignolo traces modernity’s origins to colonial discoveries, conquests, and expansions, and not to the Industrial Revolution. “The ‘discovery’ of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves,” Mignolo states, “are the very foundation of modernity.” Since Christian theological imagination was instrumental in advancing colonialism and justifying slavery (via racial inferiority narratives), an analysis of modernity entails an analysis of Christian theology and religion.
Jeannie Hill Fletcher’s The Sin of White Supremacy provides useful examples of how “classically trained university theologians applied their training in the practical theology of conquest and colonialism formed by a partnership with Christian empire.” Providing faith formation to “Indians” and slaves is one example; theologians instructed Indigenous and Africana peoples to leave behind their superstitious, heathen-like ways and embrace Jesus Christ as lord and savior. To this day, I have heard theologians disparage Santería or Vodun as somehow less “logical” or real than Christianity. In doing so, these theologians effectively destroy(ed) Indigenous and Africana knowledges and supplant(ed) them with Western imaginations that urge these peoples to accept their fates in service of god’s plan and desires.
Indigenous peoples and Black slaves were placed on a “human” sliding scale, with their humanity often called into question. Many are familiar with the account of how Enlightenment thinkers (like Kant) thought blackness came from the curse of Ham.
Or consider the occurrences during the Valladolid debates (1550-1551), when theologians Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda discussed whether “Indians” were humans who possessed souls and the capacity for rational thought. Here were two mortal men debating the humanity (the very existence!) of other mortal beings: two theologians using their imaginations to play god. These and similar accounts make it difficult to ignore how university theologians and philosophers used their scholarly reflections—disseminated as logical truth—to inflict much pain, suffering, and violence on nonwhite peoples. Indeed, theologians contributed to the erasure of entire peoples from theological meaning making.
With nonwhite, nonmale peoples barred from “humanhood” for their perceived lack of rationality, a very narrow subset of the white population (university scholars) forced their theological imagination on all peoples. As Copeland notes, “Christianization was equaled with Europeanization—indigenous peoples were to assimilate as and to the Spanish or Portuguese or English or French ways of living and doing, worshipping and praying.” Or, as J. Kameron Carter succinctly puts it, “Christian civilization became Western civilization, and vice versa.”
Navajo “chief’s-style” blanket, c. 1870-80. Navajo weavers recycled and rewove the red yarn from red cloth given to them by the U.S. government while the Diné people were living in forced military camps. Source: Gift of Col. F. M. Johnson, Jr., The Textile Museum at George Washington University
Theological as secular imagination
Many might be tempted to think that theological imagination no longer holds sway over modern secular minds, much less secular societies. Such a view underestimates the power of myths-turned-narratives (etiologies) to shape current collective and individual identities. And such a view misunderstands the impact of Western Christian imagination on current “secular” states like the United States.
For instance, in Inventing a Christian America, law professor Steven Green underscores the pervasiveness of the view that America is a Christian nation founded on Christian theological principles. Such a view is often, according to Green, “intertwined with expressions of patriotism and American exceptionalism”—of fervent love for the mythical grand city on a hill.
Theological thinking, as noted, also shaped current understandings of race. Carter argues that “modern racial discourse and practice have their genesis inside Christian theological discourse and missiological practice, which themselves were tied to the practice of empire in advance of Western civilization.” In a similar vein, scholar Terence Keel points out that “Euro-American scientists inherited from their ancestors a series of ideas and reasoning strategies about race that have their origin in Christianity and continue to shape contemporary thought.” And let us not forget how politicians employ Christian language to stir patriotic sentiment, as evident in the following quote from Ronald Reagan: “Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free?” (The irony, of course, is that Black and brown bodies cannot breathe freely in the US.)
Christian mentalities (imaginations-turned-narrative-logics) will continue to shape collective identities until they are thoroughly deconstructed and decentered. Only a shakeup in theological knowledge production will allow this to happen. In fact, Ciarra Jones calls on faculty chairs to examine their own disciplines, which she argues need “to be dismantled and reimaged.”
Some might contend that I am presenting a caricature of theology and theologians. However, I am not arguing for the destruction of Christianity or theology.
I am merely suggesting that Christianity and its theologies be placed alongside (and not over) other myths, other imaginations, so as to allow fresh imaginations—and knowledges—to take flight.
