Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation

Wading Through Many Voices

Wading Through Many Voices Toward a Theology of Public Conversation

Edited by Harold J. Recinos

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wading through many voices : toward a theology of public conversation / edited by Harold J. Recinos. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-0583-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0585-7 (electronic) 1. Christianity and culture. 2. Multiculturalism—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Ethnicity—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Church and minorities—United States. I. Recinos, Harold J. (Harold Joseph), 1955– BR115.C8W28 2011 261—dc22 2010051257

` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction Harold J. Recinos

1

Part I:╇ Theology Becoming Public Discourse ╇ 1╇╇Expanding Our Academic Publics: Latino/a Theology, Religious Studies, and Latin American Studies Michelle A. Gonzalez Response to Michelle Gonzalez Marcia Y. Riggs ╇ 2╇╇ Escaping the Polarity of Race versus Gender and Ethnicity Marcia Y. Riggs Response to Marcia Riggs Michelle A. Gonzalez ╇ 3╇╇Global Hegemonic Power, Democracy, and the Theological Praxis of the Subaltern Multitude Eleazar S. Fernández Response to Eleazar S. Fernández: Otro(s) Mundo(s) Zurdo(s) María Teresa Dávila ╇ 4╇╇The Role of Latino/a Ethics in the Public Square: Upholding and Challenging “the Good” in a Pluralistic Society María Teresa Dávila v

17 33 37 49

53 68

73

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Response to María Teresa Dávila Eleazar S. Fernández

90

╇ 5╇╇ Pluralist Separatism and Community Jace Weaver Response to Jace Weaver Luis Leon

95

╇ 6╇╇American Prophecy: Cesar Chavez in Light of Martin Luther King and Gandhi Luis Leon Response to Luis Leon Jace Weaver ╇ 7╇╇“Salvation and Transformation”: Latino Evangelical Political Activism and the Struggle over Comprehensive Immigration Reform Gastón Espinosa Response to Gastón Espinosa Andrew Sung Park ╇ 8╇╇Theology of Enhancement: Multiculturality in an Asian American Perspective Andrew Sung Park Response to Andrew Sung Park Gastón Espinosa

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115 130

133 152

155 174

Part II: Beyond Only Difference ╇ 9╇╇Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been: Democratic Hope and Creative Exchange Victor Anderson Response to Victor Anderson David Sánchez 10╇╇Foregrounding Our Apocalyptic Heritage in Hopes of Domesticating It: Creating a Postapocalyptic Society in a Plural World David Sánchez Response to David Sánchez Victor Anderson 11╇╇“Isn’t Life More Than Food?” Migrant Farm Work as a Challenge to Latino/a Public Theology Nancy Bedford

179 194

199 215

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Contents

Response to Nancy Bedford Mark Lewis Taylor 12╇╇Beyond Only Difference: Necropolitics, Racialized Regimes, and U.S. Public Theology Mark Lewis Taylor Response to Mark Lewis Taylor Nancy Bedford 13╇╇American Indians, Conquest, the Christian Story, and Invasive Nation-Building Tink Tinker Response to Tink Tinker Lara Medina 14╇╇ Nepantla Spirituality: An Emancipative Vision for Inclusion Lara Medina Response to Lara Medina Tink Tinker

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235 251

255 275 279 295

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Contributors

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Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by support from Perkins School of Theology’s Center for the Study of Latino/a Christianity and Religions, and funds were provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. There are also many people to thank along the way. First, thank you to David Maldonado Jr., William Lawrence, and the Board of the Center for the Study of Latino/a Christianity and Religions at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology for supporting this project. Second, a very special word of thanks to Carolyn Douglas for providing outstanding staff support for every stage of the project.

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In the United States, religion matters in public life in various and different ways.1 Since the 1970s, the public role of religion was evidenced in the mobilization of religious forces on the abortion issue after Roe vs. Wade, the rise of the moral majority and Protestant fundamentalism, and the emergence of global militant Islam. Public religion played a role in the U.S. civil rights movement, the United Farm Workers movement, the Central American Sanctuary movement, the Immigrants Rights movement, the Sandinista revolution and other political conflicts in Latin America, and the disintegration of Apartheid in South Africa. In terms of presidential politics, the public character of religion was implicated in the election of born again Christians like Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush to the presidency and religious themes were seriously kept before the public in the more recent contentious debate over then-senator Barack Obama’s choice of pastor and church membership.2 In American life, religion is a cultural fact that influences individual and social life and understanding in the wider public sphere. Since the 1980s, many social scientists have been drawn to the emergence of public religion, which traditional secularist theories had earlier predicted would continue to move toward greater marginalization and irrelevance for modern life. The publishing industry playing on the growing awareness that religion is more than a private affair made available books like Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics; Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans, eds., The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestant1

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ism; Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters; and Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, among others. From Peter Berger’s volte-face on the declining role of religion in the modern world, the quiet activism of mainline Protestant churches on issues of social welfare and environmental ethics, the juxtaposition of religious and scientific worldviews, and the concern to place religious ideas, values, and conduct in the public square, it would be hard to argue that there is no evidence that religious claims play a role in U.S. public life. In the United States, one hears the argument that religion should be denied a role in public life and it should characteristically be seen as a private affair.3 Others acknowledge that religion has and continues to shape public values, but operates from a limited place in society.4 What is undeniable now is that since September 11, 2001, thinking about the public role of religion requires confronting the disquieting interaction of religious ideas with political cultures of violence.5 Religion can no longer be naively viewed as a form of spiritual life that provides comfort and promotes values favoring the common good in society. Religious beliefs can be manipulated, misused, and interpreted to motivate pious people to favor the use of violence and murder to promote their cause. Those now inclined to pay attention to scholars who follow the activities of violent religious groups6 must also critically reflect on the ways the religiously motivated violence of 9/11 has empowered Americans to respond with their own religiously sanctioned violence.7 The rise of religious fundamentalism and terrorism in public life threatens global peace in ways uniquely different from that older social order that found such threats in nationalism and political ideologies.8 Public theologians who speak from within various and different traditions are required to critically understand how their religious discourses relate to economic, political, and cultural contexts of experience in society. In part, this means thinking about public religion in terms of the common good in American society requires overcoming a mentality that finds evil in others and discourages a broad understanding of the world. In a world where religious actors think violence wins, public theologians must take on an American Christian culture apparently convinced a warrior Jesus leads our violence to defeat the violence and evil of others. In these days of the public use of religion for violent ends, public theologians can deepen our common life by articulating the public relevance of theology and the values that can serve to correct the moral conscience of society. In his Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Age, Ronald Thiemann links public theology to a Christian frame of reference to suggest how theology and the church can address a modern, culturally pluralist society.9 Thiemann argues questions of religious conviction and value are and should be a part of public discourse in a diverse society.



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He also explains liberal Protestant Christianity should not only mistrust accommodating itself to culture, but deconstructing the myth that the United States is a fundamentally Christian nation is necessary to respond to and foster a diverse conversation in public life.10 We argue not only is the United States a religious plural nation in which Christian accommodations are suspect, but the nation’s cultural history reflects a struggle with the problem of difference. What most occupies the minds of persons in the United States is not whether or not the church has a distinctive voice to claim and add to the public square, but the potential for diversity to cause “societal disruption, individual dislocation, and cultural disintegration.”11 Public theology should address the problem of difference by helping us learn from what is produced from common experience, but issuing forth from difference and otherness.12 In the marketplace of public voices, theology per se does not command a wide cultural hearing for various reasons.13 Theology is suspect in contemporary society due to its ecclesial insularity often reflected in problematic views on woman’s rights, clergy sexual abuse of children, racial justice, immigrants rights, international conflict, labor rights, and gay and lesbian rights. In the academy, theology has mostly pursued its task apart from public scrutiny and in the company of theologians who apparently don’t mind being cut off from interdisciplinary questioning. Theologians often produce works for religious readers with little regard for its intelligibility for nonreligious audiences and sociopolitical relevance in public life. In short, theology’s short reach into the public sphere results from its being too ecclesial, parochial, and intellectually distanced from public criticism and examination. From this vantage point, I find the view of Duncan Forrester on public theology illuminating, public theology . . . is not primarily concerned with individual subjectivity, or with the internal discourse of the church about doctrine and its clarification, important as these things are. Public theology, as I understand it, is not primarily and directly evangelical theology which addresses the Gospel to the world in the hope of repentance and conversion. Rather it is theology which seeks the welfare of the city before protecting the interests of the Church, or its proper liberty to preach the Gospel and celebrate the sacraments. Accordingly, public theology often takes “the world’s agenda,” or parts of it, as its own agenda, and seeks to offer distinctive and constructive insights from the treasury of faith to help in the building of a descent society, the restraint of evil, the curbing of violence, nation-building, and reconciliation in the public arena.14

Hence, public theology is charged with developing intelligible scholarship outside a narrow academic and ecclesial field to address audiences in the larger public arena. In the context of a society idolizing wealth and power, public theology should aim to make a contribution to public life

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by offering theology to debates that form and shape cultural views, values, policies, and actions.15 In the United States, public theology has largely not adequately developed a discussion that problematizes and responds to its multicultural and multiethnic social context.16 Because our ideas of God are patterned by how we perceive ourselves and others, public theologians can contribute to human well-being by critically reflecting on culturally dividing identities, discourses, and exclusionary practices. Public theology should offer theological insight in public space in light of a wide-ranging conversation whose claims are validated by reason, and open to the ongoing critique of others in society. In a time when Christian fundamentalists want the Ten Commandments displayed in courthouses, and progressive Christians activists are mobilizing to end foreign wars and are in support of the human rights of undocumented immigrants, public theology’s ideas should be accessible to the wider public for scrutiny of its contribution to democratic discourse and the common good. Public theologians concerned with the common good of a pluralistic society do not seek a privileged position for Christianity in the public sphere; instead, the publicness of their theological discourse witnesses to values important to the common good in a diverse world.17 Public theology speaks for them of the good of society “in the midst of a public discourse often dominated by considerations of power and domination.”18 The public sphere is a space in which public opinion is formed and maintained and where theologically informed arguments on matters of social importance can contribute to transformations in public life. Public theology is in the position of projecting a religious witness that aims to transform the reality out of which economic and political positions are shaped in light of a more compassionate view of the public realm. Public theologians aware religious identities have public relevance19 and who enter the terrain of difference are charged with the task of examining emerging social issues from the perspective of a preferential option for solidarity across the boundaries of race, class, gender and culture. Theologian Benjamin Valentín explains Latino/a theology has focused a great deal of attention on questions of culture, identity, and difference, but it has not deliberately moved in the direction of contributing to and shaping a public discourse of social relations for our diverse and divided society;20 yet, U.S. Latino/a theologians are challenged to move beyond socially fragmenting, identity-based discourses, address issues of socioeconomic exploitation and inequity, build and sustain coalitional social forces defined by socially binding discourses, and respond to the basic marginalization of theology in the public sphere.21 In these ways, Latino/a public theology will intentionally be engaging the public realm, not simply being overheard with respect to what it has to say of economic, political, and cultural life.



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I agree with Valentín that U.S. Latino/a theologians need to raise to the level of critical analysis the limits of their way of doing theology and the multiple ways the discourse of identity and difference works against expanding the concerns of social justice. They must discuss the importance of the exercise of the political vocation of citizenship and the “projection of a regenerative vision that is broad enough to bring different persons, different kinds of liberationists and progressives, together in the public realm to collaborate for a greater social good.”22 Nonetheless, Latino/a theologians who have focused on culture, identity, and difference in their work are profoundly concerned about the public relevance of their theology; indeed, the publicness of Latino/a theology comes by way of asserting the authenticity of self-identity, a demand that it be culturally respected, and an awareness that distinct identities contribute to the development and maturation of democratic values in society.23 Concentration on culture, identity, and difference does not mean Latino/a theological language is disengaged with social realities demanding transformative political, economic, and cultural action. Nonetheless, U.S. Latino/a theologians can heighten the publicness of their mode of discourse by engaging in dialogue with various and different voices concerned to understand what theology contributes to public life in a plural democratic society. In this work, Latino/a scholars and scholars representative of different ethnic communities come together to produce a dialogical public theology that centers attention on how to live together in a world of difference. The essays in this collection articulate a shared public theology in light of emerging social issues as well as suggest how a fundamental respect for difference is a required first value for living together in a common social and political space. This particular work in shared public theology aspires to contribute a mode of critical discourse and theological reflection that aims to influence public discourse and action directed toward social change in civil society. The contributors to this collection share the conviction that religion matters in public life, especially for addressing the weakened commitment to the cultivation of freedom, justice, solidarity, and the well-being of our diverse society. Because the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of difference, theology as a form of public discussion can serve to guide the moral and intellectual framework of our increasingly changing and fractious society. We seek to reach out to a wide public by articulating a vision of social and political life that argues the intelligibility of the American experiment in nation building is the well being of its union of differences. The task of public theology conceived in this collection of essays is not so much an exercise in having theological arguments available for public examination or making religious statements intelligible for a secularizing society; rather, our focus is to provide a culturally pluralistic U.S. society with a public theological agenda that recognizes our common life together. In particular,

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this collection of essays seeks to develop a shared public theology that addresses aspects of the current state of society, while offering readers a social and political vision broad enough to bring various and different groups together to collaborate and struggle for an improved understanding of the common good for our pluralistic, democratic society. Public theologians speak in ways that are meaningful to the religious traditions of which they form a part, but they also speak to a wider public concerned to nurture, deepen, and transform a wider arena of human relationships.24 Within the context of the cultural and religious pluralism of the United States, a public theologian is challenged to constructively propose a theologically sound public, critical, and emancipative understanding that seeks the common good of a racially and ethnically changing U.S. society. In this sense, public theology is obligated to remain open and responsive to the demands of its social context. In this work Latino/a, African American, Asian American, Native American, and Euro-American intellectuals unfold a public theological conversation with each other and their readers designed to help communities divided by race, class, ethnicity, and gender find common ground for life together. The contributors to this work are aware that public theologians are privileged intellectuals who risk reinforcing the very hierarchies of power they seek to disrupt each time they claim to speak for, speak about, and speak of excluded people. As public theologians concerned to transform power groups, the essayists here will take care to address the danger in their work of reproducing yet another power relation of domination, exploitation, and subordination.25 By exploring the public role of theology from the perspective of difference, the contributors to this collection aim to provide faithcommunities with the elements of historical discernment and responsible analysis that is necessary to stir commitment to think and act in ways that seek to reform political, economic, social, and cultural life.26 Religion is a system of diverse voices held together by shared symbols and language that shape identities; however, disagreements arise over the applied meaning of those symbols and discourses to public life.27 In part, public theology commands attention and achieves relevance when it pushes beyond the boundaries established for religion by the conventions of society. The strengthening and renewal of democratic tradition and responsible citizenry envisioned by the public theology offered by this collection argues for the importance of reflecting on the assumptions of the public discourses of a plural society that inform social relations. This work’s aim of constructing a shared public theology suggests it is possible to realize the functions of our specific cultural dispositions and yet elaborate a shared framework of public understanding. We propose to critically examine specific beliefs and practices, hold them up to public questioning, and entertain their importance in the debate about the idea of the common good.



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What is meant by the public sphere? The public sphere is not uniform, but a complex reality “constituted by open conversations, plural discourses, and diverse communities.”28 The public sphere as an open space for the exchange of ideas and building of diverse social relations can be a mechanism for imagining a more inclusive vision of the common good and the ongoing democratization of society. Our shared public theology claims a space in public life that gives evidence of the importance of religious ideas in the public arena as well as the need for public theological conversation across the traditional boundaries of identity. As shared public theology, the collection represents intercultural public theology as a vital terrain of study that contributes to the search for a theological and intercultural framing of the political idea of the common good. The contributors offer stimulating and contemporary essays that give evidence to the promise of a culturally contextualized and interethnic reflection on U.S. public theology. These essays in shared public theology will in various and different ways provide categories and building blocks to correct the current exclusionary interpretation of the common good and for understanding responsible citizenship in public life.

Outline of Chapters Public life in the United States is constituted by diverse communities reflecting plural discourses that challenge public theologians to rethink the political idea of public good, the values constitutive of collective life, and the possible directions for public theology in a world of often conflicting worldviews. In chapter 1, Michelle Gonzales begins by noting the basic starting point of Latino/a theology is the lived religious experience of Latino/a Christian communities spread across the United States; however, she notes a substantial amount of intellectual effort has been given by Latino/a theologians to wrestling with questions of identity through the classic categories of Christian theology. Latino/a theologians have distinguished their work from their Latin American colleagues and they have attempted to dialogue with and response to the dominant Anglo theological academy. In chapter 1, Gonzalez argues that in placing such a sharp distinction between U.S. Latino/a and Latin American identities and in focusing so much academic scholarship geared toward the Anglo theological academy, Latino/a theologians have narrowed the public and consequently the impact of their academic discourse. Gonzalez argues that Latino/a theologians who achieve dialogue with scholars of religion that fall beyond the walls of theology will move toward overcoming their cultural marginalization from a wider public that offers a larger social space for public conversation and argumentation. Latino/a theologians seeking to articulate a public theology

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can begin by engaging in intentional interdisciplinary dialogue with historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers working in the field of Latino/a and Latin American religion. In chapter 2, Marcia Riggs extends the conversation about intentional dialogue beyond theological boundaries by first describing and assessing the ways in which African Americans remain captive to binary thinking about race, gender, and class. Riggs argues that this captivity hinders African Americans from being authentic and effective partners with various and different groups in American society in struggles for justice with respect to public policy issues such as immigration, gay marriage, and public education reform. After exposing the historical and theological roots of binary thinking and why such thinking persists among African Americans, Riggs presents a womanist religious ethical theory of justice that invites African American Christians to reinterpret the call to a ministry of reconciliation as a call to a ministry of transformative mediation. Practices of a ministry of transformative mediation are key to escaping the binaries of race, gender, and class thinking and engaging in the liberative praxis of coalitions. Riggs discusses the ways a womanist religious ethic can guide twenty-first-century practices of justice beyond polarities of identity politics and in the interest of forging a deeper understanding of community in light of human difference. In chapter 3, Eleazar Fernández takes hold of openings created by the eruption of various and different subaltern voices in the international order to begin articulating a public theological discourse. Fernández advances the idea that social groups need to move beyond identity politics, but this moving beyond must at once affirm the place of socially subordinate identity groups in the wider conversation of reimagined public theology. Although not denying that ideas like community and identity are big and unstable, Eleazar understands public theological discourse is rooted in specific shared understandings that influence how members of a social group believe their world works. Drawing on the theoretical work of various “masters of suspicion” (e.g., Hardt, Negri, Bhaba, Anzaldua, among others), Eleazar imagines public theology seizing fresh democratic spaces in society by critiquing hegemonic discourses from the perspective of the practices and pedagogies of dissent produced by subaltern groups, which offer other versions of political community. In chapter 4, María Teresa Dávila observes that Latino/a ethics has centered attention on the experiences of marginalization, cultural and racial oppression, unemployment or underemployment, religious objectification, and social and geographic dislocation, especially familiar to Latinos/as in the United States. More recently, Latino/a theology and ethics has turned to the larger question of the role of doing theology in and for the public square with the aim of moving beyond the particularities of Latino/a experience, yet drawing on its identity insight in the conversation with the



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wider public. In this chapter, Dávila adds to this emerging body of work by placing Latino/a ethics in conversation with the political idea of “the good” and the challenges needed to be faced in the public square. The author is especially concerned to discuss the ability of Latino/a theology and ethics to articulate the option for the poor in powerful and creative ways that make sense in a pluralist public square. The author insists Latino/a theology, and ethics in particular, is today required to expand beyond the boundaries of mere identity politics in order to fully encounter and assimilate within its discourse the situation of other struggle-laden social groups in the wider U.S. civil society. In chapter 5, Jace Weaver presents a Native American perspective on public life, first arguing that prior to the coming of Europeans, the Indians of North America lived out a kind of natural pluralism. Weaver goes on to discuss the theological discourses Europeans used to justify the horrors of colonialism, while calling into question the religiously sanctioned myth of American Divine mission, American exceptionalism. While Weaver notes that broadly speaking the story of minorities in the United States has been one of seeking inclusion in the American system, Indians fought incorporation, and today, of all groups, Native Americans have the highest percentage of people who want out. For Weaver, any public theology dealing with social relations in a pluralist and divided society must take facts about Native America into account. For instance, Native Americans continue to be federally regulated by a foreign government, which reflects continuity with a history of cultural and material expropriation. Weaver especially promotes the idea of pluralist separatism for understanding Native American relations to the larger public, which means a “relational pluralism” that is respectful of “the inherent right of federally recognized tribal nations to govern their territories and their own citizenry and the right of Natives to refuse assimilation and embrace cultural and religious difference.” In chapter 6, Luis Leon draws on the speeches, writings, and interviews of Cesar Chavez to explore the role public theology played in Chavez’s campaign for American hearts and minds. The essay masterfully maps the connections between King, Gandhi, and Chavez, especially centering attention on how a broad ecumenical faith and practice enabled Chavez to reach a critical mass of Americans. As an organic intellectual and founder of the United Farm Workers (1962), Cesar Chavez used public religious strategies to bring about social change and to advocate on behalf of the dignity, equality, and human rights of farm workers. Leon observes that Chavez was not limited to the boundaries of identity politics; rather, he understood that beyond the system of racial classification of ethnic groups that prevailed in the United States all people were equal in light of the parenthood of God. Like King, Chavez envisioned a beloved community making life together “beyond classification of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and all other identi-

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ties that create divisions and violence.” The chapter contributes toward comparative understanding of three powerful historical actors who stood for the full humanity of racialized minorities in the United States, and the colonized around the globe. Chapter 7, written by Gastón Espinosa, begins by examining Latino Evangelical faith-based political activism on comprehensive immigration reform and the 2008 Election. Espinosa observes that the vast majority of Latino Protestants self-identify as born again Christians and/or Pentecostal/Charismatic. This essay focuses particular attention on the faith-based activism of Assemblies of God clergymen Jesse Miranda and Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), which is an organization with members and leaders from over twenty denominations. Espinosa’s interdisciplinary study draws on historical, social scientific, national survey, and oral history interviews to demonstrate the emerging public theology of a new breed of Christian activists challenging the long-standing stereotype that Latino Evangelicalism preaches a compensatory theology that offers no more “than a pie-in-thesky-after-you-die theology in the face of tremendous suffering and injustice.” Espinosa methodically draws out the social, ethical, and political implications of Latino Evangelical faith-based political activism providing insight into how it combines the piety of Billy Graham–style faith witness with the activism of such figures like Martin Luther King Jr. Espinosa acknowledges that not all Latino evangelicals are activists; however, the new faith direction promises to make a significant contribution to discussions of public theology in light of newer understandings of righteousness, justice, and transformation being articulated by NHCLC for participation in the wider public. Chapter 8, written by the Andrew Sung Park, begins to reflect on the meaning of public theology in a world of difference by noting that the United States is a multicultural, multiracial, and multilinguistic society that purposely worked to overcome racial and ethnic tensions between various ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the politics of race in the United States has produced oppressed-suffering among various subaltern ethnic groups that needs to be addressed by what Park calls a public theology of enhancement. Because a theology of enhancement is based on the principle of equality between different groups and the concern to engage in relations of mutual enrichment and criticism, it offers a building block for public theology in a plural society by suggesting the importance of constructive dialogue and mutual criticism across ethnic communities. Park carefully outlines his public theology of enhancement, ending the reflection by acknowledging difference as a social good capable of producing unifying social relations to the degree there is mutual pursuit of justice, equality, and empowerment of all in society.



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Part II, Beyond Only Difference, includes chapters that focus attention on public theology in relation to postmodernity; the relation of public theology to food production and women; early Christian apocalyptic texts and their public theological message for a more humane and plural resolution to a segmented and violent contemporary world; Native American challenges to the intellectual and moral understanding of Euro-American Christianity and Western democratic tradition. Although the subject of public theology resists a single definition, the chapters in the section, along with those in part I, contribute to the ongoing debate regarding how and under what conditions theology and public life come together. More importantly, the issues addressed in this part of the book suggest the challenges the theological community must face for understanding the multiple meanings of the common good, the promise and limitations of the discourse of theology, and the pursuit of the common good in a pluralistic, democratic society. Chapter 9, written by Victor Anderson, proposes a possibility for an American public theology that pushes in a direction suggested in postmodernity’s shift to the centrality of the local. Anderson suggests that the renewal of American public theology may better be found in the democratic practices issuing forth in localized discrete communities of participants where the intersections of faith and public life evidences local citizens living out the significance of their religious symbols, beliefs, doctrines, and loyalties. Drawing on the insights of intellectuals like Romand Cole and Vincent Harding, the author argues the renewal of American public theology for the twenty-first century will require a robust account of participatory democracy by local citizens engaged in democratic practices influenced by their faith commitments. In chapter 10, David Sanchez argues that any attempt to begin a discourse on shared public theology in a world of difference must engage specific historical obstacles. In this essay, Sanchez focuses attention on our shared tradition of early Christian apocalypticism (i.e., radical sectarianism)—as promoted in texts such as Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica, the Gospel of Mark, and the Book of Revelation and draws a connection between these divisive and violent texts and their link to a perceived innocent America. Apocalyptic texts have helped the powerless persevere their hardship, find a symbol system for judging the abuses of power, and give expression to futuristic hope; yet, these same texts in the hands of powerful social groups serve to oppress and dominate others (e.g., American Christianity deformed by imperialism). From the perspective of public theology, Sanchez seeks to come to terms with our “apocalyptic scriptural skeletons,” while also privileging early Christian texts that promote a more humane and plural resolution to a conflicted world. Chapter 11, written by Nancy Bedford, takes up the discussion of public theology by examining the politics of food production and consumption in

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the United States, especially in light of its impact on U.S. Latinas and Latin American women. In her concern to give voice to an imagined alternative future for those who suffer unjustly, Bedford locates the plight of Latino/a migrants who work in the fields at the center of the public voice of theology. From the standpoint of poetic reason public theology is not only called to denounce injustice, but in Bedford’s vision “to point to new imaginative possibilities for justice.” Christian public theology contributes a capacity to speak honestly about the “truth of reality” by simply asking with those who do the heavy migrant labor: “What are the human and natural costs of the food we eat? Is such food worth more than the life of those who harvest it?” In chapter 12, Mark Lewis Taylor explains that the idea of the public has been used in U.S. Christian nationalist culture to favor a “a politics of whiteness and male hegemony” in public life. He shows what “public theology” can become when it discusses the “public” as racialized regimes of social control. Taylor’s central argument examines four major regimes of racialized social control: mass incarceration, migration, Indigenous land confiscation, and U.S. imperial power. For Taylor an adequate treatment of the “U.S. public” requires naming and resisting racialized regimes, as they interplay in a fluid apparatus that often disfavors difference and subverts genuine public conversation. Taylor concludes by calling for a Christian public theology that explicitly names and addresses the four regimes, particularly by following the already prodigious art forms—poems, songs, novels, painting—wielded for survival and flourishing by peoples on the underside of these racialized regimes. Chapter 13, written by Tink Tinker (wazhazhe udsethe, Osage Nation), observes that the idea of the “common good” is an American Indian philosophical, spiritual, and political tradition reflected in all dimensions of Indian spirituality, social structures, and politics; however, when the political idea of common good is applied to U.S. society, Tinker questions that democratic relations are the priority influence. What is most evident about U.S.-style democracy is that it is mostly a constitutionally based procedural democracy with a culture that associates democratic tradition with voting practices. Tinker argues that the old American Indian traditions of governance were much more intensely democratic than imagined in the modern Euro-Western state system. Unlike the U.S. democratic modern system that lodges ultimate control in an executive, senate, and judiciary branches of government that are complexly intertwined, and with which civil society interacts, Tinker argues that American Indian governance made allowances for all voices to be heard on every issue before the people and spread authority around in a diverse pattern of diffusion. In this essay, Tinker offers a counternarrative that resists any description of U.S.-style democracy as an institution that represents an unmitigated good.



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Finally, in chapter 14, Lara Medina examines the distinct spirituality being practiced today by many Chicanas and Chicanos, the spirituality of Nepantla or middle space. Drawing on the theoretical work Gloria Anzaldúa who reclaims this Nahuatl term to reflect on the meaning of borderland culture and the cultural/biological admixture represents, Medina seeks to determine what Nepantla spirituality offers to understanding and shaping a life together in an ever-pluralizing society. From a postcolonial perspective, the cultural hybridity that provides a lens for critically understanding life in a diverse society makes a contribution to rethinking public theology in a world of difference. Medina’s Nepantla or middle space spirituality may contribute to the formulation of a shared public theology that concerns itself with conversations across cultural, social, political, and geographical borders. Medina’s work suggests people who reside in the borders between different cultures may very well be in the best position to hypothesize about the factors of society in light of a more dialogic vision of society. Perhaps, nepantleros can raise in public the question of God in the destiny of those excluded from structures and discourses of power. This collection seeks to enhance the study of contemporary public theology and religion in general, and U.S Hispanic/Latino(a) and ethnically conscious political theology in particular. As the first work of its kind to articulate a multiethnic perspective on U.S. public theology, the unique contributions in this book will counter the divisive identity politics of U.S. public life with shared systematic thinking aiming to promote mutual understanding and strengthened commitment to public discourses and practices oriented to a shared vision of public good. In short, the various reflections in this work on shared public theology envision a dialogic process of cultural and ethnic border crossing that argues against naively purchasing the conventional American narrative of the common good, while insisting that in a world of difference democracy matters.

I Theology Becoming Public Discourse

Keep Out! we feel time passing like an express train

that never cares to hear us shout, “Help sweet Jesus!”

on a cold day in a deserted station water dripping

You see, we work the jobs downtown others hate always

from melting snow through cracks in the

hanging on the splintered Cross shoved in all ground

overhead sidewalk. a cold breeze goes by our ears

this side of the border casting no light on the

driving memories to mind well hid behind the spoken

facts drenched with the daily injustices that

“good day.” we know the subway will carry

yet make us bawl for better days.

us back to that place next to the projects

—Harold J. Recinos

1 Expanding Our Academic Publics: Latino/a Theology, Religious Studies, and Latin American Studies Michelle A. Gonzalez

The fundamental starting point of Latino/a theology is the lived religious practices of Latino/a Christian communities throughout the United States. The emphasis is overwhelmingly ecclesial, while nodding to the fact that many Latino/a religious practices exist on the border of Christian ecclesial structures and in some cases, incorporate non-Christian elements within them. Similarly, Latino/a theologians struggle to negotiate their strong commitment to Latino/a theological categories that speak to the lived reality of Latino/a faith, while simultaneously remaining equally committed to the traditional categories of theological discourse that have been classically articulated throughout the centuries. Unfortunately, often the integration of the two is not seamless. Latino/a theologians often claim that in their efforts to speak to the lived religious reality of Latino/as they draw from interdisciplinary sources in order to access the fullness of lived experience. This is the case for many prominent Latino/a theologians. However, while they draw from interdisciplinary sources, Latino/a theologians rarely engage in interdisciplinary conversations with scholars outside of the theological academy. Latino/a theologians have spent a substantial amount of their intellectual efforts wrestling with questions of identity through the classic categories of Christian theology. Fundamental to these questions of identity is the historic need for Latino/a scholars to distinguish themselves from their Latin American colleagues. While Latino/a theologians today are no longer the forgotten relative of Latin American scholars, in claiming so vehemently that they are not Latin Americans, Latino/a theology has effectively cut itself off from the historical Latin American landscape that is a vital source for 17

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Latino/a theology. In addition, the theological focus of this corpus has also often been in dialogue with and response to the dominant Anglo North American theological academy. In this chapter I argue that in placing such a sharp distinction between Latino/a and Latin American and in focusing so much academic scholarship geared toward the North American theological academy, Latino/a theologians have narrowed the public and consequently the impact of their academic discourse. Latino/a theologians would greatly benefit from a more intentional dialogue with scholars of religion that falls beyond the walls of theology, particular within the areas of Latino/a and Latin American Studies. I begin by examining the construction of the primary audience of Latino/a theology, which, I argue, is excessively narrow in scope. In my second section I explore the importance of reconnecting with Latin America as a fundamental necessity for contemporary Latino/a theology. My final section explores Latino/a theological entries into interdisciplinary work and calls for more intentional scholarship in this area. Ultimately, unless Latino/a theologians explicitly engage the broader Latino/a and Religious Studies academic publics, our work will remain excessively limited in scope and impact.

Latino/a Theology’s Primary Audience As mentioned above, the question if identity has come to dominate Latino/a theology. These reflections on Latino/a identity broadly fall into two categories: attempting to define what is Latino/a about Latino/a theological discourse and offering an authentic description of the Latino/a community in all its diversity in the United States. I am not immune to this speculation. An age-old question for me is what makes Latino/a theology Latino/a? Is it the author of the text or is it the subject matter of one’s research? In a recent article, Fernando Segovia frames this question in terms of the Latino/a critic as individual and agent.1 One can easily have a black biblical scholar who never references his or her identity or a broader sense of his or her ethnic or racial group in his or her research. This person could be described, I imagine, as a biblical scholar who is black. But is he or she a black biblical scholar? Similarly one can have a white Anglo scholar of religion who works closely with the Latino/a community, knows the language, and focuses his or her academic research on the Latino/a community. For many, that person can never be called a Latino/a theologian because he or she is not Latino/a. And yet, how would one categorize such work that is informed by and gives voice to the Latino/a community? Another way of framing my question is what makes Latino/a theology Latino/a? The box that the author checks on their government census, or the community of accountability that informs his or her work?



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This discussion, similar to Segovia’s, is focusing on the author, not the discourse in and of itself. Therefore, when Segovia defines Latino/a American biblical criticism and pedagogy as a combination of membership and conscientization, he is focusing on the author. My question for Segovia, and Latino/a theologians as a whole, is whether or not anything about the subject or focus of one’s research becomes reflective of its minority status. Does not the social location of the subjects and contexts of our study impact how we categorize our work? This is merely a question. For example, in my work on Guatemalan Catholicism, I do not think my Latina status as a U.S. citizen “allows” me to do Guatemalan theology. Therefore, I do work on Guatemalan religion in the field of religious studies. And I must admit, I am more comfortable with that than any work I do in Latino/a theology. Why? Because the manner in which my work is categorized and received is defined by my focus, poor Guatemalan Mayans’ encounter with the sacred and not my identity status here in the States. The category of minority could be purely academic I suppose, referencing our work in the academy and the hegemonic forces that marginalize our work. In other words, does the category of minority refer to the manner in which our scholarship is received by the academic elites? Again, and here is my concern, the focus remains on the authors of that scholarship and not their communities of accountability. The academy exclusively defines their work. While I engage in speculation about the authentic nature of Latino/a theological discourse, I am well aware that many of these musings must be revealed for what they are: academic speculation that has little to do with the lived religious practices of Latino/a communities. While I engage in the debate surrounding the true nature of Latino/a identity and discourse, I must admit that I am extremely wary and frankly tired of this continuous discussion that plagues our work. Here I find much affinity with the theology of Benjamin Valentín. Especially significant for this chapter is his framing the discussion in light of public theology. Valentín is critical of Latino/a theology’s preoccupation with identity politics for he sees it as hindering the public and political impact of this theology.2 Valentín challenges Latino/a theology to become more of a public theology and less of a local theology. In addition, this preoccupation with culture and identity has inadvertently eclipsed other social and political inequalities that exist within Latino/a communities. A homogenous depiction of Latino/a communities ignores the racism, colorism, classism, sexism, and homophobia that exist amongst us. This heavy emphasis on the particular identity of Latino/a also impedes coalitions to flourish with other marginalized groups. Valentín’s concerns resonate with me, yet to speak of identity is a political, public act. Latino/a theologians, however, should turn their attention to building coalitions with other marginalized

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groups when considering the question of identity politics instead of focusing so heavily on internal squabbles. Linked to Latino/a theological musings on identity is the centrality of culture within Latino/a theology. However, Latino/a theologians often treat culture as an abstraction. As Valentín thoughtfully highlights, the emphasis on culture appears in the eerie absence of scholarship on cultural production. “Although they have placed much emphasis upon the category of culture, it is puzzling that our Hispanic/Latino(a) theologies still have not made much use of cultural artifacts—the literature, music, art, drama, and film, for instance—generated by Latino/as in the United States.”3 Valentín links to the viability of Latino/a systematic theology in the United States, and I would also add that this is connected to the future of our broader public theology. While commending and acknowledging the significance of Latino/a theology’s emphasis on culture, symbol, and identity, Valentín’s scholarship calls Latino/a theology to expand its publics. He notes that Latino/a theology has paid little attention to the negative reception of identity-based discourse in the United States as a whole.4 Too often, our emphasis on culture leads to an internal discussion that those unfamiliar with the Latino/a community find difficult to penetrate. This is evident in the recent volume Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism, by Néstor Medina, which tackles the notion of mestizaje and its function both in Latino/a theology in particular and Latin American and Latino/a studies in general.5 This is best described as a critical introductory book that offers the reader a window into the internal debates on identity within Latino/a theology, concluding with Medina’s own critical proposal on the future and viability of this term. For the reader who is not well versed in Latino/a theology, one has the sensation of eavesdropping on an important debate, not entirely clear why it is so important. In many ways, this continuous focus on Latino/a identity within Latino/a theology is our worst downfall. In our attempt to respect the flesh-andblood Latino/as that are represented in the construction of Latino/a identity in our work, we often end up speaking incessantly about ourselves at the expense of our communities. This hampers the public nature and accessibility of our scholarship. Nonetheless, this book offers an important contribution to the continued debate on Latino/a identity within Latino/a theology, a debate that for better or worse will continue into the next decade. In my own earlier writings I fell easily into this paradigm. I was extremely critical of what I understood as the “Mexicanization” of Latino/a theology, especially by Cuban-American and Cuban exile theologians who paid little attention to their own communities.6 Yet now, I must admit, I would revamp my critique. While I still agree with my claim that Latino/a theologians have constructed a theological identity category of Latino/a that overemphasizes Mexican religious experience and history (i.e., mestizaje,



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Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the border), I am uncomfortable with the fact that I implied that theologians of Cuban descent in the United States are somehow called to write about their communities. This critique creates a construction of theological authorship that implies that one is “required” to write about his or her own cultural or national communities, and somehow has a more authentic voice in doing so. While I would argue that being a part of a culture through one’s heritage does give an individual a certain insight about his or her work as an “insider,” I do not think authentic insight is limited to members of a particular cultural or national group. Latino/a theology has been marked by this contention that there is an authenticity to our theological claims about Latino/as as Latino/as. Yet how one identifies and participates in Latino/a culture and communities varies from community to community. Similarly, there are many non-Latino/a theological scholars who have substantial commitments to Latino/a communities, yet they are often sidelined as inauthentic. I think that in overemphasizing our “theological birthright” we have created a very dangerous and limited understanding of our theological contributions. On the one hand, we have created an “us” and “them” regarding who has an “authentic” theological voice. Second, and more important for our broader contributions to the theological public, the claim that a Latino/a has the most authentic voice about Latino/as automatically leads to the claim that our writings on non-Latino/a topics are not as authentic. We have limited our work to Latino/a communities, thus eclipsing our theological scholarship in the broader field, which remains dominated by European and EuroAmerican thinkers. I am also thoroughly uncomfortable with academic discourse being so severely limited by one’s birthplace, heritage, and/or native language. In a more positive light, the emphasis on culture does not always have to lead to a parochialization of Latino/a theological discourse. As Orlando O. Espín highlights in his volume, Grace and Humanness: Theological Reflections Because of Culture, Latino/a theology must articulate a theology of religions in order to engage in dialogues with the non-Christian traditions in our midst.7 Espín’s emphasis on culture leads to a broadening of the theological horizon of Latino/a theology, challenging Latino/a theologians to engage in interdisciplinary work that stretches beyond the comfort zone of Christian systematic theology. Underlying the debate on identity within Latino/a theology is the question of audience. This has come to dominate the framework, loci, and focus of Latino/a theological scholarship. I contend that Latino/a theology is primarily addressing two publics: the ecclesial realm and the North American theological academy. Unless we broaden the intended audiences and interlocutors of our scholarship, our theological work will have little impact outside of these realms. Valentín offers a significant critique of the

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excessively ecclesial emphasis of Latino/a theology. In his 1998 critique of Latino/a theology Valentín critiques the discourse on three fronts: its ecclesiocentrism, its overemphasis on biblical authoritarianism, and its failure to connect with other U.S. marginalized groups.8 Of the three critiques, I would like to focus on the first, the limitation of Latino/a theology to ecclesial concerns, and more importantly, the implicit assumption that theology is only for and in the church. Latino/a theology has historically been extremely tied to ecclesial concerns, both among Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars. While I am not critiquing this emphasis per se, I am critical of the almost exclusive emphasis on the church. Many of the Latino/as we claim to represent understand their spirituality in much broader terms, and we must address this ambiguity directly. Some scholars have moved in this direction, highlighting the complexity of the Latino/a theological world. Whether it is Jeanette Rodríguez’s use of flor y canto as a starting point for her Latina feminist theology or Ana María Pineda drawing from Nahuatl oral tradition and aesthetics as a source for her theological voice, Latina theologians do not reduce Latino/a identity to nonindigenous, non-African, and exclusively Western.9 Yet Latino/a scholars often use the cultural and religious production of Indigenous and African peoples to be sources for theological reflection with ease while simultaneously maintaining a dominant paradigm within our construction of Latino/a identity and religiosity. They do this without acknowledging the function of power within our academic appropriation of non-Christian and non-European sources. This is seen most sharply in the Christian starting point of Latino/a theologies and the ways in which non-Christian sources and cultures are appropriated into our discourse. Latino/a theologians approach Latino/a religion from a Christian foundation, adding the flavors of African and Indigenous America as they see fit. Espín’s above-cited work calling for a theology of religions is a much welcome alternative to this paradigm, as is Edwin Aponte’s work on botánicas. As noted by Aponte, the botánica has become “a place of wider spiritual significance and increasingly eclectic metaphysical blending. But metaphysical blending does not necessarily mean that the distinctions between religious traditions are forgotten or obliterated.”10 Latino/a Christians who self-identify as Christian readily enter into spaces such as botánicas as part of their everyday religious lives. As Aponte points out, this reflects a metaphysical attitude toward religion that blends various traditions. He concludes his article by calling for Latino/a scholars to develop research tools to address the “boundary crossings” that characterize Latino/a religious traditions. Regarding the academic public of Latino/a theology, I would argue that most Latino/a theologians write for the Euro-American theological academy. Because this is the dominant discourse in contemporary North American theology, we allow ourselves to be dominated and limited by a



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theological agenda that is not connected to or reflective of our communities of accountability. I also contend that even when we try to liberate ourselves from this, we most often fail. The 1999 volume in Latino/a Catholic systematic theology entitled From the Heart of Our People began with the question, “What would catholic systematics look like if it were done latinamente.”11 Glancing at the table of contents of this volume, I am struck by whether or not its success can be measured by its connection to, or lack thereof, to Latino/a faith communities. Sure, there are articles with the words “Tierra,” “Pueblo,” “Fiesta,” and “Convivencia” in the titles. Yes, these Spanish words mask traditional Roman Catholic systematic theology. While this book was an attempt to do Latino/a Catholic systematic theology, what it actually reflects is a European-born systematic theology flavored with the spices of Latino/a culture. While the language has changed, the theological loci covered in the book remain the normative paradigm. Ruben Rosario Rodríguez proposes an alternative public theology that is deeply rooted in Latino/a faith commitments yet attempts to bridge the divide between the religious and secular worlds. However, unlike many scholars that propose such a project, he remains critical of the move to incorporate theoretical perspectives from outside the Christian tradition, for that leads to a sacrifice of what is authentically Christian. Critical theories must not become the primary discourse of theology; the primary discourse must be a community’s faith commitments. Rodríguez acknowledges that this may lead to the marginalization of Christian theology as public discourse. However, he contends, “Theologians have a responsibility to make the faith community’s deepest commitments intelligible to outsiders as honestly and authentically as possible, as well as the freedom to engage in political debate from an openly confessional stance.”12 The unique contribution of the theologian must remain theological. Ultimately Rodríguez is arguing that the claim that confessional theology is tainted and therefore more subjective favors one epistemology over the others. Robert Orsi made a similar claim when he notes that it would be unlikely that a theological studies department today would hire an Aquinas or a Barth in this day and age. “Religious studies departments might introduce students to Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth, but these programs would never hire such intellectually rigorous but religiously committed thinkers for their own faculty.” Orsi continues by arguing that Religious studies has distorted its own subject matter, where beliefs are not admitted into the hallowed walls of the academy.13

Latin America Latino/a theologians need a more porous understanding of Latino/a and Latin American theologies. We have focused a great amount of attention

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on distinguishing them from their Latin American colleagues. In its early years, Latino/a theology was considered a subset at best of Latin American theology. Given the prominence of Latin American liberation theology, the work of Latino/a theologians was often eclipsed, ignored, or replaced by their Latin American colleagues. As Allan Figueroa Deck points out, “We are not Latin American theologians ‘passing through.’ We are North Americans of Hispanic origin. We have one foot, as it were, in the Third World and another in the First.”14 Latino/a theologians, as bridge people between the First and Third Worlds, face the ambiguous position of being people on the margin, living in between two cultures. The work of Latino/a theologians is connected to yet separate from Latin American theology. One should not confuse the two and realize that just because Latino/as and Latin Americans have a shared history, they are not the same people. Latino/a theologians have self-isolated themselves from their theological history through their adamant claims that they are not Latin Americans. No, we are not, yet Latin American theological history is a fundamental dimension of Latino/a religious history. The lack of historical theology and religious history in our work greatly hampers it. While Latino/a theologians take the everyday contemporary faith of Latino/as as their theological starting point, that faith must be contextualized in light of Latino/a theological history. It did not emerge in a vacuum. Similarly, with the porous nature of the U.S.-Mexico border, with more and more immigrants arriving daily (both legal and illegal), that Latina American ecclesial reality is a component of contemporary Latino/a religious life. This historical disconnect between Latin American theological history and contemporary Latino/a theologians is not apparent in the work of all Latino/a theologians. Orlando Espín’s scholarship on Trinitarian monotheism in sixteenth-century Mexico connects contemporary Latino/a popular religious practices to their historical Mexican antecedents. Alex GarcíaRivera’s writings on St. Marten of Porres also focus on the historical roots of devotion to this saint. My own work on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz retrieved her as a Latin American Church Mother for contemporary Latin American and Latino/a theologies.15 These theological moments are important steps in bridging the divide between Latino/a theology and its Latin American historical context. I should add that I am not arguing here for a shared history in terms of Latino/a and Latin American theologies at the level of academic discourse (though for some Latino/a theologians, this is the case). I am arguing for a need to address the Latin American theological history as part of Latino/a community’s theological history. Latino/a theologians share an ambiguous legacy with Latin American liberation theology, however, for as peoples of Latin American descent living in the United States they are forced to bridge both the First and Third Worlds. Caught between two cultures, the dominant Anglo culture



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of the U.S. and Latin American/Latino/a culture, Latino/a theologians are also trapped between two different understandings of the theological task: European/Euro-American theologies and Latin American theologies of liberation. For Manuel J. Mejido, this creates a fundamental problematic within Latino/a theology in its attempt to reconcile these radically different discourses and their accompanying worldviews.16 The former discourse is rooted in the European Enlightenment and Modernity, the latter informed by Latin America’s marginalization to the underside of modernity. Though I am in agreement with Mejido’s location of Latino/a theology as a bridge between these two worldviews, I find he exaggerates his point. Latin American liberation theology, while emerging from the underside of dominant history, remains wedded to and a product of modernity. As noted by Enrique Dussel, “It is the theology of a colonial or neocolonial world which often simply reflects the theology of the ‘center’; but in its more creative moments it has produced a new theology that has risen up against the great traditionally constituted theology.”17 Latin American liberation theology radicalized understandings of the theological task, yet remains linked to dominant theology. The break is not as radical as Mejido assumes. One only has to look at the number of Latin American liberation theologians who were educated in European universities and the influence of Europeanborn Catholic social movements, such as Catholic Action, upon the first generation of Latin American theologians. Latino/a theologians share a similar legacy, as the majority of them were educated in Anglo-dominated institutions in the United States. Nonetheless, Mejido’s work raises the question of the location of the Latino/a theologian as occupying an ambiguous space within the academy and the larger society. A fundamental feature of Latino/a theology since its inception has been its attempt to bridge the pastoral and the academic. In their emphasis on the organic unity of the pastoral and the academic, Latino/a theologians, at times more successfully than others, have attempted to argue that this false distinction is foreign to their theological projects. They also argue that their theological writings represent the voices of an oppressed community. The transition to more explicitly engaging the Latin American context will not be seamless. As Jeanette Rodríguez noted in her contribution to the volume Feminist Intercultural Theology, there is much that divides us and our neighbors to our south. The book was initiated through a gathering with a group of Latin American feminist theologians and a handful of Latina theologians (of which I was one) in Mexico City. Rodríguez highlights a sense of disdain on the part of certain Latin American sisters as a U.S.-born Latina claiming Latina identity, yet emerging from the belly of the privileged U.S. empire. That tension became a constructive point of conversation throughout the gathering, and in her contribution Rodríguez emphasizes the need

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for bridge building.18 I would argue that Latino/a theologians have spent much time building bridges with the North American theological academy, and that we need to build more bridges with our Latin American colleagues. We also need to build more bridges between our communities and the academy, especially those communities that often grate against the more “liberal,” liberationist, and contextual impulses in the academy, those scholarly voices who are often our closest allies. For Latino/a theologians the question of representation is before us in ways that move beyond the challenges of race and culture. As theologians that are informed by liberationist movements in the Americas, we must address the current state of the Christianity that is before us. Much has been made of the current explosion of primarily Pentecostal and evangelical churches in the global South and among blacks and Latino/as in the United States. The growth of a more Spirit-focused, what many would label “conservative,” spirituality that is not limited to Protestants, is also clearly seen in the growth of Charismatic Catholicism. This ecclesial model, which is radically different from the liberationist paradigm needs our careful study and attention. I came into the world of theology through black, feminist, and Latin American liberation theologies. Liberation theologies are extremely formative and influential on how I understand both my academic research and my pedagogy. When I began to do theology from my own cultural and ethnic background as a Cuban American, I came to realize that Latino/a theology has a very ambiguous and rocky relationship with liberation theologies as a whole. On the one hand, Latino/a theologians are often mistakenly seen as the younger, less significant, sibling of Latin Americans. On the other hand, Latino/a theologians have never been quick to self-describe their work as liberationist. Yes, many of them reflect an attention to and serious consideration of liberationist voices; however, very few categorize their academic scholarship as liberationist. As a graduate student I was extremely critical of what I interpreted as a lack of political commitment by my Latino/a mentors. I wanted them to claim a liberationist voice. However, as the years go by and I begin to study more closely the everyday faith of Latino/a and Latin American Christians versus studying an academic abstraction of that faith, I am much more in agreement with the categorization of Latino/a theology as nonliberationist. Does this mean that Latino/a theology is a counterpoint to Latin American and other liberationist discourses? Far from it. However, as a theology that has always claimed the expresses the faith of the people I have come to the conclusion that the faith of the people is not necessarily liberationist. Liberation ecclesiologies only represent a small percentage of Latino/a and Latin American churches. In fact, if we look at Christianity in Latin America and among Latino/as, it is becoming increasingly evangélico.



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Interdisciplinarity This brings me to my final theme, the question of interdisciplinarity. Latina theologians have been at the forefront in their use of Latina and Chicana theory as a means through which to engage in interdisciplinary work. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz’s incorporation of Iris Marion Young’s oppression theory as well as a sophisticated analysis of justice and María Lugones’ notions of world traveling introduced feminist philosophical voices into the discourse of Latino/a theology as a whole. María Pilar Aquino connects the incorporation of Latina feminist/theorists to liberationist movements as a whole, thus putting the narrative of Latina feminist theology into a broader framework of Latin American and Latino/a grassroots and academic movements. “The growth and development of the powerful tradition of Latina/Chicana feminist theories correspond to the contemporary growth and development of a plural sociopolitical movement of a plural sociopolitical subject, both constituted as a new sociopolitical force for the achievement of justice, equality, human rights, true democracy, and a greater equality of life for all, which together can be summarized in the term liberation.”19 Aquino locates Latina feminist theology within Latina/Chicana feminism as a whole. Within Latina feminist theology, the particularity of a writer’s national context and its indigenous sources are, in some authors, imposed on the broader discourse of Latina theology. Nancy Pineda’s article, “Notes Toward a Chicana Feminist Epistemology (and Why It Is Important for Latina Feminist Theologies),” deftly urges Latina feminist theologians to pay attention to epistemology and feminist theory.20 Her article privileges the contributions of Chicana feminist theorists whose work informs her own epistemology. The significance of these sources and their role in Pineda’s theological reflections is clear in one who is a Chicana herself. Similarly, María Pilar Aquino uses the term “Latina/Chicana” to designate the feminist theoretical construction that underlies her own Latina feminist theology.21 While both scholars never clarify why Chicanas should be the privileged interlocutors for the broader field of Latina feminist thought, they are to be commended for connecting the discourse of Latina feminist theology to broader academic and social movements. Our interdisciplinary work will also allow us to address some concerns outlined in the first section of this chapter, the need to broaden the context for which we are writing theology, which I view as too narrowly ecclesial. Yet broadening the scope can lead to challenges of the theological authenticity of our work. In my original field, theology, I find that when I work on non-Christian Caribbean traditions or folk religion like evil eye I have crossed the border into religious studies. As long as I speak of feminist theology, La Caridad del Cobre, and traditional themes within Christian theology I stand on firm ground in my theological discourse. Yet that disciplin-

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ary nationalism, that limitation of how we define our work on humanity’s response to their experience of the sacred, is so antithetical to the way that everyday Latino/as, at least, experience God in their lives. I also pose interdisciplinarity as a question because when we cross that disciplinary border and enter into other discourses and fields a radical transformation of how we understand our work as minority discourse occurs. I remember my first time at a Latin American studies meeting at the University of Miami feeling much like an illegal alien who had stealthily crossed the border undetected. Why? Not because I am Latina, but because I study religion. In many racial ethnic discourses, Latin American studies, Latino/a studies, and African American studies, religion still remains a somewhat marginalized subject. This is changing, but it will never fully change unless scholars like us directly engage in these concrete interdisciplinary conversations outside of the halls of the AAR and SBL. However, we do a real disservice to ourselves if we are not moving outside of our narrow field of religion and yet claim to be critical scholars on race and identity. I do not think it is enough to just read the books. In his own research Gastón Espinosa proposes a “Nepantla-based ethnophenomenological method as one of many possible alternatives to rethink how one goes about studying and interpreting Mexican American religions at secular colleges and universities where one is required not to promote or endorse a theological worldview.”22 Espinosa hopes to narrow the gap between religious studies and theology. His has an interdisciplinary approach that attempts to respect both the insider and the outsider within the religious traditions. I commend Espinosa’s rejection of the false dichotomy between theology and religious studies, but more importantly, I welcome his problematization of the insider/outsider role in our scholarship. Latino/a theologians have yet to substantially address this question, since we are all assumed insiders of the discourse we have constructed. However, some are more inside than others, and many are on the outside. Latino/a theologians have canonized a certain understanding of Latino/a religious life that does not mirror the complexity and diversity of the Latino/a religious world. It appears to me that Latino/a theologians have written ourselves into a corner. Echoing Victor Anderson’s critique of ontological blackness, the question I ask of my colleagues’ and my own research is, am I honestly describing the faith of the people, or am I just either imposing my understanding of how I think Christianity should be and interpreting the religion of Latin American and Latino/a peoples to fit that mold?23 How do I understand theological movements that do not fit into the construction of Latino/a theology operating in my own work? Does Latino/a theology describe only one dimension of Latino/a Christianity or all of it? This is clearly seen in the marginal status given to Pentecostalism in Latino/a theology.



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Perhaps no other religious movement within Latin America and among U.S. Latino/as has received more recent attention by academics than Pentecostalism and evangélico movements. Recent figures estimate that at least one in ten Latin Americans are evangelical, with 70 to 80 percent Pentecostal. In some countries the figures are even higher. The Indigenous nature of Pentecostalism, with its Latin American pastors and leadership, is Pentecostalism’s greatest resource. In other words, unlike Catholicism where clergy is often foreign born, Pentecostalism and other Protestant evangélico movements draw their leadership from the local population. David Stoll has written extensively on the growth of Protestantism in Latin America and is considered a decisive figure in the field. Stoll designates three characteristics of evangelical Protestantism: authority of Scripture, experience of personal salvation through Jesus Christ, and the importance of the missionary enterprise.24 Stoll notes that it is too simplistic to assume that the growth of evangelicalism in Latin America is due to North American evangelization efforts and money. It is also a manner of downplaying the religious ownership by the poor of evangelicalism. Most importantly, as highlighted above, the opportunities for native pastoral leadership became one of evangelical Protestantism’s greatest appeals. Unlike Catholic clergy, evangelical pastors are not required to pursue higher education. Also, there is more flexibility and growth possibilities at the local level due to the variety and number of evangelical churches. Manny A. Vásquez is yet another scholar who offers insight on Pentecostalism’s growth, with special regard to gender. Pentecostalism has emerged as an unlikely source of empowerment for women. The manner in which Pentecostalism reconfigures the line between public and private life, encouraging men to become more active on the domestic sphere, is one factor. This is in contrast to liberationist Catholicism that tended to emphasize the public and the structural at the expense of issues of oppressive paradigms within the domestic sphere.25 For Vásquez, evangelical movements within Christianity build on the importance of the personal and domestic for religious life. Catholicism, especially in its liberationist incarnation, has privileged the structural over the everyday. Pentecostalism has grown among U.S. Latino/as through a process David Badillo calls “‘reverse missionization,’ whereby Latin Americans, having adapted the missionary version of Protestantism to their national and local culture, then migrate north, producing an even more mixed or hybrid religion.” Badillo argues that the growth in evangelical and charismatic Latino/a congregations cannot only be found in surveys of Pentecostalism but must also be assessed in light of the influence of evangelical movements on mainline Protestant Latino/a congregations.26 This is seen, for example, in the growth of the Charismatic Renewal Movement in Latino/a Catholicism.

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Often when one thinks of movimientos evangélicos in Latin America, the assumption is that these movements are exclusively Protestant. However, with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement (CCR) one finds an evangelical face of Catholicism. CCR is one of the largest and fastest growing movements in the Latin American Church, and is also thriving in other parts of the Third World. It has enormous appeal amongst the laity and the approval of national episcopacies. In spite of this, the movement has received scant academic attention, due in part to scholars’ heavy emphasis on liberation theology and Base Christian Communities. As noted by R. Andrew Chestnut, “The notion of the ‘preferential option for the poor’ and the attempts to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Latin American soil through political and social transformation proved far more appealing to many scholars than a socially disengaged movement dedicated to transforming individual lives through conversion.”27 One of the factors that distinguish the CCR is its missionary appeal and its use of media. One of the features that marks Charismatic Catholicism is its similarities to Pentecostalism. This is seen in particular in the shared emphasis on the Holy Spirit. This emphasis on the Holy Spirit is what distinguishes Charismatics from other Catholic groups. A belief in the gifts of the Spirit, such as faith healing and glossalia, a certain degree of biblical fundamentalism, and asceticism are some of the characteristics Charismatics share with Pentecostals. Devotion to Mary and acquiescence to the Vatican, however, are distinguishing markers of CCR in contrast to Pentecostalism. The birth of CCR is traced to 1966 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. The movement spread to Latin America in the 1970s. CCR’s first members were predominantly middle class with a large number of women. Three trends shaped the movement during the 1980s: growth among the popular classes, Episcopal approval, and its primacy as a tool of evangelization. In the 1990s CCR became institutionalized. Within Latino/a theology Pentecostal voices have been ever-present, yet often reduced to the margins of the more liberal theological academy. Scholars such as Samuel Solivan and Edward Villafañe have consistently been writing about Latino/a Protestantism and Pentecostalism since the earliest decades of Latino/a theology. Both Elizabeth Conde-Frazier and Arlene Sánchez Walsh center their theological scholarship on Pentecostals and evangelicals. Conde-Frazier focuses her work on theological education and missiology. Conde-Frazier reminds us of the significance of theological education for creating a missiological approach that speaks to the context and culture where the church is located.28 Situating her work in Southern California, “Sánchez Walsh focused on the ambivalent relationship that Mexican-American Pentecostals have with their ethnic identity as it relates to their religious identity.”29 The growth of these evangelical movements throughout the Americas is often presented as exemplifying the failure of liberation theology. Indeed



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Latin American liberation theology in particular has been accused of being extremely out of touch with the spirituality of the poor. Similarly, liberation theologians must be accountable to their attribution of liberationist rhetoric to concrete poor peoples. The growth of evangelical Protestantism, with its deemphasis on political engagement, among poor Latin Americans clearly challenges the claim that politicized discourse is indeed organic to the poor. Pentecostalism also forces scholars engaged in dialogue with liberation theologies to challenge the construction of liberation in our theologies. As Sánchez Walsh highlights, studies of Pentecostalism challenge liberationist, especially North American feminist, constructions of liberation in their theologies. Within Pentecostalism, especially for Latinas, the home and family become the locus of liberation. “Latinas experience freedom and liberation as they convert to Pentecostalism” albeit in a different manner than how liberation has been constructed theologically in the past.30 In addition to the growing traditionalist and orthodox faces of Christianity in Latin America and among U.S. Latino/as, one also finds, as Philip Jenkins has thoughtfully highlighted, a Christianity that is increasingly supernatural in beliefs.31 This has always been the face of Latin American religion, given the nature of the medieval folk Spanish Catholicism that arrived in the region, coupled with the African and Indigenous religions this Catholicism encountered. There are many historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers working in the field of Latino/a and Latin American religion that theologians must begin to directly engage. The primary data they offer us can provide a solid foundation for our theological work.32 Too often in theology I find interpretations of certain dimensions of lived faith without any sense of the basis of that interpretation. It appears that Latino/a theologians, for the most part, have constructed a narrative about Latino/a Christianity that does not entirely mirror the actual lived religion. I am concerned that the footnotes of many Latino/a theologians do not reflect any engagement with scholars in other disciplines working on religion. In addition, this more interdisciplinary approach would allow for other religious traditions that shape Latino/a Christianity to have a more prominent role in interpretations of the Latino/a religious worldview. This is essential to understanding Latino/a Christianity, which does not exist in a bubble uninfluenced by other religious traditions. One excellent study mirrors the sort of interdisciplinary work that should characterize more of our scholarship, the 2002 volume Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism. This excellent volume brought together historical, anthropological, and ethnographic studies of particular Mexican American devotions and practices. As the editors highlight, “Given the complexities of studying religious traditions and their meanings, we endeavored to enrich the volume by making it as interdisciplinary as possible.”33 The volume

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concludes with theological reflection on these concrete practices. The interdisciplinary focus of the book was intentional. Latino/a theologians face an exciting and difficult future ahead of us. Scholarship on religion among Latino/as and Latin Americans has crossed interdisciplinary boundaries. Similarly, Latin American and Latino/a studies have solidified themselves within the academy as necessary conversation partners within American and area studies. Our communities keep growing and the demographics of Latino/as in the United States is changing rapidly. The challenge before us is to speak to that growth and diversity, that complexity of the Latino/a religious worldview and the everyday practices we theologians hold so dearly, to address the wealth of scholarship before us, looking toward the future while remaining grounded in the past. Latino/a theologians must continue to write theology, yet the audiences and approaches to our work must reflect the richness of our communities and the academic dialogue partners we now have before us. We are finally not just a handful of scholars, and now the task before us is to authentically dialogue together across racial, ethnic, national, and disciplinary boundaries.

Response to Michelle Gonzalez Marcia Y. Riggs

In Michelle Gonzalez’s chapter, I hear the voice of a Latina theologian speaking a word of insider criticism to other Latino/a scholars. The focus of her criticism is their failure to do scholarship that engages with and speaks to wider publics. According to Gonzalez, Latino/a theologians have spent far too much time wrestling with questions of their identity in these ways: (a) how to understand their identity in “classic categories of Christian theology” and (b) “the historic need for Latino/a scholars to distinguish themselves from their Latin American colleagues.” The greatest consequence of this struggle to establish their identity in these ways is a focus on the North American theological academy as their primary audience because of an alienation from the Latino/a community and Latin American history. Gonzalez proposes that interdisciplinary conversations with Latino/a and religious studies academic publics are one way for Latino/a theologians to address these consequences. There are three important questions for all of us that Gonzalez raises for me as we consider how to move “toward a theology of public conversation”: 1.╇ Who gets to speak on behalf of whom? 2.╇Who constitutes the speaker’s (the scholar’s) community of accountability? 3.╇Who are the wider publics with whom we theological scholars must engage? In dialogue with insights from Gonzalez’s chapter, I will respond to each of the questions below. 33

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Who gets to speak on behalf of whom? This question pushes theological scholars to think about the ways in which we can slip into objectifying the subjects (the people and their experiences) of our theological reflection, even when we are members of the group of people who are our subjects. Gonzalez poignantly frames this matter thus: “In our [Latino/a theologians] attempt to respect the flesh and blood Latino/as that are represented in the construction of Latino/a identity in our work, we often end up speaking incessantly about ourselves at the expense of our communities. This hampers the public nature and accessibility of our scholarship.” Gonzalez further contends that this also has led to a notion of a “theological birthright” and “an ‘us’ and ‘them’ regarding who has an ‘authentic’ theological voice.” The byproducts of this way of doing theology are (a) that Latino/as who write on non-Latino/a topics are not as authentic and (b) the eclipse of Latino/a theological scholarship in the broader field. Who gets to speak for whom? From this ethicist’s point of view, this is a question about authenticity because authenticity is a signifier for integrity. On one hand, integrity means that scholars get to speak only when we are willing to guard against a narcissism that leads us to project our issues as theological reflection on behalf of others. On the other hand, integrity is earned by scholars who are unafraid to speak on behalf of a diversity of others and topics, thus enlarging both the speakers and the subjects who must be respected in the broader field of theological scholarship. Who constitutes the speaker’s (scholar’s) community of accountability? Importantly, Gonzalez’s discussion suggests to me that an audience and a community of accountability are not synonymous. As mentioned above, Gonzalez notes that Latino/a theologians have made the North American theological academy a primary audience; she thinks that the church is the other significant audience. She accuses scholars of limiting the impact of their scholarship when the academy is the audience; she thinks that when the church is the audience, the broader understanding of spirituality among Latino/as is diminished. From my perspective, these criticisms of the way that these audiences restrict Latino/a scholarship lead us to consider what counts as normative and the norms that are necessary to guide scholarship that is open to wider publics. What counts as normative and what norms can open us to wider publics are the matters that will move us from focusing on the audience(s) we are addressing to being grounded in a community of accountability. Unlike an audience who is normative because we freely choose that group who is to be the recipient of our scholarship or because that group is powerful enough to determine whether or not our scholarship is acceptable or not, a community of accountability is the group who counts as normative because they are the subjects who are the sources for doing our theological reflection. Although we choose initially the group that is our subjects, this group of persons is the only



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group who can actually determine the integrity of our work (that it is not a projection of our issues, as I describe integrity above). Furthermore, once we shift from a focus on an audience to the community of accountability that grounds us, we do our scholarship guided by norms of respect for that community as prerequisite to norms of engagement with other groups who are our audiences. Finally, who are the wider publics with whom we theological scholars must engage? Although Gonzalez is clearly concerned with the wider academic publics with whom Latino/a theologians should engage, that is, Latino/a and Latin American Studies and “the broader Latino/a and Religious Studies academic publics, her chapter pushes all of us theological scholars to ask about wider publics more broadly for reasons that Gonzalez pushes for academic interdisciplinary conversations—“when we cross that disciplinary border and enter into other discourses and fields a radical transformation of how we understand our work as minority discourse occurs.” I have experienced such radical transformation as I breach disciplinary boundaries between religious social ethics and transformative mediation and conflict transformation studies. When my ethical reflection on religion, conflict, and violence is done in dialogue with conflict studies, my scholarship has implications for the lives of three audiences: (1) communities of faith, (2) persons of faith as they encounter a diversity of persons in the public realm, and (3) members of the religious and nonreligious global community. I remain clear that my community of accountability consists of the groups whose experiences of religion, conflict, and violence are the subjects of my scholarship because of the encounters that they have had with me as we have grappled together to discern the meaning of such experiences for the purpose of transformative practices. My engagement with conflict studies was not accidental, but it reflects my concern to make a constructive contribution to the critical issue of the religious foundations of terrorism in twenty-first-century life. I think that it is thus important that theological scholars determine the wider publics with whom to engage with reference to the pressing social, economic, political, and religious issues of the twenty-first century. Social psychologists, economists, political scientists, and comparative religious scholars come to mind immediately as I consider the twenty-first century as one marked by consequences deriving from traumas of war, financial collapse, the disappearance of national boundaries, and religious pluralism—both at home and abroad. With the questions that Michelle Gonzalez’s insights in this chapter have provoked for me in mind, I think that the greatest challenge before us scholars is to expand both our publics and what we mean by the term “theology” itself. Theology has never actually been the private domain of academics, because each of us everyday asks some question(s) about who

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God is, what difference it makes to consider a divine presence at work in the world, and how to respond faithfully to the challenges of twenty-firstcentury life. So, expanding what we mean by the term “theology” is really a matter of listening for and to such everyday theologizing, for it is the theology of public conversation, and we scholars are simply being invited to join a conversation already in progress.

2 Escaping the Polarity of Race versus Gender and Ethnicity Marcia Y. Riggs

I think that most of us African Americans would like to believe that we are all (as we say about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) “drum majors for justice.” In recent years, particularly during the 2008 presidential run for the White House, we have tended to bemoan our place in the pecking order of oppressed groups for whom civil rights in the United States must be fought. In fact, many of us criticize President Barack Obama for not being concerned enough with the plight of African Americans in terms of his public policy agenda, especially with regard to the economic plight of poor African Americans, the educational needs of African American children who largely populate urban public schools, and the plight of historic black colleges and universities to survive. Many of us believe that the term “civil rights” is reserved for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and that the clamor of other social groups such as the LGBQT community and Hispanic/Latino immigrants (illegal or legal) for the extension and protection of their civil rights is a misnomer (at best) and just wrong (at worst). Having been the beleaguered “minority” for so long in this country has left us unable to relinquish that status in the name of the “justice for all” for which we African Americans fought and continue to fight. Writing such a description of my own community is difficult, but I think that it has become necessary. It is necessary because our stated justice agenda (dignity, equality, freedom, access, opportunity) in this country loses credibility and validity each time that we refuse to be inclusive of all social groups in this country who suffer the violence 37

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of white supremacist oppression. The failure of the African American community to acknowledge heterosexism and xenophobia as forms of systemic oppression on a par with racism means the loss of partners in the struggle for the rights of full citizenship. The purpose of this essay is to expose and explicate reasons for the failure of African Americans to be inclusive and to offer a womanist religious liberation ethical1 “theory” of justice that can, at least, “write” the wrong of our discriminatory beliefs and behavior against those communities with whom we need to be in solidarity. I place the words “theory” and “write” in quotation marks to signify that I realize that I am making a theoretical plea that might eventually find its way into practice. To that end, I will use three currently debated issues—same-gender marriage, public education, and immigration—as the basis of this exposé. I have chosen these issues because each one represents a deeply rooted experience of oppression for two other marginalized social groups in U.S. society whose rights are being contested as matters of constitutional import. Also, each issue is currently contentious intracommunally (within the African American community) as well as intercommunally (between African Americans, the LGBQT community and the Hispanic/Latino/a community as well as the nation as a whole). This essay has three parts. First, I will present a description of the ethical dilemma at the heart of the polarity of race versus gender and ethnicity with respect to the African American community’s relationship with the LGBQT community and the Latino/Hispanic community. Second, with that description in hand, I will analyze each of the two issues (same-sex marriage and immigration) in terms of the dynamics of the polarity that animates each of the issues. Third, I will propose a womanist religious ethical theory of justice that provides a way for African Americans to “escape” the polarity of race versus gender and ethnicity by means of a theoretical framework for solidarity between oppressed social groups in U.S. society, with implications for living out this framework. I am using the term “escape” instead of words such as “overcome” or “transcend” because I seek to convey a sense of captivity to this polarity from which African Americans must do difficult intentional work to break free; the terms “overcome” or “transcend” tend to convey (particularly in religious thinking) human effort that requires either we no longer acknowledge something that creates alienation or that we humans require the assistance of some divine power to make possible relationship beyond the condition that creates alienation. In other words, I want African Americans to act as moral agents (primary earmarks of which are subjectivity and intentionality) in responding to this polarity rather than relinquish our responsibility to a higher authority—divine or human.



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The Ethical Dilemma of Race Versus Gender and Ethnicity2 As stated above, African Americans seem unable (unwilling?) to relinquish their status as the most beleaguered minority in the United States. It is my contention that this stance binds African Americans to thinking that polarizes us as a racial social group against other marginalized people such as the LGBTQ community and ethnic social groups of color, particularly in the United States—against Hispanic/Latino/a and Asian social groups. And, this polarized thinking is constitutive of an ethical dilemma wherein the choice is between loyalty to the race and collusion with and/or cooptation by white racist oppression because of disloyalty to the race. Unlike an authentic ethical dilemma wherein the choices to be made are equally legitimate (thus the dilemma), here the ethical dilemma is characterized by two absolutist contradictory choices. However, because these two absolutist contradictory choices are perceived by African Americans as legitimate and necessary in order to secure justice for themselves, my task as a womanist religious liberation ethicist is to expose how making either choice promotes oppression, thus subverting the justice sought. A look at each of these choices will clarify further why this is a false ethical dilemma. Loyalty to the Race. This side of the ethical dilemma is not a new one for African Americans. African Americans have questioned the loyalty of one another since the days of slavery. Within slavery African Americans were frequently suspicious of one another because of their status as laborers (field hands vs. house servants), of skin color (dark versus light), and betrayal at times of escape. Such suspicions can be seen as the roots of an ever-evolving social and political litmus test as to what constitutes loyalty to the race. This litmus test tends to be used to judge particular attitudes, commitments and/ or behaviors, such as interracial marriage, being a Republican rather than a Democrat, or failure to support black-owned or -operated business. Collusion with and/or Cooptation by White Racist Oppression. This side of the ethical dilemma is manifest most often as the political side of the litmus test for loyalty to the race. When African Americans are perceived to place issues such as gender and ethnicity either alongside or over against issues of race with respect to public policy, then an accusation of collusion with white racist oppression is made. This is the case because it is assumed that a failure to prioritize race in all matters pertaining to the sociopolitical and economic interests of the African American community threatens the united communal front that is required to confront outside oppressive forces. Consequently, the collusion with and/or cooptation by white racist oppression side of the dilemma tends to have more consistently ideological and institutional consequences (e.g., public policy that mutes or ignores race as salient).

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The falsity of this ethical dilemma for African Americans is evident as the community’s primary engagement with others is from a posture of defensiveness. From such a posture, it is not surprising that there is a failure to acknowledge fully the oppression of other social groups or to recognize the need for solidarity with those others. Further explication of the African American’s failure in this regard with respect to the homosexual community and the Hispanic/Latino community will now be discussed through the issues of same-gender marriage and public education and immigration, respectively.

Captivity to the Polarity Same-Gender Marriage. African Americans enter the debate mostly through their religious and social commitments mingled with an interpretation of their history of struggle for civil rights in the United States. The opposition to same-sex marriage deriving from religious commitments is based in an interpretation of scriptures that condemns homosexuality as a sin and AIDS as God’s punishment for such immoral sexual behavior. This scripture-based argument betrays a kind of biblical literalism and theological conservatism found within most historic Protestant black churches that exists alongside a liberal social agenda with regard to issues of race and economics in particular. These remarks by Dr. Robert Franklin (social ethicist and president of Morehouse College) describe aptly the position of black churches with respect to same-gender marriage: Black churches have been struggling with both their natural empathy (for oppressed minorities) and their reading of Scripture. And this has prompted an extraordinary debate about whether or not the gay rights movement is a civil rights struggle, a human rights struggle; whether it is something that the church can support and embrace.3

With regard to social commitments, the survival of the black family is cited as a reason for opposition. This reason came to the fore during the 2008 election when exit polling of African Americans in California regarding Proposition 8 (to reinstate a ban on same-sex marriage) revealed their overwhelming support of it. Although those same African Americans voted for Barack Obama for president, they were still able to bifurcate their ethical commitment to equality in U.S. society into (1) a political commitment to the election of the first African American president and (2) a social commitment to traditional gender roles and scripts for family.4 Finally, African Americans cite the historic roots of their civil rights struggle in the Constitutional denial of their personhood as an important reason for not comparing or collapsing the struggle of the homosexual community with or into the African American experience of oppression and fight for



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civil rights. Also, many African Americans understand homosexuality to be a personal choice whereas the race of African Americans is a biological or anthropological given that has been construed by others as a reason to deny their humanity and citizenship. Thus, captivity to the polarity of race versus gender that grounds African American opposition to same-gender marriage belies ethical commitments of African Americans to a “justice for all” agenda. In order to escape this polarity, African Americans will have to admit to (1) reading scripture selectively and (2) historical amnesia. This selective reading of scripture is in fact a proof-texting of heterosexism that is eerily similar (if not analogous) to scripturally based arguments used by white racists in support of slavery and white supremacist racist oppression. Likewise, the legal denial of the right to marry across racial lines is equally a part of the historical struggle and surely has relevance when African Americans contrive a historically driven argument. Public Education. Education has been considered by African Americans as one of the most important avenues for attaining full citizenship as well as upper mobility in U.S. society. Also, legislation concerning education is a critical civil rights victory. That legislation consisted of two decisions in the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education (1954–1955). The first decision on May 17, 1954, declared that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The second decision on May 31, 1955, is the one best remembered because of its wording; this final decision regarding timing and implementation ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed.”5 Although race is at the heart of Brown, the decisions in Brown are the ground upon which subsequent public policy on public education have been based. A cursory historical look at public education policy since Brown will be presented below as an introduction to the issue of public education reform as such relates to African Americans and Hispanic/Latino/as. On April 9, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) into law. ESEA was part of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and was to provide substantial monetary funds for K–12 education to schools serving children from low-income families. The funds were to provide for professional development of teachers, instructional materials, resources to support educational programs, and parental involvement. This law was originally authorized through 1970; and it has been reauthorized every five years since 1970. “ESEA has survived eight presidencies and undergone numerous name changes. But the basic premise of the law stands today; it ‘provides targeted resources to help ensure that disadvantaged students have access to a quality public education’ (Section 201, Elementary and Secondary School Act, 1965).”6 The current reauthorization of this act is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 that was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.

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The overall intent of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is “for all students—regardless of economic status, race, ethnicity, language spoken at home, or disability—to attain proficiency in reading, math, and science by 2014.”7 It has these emphases: standards, testing, accountability measures, and teacher quality. There are some features of NCLB that differentiate it from the previous legislation. Most significantly, NCLB redefines the federal role in K–12 education; the federal government requires states and districts to demonstrate both student achievement and “consistent progress over time in closing the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their peers.”8 Two matters relating to issues of discrimination interface with this history and are important to this discussion. First, in the 1970s compliance reviews with respect to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were conducted in school districts with large Spanish-surnamed student populations, and a number of common practices that have a discriminatory effect on educational opportunity for Spanish-surnamed students were found. Such discrimination was also found with regard to other national origin minority groups such as Chinese and Portuguese students. Common practices underlying the discrimination are failure to provide English language instruction, assignment to classes for the mentally retarded and denial to college preparatory classes, ability or group tracking for purposes other than increasing English language proficiency, and the provision of notices to parents in a language other than English.9 Second, on June 28, 2007, in a 5–4 decision the Supreme Court ruled in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. against racial balancing plans for public schools. The decision struck down plans in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky. Chief Justice Roberts maintained that the historical precedent of Brown necessitated that race not be used to assign children to schools even for the very different reasons offered by the schools for such plans today. Although Justice Kennedy was the swing vote of the majority opinion; he spoke against the categorical opposition to such plans voiced by Chief Justice Roberts. Kennedy asserted that plans should seek to ensure diversity with regard to a school’s racial make-up within a district rather than with regard to the placement of individual students; for example, school officials might make strategic decisions about where to build a school to effect diversity.10 The issue of public education reform thus derives from a historical and contemporary education policy that seeks to address discrimination in order to close the gap between disadvantaged students and their peers, and in turn further close the gaps experienced by minority social groups because of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and xenophobia in the larger society. Nevertheless, when African Americans face Hispanics/Latino/ as in the educational reform debate, they do so from a posture of self-



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preservation. This is the case because African Americans perceive the current climate as one in which public education policy will not include race as a salient factor. Also, for other reasons this posture of self-preservation is not baseless. There is a changing racial and ethnic mix in U.S. public schools wherein the Hispanic/Latino/a student population has risen from 12.7 percent to 19.8 percent of the total public school enrollment as compared to the black share of public school enrollment, which is 17.2 percent (a slight rise from 16.55) during the period from 1993 to 2006.11 When surveyed about schools and education, Hispanics/Latino/as are “more optimistic about the schools, do not see themselves particularly disadvantaged or victimized,” and they are “willing supporters of the key principles embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act.”12 For African Americans, whose history with public education has been separate and unequal, whose funding for neighborhood schools tends to suffer from lower real estate tax rates, and who find the NCLB performance standards to have adverse effects disproportionately upon schools where African Americans are the majority of enrollment, the two observations cited above do provide explanations for the posture of self-preservation. Moreover, “within the educational system redistributing resources to Latino-targeted programs, such as bilingual education, often limits the resources available to African-Americans and other non-Latino students.”13 Consequently, the possibilities of coalitions between African Americans and Hispanic/Latino/as with respect to education are tenuous. Captivity to the race versus ethnicity polarity with respect to education is thus best characterized as a posture of self-preservation premised upon becoming outnumbered and because of a history with public education that has produced attitudes of distrust. This captivity can only be broken if African Americans build coalitions with Hispanic/Latino/as for the purpose of strengthening public education since they are the two groups who predominantly populate this system. In other words, African Americans must relinquish their posture of self-preservation and find common cause because that is truly the case. Immigration.14 This issue is framed largely by African Americans as one of competition. In the U.S. context of white racist supremacy, it is not surprising that African Americans perceive a scarcity of resources for which marginalized groups must compete. A study15 that examines the attitudes of African Americans toward immigration revealed the following: 1.╇Pro-immigration attitudes. Attitudes are largely motivated by economic self-interest in terms of the state of the national economy, personal financial condition, and job availability. A healthy national economy and optimism about personal finances as well as a greater number of local jobs all contribute to pro-immigration attitudes. Hav-

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ing more education and being non-Protestant also contribute significantly to a pro-immigration perspective.16 2.╇Immigration policy preferences. Economic self-interest as a factor that influences pro- or anti-immigration attitudes is not found to be as statistically important a measure of African American immigration policy preferences. Instead, contextual (exposure to immigrant populations), symbolic (partisan identification and ideology—conservative or liberal), and demographic variables (gender, education, employment status) are more influential. Interestingly, being a woman, having a conservative political ideology, and earning low wages are all factors that foster less liberal immigration policy preferences.17 3.╇Attitudes toward immigrant-dominated groups. Here the aim is to ascertain feelings about the groups. The measures for ascertaining feelings toward Hispanics/Latino/as were (a) whether or not they end up on welfare, (b) whether or not they significantly increase crime, and (c) whether or not they keep to themselves and do not try to fit in. Not surprisingly, when African Americans have favorable opinions of Hispanics/Latino/as, then they are more likely to have proimmigration attitudes.18 The authors conclude their study with these remarks: “As more immigrants arrive in the U.S., blacks may become increasingly concerned about the immigration situation in the country. Furthermore, since many Latinos rely on government assistance and many seek residence in predominantly black areas, Latino immigrants may continue to be perceived as cultural, economic, and social threats to blacks.”19 Thus, captivity to the polarity of race versus ethnicity suggested by this study is rooted in the African American’s framing of the issue of immigration as a competition for scarce economic resources, a matter of scapegoating Hispanic/Latino/a and other immigrant-dominated groups for social ills, and fear of further displacement in a society where they are still marginalized, in spite of the significant gains of the civil rights movement.20 It is important for African Americans to recognize the implicit divide and conquer strategy with which they are complicit whenever the self-interests and fears of one marginalized group become barriers to effective coalitions among marginalized groups. In the present context of economic instability, rampant nativistic21 nationalism, and the prediction that at the conclusion of the 2010 census Hispanics will comprise 16 percent of the total U.S. population (becoming the nation’s largest minority population),22 it is critical that African Americans escape the polarity of race versus ethnicity for the sake of pursuing an authentically inclusive common good that promotes dignity, equality, freedom, access, and opportunity for all.



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Escaping the Polarity A Womanist Religious Liberation Ethical Response. According to the description of the African American community’s response to the issues of same-gender marriage, public education, and immigration, these are the dynamics that animate the polarity: a literalistic reading of scripture, historical amnesia, economic self-interest, scapegoating, and fear, respectively. The captivity of African Americans to the polarity results in a subversion of justice and the womanist religious liberation ethical response must address this subversion. The primary earmarks of this subversion of justice are (a) its limited scope (i.e., narrowly construes who is included in the moral community and entitled to justice) and (b) its one-dimensional understanding of justice (i.e., lacks a sense that justice has multiple purposes and aims). Thus, the primary questions to be answered in this concluding section are: What understanding of justice nurtures an expansive notion of moral community? How is justice to be practiced in this enlarged moral community? What is justice? Moral community is defined in terms of both who counts and what is morally relevant in determining who counts. It may or may not be obvious by now that polarized thinking is central to the false ethical dilemma of race versus gender and ethnicity. Using polarized thinking, African Americans have construed a narrow moral community in which race is a key determinant of who counts and what is morally relevant in determining who counts. Race is key, but it is actually not the sole determinant being used to mark the boundaries of the moral community. In addition to race, gender and ethnicity are considered morally relevant for the purpose of determining who is included in the moral community. In this case, thought, being gay or lesbian and being Hispanic/Latino/a counts even if its relevancy is determined over and against race. In other words, the moral community based upon a polarity between race, gender, and ethnicity maintains a hierarchy of inclusivity—race being normative for ranking ethnicity and gender within the hierarchy of the moral community. A womanist liberation ethical understanding of moral community seeks to undercut such a hierarchy while not undermining the relevance of race, gender, and ethnicity. Race, gender, and ethnicity are morally relevant because they are signifiers for the diverse ways that we embody humanity. Or, in more theological terms, race, gender, and ethnicity are the earmarks of an embodied imago Dei. All of us count in this moral community because we are God’s creation, humans wonderfully made for relationship with one another.23 We have been created by God in God’s image and that image begins to come into full focus when we encounter one another as we seek relationship. However, because we name and know ourselves through socially constructed lenses, we frequently see one another out of focus; we attribute meaning that, in effect, annihilates our embodied differences and

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often leads us to label one another in ways that judge, dismiss, objectify, and silence. Living as moral beings in community thus means that we must reframe our socially constructed race, gender, and ethnic identities as signs of diversity and pluralism in God’s creation, and we must affirm that all of God’s creation has intrinsic dignity that must be respected. Our lives in relationship with one another are thus to be relationships of equality, not hierarchy. In the end, moral community is created as we engage one another as equals. Of course, as we create moral community, we forget that we are equals. Theologically, we are not surprised by our forgetfulness because we are a fallen creation. Traditionally, our theological reflection upon our inability to keep one another in focus, the inability to encounter one another as we seek relationship, has been ascribed to our fallenness, and we speak of the need to transcend our embodied differences. In other words, we are sinners and the best that we can do is to ignore what we see, to ignore one another’s embodied humanity, and to seek to love some essential humanness that we all possess. However, from my womanist liberation theological ethical position, I contend that traditional theological reflection has led us astray into denial of the imago Dei, the image of God, in each of us and consequently into denial of that which makes us capable of being and acting morally. The imago Dei in each of us must not be relegated to something essentially human or to a way of relating to one another that is contingent upon our ability to transcend or ignore our embodied differences. We in all of our embodied differences incarnate the imago Dei. Moreover, in Christ we are a new creation. As God has created us, God also reconciles us; creation and reconciliation meet in Christ. We are therefore sociohistoric selves who are imago Dei, who are imago Christi. Accordingly, re-created in the image of Christ, we have a responsibility to strive toward reconciliation as we create a moral community of equals that has justice at its center. Womanist liberation ethical justice as the center of a moral community of equals is one that is consistent with a biblical view of justice. According to one author, these are the contours of biblical justice: an attribute of God (“God is the source and measure of all justice”); an emulation of God (“we are to be agents of God’s justice”); a primary obligation (“justice requires commitment and struggle”); an object of hope (“the full revelation of justice remains an object of hope”); a commitment to action (“the exercising of power to resist the oppressor and to set the oppressed free”); a relational reality (“doing all that is necessary to create and sustain healthy, constant, and life-giving relationships between persons”); a partiality for the disadvantaged (“justice is partial and impartial, biased and unbiased, equal and unequal, depending on the issues at stake”); a restorative activity (“justice is satisfied by repentance, restoration, and renewal”).24 In sum,



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Justice flows from God’s own being and designates the way God intends the world to be. But, things have fallen into disorder; the shalom of creation has been ruptured. God responds by seeking to restore the world to the way that it ought to be.25

Likewise, Jesus incarnates the justice of God, and we come to know how to practice justice from the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus. The important features of practicing justice that we learn from Jesus are (1) a rejection of social discrimination, (2) a critique of economic justice, (3) a mistrust of institutional power, and (4) a repudiation of war and violence.26 Womanist religious liberation ethical justice may be theoretically framed in terms of a call to do justice as moral agents who understand that moral community is created as we live faithfully these three interrelated continua that are constitutive of ethical life: Theological: confession, repentance, reconciliation Ethical: complicity, accountability, responsibility Justice: corrective, compensatory, (re)distributive It is to how we practice this justice to which I now turn. How shall we practice justice? It is finally how we practice justice that will enable African Americans to escape the polarity of race versus gender and ethnicity. When we African Americans live out our moral agency along the interrelated continua of ethical life and accept that they are members of a moral community of equals when relating to the homosexual community and the Hispanic/Latino/a community, justice will be practiced as what I as a womanist liberation ethicist call religious ethical mediation. Religious ethical mediation is an important way to practice justice in the twenty-first century because escaping polarities of relationship (race vs. gender; race vs. ethnicity) requires acknowledging the ways in our attitudes, values, and behaviors are ultimately grounded in either deception or moral courage. In fact, we should think of moral community as a synchronous cultural space that consists of interacting cultures of deception and moral courage. The primary values of the culture of deception are repression and silence. When we participate intentionally or complicitly in this culture, our morality is driven by these two complex, interrelated fears: (1) fear concerned with loss (loss of power, status, and/or privilege) and (2) fear concerned with devaluation (fear of being dismissed, objectified, and/or misperceived). When we African Americans are captive to the polarity of race versus gender and ethnicity, we are living into the culture of deception. It is precisely because the fears of loss and devaluation for African Americans are related to our status and dismissal as a minority group over and against other minority groups that earmarks our participation in this culture of deception. The primary values of a culture of moral courage are empathy and

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nonviolence. When we participate intentionally in this culture, our being and doing is about engendering—seeking and finding—relationship with others that supports the surviving and thriving of all of Creation. When we African Americans are escaping the polarity, we are living into the culture of moral courage because we confess and repent of our failure to respect the imago Dei in others and seek to initiate processes toward reconciliation. We acknowledge our complicity in the oppression of other social groups and work to become accountable to those others as members of a shared moral community; and our responsibility is lived solidarity—coalitions, boycotts, marches, etcetera—as such is required of us. Doing justice in a moral community that is a synchronous cultural space of deception and moral courage means that everyone and everyone’s group is engaged in processes of self-criticism and mutual criticism from the perspective of “justice for all.” Everyone and everyone’s group engages in intentional processes of living into tensions (tensions of ambiguity, complexity, perplexity, fear and/or ignorance of the other)—tensions of conflict—in ways that those tensions become opportunities for creative moral responses and agency to emerge. In other words, we must live creatively into the tensions of diversity and pluralism—between rejection and invitation, between exclusivity and inclusivity, so as to participate in the expansion and transformation of moral community into a community of equals. Justice (corrective, compensatory, [re]distributive) is thus practiced as a ministry of reconciliation that is transformative mediation. Transformative mediation sees tensions/conflicts as opportunities for moral growth. Empathy is a normative virtue and social value of transformative mediation. This is the case because empathy as a virtue requires each member of a social group to open herself or himself to each other for the purpose of seeing from the other’s point of view, intellectually and imaginatively. Empathy as a social good assumes diversity and plurality as a context in which multiple realities and interpretations of what counts as truth are acknowledged and respected. Justice centered in this twofold understanding of empathy creates moral community that has a communitarian norm that does not seek reconciliation as an end but as a process. Reconciliation as process means that we Christian people of faith understand that being created in the image of God and re-created in Christ as new creation, to live as a moral community, is about living in relationship with others as differently embodied sociohistoric selves who must “live into the tensions” that living in relationship with one another’s differences entails. Escaping the polarity of race versus gender and ethnicity will not be accomplished once and for all, but this will require being intentionally committed to God’s justice as an open-ended (everflowing) practice of mediating our tensions.

Response to Marcia Riggs Michelle A. Gonzalez

It is with delight that I read the first opening lines of Marcia Riggs’s chapter calling for an emphasis on justice for all who suffer at the hands of white supremacist oppression and a need for the African American community to be more attentive to the heterosexism and xenophobia that plagues them and this nation at large. Her critique of the privileging of race is one I agree with wholeheartedly. If I was speaking of my own community, Latino/as, I would wholeheartedly agree on the need to foreground the heterosexism in our communities. Unsurprisingly, I would call my Latino/a hermanas and hermanos to turn their eyes toward racism, and not focus exclusively on ethnic prejudice and xenophobia. Yet this is not a contest. The goal, as Riggs thoughtfully elaborates, is to have an inclusive analysis of oppression. As the title of her chapter clearly states, we must escape the polarity of “race versus gender versus ethnicity.” Riggs’s call for the African American community to relinquish its status as the most “beleaguered minority” in the United States resonates with me strongly. This is not due to the characterization; it is due to the overall sense of competitiveness and divisiveness it promotes among minority groups in the United States. The false ethical dilemma of “loyalty to the race” versus “cooptation by white racist oppression” is one I know quite well. This is often waged, in different guises, to Latina feminists who are accused of selling out their communities or trying to contaminate Latino/a culture with Anglo feminism. A fundamental dimension of the problematic of the race versus ethnicity divide is that when considering the Latino/a and African American com49

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munities we are dealing with communities that are far more complex that these simple categorizations provide. Latino/a or Hispanic is an ethnic designator that has much more to do with country of origin and culture than race. Latino/as after all, constitute a variety of races: whether it is the brown Guatemalan, the Chinese Cuban, or the black Puerto Rican. What unites the Latino/a community here in the United States is a false sense of unity that is often not reflected in their Latin American and Caribbean homelands. This constructed sense of the Latino/a community here in the United States is based on a colonial Spanish legacy and the contemporary sociopolitico-cultural context that groups us together. Unlike the African American community, where race has been a historic unifying factor, Latino/as do not have a shared issue or history surrounding one pivotal dimension of one’s identity. Even the issue of immigration, one that has become in many ways the “brown issue” of recent history, is one where great variance among Latino/as exists. We only have to look at the three largest Latino/a populations in the United States. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens; therefore the issue of immigration is null and void for their particular relationship to the mainland. Cuban Americans have the benefit of the “dry land” immigration policy that allows them to remain in the United States if they touch dry land. For Mexican Americans, however, the issue of immigration is central. Similarly there is great variance among these communities on the issue of immigration, particularly illegal immigration and how it should be addressed. The African American community does not escape the complexity of identity politics. Often in the United States, African American and black are used interchangeably. However, they are not interchangeable. I would argue that while race historically has united the African American community, it is, in fact, a cultural category. The racial category of black encompasses communities in the United States far broader than the African American community. Here in Miami, I live minutes from Coconut Grove, a historic Bahamian black community. There are Jamaican American and (shockingly to some) even Latino/a blacks. Little Haiti reminds us of the strong Haitian American communities in Miami and the New York area. None of the groups I have listed self-identify as African American. However, many of them do identify as black. For the scholar of religion this poses an interesting question when one examines the overwhelming predominance of black Protestant Christianity with black and womanist theologies. With the consideration of Latino/a and Haitian blacks, Roman Catholicism becomes a significant player on the black ecclesial scene. As Riggs thoughtfully highlights, part of what divides us as minority groups is that sense that we are all fighting for the same small piece of the pie, competing for jobs, resources, grants, and our general community’s agendas. We have the impression that if we turn our attention away from



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“our issues,” “our communities,” and “our publications,” they will come in and take the limelight away from us. Ultimately we do not see each other as colleagues but as competitors. Until we undermine this paradigm we will never have authentic dialogue, coalition work, and solidarity. I would add another dimension to the race-ethnicity divide, one that often remains a great unspoken when African Americans and Latino/as attempt to work together and learn from each other’s histories. This is the issue of language. We live in a country that is saturated by a monolingualism that I, to this day, find shocking. Latino/as overwhelming refusal to accept this culture of monolingualism is one which creates an unintentional divide between us and other minority groups. Part of true dialogue, solidarity, and coalitional work is knowing the histories and stories of those with whom you are attempting to work with. Among academic circles this can become problematic when many of the resources and dialogue partners Latino/as engage still remain only accessible in Spanish. It is my hope that future work among African American and Latino/a scholars will address head-on this monolingualism and its consequences. The deprioritization of gender is one that continues to plague both our communities. Whether it is the concrete heterosexism that pervades our communities or among academic circles, a sidelining of feminist projects as marginal to our libratory work, Latino/as and African Americans both bear the weight of seeing gender analysis as an “add on” to the central work of ethnic prejudice and racism. Riggs highlights the heavy emphasis on Scripture and what she describes as “historical amnesia” as two dimensions that informs the heterosexism of African American communities. Though historically Roman Catholic, the new surge in Protestant, particularly Pentecostal, Latino/as is one that has changes the value and power of Scripture within our communities. Riggs’s reflection on our “embodied imago Dei” is a fundamental theological starting point. Latino/as and African Americans accept too readily the constructed categories of identity that function in dominant U.S. culture, drawing a line in the sand between “us” and “them.” This polarity not only weakens our ability to have authentic solidarity; it reinforces the dominant white supremacist, monolingual power structure. Her emphasis on relationships resonates with me, for in my own research exploring the imago Dei in light of the Trinity, and thus, in light of relationships that constitute the diversity amidst the unity of the Godhead, is a powerful theological notion. This emphasis on relationship as constitutive of the image of God that dwells within all of us yet is expressed by our historical particularity is one with a rich history in traditional Christian theologies and more recently in feminist theologies. I would like to conclude with Riggs’s reflection on fear. Minority populations live in the constant state a fear that any attention that is not focused entirely upon us and those dimensions of our community that we have

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deemed as central will ultimately lead to their devaluation. We live in fear that if the spotlight will be taken away from our particularity that we will disappear. This impedes true openness and dialogue with other communities. It also blinds us to the intricate web of oppression that binds us all together, in which gender, race, and ethnicity are all interrelated players. It is my belief, however, that this fear is slowly subsiding, at least among academic circles. Engaging scholars such as Riggs, learning the stories of our African American hermanos and hermanas, and seeing them not as a threat but as colleagues will slowly turn the tide from the divisiveness the dominant structure has imposed on us, and that sadly for too long we have accepted.

3 Global Hegemonic Power, Democracy, and the Theological Praxis of the Subaltern Multitude Eleazar S. Fernández

Whatever its current expression, the exercise of hegemonic power materializes in the violence it unleashes on the lives of the diasporized, racialized, and genderized communities or, if I may use an embracing term, subaltern communities. Even if subaltern communities cannot articulate clearly the nature of hegemonic power, they experience this mighty power viscerally because they have to wrestle with it every day of their lives. They have learned to be politically savvy in the face of this power if they are to thrive or even merely survive. More than developing strategies and tactics of survival, subaltern communities have developed strategies and tactics of transformative praxis. One expression, especially as it has found articulation in the works of Third-World U.S. feminists, comes in the form of “differential” and “oppositional” modes of consciousness.1 Highly critical of ideologies that perpetuate old or support new hegemonies and aware of power’s ability to shift and maneuver, U.S. feminists of color view differential-oppositional consciousness more as “tactic” rather than “strategy.” Differential-oppositional tactics fit well with what Chela Sandoval calls “tactical subjectivity”: a subjectivity that denies that any one ideology has “the final answer.” It has the “capacity to de-center and re-center” as well as to move and adapt vis-à-vis shifting currents of power, especially in relation to the power of the current globalizing sovereignty.2 Differential-oppositional praxis appears in current black, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American theologies and receives distinct articulation in womanist, mestizaje/mulatez, queer, diaspora, and postcolonial theologies. I celebrate the flourishing of theologies that articulate what Susan 53

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Hawthorne calls a “diversity matrix,” but the differential-oppositional needs to be accompanied by another significant step: coalitional praxis.3 For this reason, I recast and name the concept differential-oppositionalcoalitional praxis of transformation. The differential-oppositional has to be coalitional to match the power of the current globalizing sovereignty, a power that stands in opposition to democracy and to the aspirations of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as the “multitude.”4 While a significant step, coalitional praxis is also insufficient. Commitment to greater well-being demands more than tactics: it calls for solidarity, a solidarity guided by the moral commitment to seek the well-being of all. To pursue this project I need not only explain differential coalitionaltransformative praxis and its bearers—the politicized and organized multitude, but also take account of the new globalizing power. What is the new globalizing power? What is the transformational praxis of the multitude? What is the common that can rally and unite the many differences? What follows is my attempt to respond to the above questions by articulating a public theology that adopts the spirit and form of differential-coalitional praxis of transformation to help birth, in the words of subcomandante Marcos, “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” (a world in which there is room for many worlds). This world resonates with the vision—Otro Mundo Zurdo (the left-handed world)—of subaltern women of color in which different affinities have a place.5 I want to advance a theology that helps midwife the emergence of alternative democratic public spaces, spaces that allow all in our highly interconnected and fragile world to flourish. Under the current global order, however, the security and flourishing of all diverse forms of life, including human communities, are not possible: so a differential-coalitional praxis of transformation needs to be performed.

The Current Globalizing Sovereignty: What Is It? Understanding the nature and character of the current globalizing sovereignty is crucial if we are to articulate a public theology that is commensurate to our current context and its challenges. If we fail to understand the nature and character of this hegemonic power, there is no doubt that our theological praxis would be outsmarted and outflanked even before it steps into the public arena. How shall we describe and name the global hegemonic power that shapes our day-to-day lives? Shall we call it, following Walter Wink, the Domination System?6 What is its nature and what are its basic features? How is power understood and practiced in the theory of the Domination System? The most powerful, sophisticated, seductive, devious, and destructive embodiment of global power today is what Wink calls the Domination



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System. The Domination System can be described as a total system on multiple counts: length, depth, and height. Its length is global; its depth reaches the human psyche and self-worth; and its height extends to the heavens, invading the abode of the gods and the spiritual domain. The best way to describe the workings of power in the Domination System is that of a “network.” The Domination System is made up of and is widely dispersed through a “network of Powers.”7 This “network of Powers” (the Domination System) serves to promote “unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all.”8 Crucial to the perpetuation of this “network of Powers” is its myth and spirituality. What may appear as secular institutions (e.g., transnational corporations, global political-economic system, etc.) have, at their core, a religion or spirituality. Through the power of story that is told often enough through various institutions (home, school, church, and the wider community) and various media such as books, news, and various forms of entertainment, the tale of the Domination System ceases to be a tale and gets accepted as the reality itself even if it is destroying people’s lives. “No matter what shape the dominating system of the moment might take (from the ancient Near Eastern states to Pax Romana to feudal Europe to communist state capitalism to modern market capitalism),” Wink goes on to say, “the basic structure has persisted now for at least five thousand years, since the great conquest states of Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.E.”9 Even as its character has changed through the millennia, we can affirm with Wink that the most current expression of the global sovereignty is not entirely novel. However, while we can say that continuities exist, it may be that the basic structure is also evolving. I am of the opinion that a significant shift is altering the basic constitution and appearance of the sovereign power. Wink provides a worthy starting point in talking about power as “network,” but we need to move further, and it is here that Hardt and Negri’s account is useful because it matches well with the current manifestation of the new globalizing power—empire.10 Empire, in the way Hardt and Negri have articulated it, is the current globalizing power. Unlike modern imperialist nation-states, empire is nonnation-state specific: it embraces nation-states and works with nationstates (and other transnational bodies), but it transcends nation-states. It works with imperialist nation-states, such as the United States, but empire’s interest is not completely identical with imperialist nation-states. In many cases, empire undermines the sovereignty of nation-states. “The contemporary global order,” Hardt and Negri contend, “can no longer be understood adequately in terms of imperialism as it was practiced by the modern powers, based primarily on the sovereignty of the nation-state extended over foreign territory. Instead,” they argue, “a ‘network power,’ a new form

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of sovereignty, is now emerging, and it includes its primary elements, or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers.”11 It may be the case, as pointed out by Charles Amjad Ali and Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, that “every empire, whatever its raison d’être, is fundamentally an articulation of power,” but the “articulation” of power is not always the same.12 Empire articulates its hegemonic power in terms of “network power.” Network power, for Hardt and Negri, “signals a passage from a centralized and bounded form of power based in nation-states, to the network form of Empire, which include not only the dominant state powers but also supranational administrations, business interests, and numerous non-governmental organizations.”13 Empire’s network power is not limited to control and management of territories and population; it includes control and management of human nature and social life in its entirety. In this sense, empire is a paradigmatic form of biopower.14 Empire’s biopower entails a shift from that of a “disciplinary society” well articulated by Michel Foucault in which the social command is carried out through a diffuse network of dispositifs (apparatuses) to one of “society of control.” In society of control there is not simply the intensification of disciplinary apparatuses, but the “control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks.”15 The results of biopower include docile bodies, disciplined workforce, and self-policed citizens who are well suited for the capitalist mode of production. We may say that the grip of sovereign global biopower is pervasive and thorough, but it is hardly total. The dominating and homogenizing work of empire has generated conflicts and counterglobalist resistance.16 Groups resisting empire are, in many ways, fluid, mobile, and networked transnationally. They involve nonnation-state agents. If the current globalizing sovereignty is network power, the counterpowers are also networked and they operate within and beyond nation-states. As it has been said, it takes a network to fight a network; hence, network conflicts are appropriately called “netwars.”17 With serious and increasing threats coming from nonstate agents whose network blurs the divisions between inside and outside and between national and foreign policy, we can observe a shift in the way nation-states take account of the threats. It is a shift from the framework of national “defense” to one of “security.”18 When security becomes the overriding framework, war is not the exception but a permanent reality (different from Clausewitz’s claim, which still considers war a limited state of exception which is waged between nation-states).19 Moreover, when security is the framework the line between military and police interventions is blurred. The diminishing of civil liberties and increasing rates of incarceration are manifestations of the shift to security framework in response to a constant state of war, which in itself is a creation of empire.



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The Subaltern Multitude vis-à-vis the Global Hegemonic Power The current global hegemonic power must be opposed by diverse sectors of the global civil society and challenged on multiple fronts. Counterpoised to the global hegemonic power and rhizomatically spread is the “multitude,” which Hardt and Negri identify as “the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone.”20 In contrast to the undifferentiated unity of people, the multitude is composed of singularities that are capable of acting not on the basis of sameness but on what the various singularities share in common.21 If the global network power homogenizes and violates difference, either by elimination or by absorption, the way of the multitude and its praxis of transformation affirm differences as constitutive in the construction of the common. It is true that fragmentation is everywhere, but there is no conceptual or actual contradiction between singularity and commonality. The global multitude—the multitude that can undermine the new global sovereignty—is “an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce.”22 We may continue to speak of the multitude in a general way, but there are particular singularities within the great multitude that I would like to highlight that fall under the name of the subaltern multitude. The subaltern multitude, particularly the diasporized, racialized, and genderized, plays a critical role within the larger multitude vis-à-vis global hegemonic power. The subaltern multitude’s experience under the homogenizing and fragmentizing global power has given birth to ways of seeing the world and to some forms of transformative praxis. Homi Bhaba notes that “the range of contemporary critical theories suggest that it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.”23 Gloria Anzaldúa speaks of la facultad that the subaltern develops, that is the “capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities . . . (when not brutalized into insensitivity).”24 I privilege the subaltern standpoint here not because it is an “innocent standpoint,” but because it calls for the recognition of “deadly innocence” or “skeletons in the closets,” which is an indispensable component for any transformative discourse.25 In Donna Haraway’s words, the subaltern standpoint and insights are “preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge. They are savvy to modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts—ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively.”26 The sociopolitical location of subaltern multitude provides a fertile soil for the birthing of alternative forms of consciousness and alternative forms

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of knowledge that can challenge the hegemony of the globalizing sovereignty. This does not mean that the subaltern multitude will necessarily and always think critically. If this were the case, there would be no point in doing conscientizacão.27 A critical standpoint is not automatically given by social location; it is an “achieved standpoint.”28 Nonetheless, the sociopolitical location of the subaltern multitude provides the right atmosphere for the emergence of alternative knowledge vis-à-vis hegemonic knowledge. The working poor, for example, live in the location of contradiction: they both belong to capital and to the working multitude. The migrants, a special category of the poor, provide an example of being both productive and at the same time bearers of critical consciousness. They invest the entire society with their “subversive desires.”29 The subaltern multitude’s experience of multiple oppression, contradiction, and dissonance has generated ways of seeing and knowing that is often hidden from the sight of those who are dominant. The dominant only sees one form of knowledge—the dominant form of knowledge or the universalized dominant culture and it is not even aware of its own view and location. The dominant form of knowledge is one that has forgotten its own location: it thinks that it views reality from everywhere (sub specie aeternitatis), which is tantamount to viewing reality from nowhere. “Dominant culture knowledge” suffers from what Hawthorne calls the syndrome of “Dominant Culture Stupidities,” which is characterized by “tunnel vision, one-eyed seeing and narrow worldview.”30 Unlike the dominant group, the subaltern multitude has access to multiple realities and to forms of knowledge that are useful not only for their survival, but also for imagining a different and better tomorrow. Because they experience multiple forms of oppression as well as a sense of multiple belongings, subaltern communities are bearers of alternative consciousness in general as well as differential-oppositional consciousness in particular. The differential names and emphasizes the distinctive identity and experience of particular groups or communities. In the life of the subaltern multitude the differential generally corresponds with forms of oppression such as class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity. If the areas of pain are identical with the areas of difference, then the difference matters. It is not surprising that subaltern activists refuse to submit to discourses on sameness, including those done in the name of common cause or universal sisterhood. However, embracing difference is not an end or objective itself, says Angela Davis, but “a point of departure and a method for transforming repressive and antidemocratic social circumstances.”31 In other words, difference, while ontologically connected to one’s identity, can be employed and deployed as a method to undermine, fragment, and weaken hegemonies and to create global democracy. As a “tactic” rather than a “strategy,” differential method is fluid, mobile, and can shift, to use the words of



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Anzaldúa, “between and among” ideological positionings.32 This emphasis on the differential and the oppositional may make us miss another dimension: the coalitional. As tactical positionings, differential-oppositional consciousness need not lead to antagonistic polarization among singularities in the subaltern multitude. Differences as tactical positionings may even function, as Audre Lorde puts it, as “a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity spark like a dialectic.”33

The Subaltern Religious Multitude and its Differential-Oppositional-Coalitional Theological Praxis The subaltern religious multitude is one of the singularities that make up the multitude and, like other subaltern multitude, has developed consciousness and ways of knowing that are alternative to imperial discourse. As a singularity, it has developed a distinct “immaterial” product called theology, particularly a theology that challenges hegemonic practices. While theology is “immaterial” (intellectual or symbolic labor) the producers of theology are not: they are laborers in the context of the domination of global capital.34 In the Christian tradition, subaltern theology has found expressions in the works of black, womanist, Hispanic, mestizaje/mulatez, and liberation-postcolonial theologians. In spite of their differences, one of the central and enduring commitments of subaltern theologies is the preferential option for the poor. More than anything else, the option is made because it is the option of the One who was crucified with the people. The heart of the Christian understanding of the incarnation is not that God has chosen Jesus Christ as the exclusive vessel, but that God is among us and, even more, has taken the shape of the despised and the downtrodden.35 Following this central commitment, subaltern theologies continue to articulate the option for the poor not because they are morally better than the wealthy but because they are dying before their time; that their situation is not right and it is not all right. Yes, it is not all right, and subjugated subaltern communities are longing for the new and the not yet. There is no doubt that the poor have internalized colonization, but their laments are expressions of their openness to a new social arrangement. While the central commitment of the option for the poor has been reaffirmed, the notion of the poor has been problematized and modified to reflect the manifold singularities that constitute the poor. Contrasting postcolonial discourse with liberation hermeneutics, R. S. Sugirtharajah contends that “postcolonialism does not perceive the other [particularly the poor] as a homogeneous category but acknowledges multiple identi-

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ties based upon class, sex, ethnicity and gender.”36 The reliance of the first generation Latin American liberation theologians on dependency theory has resulted, according to the “next generation” of Latin American liberation theologians, in the failure to “to grasp fully the situation of colonial heterogeneity lying underneath the ‘poor’ it sought to address.”37 The poor, Ivan Petrella contends, is “not a unified and homogenous revolutionary subject,” a homogenous special class that will drive history forward, but is instead composed of individuals from various walks of life who are struggling for a more dignified life.38 The failure of the first generation of liberation theologians to see the heterogeneity of the poor has undoubtedly suppressed voices of oppressed and exploited groups within the fold of the subaltern, such as women and people of different sexualities. The consequences of such homogenization of the poor are visible in the failure of liberation theologians to discern the very oppression in which they have participated. The assertion of a paradigmatic “ism” has been costly. As Gustavo Gutiérrez admitted, “One of our social lies has been the claim that there is no racism in Latin America.”39 Similarly, James Cone concurs, “My strong negative reaction to the racism of many white socialists in the United States distorted my vision and prevented me from analyzing racism in relation to capitalism.”40 Feminism followed suit and it, too, for some time, reduced other systemic forms of oppression to peripheral status while brandishing sexism as the paradigmatic form of oppression. Because it considered sexism as the paradigmatic oppression, it also leveled the experience of sexism of all women regardless of their class and race. This privileging of sexism, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “erases the complex and often contradictory positionings of the subject.”41 The idea that sexism is the most fundamental form of oppression that unites all women does not take into serious consideration the fact that sexism is experienced differently by women of the Third World or the global South. The multiple and differentiated theological accounts expressed by subaltern theologians in recent years reveal an awareness that the subaltern is made up of singularities; its experience of oppression cannot be reduced to sameness under the general rubric of the poor. The differential and oppositional theological expressions are, however, finding ways to be coalitional. Dialogical-coalitional engagement among subaltern theologians has increased in the past few years. But, as I said in the beginning of this essay, the term “coalitional” sounds too limited to the tactical. Commitment to the public good or greater well-being demands more than tactical moves: it needs moral grounding—the affirmation of the flourishing of all. In general, this means solidarity with all beings, which, in the context of its violation, means preferential solidarity with those who are dying before their time.



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Naming the Common and Producing the Common: Finding Connections Crucial for building coalitions is articulating the “common” and seeking connections. While this is well recognized by various social and political movements, I say that the character of coalition is interpreted differently in relation to the way the common is understood. The common is often understood in a general, generic, and essentialist terms. It is also commonly associated with the traditional notion of community or public. In legal terms the common is a public domain, owned and managed by the state. This is not what is meant by common here. The common (a project of the multitude), as Hardt and Negri contend, marks a passage from Res-publica to Res-communis.42 The common is not an entity controlled by the state but something that is named and produced through the communication and collaboration of the singularities that comprise the multitude. It is not essentially communitarian. The common is an expression of an “ethical notion of performativity”: it is a performance of the singularities in their acts of naming the common that they share (they live on the same earth, struggle under capitalist regimes of production and exploitation, and share hopes for a better life) and, in their communication, also produce the common. The common they produce is also productive: the common produces the common. This dual understanding of the common—that which is produced as well as that which produces—is a critical key to understanding economic and social activity.43 What is the common that exists and that which we must produce? Where must we focus our gaze to start building the common? Where do differences intersect and how shall we discern the common in the intersection? One way to interpret the intersecting of differences is to recognize the various forms of oppression of subaltern communities as inseparable even as they are distinct. This is what I have argued elsewhere as the interlocking structure of systemic evils.44 It means that the configuration of one’s experience of a specific form of oppression and exploitation is influenced by the extent to which one is affected by other forms of oppression. This is a reminder that while differences exist, interconnections also exist. Lines of differences are present (e.g., class lines, racial lines, and gender lines), and it is “between” such lines, says Cherríe Moraga that “the truth of our connection lies.”45 When lines of differences connect, attract and relate, the common is in the process of production and coalitional praxis is in the process of being born. The interlocking structure of systemic oppression calls for multiple approaches of action. “We must work with many fronts at once,” says Charlotte Bunch, because people are oppressed by multidimensions of issues in different degrees. “While we may say at any given moment that one issue

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is particularly crucial, it is important that work be done on other aspects of the changes we need at the same time,” Bunch continues.46 Aida Hortado states a similar point: “all forms of oppression afflicting . . . groups have to be taken into account simultaneously.”47 In response to white feminists’ homogenizing discourse regarding generic women’s experience, subaltern women of color’s discourse on difference points to the necessity of dealing with forms of oppression that are particular to certain groups. Instead of conceptualizing gender subordination from the sole point of women’s experience, which homogenizes and imperializes, Hortado, along with Patricia Zavella and other feminists of color, proposes that “social structure should be the analytical focus, which allows for profound differences among women.”48 This insight is useful not only in women’s discourse but also in negotiating, articulating, and advancing coalitional politics for global democracy. The massive protest in Seattle against the World Trade Organization gives us a taste of the common that the multitude can produce amidst distinctive differences. We know, of course, that Hardt and Negri’s amorphous and defuse multitude could not perform such massive protest. We should not have any illusion of that. The historic protest happened because of the organizing and mobilizing work that turned the multitude into a social movement. Social movements representing different constituencies “converged” in Seattle in 1999 with their cahiers de doléances (list of grievances) and demands. Groups that appeared to have contradictory interests, such as the environmentalist and trade unionists, supported each other. On first sight, the list of grievances looks incoherent. But that is not exactly the case when we look at it closer. It was not simply a list of cacophonous voices; it was a chorus. The chorus of the Seattle multitude was directed against a global system that has caused so much misery: poverty, labor exploitation, unfair trade relation, ecological degradation, human rights violation, war, repression, human trafficking, etcetera. “At the WTO demonstration in Seattle,” says bioethicist Michael W. Fox, “I felt the dawning of a global ethical society. Arising from the ashes of corporate hegemony and government complicity and corruption, it links the rights and interests of all beings, human and nonhuman, with a healthy environment, a healthy economy, and healthy communities.”49

Subaltern Particularity and Public Vision Naming and producing the common through coalitional politics among singularities that constitute the multitude is critical for advancing global democracy. This challenges the subaltern religious multitude, particularly its immaterial product, theology. Subaltern theologies live in a habitat in



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which their various publics (church, academy, and civil society) do not have a good track record of dialogue, cooperation, and integration. It is ironic that though many of the theological seminaries are church-owned or related, the pull of the academic guild has in many ways alienated the theological scholar/teacher from the church. Postcolonial theologians, for example, have written postcolonial theologies without a church.50 Criticisms have also been raised against the disciplinary silos and curricular fragmentation that have plagued the academy in general and theological education in particular. Academicians, including theologians, seem content with a mutual agreement, a “hands off” principle, among fields of discipline. Unfortunately this hands-off agreement breeds indifference to general concerns affecting theological education and it fails to take account of integration.51 If disciplinary silos and fragmentation are some of the ailments of theological education, why would subaltern theologies be an exception? Are subaltern theologies’ discourse on difference, hybridity and identity being outflanked by the fragmenting and hybridizing work of the postmodern empire? Are subaltern postcolonial theologies of hybridity and difference “pushing against an open door”?52 Maybe the focus on identity politics has ghettoized and rendered subaltern theologies irrelevant in the public square? Although targeted at Latino/a theologies, Benjamin Valentín’s warning of the danger of liberation-differential theologies falling into fragmentation and public irrelevance needs serious attention by all subaltern theologians. Valentín is bold in his criticism that leftist discourse, contrary to the image it has been presenting as revolutionary, is “oppositional” at best—it only partially responds to social justice—and at its worst serves to eclipse broad-based articulation of justice and coalitional praxis.53 He does not end, however, with indictment, but issues a call: “The demands for justice in our times call for discourses that can move beyond the theoretization of difference to the theoretization of the interstitial spaces of interaction, interconnection, and exchange that may exist between our different aspects of identity and struggle.”54 I interpret Valentín’s call to move beyond theoretization of difference not as abandoning difference but building on the gains and insights of identity and cultural struggles. Moving beyond theoretization of difference requires taking account of difference seriously without falling into fragmentation. Knowing the cunning of the postmodern global power, subaltern theological reflections on difference and hybridity must resist becoming mere fragments, pieces that mirror imperial thinking and are incapable of talking back against empire. For subaltern theologies to talk back against empire they must cease from being fragments and become integridades (whole, different, one who stands independently and speaks truth to power—íntegro), as Marcella María Althaus-Reid puts it.55 I read Althaus-Reid’s integridades

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as singularities. Integridades are not different from the norm imposed by imperial discourse but are singularities that comprise the multitude— singularities that communicate. Moreover, theorizing beyond difference to respond to the call of justice does not mean abandonment of difference but of placing the struggle for positive cultural identity in the face of its denigration as a struggle for social justice. What is crucial is how we see cultural and identity struggle in relation to the whole matter of justice or right relation. “Particularizing predicates” (e.g., race, gender, class, and religion) are not hindrances; they are critical in understanding social justice. They broaden our notion of social justice; they force us to examine what we silence in our rush to claim sameness or the universal.56 How shall we embrace particularizing predicates—these ontological and epistemological references of the differential—without falling into the yawning abyss of fragmentation and political ghettoism? While I adopt the term “particularizing predicates” here, I would like to problematize it. The term is overloaded with essentialist and essentializing premises. It presupposes a stable subject in which predicates are accidental to the subject. It presupposes that we can detach the predicates from the subject and the subject would still be a subject—a real flesh-and-blood human being. Contrary to this essentialist-universalist notion of subject, I view particularizing predicates as constitutive of the subject. There is no subject without predicates. Predicates are ontological or, to put it differently, they are “ontological predicates.” Predicates make the individual or community truly singular, and they matter. Because predicates matter constitutively, they matter not simply as a prelude to but as constitutive of the new and better tomorrow. In other words in the new tomorrow predicates are not eliminated—they flourish. To appropriate an interfaith analogy, I concur with Raimundo Panikkar: “It is not simply that there are different ways leading to the peak, but that the summit itself would collapse if all the paths disappeared. The peak is in a certain sense the result of the slopes leading to it.”57 If I may pursue, why should we assume that there is only one peak? Given this understanding, I see the controversy between universalist/ essentialist and communitarian/particularist as futile. I may not say dogmatically with the particularist that “identity is destiny,” which makes identity a prison cell, but I affirm that identity is constitutive of destiny.58 Identities/particularities/singularities matter. As constitutive of the subject, affirmation of predicates is logically ontological, and this ontological claim demands moral recognition. But predicates also function, if I may use the term, as “tactical predicates” (tactical subjectivity). They are tactically useful to pry open various manifestations of hegemony. Tactical predicates/ tactical differentials, however, need to be connected to the ontological and



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moral claims of predicates, particularly predicates of pain, if the tactical is to have moral reference and if the tactical is not to go down the slippery slope of piecemeal political pragmatism. If affirming particularizing predicates as constitutive of the subject is critical in providing moral reference to the tactical use of predicates/differences, it is equally critical that any assertion of the particular or the local be seen in relation to the whole. Particularism or localism is tactically useful in countering hegemonic forces, but it can easily be co-opted and twisted by groups that are determined to advance and protect their self-interest. As a corrective we must see the needs of the local in relation to the wider social well-being, especially in light of the needs of those who are dying before their time. Ecologists offer some insights that are useful in talking about the relationship between the local and the wider society. While we must recognize that something/someone has value not simply for its usefulness to us, I resonate with Holmes Rolston III that the discourse on intrinsic value is problematic in a holistic web of life because of its tendency to forget that something is “good” only “in a role, in a whole.”59 In relation to the larger body politic, we need to assert that the well-being of the local must be seen in relation to the global and vice versa. The aspirations of the local are possible only in relation to the global. Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a way of interpreting the local/particular in relation to the global in his concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism.”60 Rootedness or connection to the particular is not antithetical to cosmopolitan vision. In fact, recognition of our rootedness in specific geographies and cultures and nexuses of relations is a critical point for a credible account of cosmopolitanism. We can say that we are all citizens of the earth, but that does not take seriously into account our specific locations, much less address the power differentials between inhabitants of the global South and the global North. Once rootedness is accepted, the critical point is whether our rootedness is self-enclosed or porous to the presence and claims of other human beings in their particularities. Rooted cosmopolitanism seeks to honor these particularities and refuses to sacrifice differences for the sake of sameness or the universal. As the cosmopolitan person knows, differences are our social reality and they have much to teach us. Since differences are present and cannot be wished away, cosmopolitanism is at heart a matter of conversation and a challenge and less about the name of a solution, says Appiah.61 The entry points of conversations do not need to be universal, but what the particular people who are engaged in conversation share in common. Once they have found enough to share, “there is the further possibility that [they] will be able to enjoy discovering things [they] do not yet share.”62 The conversation need not lead to an agreement or consensus, but it opens the possibility of deepening the relationship and the exploration of common concerns.

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Rootedness to the local or the affirmation of the particular is not identical with exclusivity. It is our entry to seeing our connections—an entry to the development of a cosmopolitan outlook. For example, the migrants or diaspora subalterns, particulars as they are, do not only infect society with their “subversive desires,” they are also bearers of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, rightly notes Appiah, is an invention of diasporastrangers-contaminators.63 It took me more than a decade to understand that diaspora—though an experience of uprooting—is not simply about being rootless; it is also about finding roots wherever our journeys take us. As a person in diaspora I will forever cherish my home “out there” (Philippines), but I also have found a home in the journey, and I have found a home in other lands. In making the United States my home I see not only its imperialistic foreign policy but also the real flesh-and-blood people who are starving, bleeding, crying, and celebrating life. I oppose the war in Iraq, but I also cry when a U.S. soldier is killed, and I am outraged at a government that sends soldiers to war but does not take care of them when they return home maimed and/or psychologically devastated as veterans. This is what it means, I believe, to have a diaspora heart that has made every place a home—a heart that has become cosmopolitan.

Engaging the Public and Creating Counterpublics The vision of the subaltern multitude of a world in which there is room for many worlds needs to find a place in the wider public square if it is to contribute to the shaping of the public life. The official public sphere is, however, elitist and exclusionary: it favors the wealthy and denies participation of a significant number of groups such as the poor majority, the common laborers, the women and children, migrants or noncitizens, etcetera. The notion of public discourse based on the force of better argument only serves to hide the advantage of those who have educational credentials and economic and political means. It is naïve to simply start a dialogue or conversation as if sociopolitical inequalities do not exist. The official dominant global public as we know it is controlled by powerful economic and political interests that are anti-multitude. This is certainly the case with the World Trade Organization and the G8. The official public sphere does not only exclude subaltern voices, it is also exclusionary or inhospitable to religious voices, including the theological production of the subaltern multitude. Although there is a growing recognition of the positive role that religion plays in society, many subaltern progressive movements do not readily welcome the contributions of religious communities except for tactical purposes, such as “renting a clerical collar” or clothing mobilization work with “moral garments” or providing



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it with a “passport of morality.”64 This should not, however, be a reason to give up working with progressive movements and to give up participation in the wider public sphere. The subaltern theological multitude’s project to articulate a public theology is a step in the right direction. Given multiple exclusions and multiple inequalities, it is important that the official public must be challenged. But more than that, subaltern theological communities must create multiple counterpublics. The struggle is not simply for inclusion into the single official public, as if it were good in itself, but because multiple publics are necessary for participatory democracy.65 Any adequate theory of the public must allow for the multiplicity of publics, especially publics that have been sidelined and silenced by the larger public. These alternative publics are not meant to be “separatist, except periodically, for health,” says Alice Walker.66 Counterpublics provide a space for the subaltern multitude to regroup, reimagine, re-energize, and restrategize so as to engage and subvert the larger exclusionary public as well as to construct a new and better tomorrow. The vision of Otro Mundo Zurdo (the left-handed world) needs a counterpublic—a counterpublic to dream, subvert the status-quo and launched differential-oppositionalcoalitional praxis. Subaltern theological communities have much to share in the creation and nurturance of counterpublics—publics that have much to contribute to the formation of global democracy—more than what the secular public has realized or acknowledged. Otro Mundo es Posible. But it will not come by itself. It will come only through the well-coordinated conspiracy (breathing together) of multiple singularities that act in common. The theological labor and product of the theological subaltern multitude must become a public discourse and join the transformative labor of the organized and mobilized great multitude to resist empire and help midwife the birthing of another world, a global democracy.

Response to Eleazar S. Fernández: Otro(s) Mundo(s) Zurdo(s) María Teresa Dávila

Eleazar Fernández’s chapter confronts us with the basic question of how to construct “the common” or “public” in a world in which our public square and forums are, in essence, the exclusive terrain of the privileged perspectives of a few. Excluded from this common are the real lives of countless groups of marginalized subaltern groups whose very existence seems to defy commonly held notions of universalized principles of how to be human, how to be a person, in the new international order. Can we effectively counter this exclusivist notion of “the common” or “public” with constructions of a variety of “commons” that acknowledge and include the particularities of subaltern groups, not as decorative elements of a universal vision of humanity, but as constitutive of the pluriform construction of the good that considers plurality an ontological principle of the human? To be able to answer affirmatively to this question, Fernández suggests that we need to establish the democracy of the multitude. This depends on the possibility that subaltern groups can create “counterpublics,” voices rooted in particularity, especially those shaped by the experience of pain that can speak truth to the oppressive qualities of the common as established by the hegemony of the domination system. In turn, this is possible only when we allow for a “multiplicity of publics” that gives proper recognition to the variations and differences basic to human life in communities. A key insight offered into the process of creating the democracy of the multitude is the construction of reality through systems of knowledge by the center and the correction of knowledge that comes mainly from “the 68



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subaltern multitude’s experience of multiple oppression, contradiction and dissonance.”1 The hegemony of the domination system is sustained both through networks of power as well as networks of information. Both of these contribute to the construction of a totalizing and fragmenting reality. This then begs the question: “how do we construct the real?” On which sources do we rely to put us in touch with the most authentic forms of knowledge, avoiding the false, and ultimately violent, sense of having an all-encompassing comprehensive perception of reality? In an age when so many of our media outlets and sources of information are controlled by very few networks of production, beholden to the capitalist principle of the greatest profit for shareholders over and above a commitment to critical analysis and the dissemination of information generated by a plurality of sources, this becomes a critical question. Within Latin American liberation theology this is referred to as “honesty with the real” and it is one of the most fundamental shifts of a liberationist methodology. In seeking to address the questions of liberation and salvation within history churches and communities of faith are called to establish a new relationship with reality, one that is not dominated by the knowledge content spun by the domination system. In other words, the first liberating act that communities of faith must perform is questioning established networks of knowledge and privileging the knowledge, memories and histories rooted in the experiences of subaltern communities. In this sense, the quest for liberation begins as a task of epistemological suspicion and rebuilding. Fernández rightly asks us to challenge knowledge produced by the domination system(s) for the task of epistemological suspicion and rebuilding. For communities of faith whose location is within the center of the domination system, this is akin to solidarity. Solidarity defined as accompanying others in their suffering while at the same time contributing to their fight against oppression, silencing, victimization, and rape necessitates that we become incarnated in the world of the subaltern communities Fernández describes. Therefore, solidarity with the poor and oppressed, one of the basic pillars of the social teaching of many traditions, becomes impossible without proper grounding on the realities of the peoples we seek to accompany and whose suffering we are called to share. Knowledge becomes a matter of location, and location becomes a matter of where we choose to see and ultimately where we choose to love. Theologian Jon Sobrino puts it this way: Theologians must ask themselves with utter seriousness—without in any way preempting the answer—whether such poverty is not the greatest challenge confronting them as theologians, whether their most urgent theological task is to grapple with this reality, try to understand it, and save people from it. . . . It is an option whether to look at the truth of things or not.2

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While this quote and other examples from liberation theology suffer from the narrowness of vision pointed to by Fernández—the universalization of the experiences of marginality, suffering, silence, and poverty rather than admitting to the pluriform experiences of suffering among different groups of women, the indigenous, sexual minorities, and the environment—Sobrino explicitly grounds his theological enterprise on the question of knowledge and the construction of reality. In Sobrino’s view there exist only either theology done from the location of the oppressed or theology irrelevant to the oppressed. He continues, There is also the difficulty of not wanting to see the world as it is, for to look honestly at the sufferings of the world is at the same time to have to ask about their causes. Once we begin to grasp this world as the product of our own hands, we are overwhelmed with questions, uncertainties, self-incriminations. The sin of the world is unmasked, together with the lies and false values by which we seek to veil this sin.3

By resorting to postcolonial theory and the work of contemporary identity theorists Fernández is able to point out in greater detail the often causal link between false knowledge, or the construction of a false sense of universality applied to knowledge produced by the centers of the domination system(s) and the real material suffering of those who do not accommodate to the notion of human being defined by dominant networks of knowledge and power. The task of epistemological questioning and reconstruction then becomes an anthropological task, questioning what is considered to be the very essence of being human in the modern world, by the multiplicity of experiences presented by subaltern communities.4 The “counterpublic” and the multiple publics that give rise to the democracy of the multitude require the unmasking of sometimes centuries of oppressive relationships among the human family, relationships in which those at the center of the domination system(s) will find ourselves incriminated. The methodology of the praxis of building coalitions across and through differences and the theological praxis of transformation will ultimately require sacrifice from those of us who perceive a threat to our established notions of the real and the human. This sacrifice will entail encountering the stories that more accurately reflect the everyday experiences of the human family in all its variations, lo cotidiano. The praxis of knowing the other—someone whose reality seems distant to ours but whose humanity and destiny we share—is an act of love. A love that seeks to join in acts of liberation must boldly practice the epistemology of the subaltern multitude. Love, Christian love, will require that we make a choice of perspective(s). Fernández reminds us that “the sociopolitical location of the subaltern multitude provides the right atmosphere for the emergence of alternative knowledge.”5 To continue to privilege the



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networks of knowledge and power of the domination systems with its universalizing tendencies and violent mechanisms of defense is tantamount to the idolatry encountered in the biblical story of the tower of Babel, the hubris of the powerful and those with voice. God’s response in this story is to multiply the perspectives, multiply the languages, multiply the voices, that ultimately the oppressive power of the few would be counterbalanced with the realities of the multitude.6

4 The Role of Latino/a Ethics in the Public Square: Upholding and Challenging “the Good” in a Pluralistic Society María Teresa Dávila

The development of Latina/o theology over the past three decades has opened space among U.S. theologies of liberation for the particular experience and reflection of Latin American peoples in the United States and subsequent generations of Latina/os. Influenced by Latin American liberation theologies and the preferential option for the poor, Latina/o theologians sought to lift up the experience of marginalized and oppressed Latina/os in U.S. society: experiences marked by invisibility; cultural, social, and political alienation; economic struggles; dehumanizing jobs or no jobs at all; as well as reflecting on the particular suffering of Latina/o women in the home and in society. The result has been a rich and varied tradition that for the most part tries to lift up the everyday reality of Latino/as, lo cotidiano, as a place of theological reflection and encounter with the divine, as well as recover, empower, and celebrate the cultural and religious identity of Latino/as in U.S. society and in the field of theology in particular for the purpose of advancing the liberationist goal of promoting the welfare and dignity of Latina/os. To the groundbreaking work of Justo González, Daisy Machado, Orlando Espín, Roberto Goizueta, Virgilio Elizondo, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Ismael García, and others, we now add a second and even third generation of Latina/o theologians that continue to reflect on the varied themes of accompaniment or acompañamiento, the mujerista praxis of a proyecto histórico de liberación, popular religion, mestizaje/mulatez, and such.1 With 37.4 million Latino/as in the United States, and “more than one in eight people” being of Hispanic origin, according to a March 2002 Census Bureau report, 73

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Latino/as doing theology and ethics represent a growing segment of the population.2 But just because we’re growing in numbers doesn’t mean that things are getting any better. Though there may be a more welcoming space for all things Latino/a—especially if it sells well in the market and if it presents a docile, domesticated version of Latino/a life—the socioeconomic reality of Latino/as continues to be one of marginalization and oppression: Latino/as experience a poverty rate of almost 23 percent and are one of two groups (African Americans) in the United States whose net worth has declined every year. The figures are just as troubling in the areas of employment and education.3 While the emergence of Latina/o theology was a significant moment in the academy, influencing how and where we looked for sources of theological and ethical reflection as well as shedding a different light on the marginalization of Latino/as in the United States, the time has come to expand Latina/o theology and ethics to do two things: first, to reradicalize the themes and concepts previously developed so that, second, we can engage, confront, and revolutionize the dominant forms of discourse and activism in U.S. civil society, especially regarding a shared vision of “the good” in the United States, the criteria through which we imagine the kind of life we ought to be living in community.4 This means expanding the themes of Latina/o theology to specifically address the socioeconomic and political dimensions of oppression that were previously incorporated into conversations regarding cultural, identity, and religious liberation.5 The contributions of Latina/o theology, and ethics in particular, need to be expanded to move beyond identity politics and cultural liberation to fully encounter U.S. civil society in liberative discourse and practices that considers the plight of all of humanity’s victims and marginalized. I hope to engage in this exercise by first, presenting some of the theological and ethical insights of Latina/o theology in the works of three Latina/o thinkers, Ismael García, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Roberto Goizueta; second, expanding and lifting up radical elements of these insights for a contemporary encounter with U.S. civil society that can address sociopolitical and economic oppression at the national and international level;6 and third, using these themes in their new form to unmask oppressive constructs of the good in civil society through an evaluation of a series of recent events in the public square. I have purposefully chosen to engage “events” rather than themes in civil society because I believe that one of the potential gifts of Latina/o theology to U.S. civil society discourse is the focus on the everyday and on the concrete events of human life rather than on overarching themes and propositions. My personal commitment to this topic comes from my identity as a Christian, an ethicist, a woman, and as a Puerto Rican. My theological education exposed me to very little of the tradition of Latina/o theology. Being born and raised in the island, a U.S. citizen, and coming from a class



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of highly educated middle-class families, I rejected Latina/o theologies as something that was not my concern. Having been transformed by Latin American liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor, I now return to the people with whom I live, whom I serve, and whom I teach and look to Latina/o theology for language and resources to critically reflect on the oppression and marginalization of the poor and the privilege of the middle class in the United States.

The Heritage of Latina/o Ethics While discussing the heritage of Latina/o ethics I will present some of the major insights of Ismael García, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Roberto Goizueta. These are not comprehensive comments but they serve to provide an orientation into the development of Latina/o ethics. In Dignidad: Ethics Through Hispanic Eyes Puerto Rican ethicist Ismael García develops what he believes is at the center of Christian ethics as lived out by the Hispanic communities in the United States: an “ethics of recognition and care.”7 He does this by examining the implications for ethics of the Latina communitarian identity. He says: Moral rationality is intertwined with at least three elements: (1) our communally induced feelings and shared understandings of what is right and good, of what is wrong and bad; (2) the habitual and traditional ways their communities organize our day to day practices and institutionalize their understanding of the good and right, bad and wrong; and finally (3) traditional cultural practices and abiding religious convictions which, even if we cannot prove them true or false to the uninitiated, still enable us to confess in a clear and intelligible way that which constitutes the ultimate ground of our moral commitments.8

García emphasizes the social nature of all morality, especially the way Latina ethics “acknowledges the inclination to be concerned for others” and is marked with “the disposition of having other regard.”9 Dignidad in Latina/o ethics is the source for an ethic of recognition and care because it reflects the two sides of acknowledging the image of God in every human being, both upholding the dignity inherent in every human being including the self, and critically denouncing the places where human dignity comes under threat or attack. García discusses ethics within the Latino/a communities as a combination of traditional ethical systems: the principle of autonomy and the language of rights, rules-based ethics, obligation and responsibility, character ethics, and principle ethics. In the end he proposes that an ethic of recognition and care accomplishes two important priorities of the Latino/a people: it acknowledges the principles and rights that guide interactions among

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individuals in a any society while at the same time expanding the liberal vision of rights and responsibilities beyond the individualistic parameters of human interaction set by U.S. civil society.10 According to García, expanding “rights talk” in civil society would incorporate the Latino/a sense of community and interconnectedness of humanity and would allow for group rights alongside individual rights so that cultural and ethnic values could flourish alongside. At the same time, García wants to safeguard ethics from a provincial or tribal understanding of community that often spirals into embedded mutual relationships among one’s own while sustaining a heavy mistrust of outsiders. For this reason he is intent on holding on to the principles of human rights and dignity that imbue each stranger or outsider with a voice in determining their vision of the good. In this way he recognizes both the marginalization and oppression experienced by Latino/as as outsiders from the dominant group, as well as the potential for Latino/as themselves to be suspicious of engaging other cultural, social, and religious groups in a space of mutual understanding, cooperation, and equality.11 Finally, an ethic of recognition and care expands traditional notions of justice beyond giving to each person their due. Justice within a Hispanic ethic of care combines the passion of emotional ties with others in the community with the “dispassionate thought that extends principles of autonomy to people from other groups.”12 According to García, limiting justice to giving each individual their due tends to support the status quo and ignore the needs or concerns of a group. Justice cannot be concerned simply with equal opportunity but it must also be concerned with the outcomes for all members of society. Therefore, it is more than just a political concept about rights and duties. Justice in Latina/o ethics is balanced with compassion, love, and care as part of the character development of the moral person. For Ada María Isasi-Díaz, mujerista theology and ethics is composed of a number of guidelines derived from the daily experience of survival of Latinas in the United States. Her methodology has always been to encounter theology, ecclesiology, and ethics from the perspective and through the lens of the lives of the Latina women with whom she works. From this form of analysis of lo cotidiano three clear ethical guidelines are discernible: first, the positive appropriation of the binomial mestizaje/mulatez to represent the diversity, difference, and interconnectedness present in the composition of Latino peoples; second, the proyecto histórico that considers both the present context of struggle and suffering together with the hope for historical fruition of our goals; and, finally, praxis as central to mujerista epistemology that considers the “binomial survival-liberation” and that is informed by the preferential option for the poor.13 For Isasi-Díaz, the daily lives of Latinas show the need for a theology that both denounces oppression and marginalization and announces the hopes



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of personal and communal goals as part of a concrete historical project of survival and liberation. As will be discussed below, this insight is instrumental to contributing to the construction of the good in society that is both inclusive and liberational. The historical project has to be a concrete vision of liberation so that we know well in advance how to prepare for it. A concrete vision for the historical project also serves as the criteria that judges whether we are deviating from the original goals of liberation.14 A historical project of liberation within mujerista theology includes the liberation struggles of all women and all oppressed in the world out of the liberative aspirations of Latinas. It is inclusive. Therefore, Latinas’ call for change is revolutionary more that reformist. Mestizaje/mulatez is the framework for a more inclusive vision of liberation. According to Isasi-Díaz, this binomial is able to incorporate the three-pronged mestizaje of Hispanic women of race, culture, and history as well as the unity and solidarity amidst the differences of all the groups represented within the Latino peoples and the human family in general. Isasi-Díaz pushes mestizaje/mulatez to be an element of change in society by reconceptualizing our understanding of difference toward a more relational and solidary praxis.15 Roberto Goizueta developed a theology and ethic of acompañamiento or accompaniment while also considering the everyday reality of Latina/os. In Caminemos con Jesús Goizueta takes the Good Friday processions of the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, the story of Juan Diego and Our lady of Guadalupe, and other expressions of popular religion among Latina/os to ground a relational understanding of the marginalized and oppressed person who finds her or his source of dignity in the different forms of accompaniment present among Latino/as. For example, Juan Diego finds his human dignity revealed in the accompaniment of the Virgin throughout his encounters with the bishop and his own people. In the case of the Good Friday procession, accompanying Jesus on the way to the cross becomes a source of solidarity: being with Jesus and Mary at a time of unjust suffering is a way of participating in mutual relationships of solidarity that share in that suffering.16 Goizueta’s methodology uses an aesthetic concept of mestizaje (taken from the work of Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos) to analyze Latina/o popular religion as praxis defined by interpersonal relationships of liberation. The liberative element comes in viewing interpersonal activity as an end in itself and not as an instrumental tool for personal benefit.17 For Goizueta the beauty of the other compels one to action that considers not just the cultural, but also the political and economic dimensions of life. Goizueta discusses the role of Latina/o theology in a pluralist, postmodern world. In his view the preferential option for the poor must be the central element in any form of pluralism as the criterion for the possible establishment of universalities from the encounter with the other.18 It is

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only in admitting the realities of marginalization that have been denied in the past that we can hope for any sense of universal knowledge in a postmodern world. In both Isasi-Díaz’s and Goizueta’s analysis, the perspective of the poor is privileged in a postmodern pluralist world because the poor have no vested interested in the perpetuation of the status quo.19

Invigorating Latina/o Ethics: Giving Primacy to the Preferential Option for the Poor To the major themes identified above: popular religion, lo cotidiano, proyecto histórico, mestizaje/mulatez and aesthetic mestizaje, acompañamiento, dignidad and an ethic of recognition and care are added others such as fiesta, teología en conjunto, la Morenita, and a relational anthropology of nosotros that also celebrate the heritage, traditions, and diario vivir or daily living of Latina/os. Up to this point these themes have been trying to interpret and voice the suffering, oppressions, dreams, hopes, and aspirations of Latina/os and other marginalized groups. As such they present an extension of the new paradigm for doing theology that was introduced in Latin American liberation theologies, one that interpreted the preferential option for the poor in North America in the cultural and ethnic terms of identity or group politics. It expanded the sources for theological reflection from universal concepts in the Christian tradition to the particular lives of women and men in the margins of U.S. society.20 But some today consider this focus on identity politics and cultural empowerment a deviation of the original focus of Latin American liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor that de facto de-emphasized the political and socioeconomic dimensions of liberation. Benjamin Valentín, for example, proposes that a consequence of this shift in emphasis has been the compartmentalization of Latina/o theology and ethics as the concern of one particular group, “deeming the search for positive selfidentity and collective cultural identity a crucial component of liberation in the United States.”21 He considers this a limitation that self-selects Latina/o theology and ethics out of the discourses of civil society as well as preventing it from contributing to radical social change in the socio-economic dimensions of U.S. society. Valentín proposes that Latina/o theology must include critical analysis of the political economy in order to become a truly public theology that can challenge systemic oppression in coalitions with diverse marginalized groups based on the solidarity of difference.22 Manuel Mejido also critique’s Latina/o theology’s turn to aesthetics and the cultural symbolic as having lost the Marxist orientation of the social and economic analysis performed by early liberation theologies. In his view, the turn to the particular risks leaving the system unchallenged and fails to make a



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break with liberal democratic capitalism as the triumphant global system of human relations and exchange.23 I agree with a critique launched by sociologist Otto Maduro who, at a gathering of the Hispanic Theological Initiative, raised the question of whether all Latina/o theology was trying to accomplish was getting a “piece of the pie” rather than radically alter the conceptions on which the system is based.24 This characterization of Latina/o theology as overlooking critiques or analysis of political economy cannot be made in the absolute. The three theologians discussed above, García, Isasi-Díaz, and Goizueta, as well as many others, do in fact include an assessment of the economic oppression of Latino/as and other marginalized groups. Each one brings a deep appropriation of the basic facts of suffering, poverty, oppression, and marginalization of Latino/as in the United States. Though García focuses on identity and dignity in developing Hispanic ethics, he explicitly frames the Latina/o experience as one of oppression and domination in multiple layers: economic oppression (focusing on the problem of labor and just remuneration for Latino/a workers); social oppression (again linked to the labor issue through the social stigma that Latino/as endure); political oppression (as a lack of political influence or power to make the dominant group accountable); and cultural oppression (the way of life of minorities is characterized as deviant). García sums this up as a situation of violence toward Latino/as in every sphere of life, both public and inside the home.25 Isasi-Díaz, in focusing on the stories of particular women’s daily struggles for survival, liberation, and striving for a fulfilling life, promotes engaging the daily living of other marginalized women globally and links the mujerista agenda with that of feminists around the globe.26 When Isasi-Díaz presents the statistics that mark the suffering for Latina women in the United States, she is lifting a snapshot of what lo cotidiano represents for women across the globe. Two particular analyses in Goizueta’s Caminemos con Jesús point to his commitment to unmasking some of the myths of political economy in the United States. One is his detailed critique of the postmodern turn in the academy and the role that Latina/o scholars play in segmenting the other, basically domesticating the more radical dimensions of social analysis and theology from the margins.27 The second is his proposal for a U.S. Hispanic theology to be an urban theology or a theology of acompañamiento of the urban poor (the preferential option for the urban poor), where he describes in detail not only the marginalization of the urban poor but also the complicity of those who flee the inner city for the suburbs.28 All three authors critique one important assumption of U.S. civil society and liberal democratic capitalism in general: they point out the murderous myth that in this society hard work pays off for everyone and that liberal democratic capitalism provides equality of opportunity for everyone, therefore making urban poverty, Latino unemployment or underemployment, lack of education, and other

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socioeconomic ills the responsibility of personal failure, and lack of initiative and discipline.29 The role or shape of the preferential option for the poor seems to be one of the main issues of concern to both friends and foes of Latina/o theologies. It is evident that in appropriating liberation theology for the North American context Latina/o theologians gave primacy to the dimensions of cultural oppression and identity politics that are included in the option for the poor. Though the sociopolitical analysis and critique of the political economy is present, as described above, it is included as part of the cultural/ identity issues within Latina/o theology. The revolutionary dimensions in Latin American liberation theology are lost in an effort to show, analyze, and critique how Latino/as are excluded from the “American Dream” rather than radically questioning the Dream itself. With respect to U.S. civil society, Latina/o theologies seem to be advocating for the creation of institutions that promote Hispanic values and identities in a positive light.30 According to García: Society is not necessarily good in itself, but merely provides different groups with the goods and services they need to follow their self interests and notions of the good life. Within it, different social groups negotiate the conditions under which they will work together. The aim of the larger community becomes fairness and efficiency for the sake of the overall well being of its racial and ethnic constituencies.31

I believe this understanding of civil society and its determination of the good is what is commonly understood as a thin notion of the role of society, one in which different groups can pursue their own interests and notions of the good life, establishing associations of solidarity and cooperation across different groups for the purpose of exerting the necessary pressure that will raise awareness of particular forms of oppression or neglect as a corrective to the system.32 The advantage of such a thin vision is that it allows space for particular groups to participate in civil society and encounter each other and even build coalitions with each other for the common good. The disadvantage becomes the inability of civil society so construed to challenge the dominant system of political economy with an alternative vision. In fact, according to Mejido, Petrella, Maldonado, and many others, this loose and thin vision of civil society is held together by and serves the purpose of promoting the political and economic status quo.33 The question here becomes, is Latina/o theology advocating for participation in civil society or transformation? Benjamín Valentín proposes that Latina/o theology do both. I believe Valentín is working out of both a hope for Latina/o theology to become public by participating in established forms of discourse that can achieve a transformation of the established civil order. This would be a new task for



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Latina/o theology, one that necessitates the expansion and radicalization of the themes of Latina/o theology.

Radicalization for Participation and Transformation The process of radicalizing the themes that dominate Latina/o theology begins with the understanding that this must be radicalization en conjunto. In engaging this task I am resorting to a number of Latina/o theologians who subscribe to a radical vision for liberation theology in the United States. Radicalization for participation and transformation of U.S. civil society involves a recovery of certain elements of liberation theology as it was originally formulated in Latin America, especially the dimensions of a social analysis and critique that address the poverty and oppression among all marginalized groups historically and presently. I suggest that the preferential option for the poor and historical memories of injustice can supply a possible methodology for such radicalization. This would entail understanding the preferential option for the poor in its original form—as a continual praxis of denouncing material poverty as against God’s plan for humanity, adopting spiritual poverty as complete openness to God and the refusal of idolatry, and being in solidarity with the poor and victims of injustice—linked with a deep sense of memory that chooses to hold on to the history of conquest, colonialism, oppression, violent mestizaje, border crossing, exclusion, and invisibility from colonial to modern times. I will only reflect on the radicalization of a few themes but I hope that this is an exercise that we can all engage in throughout the repertoire of Latina/o theology.34 1.╇Dignidad and acompañamiento—There can be no acknowledgement of the dignity of the human being according to Latina/o anthropology without an understanding of the interrelated and relational nature of the person. Therefore, as García suggests, human dignity for Latina/os moves beyond the common liberal language of human rights into the realm of solidarity, acompañamiento. The radicalization of a relational understanding of human nature leads to the realization that solidarity is an integral part of human dignity. But this solidarity must be one that dares to outrage because it dares to keep in tension human dignity with the sorrow, shame, and outrage toward the unjust suffering that is an affront to that very dignity. 2.╇Lo cotidiano/daily living—This powerful insight of Latina/o theology must include not just the celebration of everyday victories or liberations. As Isasi-Díaz and Ivone Gebara (Brazil) suggest, a radicalized

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view of lo cotidiano confronts the daily hardship of the majority of the world’s people. It returns to the liberationist insight that for twothirds of the world lo cotidiano is not daily living but daily dying with the added caveat that we in the United States have a deep complicity with this reality. Isasi-Díaz’s most recent work on justice expands lo cotidiano in this direction.35 3.╇Mestizaje/Mulatez—This theme touches me personally in my history and identity. Because of the history of my people, the marks of slavery on my great-grandmother, I cannot fully embrace the positive light with which these two words have been characterized in Latina/o theology. At a presentation at the University of Dayton, Orlando Espín commented on the origins of the Latino people: “We were born as conquered people or as enslaved people or as the children of those who benefited directly from the enslavement and conquest of others.”36 Goizueta also mentions that “the origins of mestizaje lie much more in the Spaniards’ violent raping and pillaging of the indigenous people and their culture than in any “abundance of love” [criticizing José Vasconcelos’ reading of mestizaje].”37 Therefore, if we are to use mestizaje/mulatez as theological themes we must do so stressing their intrinsically tragic nature, making it a historical concept rather than a racial one. For me the binomial mestizaje/mulatez says: “I am what I am because of the violence of conquest, greed, genocide, and blatant disregard for those other than the Euro-Iberian model of being human.” Mestizaje/mulatez as a mark of being Latina bears the “never again” of each genocide or violent atrocity in human history. I suggest that a radicalization of this theme be analogous to the body of Jesus after the resurrection: though he rose from a violent death on the cross, the marks of the cross remained with and on him, without ultimately allowing them the last word.38 4.╇The preferential option for the poor—African American theologian Shawn Copeland faults black political theologies with being concerned with the effects of white racist supremacy rather than attending to the oppression of black women and a critical analysis of capitalism. She suggests that the next wave of black political theologies must “make a rigorous analysis of imperialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, and the practices of democracy.”39 I believe Latina/o theology must do the same if it is to radicalize its use of the preferential option for the poor. In her poignant analysis of the preferential option for the poor in the United States, Carmen Nanko sounds two important warnings. First, Catholic Church authorities, after a number of decades of writing and reflecting on the option for the poor, seem to have (1) forgotten where it came from, it’s context among the conditions of poverty and oppression in Latin America, therefore expanding the



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scope of who the poor are in the U.S. context to include the nonmaterially poor;40 (2) presented an understanding of the option for the poor that is an unclear amalgamation of justice and charity that lacks any sense of urgency and social conscience to be shared by all;41 and (3) relegated the option for the poor as a tool for the rich to gain salvation resulting in the instrumentalization of the poor as tools for the evangelization of the rich and powerful.42 The second warning is Nanko’s assessment that there are severe difficulties in understanding the phrase in a U.S. context with a vast middle class.43 I agree with Nanko when she suggests that the articulation of a preferential option for the poor proper to the U.S. context will require “taking into account the context of the United States with its unique spectrum of abundance as well as marginalization.”44 For Nanko this means that second- and third-generation middle-class immigrants return to and remember the margins from which they came and encounter the new wave of immigrants for whom economic struggle and oppression is a daily reality, an encounter that is becoming all too infrequent and less desirable for established Latino/as.45 I would expand this suggestion to include an encounter between the middle class and those who are historically poor in the United States, in the urban ghettos of our cities, the mining towns of Appalachia, and the former industrial capitals. Radicalizing the preferential option for the poor, following the challenge of Copeland, Mejido, Nanko, and others, requires a return to extensive social analysis and critique of the political economy as we have it today as well as its historical dynamics that sustain unjust structures of oppression.46

Abriendo Paso a la Transformación Social: Uncovering the Good in the Context of a Radicalized Latina/o Ethics in U.S. Civil Society The biggest challenge facing Christian ethics in its engagement with U.S. civil society is that often major themes of Christian ethics—love of neighbor, idolatry, sin, just war theory, the option for the poor, the sanctity of life, admonitions against wealth—end up being co-opted or shaped by the dominant ideology operative in the United States.47 Be that ideology militarism, liberal democratic capitalism, or a combination of the two, Christian ethics has had to enter the public square with much humility, ready to adapt, and often conforming to the dominant values of civil society in some aspect of its teaching. But in fact the great diversity of traditions within Christian ethics—pacifist, just war theorist, Christian realism, the Puritan work ethic, sectarian isolationists or accommodationists—have

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provided avenues for engaging civil society. Therefore Latina/o theology and ethics must reflect at this time on how to enter contemporary discourse in civil society in ways that sustain, expand, and radicalize its main themes, aware of the risk of capitulating the struggle for liberation to the dominant values of the system. I suggest that Latina/o theology’s most promising gift is its focus on the concrete experience of the marginalized, the oppressed, and the victims as centers of theological reflection and praxis for justice. This focus would help Latina/o theology and go beyond the discussions on wider (universal) themes within U.S. civil society and current conceptions of the good grounded on human rights, equality, individualism, and such, into the space of concrete events that shake or question the foundations of civil society and present an opportunity for radical reflection and action.48 I will discuss some very recent events in U.S. civil society and look at them through the lenses of a number of the themes I expanded above. 1.╇9/11, the war on terror, and the re-creation of the other—Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s reflection “In a Time Such as This” proposes that the appropriate Christian response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 should be one of compassion for all parties involved, everyone who at that moment was identified as a victim of unjust suffering: those who died in the attacks, their families, young Muslim activists who are taught to hate and who have no other hope than what they can hope for in the afterlife, entire populations of women who are oppressed into oblivion by regimes previously supported by the United States, U.S. soldiers being ordered to perform acts of violence and war that they do not find justified.49 Indeed, in the case of 9/11, Isasi-Díaz links compassion with knowledge and determines that anyone acting out of other motives such as revenge or hate do not truly know the elements of a situation as they are revealed through an outlook informed by compassion.50 According to a 2005 survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, “attitudes toward the war in Iraq are more negative among Latinos than in the general population with most saying that U.S. troops should be withdrawn as soon as possible,” with Puerto Ricans (whose service men and women are dying in a much larger proportion than any other group represented in the war) leading the call for the withdrawal of troops (70 percent).51 International human rights groups and NGOs who had been paying attention to the daily living—lo cotidiano—of Afghani women had been warning about the extremism of the Taliban regime years before 2001, even when the U.S. government was contributing to that regime. A radical vision of lo cotidiano would demand that the voices of daily suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan gain currency in U.S. civil society discourse, and the declaration of one person of “mission accomplish” would be drowned



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out by the daily experiences of U.S. soldiers, foreign reporters, and men and women on the other side of the world. A radical revision of acompañamiento and solidarity would question just how it is that we are walking with the Iraqis, and whether compassion has any room in our discourse inclusive of all members of our society. Indeed, the war on terror is shaping our understanding of the other in the public square on our own shores, determining whose religion, ethnic traits, foods, and language are accepted and whose are not. This sense of “the other” or the outsider extends beyond those groups we believe to be in conflict with to any group that reaches our shores through post9/11 protected borders, as shall be discussed below. Acompañamiento today requires that we walk with those groups considered other, that we engage in interreligious dialogue, that we include new voices to the framing of the good life within our shores and to wherever our military and economic might is extended. A good defined by one voice is exclusive and limited; it signals “the good life” for some, and a life of daily dying for the others. 2.╇Healthcare reform and the value of the person in the common good—The conversations in the nation that took place around health care reform shed much light into what many “Americans” believe to be the good life and the common good. For many vocal groups, a life they would choose to live included a government-backed public option in health care and insurance. For another equally (or more so) vocal group a public option represented a step backward in living out the principles that our founding fathers believed would make the United States a free country, open for development and civic participation in communities shaped and ruled by democratic principles. This impasse threatened to derail any hope for effective reform that would begin to address one of the most shameful dimensions of our life in community in the United States, the appalling availability of adequate care for millions of our citizens, particularly for a vulnerable middle class whose economic stability is constantly under the threat of the expenses associated with a catastrophic illness or the loss of a job. While many during these conversations agreed that the strength and justice of a society is measured by how it cares for its weakest and most vulnerable members, there was great—sometimes threatening— dissent as to how this would look in terms of public policy and legislation. While communities of faith tried to incorporate their voices for just health care reform, Latina/o leaders were not as vocal in this debate.52 This particular debate was a direct challenge to express what the preferential option for the poor could look like in the context of legislation and public policy. From the beginning of the most current debate, there was an attempt to include stories of lo cotidiano of health-

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care challenges for most Americans, the ways in which the health-care system as it is damages the lives of so many who are uninsured or underinsured by ruining their economies and denying them muchneeded care. However, the nation as a whole was clearly challenged in articulating what solidarity and acompañamiento could look like in this case, and challenged as well in articulating what is rightfully due to the dignity of every human being, dignidad. Are these concepts key to Latina/o theology simply not translatable to the realm of public policy debate? I would dare to say that we cannot afford the exclusion of the contributions of Latina/o theologies in the public square today. 3.╇The political, social, and economic status of Puerto Rico—The situation of Puerto Rico is complicated. In an essay published in the daily newspaper El Nuevo Día, a commentator branded Puerto Rico as ingobernable: unable to be governed.53 A radicalized vision of mestizaje/mulatez that recovers the sense of the tragic in Latin American and Latina/o history would provide adequate tools for critically reflecting on the five hundred years plus of colonialism, servitude, dependence, and political in- and out-fighting that has dominated and shaped this island. The political status of Puerto Rico may be a hotly contested topic among U.S. Latino/as. But this is no reason why Latina/o theologians should remain silent. In fact, a number of Latino/a institutions in the United States advocate for Puerto Ricans to exercise their right to self-determination, whatever the outcome.54 Puerto Rico’s economy at this time has suffered the effects of the recession in the United States in great proportions. Not only are the infrastructures of the government lacking the resources to sustain a life considered “good” by any stretch of the imagination, but the private sector is suffering greatly as well. While unemployment in the United States hovers just under 10 percent at this time,55 in Puerto Rico that number has topped 16.2 percent officially,56 closer to 20 percent unofficially. An economy where one out of every five adults is unemployed is unsustainable, and this decay results in further violence, drug addiction, and lack of educational opportunities for a people already at risk. How do we confront civil society with the crassly neglected reality of Puerto Rico’s violent mestizaje, going on even to this day? For Latina/o theologians colonialism and acompañamiento must continue to be principles of critical revision so that we can more accurately and authentically include this oft-neglected segment of U.S. society in vibrant and inclusive visions of the good that represent the current realities and future hopes of the Puerto Rican people. 4.╇Environmental health and our addiction to oil—The explosion at the Massey coal mine in West Virginia and the massive oil leak in the Gulf Coast represent a kairoi in U.S. civil society for the option for



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the poor. It is no coincidence that both of these events greatly affect voiceless and poor segments of our society. A society whose economic motor depends solely on nonrenewable sources of energy—oil, gas, or coal—will inevitably incur in the victimization of the poor and voiceless—whether this is the environment and life forms other than human or the poor who suffer the effects of coastal flooding, toxic waste dumping, or unsafe drinking water. Our relationship with our sources of energy is one of unbridled consumption without much regard for the victims of our idolatry of a fuel driven life. The explosion at the Massey mine and the oil leak in the Gulf Coast, both of which entailed the death of a number of workers, exposes the murderous nature of our idolatrous addiction to fuel. While conversations in the public square include environmental sustainability and protection of ecosystems in notions of the good life, we are short on understanding the impact of our consumption on real human lives. Might we benefit from a conversation enlightened by a deeper vision of lo cotidiano in asthma-riddled neighborhoods, among the fishermen who can no longer claim the Gulf Coast as a source of livelihood, of the miners who daily walk into a business place whose owners often lobby against the very regulations that could keep them safe? We are, in other words, in desperate need for different rubrics that will encourage us to see the daily realities of those who suffer from our addiction to unrenewable sources of fuel. Perhaps Latina/o theology can contribute a new epistemology of the option for the poor, one that equates love with knowing and knowing with experiencing the suffering of the poor. 5.╇The threat mentality toward immigrants and the new Arizona Law (SB 1070)—Samuel Huntington’s article on “The Hispanic Challenge” proposes that the U.S. “creed” (the race, ethnicity, culture, and religion of the white, English, Protestant originators of the country) has come under attack by a new wave of immigrants that is refusing to assimilate in culture and in language.57 In fact, for Huntington the threat from Latino/as is so serious that it puts the very political integrity of the nation in danger. This threat would ameliorate if the influx of Latin American immigrants, especially from Mexico, would cease altogether.58 This thesis, which came under heavy fire after its publication in April 2004, has undergone a revival in the past few weeks as U.S. civil society debates the anti-immigrant law in Arizona, SB 1070. A law that calls for authorities to question and demand documentation from persons based on the suspicion that they may be in the country without proper documentation, illegally, demands a response from Latina/o theologians that incorporates all the tools available. We are once again confronting the inability of the United States to remember

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a history of mestizaje and colonialism that includes the violent expansion and illegal takeover of lands already occupied, the acquisition of land by force from Mexico, and the importation at various points of cheap labor force from various countries (Japan, China, Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico prior to its incorporation under the present political arrangement). A radical understanding of lo cotidiano, of mestizaje/mulatez, acompañamiento, and the preferential option for the poor would provide profound insight into this moment in civil society. The cycle of demonizing or vilifying the foreigner or the stranger, often as a result of generalized fears resulting from particular instances of violence coupled with the myth of the other, is common sport in U.S. civil society and it must be countered by careful critique of the dynamics of the political economy that perennially sustains an underside. Ismael García’s description of dignidad as the inherent value of every human being that must be considered in the development of a shared understanding of the good that is both respectful of differences but cautious of establishing violent parameters of “in” or “out” categories of belonging is key to addressing this impasse in our nation. This Arizona law is only a chapter in the ongoing saga of the myth of the other in our country, but one that raises the stakes for countless Latina/os living there and in other communities following suit. Its requirements demean the humanity of all Latina/os and in turn of all newcomers to this country. This law represents a strike against the common good rather than its expansion and edification. In the face of the questions posed by Huntington’s thesis, whether new waves of immigrants can assimilate to the set of values that sustain the liberal democratic capitalism that is so highly valued in developed economies, Latina/o theologians should counter with the insight that, as Isasi-Díaz comments, the social mobility of one group is due to their being replaced at the bottom of the heap by another group.

Conclusion The future of Latina/o theology and ethics will harvest the fruits of the radical themes that were there from the very beginning. If we are to form coalitions of solidarity based on difference, as Valentín suggests, for the purpose of liberative transformation and the construction of a truly inclusive vision of the good, then Latina/o ethics must contribute to the public discourse with a system of radical themes shaped by Latina/o theology and the experiences of those at the margins of our society locally and globally. The presence of Latina/o ethics in U.S. civil society should be transformational, not simply a well-positioned argument for getting a piece of the pie.



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This is a difficult process. Our model for doing theology, in the academy in general, leaves little room for the kind of proactive theologizing en conjunto that is required for the praxis of liberative discourse in civil society. I believe that Latina/o theology is well poised with a toolbox of radical themes that can engage civil society, questioning the very foundations of long-held yet exclusionary visions of what makes a good society and the ideologies that sustain them. At the center of this engagement should be a renewed commitment to the preferential option for the poor radically understood, as Nanko rightly points out, within the U.S. context of a vast yet vulnerable middle class and a wide experience of marginalization. Though the themes of identity and cultural liberation continue to be pressing issues in civil society, for example in the case of the status of Puerto Rico and the Arizona anti-immigration law, our understanding and use of the themes of mestizaje/ mulatez, lo cotidiano, teología en conjunto, dignidad, acompañamiento, and the preferential option for the poor must be radically expanded to focus on the basic critiques needed for a liberating transformation of the public square, the conversations it holds, and the realities it produces.

Response to María Teresa Dávila Eleazar S. Fernández

I respond to María Teresa Dávila’s work in the spirit of acompañamiento and of theologizing en conjunto. It is a delight to respond to a chapter in which I share the author’s main concerns, struggles, and hopes. As with Dávila, I continue to affirm the crucial significance of liberation theologies’ preferential option for the poor. I am concerned, as is Dávila, of the danger of losing the radical message of liberation theologies in the current theological articulation of racial-ethnic-diaspora minorities, particularly in their pursuit of identity and cultural politics. The cunning of the dominant culture and the lure of the American Dream urge us to ask whether various forms of struggle under the umbrella of identity and culture are struggles to secure a “piece of the pie.” It is tempting to adopt a “thin” vision of civil society in which various marginalized groups are allowed to participate but are sidetracked from their historical focus on building a more just and caring society. Though Dávila voices a warning against playing the game of the dominant society, she believes some Latino/a theologians/ethicists (Ada María Isasi Díaz, Ismael García, and Roberto Goizueta) have indeed integrated identity and cultural politics with a strong critique of the global political economy. Again, I go along with her basic claims that identity politics and critique of political economy need not be separate; that a strong historical and social analysis is crucial; and that we need to reradicalize and expand liberation themes. Dávila’s concerns provide a starting point for what needs to be pursued if we are to prevent racial-ethnic minority theologizing from becoming a pursuit of getting a piece of the pie of the American Dream, and if we are 90



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to unify the multiple concerns into a common project of transformative politics. “Expanding” or “adding” to the list of radical liberating themes that subaltern theologizing needs to engage is important; it shows that subaltern theologizing can engage with multiple issues. But this alone is not sufficient. We need a theoretical framework, a method. We need Juan Luis Segundo’s reminder that it is not themes or content that guarantee the liberating character of liberation theology, it is method.1 At times liberation theologies have forgotten this point. As R. S. Sugirtharajah pointed out, liberation theology has become more interested in reflecting about liberation themes than in being a liberating hermeneutic.2 We need to move beyond reflecting on liberation themes and instead develop a theoretical framework that identifies the interlocking concerns of identity and cultural politics, political economics, etcetera. To maintain its radical character, this theoretical framework must be able to weave our multifaceted identities and concerns and it must be normed by preferential option for the poor. As Dávila has emphasized, the preferential option for the poor is crucial to the continuing radicalization or reradicalization of subaltern theological reflection. In many ways the observation that Latino/a theologians have toned down, if not neglected, the discourse on preferential option for the poor, is true of subaltern theologians in general. This neglect has serious epistemological, normative, and practical consequences. Continuing affirmation of the preferential option for the poor is a crucial marker of the God we know and believe in and through Jesus—a God who opted to become one with the crucified and suffering people. Epistemologically, it calls us to adopt the perspective of the dispossessed. Affirming the central insight of preferential option for the poor is crucial if subaltern theologies are to maintain the spirit of radical hospitality: hospitality to the marginalized and the excluded. It is crucial if subaltern theologies are to maintain their critique of the global political economy. Contrary to its promise that a rising tide lifts up all boats, it lifts up all yachts. Worse, the poor do not even have boats; they are drowning in the tsunami of corporate profits. Indeed, the preferential option for the poor demands that we evaluate the current dominant global economics in light of the plight of the victims. But we can only evaluate it critically if we engage in rigorous historical and social analysis. Dávila’s account of connecting preferential option for the poor with social analysis is critically important. Making it more relevant is her attempt to appropriate preferential option for the poor in the context of the United States in which, following Carmen Marie Nanko, there is a “spectrum of abundance as well as marginalization” or, as she puts it, a “context with a vast middle class.”3 The “middle class” in the United States may be vast compared to Puerto Rico or Mexico, but it is shrinking. Moreover, the “middle-class rhetoric” in the United States is deceptive. Many who call themselves “middle class” are hardly making both ends meet or

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can do so only by working two full-time jobs. “References to the middle class by politicians,” argues Gregory Mantsios, “are designed to encompass and attract the broadest possible constituency. Not only do references to the middle class gloss over differences, but also these references avoid any suggestion of conflict or exploitation.”4 The rhetoric of middle class must itself be exposed as a lie, a lie that many “established” Latino/a immigrants and other immigrant groups have bought into. Because many immigrants believe that they are already “established,” it is not surprising that they are advocating for stronger immigration laws and enforcement. Therefore, I push for a rigorous historical and social analysis to expose the myth of “classlessness” in the United States. We need a rigorous historical-social analysis to maintain and advance transformative praxis. Moreover, historical-social analysis must be informed and normed by preferential option for the poor. Yet, the option for the poor must be continually critiqued lest it become a discursive regime of truth with the potential of muting other voices. As I noted in my chapter, the poor is not an undifferentiated category, a homogenous revolutionary class that will drive history forward. The poor are those who are dying before their time from multiple but interrelated factors: economic oppression, sex and gender identity, ethnic-racial identity, etc. Reducing the poor to one category of oppression is a form of violence. We can continue to affirm preferential option for the poor without reducing the poor to a homogenous class or submitting to reductionist economic and class analysis. Unless one is beholden to a single paradigmatic form of oppression, expanding the notion of the poor is not a deviation from or dilution of the radical economic critique; it is a continuing pursuit of radicalization. Opening preferential option for the poor to include previously excluded categories (race, gender, culture, and sexual identity) is an expression of such radicalization. With the notion of the poor embracing multiple forms of identity, belongings, and marginalization, we have broadened and deepened the notion of agency. Agency is broadened when it encompasses individuals, groups, and communities with different experiences of marginalization. Agency is deepened when it is not identified with a homogenous revolutionary class or with the autonomous self-generating subject of modern liberalism—“pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.” Rather, agency is born in the tensions, conflicts and counterpressures that are formed when individuals and groups get in touch with the repressions of life. Here, contends Joerg Rieger, new forms of agency and resistance emerge that might take us beyond the dichotomy of materialism and idealism.5 A wider (not weaker) and reradicalized notion of the poor and a broadened notion of agency have prepared us to address the multiple and interlocking structures of oppression. To realize Dávila’s hopes for a more radical, empowered, and transformational social movements, we must articulate



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a conceptual framework that can link multiple forms of oppression. Empire, understood as network-powers, provides such theoretical framework. Empire is hegemonic power that assumes various expressions. It can appear in the form of a unified predatory global market, capitalist patriarchy, global militarism, global apartheid, a virulent operation gatekeeper, and an ecologically destructive economic system. This network-power rules nature (anthropocentrism), the destitute poor (classism), cultural/ethnic others (ethnocentrism), women (sexism), and those different from the dominant sexual identity (heterosexism). All these forms of ruling constitute what I call interlocking forms of oppression. The hegemonic network-powers can only be countered by coalitional politics that address the challenges on multiple local and global fronts. The turn to the particular or the struggle against particular forms of oppression will not necessarily lead to failure to challenge the dominant global system, as Latino theologian Manuel Mejido seems to imply.6 Such a failure would happen only if particular critiques are not informed by a wider systemic critique. What causes concerns and makes me suspicious are universal accounts that cannot accommodate or illuminate particular accounts. If a grand scheme cannot give account of a particular, then some voices have been muted. Specific narratives of oppression matter and must be given a hearing because they provide a thick description of the everyday struggles (lo cotidiano) of subaltern communities in relation to their varying identities, belongings, and social locations. Equipped with a broad conceptual framework that can take account for broad network-power as well particular forms of oppression, subaltern theologians are in a better position to bring their concerns and moral claims to the wider public. This form of public participation might appear to purport a “thin” vision of civil society, but it cannot be neglected. Much as we like to be outside, there is no complete outside. Subaltern theologians are laborers in the neoliberal market they seek to transform. This does not mean that they cannot exercise transformative agency. To choose between participation in civil society or transformation of that society is a false dichotomy. Transformative praxis is still possible, and this requires the creation of counterpublics. Counterpublics are needed to nourish and clarify vision as well as launch transformative praxis. I journey with Latino/a theologians in forming such counterpublics so as to transform the wider public.

5 Pluralist Separatism and Community Jace Weaver

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair’d in the adamant of Time. —Walt Whitman, “America,” Leaves of Grass As long is there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free. —Eugene V. Debs

What is thought to be the only recording of Walt Whitman’s voice is of a reading of his poem “America.” Amid the crackling and pops of the old wax cylinder, one hears a tremulous, perhaps slightly nasal voice reading slowly and authoritatively. The voice carries conviction and belief. My wife, Laura Adams Weaver, and I have, in an essay on ethics, written about this poem, which was published in 1888 and became part of “Sands at Seventy,” the first annex to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. There is, as we pointed out, an unintended irony in Whitman’s words: “At the time he wrote, America was not a place of equal daughters and sons. AfricanAmericans were severed from that idealistic vision. So were immigrants, who fed a need for cheap labor and stood on the lowest rungs of the socio95

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economic ladder. So, in fact, were women. And so were the so-called first Americans, the indigenes of this place.”1 Cultural critic Greil Marcus, near the opening of his book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice writes, “America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes.”2 In his contrapuntal recitation, Marcus provides a necessary corrective to Whitman’s nineteenth-century love note to American exceptionalism. Yet it is still imperfect. For American Indians, Marcus could have added that the United States is also a place of genocide and survivance.3 Every indigenous people has at least one creation myth. Some have more than one. Some people object to the use of the word “myth” to characterize these protologies. Myth in our time has come to connote an untruth, a fairy tale. Yet, in its most precise form, a myth is simply any story that is foundational for the identity of a people. The Battle of Agincourt actually was waged on St. Crispin’s Day in 1415, but its story of vastly outnumbered English citizen-soldiers defeating the flower of French knighthood is the stuff of myth. The United States has many creation myths: Pilgrims, American Revolution, Civil War, westward expansion, the “greatest generation” defeating totalitarianism, the civil rights movement. All of these happened, but, as formative of the American narrative, they have assumed the character of myth. These myths are constant, but they are neither immutable nor even stable. They are assumed, but they are nonetheless always contested. Over time, they are revisited, revised, rewritten, and reinterpreted. Jesuit scholar Edward Ingebretsen, in his excellent and important Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King, observes: Community mythologies must be resilient enough to survive time and change, and broad enough to include many disparate groups. Woven of words as well as of deeds, community myth is forged in war as well as in peace; it forgets as well as remembers, all in the public interest. Like any identity, a myth a community honors about itself must seem to be second nature, a matter of habit, perhaps even of necessity. Above all, it must be normalized, its contrived origins forgotten to such an extent that they appear universal common sense.4

On the constancy yet mutability of such stories, he writes, “Any enduring community myth tells the story that a society most wishes to hear about itself, justifying the tensions it finds tolerable while denying those it cannot face.”5 Thus the myth evolves over time, as societal self-perception changes. Nevertheless, the change can be slow, even imperceptible—glacial. In the spring 2010, the cable network The History Channel aired a five-part, ten-hour series entitled America: The Story of Us, narrating the



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history of the United States through World War II. The “us” of the title is disputable. The series began with the founding of Jamestown. Earlier Spanish settlement of Florida was ignored. In the first three episodes, taking viewers through the nineteenth century, only whites and African Americans had any real presence. The “talking heads” were overwhelming white, with historians Louis Henry Gates and Annette Gordon-Reed and civil rights activist Al Sharpton representing blacks. Three brief comments by Robert Warrior (the sole Native American voice) were all that interrupted what was largely the old American metanarrative. According to Marcus: More than any other place on earth, America can be attacked through its symbols because it is made up. It is a construct, an idea, and as from the beginning to this day it is still seeking to construct, to shape, whoever finds himself or herself on its ground. The nation exists as power, but is only legitimacy is found in a few pieces of paper. Take away the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and perhaps a various public speeches that lie behind those documents or pass them on, and as a nation you have little more than a collection of buildings and people who have no special reason to speak to each other, and nothing to say.6

It is the paradox of the United States, both its strength and its fragility. Sociologist Emile Durkheim taught us that religion is “society’s way of worshipping itself.”7 It is also, less prosaically, the lies a society tells about itself. Elaborating on Durkheim’s observation, Ingebretsen writes: In other words, a society’s religious investment reflects its pattern of self-awareness; culture, if you will, takes its identity from the gods it worships. Religion is social identity mystified (deified), ritualized in particular moments and gestures. Its rhetorics universalize and sustain certain values prized in theory— individuality, community, love—while disguising the fact that those values dot always, in practice, apply. The rhetoric of transcendence privileged by a culture thus embodies the society’s contraries and oppositions, while hiding from immediate view powerful social hierarchies and motivations. Religious systems, then, are often a society’s most congruent and compelling, if not always logically coherent, forms of civic management.8

Yet the United States, for all its religious overtones and grace notes, is a secular nation: its faith in its founding credo, a religion. If one doubts it, one need only listen to right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck, who, tearyeyed, blurs the edges between sacred and secular to invisibility. One can, in fact learn a lot about a people by those things they imbue with meaning as secular gods. The heirs of the French Revolution still proclaim “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”—liberty, equality, brotherhood—as their source of identity and cohesion. Anglo-Canadians, who never experienced a

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revolution of their own, extol the passive, “Peace, Order, and Good Government.” French Canadians, deprived of their own independent nationhood by history, cry out in an echo of memory: “Je me souviens.” In the first of those performative utterances to which Marcus refers, the Declaration of Independence, the nascent United States lifts up “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In constitutional terms, these become transmogrified into the Lockean “life, liberty, and property,” with private property being elevated above all else to the seat of supreme being. In “America,” Whitman offered up an idealized portrait of the United States as a place of already-accomplished equality. Ironically, however, socialist Eugene V. Debs, in his statement of both solidarity and the possibility of evolution, provides not only a more realistic but no less idealistic vision of the country. As clichéd as it is today, that vision is one of a nation noble in concept but flawed from its inception, a nation always perfecting itself to more completely live up to its ideal of equal sons and equal daughters, despite often horrendous lapses and failures. Indians and blacks were othered in the Constitution. Congress was given sole authority in Indian affairs and was barred from outlawing the slave trade for twenty years.9 Blacks were considered three-fifths of a human being for census purposes, as a check on Southern power in Congress. Native nations were forced to endure the brutality of forced relocations to homes far away from homelands. In 1883, the nation barred the immigration of the Chinese, who had built its railroads of the West. It prematurely dismantled Reconstruction, and permitted Southern states to replace it with the demeaning violence of Jim Crow. Cold War paranoia left many lives and careers in ruins. In 2010, Arizona legislators rode a wave of xenophobic anger and passed a law, which, despite literal language to the contrary, permits racial profiling of Latino/as. They then doubled-down by banning the teaching of ethnic studies in public primary and secondary schools and forbidding teachers “with accents” from teaching English. Such a list is a representative but far from complete. As I have written previously elsewhere, there has always been a gap between the ideal of the United States’ self-image and the reality of its history and existence. From the beginning, America saw itself as exceptional, unique. It possessed a strong sense of messianism. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and historian Alan Heimert write in their 1964 book, A Nation So Conceived, “Most of the nations, in Western culture at least, have acquired a sense of national mission at some time in their history. Our nation was born with it. . . . Like Israel of old, we were a messianic nation from our birth. The Declaration of Independence and our Constitution defined the mission. We were born to exemplify the virtues of democracy and to extend the frontiers of the principles of self-government throughout the world.”10 Again we are confronted by the whirligig volte-face that is America. Its founding principles



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and the self-perception they engender can inspire more than two million Union soldiers in a crusade to end slavery, spurred on by the lofty words of Julia Ward Howe. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me; As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

Yet they also have led to the worst kind of adventurism abroad in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The plupart of American exceptionalism derives from its formal origins as heir to England, which saw itself as divinely set apart, and from the fact that it was the first colony to throw off colonial ties to that metropole, an act of patricide that set the standard for the modern world. In 930 C.E., the progeny of the Vikings met on the Parliamentary Meadows east of Reykjavik and established the Althing, the world’s first national assembly. It is posited that around 1145, the Iroquois performed a similar act here in North America, following the teachings of Degandawida and creating the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.11 These two became the first two representative democracies. Despite their internal differences, Icelanders and Iroquois were largely homogenous communities. And following the establishment of the United States, from the earliest moments, political theorists began to speculate about whether homogeneity was not a prerequisite to the survival and success of democratic institutions. Writing about his experiences of the new American Republic in the early 1830s, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: If a confederation is to endure for long, a homogeneity of civilization is no less necessary than a homogeneity of needs among its member nations. The civilization of the canton of Vaud is to the civilization of the canton of Uri as the nineteenth century is to the fifteenth: hence Switzerland has never really had a federal government. Only on the map do its various cantons constitute a union, as would become apparent if a central authority ever attempted to apply a uniform set of laws throughout its territory. One fact about the United States admirably facilitates the existence of the federal government. Not only do the various states share almost the same interests, origin, and language, but they are also civilized to the same degree, so that it is usually easy for them to come to agreement. I doubt that there is any nation in Europe, however small, whose various parts are not less homogenous than the people of America, who occupy a territory at least half the size of Europe.

A century later, pioneering Oklahoma historian and archaeologist, Joseph Thoburn coauthored Oklahoma: A History of the State and Its People with Muriel Wright, the granddaughter of Choctaw chief Alan Wright. In

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it they stated, “The question as to the possibility of the permanent endurance of a democracy, or representative republic, the constituent citizenship of which is not of a homogenous character, is one of grave doubt. In any attempt to find its solution, due regard must be paid to underlying principles; racial integrity is the greatest issue involved and this, with the adaptability or lack of the same on the part of a questionable element, must eventually outweigh prejudice, sentimentalism and even artificially created rights.”12 Perhaps the best-known theorist espousing homogeneity as a prerequisite to democracy was German political scientist Carl Schmitt. In his book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt declared, “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” The analyses of each of these thinkers, while subject to debate, are flawed. De Tocqueville’s observations miss the deep divisions between North and South, visible even in the early 1830s, that belie his “homogeneity of needs.” Thoburn and Wright use their discussion to justify Jim Crow laws, particularly the so-called Grandfather Clause that attempted to deny African Americans their electoral franchise. Schmitt was a committed Nazi. Nonetheless, the question they raised persisted. Niebuhr and Heimert question the “common inclination of the whole European democratic world to regard democratic self-government as a simple option for all peoples and all cultures, whether primitive or traditional, without calculating in what degree they have acquired the skills, which have put political freedom in the service of justice in the West; or whether they possess the elementary preconditions of community, the cohesion of a common language and race” that make democracy possible.13 And political scientist Chantal Mouffe, whose home country of Belgium teeters precipitously on the precipice of dissolution over divisions between the Flemish and Walloons, while admitting that Schmitt’s political affiliations give his words a “chilling effect,” nonetheless says his “provocative thesis . . . may force us to come to terms with an aspect of democratic politics that liberalism tends to eliminate.” With the rise of the rabidly populist “tea parties” and partisan gridlock in Washington, one might be forgiven for agreeing with de Tocqueville or Schmitt. Too often today it seems as if the United States itself is viewed as a zero-sum game. Yet despite the failings discussed above and many more besides, the American experiment has long served as a challenge to such notions. In spite of ethnic strife around the globe, there is a growing body of both evidence and scholarship that heterogeneity, not sameness, is requisite for a thriving democracy.14 Mouffe’s agonism, or as she calls it “agonistic pluralism,” with its recognition of the creative potential of certain



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tensions and conflicts, would seem to offer one way to conceptualize living in a heterogeneous democratic society. In an interview with Dave Castle for the progressive British magazine Red Pepper, she said: I use the concept of agonistic pluralism to present a new way to think about democracy which is different from the traditional liberal conception of democracy as a negotiation among interests and is also different from the model which is currently being developed by people like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. While they have many differences, Rawls and Habermas have in common the idea that the aim of the democratic society is the creation of a consensus, and that consensus is possible if people are only able to leave aside their particular interests and think as rational beings. However, while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted. The democratic process should supply that arena.15

Another alternative model for living in a pluralistic, democratic society might reasonably be sought in the church. Christians, following the dictates of the Great Commission, have spread Christianity around the globe, gaining adherents in every corner of the world. Theology has been inculturated in every land. In spite of decades of decline in church membership, the United States remains the most Christian nation in the world. Despite, however, the multicultural reality of the American nation, the cliché remains nevertheless true: worship is still the most segregated hour of the week for most Americans. Prior to the coming of Europeans, the indigenes of the Americas lived out a kind of natural religious pluralism. Native cultures were religiously undergirded, and religion permeated every aspect of life, so that it was impossible to separate out what was religious from what was political, what was religious from what was artistic, what was religious from what was economic, and so on. In The Soul of an Indian, Dakota physician Charles Eastman wrote, “Every act of [an Indian’s] life is, in a very real sense, a religious act.”16 To speak then about Native culture and religious traditions is to talk about things that are virtually synonymous and coextensive, like a hand in a glove. For this reason, while tribes might clash with one another, they did not fight religious wars. Nor did they proselytize. It would have seemed absurd for a Cherokee to feel a need to convert a Creek to being Cherokee, for instance. Rather, each group believed that they had their original instructions, as did every other tribal group. If each tribe lived in accordance with these instructions, all would be well. A tribe thus did not see itself as having a monopoly on the truth. Native cultures are what have been described as “polycentric.” Two stories will illustrate this aspect of indigenous societies.

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In my book That the People Might Live, I relate the story of an anthropologist who visits an Indian community and makes contact with her collaborator. “The first thing you need to know,” her host says, “is that in the center of our village is our council fire, and that fire is the center of the universe. Our creation stories prove it.” She dutifully notes this. The following day, she and her host travel to the other side of the mountain to visit another, closely related band. Her host introduces her to another elder, who says, “The first thing you need to know is that in the center of our village is our council fire, and that fire is the center of the universe.” As he spoke, the Indian from the first village nodded. The anthropologist expressed her perplexity, saying, “You said your council fire is the center of the universe, and yet you seem to agree with him when he says his is. They can’t both be the center, can they.” Her host’s brief response speaks volumes: “When we’re there, that’s the center of the universe. When we’re here, this is the center of the universe.” Alluding to that story, Osage theologian George Tinker (also included in this volume) writes, “Sometimes a single truth is not enough to explain the balance of the world around us.”17 The second story relates to an eighteenth-century missionary encounter. It is sometimes ascribed to Red Jacket, a Seneca chief known his disputations with clergy. As the story is told, a missionary came to the Indian village. Gathering the people around, he proceeded to tell them the biblical story from creation through resurrection. When he had finished, the chief replied, “It is a good story. Now let us tell you ours,” after which he began to tell the Iroquois earthdiver creation myth. The minister leapt to his feet, crying, “What are you doing? I offer you eternal truths, and you give me nothing but lies and blasphemy!” Unfazed, the Indian said, “Sir, you are obviously poorly schooled in the art of courtesy. We listened to your story and believed it. Why can you not hear ours and believe it, as well?” Today, as alluded to earlier, American Indians are something of an anomaly in the United States. Tribes are separate sovereigns within the federal system. They are nations within a nation, a status confirmed by both treaties and the U.S. Constitution. Native Americans are thus dual citizens—of their tribal nation and of the United States. Furthermore, broadly speaking, the story of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States has been one of seeking full inclusion—politically, socially, economically—in the American system. Indians fought incorporation, and today, of all groups, Native Americans have the highest percentage of both individuals and groups who want to opt “out.” Native nations were dispossessed of their lands and deprived of their governments, often violently, other times by chicanery and operation of law. Their practice of their own religious traditions was outlawed by the federal government from 1883 until 1934. Generations of Native children were “scooped up” and forced into assimilative boarding schools or adopted and



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fostered out of their families, communities, and cultures. The thousands of promises made by European powers or the federal government were never honored; treaties were always broken. Periodically, in recent years, church groups or governments issue apologies to indigenous peoples. My favorite is a joint resolution adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1993, acknowledging the United States’ complicity in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and apologizing to Native Hawaiians. The United States annexed Hawaii on July 7, 1898. “It won’t happen again,” the resolution seemed to say. Such apologies are a desperate search for cheap grace by easy acknowledgment of past acts without genuine transformation of actions or the ongoing situation. Speaking of apartheid and the dispossession of blacks in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is reported to have said, “If you take my pen and say you are sorry and don’t give me back my pen, nothing has happened.” The putative apology is of no real effect. Today, stolen Indian lands and resources are still in the hands of others. Inherent Native sovereignty is still infringed upon. Poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism are major problems. And Indians rank at the bottom of every major health and social indicator. If you take my pen and say you’re sorry, what good does the apology do me, if you still keep my pen? Any public theology seeking to deal with “social relations [in] our diverse and divided society” must take these facts as its starting point. At the same time, however, despite the continuing reality for Natives of the United States as a settler colony, we must all find a way to live together in this geographic space we share. What is called for, however—what is a necessity—is more than cheap grace. One possible approach might be restorative justice. Restorative justice focuses on the needs of victims, offenders, and the community as a whole as a result of crime or injury. It is a broad term which encompasses a growing social movement to institutionalize peaceful approaches to harm, problem-solving and violations of legal and human rights. These range from international peacemaking tribunals such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa to innovations within our criminal justice system, schools, social services and communities. Rather than privileging the law, professionals and the state, restorative resolutions engage those who are harmed, wrongdoers and their affected communities in search of solutions that promote repair, reconciliation and the rebuilding of relationships. Restorative justice seeks to build partnerships to reestablish mutual responsibility for constructive responses to wrongdoing within our communities. Restorative approaches seek a balanced approach to the needs of the victim, wrongdoer and community through processes that preserve the safety and dignity of all.18

It emphasizes repairing the harms caused by the act based upon the assumption that when all stakeholders—victims, offenders, and community

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representatives—come together to decide how to do that, “the results can be transformational.”19 Though fairly recent in American society, restorative justice is actually an ancient phenomenon. It is much more in keeping with indigenous law-ways in which the community itself has rights. In her book Speaking of Indians, ethnographer Ella Cara Deloria notes that the murder of a Dakota by a Dakota was traditionally punishable either “immediate reprisal” or putting the offender through “ancient ordeals,” which if survived meant exoneration. In some instances, however, “now and again,” the crime was balanced out by the victim’s family agreeing to adopt the offender “to be one of them in place of his victim.” He would then agree to perform the role and fulfill the obligations of the deceased to the family and the larger social unit. Deloria wrote: And what might easily have become burning rancor and hatred, perhaps leading to further violence, was purged from the hearts of all. It was, of course, obligatory on all the slain man’s immediate relatives by blood and marriage to receive him properly. And the men, women, and even children quickly fell into line, without awkwardness, accepting the situation and behaving according as each was now related to him. The proper attitudes and behaviors accompanying each term [of the kinship system] were, as I have said before, ingrained in them from constant practice until they were automatic. Until there were instinctive, I nearly said, but of course that is not the word. It is not instinctive to be unselfish, kind, and sincere toward others, and therefore courteous. Those are traits that have to be learned. And they can be learned, but only by scrupulous repetition, until they become automatic responses; until, in the case of the Dakotas, the very uttering of a kinship term at once brought the whole process into synchronic play—kinship term, attitude, behavior, like a chord that is harmonious.20

This is no cheap grace, no facile reconciliation. I can think of nothing harder, even among the Sioux for whom kinship responsibilities were so deeply encoded. Ella Deloria was a Dakota writing about Dakotas. While the American Civil War was being fought in the East, the Dakota faced intolerable and deadly conditions in the West. They had been lied to and cheated by treaty negotiators and bilked by traders. Now as promised rations were being withheld and starvation loomed, they prepared for war. On August 18, 1862, they struck. What whites called the Great Sioux Uprising was on. The Indians were led by Little Crow. The Dakota in Minnesota were hopeful that the distraction of the whites’ own conflict would give them an advantage. Little Crow knew better. He had been to the whites’ cities. He knew their numbers and their power. He ridiculed the young men of the war council, saying, “See!—the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm.



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You may kill one—two—ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one—two—ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. . . . Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day.”21 Even though he knew it was futile, Little Crow told the assembly that if they were bent on war, he would lead them. The Indians, catching the settlers by surprise, enjoyed early success. But gradually the tide turned in favor of the Minnesota militia led by Colonel Henry Sibley. According to Ralph Andrist, “To Sibley, his mission from that point on was one of vengeance, the speedy hanging of many Sioux.” Promoted to brigadier general for his victory, he convened a military tribunal to try the Indians. Over two thousand had been rounded up. Nearly four hundred men were tried. Three hundred and three were sentenced to death. Another sixteen were given prison terms. The court operated so efficiently, it could try an accused man and sentence him to hang in as little as five minutes. Andrist writes, “It was not considered necessary to prove actual killing or other crime; taking part in a battle, or even presence at the scene of a battle were ruled to be punishable by death.”22 President Abraham Lincoln intervened. He insisted on reviewing personally the records of all those under death sentence. According to Andrist, “The records were gone over; the work of Sibley’s court collapsed.” The president concluded that the Indians had been involved in a war. Therefore merely fighting in battle was not enough to warrant execution, which would be reserved for those who committed murder or rape. In the end, on the day after Christmas 1862, thirty-eight men were hanged at Mankato, Minnesota.23 It was the largest mass execution in United States history. One of the signal engagements of Little Crow’s War occurred when Little Crow and his followers attacked the German settlement of New Ulm. Townspeople, reinforced by a contingent of soldiers from Mankato, threw up barricades. They burned much of the town themselves to deprive their enemy of cover. In the end, after a pitched battle, the whites were forced to evacuate the remains of the town. Howard Vogel, a professor of law at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, is one of the country’s leaders in restorative justice as an approach to “conflict resolution for social healing.” He is also a descendant of those German immigrants who fought Little Crow at New Ulm. For the past several years, he has been involved with descendants of those Dakota warriors and other community people in a restorative justice group who work on their conflictual history and what it means to live together in twenty-first-century Minnesota. Again, this is no simplistic, Rodney-Kingcan’t-we-all-just-get-along. Both were, in fact, victims. The German settlers were able to occupy the land because the Indians had been deceived and

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coerced into fraudulent land cessions. On the other hand, the immigrants were misled about the land they were moving to occupy. David Larsen, a psychologist and a Dakota, says that they “were told the land was free, that nobody owned it, that they could just come and take it. They weren’t mean. They believed what they were told. And all of a sudden there were people like us saying, ‘No you can’t have this. This is ours. And we’re not going to change.’”24 When the Dakota rose up against the depredations they suffered at the hands of the federal government and its agents, the people of New Ulm and other settlers were caught in the crossfire and defended themselves. Larsen attributes much of the hostility that has plagued Native/ white relations in Minnesota to unresolved anger on both sides. Canadian political scientist Tim Schouls in his book Shifting Boundaries examines pluralism, which he defines as “a public arrangement in which distinct groups live side by side in conditions of mutual recognition and affirmation,” as a mode of Native and non-Native cohabitation in Canada. He writes, “Canada is a plural nation with a variety of ethnic, cultural, religious and national identities. Some societies possess more diversity than others; Canada is among the most multi-ethnic. While Canadian history contains instances of intolerance and oppression, it also contains measures that have tried to accommodate Canada’s multi-ethnic population. For this reason, Canada is often called a pluralist state.”25 While there are important differences between the history of Native/white relations in the United States and Canada (notably the absence of Indian wars in the latter), in broad brush, those histories and the policies generated by the two national governments have paralleled each other—segregation of Natives onto reservations (called “reserves” in Canada), aggressive and coercive assimilationist laws, bans on the practice of Native religions, children forced into boarding schools (“residential schools” in Canada) or adopted out to non-Native families, marginalization of Natives. Schouls admits that although pluralism is about “recognition” and “affirmation” in theory, what these principles mean is actually contested in fact. Too often pluralism is read simply, in an unsophisticated fashion, as Native desire to maintain cultural difference. Instead, Schouls calls for reframing issues of indigenous self-governance in terms of what he calls “relational pluralism,” which requires acknowledging and examining power differentials between Native communities and the nation-state and within Native communities themselves. He writes: Framed in this way, Aboriginal politics involves demands to equalize current imbalances of power so that Aboriginal communities and individuals within them can construct Aboriginal identities according to their own designs. Less conspicuous in this approach is the idea that Aboriginal self-government should be seen as a tool to preserve cultural and national differences on the



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purported premise that these are goods in and of themselves. I believe that finding morally defensible and politically viable answers to questions raised by the Aboriginal assertion to power is a more accurate way of framing one of the greatest political challenges facing Canada today.26

In his analysis, he is less concerned with producing a detailed political model than examining the “fundamental moral and political questions associated with the [indigenous] right to self-government.” While Schouls book is not without flaws—I have trouble, for instance, with his stress on “identity”—I find his emphasis on Native self-government, power imbalances, and “internal” and “external” equality—all tied into cultural and natural difference—to be useful. His “relational pluralist” approach provides a way to think about coexistence with mutual recognition and affirmation or respect.27 My stance in favor of Native nationalism in my book That the People Might Live led my friend Alan Velie, a professor of Native literature at the University of Oklahoma, to accuse me of “pluralist separatism.” In Turtle Goes to War and later in American Indian Literary Nationalism, I professed ignorance as to what exactly he meant by the term. To my mind it brought up “Let a hundred separatisms bloom” or “Let there be two, three, many separatisms.”28 Even so, I said that I embraced the phrase. For me, embracing the sovereignty of Native tribal nations espouses a kind of separatism, but it is a pluralist separatism. A relational pluralism that affirms and respects the inherent right of federally recognized tribal nations to govern their territories and their own citizenry and the right of Natives to refuse assimilation and embrace cultural and religious difference—and the equally important concomitant right of Native individuals to make contrary decisions (such as the practice of Christianity) for themselves—would provide a modus vivendi for coexistence among Natives and non-Natives in the United States. Two decades ago, in the spring of 1990, I entered into an already ongoing dialogue on these issues with Native theologians Robert Warrior and William Baldridge. The conversation had begun in September 1989 with the publication by Warrior of “Canaanites, Cowboys and Indians” in Christianity and Crisis.29 The article likened the American Indian experience to that of the Canaanites, dispossessed of their homeland and annihilated by a foreign invader. Native Americans therefore, said Warrior, read the Bible with “Canaanite eyes.” Warrior went on to maintain that the story of the Exodus, the paradigm of contemporary liberation theology, cannot be severed from the story of the conquest of Canaan and the destruction of the Canaanites. Exodus cannot be divorced from eisode. Colonialism and genocide are at the base of the texts themselves. Unless another paradigm can be found, Warrior contended, no Native Christian theology of liberation can exist.

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Cherokee theologian Baldridge responded shortly after publication of Warrior’s piece in a letter to the editor of the same journal. He stated that the essay by the Osage former Christian had “precipitated an intellectual and spiritual crisis for him as a Native American Christian. He wrote, “Warrior’s arguments had a powerful impact on me as I could dispute neither his emphasis on the story nor his reading of the story.” As a means of redeeming the biblical text, Baldridge suggested the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. The woman approaches Jesus asking for healing for her daughter. Annoyed, the disciples urge him to send her away, and Jesus turns to her, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The woman persists, and Jesus attempts to brush her off again: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman will not be denied. She shoots back, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” According to Baldridge, “What happens next is a miracle: The Son of Yahweh is set free. The son of the god of Canaanite oppression repents. Jesus not only changes his mind, he changes his heart. He sees her as a human being and answers her as such. ‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly . . . and so, I believe, were the wounds of bitterness in the Canaanite woman.” The rift between Canaanite and oppressor is thus bridged for Baldridge. Warrior considered Baldridge’s response in a printed rejoinder, ultimately rejecting it. He wrote: Isn’t this where we American Indians find ourselves? Like the Canaanite woman, we must go begging to the people who colonized us in order to secure the bare minimum of justice. Like her, our healing has become wrapped up in changing the colonizer’s mind about our right to be self-determined, legitimate nations of people. Thus we must confront them in strength with our humanity. We have been doing so for 500 years, to little avail. Yet we remain persistent and hope someday to change their minds, or at least their actions. . . . But, if we are able to convert the son of the Christian god and his followers, my choice will still be to go home to the drum, the stomp dance, and the sweatlodge.

It was at this point that I entered the conversation. First in my master’s thesis and then in two related articles in Christianity and Crisis, I offered a model for redemption of the biblical text that meets most of Warrior’s criteria. A biblical paradigm for Native American/Canaanite liberation can be found in the account of the daughters of Zelophehad found in two parts in Numbers 27 and Joshua 17. In Numbers, just as Moses and Eleazar have completed the census of Israelites that will determine allotment of land in the Promised Land, Zelophehad’s daughters approach. They tell the leaders that their father has died in the wilderness, leaving no sons as heirs, only daughters. They are worried



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that, because women cannot inherit, they will be deprived of their place when land is apportioned. Moses seeks the guidance of God, and God says, of course the daughters should have their place when the land is allocated. A new law is promulgated. Later, in the book of Joshua, when Eleazar and Joshua actually carry out the apportionment, they forget Zelophehad’s daughters. The women again step forward, pointing that God commanded Moses to allow them to inherit on the same basis as their male kin. Thus reminded, Joshua allots the promised portion to them. The story illustrates that all—even the most powerless and oppressed of a society—have the right to share equally in the promise. It also vividly shows us that the oppressed must not remain silent or inactive in the face of their oppression. At every turn it is incumbent upon them to remind the oppressor of God’s promise and thus to be the heralds of their own salvation. Zelophehad’s daughters confront those in power—to use Warrior’s phrase—in strength with their humanity. Where one might have faltered, five step forward together—shoulder-to-shoulder—and demand what is theirs by right. Most importantly, for purposes of our discussion, the story has direct meaning for the Canaanites. The names of Zelophehad’s five daughters—Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah—were, in fact, the names of five towns in northern Canaan in the land of Hepher. They were taken from Numbers 26, where they were meant as towns, and reinterpreted for purposes of the allotment story. The Hepherites were neither destroyed nor dispossessed. Nor were they reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of like the Gibeonites. Rather, they formed a religio-political alliance with the Israelites. Ideologically, the Israelites were embarrassed that their conquest and occupation of Canaan was less than total. So in their sacred history they told themselves and the generations to come later of a complete extirpation, a genocidal ethnic cleansing. Yet they themselves knew that this was a fiction. Canaanites remained on the land. Their presence could not be ignored, so it had to be explained or disguised. Gibeonites were reduced textually to lowly manual laborers. Hepherites were forced into drag as Zelophehad’s daughters. The story of the daughters in Numbers and Joshua is a masquerade, a concealed account of the maintenance of the Hepherites’ cultural and territorial integrity—an integrity that according to 1st and 2nd Kings survived at least until the time of Solomon. In similar fashion, Amer-Europeans, in order to complete and validate their own conquest, figured Indians as a vanishing race, destined for inevitable extinction. By the twentieth century, in the collective American Mind, the disappearance had been accomplished with finality. Natives were left behind in the nineteenth century and prohibited from being coeval.

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American Indians are thus the Hepherites, Zelophehad’s daughters, sharing a land and living in the midst of a foreign people, yet preserving their own identity and self-determination. While the issues remain complex and not subject to easy resolution, the story of Zelophehad’s daughters provides us with a paradigm around which to theorize cohabitation and coexistence in this space and this nation we all share. Theorizing, however, is insufficient. The theoretical paradigm must be combined with both the pluralist separatist and restorative justice approaches limned above. Much hard work remains on both sides. Non-Natives must acknowledge the manifold injustices inflicted upon Natives in the past and commit themselves actively to remedying their continuing effects in the present. They must recognize the sovereignty of tribal nations. They must respect that this sovereignty and the accompanying right of self-determination entails authority by those tribal nations over their own citizens and territory and the right to at least share in decisions affecting them and their futures. Concomitantly, while continuing to confront Amer-Europeans with the promise “in the strength of our humanity” and holding them accountable for failures to live up to it, Natives must admit—in the first instance to themselves—two things. First, the settler colonizers have settled in. No one is going anywhere. Second, the sovereignty exercised by Native nations is what in legal terms is known as a “clipped sovereignty,” subject to the superior sovereignty of the federal government, and that is not going to change. In this, they stand in a position not unlike the states. To acknowledge this, however, is not the same as acquiescing in it; in their negotiations, legal actions, and activism, Natives must always seek to redress past wrongs and this ongoing imbalance of powers, the essence of Schouls’s relational pluralism. I said that a lot of hard work lies ahead. The admissions in the two prior paragraphs require the abandoning of entrenched positions occupied by both Natives and non-Natives. Non-Natives object to the pluralist separatism of lived tribal sovereignty for the same reason that political conservatives decry multiculturalism as supposedly rending the fabric of the United States’ e-pluribus-unum society. Conversely, the admissions of the second paragraph fly in the face of much American Indian activist rhetoric. Nevertheless, I believe that in both cases they are the preconditions to any movement toward restorative justice between Natives and Amer-Europeans and that they form the minimum bases for Schouls’s “mutual recognition and affirmation” required if we are to live side by side. It seems to me to be little other than Niebuhrian realism. Only through respecting these preconditions, while working to remedy past and existing injustices, can we hope to perfect the ideal of a pluralist, democratic society in this land that history has decreed we must share.

Response to Jace Weaver Luis Leon

The Detroit Institute of Arts organized and is currently exhibiting a collection of African images and objects entitled, “Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present.” This exhibit is a chronological study in African representations of the thought, practice, and religious mythologies of the Christian Europeans. The purpose of the show, according to the official description, is as follows: By contextualizing African works that imitate, distort, criticize, or poke fun at the white “other,” Through African Eyes will raise compelling questions: for instance, when is parody humor, and when is it a form of resistance against Western domination? The exhibition casts the European as the cultural “other” and this reversal of the usual Eurocentric perspective suggests the exhibition will be sobering and thought-provoking. African voices will permeate the exhibition and its interpretive strategies to insure that its intellectual conclusions are reinforced by opinions expressed by Africans.1

Painted in broad strokes, Jace Weaver’s chapter “Pluralist Separatism and Community” is a reflection of the American colonists’ culture from a Native point of view. Like the “Through African Eyes” exhibition, Weaver’s chapter provokes questions of parody, humor, and play—weaving together art, poetry, and philosophy from the master narratives of American exceptionalism. Weaver lays bare the motivations for and the consequences of theological discourses Europeans deployed to justify the horrors of colonialism. From Weaver’s Native perspective, the popularly held myth that America and thus Americans were chosen by God to advance freedom, that is, civil 111

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religion, is reduced to a tragic parody, an irony, a farce. Walt Whitman’s celebrated poem “America” as epigraph seems little more than a masterful racist limerick from a closeted homosexual trapped in a world of Romantic Victorian fantasy. How different the narrative of the European colonizer when captured and reflected back, refracted by the will of the colonized. From Native views—the conquered—grandiose notions of God’s destiny for the master race clash with the struggle for human dignity, agency, and autonomy of all creation. Images exhibited in “Through African Eyes” demonstrate the paucity of rhetorical suasion European myths held for Africans. Rather than crusading heroes, Europeans were depicted by Africans as lazy drunken buffoons who acted out of greed and malice. Religious images show that Africans did not accept Christianity as was necessary for the discourse of colonialism. Instead, Africans drew from the repertoire of images and stories that populated the Christian pantheon in order to broaden means by which to tell their own stories. Indians, too, as Weaver argues, resisted the macabre colonial Christian narratives of human sacrifice. Additionally, throughout Latin America Native peoples also chose to incorporate Christian elements into their ancient traditions. Indians, as Weaver deftly illustrates, were able to fathom and narrate contradictory truths in early de facto constructions of American pragmatism, wherein truth, like the optical lens in William James’s well-worn metaphor, becomes true (is verified) when enabling clearer vision and producing good effects in the world. In his writings on “Pragmatism” and “The Meaning of Truth,” James argues that larger truth is discovered in that mediating sight produces clearer vision, but that that lens and product may differ, even conflict. Indians need not kill in order to confirm and experience truth through the physical sensation of violence.2 Indians heard the stories of each other and believed them. For that, Seneca chief Red Jacket was startled by the poor conversational skills of his Christian missionary interlocutor. Stunned, he exclaims: “We listened to your story and believed it. Why can you not hear ours and believe it, as well?” This is the purest form of pluralism. Weaver boldly proposes what he calls “pluralist separatism,” which he describes as follows: A relational pluralism that affirms and respects the inherent right of federally recognized tribal nations to govern their territories and their own citizenry and the right of Natives to refuse assimilation and embrace cultural and religious difference—and the equally important concomitant right of Native individuals to make contrary decisions (such as the practice of Christianity) for themselves—would provide a modus vivendi for coexistence among Natives and non-Natives in the United States.



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It seems to me that this is at least the spirit and goal of the 564 existing tribal governments spread out over 287 Indian reservations, with two hundred alone concentrated in Alaska and many more seeking federal recognition. Yet, instead of a freedom for self-determination, tribal lands and governments have been treated by the United States as colonized territories, exploited for natural resources and cheap labor. Indeed, herein lies the connection between Native people in the United States, Chicanos, blacks, and racialized Asian Americans. The process of assigning a discourse of race simultaneously enables dehumanization, and a tragic designation on a classification of humanity that legitimates their domination. During the colonial age, this hierarchy of races was thought to closely follow the laws of nature, to come from Creation, to be the handiwork of God. Weaver points out that the U.S. Constitution, that great harbinger of freedom, modernity, and democracy, categorized blacks as three-fifths of a human; not as nonhuman, but as humans who were devalued, worth less than a European. The incongruity between champions of freedom who were slave holders is reconciled in the Enlightenment doctrine that while still human, some groups of humanity suffered from a deficiency in God’s grace, and were therefore meant to serve the masters. In his essay entitled “Race,” Thomas Jefferson drew a scale of humanity, from Africans to Indians to Europeans, a tormented reasoning that no doubt exorcised his own demons. Subsequently and not without great irony, decolonizing practices in the twentieth century relied on theological discourses, narratives about God, creation, sin, and social redemption. Gandhi, King, and Chavez narrated new visions of God’s creatures in which all humans are truly equal. Even while officially shunned from the modern nation state, religious authority continued to lend legitimacy to republican governments in modernity’s greatest sleight of hand: civil religion, what Rousseau called the “spiritual dimension of the state.” King perhaps best of all provided a fresh and even Baptistic reiteration of the nation’s highest belief in which all were human. In the famous image from the civil rights movement, black men don sandwich boards that declare without ambiguity: I Am a Man. Yet, this strikingly gender-specific declaration of humanity raises questions about another of Weaver’s concerns: community. As I see it, this is the key and organizing question for this work: how do we go about the task of organizing community? Certainly a lofty goal when considered carefully. The root of the word “community,” commune, also roots the word “communitas,” the highest expression of community creating a spirited, intimate, human connection. Erotic really in its truest sense, insofar as eros binds together humans to the degree whereby a new organism is birthed from the coalescence of individuals—a merger unto death.3 How then does this unity bind together differences?

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The declaration of manhood cannot go far enough. Chicana critic Cherrie Moraga boldly points out the faulty logic of this statement and proposes a resolution. On some level, our brothers—gay and straight—have got to give up being “men.” I don’t mean give up their genitals, their unique expression of desire, or the rich and intimate manner in which men can bond together. Men have to give up their subscription to male superiority. I remember during the Civil Rights Movement seeing newsreel footage of young black men carrying protest signs reading “I AM A MAN.” It was a powerful statement, publicly declaring their humanness in a society that daily told them otherwise. But they didn’t write “I AM HUMAN,” they wrote, “MAN.” Conceiving of their liberation in male terms, they were unwittingly demanding the right to share the whiteman’s position of male dominance.4

Similarly, when conceiving of separatist communities there is great potential to look only at race as a dividing line, and therefore replicate models of sexual and gender marginalization. Weaver’s silence on this issue is troubling. He speaks of the settlement of Jamestown, without the mention of its all male status, founded, historians argue, as a gay male utopia. Advancing such knowledge would do much to shake the pillars of heterosexual normativity that are the foundation of the U.S. mythological discourse. Similarly, when retelling the story of the Canaanite women whose denied inheritance was restored by Jesus, Weaver misses an opportunity to illustrate the patriarchy and misogyny that is the cornerstone of property ownership in the modern West.5 In fact, such is a biblical heritage! Weaver provides a provocative contribution to the ongoing conversation that is democracy. I don’t believe democratic discourse needs to reach a consensus. Consensus needs always to be questioned, critiqued, challenged. Rather than consensus models of democratic union, self-governance needs to be more than agonistic: democracy should be gritty, aggressive, even filthy. Instead of strained consensus, which has caused great catastrophes in American history, perhaps we should work for contested and aggravated advance, wherein all is provisional, subject to the multiple and competing truths that constitute human reality.

6 American Prophecy: Cesar Chavez in Light of Martin Luther King and Gandhi Luis Leon

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. —St. Paul It was all done by Christ and Gandhi and St. Francis of Assisi and Dr. King. They did it all. We don’t have to think about new ideas; we just have to implement what they said, just get the work done. Gandhi offered everything there is in his message. —Cesar Chavez, 19901 Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.2 —Gandhi

During the funeral of Cesar Estrada Chavez (1927–1993) influential politicians, artists, clergy people, and actors eulogized him, framing him for a generation to come. Art Torres, California Democratic Party state chairman, spoke for millions of Latinos when he declared: “[Cesar Chavez] is our Gandhi, our Martin Luther King.”3 Chavez’s official eulogy included a declaration by Los Angeles Catholic archdiocese cardinal Roger Mahony, who called him “a prophet for the farmworkers,” and President Clinton issued a statement describing him as a heroic “Moses figure for his people.” Not long after his death, the Mexican norteno band, Los Tigeres del Norte, re115

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corded a song whose chorus melodically articulated a well-known comparison between Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. It declares: “and if you didn’t know it before, now you know it, you have a separate place in the Heavens.” Even while Chavez is far lesser known than Gandhi and King, the similarities among them illuminate a broad pattern of leadership in the modern age that combines religion and politics. Mohandas Gandhi influenced both the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King and Chavez; whereas Chavez modeled himself largely after King, and by the time of his death, King began looking also to Chavez. In what follows I map the connections among them, focusing briefly on three points of intersection: their historical overlap; their commitment to a strategy of nonviolent, direct action; and the articulation of a theological response to racism and the postcolonial condition. I argue that Chavez emulated the role of modern prophet from King in the line of Gandhi, but that he transformed that identity so that it addressed his particular social context. The struggles of Chavez, King, and Gandhi resonate especially inasmuch as each waged a religious crusade exposing that which had been obfuscated by a modernist racial discourse: all people are equally human despite race—since all are children of God. Therefore, racism and its material expression, colonialism, offend God: racism is evil and sinful. Perhaps most ironic in the spiritual suasion of these leaders is that religion, modernity’s foil, became the effective mechanism by which to transform modern times. Gandhi, King, and Chavez broke the civic religious code that transformed the authority of the church into the realm of the state whereby republican governments can then scramble existing religious grammars to invent its own language of the sacred, what Nietszche’s prophet Zarathustra called tongues of “good and evil.” Chavez, King, and Gandhi have been tied together historically and philosophically using the common thread of nonviolence, without much sociological context.4 Each was swept into a global tide of a rapidly decolonizing world wherein men of color were encouraged to seek spiritual rejuvenation through anticolonial violent revolution. Malcolm X, Che Guevera, and Franz Fanon exhorted colonized men to sacrifice themselves for the greater redemptive end of national sovereignty and social liberation. By the mid-twentieth century, King and Chavez responded to the crisis of “internal colonization” within the United States by preaching a nonviolent discourse of love and sacrifice intended to appeal to all people who work for social justice; yet, it was conceived and expressed in male terms.5 For better or worse, they performed models of masculinity intended especially for male audiences. Hence, according to Cherrie Moraga, they were “unwittingly demanding the right to share the whiteman’s position of male dominance.”6



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Heretofore there has been regrettably little religious comparison paid to these three powerful historical actors. Broadly figured, the rites of life passage for Gandhi, King, and Chavez replicate and revise the mythological hero: separation, trial, and return to slay the local dragon.7 Of course this is not to propose that each was a without human error or saintly; Chavez complained when outsiders thought of his people as “saints.” The fact that each of these men was flawed bears repeating as much as does their common humanity. In other words, the modernist fantasy that criticism should be rendered as academic truth is over simplifying a difficult and politically charged endeavor—to the extent that it is trivial and banal. Yet, when presenting this work, I am continually charged to say something unflattering or offensive about Chavez as if such evinces an anachronistic notion of positivistic truth. Mostly as an obligation, I acknowledge that there is much to criticize in the lives of these men, and some of that will come out organically in the course of my analysis. But, I don’t raise it for personal gain, nor is it the focus of my chapter. My most critical area of analysis is gender and sexuality—but this of course leaves other areas unexamined. Despite their flaws, each achieved a prodigious goal for their constituencies. With this in mind, the first part of what follows adumbrates Chavez’s life passages, tracing the mythology and prophetic vocation. Next I connect him to Gandhi and finally to King before placing these comparisons into the broader arena of religions and American politics. Chavez’s work in religion and politics as well as his life patterns speak to our current realities inviting global perspectives and blurred lines of religious adherence when confronting localized oppressions.

Rites of Passage Contrary to popular fiction, Chavez was not unlearned, unlettered, and of a simple family. Chavez benefitted from the experience of his extraordinary paternal grandparents who were integrated into his immediate household.8 His father’s mother, Dorotea, or “Mama Tella,” was raised in a Mexican convent where she learned Latin and Spanish. His grandfather, Cesario Chavez, or “Papa Chayo,” was a devotee of the Mexican Revolutionary spirit, living and teaching the principles of “tierra y libertad,” or land and liberty. Cesar’s mother, Juana Estrada, a full-blooded Taramara Indian, was a woman of uncommon faith. A midwife and spiritual healer or curandera, she was skilled in the elaborate world of healing. Chavez recounts: “My mother had a reputation in the valley for her skill in healing, a skill she put to constant use, for she couldn’t bear to see anyone in pain, and there were no doctors in the valley. She was especially knowledgeable in the use of herbs choosing some to cool a fever, others to cure colic, and mixing brews

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for specific illnesses. Her faith in her skill was as strong as her belief in the saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe.”9 She taught Cesar the ancient art of herbal and spiritual healing. Her favorite remedy was the herb Manzanilla; young Cesar was tagged with the nickname, “Manzanillo.” Yet, for Juana Estrada faith and compassion eclipsed economic reason inasmuch as she would spend the family’s subsistence resources on helping others; “you always have to help the needy,” she reasoned, “and God will help you.”10 Cesar learned a great deal from his mother. “When I look back I see her sermons had a tremendous impact on me. I didn’t know it was nonviolence then, but after reading Gandhi, St. Francis, and other exponents of nonviolence, I began to clarify that in my mind. Now that I’m older I see she is nonviolent.”11 She dispelled for young Cesar the mystique of macho identity: “She taught her children to reject that part of culture which too often tells its young men that you’re not a man if you don’t fight back.”12 Cesar remembers his father as a hard worker who never touched alcohol. Together with “Papa Chayo,” he began a homestead, clearing more than one hundred acres of dry valley floor—three years prior to Arizona’s entrance into the United States. Chavez’s father taught him to abhor machismo, and also taught him social justice. Librado was uncommonly active in the earliest efforts to unionize farm workers. Cesar learned from his abuelo, a refugee of the revolution and self-made hacendado. Mama Tella taught him the importance of reading and classical learning. She was raised in a convent and spoke several languages. At the foot of her bed he learned in the manner of the ancients. His mother and grandmother also taught him religion. “As we didn’t have a church in the valley and it was very difficult to go to Yuma, it was my mother who taught us prayers,” explains Chavez, “throughout the Southwest and Mexico where there were no priests for a long time, the amazing thing was that people kept the faith. But they were more oriented toward relics and saints. My mother was very religious without being a fanatic.”13 Virgil Elizondo describes his Catholicism as “home based” or “casita religion.”14 The depression years, drought, and corrupt politicians took its toll on the Chavez family property and businesses: they lost the ranch and became migrant farm laborers. Chavez often described the deplorable conditions of the farm workers in intricate detail, recounting his boyhood memories of following the crops: “Sometimes growers provided camps—without plumbing—and workers bathed and drank from irrigation ditches. Many families often lived on riverbanks or under bridges, in shacks built of linoleum scraps and cardboard cartons, or tents improvised from gunny sacks. Though farm workers were harvesting vegetables and fruit, hunger was constant. The abundance of farm workers diminished the work load at the same time drove down wages. There was little money for food. Some families survived on nothing but beans and fried dough, or perhaps just fried



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oatmeal, or dandelion greens and boiled potatoes.”15 In addition, farmers often paid workers less than what they had been promised as farm labor was literally without rights or protections. Field laborers spent long hours under a blazing sun performing monotonous and back-breaking work without rest or proper equipment. Contractors often failed to provide water and toilets for the workers. But the most difficult part of this task was working with a tool called the short-handled hoe. This required workers to stoop over and contort their bodies unnaturally to execute their burden. Chavez described this work likening it to the passion of Christ: “I would chop out a space with the short-handled hoe in the right hand while I felt with my left to pull out all but one plant as I made the next chop. There was a rhythm, it went very fast. . . . It’s like being nailed to a cross.”16 Like Gandhi and King, Chavez often peppered his political critiques with religious imagery. Cesar left school at age fifteen upon graduating from the eighth grade in 1942, enabling him to return to work the fields full time and thereby liberating his mother from the back-breaking job. This was also a rebellious period in his life, and his identity underwent a brief but conspicuous transformation, a “pachuco” or zootsuit period. He began to smoke, drink beer, and dance: the erotic choreography and uninhibited parties of the pachucos and pachucas gave Chicana and Chicano youth a Dionysian idiom for expressing their alienation and rage. The adolescence of prophetic “heroes” is often characterized by rebellion, followed by continually morphing personal identity. In 1946 Chavez joined the navy, serving in the Pacific. “Those were the worst two years of my life: this regimentation, this super authority that somehow somebody has the right to move you around like a piece of equipment. It’s worse than being in prison. And there was a lot of discrimination.”17 While in the navy he was exposed to racism and suffering on a global scale, crystallizing his resolve to advance a universal justice, beginning at home. This episode marks a period of total separation from a world in which he was familiar, and immersion into a hostile environment in which he was made to battle and endure an unjust and unrelenting force. This is perhaps the most formative of the rites of passage: separation, or the state of “liminality,” at the limen or border of social structures, wherein greatest personal transformation is possible. Similarly, Gandhi left his native India to become a barrister first in England then in South Africa before returning home to work for Indian independence from the British. King left his childhood home and father’s church in Atlanta after graduating from Morehouse College to study in the north, and then to take a congregation in Birmingham before returning to his native Atlanta from whence the majority of his work was based. Chavez’s separation from home during his naval tour immersed him in the lofty rhetoric of American patriotism and civil religion. It was during

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his military service when an incident occurred at a local theater that would further impress upon him the urgency of working for democratic morality; this has been called his “Rosa Parks” moment. On a shore leave, he was not in uniform. For a long time, movie theaters throughout the San Joaquin Valley were segregated. It was just accepted by the Mexicans then. In Delano, the quarter-section on the right was reserved for Mexicans, blacks, and Filipinos, while Anglos and Japanese sat elsewhere. . . . This time something told me I shouldn’t accept such discrimination. It wasn’t a question of sitting elsewhere because it was more comfortable. It was just a question that I wanted a free choice of where I wanted to be. I decided to challenge the rule, even though I was very frightened. Instead of sitting on the right, I sat down on the left. . . . It was the first time I had challenged rules so brazenly.18

He was forced from the cinema and detained in jail. Failing juridical charges, he was released after a police officer threatened and degraded him. Chavez’s naval tour educated him in the religion of the nation state, especially its transcendent promises of freedom, justice, and equality— until death. Upon leaving the navy he returned to California and married Helen Fabela in October, 1948. The couple was married in a chapel in Reno, Nevada, forgoing the Catholic sacrament. One year later, they were married (again) by a priest.19 Cesar and Helen settled in San Jose, where they had eight children. In 1952 Chavez met Fred Ross (1910–1992)—a man who Chavez claims “changed” his life. Ross worked with the Community Service Organization (CSO) directed by Saul Alinsky (1909–1972). Alinsky was a Chicago-born Jew who has been called the architect of modern community organizing.20 Cesar soon became a disciple of Fred, who secured a position for his young apprentice also as a community organizer. Chavez read widely during those years, including works on photography, art, philosophy, politics, economics, and religion. According to Peter Matthiessen, during these years Chavez reading ranged “from St. Paul to Churchill, and from Jefferson to ‘all the dictators’; his self-education, in the CSO years, included reading in Goebbels and Machiavelli and Lord Acton.”21 Chavez himself openly declared Machiavelli’s The Prince as one of his favorite texts. With this in mind, I propose an understanding of Chavez as an organic intellectual, who, according to Antonio Gramsci, is occasioned by and emerges from the needs of a social movement.22 As such, there was an urgency about Chavez’s learning; his reading was purposeful. He studied texts that would enable him to theorize and enact social change. By the end of his life he began strategizing alternative institutions that would provide economic and religious models of justice for the world, including com-



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munal living. Isolated in the Tehacapi mountains one hundred miles north east of Los Angeles, he began cultivating a beloved community that at one time was populated with 250 people.23 In 1962, on his birthday, Chavez quit the CSO to dedicate his time to organizing farm workers. This date marks a rebirth and return for Chavez. He moved to Delano, in the heart of California’s Central Valley. The majority of migrant farm workers lived on the west side of Delano—Chavez lived on the east side, though he did not own his home. The west side of town was inhabited by Mexican Americans, followed by Filipinos, African Americans, and a smaller presence of Puerto Ricans. During the 1970s, Muslims of Arab decent began populating the west side, all of whom lived and worked with few rights and protections: they were literally at the mercy of the farm owners. In the early days poor whites were also working the field, those who had migrated from the “dust bowl” during the Great Depression. However, by the first strike in 1965, white farm workers constituted a separate and higher level of labor. One Central Valley police officer explained the situation as follows: “We protect our farmers here in Kern County. They are our best people. They are always with us. They keep the country going. . . . But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs.”24 Even while the de jure colonial conditions may have evaporated, their legitimizing discourse remains. Indeed, prior to King’s civil rights movement, conditions for poor blacks in the southern United States and for Mexicans in the Southwest were remarkably parallel. Mexican farm workers were an easily exploitable population, especially since a de facto Jim Crow–style of segregation barred Latinos from many jobs during the 1940s and 1950s, and even into the 1960s. It was common to read signs in business windows across California and the Southwest that read: “White Trade Only.” Moreover, the 1935 Labor Relations Act allowed employees to unionize exempted farm workers from that right. Chavez realized that the racialized condition of the farm workers was only beginning to be exposed to the world, and that when illuminated globally by the light of media exposure, many would be appalled by the injustice and crimes committed against humanity. This illumination would generate enough pressure to confront and challenge the status quo. Hence, he attracted attention to Delano, he performed for the cameras and reporters, even, some say, at the expense of accuracy and reality.25 During the 1960s and 1970s, Chavez recruited college students, activists, artists, musicians, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and clergy of all stripes to come to Delano and help support the strike. Volunteers were given room and board and paid five dollars a week, the same pay Cesar accepted. As a result, Delano became a nodal point where people from around the globe would converge on a pilgrimage of sorts, meet and work with Chavez,

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and become spiritually transformed.26 Yet, Chavez’s racial marking limiting him to the parameters of a Chicano Catholic hero obscures the fact that he was a figure who not only worked to transcend race and religion, but who disrupted and transformed modernist racial and religious markings into a communion of souls converted to his way of thinking. But Chavez had many detractors during his life and still today. Tragically, near the end of his life he began exhibiting signs of insomnia and megalomania.27

Return: A Struggle for Humanity Throughout the twentieth century in Delano, the California Agribusiness center, police and local sheriff’s departments were deployed as militia forces by growers who strategically thwarted efforts at unionization and workers rights there for over a century. Yet, Chavez was intent on forming a union even at great personal cost; in 1965 he called a grape boycott. In 1966 the first grower signed a contract. But the international boycott of California table grapes didn’t begin until 1967. Before the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, most new contracts were won through boycott pressure and sometimes economic power on the picket lines during strikes. The dilemma of renegotiating existing contracts didn’t become a problem until 1973, when grape growers turned UFW agreements over to the Teamsters Union. Teamsters Union contracts did nothing to improve conditions or raise wages for their constituents. As a result, Chavez’s union faced not only the powers of the government wedded to a multibillion dollar industry, but also found itself pitted against the nation’s largest organized crime syndicate. Teamster goons openly attacked striking women and children, brutalizing them under the gleeful gaze of police officers who stood nearby idly, gawking. Still, when violence erupted against the picketers, inevitably police arrested the bloodied strikers—prompting congressional hearings in Delano and the famous wisecrack from Robert Kennedy, suggesting that during the lunch hour, the sheriff “read the Constitution of the United States.”28 Kennedy’s quip brings centrally to bear that the struggles of King and Chavez resonate inasmuch as they were each about the struggle to be classified as fully American. Comparing King’s SCLC to Chavez’s UFW, one theorist writes: “both agencies attempted to convince the larger public that the symbols of their respective movements were in keeping with the values of the nation as they had been inculcated into the metaphors of earlier historical situations and became part of the accepted civil religion by the majority.”29 At one fundamental level, Gandhi, King, and Chavez confronted exactly the same beast. Modern colonial governments encoded racial prejudice into unlikely idioms of statecraft, particularly the governance of colonized peoples.30 As strategies in a giant social apparatus of domination and



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exploitation, the idea of a totalizing racial hierarchy whereby so-called inferior peoples benefited from the tutelage of the advanced and civilized became a cornerstone of the global passage into modern industrial markets and labor systems. Initially, this ideal order was thought natural, to come from “God.” The enslavement of Africans, genocide committed against the Native Americans, the conquest of Mexico and the exploitation of Mexican Americans, and the conquest of India were all driven by the same basic modern racial assumptions. Chavez was astute inasmuch as he determined that at a fundamental level his was a struggle to be recognized as fully human in a society that denied that fact. As he saw it: No issue can get people excited and interested in doing something about a problem as much as when personal dignity is involved. No injury is greater than not being looked upon as a human being. The deepest kind of hurt is when you find you’re not welcome, when even by the tone of voice you are addressed you know that you are not considered to be anyone. The working conditions and the wages, the lack of drinking water, the lack of education, the lack of housing, all hurt but not so deeply as personal injury. Wages are not our main issue in the strike. If this was our main issue, it would disappear after you got the union in to get an increase in the pay. . . . We cannot help people or even help ourselves unless we understand first of all that they are human beings.31

Toward the same end, Gandhi abolished the formal caste system in India whereby birth right entitled some to Brahmanic status, while others, most, were relegated to the ranks of the “untouchables.” When King supported striking sanitation workers in Memphis, they donned sandwich board signs bearing the declaration, “I Am a Man.” Chavez summarizes his humanistic mandate as follows: “As human beings we have a very special mission in this life, and that is service to humanity.”32

Ahimsa and Satyagraha: To Redeem the Soul of America Gandhi died in 1948; therefore King and Chavez only knew him through his writings and followers. King claimed that Gandhi was the inspiration for his movement since the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott. In 1959, King made a pilgrimage to India, where he met with Gandhi’s disciples, including Prime Minister Nehru. This visit enabled King to draw connections between the struggles of the internally colonized minorities within the United States, and global anticolonial struggles. The Indians regarded King as a brother, because of the color of his skin. “But the

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strongest bond of fraternity,” he said, “was the common cause of minority and colonial peoples in America, Africa, and Asia struggling to throw off racism and imperialism.”33 King and Chavez agreed that the conditions of racialized minorities in the United States replicated those of the colonized around the world, beginning from the discourses of race, humanity, and a social order. King once compared the struggles of African Americans to those of colonial India: “I am absolutely convinced that there is no basic difference between colonialism and segregation. They are both based on a contempt for life, and a tragic doctrine of white supremacy. So our struggles are not only similar; they are in a real sense one.”34 Similarly, Chavez compared his struggles to Gandhi as follows: Oh, there are a lot of similarities. Gandhi was dealing with the powerless and the poor and the ones who were discriminated against, and we have that now—the poor, and the people who are discriminated against. We have classism, racism. Gandhi was also working against foreign domination, and this is similar to our situation in that agribusiness is really like foreign domination. They don’t live here.”35

The causes of King and Chavez responded to a malevolent theological technology attributing a hierarchy of races to God’s design. That is, racism begins with the premise that some peoples are inherently inferior to others, that this is an intentional design that emerged from the mind of God to delineate humanity. Hence, both King and Chavez engaged in a theological debate; they both argued that all humans are equally God’s children. Chavez integrated his learning into his political and spiritual practices: “I read everything I could get my hands on, Gandhi, and I read some of the things that he had read, and I read Thoreau, which I liked very much. But I couldn’t really understand Gandhi until I was actually in the fast; then the book became much more clear. Things I understood but didn’t feel—well, in the fast I felt them, and there were some real insights. There wasn’t a day or a night that I lost. I slept in the day when I could, and at night, and I read.”36 Remarkably, the diminishment of Chavez in relation to Gandhi and King is a nearly universal trope in the literature, beginning very early. In 1966, one biographer wrote: “Whether Cesar Chavez will become the Martin Luther King of the Mexican-Americans remains to be seen. While he has penned no brilliant essays like King’s, he has demonstrated remarkable leadership qualities, and there is no one else of his stature in sight in the Mexican-American community.”37 Condescension and error blur the record on Chavez’s education. Autobiographer Jacques Levy wrote in 1975, claiming that Chavez “knew very little about Gandhi except for what he read in papers and saw in newsreels.”38



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By contrast, Chavez claims that he spent his life studying Gandhi—even while biographers erroneously report that he was introduced to Gandhi by missionary priest Father Donald McDonnel in 1952. According to Chavez himself: I was eleven or twelve years old, and I went to a movie. In those days, in between movies that had newsreels, and in one of the newsreels there was a report on Gandhi. It said that this half-naked man without a gun had conquered the might of the British empire. . . . It really impressed me because I couldn’t conceive of how that had happened without guns. Even though I had never heard the name Gandhi before, the next day I went to my teacher and asked her if she knew anything about him. She said, “No, but I have a friend who knows quite a bit about him.” Then she gave me the name of her friend, a construction worker who was studying Gandhi. He gave me a little book on Gandhi. As I grew up, I started learning more, and ever since then, I have made a life project of reading about Gandhi and his message.39

It is in the creative, nonviolent, spiritual response to a modern theology of human design wherein the synergism between Chavez, King, and Gandhi thrives. Both King and Chavez looked to Gandhi’s twin principles of ahimsa, or the Vedic doctrine of nonviolence, as well as satyagraha, or the soul force—a term Gandhi coined to religiously describe the principle of his movement: striving toward truth and a self-sacrificial love.40 Arising from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on February, 14, 1957; its expressed goal was to “redeem the soul of America.” Chavez often recalled his debts to King. In 1973 he wrote: I had followed King’s actions from the beginning of the bus boycott in Montgomery, when I was organizing the Community Service Organization, and he gave me hope and ideas. When the bus boycott was victorious, I thought then of applying boycotts to organizing the Union. Then every time something came out in the newspapers, his civil rights struggle would just jump out of the pages at me. Although I met some of the people that were working with King and saw him on television, I never talked with him except on the phone. But Martin Luther King definitely influenced me, and much more after his death. The spirit doesn’t die, the ideas remain. I read them, and they’re alive.41

In 1968, following Chavez’s “love fast,” King was in Los Angeles and had hoped to travel north 145 miles to visit Chavez; but as one biographer reports: “At that time he said his schedule did not then permit a trip to Delano to see Chavez, but that he planned to do so in the very near future. Plans were announced for a national unity meeting in Washington on April 22, where Blacks, Chicanos and the poor whites from Appalachia would

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assemble.”42 These plans were abandoned following King’s assassination. Still, Corretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy of King’s SCLC worked with Chavez and his UFW. During Chavez’s first fast, King sent Chavez a telegram, dated March 5. He claimed that the “plight” of the SCLC and the Farm Workers were actually “one in the same.” He commended Chavez for his nonviolence that shined as an example of the Gandhian tradition and its “deeply spiritual healing powers.” At the termination of the fast, King sent another telegram calling Chavez a brother in the fight for equality. He declared the unity of the two leaders’ movements, calling it the “struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity.”43 King understood that he and Chavez were kindred spirits whose simultaneous struggles were tied in a postcolonial web of racial exploitation. Upon Dr. King’s assassination, Chavez sent a telegram to Coretta Scott King, expressing the collective sorrow of the Farm Workers, calling King a man of peace. Remarkably, Chavez reassured the grieving widow that despite the tragic death of her husband, there was still much good about America. On April 7, 1968, Chavez spoke at a public memorial for King organized by the Urban League at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Additionally, the UFW was a “sponsoring organization” for the Poor People’s Campaign, started by King, but did not attend the event—even while his presence was requested. On June 4, 1968, Chavez received a telegram from the Reverend Ralph Abernathy that urged him to come to the event immediately.44 Chavez was asked to formalize his participation with King’s legacy, but could not due to ill health. He responded to Abernathy’s request with regrets. When Chavez was jailed in December of 1970 for about three weeks for violating a court order banning a boycott of Bud Antle lettuce, he received a telegram from Ralph Abernathy committing the SCLC to the aid of Chavez’s fight. During that same period, on the eve of the celebration for La Virgen de Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico and icon in the UFW visual ensemble, Chavez received a telegram from Coretta Scott King in which she asked Chavez to contact her if she could be of any help. In 1974, Chavez traveled to Atlanta to receive the second annual Martin Luther King Peace Award (the first was awarded to Andrew Young), on the occasion of King’s forty-fourth birthday celebration. In April of 1978, Chavez published a tribute to King entitled: “Martin Luther King, Jr.: He Showed Us The Way.” In it he writes: “In honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory we also acknowledge nonviolence as a truly powerful weapon to achieve equality and liberation—in fact, the only weapon Christians who struggle for social change can claim as their own. Dr. King’s entire life was an example that inspired much of the philosophy and strategy of the farm worker’s movement. Our conviction is that human life is a very special possession given by God to man and that no one has the right to take it for any



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reason or for any cause, however just it may be. We are also convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence. Nonviolence supports you if you have a just and moral cause. Nonviolence provides the opportunity to stay in the offensive, and that is of crucial importance to win any contest.” But he cautioned that nonviolent struggle must be focused and informed. For if it “fails our only alternative is to turn to violence. So we must balance the strategy with a clear understanding of what we are doing.” At one level Chavez’s public campaign was a battle for the American soul, over the very definition of what it means to be an American. He once explained: “Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counter power, or through change in their hearts and minds.”45 His was the soulful route to change. In the United States, serious political debate occurs over the meaning of the nation’s collective sacred texts—much like old style Protestant liberalism occurs over biblical meanings. The United States has been called a nation with the “heart of a church”—a Protestant church. With this structure in mind, Chavez acted as a national preacher, or prophet.

American Prophecy To his followers, Chavez was endowed with those “extraordinary powers” classical sociologist Max Weber called “charisma”—the primary qualification of a “prophet.”46 For Weber, charisma is defined as the endowment in humans of extraordinary powers. There are two means of endowment. The first is by virtue of office, possessing a title that confers authority and charisma to its holder; this is what Weber calls the “priest.” The second means of charisma is the natural endowment; this quality adheres naturally in the subject and is revealed at different times throughout his or her life. Obviously, Chavez’s charisma was of the second or natural endowment. In his most complete autobiographical testimony Chavez confesses that he did in fact consider becoming a priest. Weber’s figuration of the prophet is either ethical, text based, or exemplary, based in image and symbol. Chavez was both the ethical and exemplary prophet—based in action and symbol. As such, he speaks on behalf of the poor and of the oppressed, claiming his prophecy a fresh revelation directly from God. Perhaps most importantly in its relation to Chavez is that the prophetic hero seizes rather than submits to power. Inspired by his reading of Thoreau on civil disobedience, Chavez refused to submit entirely to unjust institutional power and worked instead to bend the structure of society to his vision for social justice. Simultaneously, he forged new models of alternative human institutions: modern institutional society is corrupt inasmuch as it is founded upon a triumph of imperialism underwritten by a discourse delimiting a hierarchy of races.

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Hence, the prophetic narratives of each of these three heroes began with a basic truth: racism is a sin. Chavez explains: “Everywhere we went, to school, to church, to the movies, there was an attack on our culture and language, an attempt to make us conform to the ‘American way.’ What a sin!”47 Here, social ills are translated into religious idioms. In Chavez’s own words, his moralizing was a strategy for social change: “Nonviolence also has one big demand—the need to be creative, to develop strategy. Gandhi described it as ‘moral jujitsu.’ Always hit the opposition off balance, but keep your principles.”48 Each of these leaders deployed a religious and discursive form of Asian martial arts in order to wrench open a space for a narrative of social change in the democratic public square. This is the leadership space occupied by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez. Each of these leaders was able to prophetically renarrate the prevailing religiously held ideas of their respective state orders. Gandhi’s was perhaps the most difficult and complicated task, for he needed to religiously unite a population that was itself divided among Hindus and Muslims. King united Baptists and other mostly Protestant Christians. Chavez’s organic community was predominantly Catholic, but as discussed earlier, he united largely Catholic Chicanos and Mexicanos with Puerto Ricans and Philippinos, blacks, Arabs, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. Chavez’s prophetic message was therefore necessarily complicated and coded, so that it could resound throughout many populations, and for this reason it has been misunderstood, or only partially understood, rendering its interpretation incomplete. But this equivocation is understandable, given that Chavez’s own civil religious message was never fully completed, it continued to develop throughout his life, and at times it seemed to change and to contradict itself. It could be disclosed most effectively in fragments or “aphorisms.”49 Decoding and applying these messages in historical context is a complicated but worthwhile task especially inasmuch as it suggests the need for a global perspective on localized subjugation.

Conclusion: In Time While similar in many respects particularly regarding ahimsa and satyagraha, Chavez’s thought and practice departed from King in terms of his philosophy of time; but later in his life King became more attuned to the rhythms of Chavez’s movement. Chavez followed a long-term strategy requiring time for planning, training, and execution, but early in his movement, King’s tactics were patterned on crisis time. One biographer argues: “Although Chavez and King shared a commitment to nonviolence as a way of life and as a strategy for social change, it is clear that they understood nonviolence to be making very different claims on people’s time.”50 This



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same biographer attempts to distinguish Chavez as an original thinker who influenced King, concluding: “King came more and more to embrace forms of political organizing that were at the center of Chavez’s efforts with the United Farm Workers, namely a devotion to the empowerment of marginalized people as autonomous, democratic agents and the building of alternative institutions within civil society as sites of resistance to corporate capitalism and violent militarism.”51 I would add to this list religious institutions that provided new grammars of sacred and profane responding to modern times. In fact, Chavez established his final office and current resting ground as a center for nonviolence complete with an interfaith chapel, naming it “Our Lady Queen of Peace.” Chavez first described it as “a religious place.”52 In 1964, King published a book entitled, Why We Can’t Wait, in which he elaborates many of the themes articulated in his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” in which he said “justice delayed is justice denied.” His “Letter” expressed his theology of time. He dispelled what he called “the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. . . . We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” Yet, in that same work he declared: “A methodology and philosophy of revolution is neither born nor accepted overnight.”53 He recognized that social change on a large scale insists on time. Similarly, Chavez acknowledged time as essential to social transformation. According to Chavez, “Truth needs another element, and that is time. If you have those two elements, truth and time . . . sooner or later the truth is going to be exposed. . . . It cannot be hidden. . . . Mankind has never been able to deal with the suppression of truth.”54 Perhaps this distinction in emphasis is best focused through the lens of soteriology. Chavez, baptized Catholic, trusted in a gradual salvation, marked by passages, transitions, faithful repetitions, and returns. King, a Baptist minister, demanded immediate transformation; his was a movement animated by immediacy, captured by a state of rapture, a condition of grace, occasioned by the primal fall and fragmented redemption. Both, however, worked to achieve a vision of the “beloved community.” In the words of King: “But, the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”55 Chavez too worked toward a beloved community, beyond classification of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and all other identities that create divisions and violence.

Response to Luis Leon Jace Weaver

It seems appropriate that the editor paired Luis Leon and me together, since our chapters take up some similar issues, he from a Latino/a perspective and I from an American Indian one. Dr. Leon compares and contrasts United Farm Workers’ leader Cesar Chavez with Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. Speaking of Chavez and King, he writes that “they both argued that all humans are equally God’s children.” Certainly this is one of the messages that I draw out from the story of Zelophehad’s daughters in the Hebrew Scriptures, that all have the right to share equally in the promise of God. As Dr. Leon knows, earthly societies, including the United States, have denied groups and individuals that absolute right to equality. All three of Dr. Leon’s subjects were adept at turning the rhetorics of the systems they opposed against them. Among subaltern subjects this is hardly a recent trick of resistance. In the 1820s, William Apess, a Pequot Indian, was drawn to Methodism because of its Wesleyan preaching of radical egalitarianism and promise of Christian perfection. Yet despite such preachings and promise, Apess also encountered intractable racism and was forced to leave the Methodist Episcopal Church for the splinter Methodist Protestant Church to achieve ordination. I have written about Apess in my book That the People Might Live, discussing how he continually invokes the language of evangelical Christianity and its appeals to the Bible to expose white racism and to subvert whites’ use of the same material for racist ends.1 Yet more connects our two chapters than our subjects rhetorical subversion or use of resistance to claim the promise. Chavez was himself an Indian. His mother, as Dr. Leon points out, was Yaqui. This Native nation has a fascinat130



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ing religious history. Originally living in Sonora, the Yoeme (as they call themselves) were evangelized by the Jesuits in the early seventeenth century. Most of the people adopted Christianity and moved into eight new sacred towns on the Yaqui River. With the suppression of the Jesuits in the mid-eighteenth century, however, the order was required to leave Sonora. In the wake of the Jesuit withdrawal, the Yoeme attempted to continue to practice Catholicism without priests. In their absence, however, gradually elements of the Natives prior traditions began to creep in. Today, what is considered Yoeme traditional religion, the Yaqui Church, is a thoroughly syncretic Christianity. The Yoeme differentiated themselves from Mexicans, refused to accept an inferior status, and fought fiercely to defend their sovereignty. Their resistance brought them into conflict first with the Spanish and then with the Mexican government. The dictator Porfirio Diaz brutally persecuted the Yoeme and sought to relocate them from the Sonora. Many fled to Arizona, Chavez’s mother’s family probably among them. So there are significant points of intersection between our two chapters. I appreciate the opportunity to be in conversation with Dr. Leon. Leon emphasizes the universalist character of the messages and missions of his three subjects and their nonviolent resistance. He writes, “Chavez’s racial marking limiting him to the parameters of a Chicano Catholic hero obscures the fact that he was a figure who not only worked to transcend race and religion, but who disrupted and transformed modernist racial and religious markings into a communion of souls converted to his way of thinking.” In his conclusion, he references King’s vision of a beloved community, and states, “Chavez too worked toward a beloved community, beyond classification of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and all other identities that create divisions and violence.” While I value Dr. Leon’s perspective, I have some questions here. I wonder where Gandhi is in this analysis? M. K. Gandhi stressed ahimsa and satyagraha, but his movement always had one and only one goal: hind swaraj, Indian independence from Great Britain and colonial domination. Chavez may, as Leon contends, been waging “a battle for the American soul, over the very definition of what it means to be an American,” but he did so first and foremost to change the dehumanization of farm workers in particular and Chicano/as in general. King (and everyone in the civil rights movement) fought for liberation of African Americans, but realized that meant redeeming white America, as well. From a Native American perspective, the Yoeme fought Diaz for their own dignity and sovereignty. Zelophehad’s daughters stood up for themselves to get land, not to redeem Moses, Joshua, or Eleazar, even if that was a coincidental, saving outcome. As I have written, Apess saw in Christianity not the “‘community of the colorblind saved’ but a potent weapon. . . . Rather than using his Christianity as a tool of assimilation, he employed it as a means to assert his own Native identity and nationalism.”2

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In my chapter, I said that we must all seek a modus vivendi in this space and place we all share. But that term, meaning literally a “method of living,” also carries a sense of an arrangement between those who differ or a temporary agreement between contending parties. It holds within it some sense akin to Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism. Nothing in it suggests that we must surrender our particularity. Nearly four decades ago, in their book A Nation So Conceived, Reinhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert endorsed the “melting pot” with its “implied conformity to some ‘American’ social pattern.”3 I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe Dr. Leon does either. He quotes Chavez, “Everywhere we went, to school, to church, to the movies, there was an attack on our culture and language, an attempt to us conform to the ‘American way.’ What a sin!” I worry about how easily universalist language—like transcending race or moving beyond classifications and identities that divide—is turned into a rhetorical cudgel against pluralism. Conservatives have employed King’s quote about judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin to justify opposition to any form of affirmative action or any attempt to achieve diversity in the academy or the workplace. Most recently, the Arizona superintendant of education used the sentiment as justification of the bill he wrote to ban any courses that “encourage racial or ethnic solidarity” from the public schools. After all, doesn’t Dr. King’s vision mean we should simply be colorblind in all things? The answer is, “No.” Those of the supposedly colorblind Right deliberately wrench King’s statement from the March on Washington out of context. He was referring not to “people” generally but to his own children—his four black children—because in America in the 1960s, African Americans were most often not so judged, as they had not been for any of the preceding three hundred years. When he dreamt that the United States might one day live up to its creed that all men are created equal, he did not mean only men, and he did not say that equality meant surrendering identity. When he wished for the day when the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders would sit down at the table of brotherhood; he did not precondition that fellowship on the progeny of slaves assimilating to “white culture.” Refutation of such a universalism takes on increased urgency in the case of Native Americans. As I said in my chapter, any discussion must take as a starting point that Native tribal nations are separate sovereigns within the federal system. It must also understand that the vast majority of American Indians are not Christian. I have some sympathy with Robert Warrior’s interpretation of the Canaanite woman: she did not become a follower of Jesus. Rather, having gotten healing for her daughter, she left and was never heard from again. I’ll stick to my pluralist separatism.

7 “Salvation and Transformation”: Latino Evangelical Political Activism and the Struggle over Comprehensive Immigration Reform Gastón Espinosa

Let us be clear. As Hispanic Christians, we stand committed to the message of the Cross . . . that is both vertical and horizontal. It is salvation and transformation, ethos and pathos, Kingdom and society, faith and public policy, Covenant and community, righteousness and justice. . . . Every day that passes without Comprehensive Immigration Reform adds tarnish to the soul of our Nation. —NHCLC

This statement by the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) captures the spirit of a new generation of Latino Evangelical activists that is seeking to balance righteousness and justice and spiritual salvation and social transformation in its struggle for social justice and comprehensive immigration reform. Over the past ten years, at least half a dozen organizations have emerged that specifically seek to bring about political, civic, and social change. The most notable national leaders and organizations include Rev. Samuel Rodriguez’s NHCLC, Rev. Luis Cortes’s Nueva Esperanza, and Rev. Miguel Rivera’s CONLAMIC.1 This new breed of activists challenge the long-standing stereotype that Latino Evangelicalism preaches nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky after-youdie theology in the face of tremendous suffering and injustice. They seek to Portions of this chapter were previously published as “‘Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote’: Latino Religions, Politics, and Activism in U.S. Civil Society,” The Annals of American Academy of Political & Social Science 612, no. 1 (July 2007): 151–71. 133

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promote a Christian message that is both vertical (righteousness) and horizontal (justice). They have been inspired by the work of Jesus, Francisco Olazábal, “Mama Leo,” César Chávez, Reies López Tijerina, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham, and more recently the pioneer faithbased activism of Rev. Ray Rivera of the Latino Pastoral Action Center in the Bronx and Rev. Jesse Miranda of the Alianza de Ministerios Evangélicos Nacionales (AMEN). In the words of President Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the NHCLC seeks to promote the “reconciling message of Billy Graham with the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr.”2 This does not mean that all Latino Evangelicals are activists or that most are on board with this new generation of foot soldiers, for many still shy away from any explicit link between faith and political activism. This is especially true for members of the older generation, who believe engaging in politics is worldly, siphons off badly needed personnel and resources needed for evangelism, and compromises and dilutes their prophetic voice. Recent immigrants are also reluctant to get involved out of fear of deportation, appearing un-American, and because back home in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia, faith-based activism could lead to violence, torture, and death, as the story and martyrdom of Archbishop Romero so vividly illustrates.3 This case study will examine how one Latino faith-based organization, the NHCLC, is seeking to bring about positive social change on behalf of the community through the struggle for comprehensive immigration reform. This organization has been selected because of its youthfulness, deep ties to the Pentecostal movement, and because it was arguably the most prominent and influential Latino Evangelical organization fighting for comprehensive immigration reform on Capitol Hill both in 2006 and 2008, having met with a large number of key political leaders on this topic.4 Despite this hesitancy in the community, the NCHLC is part of an emerging generation of largely second- and third-generation U.S.-born Latinos whose members are increasingly protesting, picketing, and seeking private and public strategies to bring about social change for what they believe are biblical causes that reflect God’s vision for society. They see comprehensive immigration reform as one such cause. These new activists problematize the traditional black versus white, liberal versus conservative, and pro-life versus pro-choice narratives and binaries of American political activism. They are in the vanguard of a new generation of political activists that have largely eschewed the apolitical views of their fathers and grandparents and instead are demanding to have a place at the proverbial table of American civic life. They are promoting what might be described as a Latino social gospel movement. Their story in many ways reflects the changing dynamics and contours of the Latino community, American Evangelicalism, and religion and politics in America.



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This chapter will analyze demographic shifts and the growth of Latino Evangelicalism, ask why this growth matters politically, and offer a case study of how the NHCLC has sought to promote comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 and 2010, and then it will reflect on what lessons scholars can draw from this case study. The chapter argues that the NHCLC’s ability to rationalize their faith-based political activism and part company with the previous generation is due to their twin emphases on righteousness and justice and salvation and transformation. They see their social activism leading to a more biblical and just world and what they deem as progressive social change. They believe the future success of the Latino community and United States are inextricably linked and thus view their activism for spiritual and social transformation as shaping not only their own community, but also the entire nation.

U.S. Latino Evangelical Religious and Political Profile The key reason why politicians and the media have paid increasing attention to the Latino community in general and Latino Evangelicals in particular is their rapid numerical growth and because social science research has established that religion often influences how Americans in general and Latinos in particular vote on Election Day.5 The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the Latino population has soared from 22.4 million in 1990 up to forty-eight million in 2010, not including four million people in Puerto Rico and another ten to twelve million undocumented immigrants. Latinos officially make up one out of every six (15 percent) Americans. By 2050, the population will increase to 128 million (29 percent). They are also now the largest minority group in twenty-three states.6 The influence of Rev. Rodriguez and the NHCLC is due to the rapid growth of the Latino Evangelical community. This 2008 Latino Religions and Politics (LRAP) national survey (n = 1,104) found 94 percent of U.S. Latinos self-identify as Christian—66 percent Catholic (30 million), 25 percent Protestant and other Christian (11.5 million)—of which 20 percent are Protestant (9.2 million). Born-again and Evangelical Christians now make up 44 percent of all U.S. Latino Christians (citizens and noncitizens) and about 37 percent of the total aggregate Latino community across religious traditions. A surprisingly high 32 percent of all Latino Catholics and 84 percent (7.72 million) of all Latino Protestants self-reported being “Evangelical” and/or “born-again,” or someone who has “personally had a conversion experience related to Jesus Christ.” The growth of the nation’s twenty-five thousand Latino Protestant churches is not likely to taper off anytime soon given the fact that they regularly break off to form new denominations and because recent studies have indicated that over half a

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million Latinos may be converting to Protestantism and other Evangelical religious traditions every year. Another study confirmed this shift when it reported that for every one Latino who returns to Catholicism, four leave it. The main reasons why the Latino Catholic population has consistently remained between 66 and 70 percent over the past twenty years are high birth and immigration rates.7 Religion is a significant variable in providing meaning and shaping their political outlook in key issues like immigration. The LRAP survey found that more than 70 percent of Latino registered voters nationwide stated that their religious beliefs were important in shaping their views on immigration. Latino Protestants and Catholics said that religion provides a great deal or quite a bit of guidance in their day-to-day living (80 percent and 76 percent). They both also reported relatively high rates of attending church (70 percent and 54 percent), praying (90 percent and 78 percent), and reading the Bible (62 percent and 32 percent) once a week or more. Immigration reform was a priority for many Latinos. Sixty-six percent of Latino registered voters agreed that immigration reform should be a “very important” priority for Congress, with virtually identical responses from Latino Catholics and Protestants (67 percent versus 66 percent). Latinos were critical of how politicians from both political parties treated immigrants. Sixty-two percent of Latino registered voters nationwide indicated that they had heard public officials speak negatively about immigrants and a surprisingly high 45 percent of Latino Catholics and 44 percent of Protestants reported that they had heard public officials from both parties speak in such a negative manner. The growth of Latino Protestantism and Evangelicalism is politically and demographically significant because they vote at higher rates than Catholics (e.g., 49 percent versus 43 percent in 2008), are concentrated in key swing states like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida, represent a disproportionately high percentage of the electorate proportionate to their percentage of the population, and are volatile, having shifted their vote by more than ten points in over one election cycle.8 Their growth has mirrored the overall growth of the Latino community and electorate, the latter of which has increased from 2.4 million in 1980 to thirteen million in 2008. Latinos nationwide now make up 9 percent of the U.S. electorate. They grew by a staggering one million new voters between 2004 and 2008 and are expected to grow by over one million new voters every four years for the foreseeable future. As a result of their growth, they now make up a large share of the electorates in New Mexico (37 percent), Texas (25 percent), California (23 percent), Arizona (17 percent), Florida (14 percent), Colorado (12 percent), Nevada (12 percent), and New York (11 percent), almost all of which have large Latino Evangelical populations and churches.9



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The long-term political influence of Latino Evangelicalism is further underscored by the fact that 41 percent of Latino immigrants and 36 percent of U.S.-born Latinos who were registered to vote in 2008 also self-identified as born again Christian.10 A full 67 percent of all Latino Protestant and 24 percent of all Latino Catholic registered voters self-identified as born again Christian. The Pentecostal and Charismatic movements appear to be driving much of the Latino Evangelical growth as the LRAP survey found that 65 percent of all Latino Protestant and 26 percent of all Latino Catholic registered voters self-identified as born again and Pentecostal or Charismatic. In fact, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians make up 64 percent of all Latino Protestants and 22 percent of all Latino Catholics, regardless of citizenship. The Latino Protestant electorate and turn-out in 2008 (2 percent) was as large or larger than either the Jewish (2 percent) or Muslim (less than 1 percent) electorates.11 Despite their growth, Latino political clout is undermined and significantly less than its potential because of low voter turnout and because 60 percent of Latinos are ineligible to vote because they are either under 18 (34 percent) or are noncitizens (26 percent).12 In the past, the National Council for La Raza and other organizations promoted voter mobilization. Now the NHCLC has launched a new voter mobilization effort, which seeks to mobilize one million new Latino voters by 2012. Obama has paid close attention to these developments and for this reason has proactively reached out the Latino Catholic and Evangelical communities by appointing Dr. Miguel H. Diaz (Roman Catholic) and Wilfredo de Jesus (Pentecostal and vice president of social justice for the NHCLC) to his National 2008 Election Campaign Advisory Board. This along with a series of meetings with Catholic and Latino Evangelical leaders helps to explain why Obama was able to flip the Latino Evangelical vote from voting 58 percent for Bush in 2004 (58 percent Bush versus 40 to 44 percent for Kerry) to 58 percent for Obama in 2008 (58 percent versus 31 percent). This Protestant shift, combined with winning 69 percent of Latino Catholic vote, helps explain how Obama was able to capture 67 percent of the Latino aggregate vote nationwide (versus McCain’s 31 percent), something that helped him win the key swing states of New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida, all of which paved the way to the White House.13

Latino Evangelical Struggles for Comprehensive Immigration Reform Obama saw the growing political power of the Latino Evangelical vote during the 2006 debate over comprehensive immigration reform. They carried and posted placards across the nation that ominously read: “Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote.” This slogan, along with their twin emphases on

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righteousness and justice and salvation and transformation, captures the spirit that resonated with Obama’s own political and social views. Latino Evangelicals were aware that the 2008 election was gearing up, and were all too quick to remind politicians and the media that their vote should not be taken for granted and that they could and have switched their vote by significant margins in just one election cycle. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats should take their vote for granted. Latino Evangelicals shared a common cause with a rainbow coalition of religious, secular, and faithbased organizations in opposition to the U.S. House of Representative’s immigration reform bill HR 4437 Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Protection Act, because it criminalized undocumented immigrants, churches, and organizations that assisted them and was, in their mind, unbiblical because it did not reflect God’s mercy.

Latino Evangelical and Pentecostal Political Activism: Birth of the NHCLC The NHCLC launched a vigorous, systematic, and sustained protest against HR 4437. In many ways, this relatively young and recent organization was birthed on the anvil of the 2006 immigration reform debate. Their protests of HR 4437 catapulted them into the national limelight because they were young, ecumenical, Evangelical, and were largely made up of pastors, evangelists, and lay leaders that had direct grassroots connections to some of the largest Latino Evangelical churches in the nation. Its greatest distinctions are that it was founded by Pentecostal leaders, is ecumenical, and includes Mainline Protestants and born again Catholics into its ranks, and has sought to create an interdenominational national faith-based organization that seeks to engage in advocacy on behalf of the entire Latino community. The NHCLC was founded by Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an ordained Assemblies of God minister and a graduate of Lehigh University, where he earned a master’s degree in educational leadership. Born to Puerto Rican parents who migrated to New York City, he was called to the ministry at the age of fourteen and began preaching to youth rallies at the age of sixteen. At the age of eighteen, he led the Hispanic youth ministry of the Eastern Spanish District of the Assemblies of God, serving more than three hundred churches. For a number of years, he and his wife co-pastored a Spanishspeaking Assemblies of God Church in Sacramento, California, before he stepped down to assume the leadership of the NHCLC. His wife continues to serve as senior pastor of the church.14 In 1995, he cofounded the NHCLC to address Latino faith issues in American public life for all “Hispanic born-again Christians of all denomi-



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nations in the United States of America.” Their mission statement, which he helped draft, states: “The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) is committed to serving the 16 million Hispanic born-again Christians in the United States and Puerto Rico across generational, country of origin, and denominational lines on issues that pertain to the family, immigration, economic mobility, education, political empowerment, social justice, and societal transformation.”15 He intentionally drew inspiration from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and the National Council for La Raza to form a national Latino Evangelical faith-based civil rights and spiritual renewal organization. He sees his organization as the counterpart to the NAE and SCLC and often describes his organization as the Hispanic SCLC or NAE. The stated purpose and functions of the NHCLC are to: (1) provide leadership to exert a collective Latino voice before legislative, economic, and ecclesiastical authorities in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals, (2) host annual conferences throughout the nation where Latinos can come together for revival, renewal, and restoration, (3) provide networking opportunities for empowerment and service, (4) create apostolic partnerships with Hispanic churches in America with the purpose of creating Faith Based Community Programs, (5) engage in political and social advocacy and seek to empower Latinos via “spiritual progressive leadership” through voter registration drives, Latino–African American alliances, and other initiatives that directly affect Latinos, and (6) serve as a prophetic voice on behalf of the voiceless undocumented and on other key political, social, and cultural issues. According to their promotional literature, they also seek to lead the Hispanic Evangelical Church in America in transforming the culture, preserving the Judeo-Christian value system, and building spiritual, intellectual, and social/political capital within the Hispanic American community.16 Rodríguez and the NHCLC drew on these principles to create a number of strategies (many implemented in the churches they used to pastor) to help reframe the comprehensive immigration reform debate and put pressure on President Bush, John McCain, and Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. In April 2006, they used the mass media as a faith-based vehicle to push for immigration reform. Rodríguez stated in an interview with the Washington Post that the immigration reform debate was a “watershed” moment between Euro-American and Latino Evangelicals. He said that if they joined in their efforts, they would forge a positive relationship that would last for “decades.” However, he also warned that if white Evangelicals didn’t “there is a possibility of a definitive schism” and that there would be serious “ramifications” in the church and in American politics— an allusion to Latino Evangelicals defecting in even larger numbers to the

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Democratic Party. He sought to put pressure on the NAE to support comprehensive immigration reform, which at that time was neutral. He and the NHCLC stated that they wanted to know why white Evangelicals did not support comprehensive immigration reform, why they only supported law enforcement against undocumented immigrants—without any mention of compassion or any Christian moral imperative to help immigrants.17 The sharp criticism of his white Evangelical counterparts was driven by his conviction that the comprehensive immigration reform issue was both a spiritual and civil rights issue. He stated that although in “the culture wars, Hispanics are on the values side,” civil rights and social justice were also very important to them and that they were “attuned to poverty, homelessness, AIDS.” For this reason, he said, “We [Latino Evangelicals] have a more complete vision of the gospel” than their white counterparts because they tended to focus almost exclusively on salvation, with often little attention to social justice. In an email interview, he reported that he sought to promote the twin themes of righteousness and justice and salvation and transformation by participating in and in many cases organizing twenty-four faith forums from June 2007 to November 2008. At the 2007 NHCLC board meeting in Baltimore, the late chairman Rev. Felix Posos and Rev. Samuel Rodríguez declared that the “prophetic role of the Latino church [w]as one of Righteousness and Justice.” They went on to state: “We must function and operate under a Daniel anointing. We must never be the extension of one political ideology or the other but rather, we must serve as a prophetic role, truth tellers to the government and the church.” He also helped direct two major faith forum conferences on Latino faith, immigration, and the 2008 election. In order to capitalize on their grass roots, they sought to increase their influence by seeking access to over one hundred thousand Latinos via their database and through other public venues and forums. He also sought to promote immigration reform via the radio and by sending out literature and voting guides to over eighteen thousand churches and other organizations.18 The NHCLC next engaged in bipartisan meetings, seminars, and colloquia with key Democratic and Republican political leaders. They sought to steer a “middle path” between the extremes of HR 4437 and general amnesty. In this respect, they were very successful as they gained access to many of the most important leaders in both the Democratic and Republican parties eager to court the Latino vote, leaders such as the late Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Sam Brownback, Harry Reid, and John McCain. They worked directly with many of these leaders and often spoke together in unison on Capitol Hill.19 The NHCLC proactively sought to reframe “illegal immigration” and comprehensive immigration reform by engaging in dialogue with the NAE, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council, with the specific goal of



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either gaining their support or keeping them from becoming an outspoken critic of their goals. They were largely successful in this endeavor as the NAE supported their cause while Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council decided not to take a position for or against comprehensive immigration reform in the 2006 debate. They then contacted some of these leaders to persuade them to adopt more moderate views on immigration. In an effort to move the evangelical community to support their views, Rodríguez wrote an open letter to Evangelicals in April 2006 on immigration reform. In it, he said that Evangelicals had a moral obligation to speak out on behalf of a comprehensive immigration reform. He cited findings from the Pew Forum, which found that many white Evangelicals were fearful of Hispanic immigrants. He challenged them to follow the example of World Relief, the development arm of the NAE, in calling for comprehensive immigration reform. He made it abundantly clear that, like Mahony’s Campaign for Justice, the NHCLC was not calling for amnesty but rather a policy that protected the border, stopped undocumented immigration, and applied the rule of law in a matter that is “consistent with a biblical worldview,” thus underscoring their theme of righteousness and justice and salvation and transformation. He ended by stating that he believed that Latino Evangelicals presented a “viable bridge” between both sides of the divide and he hoped they could partner together to preserve their shared values.20 The NHCLC sent letters to President George W. Bush and Congress in an endeavor to reframe undocumented immigration from a faith perspective. In the first letter on March 1, 2006, they encouraged them to move beyond mere enforcement measures in HR 4437 to create a comprehensive immigration reform bill based on biblical mandates, the Christian faith and values, and a commitment to “civil and human rights.” They justified this approach by invoking the Bible. They stated that God requires that people show love and compassion to aliens and then cited Deuteronomy 10:18–19, which states, “You are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.” They followed up by citing Leviticus 19:33–34, stating that God’s people are not to mistreat the aliens and that they are in fact to be treated as one of your native-born sons. The NHCLC called on Bush and Congress to promote laws and values that “treat all individuals with respect.”21 On September 1, 2006, Rodríguez and the NHCLC sent a second follow-up letter to President Bush and Congress that seemed to go beyond the more diplomatic language. They stated that the lack of passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill resulted in cultural, legal, and phenotypical racism, with many Latinos facing the kind of “racial profiling, discrimination, and hostile ethnic” polarization that they had not faced since the days of the civil rights movement. They pointed out that cities across America were passing ordinances that “in essence legalize

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racial profiling” and “place the Latino community in an unnecessary posture.” Pushing even further, they stated, “Americans have the intellectual wherewithal, the political acumen and the spiritual fortitude to reconcile the principles of law and order with a pathway to citizenship for those [Latinos] that seek to live the American Dream.” They ended by calling on Congress to pass a bill and the president to sign into law legislation that protects the border, ends undocumented immigration, and creates a “market driven guest worker program that facilitates avenues by which the millions of families already in America that lack the legal status can earn such status in a matter that reflects the Judeo Christian value system this nation was founded upon.” In addition to their own signatures, they were able to receive endorsements from other prominent Latino clergy, professors, seminary presidents, and organizations.22 These efforts by Rodríguez, the NHCLC, and their supporters did not fall on deaf ears as Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Henry Reid, Ken Salazar, and Republicans like Bill Frist, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback, and others met with them to listen to their concerns and find alternative strategies to address immigration reform. In addition to meeting throughout 2006 with various members of Congress, President Bush also responded to these calls at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast on June 8, 2006, when he stated that the United States had to find a “commonsense,” “reasonable middle ground” on immigration reform that treats Latinos with “dignity” and “respect.” He stated, “If you’ve paid your taxes, you’ve been here for a while, you can prove that you’ve been working, you’ve got a clean background; if you want to become a citizen you pay a fine, you learn English, you learn the values and ideals of America that have made us one nation under God” then you should be able to live and work in the United States. For this reason he called on Congress to support a guest worker program.23 In addition to these formal letters and meeting with members of Congress, in 2006 Rodríguez and the NHCLC board had three meetings at the White House on the topic of immigration reform, including one meeting with President Bush. This kind of influence led Sydney Blumenthal to argue in the Guardian that the NHCLC “stymied” the Family Research Council and the religious right from getting Senate Republicans to pass HR 4437. Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post wrote that the NHCLC also prompted the Republicans and Evangelicals to soften their tone on immigration reform. Despite these efforts, other evangelical groups like the Christian Coalition and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum have strongly opposed the McCain-Kennedy bill and the position of Rodríguez and the NHCLC because they see it as an “amnesty” package.24 Although immigration reform was not passed in 2006, it remained a hot topic in the 2008 presidential election, with some arguing that John



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McCain’s decision to back pedal from proposed bill cosponsored with Ted Kennedy is one of the reasons why he only took 31 percent of the Latino vote on Election Day. Furthermore, a number of surveys that year noted that immigration reform was one of the top election issues in the Latino community. For this reason, Obama promised to make comprehensive immigration reform a top priority in the first year of his administration. Obama quickly sought to repay Latino Evangelical leaders by inviting Rev. Samuel Rodriguez to give a formal prayer at his presidential inauguration and by appointing Latino Evangelical leaders associated with the NHCLC like Noel Castellanos to the Presidential Advisory Council for the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives and Neighborhood Partnerships. Rodriguez and the NCHCL have also enjoyed regular access to the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, in addition to a large number of Republicans who hope to regain the level Latino Evangelical support that Bush enjoyed in 2004.25 Despite these token gestures, Obama’s delays in pushing for immigration reform led to frustration among Latino Evangelical activists. Rodriguez and the NHCLC openly criticized Obama for not keeping this campaign pledge and for dragging his feet. The result of this critique and that of many others even more powerful and influential was that in 2009–2010, Obama began to speak more forcefully on behalf of comprehensive immigration reform. Obama caught a break after Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s signed into law SB 1070, which effectively criminalized undocumented immigrants. He used this opportunity to jump start comprehensive immigration reform and to criticize the Republican Party for being misguided and anti-immigrant.

Contemporary Debate over the Arizona Governor’s Immigration Law SB 1070 At the same time Obama was finally charging uphill to fight for immigrants, the NHCLC formally protested Governor Brewer’s decision and the provisions in SB 1070, which was signed into law April 23, 2010. This new law, one of the strictest in the United States, included provisions that enabled law enforcement officials and the courts to identify, prosecute, and deport illegal immigrants. The governor and her supporters stated that the law was put into effect because, despite multiple requests for help, President Obama and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano did nothing to secure the border with Mexico. She stated she was forced to act to protect Americans from violent drug-cartel-related crime, the murder of Arizona ranchers, the kidnapping and rape of young women by undocumented immigrants with criminal backgrounds, and because nothing was

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being done by the federal government to curtail the flow of the estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona. Brewer laid the blame on the Obama administration for squarely forcing Arizona to “solve a crisis we did not create and the federal government has refused to fix.” She went on to state that the new law “protects all of us.”26 Exactly who is included in the “all” is unclear. The new law requires state and local police officers to detain and arrest immigrants unable to provide legal documentation and it also makes it a crime to transport and hire undocumented and day laborers. This does not mean they would stop every Latino, she claimed, just those about whom they had “reasonable suspicion,” an open-ended criteria that could be manipulated and abused. In order to address the biggest complaint that the new law led to racial profiling, she signed a law that made racial profiling illegal. Brewer’s action is not an isolated incident. In fact, since 2007 hundreds of laws and bills have been proposed and/or passed that restricts the rights of documented and undocumented immigrants. In 2009 alone, over 222 immigration laws were enacted and 131 resolutions were passed in forty-eight states, most of them restrictive in nature.27 The NHCLC is aware of these developments and in many ways sees SB 1070 as symbolic and emblematic of a larger, deeper problem of racial profiling and cultural racism and marginalization in American society. The struggle over immigration reform and the de facto criminalization of Latin American immigrants reinforce distinct racial undertones, which if not properly addressed may in turn lead to greater racial tension in the future. The distinction between a tiny criminal element (which can be found in any large population) and the larger population of law-abiding immigrants is often overlooked. While the larger goals of stopping drug cartels, kidnappers, and organized crime is laudable and something that most undocumented immigrants themselves applaud, by not always making careful distinctions between the criminal and law-abiding element, SB 1070 and countless similar measures end up criminalizing an entire population and class of people. All of this, the NHCLC and other critics contend, contributes to nativism, xenophobia, and the racialization of society, all of which undermine the social fabric of the nation.28 This is no doubt about part of the reason why the political and public outcry over the Arizona law was immediate. Not wanting to mince words, Rodriguez and the NHCLC called the bill “Legislative Nativism.” President Obama and others joined the NHCLC by calling the new law “misguided.” Latino civil rights activists like President Janet Murguia of the National Council for La Raza said the law would legitimize and legalize racial profiling and The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said the new law would create a “spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”29



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Cardinal Mahony stated: “The Arizona legislature just passed the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law.” “The tragedy of the law,” he continued, “is its totally false reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense.”30 Arizona senator Russell Pearce, the sponsor of SB 1070, lashed out at religious leaders in return, stating that Cardinal Mahony had no credibility on the topic given that he’s a leader “who’s been protecting child molesters and predators all of his life. He’s the last guy that ought to be speaking out.” Pierce said the law was only aimed at violent criminals and lawbreakers. He stated, “We love and admire immigrants who come here to assimilate to be Americans. This has nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with those who enter our country illegally.”31 In an effort to offset these kinds of criticisms, Rodriguez and the NHCLC took part in a massive comprehensive immigration reform rally on March 21, 2010, in Washington, D.C., an event attended by tens of thousands of supporters and speakers like Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornell West, and others. Rodriguez not only attended, but also spoke at the event, as did other Latino Evangelical leaders.32 On April 20, 2010, Rodriguez and the NHCLC sharpened their criticisms of SB 1070 by stating: “Today, Arizona stands as the state with the most xenophobic and nativist supportive laws in the country. We need a multi-ethnic firewall against the extremists in our nation who desire to separate us rather than bring us together.”33 After invoking Isaiah 10:1–3, Proverbs 31:8–9, and Leviticus 19 on providing mercy and hospitality to immigrants and chastisement for discriminatory treatment of immigrants, Rodriguez invoked Republican icons Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, the latter of which granted citizenship to over 2.7 million Latinos in his 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. He stated: “The Arizona Law stands as evidence that in 21st Century America, we may no longer be in the Desert of Segregation or the Egypt of Slavery but we just discovered there are Giants to be slain in the land of Promise. The Arizona Law is without a doubt, anti-Latino, anti-family, anti-immigrant, antiChristian and unconstitutional. In addition, the law is without a doubt, Anti-Conservative. It runs counter to the Republican vision of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.”34 In a direct effort to persuade the Arizona legislature to change its views and to send a signal that they would be held accountable by Latino Evangelicals for their actions, Rev. Eve Nunez, vice president of NHCLC and Arizona State chapter director for the Association, delivered Bibles to all the Arizona legislators who signed Senate Bill 1070, including the two sponsors, Russell Pearce and Steve Montenegro, who is also a former immigrant. Each Bible had the name of the legislator and the following scriptures:

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Woe to the legislators of infamous laws, to those who issue tyrannical decrees, who refuse justice to the unfortunate and cheat the poor among my people of their rights, who make widows their prey, and rob the orphan. What will you do on the day of punishment, when, from afar off, destruction comes? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches? (Isa. 10:1–3)35

Rodriguez and the NHCLC also had a few choice words for President Obama and the Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress, who he chastised for dragging their feet on comprehensive immigration reform and for not keeping the campaign promise to pass reform in Obama’s first year in office. He also made it clear that he was not calling for general amnesty, but rather for a humane solution to the immigration problem. He stated: We have elected our leaders to lead and it’s time that they did so. From Republicans, we’re hearing they want to wait until next year. Democrats like Harry Reid are playing politics with the issue and the President appears to be letting Congress off the hook. To the Democrats and the President we say, remember your promise. We sure do and we will remind you this November and November 2012. To the Republicans we say, you are either the party of Lincoln and Reagan or David Duke, Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan. Remember Pete Wilson in California? We sure do. We are tired of excuses, Now we want solutions that will end the division and fear in Arizona and put our country on the right path again. Where is the leadership that we need?36

In order to bring about the desired change, he and the NHCLC called for a multipronged strategy that drew on the strategies employed by César Chávez, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders, strategies such as prayer vigils, forty days of fasting, marches, boycotts, letter writing campaigns (one million faxes, e-mails, texts and letters as a goal), and nonviolent civil disobedience to “push back xenophobia, nativism and racial profiling.”37 They sought a strategy that, “respects the God-given dignity of every person, Protects the unity of the immediate family, Respects the rule of law, Guarantees secure national borders, Ensures fairness to taxpayers, [and] Establishes a path toward legal status and/or citizenship.” They also supported a “just integration/assimilation strategy” that would require criminal background checks of all incoming immigrants, admonition of guilt that if they crossed they broke U.S. laws, and learning English.38 They admitted the challenge was great. However, by emphasizing righteousness and justice, salvation and transformation they believe that they can find a middle path that can lead to the passage of a balanced comprehensive immigration reform bill that will be acceptable to American Evangelicals and conservatives and liberals and progressives. They wrote: “But here lies the challenge; can we reconcile Leviticus 19 [human treatment of immigrants] and Romans 13 [obeying laws]? Can we repudiate xenophobic



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and nativist rhetoric, push back on the extremes from both the left and the right and converge around the nexus of the Center Cross where righteousness meets Justice, border security meets compassion and common sense meets common ground?”39 Drawing on analogies that echo the work of Virgilio Elizondo’s mestizo Jesus in the Galilean Journey (1985, 2000), he also cited the Exodus story and other biblical passages calling on people to realize that Moses, Jesus, and many other foundational Christian leaders were undocumented immigrants at one point in their lives.40 He ended by stating, “As Hispanic Christians, we stand committed to the message of the Cross. However, that cross is both vertical and horizontal. It is salvation and transformation . . . faith and public policy . . . righteousness and justice. . . . [W]e humbly encourage Congress to finally pass and sign into law legislation that will protect our borders, put an end to all illegal immigration . . . in a manner that reflects the Judeo Christian Value system.”41 Rodriguez and the NHCLC have also influenced a number of prominent Evangelicals like Leith Anderson of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Stephen Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church, civil rights activist John Perkins, Bishop George McKinney, and a number of others to go on the record in support of comprehensive immigration reform. The key has been for Rodriguez and other Latino Evangelical leaders to build relationships with their white and black Evangelical counterparts across the denominational spectrum. David Gushee has argued that “relationships are maturing” between Latino and white Evangelical leaders and this has resulted in not only long-term friendships, but also partnership in key issues like immigration reform. He stated, “When you’ve got a friend screaming in pain, who’s saying this is really dangerous, you pay attention to that.”42 The results have been promising. After three years of meetings and negotiations, in October 2009, the National Association of Evangelicals Board of Trustees overwhelmingly approved a statement that affirmed Rodriguez and the NHCLC’s views on comprehensive immigration reform.43 Rather than see reform as a threat that would divide Evangelicals and the nation, some see it as something that can unite them. Rich Nathan, pastor of the 8,500-member Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, stated, “I am aware of no other public policy issue that would join together mainline (denominations), Roman Catholic, evangelicals, right and left across the spectrum. Abortion divides us, gay rights divide us, war and peace divides us, but comprehensive immigration reform unites us.” Leith Anderson of the NAE pragmatically stated that “a significant part of our churches and denominations are part of the immigrant community so we have a very close connection and a very great interest” in the topic. For this reason and others, he decided to shift his support to favor comprehensive immigration reform. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of

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the Southern Baptist Convention, stated, “The failure to resolve this issue is rending the social fabric of the nation. . . . This just takes national will.” He stated that if comprehensive immigration reform comes to the floor of the Congress he would use his considerably influence on Capitol Hill to help “get it through.” Rather than just talk about it, Rodriguez, Anderson, Land, and other prominent Evangelical leaders met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill to offer a united front in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.44 Despite these calls for unity, not everyone is persuaded or unified. One blogger for HOT AIR wrote, “What kind of bizarre Christian principle provides that we should be good Samaritans to the people who broke the law in coming here . . . ?” Bob Dane of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a leading anti-undocumented immigrant group, stated that “some of the churches have become sanctuaries where illegal immigrants can take refuge—it’s an aiding and abetting activity. We shouldn’t be confusing theology with policy.”45 Indeed, herein lay the crux of the problem. Whose theology and whose policy? Who speaks for one or both? Based on what criteria? How does one bring critical reflection to bear on social practice and transformation? Some people argue that religion should play no role in public life, while others like Rodriguez and the NHCLC argue that it’s instrumental in bringing about the kind of social change that balances righteousness and justice and personal salvation with community transformation. Indeed, the NHCLC is part of a long tradition of faith-based political and social activism that stretches from Quaker abolitionists to the Social Gospel to Gandhi to Dorothy Day to Reies López Tijerina to César Chávez up to Martin Luther King Jr. President Obama recognized this organic connection between faith, social change, and morality. Echoing countless faith-based activists and Democratic presidents before him like FDR and Bill Clinton, Obama chided secularists for asking religious believers to leave their religion and morality at the door of American public life. He stated in his autobiography The Audacity of Hope (which came out in Spanish in 2007): Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham, Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.46

Rodriguez and the NHCLC were fully aware of this link and Rodriguez sought to use it to his advantage with other Evangelicals leaders. However,



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this mixing of religion and politics is a double-edged sword because the same moral compulsion that prompts a person to cite the Bible and faithbased moral views to support immigration reform can also prompt that person to use that same Bible to oppose values and practices of other disadvantaged groups. The best example of this is conflict that erupted in June 2010 after Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unexpectedly added a provision to the comprehensive immigration reform bill that would enable same-sex partners from overseas to become legal citizens. He did this knowing full well that it could seriously and perhaps permanently divide the tenuous coalition that Rodriguez and Obama were trying to bring together. Schumer’s decision threatened to split and destroy the liberal-conservative coalition and the participation of white Evangelicals that Rodriguez, the NHCLC, and other Latino Evangelicals had worked so hard to bring on board. However, Schumer calculated that blood and ethnicity was deeper than religion. His strategy was wrong and short-sighted as Anderson, Land, Rodriguez, and others promptly sent Schumer a letter on June 4, 2010, in which they made it clear that they would withdraw their support for Obama and his version of the comprehensive immigration reform bill on Capitol Hill if Senator Schumer continued to “pander” to “special interest groups.” They stated that “same-sex domestic partnerships will doom any effort for bipartisan support of immigration and will cause religious conservatives to withdraw their support” from Obama’s comprehensive immigration reform bill. They asked Obama and Schumer if they were willing to forgo helping “tens of millions” of Latinos and other immigrants in order to help “only about 36,000” gay and lesbian couples, the numbers estimated to benefit from Schumer’s provision. They accused Schumer and his supporters of political posturing, not really caring about Latinos, and seeking to undermine the bill and hurt millions of Latino immigrants. In some ways, Rodriguez had little choice in the decision to oppose Schumer’s provision because the vast majority of white Evangelicals and Latino Evangelicals oppose same-sex relations and gay marriage on biblical grounds.47 The Schumer conflict reveals the all-too-real limits and fault-lines of faith-based political activism and coalition building. It demonstrates how the same activist groups that seek tolerance, acceptance, and liberty can invariably impose their own ideological, religious, and moral borders and boundaries on other groups that also feel despised and oppressed. The episode highlights the problem that liberal Protestants and Catholics will continue to face if they want to work with Latino Evangelicals and conservative Catholics in the future. They will have to decide if they are willing to engage in limited partnerships to bring about strategic goals, or if as a matter of principle they won’t work with any organization that does not fully support one or more of their key social causes. To date, it appears that a growing

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number of progressive groups have decided to work with Latino Evangelical faith-based organizations in limited, strategic partnerships; whether or not this will remain true in the future remains to be seen.

Conclusion This case study has explored how a new generation of Latino Evangelical faith-based activists has sought to bring about social justice by seeking to balance righteous and justice and salvation and community transformation. The righteousness component is driven by what they believe is their fidelity to the Bible and its views about justice and the treatment of immigrants. The justice component is their God-ordained mandate to advocate on behalf of these immigrants when they are not treated with respect, dignity, and in a Christ-like manner. Rodriguez and the NHCLC have used their faith, Bible, religious and social networks, along with traditional strategies such as letter writing, protests, symposiums, and conferences and the press to promote their cause to white Evangelicals in general and national political leaders and the nation in particular. We have seen that they have met with limited success by persuading a number of key national religious leaders and organizations to adopt their views. However, they have yet to successfully have any major national legislation passed that changes the plight of millions of undocumented immigrants. That day lies in the nottoo-distant future. As we reflect on this study, what lessons can we learn about Latino Evangelical faith-based political activism? Latino Evangelical activism is rooted, articulated, and rationalized in biblical language, metaphors, and paradigmatic stories. Latino Evangelicals used the Bible to justify and rationalize their views, actions, and strategies. They used the Bible to appeal—like Martin Luther King Jr. before them—to a higher law and they targeted religious leaders and their followers because they recognized that without their support, there was no way they could have any hope of passing comprehensive immigration reform. Their success was due in part to the relationships they initiated, developed, and cultivated with other religious and political leaders and in part to their use of their common faith to serve as a bridge and basis for these relationships. Their story highlights the impact that a relatively small but vocal group of determined people can have within their own movements and, to a lesser degree, society. Latino Evangelicals demonstrate how a group that is seen as potentially subversive can overcome their own social marginalization and can in fact wield considerable political influence disproportionate to their membership and actual size. The NHCLC is an example of how an interdenominational and multiracial but still ethnic-led organization can bring together



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people from across various church and faith traditions to fight for social justice and transformation. It highlights the limits of coalition-building across social boundaries and reminds us that short-term strategic partnerships rather than long-term alliances may be the most practical and effective route to achieving one’s goals given the cleavages that exist in society. It underscores the various ways that politicians try to manipulate and use the faith community for their own political ends and how faith communities can in turn try to use these politicians and political parties to achieve their own strategic goals. The NCHCL’s story also reveals the changing religious and racial-ethnic power dynamics in American society as Latinos in general and Evangelicals in particular are playing an increasingly influential role in both Republican and Democratic parties seeking to win their support. Finally, this study found that despite the secular nature of U.S. society, religion continues to play a profound role in shaping ethnic communities, society, and American political discourse. Given the rapid and ongoing growth of the Latino Evangelical community in the twenty-first century, this influence is likely to continue well into the future. The benefits and fruit of their faith-based activism for the community and nation remain to be seen.

Response to Gastón Espinosa Andrew Sung Park

It is my privilege to respond to Gastón Espinosa’s “Salvation and Transformation.” I have learned a lot through his chapter. It is an informative, impressive, and transformative article, describing the work of the NHCLC (the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference), particularly about its historical task for comprehensive immigration reform. There are three points I will make: the indispensability of comprehensive immigration policy, the importance of salvation and transformation, and a superordinate goal1 for the NHCLC. First, because of its incongruous ideas, the patchwork of immigration policies hurts everybody—American tax payers and undocumented immigrants, while a comprehensive immigration policy will benefit all. President Obama was right when he talked about immigration reform in his 2010 State of the Union address, for it would strengthen our economy further by creating more jobs, lifting wages, and trimming down the deficit. “By requiring undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to become legal residents, pay taxes, study English and work towards citizenship, we will generate billions in new tax revenues, help American workers and honest employers now undercut by dishonest employers who game the system to gain an unfair advantage, and reduce illegal immigration dramatically,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice.2 The present immigration policies do not work. The latest proposed legislation to reform our immigration laws is Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez’s HR 4321 on December 15, 2009. True, the term “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” means very different things to different people. It is, however, 152



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much better to deal with comprehensive immigration policy rather than to avoid it, for such an action will publicly clear the direction and integral immigration policies of our nation. It is laudable that NHCLC has been working for comprehensive immigration policy to change the present fragmented policies and that Espinosa highlights its efforts. Second, NHCLC shapes the future of U.S. politics through the paradigm of salvation and transformation. It is a very balanced understanding of biblical theology. Righteousness signifies individual piety while justice possesses social aspects as well.3 Both of them, however, are derived from the same Greek term “dikaios.”4 Espinosa highlights the Christian message of righteousness/salvation (vertical) and justice/transformation (horizontal), which will bring forth the future progress of the Latino community and United States that “are inextricably linked and thus view their activism for spiritual and social transformation as shaping not only their own community, but also the entire nation.” This salvation-transformation theme is different from the idea of liberation theology that equates salvation and liberation. It distinguishes salvation coming from our vertical relationship with God from transformation arising from our horizontal social relationship with God. I appreciate this balanced view of a theological act on personal spirituality and social holiness of Christian life. In light of this discussion, when we consider “comprehensive immigration reform,” it is clear that this issue is not a simple political one, but an issue that involves holiness at the personal and social level for all Christians. For John Wesley, there is no other holiness than social holiness. In this sense, personal salvation must coincide with social holiness. Based on the same etymology dikaios, righteousness and justice are inseparable and converge at God’s holiness for individual Christians and society. Third, Espinosa points out that “the purpose and functions of the NHCLC is to: (1) provide leadership to exert a collective Latino voice before legislative, economic, and ecclesiastical authorities in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals; (2) host annual conferences throughout the nation where Latinos can come together for revival, renewal, and restoration; (3) provide networking opportunities for empowerment and service; (4) create apostolic partnerships with Hispanic churches in America with the purpose of creating Faith Based Community Programs; (5) engage in political and social advocacy and seek to empower Latinos via “spiritual progressive leadership” through voter registration drives, Latino–African American alliances, and other initiatives that directly affect Latinos; and (6) to serve as a prophetic voice on behalf of the voiceless undocumented and on other key political, social, and cultural issues. According to their promotional literature, they also seek to lead the Hispanic Evangelical Church in America

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in transforming the culture, preserving the Judeo-Christian value system, and building spiritual, intellectual, and social/political capital within the Hispanic American community. The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference has done significant works for the Hispanic American community. It is commendable that one of its goals is to empower Latinos via “spiritual progressive leadership” through “Latino–African American alliances” (No. 5). If NHCLC states, however, that one of its goals is to work for the justice and righteousness of God with other ethnic groups in solidarity, it will be true to its actual practice and better for its interethnic relations with all other ethnic groups. The NHCLC has done such work of cooperation with other ethnic groups and will continue to do so in the future. If NHCLC sets a superordinate goal for all ethnic groups, that will provide an internal identity for Hispanic groups and the unity of all ethnic groups. An exemplary superordinate goal for NHCLC can be comprehensive immigration reform, toward which all ethnic groups need to work together for initiating a new America. Finally, congruent with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism that heavily counts and integrates social, economic, political, and religious realities, NHCLC leads our nation into personal and social salvation through practical transformation. The strength of NHCLC lies in its realistic position that rectifies the idealism of an open-border policy and the conservatism of a closed-border policy.

8 Theology of Enhancement: Multiculturality in an Asian American Perspective Andrew Sung Park

The United States is a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious, and multiracial society. As a result of putting considerable effort into getting along with one another, we have improved racial, intercultural, and interreligious relations in general. We have, however, continually faced a great deal of racial and ethnic tension. The Los Angeles riots in 1992 revealed a crisis in our ethnic and racial relations. In this society of multiethnicity, we have pursued multiculturalism in order to resolve the ethnic and racial tensions and conflicts by emphasizing the importance of ethnic cultural values and the virtue of tolerance. Multiculturality is a de facto reality in our society and we cannot deny its actuality. This fact has generated the need of generosity among racial and ethnic groups. The major problem we face in multiculturalism is the degree of tolerance toward some controversial ethnic customs and values such as patriarchy, racial bias, domestic abuse, and classism. When ethnic groups maintain their patriarchal and repressive traditions, do we look the other way and ignore these practices in the name of cultural pluralism? To find some ways to deal with this issue, the idea of enhancement is introduced in this chapter. In a society of such racial tensions, what does it mean to pursue multiculturality? To have appropriate interracial relations, sociologists have thus far provided several major sociological theories: assimilation, amalgamation, and cultural pluralism. The assimilation model underscores the unilateral integration of all diverse ethnic groups into Anglo-American culture. William Newman expresses it this way: “In the formula A + B + C = A, where 155

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A, B, and C represent different social groups and A represents the dominant group.”1 It is clearly a hierarchical view, driving our society toward uniformity. The melting pot (amalgamation) theory has stressed the oneness of the society by obtaining a new identity through intermixing, while we lose our old ethnic identities in this new world. This model represents the formula A + B + C = D (a new identity).2 At the turn of the century, the idea of the melting pot theory was discussed, since most immigrants came from Europe. In Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan attempted to complement the theory of cultural pluralism with the idea of the assimilation model. Their new ethnicity theory holds that an Irish person becomes an Irish American and an Italian becomes an Italian American in this country (A + B + C= A’ + B’ + C’). They conclude that each ethnic, racial, and religious group blends into American society at different speeds, forming their new identities, while keeping their own ethnic distinctiveness in spite of their assimilation into the society.3 Their theory, however, expects a diminishing role for ethnic differences. Presently, the idea of cultural pluralism prevails in our society alongside the view of assimilation. Newman describes this theory in the formula A + B + C = A + B + C, where A, B, and C represent different social groups that, over time, maintain their own unique identities.4 In theory, it espouses a society of diversity in unity and unity in diversity. In actuality, this model, however, has fostered the separation and isolation of ethnic groups, hiding structural, symbolic, and silent racism. Our present social atmosphere ironically depreciates authentic diversity, and yet deepens ethnic isolation and divisions. This is due to the lack of interethnic unity in our society. Furthermore, this model suggests accepting all ethnic cultures as they are in the name of diversity. It hardly suggests encountering each ethnic culture to rectify injustice and improve the quality of its culture. In other words, the model is far from the theme of cultural transformation. What are we going to do with racism, sexism, classism, and hierarchies of racial and ethnic groups? All these models support either assimilation or pluralistic isolation. Is it possible for us to appreciate diversity, yet improve the quality of diverse cultures without sacrificing our true unity? To meet such a challenge, it is necessary to develop an enhancement model of race relations, a new model of multiculturalism.

Withdrawal or Assimilation Facing the new reality of a strange culture, Korean immigrants tend to take two basic approaches: withdrawal or assimilation. Those who fear the difficulty of language, new customs, or cumbersome race relations withdraw



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from the main society and create Korean enclaves. Compared with Chinatowns, Koreatowns form business enclaves rather than residential ones, although many Korean immigrants reside within certain sporadic Korean American apartment complexes. Those who have financial resources live in suburban areas. They are generally educated people who have the abilities to adjust to the new society. By and large, they are for assimilation. They can adopt the dominant American customs and traditions, behaving like the dominant. But when they try to make a structural assimilation, which involves joining the clubs, cliques, and guilds of the dominant in society, they experience strong resistance from the dominant group and become keenly aware of their own ethnicity. These two approaches are insufficient for celebrating our diversity in unity and unity in diversity, leading the Korean American community into a cul-de-sec. The withdrawal approach involves escapism from the reality of the world. The assimilation approach denies the beauty of our uniqueness, overlooking the unmeltability of Korean Americanness. We need a new Christian model that truly values our multiculturality in unity.

A Model for Enhancement First of all, we need to accept each culture as it is. Though imperfect, multicultures are beautiful. Unless some ethnic cultural practices are illegal, their customs and values must be accepted. This first act of acceptance is tolerance. Tolerance is the ability to exercise a fair and objective attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, religion, nationality, and so on differ from one’s own.5 Its second act is the appreciation of diversity. This enhancement model does not seek unity in diversity and diversity in unity. In this view, unity is not a goal but a natural outcome of collaborating toward the improvement of customs and traditions of our cultures and social systems. It suggests that each culture care for other cultures by challenging their shortcomings. In other words, we respect and care enough for other cultures to do this. In this model, diversity is affirmed as each culture tries to change the shortcomings of its own culture. Diversity does not only signify the affirming of what each culture is, but also the holding up of what each culture can be.

Enhancement, Diversity, Unity, and Identity Enhancement means to increase the beauty, worth, strength, or value of something. This enhancement model is an effort to heighten the strengths, beauty, and value of racial and ethnic relations by accepting and sup-

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porting one another. To accept other groups, we need to learn about and understand them first and then to appreciate their cultures and cultural values. To uphold them, we need to find out whether they need our support. This model works for the improvement of the cultural heritage of diverse groups and the cooperation of one another in mutual understanding. It is critical for ethnic groups to communicate with each other, probably through churches and other community activities. When they come to know each other, they can see the shortcomings of each ethnic culture and help each other to be transformed in genuine mutual care. Until rapport is established between ethnic groups, it is impossible for them to transform each other. The goal is not to pursue unity or diversity, but to pursue the justice of interethnic relations for God’s reign through mutual transformation. While we seek a society of divine justice, we come to experience unity. In this model, unity is not a state, but rather the dynamic experience of people while they press on toward the same direction of a goal together. Diversity does not emerge from the mere differences of ethnic groups, but it does arise when different groups acknowledge and accept the values of each group. This approach underpins unity in the pursuit of the justice of ethnic relations through mutual enhancement and diversity in the acceptance of the values of each ethnic group in mutuality. In this model, neither diversity nor unity are ultimate goals, nor are they directly connected to each other. Mutual enhancement dialectically interweaves them. Without mutual enhancement, diversity turns into separation and unity turns into uniformity. Actual unity takes place in two ways. One is when diverse ethnic groups work together for the transformation of racial injustice in society, making use of their own ethnic resources and talents; not only do they cooperate to change racial injustice in society, but also they work together to heal social wounds that were inflicted on different ethnic groups for many years. Diversity is affirmed in two ways also. One is when diverse ethnic groups work on the transformation of their own internal sins of racial prejudice, exclusive ethnocentrism, sexism, and classism and on the healing of their own wounds inflicted by racism, other groups’ exclusive ethnocentrism, patriarch, and classism. Other ethnic groups can help the process of transformation by reflecting each other’s imperfect culture in mutual care and mutual respect or by healing the wounds of each other’s injuries. The other is by participating in the celebrations of other cultures’ heritages when they celebrate them. Other groups can affirm the values and particularities of the cultures of an ethnic group by supporting its heritage. In terms of unity, there are two different aspects. First, while pursuing superordinate goals together, diverse ethnic groups may go through their solidarity together; second, by participating in the healing of racial wounds in society, these groups may come to live together through their unity.



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In terms of diversity, all ethnic groups working for the transformation of their own culture and traditions may find their own ethnic identities. When they affirm their own cultural heritages by celebrating their own ethnic values and traditions, they may learn to appreciate their own ethnic values with new insight. Their cultural heritage is not simply the fossils of the past, but rather it has the potential to develop in the future. Each group finds its identity not only in the roots of its culture (the past), but also in the cultivation of its potential (the future) and its involvement in the interethnic efforts of social transformation (the present). Self-Identity as the Cross In the enhancement model, each ethnic group needs to open its clannish boundary of community, but never lose its uniqueness—its important cultural and traditional values. The Korean American community needs to break its external shell to interact with the wider society, yet should preserve its own significant values to bear its fruits. Let me illustrate an enhancement model with an example of salt. To make a food tasty, we season it with salt. In the food, the grains of salt must lose their outer forms to permeate it. Unless they break their forms, they cannot change the taste of the food. Like the grains of salt, Korean Americans have to part with our outer form (an exclusive Korean American identity) to permeate the society, but we should never lose our inner taste of saltiness (Koreanness).6 If we simply maintain our own solitary form, we fall into our own enclave. If we lose our form without keeping our own taste, we become merely assimilated to the dominant culture. Korean American Christians should keep our Koreanness to share with others. Korean American Christians can spur Korean Americans to play the role of the transformers in this society. Korean Americans should keep our own taste to transform others and prepare to be transformed by other groups, finding our own Korean American identity in the process. This mutual enhancement is the joy and excitement of living in the United States. The symbol of enhancement is a cross. On the one hand, as we live in this multicultural society, we become conscious of others, questioning about our own roots of identity. This question of self-identity is rarely raised back in Korea. But in this multicultural setting we face such a question every day. The presence of otherness nudges us to delve into the meaning of our Korean American identity in light of our heritage and to deepen it with new understanding. The task of unraveling our own ethnic roots that grow downward without ceasing is the vertical dimension of Korean American identity. At the same time, the presence of others teaches us to find ourselves in solidarity with other groups. This means working with other groups toward a community building in the I-Thou relationship. Widening our social

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boundary may appear to attenuate the Korean identity, but it is a way to find and form our authentic identity by enlarging our historical, economic, and social horizons. The challenge of our historical mission is the horizontal extension of “Thou” to other groups in respect, care, and collaboration. The authentic horizontal dimension of Korean American identity needs to coincide with its genuine vertical dimension. Our being (person) always converges with our doing (work). Being and doing together create our becoming (identity). Becoming true Korean Americans (identity) means participating in constructing an authentic society (doing) beyond our Korean American boundary (being). Our Korean American identity is not a substance to possess, but is a happening at the crossroads of the vertical and horizontal relationships of transmuting life. In sociological terms, it is the tension between ethnic ideal and ethnic actuality that produces an ongoing identity formation. This identity formation never ends. If we locate our ethnic identity firmly, it is a dead one. If we see the dynamic flux of our ethnicity alone, we will never locate it. Our ethnic location and ethnic momentum bring forth the critical edge of a dynamic identity in the realm of liminality, the threshold of a new consciousness. Thus, they grow intertwined in their dynamic interaction of life. To find a new identity, we must transcend our old self-identity and die to it. The cross represents the death to our old self. Those who love to preserve the Korean American identity must go beyond it, and then they will find their authentic identity. For Korean Americans, forsaking our outmoded identity means negotiating a new boundary by negating our old self that was negated by various oppressors. When we die in our groupconsciousness of marginality or second-class citizenship, we will find our liminal identity, bearing much fruit. The cross is the emblem of our new self in God’s unconquerable spirit for creating our liberated identity.

Communal Visions for the Unity The more people feel threats from outside groups, the more society tends to suffer from the increase of racial tension, ethnic conflict, and xenophobia. The aforementioned models of racial relations would not work if we do not deal with racism existing between ethnic groups. Racism thrives on unmeltable boundaries in the amalgamation model, on conflictual coexistences in cultural pluralism, and on a hierarchical oneness in the assimilation model. To bring forth the genuine unity of society, racial and ethnic groups need to work together for the addressing of social injustice. There are many social issues, but racism is one of most serious problems in ethnic relations. With a communal vision, racial and ethnic groups can move toward dismantling institutional, structural, and educational racism.



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For healthy multicultural relations, communal visions are needed to transform the institutional racism, structural racism, and educational systems that evoke racial bias and discrimination. In this country, blatant institutional racism is illegal, but invisible structural racism is seen in various subtle ways. Housing rental discrimination against certain ethnic groups, a glass ceiling in employment, and redlining7 are dominant practices by which structural racism persists. Educational disparity among children of different ethnic groups is a persistent problem in achieving racial justice. Superordinate Visions In pursuing communal visions, racial and ethnic groups need to know how blessed it is to live with other groups and how important it is to understand and appreciate one another. Multiculturality is definitely a blessing rather than a social curse, making society alive, dynamic, productive, and creative. There are a number of things that several groups together can do better than one group. When we make a decision, we need several different perspectives rather than one perspective to deliberate a sounder and more informed decision. Furthermore, we can develop a “superordinate” goal in implementing communal visions. The superordinate goal refers to a collective vision that can be achieved only through the indispensable cooperation of diverse groups. Such a vision is necessary for breaking through the obstinate conflict of racial and ethnic groups. The term “superordinate goal” emerged from the Robbers Cave Experiment. To observe how the group dynamics of conflict and harmony work, social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif and their collaborators organized three summer camps for boys in upstate New York, Connecticut, and Robbers Cave, Oklahoma. Since the outcomes of these camps were indistinguishable, we will treat the experiment of the Robbers’ Cave group.8 In the experiment, boys aged eleven and twelve attending a summer camp were divided into two groups and were then induced to intergroup conflict. As rivalry and the level of frustration grew, stereotypes, derogatory attitudes, name calling, physical aggression, and camp raids followed. Next, the researchers tried to reduce the conflict between the two groups by emphasizing the higher values of brotherly love and cooperation through religious services, by introducing a common enemy, and by providing conferences between group leaders and common activities such as special meals, desserts, fireworks on the Fourth of July, and movies, but these efforts bore little fruit. The researchers finally succeeded in reducing the mutual bitterness only through a common task that requires the cooperation of both groups. They called it a “superordinate goal,” “the attainment of which is compelling but

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which cannot be achieved by the efforts of one group alone, they will tend to cooperate toward the common goal.”9 They were able to bring these two groups together by using superordinate goals, such as solving the problems of a breakdown of the water supply and the breakdown of a food delivery truck. A series of joint ventures eventually thawed their mutual hostility. The implementations of superordinate goals resulted in friendship formation across group boundaries. On the last day, both groups chose to ride home together on the same bus. Then, how can we find superordinate goals among ethnic groups? Certain types of racism may be only overcome by superordinate goals. These types of racism are institutional, structural, and educational racism.

Types of Racism Institutional Racism Institutional racism refers to the practices of customary laws, customs, and policies that engender racial inequalities in society. It legally allows a dominant racial group a range of social, political, economic, cultural, educational, and ecclesial advantages, simply because of its racial background, while implementing discriminatory measures against other ethnic/racial groups. If racist effects raise institutional ordinances, laws, ways of life, or policies, such an institution is bound to be racist regardless of whether the individuals have racially discriminatory intentions. In the context of the United States, Billingsley and Giovannoni concretely define the meaning of institutional racism: It is the systematic oppression, subjugation and control of one racial group by another dominant or more powerful racial group, made possible by the manner in which the society is structured. In this society, racism emanates from white institutions, white cultural values, and white people. The victims of racism in this society are Black people and other oppressed racial and ethnic minorities.10

Against individuals’ opposition, this racism legitimates and maintains the patterns, procedures, and policies that perpetuate the inferior, disadvantageous status of racial and ethnic groups. Residential segregation epitomizes institutional racism in the United States. As long as African or Hispanic American residential segregation is maintained by ongoing institutional arrangements and individual actions, institutional racism will stay with us: “If residential segregation persists, they reason, it is because the civil rights laws passed during the 1960s have not had enough time to work or because many blacks still prefer to live in black neighborhoods.”11 Who wishes to



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live in a rundown neighborhood? Who wishes to live in a dangerous area? Messey and Denton contend, Residential segregation is the principal organizational feature of American society that is responsible for the creation of the urban underclass.12 It takes time to dismantle residential segregation; the phenomena of suburban exodus, however, can reverse residential urban segregation. As in South Africa, the residential segregation of African Americans and other ethnic groups provides a firm ground of further discriminations for institutional racism. Due to educational, economic, political, social, cultural, and political discrepancies between groups, this residential segregation is telling us about institutional racism in the US. Until the government and concerned citizens develop long term plans to dismantle ghettoes and residential segregation, institutional racism will persist.13

Using a combination of data from the 2000 Census and the Current Population Survey, a detailed analysis of African American suburbanization confirms other research that shows substantial suburban growth of African American populations. In addition, the analysis shows that those African Americans who moved to the suburbs have substantially more income and wealth and higher levels of education than African Americans who lived within the urban cores, and that suburban African Americans live in more integrated settings than those who live in the urban areas. This implies that incomes and residential choices matter for African Americans.14 Educational Racism Higher Education Do universities have a “glass ceiling” concerning the admissions of Asian American students? “Yes, they do” is the answer of Adjunct Professor Kara Miller. In her Boston Globe article, “Do Colleges Redline Asian Americans?” she reports that Asian American students on average score 1623 on their SATs out of a possible 2400. This not only separates Asians from other minorities (Hispanics and blacks average 1364 and 1276 on the SAT, respectively), but this average score places them ahead of Caucasians, who average 1581 on their SATs.15 After reviewing data from ten Ivy League schools, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade concludes that Asian American applicants typically need an extra 140 points on their SATs to compete with white students, according to his article, “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal.”16 Much like Jewish students a century ago, Asian Americans tend to earn good grades and high scores and are routinely and almost openly discriminated against by America’s elite universities. Princeton lecturer Russell Nieli suggests a possible “Asian ceiling’’ at Princeton because most leading institutions seem to keep their Asian American student totals in a narrow range: “Yale’s class of 2013 is 15.5 percent

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Asian-American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard, and 17.6 percent at Princeton.”17 These schools reject exemplars of the American dream coming from poor, immigrant families—a few of them narrowly escaped from horrors at home. They are rejected in favor of the wealthy children of privileged white Americans who presumably look more like their alums.18 Such admissions policies based on discrimination are unfair in a country founded on justice and liberty. If a teenager excels at basketball, should he or she be eliminated from a college basketball team for being part of a high-achieving athletic group? In addition, affirmative action does not have to promote competition between ethnic students. The students can be in a “win-win” game rather than in a “zero-sum” game. The goal should be to establish an educational system that encourages more inclusive and fair opportunities for all. That is the original intention of affirmative action. Some schools develop “holistic” admissions systems. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the University of Michigan to award more points for minorities than for some academic factors in its undergraduate admissions process. As a result of that rule, the University of Michigan, along with a number of other universities, has adapted and implemented a “holistic” application process for its undergraduate admissions that takes into account many factors in addition to test scores. These factors may take account of “a student’s class rank, intellectual interests, record of leadership, awards, extracurricular activities, work experience, socio-economic status of the family and school attended, as well as other factors.”19 It is commendable that universities implement such a holistic application process. While it is healthy for universities to implement a holistic application process for the admissions process of underrepresented minority students in light of the spirit of affirmative action, they need, however, not discriminate against Asian American students in favor of the recruitment of Caucasian students. Some Southeast Asians need the benefit of affirmative action, while other Asian American students, without being discriminated against, should be allowed to compete with Euro-American students on an equal basis. The real issue we are facing is more compensatory education for underrepresented ethnic students in elementary and secondary schools. If they are well prepared at these levels, they can compete for university admissions well. This does not mean that we remove compensatory steps or affirmative action at the university level for underrepresented students. Elementary and Secondary Schools Although school segregation is officially ended in the United States, numerous schools are in practice as segregated today as they were before the



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Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and African American children are still performing at the bottom of the American educational system. The Supreme Court has outlawed “separate but equal” schools since then; yet major education problems still play against African American students. Some of the problems can be seen in African American fourth-graders, who are 28 percentage points behind their white counterparts in reading (the U.S. Department of Education), and while 74.9 percent of whites who enter the ninth grade currently graduate with a regular diploma from high school, only 50.2 percent of African Americans do, according to a Harvard University Civil Rights Project Study titled “Losing Our Future.” Between 1990 and 2000, the average percentage of white students at or above basic achievement levels in math was 72 percent; for African Americans, that number was 32 percent (the National Center for Education Statistics). According to the Advancement Project, African American students comprise 17 percent of public school enrollment, but account for 33 percent of the suspensions. Another Harvard Civil Rights Project Study reports that our schools are growing increasingly segregated.20 The gap in their academic achievement begins even before children start school, opens up between kindergarten and second grade, and is firmly established by the third grade. It continues through elementary school, high school, college, and beyond. Such an academic achievement gap results in discrepancies in employability, earnings, health care, housing, marriage, wealth, social status, and life expectancy.21 With a disadvantaged education, many African Americans end up on the streets, in the drug culture, involved in violence, unemployed, and in prison.22 With a disadvantaged education, African American students will be unable to compete with other, better-educated students from all parts of United States and the world for jobs. In such a situation, African American students are virtually still in bondage without much access to resources and social connections. According to a new national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages sixteen and older by the Pew Hispanic Center conducted from August 5 to September 16, 2009, almost nine in ten (89 percent) Latino young adults ages sixteen to twenty-five say that a college education is important for success in life, yet nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of survey respondents stop their education during or right after high school because of their family financial needs, poor English skills, a dislike of school, or/and a feeling of no educational need for their careers.23 Structural Racism Structural racism refers to customs, traditions, and prevalent practices that informally produce racial discrimination and inequalities. When legal ra-

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cial discrimination is prohibited, prejudice appears in this form of racism. It is informal discrimination in spite of the formal prohibition of discrimination against segregation and inequality within institutions. Structural racism has no legal support, but it has de facto social, cultural, and economic sanction. It is the multilayered social custom and practices of inequality against non-Euro-Americans. It is accumulated disadvantage for minorities, based on social stereotypes, prejudices, and indifferences. Race-based discrimination in housing and bank lending (e.g., redlining) are forms of structural racism. Historical Structure This country has previously attempted to achieve racial justice. The First Reconstruction (1865–1877) abolished slavery and allowed African Americans to vote temporarily, and it preserved the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. There was, however, no serious effort to compensate unpaid labor for the past two hundred years. The stubborn myth of “forty acres and a mule” lingers among most African Americans as an unfulfilled dream.24 The civil rights movement (1954–1968) or the Second Reconstruction prohibited legal segregation in public space and reinstated African Americans’ voting rights. But these efforts failed to take the momentum that could reverse the tremendous human costs of historically accumulated disadvantage to African Americans.25 Unlike the First Reconstruction, African Americans were unable to achieve any significant citizenship rights in the 1960s. Economic Structure The unbalanced wealth that affects today’s economy was first accumulated from centuries of unpaid black labor. A number of reputable institutions, such as Ivy League universities, insurance companies, and financial firms, benefited from slavery.26 This form of economic inequality persists even today, driving an economic wedge between the privileged and the exploited. Such unbalanced wealth brings about the present negative net wealth of one-third of all African American households. The average African American family’s net wealth was $16,400, less than one-fifth that of EuroAmerican families in 1998. African American families are declined home loans at twice the rate of Euro-Americans.27 The absence of black capital accumulation is a direct consequence of American structural racism. Presently, one type of visible structural racism is redlining, an unethical and illegal practice by which banks and mortgage lenders limit or reject mortgage loans to highlighted poor and financially risky ethnic areas.



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Redlining became known as such because lenders would draw a red line around a neighborhood on a hidden map, often targeting areas with a high concentration of ethnic people, and then refusing to lend in those areas. According to Calvin Bradford in his testimony before Congress, redlining is still thriving in the entire city of Detroit and the minority portions of Gary, Indiana, and Chicago, as the regulatory agencies evaluated discriminatory lenders with high CRA marks.28 Compared to neighboring cities, those living in the city of Detroit paid nearly 30 percent higher car insurance premiums than those who live in a suburb, although the geographic difference was only a few blocks apart. In Michigan, car insurance rates are heavily determined by ZIP code and credit rating rather than by the type of vehicle and driving record.29 The fact that such illegal redlining practices are implemented nationwide discloses and endorses American structural racism. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, 1,867 Korean businesses were looted or burned.30 Since their stores were in the area redlined by banks and insurance companies, they could not be fully compensated for their damaged or destroyed stores, delaying their restoration efforts. One ethnic group cannot eradicate these deep-seated racisms. All ethnic groups need to work together for such a superordinate goal of purging different types of racism in society. While pursuing the superordinate goal, we will experience the unity of diverse groups.

Diversity For promoting multicultural diversity, it is necessary for each ethnic group to work for the enhancement of its own cultural values and heritage while it transforms its own cultural and social shortcomings such as racial and sexual problems. Such particular social tasks of each group bring forth its uniqueness in line with its cultural and traditional heritage. For example, the Korean American group has been proud of its cultural values such as jung (affectionate attachment, passionate compassion, and compassionate passion), hahn (divine, great, holistic, inclusive, noble, and heavenly mind), and hyo (filial piety), while it has grappled with the internal problems of racial prejudice and sexism. To focus on intercultural relations, we will treat our intraethnic social struggles. Diversity of Particularity through Intraethnic Problems Racial Bias Racism is “the belief that people’s qualities are influenced by their race and that the members of other races are not as good as the members of your

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own, or the resulting unfair treatment of members of other races.”31 Korean immigrants have been discriminated against by Euro-Americans from the beginning of their new life in the United States. Racism is original sin, according to Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner. Parts of racism are prejudice and discrimination. Discrimination is an outward act, which is criminal. Prejudice is an inward outlook, which is intangible. It is an anti-Christian attitude. Many Korean Americans may not overtly discriminate against others, but have prejudice against other ethnic groups. Before their immigration to the United States, Koreans learned about the negative reports of the U.S. news media on certain ethnic groups. Attributable to racist reports, the pejorative depiction of certain ethnic groups in reports is common throughout the world. It is no accident that then Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone bluntly remarked in 1986: “The level of intelligence in the US is lowered by the large number of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans who live there.”32 Nakasone did not know that the data of large-scale IQ testing have shown African Americans in some northern states scoring higher than Euro-Americans in some southern states.33 This contradicts the popular belief that the IQ of a race determines its superiority or inferiority. Rather, IQ test scores may reflect its unequal heritage of wealth, the historical past, educational opportunities, and environment. One of most dramatic examples is the case of the Northern Irish. Although they come from the same ethnic group, dominant Protestants score fifteen points higher on IQ tests than the discriminated-against Catholics.34 In the United States, both Korean American and Japanese American students score about the same on IQ tests. But the Japanese score much higher than the Korean minority living in Japan on IQ tests. The reason is that the Japanese are extremely racist toward Koreans, regarding them as stupid and violent, and employ them only in the dirtiest and lowest-paying jobs.35 Korean children in Japan seem to do rather poorly in school for reasons similar to why some American minority children perform poorly in schools.36 Like Nakasone, we have assumed inferior IQs of certain ethnic groups such as African Americans or Mexican Americans. It is much easier for us to learn prejudice against them than to understand their history of suffering and courageous resistance. Many Korean immigrants have adapted the unfair hierarchical racist values of U.S. society, holding certain ethnic groups in low esteem. We have had little chance to learn about the stony road on which they have trodden. Our misunderstanding of ethnic groups is as distorted as our naive expectation of the United States as a utopia before our arrival. Our prejudice about ethnic groups is reinforced by business experiences of some Korean immigrants in high-crime areas. It is, however, necessary for us to make a distinction between racial and class issues, although it is not easy to set them apart. What Korean immigrants have experienced in high-crime areas is not a racial matter alone but also a class matter. What



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Korean immigrants need to see is the plight of ethnic groups, particularly the African American group, in their historical setting; how unfairly they are left to compete with the descendants of their former owners without wealth and education, and how many of them have been denied job opportunities and have been forced into fatalism. Some Korean Americans called African Americans “Gamdoong-yi,” which means “darkies.” This title is offensive. There is a positive term for African Americans—”Hwoock-in,” whose literal meaning is “black people.” I have, to my surprise, occasionally heard this term “Gamdoong-yi” from some respectable Korean Americans and have been disappointed with their racist remarks. We are mocked as “gook,” yet we mock others with “Gamdoongyi.” We see the speck in our neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in our own eye (Matthew 7:3). As long as we have racist prejudice within, we cannot fight against racism without. When Euro-Americans have prejudice against us, we are really resentful. Then how can we be biased against African Americans and other ethnic groups? When shall we learn from our own experience not to have prejudice against others? Until we stop prejudging others, we cannot ask others to stop prejudging us. Victims sometimes transfer their pain to others. Korean Americans are the victims of racism, but in turn we become racially biased to others. The act of hurting others is the act of sin. When they truly partake in the pain of others, they will initiate the movement to repent of the sin of prejudice against victims. It is undeniable that racial prejudice against African Americans and other groups is persistent among Korean Americans. Since more than 70 percent of Korean Americans are “Christians,”37 Korean American churches should educate their congregations on race matters. Korean American churches must start the movement of the repentance of racial prejudice. If the churches are silent on this acute sin, our silence can work as sanctioning the community’s prejudice. However hard the task may be, Korean American churches should grapple with this important issue by regarding it as our mission.

Patriarchy Because of the economic pressure of immigrant living in the United States, increasing numbers of Korean immigrant women have sought employment. More Korean married women are proportionally employed than Euro-American and African American married women in this country.38 Their economic independence subsequently has weakened the traditional authority of husbands, who feel threatened and who attempt to reassert their undisputed authority over the family. While they have adjusted to the

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two-income structure of the American lifestyle, they still adhere to the old value system of Korean life in their ethnic customs. “The traditional authoritarianism and more dominant values and the new values embedded in the egalitarian orientation of American society have not found a constructive synthesis within the family. Conflict often leads to family breakdown.”39 A Korean American enclave is a protective shield for the authoritarian lifestyle of Korean American husbands. A survey result shows that the wives predominantly carry out four aspects of house work: grocery shopping, housekeeping, laundry, and dishwashing.40 Out of the 483 married respondents, 261 respondents (54 percent) were employed. Only one-third of the respondents indicated the employment of husbands only.41 Although both husband and wife work, the wife usually does most housework including cooking, childrearing, grocery shopping, housekeeping, laundry, and dishwashing. According to the time-availability theory, household chores are primarily shared in response to the availability of time of spouses.42 To Korean immigrant families, the time-availability theory cannot be directly applied. The survey reports that Korean husbands evenly share the household task of managing the family budget and disposing of garbage.43 Generally, Korean immigrant husbands, whether they work long hours or not, are not much involved in household tasks. Subsequently, their wives must basically carry out all the housework in addition to their jobs. They are not only worn out physically but also mentally, whenever their husbands exercise sole final authority, disregarding their opinions. Furthermore, Korean immigrant women suffer from the sexism of the U.S. society. As women, they are humiliated in various ways. They are harassed by their superiors who expect them to behave in a certain way. Their salaries are lower than Korean American men and much lower than Euro-American men. People in general impose their stereotypical images on them. A second-generation Korean American woman was told at a fancy California restaurant when she made several requests: “Why can’t you act like an Oriental!”44 This kind of abuse derives not only from sexism but also from racism. It is hard to separate these two from the oppressive experience of Korean American women. Moreover, as minority persons, they are discriminated against at work even by their fellow women of European descent. In social advancement, Euro-American women have more advantages than they. The disgrace of being passed up for promotion humiliates Korean American women. These women suffer from all these compounded dimensions of social and family life. They have borne a heavier burden than married women in Korea and most married women in the United States.45 In addition to this hardship, most Korean Christian women dedicate their time for church work.46 Many Korean American churches demand that they attend many weekday meetings such as daily dawn prayer meet-



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ings, Wednesday evening services, Friday Bible Study meetings, and seasonal revival meetings, besides the Sunday morning services and Sunday evening services that many churches hold. At church, women are willingly or unwillingly relegated to secondary positions, doing all kinds of manual jobs such as preparing for fellowship, receptions, meals, washing dishes, and cleaning the church. Although many of them have the qualities to be church elders, it is rare to promote women laity to elders even in Korean American United Methodist churches.47 Most Korean American churches, except a few denominational churches, do not allow woman elders. Most elders are males. Korean American churches strongly reflect “the influence of Korean Confucian patriarchal traditions, the conservative theological position of Korean churches, and the practical need of Korean male immigrants to create high-status positions through ethnic churches.”48 For many of them, the churches are not the place where they experience liberation but mental and physical exhaustion and repression. The churches are the mere mirrors of their culture and community; their churches are not above patriarchy but under it. Korean American women have been overburdened and burned out by housework, employment work, and church work, and have been discriminated against due to racism. Their agony is quadrupled. Double sexism coupled with racism and the hardship of immigration life has engendered their han-laden agony.

Conclusion It is critical for us to promote multiculturalism in the United States. Even though it is important to support multiculturalism in this society, we should not be complacent with its mere promulgation. We need to shape and reshape American multiculturalism in a creative way. There is a distinction between sociological multiculturalism and theological multiculturalism. The sociological multiculturalism intends to describe multiculturalism. The theological multiculturalism expects to prescribe multiculturalism. To face challenges of our multicultural society, we need a new multicultural-relations model. I have tried to articulate a multicultural theology from a Korean American perspective through an enhancement model. Its major points are enhancement, diversity, and unity. To bring forth unity in community, Korean Americans should coordinate to transform social sins and social hurts while moving toward superordinate visions. To celebrate the gifts of diversity, Korean Americans should deepen and heighten our blessed cultural heritage such as hahn, jung, mut, and hyo, while finding our particularity as we work on our own internal sins of racial bias and patriarchy.

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In intercultural relations, we do more than accept each other. We challenge the sins of other groups and heal their deep wounds, while working on our sins and attending our own wounds. In Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr presented five models of Christian relationships with culture: Christ against culture, the Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture.49 Among them, he implies the transformation model as the best pattern. The model differentiates Christ from culture and then treats culture as the objective reality that Christians should unilaterally transform. We cannot, however, unequivocally separate Christians from culture. Even Christ was not fully free from culture. If we take the humanity of Jesus seriously, such a separation between Christ and culture is unattainable; for the civilization of the first century influenced his life and thinking. Even if we suppose that Christ might be an absolute transformer who was not influenced by culture, Christ’s followers are not. The point is that Christians should not only transform, but also be continually transformed by God and culture. For Korean American Christians, tasks are more complex than Niebuhr’s models of Christ and culture conjure. On the one hand, we face two cultures: the Korean American and U.S. cultures. On the other hand, we have two dimensions of Christ for Korean Americans: a Korean American Christian ideal and the present state of the Korean American church. Thus, there is at least a fivefold task of Korean American Christians: the enhancement of the U.S. culture, the confrontation of other ethnic cultures, the enhancement of Korean American culture, the enhancement of the Korean American church, and self-transformation. First, Korean American Christians need to challenge this society. As a society, it has suffered sexism, racism, economic injustice, intolerance, media monopoly, drug culture, and various types of abuse and violence. These are the culprits of deep wounds in the world. The more we care for this society, the more we come to confront its wrongs. Using effective Christian resources and Asian American traditions, we need to confront these problems and unravel the deep wounds of the society. As we try to change these causes of social injuries, we come to seek the cultural, economic, social, and political reformation of the society. These problems involve all racial and ethnic groups. Diverse ethnic groups need to cooperate in changing our common culture by removing the collective sins of our culture and by making the victims of deep wounds whole. No group can escape from the collective sin that causes deep social wounds and work to heal these deepseated wounds of the society by itself. In the processes of diagnosing the problems of our society, strategizing effective ways to eradicate them, and cooperating for necessary actions, we find the true unity of all ethnic groups. Our goal is to create a community



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of God, in which each ethnic group can maximize all the gifts received from God, invigorating other groups to do the same. Second, Korean American Christians must challenge other racial and ethnic groups when they show their bias and discriminate against us and other groups. Whether it is racial or sexual discrimination, we need to stand up to their customs and cultures that their prejudice and practices of discrimination will be resolved. If an Anglo-Saxon group discriminates against us, we should confront its culture of racism with the spirit of care. Even if an African or Hispanic American group puts us or others down on the basis of ethnic bias, we have to stand opposed to this. Not out of contempt or resentment, but out of understanding, respect, and care for its culture and tradition, we challenge that group to change its prejudice and discrimination. Without a caring spirit and respect for any group, our challenge will only cause unnecessary or excessive conflict and collision. In turn, other ethnic groups should challenge the Korean American group to change its racial prejudice, patriarchy, and hierarchy, too. This type of pursuing change through mutual challenge will elicit the unity of diverse groups. Third, Korean American Christians need to change our own community. It is patriarchal, exploitative toward laborers, and racially biased. Traditional patriarchy allows domestic violence and lowers the status of women in the community. In commerce, some Korean American businesspeople exploit helpless workers. We need to change our business practices for fair labor compensation. Fourth, Korean American Christians must change our churches. The churches are still hierarchical, patriarchal, and exclusively ethnocentric. Regarding patriarchy, women are unfairly treated in many Korean American churches. Most churches are reluctant to ordain women and hesitant to accept women as their senior pastors. Concerning hierarchy, most Korean American churches have the vertical structure of church spiritual order: ministers, lay elders, senior deacons, and deacons. Korean American church members have regarded these orders as hegemonial rankings within the church. Concerning non–Korean American members affiliated through interracial marriages, Korean American churches have neglected and have marginalized their full participation in church life. Korean American Christians must make their churches more inclusive and egalitarian. Fifth, Korean American Christians must be transformed by the renewal of the heart in the Spirit of God (Romans 12:2). Incessant self-critical reflection is an important step to the transformation of the world. It is an emptying process for the community. It is also a reflective time, a time to reject externally projected false images of Korean Americans by other biased groups. The emptying task denotes filling with the Holy Spirit in order to have healthy self-images of Korean Americans and to carry out God’s mission given to us.

Response to Andrew Sung Park Gastón Espinosa

Andrew Sung Park has written an insightful, thoughtful, and engaging chapter that calls on Asian Americans and all Americans by inference to practice a theology of enhancement. He posits this as a middle path between the two most common approaches in the Korean community: assimilation or withdrawal. He argues that a theology of enhancement needs to “accept each culture as it is,” even with its imperfections. “Unless some cultural practices are illegal, their customs and values must be accepted.” This is because “the first act of acceptance is tolerance.” The second critical step in a theology of enhancement is “the appreciation of diversity.” Finally, he argues that a theology of enhancement encourages “each culture [to] care for other cultures by challenging their shortcomings . . . [and] the shortcomings of its own culture.” In the end, promoting diversity means holding up what each culture can and should be with a desire to increase its beauty, worth, strength, and value. Racial-ethnic cultural groups are best positioned to help other groups to “see the shortcomings” and to enable them to “pursue the justice of inter ethnic relations for God’s reign through mutual transformation.” In order to carry out this theology, each ethnic group needs to “open its clannish boundary of community, but never lose its uniqueness” in order to “become conscious of others.” It also needs to fight against ethnic conflict, xenophobia, sexism, and classism and should seek to dismantle” institutional, structural, and educational racism. Racial-ethnic groups need to stop fighting among themselves and instead pursue a common goal of bringing about tolerance, acceptance, peace and an end to racism, 174



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classism, and patriarchy. Only by so doing can they create a truly just multicultural society. In order to operationalize this, he examines H. Richard Niebuhr’s five models of a Christian’s relationship to culture in Christ and Culture: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture. Since all of these models are incomplete, he proposes as an alternative approach called a theology of enhancement. He calls on Koreans to take a five-fold approach to transform and be continually transformed by culture: enhancement of the U.S. culture, the confrontation of other ethnic cultures, the enhancement of the Korean American culture, the enhancement of the Korean American church, and self-transformation. Park’s proposal for a theology of enhancement offers a number of helpful insights with respect to creating a public theology. His first important insight is the need for racial-ethnic minorities to allow others to criticize those aspects of their culture and society that are harmful to both others and themselves. Sometimes an outsider can see one’s strengths and shortcomings better than the insider. This is critical for public theology if it is to engage in healthy and constructive dialogue. His second important insight for constructing a public theology is that we need to seek ways to enhance racial-ethnic communities and one another rather than compete for scarce resources. He argues that religion can be one avenue and a cultural grammar that people can use for this kind of constructive dialogue. This focus on enhancement is critical because it posits as its ultimate goal the building up of the community. This differs from past imperial, colonial, and neocolonial ideologies because it does not assume that the primary benefactor be the consumer, but rather the larger community it seeks to engage. This is critical to avoiding just one more neocolonizing enterprise masking their abuse in the rhetoric of helping “those” people. His third important insight is the call to analyze and critique repressive and patriarchal social, cultural, and religious practices both in one’s own culture and others. Criticizing these repressive factors (e.g., racism, classism, ethnocentrism) can indeed contribute to a more just and diverse society. Given that women often bear the brunt of male oppression, this is an important goal. Women often make up more than 50 percent of most communities and 60 to 70 percent of churches and religious organizations. To leave out their voices is to hamstring the raw potential of any community. The key will be to find a way of critiquing repressive and oppressive cultural tendencies and practices all the while not replicating the same kind of marginalizing practices they are seeking to overcome. This will be particularly difficult because on the one hand, readers are called on to accept and tolerate the society “as it is,” while on the other they are supposed to point out, criticize, and change its “shortcomings.” Of course, Park recog-

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nizes that there is embedded in this assumption the notion that there is an objective and agreed-upon standard by which a culture can be rightly measured and judged. However, all standards are inherently subjective. Thus a very careful balancing act will be required to make this process constructive for the community and society. His fourth contribution is his focus on creating a multicultural society, which is critical to the future of U.S. religion and society given that racialethnic minorities now make up 25 percent of the population and by 2050 Latinos/as alone will make up 29 percent (132 million) of all Americans. Furthermore, any theology that seeks to be relevant to the concrete realities of our sprawling urban centers where minority gang violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and poverty are endemic needs to be able to reach out across racial and religious lines. His next contribution to public theology is to remind us that we have to be diligent to avoid interethnic racism, a problem in many racial-ethnic communities. Racism is one of the forces driving the current black-brown gang violence in southern California and the decision by African Americans to burn down Koreatown in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King court decision. He reminds us that we should avoid flattening out our racial-ethnic distinctives because this in the end will only create a more homogeneous and less diverse society. That may be good depending upon one’s own political and cultural point of view, but it could also be profoundly destructive for those who disagree. In addition, we also need to avoid engaging in what Derek Sue in his book Overcoming Our Racism calls “cultural racism,” which he defines as “the individual or institutional expression of the superiority of one’s cultural heritage (arts, crafts, language, traditions, beliefs, technological skills, values) and its imposition on racial/ethnic minority groups.” Finally, Park’s chapter is important because he stresses that a relevant public theology needs to address the pursuit of mutual justice, equality, and empowerment, all of which are the basis of a stable and peaceful society. He insightfully argues, “Without mutual enhancement, diversity turns into separation and unity . . . uniformity.” Indeed. The danger and potential pitfall of pursuing justice is that one ends up criticizing everyone who disagrees with you until you’ve been able to persuade or coerce everyone to replace one form of orthodoxy (yours) for another, and one form of diversity with uniformity, all the while claiming that diversity has won the day. While the vast majority of people who fight and struggle for justice do not simply replace one orthodoxy for another, it’s nonetheless wishful thinking to automatically assume that racial-ethnic minorities are somehow less prone to doing precisely that once they have ascended to the halls of power. Park has provided a number of insights, tools, and cautions to help us avoid falling into this trap and has laid out a road map that can help us enhance our communities and society.

II Beyond Only Difference

Preacher Man snow covered sidewalks make a lame old-man think

the boulders keeping them apart. he tells us God left the big church

of the Boricua flag on an aged wood pole that hangs outside his

where the preacher babbled of an unseen Jesus to haunted faces better

apartment window. he carried hope on the streets expecting

known by slaves. pushed by a strong wind, he walks into

someday to awaken in lost paradise. he writes nightly

a bodega waiting for answers in every aisle, mumbling one day

on the soiled pages of a red spiral binder of people who

we will stop burying the dead who came to America full of dreams

no longer speak to each other despite wishing to remove

but were handed brooms. —Harold J. Recinos

9 Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been: Democratic Hope and Creative Exchange Victor Anderson

In April 2009, I was privileged to give two lectures on the topic of my book, Creative Exchange: An African American Constructive Theology.1 My lectures were on “Creative Conflict and Creative Exchange.” I think of creative exchange not so much as a principle, theological or otherwise, but as a moral and spiritual pattern toward life, an orientation toward fostering moral and political practices that maximize not only our sense of human fulfillment but also our deepest democratic longings and hopes in a world seized by conflict, violence, and a near nihilism regarding whether there exists enough good will within our local communities to find moments for cooperation that can lead to moments of beloved community. The first lecture was entitled, “An American Public Theology in the Absence of Giants.” In it, I laid out some ideas about the current situation of American public theology within our postmodern moment. I described this situation by post– Cold War politics and postnuclear formations of power, post–civil rights activism, postindustrial technologies, and a post-Protestant hegemony. I argued that these culture moves have contributed to a declining significance of American public theology and the conceptual giants guarding, refereeing, and contesting the uneasy relationship between Christian faith and our democratic social order. Among the conceptual giants that I evoked were the languages of John Dewey’s “Common Faith,” Albrecht Ritschl’s and Walter Rauschenbusch’s “Kingdom of God,” Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Impossible Possibility,” Paul Tillich’s “Protestant Principle,” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beloved Community.” However, the focus of that lecture was on H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Radical Monotheism” and his practice of 179

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reflective criticism in his critique of American Christianity and its compromise with the social forces of caste and racism in the formation of American denominationalism.2 I was also concerned with the ways that the production and reproduction of academic theology may have contributed to the loss of these languages of American public theologies and their vibrancy throughout the first twothirds of the twentieth century. For that, I turned to Van Harvey’s classic assessment and his eventual lament over the absences of the conceptual giants of American public theology and how their absence may have left us, in our postmodern moment, with what Harvard theologian, Ron Thiemann sees as two impoverishing options: a new Christendom or the banality of relativism between competing city-states of distinct publics.3 Pushing back against these two options, I argued that the postmodern shift to the centrality of the local and particular over the universal and “generalizable other” may offer better venues for tracking the intersections of faith and public life, intersections operating throughout ordinary modes of activism and care of local citizens whose actions and practices constitute a province of public theology. I describe public theology, in this explicitly populace sense as the “deliberate use of religious languages and commitments to influence substantive public discourse, including public debates on morals. It is the use of theological concepts and symbols to connect the spirituality of religious communicants to their moral, public obligations as democratic citizens.”4 In this populace sense, the significance of religious symbols, beliefs, doctrines, and loyalties are lived out in local citizens’ exercise of their civic powers and responsibilities.5 By contrast, I describe the academic sense of public theology as involving the academically or scholarly situated theologian, ethicist, religious thinker, and intellectual in “understanding, transmitting, and constructing theological rhetorics which not only sustain the political community in public practices oriented toward moral fulfillment;” academic public theology also involves theologians, ethicists, religious thinkers and intellectuals in “developing theological rhetorics which are capable of correcting the moral conscience of the political community when public life is governed by policies that violate the democratic fulfillment of its citizens.”6 In this chapter, I want to make certain ironic moves that foreground the populace sense of public theology as a province of practices for the sake of democratic speech, voice, and action. To do this, I draw on insights from political scientist and social theorist Romand Coles, public anthropologist Marla Frederick, and the senior statesman of African American religious history, archivists, and teachers of the American Freedom Struggle, Professor Vincent Harding, and one of his most empowering essays: “Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been Yet” from his Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (1990). I dedicate this chapter to him.



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I The editors of Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary (2008) describe their series in “Theopolitical visions” this way: Theopolitical visions seek to open up new vistas on public life, hosting fresh conversation between theology and political theory. This series assembles writers who wish to revive the political imagination for the sake our common good. Theopolitical Visions hopes to re-source modern imaginations with those ancient traditions in which political theorists were often also theologians. Whether it was Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of exiles “seeking the peace of the city,” Plato’s illuminations on piety and civic virtues in the Republic, St. Paul’s call to “a common life worthy of the Gospel,” St. Augustine’s beatific vision of the City of God, or the gothic heights of medieval political theology, much of Western thought has found it necessary to think theologically about politics, and to think politically about theology. This series is founded in the hope that the renewal of such mutual illumination might make a genuine contribution to the peace of our cities.7

With these goals in mind, Romand Coles engages Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas to produce a book of conversations on the meaning of Christian faith and radical democracy. However, while their exchange is itself significant, for purposes of this chapter, in what follows, I am more interested in Coles’s discussion of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters to frame my discussion.8 American public theologies were produced and reproduced on the performance of voice, indeed, very loud voices of mostly white preacher-theologians but also voices of black religious leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Thurman, whose public theologies were derived from the Black Intellectual Tradition from David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. DuBois, to Benjamin Elijah Mays, et al. However, in black public discourse and public theology, the powerful persuasiveness of their voices was also derived from the black preaching tradition with its emphasis on oratorical eloquence and explosive improvisational moves found in black freedom songs and the expressive culture of a blues and jazz people. Black public discourse and public theology were also funded on a classical and new black aesthetics, rooted in the alternative performances of voice in black nationalism (Marcus Garvey), Black Islam (Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X), and the creation of a Black Power Movement (Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, et al.). All were directing social change toward a radicalizing of democracy. Still, speech and voice were most determinate in the formations of African American public theology. This is so even today in public venues of radio (Tom Joyner, Rev. Al Sharpton, Michael Baisden), secular talk shows and televised venues (Oprah Winfrey, Tavis Smiley, et al.), and pulpits and

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conferences (T. D. Jakes, Creflo and Taffi Dollar, Juanita Bynum, et al.). In what follows, I want to render problematic this relationship between voice, speech, and action only to return to it at the end. The circulatory loop between voice, speech, and action was the primary entry into the sphere of publicity in an age print, radio, and television media, which globally mobilized public theologies for prophetic social change. Still often quiet, silent, and unheard were organizers and imminent activists, who were pushing distinct publics toward coalitions or regimes of democratic power forged by a common interest to right America’s wrongs and its often misguided Christianities. Romand Coles sees Cornel West, today, as the leading public voice of radical democracy. Yet, he also sees West situated, no rather, contained by the performances of speech and voice.9 In reading West, he wonders when and where does voice land (on) the ground of action? And this is exactly the ground on which Coles himself wants to be positioned. He wants to turn to the sphere of the local, the realm of community organizers, volunteers, and political activists. Here is the gist of Coles’s worries about public theology and its deep sedimentation in speech and voice. Speech is the basic human condition by which people try to come to terms with each other by talking. Talking is a basic act of communication between people regarding issues, interests, and concerns around which they establish themselves as distinct and local publics. Talking also turns to their common life as The Public. Voice, however, signifies the textuality of what is said. Voice qualitatively flavors speech by it intonations and articulations. Voice performs meaning connections between what is said and what is articulated. Regarding West, Coles says: “Cornel West is greatly appreciated by radical democrats for the wisdom, passion, and resonance of his engaged voice.”10 But Coles accents the word “voice” throughout his reading of West. He sees West engaged in the position of the usually underarticulated as the field of “textuality” for his own voice. Here, Coles is talking about what makes West so compelling, namely, that he, does “not only listens to others, but he explicitly calls us to listen and insists that doing so is central to the practice of radical democracy. . . . For West, it is imperative that young people see that the older generation in the academy cares about them, that we take them seriously, and that we want to hear what they have to say.”11 Curiously, in this quote, West does not suggest just what the young people get out of this exchange between themselves and the older generation of public theologians in the academy. In search for an answer to this question, I will turn later to Vincent Harding for a clue. Perhaps, Harding can give voice to West’s underarticulation of generational need; at least, that is what I want to proffer at the end of this chapter. However, after a content analysis and review of the scant amount of attention that West gives to the unarticulated, Coles offers a stinging criticism of the moments where he does.



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These moments are positioned within the overall emphasis on prophetic voices or writings that tend too little to the lived and practiced receptivity that is the greater part of the life and materiality of democratic relationship, struggle, and power. In West texts, there is too little strenuous attention to the specific textures of democratic struggles and organizing modes, to movements in churches and community centers, to the movements in the streets, on front porches, at kitchen tables; the practice saying carefully what is found there with say, the subtlety of that he musters in relation to Emerson, Morrison, or Baldwin. These practices of moving (on) the ground are very much the matter of democracy—the liturgies in which radical democracy discerns and manifests its living and dying.12

I want to insist, for purposes of this chapter, that it may be very much in such locations of the local that we are able to grasp a profound relation between public theology and democratic practices. Indeed, on this point, Coles is worth reiterating: “Practices of moving (on) ground are very much the matter of democracy—the liturgies in which radical democracy discerns and manifests its living and dying.” The concern here is not that voices such as West are unnecessary for articulating what is heard on the ground (although I have problems with this phrase because it implies that thinkers like West are not on the ground but somewhere else). Rather, given the primary circulation within and among which intellectuals produce and reproduce the unheard, the listening and receptivity of what is heard and received, when given voice, can take on a life of its own, often overarticulating the unheard and never returning to sites of their lived realities of sufferings, struggle, interminable conflicts, the local publics of everyday citizens talking about their needs, conflicts, interests, and cares. Moreover, all too often, having come to voice, the centers of aurality shift from unheard speakers to already-agreed-on sites of orality, namely, churches, class rooms, television venues, staged and orchestrated seating at the State of Black America and minister conferences. Such provinces of orality become centers of already agreed-upon articulations of what is heard and received, while centers of aurality recede into the background as the taken-for-granted province for the speech, voice, and actions of the academic public theologian. To be clear, the above analysis is not a negative criticism of the power of speech and voice in the intellectual sphere, indeed, as if it were something to be negated by an anti-intellectual otherness. Rather, the critique is a cautionary note on just how easy it is to slip from aurality to orality never to return. The slippage from listening to speech and voice makes it easy to forget the local publics of democratic hope that work to build organized communities of activists, radical democrats, and radical ordinaries. Regarding West, Coles cautions: By repeatedly foregrounding how “the love of democracy has been most powerfully expressed and pushed forward by our great public intellectual and

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artists, West’s textual practice perhaps inadvertently risks shifting to the background the endlessly powerful and informative expressions of lived artistry and philosophizing bodies in the democratic practices that receive very little comparable engagement in his work.13

II In this chapter, I argue that the postmodern gaze, with its emphasis of the local, may help academic public theologians see when and where the vitalities of a public theology for the twenty-first century may be better located as sources for the enhancement and empowering of our democratic longings and for funding of our democratic hopes, and at times, in moments, even directing us toward a vision of beloved community so heralded in the public theologies of Thurman and King. Although Coles may not share my explicit hopes, nevertheless, he agrees that if we are to fuel up our context for such possibilities, as I have suggested above, we had better turn to the world of activists, the world of community organizers. And Coles’s devoted African American public theologian is Ella Baker. Cofounder of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Baker is preeminent in Coles’s estimation of her deepest and longest history of cultivating empowering arts of democratic receptivity and taking radical democracy to another level with the creation of SNCC. Although having written little, her philosophy of social change was “inscribed in her practice” says Barbara Ransby, Baker’s biographer. She continues: “Her ideas were written in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years.”14 A woman steeped in the black church women’s club movements, which organized to support the poor members of the community, care for destitute children, and provide care to the sick and dying, Baker transported these religious commitments, says Coles, to Harlem during the Great Depression, forming neighborhood centers to care for the community deepest needs.15 For Coles, if ever there was a witness to prophetic social practices and a radical ecclesia, Baker models it at every turn of her public activism. She and other founders resisted the patriarchal leadership of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), headed by King, whose style of leadership was prophetic yet centrist, that is, organized around a single leader. By contrast, Baker’s style was group-centered, grass roots, networking beyond the church.16 She brought to SNCC the tradition of activism that was itself an embodied ecclesiology: The young Baker was led largely by the example of a different type of voice and mode of leadership, namely, that of her very active mother and the Littleton,



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North Carolina, community of “strong, hard-working, deeply religious black people—most of them women . . . who pledged themselves to serve and uplift those less fortunate.” This pledge was practical, visceral, and highly organized into women’s auxiliary associations, as well as into local and state chapters of national conventions, which played a major role within Black Baptist church.17

Baker was the embodiment of Christian prophetic practices of an engaged citizen whose faith and witness was both the source of her embodied critiques of the reaches of state power and operations that hindered democratic formations in the South and North. However, it was also an embodied critique of status quo evangelicalism in many black churches doing little to bring about active change beyond just talking. It was Baker’s indebtedness to the generations after her that motivated her organizing SNCC, instilling the quiet “patience of listening” before acting and cultivating practices of receptivity. In a significant passage, Coles responds to the question that I posed earlier, namely, what debt do African American public theologians and intellectuals owe future generations. Here is his answer: In accounts of Baker’s participation in the 1960 conference in which SNCC was officially formed, one finds a repeated motif about her “listening patiently,” “asking questions,” and “warning against dogmatism”: “ask questions, Mary,” she would say. People referred repeatedly to her “personal connection” and “care” and it is clear that she sought to teach as a solicitous exemplar of the radical-democratic ethos she preached.18

SNCC proved to be one of the most powerful sources of social change that would help turn the tides of American racist regimes of hate and containment, as it trained white and black youth, college students, and activists of other ethnic locals to teach literacy in rural communities and prepare persons for voting registration, and it also prepared young people for the brutalities that they would experience as they participated in the Freedom Rides and even risk their own lives in their quests for freedom, democratic hope, and formations of beloved community. Because of imminent African American public theologians such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Bob Moses, Prathia Wynn Hall, and many others, their successes in the “American Freedom Movement” of the 1950s and 60s became a model of American public theology for future generations.

III A good number of people have questioned whether such democratic energies exist today among people of good will, especially among the African

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American citizenship, indeed, whether such grass roots activism is possible for social change outside of televised, media-driven articulations of mere counterpolitics between two public options: Democrats and Republicans. Some younger scholars of African American religion are asking whether the local can provide substantive centers for speech, voice, and action that may renew our democratic hopes and longings beyond the overarticulations of media performance by public intellectual and talking heads. Marla Fredericks is one such scholar. Fredericks has written on a number of public issues, as a public anthropologist, that focus on public education, African American women and televangelism, religion, poverty, media and wealth, and neoliberal politics and its effects on the local and global economic orders, and on poor black women and their spiritual resources for resisting strains of poverty in Halifax County, North Carolina. The results of her study are published in Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (2003).19 Focusing on Between Sundays, I see in it a wonderful display of themes, methods, and research that highlight Frederick’s collaborative contribution to Local Democracy Under Siege (2007). In collaboration with other significant researchers and social scientists, Frederick’s “public anthropology” represents a worthy contribution to discourse on the “local” in American democratic practices that stands in good company with Coles’s Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (2005) and Coles and Hauerwas in Radical Democracy and the Radical Ordinary. In such texts, religious discourse turns to local political life, issues, and experience to assess the role of religious intervention into participatory democracy (radicalizing democracy). In Local Democracy Under Siege, Frederick and her colleagues use the tools of anthropology, particularly ethnography, to track often alluded ways in which the locally disinherited, poor, and alienated communities are given voice to their practices for sustaining democratic power under conditions of overincarceration, undereducation, high rates of teen pregnancy, high poverty rates, and high unemployment, which are constitutive aspects of these communities’ life. Moreover, they critically evaluate how neoliberal government initiatives both exacerbate and sometime mitigate the impact of these social factors on locals and how neoliberal policies also occasion possibilities for local self-involvement in exercising democratic participation in their communities’ interests. Frederick’s influence is easily recognized in those places where the book highlights results of the Halifax County North Carolina Study for which she was the principle researcher. Moreover, Local Democracy Under Siege highlights the theory and methods of public anthropology for social change. However, in no place among Frederick’s writings have these interests come together more critically and in a sustained manner than in Between Sundays. Frederick’s public anthropology does not only mirror theoretical



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insights well established by theorists of culture and cultural practices from Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu, et al., and black sociology and politics from E. Franklin Frazier, Patricia Hill Collins, Manning Marable, et al. The performance of “public anthropology” is central to her overall interests in radical democracy and the renewal of democratic energies so longed for in West’s Democracy Matter. A noted theorist of public anthropology, Robert Borofsky defines it this way: Public anthropology engages issues and audiences beyond today’s self-imposed disciplinary boundaries. The focus is on conversations with broad audiences about broad concerns. Although some anthropologists already engage today’s big questions regarding rights, health, violence, governance and justice, many refine narrow (and narrower) problems that concern few (and fewer) people outside the discipline. Public anthropology seeks to address broad critical concerns in ways that others beyond the discipline are able to understand what anthropologists can offer to the re-framing and easing—if not necessarily always resolving—of present-day dilemmas. The hope is that by invigorating public conversations with anthropological insights, public anthropology can re-frame and reinvigorate the discipline.20

Between Sundays is based on local black women in Halifax County, North Carolina, whom Frederick studied (1997–1999). Through interviews, observation, and participation in the religious lives and practices of these women, she opened a critical relation with them that continue to fuel her expanded research and writings. She explores and analyzes the impact of neoliberal politics and theory on the “marketization” of education in this poverty center of Halifax County. She explores and assesses the religious attitudes of the black women of Halifax County on such issues as electoral politics, sex and sexuality, and sexual abuse. Very important for her ongoing research is the role of black women in community activism. Frederick is continuing her research and writing on a topic most current and on which she is becoming the leading, authoritative voice among academics in the study of black religion, namely, her ongoing, vital work on the impact of televangelism and wealth and prosperity ministries on the spirituality of black women. These interests are now being extended to global contexts in her forthcoming Colored Television: Black Religion in Global Context. In Between Sundays, Frederick rightly notes that when black women’s religious experiences are the subject of either sociological or theological reflection, exploration, and assessment, they are all too often defined narrowly within the scope of the black church, black theology, or womanist theology. That is, they are given voice through these interventions. To be sure, what black women believe or how they are related to the church is certainly cultivated within the “womb” of the black church. Therefore, Frederick has not departed from the historical assessment of the black church

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as key to the black public sphere. Nevertheless, her critical judgment is also correct that “what is missing from the literature . . . is an ethnography that examines the ways in which contemporary African American women negotiate their day-to-day spiritual strivings.”21 Consequently, most missing from these sociological and theological works are the expressed voices of black women themselves. For Frederick, when heard, black women’s articulations of their spiritualities do not only substantively support the findings of these other “ideological” studies. More importantly, they reveal the ways that their spiritualities are not articulated in the literature of black liberation theologians and womanist theologians and ethicists. What she frames are the erasures of these women’s faces, voices, and everyday practices from the dominant literature on African American public theology. As public anthropologist, Frederick’s ethnography reframes African American public theology by returning to the first principle of social phenomenology, namely, a return, in this case, to black women themselves, but not as the observed and spoken for. Rather, they are represented by Frederick as agents over their everyday lives. Theirs is a spirituality that is nonreducible to near totalizing judgments about black women’s tri-partite oppressions that are often reflected in the theological literature under large ideological categories of classism, racism, and sexism. Relative to such a determinate framing device of black women’s experience within the local, Frederick’s ethnography provides a complex representation of black women’s spirituality “sufficiently nuanced to interpret these women’s lives and life experiences.”22 She wants an “interactive model” that is helpful for keeping lively and creatively tensions that lie at the core of theological interpretations of black women’s spirituality. She describes her model thus: Their responses to race, class, and gender politics are fixed neither by the innate nature of their identities, nor by the assumption of any monolithic set of rules that apply to their spirituality. Nevertheless, a common thread binds their experiences in that all of the women encountered the politics of interrelated identities on a lived basis and draw from a spirituality rooted in the transcendent power of Christ as they navigate through their lives.23

In her forthcoming book, Colored Television: Black Religion in Global Context, the theory and method of public anthropology developed and displayed in Between Sunday and Democracy Under Siege are being applied to global contexts in the Caribbean and beyond. Proceeding in narrative form, Frederick gives thick descriptions of contexts. She introduces the media by which mega-church televangelists move to captivate attention of global locals and empower and enlighten them for small yet meaningful participatory acts of personal and social change. Although yet unpublished, Frederick describes her aims: “Colored Television: Black Religion in Global



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Context appropriates [a] more nuanced understanding of globalization and applies it to our understanding of the flows of religious symbols, ideologies, personalities, and practices during the first half of the 21st century.”24 Colored Television expands our notions of Christian missions by way of televangelism beyond its already understood messages of personal salvation toward seeing religious broadcasting as “the expansion of the religious market” at work in redescribing time-space contexts where religious messages “de-territorized” cultures around the world.25 This deployment of religious broadcasting forms what West calls “Constantinian Christianity.” It signifies the collusion of Christian claims with neoliberal policies and religious markets globally. Yet, this expansionism has a double social effect, Frederick argues. While serving to emancipate and mobilize the democratic energies of locals, it also contains these efforts structurally under neoliberal ideology and socioeconomic practices of globalized capitalism and the negative effects on the world’s poor.26 Frederick’s brings her work in public anthropology to the critique of globalized capitalism under neoliberal regimes of power, emphasizing the importance of public anthropology in black religion for social change, enlightening and emancipating U.S. and global locals toward radicalizing democratic practices in the interests of the world’s poor. Echoing Coles, looking at an international context, she says: “I wrestle with questions of how religion operates on the ground. As easy as it is to watch television messages from Miles Monroe or T. D. Jakes, it is much more difficult to ascertain the importance of these messages for Jamaicans.”27 I agree. My emphasizing “on the ground” in the above quote highlights the critical edge of African American religionists such as Frederick who are paying close attention to the ways that the empirical sciences can creatively and critically impact African American public theology. Public anthropology as deployed by Frederick et al. make important contributions to the yet undertheorized and underarticulated ways that theological, moral, and political interpretations of African American public theology can be translatable for social change among both local and the world’s poor. Such a program of criticism clearly moves African American public theology toward promoting the radicalizing of participatory democratic energies within the U.S. public sphere and among global locals, when among African American public intellectuals and theologians, the local gives rise to speech, voice and democratic action.

IV Telling the stories of such democratic energies among local, radical ordinaries has been the enduring passion and devotion of Vincent Harding. For many intellectuals of my generation, he is, as was Baker for her generation,

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someone from whom we learn the best practices of radical ordinary democrats. For this senior statesman in the academy of the twentieth-century “American Freedom Movement,” as he calls it, Harding finds “the civil rights movement” too small a nomenclature to capture the ultimate ends of freedom. For him, civil rights are only markers of possibilities in the flourishing of our democratic hopes. What Baker is been for Coles, Harding is for me. He answers the question that I raised earlier, namely, why must the academic public theologian listen, learn from, and be receptive to the needs, cries, pains, and longings of future generations? Concluding this chapter, I want to focus my comments around this question. In his magnum opus for teachers, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement, Harding raises a question that is as haunting today as it was in 1990, when he wrote this book. It is perhaps even more haunting today in our postmodern moment. The question is: “Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been Yet.” Harding writes: Some years ago, I came across one of the most intriguing book title that I have ever seen. It was set forth in the form of a question: Is America Possible? Even without delving into the contents, I was struck by the playful seriousness of the inquiry, the invitation to imagine and explore the shape and meaning of a “possible” America, an America still coming into existence.28

Harding answers the question affirmatively: yes, indeed, if we do not forget; if we do not forget where we have been. This is why he, like Coles, returns again and again to the fields of the unarticulated and unheard public theologians in local places, to radical ordinaries, living out of their living pubic theologies articulated in community activism, advancing beloved community in step-by-step moments, and increasing the power of creative exchange in democratic practices. For Hardy, such practices and such attention to the local and its radical ordinaries is not for academic public theology simply a matter of chronicling important events of social crises, although cataloging such events is necessary. And we must do this work, if are not to forget. Moreover, it is not about remembering dates; and for African American public theology, dates point our lives and social history. Counterhistorical memory is not about footnoting every damned sentence written by the academic public theologian. It is not about hiding or bracketing the historian’s or scholar’s point of view or voice behind or against a camouflage of a zillion block quotes. As Harding sees it, history is telling the story; it is the fire that ignites our imaginations. Indeed, it gives us the materials for “remembering” our collective social experiences. Telling the story enables us to “remember” our struggles and our moments of relief. Telling the story has the power to move our intellects creatively from the taken for granted, everyday world of routines toward conceived possibilities for our futures as a democratic society. In such tellings, no recounting, we



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return to voice from listening, to orality after aurality. Telling the story means that I have listened and received the languages, passions, visions, longings, and democratic desires of the everyday, radical ordinaries that remain unarticulated, whose speaking is unheard, and whose talk of liberty, longings, and democratic hopes remain unfulfilled. We do not tell the story of the unarticulated ones and their freedom struggles for antiquarian interests. African American public theology involves telling the stories of not only our freedom movements, but also embracing freedom movements around global locals. Coles’s radical ordinaries go beyond our merely local or national interests and telling their stories goes beyond our sense of racial and national pride among youth and college students in this present generation. Harding’s urging on African American public theology requires our continuous telling of the story of radical ordinaries in order to inspire action and participation, to form new possibilities for a public theology in our postmodern moment in the absence of prior theological conceptual giants. Harding has been for many of my generation the teacher of history and activism. And for him, these ideas are co-joined. As he struggles with the enduring question, “Is America Possible: The Land That Never Has Been Yet?” he says: Everywhere that I have paused to reflect on the powerful, flooding movement of the Black struggle for freedom in America, I have been called back to that title, to its query and challenge. For it is a question that has always been at the heart of the Afro-American quest for democracy in this land. And wherever we have seen there freedom seekers, community organizers, artisans of democracy, standing their ground, calling others to the struggles, advancing into danger, creating new realities, it is clear that they are taking the question seriously, shaping their own answers, testing the possibilities of their dreams.29

In this chapter, my interest in turning to the province of the unarticulated listeners and teachers of a receptive generous pluralism such as Ella Baker or Vincent Harding has not been in order to negate the power of speech and voice. In the back and forth of speech among the underarticulated dreams of ordinaries co-joined with the improvisational, expressive textures of voice in Langston Hughes’s poems, Dreams and Let America Be America Again, which run throughout Harding’s essay in split verse and framed as call and response,30 Harding tracks the longings and dreams of radical ordinaries in the creative exchange of speakers and listeners between aurality and orality. No reader of Harding’s Hope and History escapes the wide range of speech, voices, and action that he elicits from Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, the Mississippi Summer and the Rise of the Mississippi Democratic Party, the Poor

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People’s Campaign, the struggle for black studies and black education, the Black Panther and Community Control, Attica, and the Gary Convention. Each movement, by the increase of speech, voice, and action, also increased our democratic hopes. From the struggle of civil rights fighters of the 1950s and 1960s, Harding tracks the dreams of radical ordinaries through songs that inspired their spirits, and sermons and public speeches that articulated their enduring beliefs in the democratic possibilities of America. He tracks the imprint of their dreams onto the global world of civic strife in South Africa, Tiananmen Square, Leipzig, and Prague. As we construe African American public theology as a global exchange, today, we can do no less than he. Our democratic hopes are global and are not just about our peculiar North American history of African American people; our hopes of radical democracy entail world lessons, both evil and good, and dreams, those deferred and actualized. Moreover, Harding’s Hope and History shows an entirely new generation of youth and college students how their world of digital technology, virtual reality, and film hold power to cut off their own democratic dreams by foregrounding nihilistic tendencies within their own cultural spaces. However, he also highlights how their media also hold power to create new insurgencies of freedom dreaming and democratic hope, new possibilities of creative exchange. Harding’s America, “The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” is still becoming with possibilities of creative exchange, with fertile ground for new dream makers and dream trackers, with local story tellers within new communities of radical ordinaries giving voice to and articulating the democratic hopes of unheard citizens in ordinary places embodying in their actions an American public theology—an embodied ecclesia. In our postmodern moment, Harding challenges this present generation to envision radical forms of democracy that give and restore voice to mothers and fathers who envision more education not less for their undereducated, underemployed, and overincarcerated children. Is an America possible where citizens can be empowered to participate in the political process without fearing that their votes will not be counted and their youthful incarcerations will not negate for the rest of their lives the right to vote and participate directly in the political process? Is an America possible where gays and lesbians can flourish as any other citizen by enjoying freedoms of expression (hugging, kissing, making love, and laughing while holding hands down the street) without fear of harassment, bashing, or becoming socially ostracized, the privacy of their homes and families are guaranteed safe places, and their loves are recognized and celebrated by the common good of marriage? Is an America possible where radically ordinary citizens, engaged in creative conflicts, can muster enough generosity for a generous pluralism and forms of creative exchange that makes possible our common democratic



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hopes and longings in our postmodern moment now absent of the great conceptual giants of a prior American public theology? Harding says: Somehow, in a time like our own, when the capacity for imagining appears to be endangered, both by the technology of television and by the poverty of public dreams, it seems especially crucial to introduce our students to the meaning of such a question as “Is America possible?” And it is absolutely necessary that they discover the significance of the biblical text: “Where there is no vision the people perish.”31

I write this short chapter in the hope that the voices of the academic public intellectuals and public theologians will not overarticulate the speech, voice, and actions of radical ordinary citizens and the goods and ends that they envision for their local publics—less their local demands become universal, and their particular political involvements muted. I also write this chapter in the hope that our local publics will not be so myopic as to overdetermine The Public by local needs and ends only. The clue to radicalizing democratic longings and hopes depends on this precarious balancing act, not only for our present moment but for future generations. Cornel West’s imperative that we listen, listen, and listen again to America’s youth culture in its manifold expressions as well as to cultural artisans throughout African American expressive culture is not only for the sake of the ongoing public relevance of African American public theologians and intellectuals. Rather, as Coles remains us, receptive listening is for the sake of radical democracy itself. Failure to do so will surely cut off the speech, voice, and participatory practices of local publics so essential for a vital American public theology for generations to come.

Response to Victor Anderson David Sánchez

In “Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been: Democratic Hope and Creative Exchange,”1—a play on African American religious history scholar Vincent Harding’s “Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been Yet,”2 Victor Anderson posits the possibility of (re)creating a public theology via the employment of a “public anthropology” to witness and assess the “centrality of the local.” Here the “local” is best understood as “discrete communities of participants” whose practices demonstrate the “intersections of faith and public life, intersections operating through ordinary modes of activism and care of local citizens whose actions and practices constitute a province of public theology.”3 Anderson argues that the goal of this shift to the “unarticulated local practices” is to find, “resources for bridging our (i.e., public and academic theologians) work with those unarticulated ones whose everyday practices may yield glimpses of actuality to some of our conceptual giants (e.g., Dewey, Ritschl and Rauschenbush, Reinhold and H. Richard Nieburh, Tillich, and Martin Luther King Jr.) of prior twentieth-century American public theology.”4 In brief, Anderson is attempting to construct a dialectic “bridge” between the overarticulated general and underarticulated local. As a result, postmodernity is construed as both the problem, in its participation of the defamation of twentieth-century conceptual giants, and the theoretical solution, in its shift to the centrality of local practices and practitioners. For it is in the local, according to Anderson, “that we are able to grasp a profound relation between public theology and democratic practices”5 thereby giving critical voice to both unarticulated practices and their practitioners. 194



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Where I would like to enter into deeper critical conversation with Anderson is in his methodological approach to excavating the unarticulated and underarticulated voices of the local in this study. Here he relies on the work of public anthropologist, Marla Fredericks, citing that public anthropology . . . make[s] important contributions to the yet undertheorized and under-articulated ways that theological, moral, and political interpretations of African American public theology can be translated for social change among both the local and world’s poor.6

It is a profound methodological shift on the part of Anderson to suggest, as he has a certain “ironic move” and emphasis from speech and voice toward practices to privileging practices back to speech and voice (here emphasizing that public theology is the province of practices). If I read Anderson correctly, the backgrounding of speech and voice is the result of his critical assessment that speech and voice have been employed by academic theologians and intellectuals to “overarticulat[e] the unheard and never return to the sites of their lived realities of sufferings, struggle, interminable conflicts.”7 Therefore, what remain underarticulated are the daily practices of the locals where glimpses of actuality and radical democracy reside. What Anderson has accomplished in his “ironic move” is to suggest an alternative starting point for theoretical constructions of new public theologies. I am struck by this proposition because as a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary, Professor Vincent Wimbush introduced an analogous methodological shift that has left a perduring impression on my scholarship. At Union I was challenged to shift my focus from texts (i.e., Bible) to textual interpretations; from so-called objective forays into scripture to the analyses of overtly subjective cultural appropriations of scripture or scriptural performances or enactments. This new orientation and starting point all the while probed how putting African Americans at the center of the study of Bible affect[s] the study of Bible? . . . What might be the implications and ramifications of construing the study of Bible—its impetus, methods, orientations, approaches, politics, goals, communications, and so forth—on bases other than European presumptions and power, interests, and templates?8

Even more striking was Wimbush’s invitation to shift away from this class-specific “fetishization” of overarticulated exegetical traditions (voice, speech, and writing?)—“that in turn reflects a fetishization of the dominating world that the text helped create”9—toward cultural practices and embodiments of textual interpretations and testimonies as employed by the subjective local. So, just as Anderson has suggested, Wimbush too argues

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for a new starting point in our construal and analyses of religious practices and public theologies. I do wonder, however, how a group can be simultaneously under- and overarticulated? My intuition tells me that what Anderson here refers to is that the “voice and speech” of the local have been overarticulated by the nonembedded, dominant ethnographer while the practices of the local (the storehouse of radical democracy) remain acutely underarticulated by both the local public theologian and dominant observer (i.e., ethnographer). Therefore, Anderson suggests a new origin for deeper reflection on the (re) creation of a new public theology: the practices of the local. In conclusion, I would like to reflect on who is (best) qualified to articulate the practices of the local. I ask this question because as a participant in the African American and the Bible Project at Union, I continually felt the constraints of being limited by my inability to parse the unspoken cultural cues of African American society as a Chicano. As a result, I experienced the colonial phenomena of interpreting another culture’s practices through my own non–African American lens(es). The work of Edward Said—especially his work on the European construction of the Orient10—echoed profoundly in my ethnographic mind as I collected data in Harlem. I also often pondered the question Gayatri Spivak so eloquently asked in her seminal essay: “Can the Subaltern Speak?”11 Can the subaltern (i.e., local) speak? And if they are able, why do I need to speak for them? Or am I them (at least from my Chicano cultural perspective)? And do they want to speak to me/us? I was also challenged by the work of political scientist, James Scott, who argued in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts12 that marginal peoples misrepresent themselves as a weapon of the weak13 in the presence of the dominant (am I an academic dominant in relation to the local?). How do I then access and assess the “true” off-stage performances of the local? How do I/we participate in articulating the local and give “critical voice” to our/their practices without becoming external, over-educated, and colonizing observer(s)? In my estimation, Anderson has responded to some of my concerns by his privileging of the work of public anthropologist, Marla Fredericks.14 For Anderson, and similar thinkers: Public anthropology engages issues and audiences beyond today’s self-imposed disciplinary boundaries. The focus is on broad conversations with broad boundaries . . . Public anthropology seeks to address broad critical concerns in ways that others beyond the discipline are able to understand what anthropologists can offer to the reframing and easing—if not necessarily always resolving—of present day dilemmas.15

I greet this observation with much enthusiasm because I agree with the assessment that we must reframe and expand the conversation beyond



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traditional disciplinary boundaries because traditional disciplinary boundaries are inherently colonial and conservative; and the colonial disciplinary paradigm is a hindrance to critical, invigorating, and emancipatory discourses in a postcolonial world(view) seeking to embrace radical and participatory democracy. I remain incredulous, however, as to whether an academic theologian is the optimal voice for such articulations in the construction of the unarticulated local. Nevertheless, the work of Anderson and like-minded scholars offers a solid foundation and point of departure for engaging such critical inquiries and investigations.

10 Foregrounding Our Apocalyptic Heritage in Hopes of Domesticating It: Creating a Postapocalyptic Society in a Plural World David Sánchez

Scene 1 Act 1: The Problem Situated in the depths of George Orwell’s Animal Farm stands the enigmatic and utopian hymn “Beasts of England.”1 Oft going unnoticed in the allegoric fable that Orwell so masterfully spun, it is—in my estimation— worthy of more focused attention and critical parsing. In this decisive and climactic part of the narrative the stately and elderly boar—Old Major— orientates the other animals living on Mr. Jones’s farm as to a future “apocalyptic” moment when animals will be liberated from the harsh rule of “Man” culminated by “Man’s” ultimate expulsion from England altogether. It is utopian in the sense that it delineates a paradox, a moment in history when animals will rule the land, and a moment that will reflect a complete change in social hierarchies that the world has never known before. It is apocalyptic in that is a visionary description of what will soon take place and is not presented as some futuristic “pie-in-the-sky” fantasy, but rather as a future historical moment yet to be realized. It will certainly take place for those loyalists who persevere. Unfortunately, Old Major dies before his prophecy is fulfilled. Nevertheless, his vision is initiated when the animals overthrow and expel Mr. Jones from his farm one fateful evening in Jones’ drunken stupor. However, a close reading of Animal Farm requires the reader to question if indeed the animals’ collective utopia has been realized (since the fruitful fields of England are still inhabited with “Man” albeit away from Jones’s farm). In addition, from the onset of the new world order, divisions and hostilities 199

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amongst the animals are readily discernable. Utopia envisioned is not the utopia manifested. The hymn of liberation and autonomy is misappropriated rather into a more oppressive reality for the newly “liberated” beasts. Fantasy and reality never square in a world where humans still exist and pigs now rule (some animals are “more equal than others”) and walk on their hindquarters (like “Man”). It may be overly simplistic to singularly indict the unscrupulous intentions of the pigs and their cronies for the new harsh reality on Jones’s farm. I would instead like to redirect some of the culpability onto the initial utopian hymn taught by Old Major, “Beasts of England.” Accordingly, the questions that immediately come to my mind are: Is this original hymn still applicable in a world where animals now rule? And, under these new conditions does the hymn itself lend ideological fodder for the oppressive posture and enacted violence against “Man” and the other animals taken by the pigs? It may strike the reader curious that I would begin my musings on the development of a “theology of public conversation” with Orwell’s satirical condemnation of Stalin’s totalitarian Soviet state, Animal Farm, but it is no coincidence that I begin here. I have long noted the striking similarities between groups that perceive themselves as marginal, dominated, and persecuted employing apocalyptic rhetoric to establish a foundation of futuristic hope that life will indeed be better for them, if only that they are more faithful, more loyal, more righteous, and persevere in the midst of current hardships. This worldview is embedded in places within the Christian canon we call the New Testament. One need look no further than texts such as 1 Thessalonians, the Gospel of Mark, or the Book of Revelation to see our apocalyptic heritage in full bloom: apocalyptic moments captured in scripture that must be continually negotiated in the twenty-first century. What is problematic—from my perspective—is that these apocalyptic texts were written from a time in Christian history where Christian marginalization, at least from the perspective of access to Roman imperial power, was indeed a reality. The resultant literary productions were predictably passive-aggressive and countercultural texts visualizing a complete shift in worldly hierarchies written from a hostile and sectarian Christian perspective. What then is the value and necessity of these canonical apocalypses when certain trajectories of Christianity were no longer marginal and later merged with Roman imperial power in the fourth-century church? How then does the modern church—in particular the First World Church— internalize, domesticate, and accommodate texts that were visualized in a completely different world order? And in due course, is it possible to attend to the question the chapters in this book seek to address: namely, how do we “produce a shared public theology that centers attention on how to live together in world of difference,” without attending to our shared Biblical



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apocalyptic heritage, which at different historical moments has manifested itself as overtly sectarian, active-aggressive, and violent? In my estimation, as a scholar of the New Testament and a citizen of the (neocolonial) First World, it is our collective obligation to identify, disarm, and domesticate these volatile texts lest they be continuously and continually misappropriated. It is my contention, as part of the process of domesticating these texts, that we excavate and foreground our apocalyptic heritage (in the Freudian psychoanalytic sense) so that we can take a serious look at it, contextualize it, discourse about it, and domesticate it so we may thereby make it practical and palatable for believers today. If not, we risk the continued stereotyping and demonization of historical actors and nations of people and fantasize about their ultimate destruction while simultaneously contrasting them to our “supposed” inherent righteousness and perceived innocence. Not only do we imply that we as the so-called righteous know the mind and will of G-d,2 but we are also inclined on occasion to initiate G-d’s violent apocalyptic drama as prophesied in some New Testament texts. This, no doubt, has led to multiple manifestations of religiously sanctioned violence over the centuries. We need look no further then the apocalyptically motivated colonization of the Americas by Catholic Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries C.E. or the messianic New World Order of the Bush II era that conceived an “axis of evil” and thereby assumed an “axis of righteousness.” No world encompassing theology of public conversation can emerge under these violent and sectarian potentialities. We must first come to terms with our apocalyptic heritage if we are to create the “building blocks for responsible Christian citizenship.”

Scene 1 Act 2: Early Christian Apocalyptic The ancient Greek word “apokalysis” in both its classical and koine form is best defined as: to unveil, reveal, disclose, or uncover.3 It is the term Paul the apostle used in Galatians 1 to describe his vision of the resurrected Jesus. The term has also come to be related to, in a more technical sense, end-time or millennial worldviews. Hamerton-Kelly, in his introduction to Politics and Apocalyptic, offers a series of definitions for “apocalypse” that recognize these end-time or millennial potentialities. Two definitions that resonate closest to how I employ the term in this chapter are as follows: an apocalypse is: “A worldview that sees into the future and prophesies the glorious vindication of the in-group and the cruel punishment of those outside [the in-group]”; and, it represents a group that is “fixated on the final solution of the problems of the [in-] group, and the final solution must be war and extermination.”4

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In 1979, John Collins proposed the following seminal definition for those writings he categorized as “apocalypses”: A genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spiritual insofar as it involves another supernatural world.5

To this definition, David Hellholm offered the very insightful addendum, “intended for a group in crisis with the purpose of exhortation and/ or consolation by means of divine authority.”6 A tentative agreement is reached when Collins concedes, “This assumption [that all apocalypses are produced from a crisis situation] is defensible if we grant that alienation and crises may be of many kinds. . . . It is not the kind of problem addressed but the manner in which it is addressed.”7 These definitions and addendum are important in that they give us some indication as to the perceived social location and general intentions of the authors of apocalyptic literature. They also offer some evidence as to how newly “empowered” groups understand and portray themselves so that they might continue to seamlessly appropriate apocalyptic prophecies. This will allow us to draw clear parallels to the enduring (albeit misinformed) utility of the hymn, “Beasts of England,” for the animals on Jones’s farm even after Jones’s expulsion. It will also give us some indication as to why imperial forms of Christianity continue to appropriate apocalyptic literature when they are no longer marginal. What must occur in both the Christian and animal worldviews, is that the group(s) with new-found power continue to portray themselves as innocent, marginal, and persecuted even in the new world order. Another assumption that must be made is that anything or anyone external to the group is “other,” hostile, and expendable. This is how the foundational myth has the capacity to become extremely volatile and serve as a formidable obstacle as to the construction of a public theology. According to biblical scholar Burton Mack: “It is the combination of innocence and power that is dangerous,” because: On the boundaries where encounters take place, the Christian [apocalyptic] lens is the forfeiture of the capacity to engage the other in [their] difference as a remarkable human being. Those on the other side have always been ranked as inferior and in need of changing, or prior and in need of development. Difference is deviance from the high standard set by the Christian ideal of the kingdom.8

In this chapter I expand upon the categorical term “apocalyptic” to include texts beyond those cataloged as “apocalypses” by Collins and Hellholm to



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include texts that promote worldviews as categorized by Hammerton-Kelly. Accordingly, my concern is not exclusively centered on the characteristics that make up the genre “apocalypse” but rather I expand my definition to include all early Christian writings that facilitated the acute rise of imminent apocalyptic expectations amongst their adherents. In the New Testament itself, there are at least three different types of eschatologies present that coexist and compete for our interpretive attention. The first, and most important for this chapter, is “apocalyptic eschatology.” Apocalyptic eschatology is best defined as that Christian eschatology that presupposes the imminent return (parousia) of Christ. Text such as 1 Thessalonians, the Gospel of Mark, and the Book of Revelation all indicate a period in earliest Christian history where adherents to these distinct movements believed that Jesus Christ would expeditiously return from the heavens to judge the living and the dead and interrupt or end world history as we know it. Adherents to the eschatological worldview of these texts maintained, very simply stated, an acute expectation of the end of the world. The apostle Paul, in his letter to the church in Thessaloniki proclaims, “we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air[!]” (1 Thes. 4:17). Here, Paul was responding to a question from Christians in Thessaloniki concerning the deaths of fellow Christians who were anticipating the imminent parousia of Jesus but never lived to see it. In Mark 13 we are informed as to the coming of the apocalyptic “Son of Man” and are instructed: “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all of these things take place” (Mark 13:30). In the Christian apocalyptic locus classicus, the Book of Revelation, Jesus himself instructs John the Seer that he will receive a vision of “what must soon take place” (Rev. 1:1). The reader (or hearer) is then presented with a twenty-two-chapter description of the “end of days” where the world is completely destroyed not once but twice in graphic detail. The Book of Revelation concludes with the following admonition of Jesus, “Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense, to repay every one for what he has done,” (Rev. 22:12). It is clear from these three examples, that there was indeed a strain of earliest Christianity that fully expected to be present at Christ’s imminent return. So why is this apocalyptic “layer” embedded in our Christian canon if their prophecies of the imminent return of Christ never materialized? How did these texts that accentuate an apocalyptically charged worldview achieve the status of canon several centuries later? Surely the Early Church Fathers were well aware that these texts harbored unrealized predictions of the imminent final days (including Athanasius in 367 C.E.). My immediate response to these questions is that Christians and Christianity simply shifted away from their earliest apocalyptic moorings by developing different theological emphases and a modified apocalyptic timeline.

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End-time or millennial movements, both in antiquity or modernity, have very short shelf lives, especially in the wake of an unrealized prophecy that predicts the end of the world and a reordering of social hierarchies in your group’s favor. The modifications to early Christian apocalyptic sensibilities included the following potential scenarios: (1) Some Christians quit the movement as a failed because of the unrealized prophecy or because of external pressures placed on the group because of their prophetic commitments and counter-cultural behavior; (2a) Some Christians domesticated their expectations by shifting the emphasis on the return of Christ to an undefined moment in the future, or (2b) Some Christians dismissed or allegorized the prophecy of the parousia altogether (both scenarios of point 2 require the suppression of initial apocalyptic tendencies); and (3) Some Christians initiated their own cultic or personal apocalypse via individual or group martyrdoms (e.g., the Donatists of Northern Africa, especially the fourth through seventh centuries C.E.). Of the three options above, the one most effective for dealing with the acute apocalyptic yearnings of the earliest Christians was option 2a: domesticating apocalyptic expectations and literary productions by collectively shifting eschatological timelines and producing a more rational and domesticated Christianity. It is the only option that allows for an emerging “orthodox” church (2b is also an ecclesial alternative but was ultimately rejected because of its “Gnosticizing” tendencies). This eschatology—sometimes referred to as eschatological reservation—results from the experience of the delay of the return of Jesus (delay of the parousia) and moves the eschaton into an undefined moment in the future. Christians still maintained a belief in the “second coming.” However, that second coming was no longer imminent. Examples of this eschatology are visible in the Synoptic traditions of Matthew and Luke. It is interesting to note that both of these gospels knew Mark’s apocalyptic gospel and even used Mark as a source, but both independently decided to modify Mark’s eschatology. In Matthew this is accomplished in part by shifting christological emphases from Mark’s apocalyptic “Son of man,” to a more rational, rabbinic Jesus who amongst other things, teaches the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew also alters Mark’s urgent tone by foregrounding Matthean ecclesial concerns. Thus, Peter becomes the “rock” upon which Jesus will build his church, a telling sign that Christianity is shifting away from its sectarian and charismatic beginnings to a more established custodial movement. In the Gospel of Luke, the author emphasizes an interim “age of the Spirit” which is also the modus operandi in the other Lukan production, the Acts of the Apostles. Here, after the Pentecost event, evangelization proceeds in a growing, “mission-izing” movement of the Spirit. In both Matthew and Luke, Mark’s apocalyptic concerns are subsumed into the rhetoric of an emerging Church that believes it is going to be around for some time. In other canonical texts such as the



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Epistles of James and 2 Peter we see this continuing domestication of earliest Christian apocalyptic: “Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord” (James 5:7), and: First of all you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming?” . . . But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness. (2 Peter 3:3–4, 8–9)

Even Paul seems to deemphasize his earliest apocalyptic predictions found in 1 Thessalonians. Arguably, the latest letters of Paul have relegated apocalyptic hope to the background while now emphasizing the theological impulses of salvation via “justification by faith” (see especially Galatians and Romans). Paul’s followers also continued this shift away from apocalyptic as demonstrated in 2 Thessalonians, which introduces the character the “man of lawlessness” as a precursor to the end that has yet to be revealed: “Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thes. 2:3).9 What we are able to glean from these two trajectories is that in both the Synoptic and Pauline traditions, apocalyptic expectations outlived their usefulness in the now emerging church and were domesticated by subsequent writers (or in Paul’s case, by Paul himself) in their respective traditions. This tendency is also apparent in the letters of James and 2 Peter. A third eschatology that must be attended to in this chapter is that of realized eschatology. In brief, realized eschatology argues that the benefits of the parousia (affirmation of the righteous who now have access to a higher order of spirituality or gnosis) are already available in the present. It is best characterized as a kind of “enlightenment” Christianity that deemphasizes end-time scenarios. This eschatology was very prominent in Gnostic Christian circles in the first several centuries of Christian history and is also palpable in the entirety of the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Luke (see especially 17:20–21), and a component of a group in competition with Paul in the city of Corinth (see 1 Cor. 4:8, and 8:1–2). Like reserved eschatology, realized eschatology shifted Christian emphases on imminent end-time scenarios to a more rational worldview that allowed emerging Christianities to begin initial steps of reintegrating themselves into the greater GrecoRoman world in which they existed. If we were to plot the trajectories of early Christian eschatologies in both the Gospel and Pauline traditions, it is fair to say that we could trace a tendency of the lowering of apocalyptic expectations in both.10 The later texts in these traditions can be viewed as correctives for the initial apocalyptic fervor that characterized both movements at their genesis. In the gospel

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tradition, Matthew’s ecclesiology, Luke’s pneumatology, and John’s Christology serve as effective counterbalances to the acutely apocalyptic tones of Mark. The same can be said of the Pauline trajectory with Paul’s development of the sophisticated soteriological emphasis on “justification.” Both traditions contain built-in apocalyptic correctives that allow the faithful to divert their attention(s) to “long-range” ecclesial and soteriological aspirations rather than concentrating on unrealized apocalyptic expectations. We moderns too—for the most part—have reserved our eschatologies or practice enlightened forms of Christianity in “mainline” traditions. But the residuals of our apocalyptic heritage are embedded in both the Gospel and Pauline traditions and lurk behind the theological scenes like hidden childhood memories too painful to foreground on a daily basis. Access to them is only gained (especially in First World Christian denominations) when critical world events manifest themselves, thus rendering us once again excavators of our former apocalyptic selves seeking psychological stability in the midst of such crises. So how does the Book of Revelation, the only canonical Christian apocalypse proper, fit into this conversation? Like the Gospel of Mark and 1 Thessalonians, an author who expected the imminent return of Jesus and the reordering of social and political hierarchies also wrote the Book of Revelation. However, unlike its canonical cousins, the Book of Revelation sits at the end of the canon with no built-in biblical corrective coming after it to domesticate its violent fantasy of the end-times. For some interpreters, this privileged position has indicated that the Book of Revelation is the interpretive key by which all that precedes it must be assessed. This was especially true for Tertullian and other pro-Montanist authors (third century C.E.).11 Some two centuries earlier, Papias—as reconstructed through the writings of Eusebius, Iranaeus, and Jerome—summarizes, “not more than a generation after its composition, Revelation, was being taken seriously in some quarters of Asia Minor.”12 This literalist interpretive key is insightful, especially when taken in conjunction with the oft quoted threat directed at less literal approaches to Revelation itself: I warn everyone who hears the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, G-d will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, G-d will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. (Rev. 22:18–19)

If the warning is not enough to convince you to mind your interpretive manners, the reader/hearer is informed: “The one [i.e., Jesus] who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon’” (Rev. 22:20). Let the nonliteral interpreter beware!



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Even under this canonical threat to alternative interpretive modalities, a more rational and less-literal hermeneutic school of thought emerged in attempt to come to terms with this volatile text. In contrast to the proMontanist position, anti-Montanist authors fought vigorously against its inclusion into the canon and “subjected Revelation to in-depth scrutiny and found that it was illogical and not an apostolic writing, but rather the product of a heretic.”13 We learn from Eusebius (ca. 263–339 C.E.) that the Book of Revelation was widely disputed in some Christian circles: Some before us have set aside and rejected the book altogether, criticizing it chapter by chapter, and pronouncing it without sense or argument, and maintaining that the title is fraudulent. For they say that it is not the work of John, because it is covered thickly and densely by a veil of obscurity.14

The majority of Eastern Church leaders (post-third century C.E.) omitted it altogether from their canon. Dimitris Kyrtatas observes, “in many corners of the East they continued to reproduce a canon exclusive of Revelation even into the tenth century.”15 In the early Western church the Book of Revelation enjoyed greater circulation as a result of an allegorical, nonliteral (i.e., domesticated) approach. Centuries later, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther condemned Revelation for being antithetical to the presentation of Jesus found in the Gospels. The modern Catholic Church selectively and cautiously employs it in its liturgy. However, even with these efforts to creatively engage (or not engage) in nonliteralist approaches to the Book of Revelation, it continues to captivate the imagination of would-be appropriators as it did in some corners of earliest Christendom. Apocalyptic literature in general, and the Book of Revelation in particular, maintain a loyal readership in part due to their appeal during critical moments in history. It is, at its very core, crisis literature and crises occur in many forms for both the “centered” and “marginal.” According to David Bromley: Apocalypticism creates structural liminality. Apocalyptic groups unequivocally reject the social order in which they reside and invest their loyalty and identity in a new order whose arrival they view as imminent and inevitable. The result is a collective existence located between the old order, whose demise is presumed imminent, and the new order, which has yet to be born.16

It is therefore apparent that our apocalyptic heritage, even with attempts to background it, lives on today as it did in earliest Christianity even with our best efforts to restrain it. Like any neurosis or psychosis, simply ignoring it or wishing it away is not enough. Therefore, the moment has arrived for us to come to terms with our heritage and admit that the imminent apocalyptic prophecies and yearnings of our earliest Christian brothers and sisters were misinformed. From a confessional perspective this is indeed a

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difficult admission. But from a sociopsychological perspective it allows for our traditions and their adherents to become cognitively whole again. To admit that under dire circumstances they/we hope(d) for validation and vindication is to become human again. If we fail to make this admission we risk, like the animals on Jones’s farm, the perpetuation of a myth that can only destroy us. A myth that, in our new-found power, “others” those on the outside with a different theological commitment and expels those from within who fail to demonstrate the proper allegiance to that very myth. We cannot continue along this path if we are going to (re-)create a world where all of G-d’s people can flourish, let alone create a humane public theology and a model for responsible Christian citizenship.

Scene 2 Act 1: Constantine, Empire, Power, and the Capacity to Initiate (an) Apocalypse Then I heard a loud voice from the temple telling the seven angels, “Go and pour out on the earth the seven bowls of the wrath of G-d.” So the first angel went and poured his bowl on the earth, and a foul and painful sore came on those who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped its image. The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in the sea died. The third angel poured his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, “You are just, O Holy One, who are and were, for you have judged these things; because they shed the blood of saints and prophets, you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!” (Rev. 16:1–6)

After the expulsion of Mr. Jones the animals find themselves in the interesting position of being the proprietors of the farm. This should have been, according to their estimations, the golden age of animalism. However, a harsh reality quickly sets in as the animals begin to divide into hierarchies and various factions. The main rivalry occurs between two pigs (who are the top of the animal hierarchy), Snowball and Napoleon, and their alternative visions for the “new creation” now called: Animal Farm. The rivalry is resolved when the articulate and visionary Snowball is exiled by the thuggish Napoleon who is aided by Squealer, another pig and anti-Snowball propagandist, with the aid of the intimidating presence of the dogs (who were removed from their mothers at an early age to be groomed as the arch defenders of Napoleon). At this critical moment in the history of the farm the phenomenon of cultural “ambivalence” manifest itself. The animals, which initially were repulsed by humans, begin to take on the characteristics of humanity (especially the pigs). For example, they begin to read and write. They move into Jones’s estate and consume alcohol, are cruel toward other animals, and ultimately



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begin to walk on two legs (direct violations of the seven initial animal commandments). Essentially, they have become what they initially despised now that they are on a completely different side of the power equation. And most importantly, they maintain their allegiance to the initial violent hymn, The Beast of England, which led to the initial rebellion. The history of early Christianity cannot be reduced to a climactic event where Christians went from marginal to centered in relation to Roman imperial power. How then do we account for the rise of Christianity from a “back-water” Galilean sect to the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century C.E., especially after the intense persecution of Christians by Rome in the third century? Although the reconstruction of this history remains contested, we can say with some confidence that Christianity’s relationship to Rome and Roman political and military power took a decided shift in Christianity’s favor in the fourth century of the Common Era. It is in this transformative century that Christian apocalyptic is first wedded with political and military might, producing a volatile mixture of myth and power for centuries to come. A brief historical sketch of the fourth century demonstrates this transition. In the early fourth century, the Roman Empire was divided into East and West.17 The western realm of the empire was ruled by the duel Augusti, Constantine and Maxentius; Licinius and Maximus ruled the east. Christian imagination has long viewed the critical moment in Christianity’s political upsurge to be the climactic battle between Constantine and Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312 C.E. and the signing of the Edict of Toleration at Milan between Constantine and Licinius in 313 C.E. (Licinius had earlier that year defeated Maximus, thus consolidating his power in the east). The Edict of Toleration is credited for giving Christians, “the freedom to worship and the right to have their property returned [that was confiscated during the age of persecution].”18 This is truly an unprecedented turning point in the relationship between Christians and Rome. What the edict did not do, however, was outlaw other forms and practices of pagan religion. What it did do was to legitimate the free worship of the Christian G-d by its adherents. There is no evidence that Constantine (or Licinius) became monotheistic after the edict. There is evidence to the fact that Constantine was not baptized a Christian until the months before the end of his life in 337 C.E. and he may have indeed continued to worship pagan gods prior to his official conversion.19 Nevertheless, what the Edict of Toleration accomplished, from an imperial perspective, was the legitimization of Christianity as a state religion and offered to “a persecuted minority full membership of Roman society,”20 especially a minority that would be completely indebted to Constantine in the future. A second critical issue that pertains to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was Constantine’s later assertion that during the battle with Maxentius he

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saw a cross in the night sky and understood it as a sign of “the support of the Christian G[-]d for his [military] success.”21 What is most troublesome from this chapter’s perspective is that Constantine’s conflation of vision and victory, “meant accepting that G[-]d willed the rise to power of the emperor by means of bloody warfare.”22 According to Freeman, “Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius of Caesaria, had no difficulty in finding relevant texts from the Old Testament to explain the victory.”23 The imagery of Exodus 15:4, which recounts the drowning of Pharoah’s armies in the Red Sea, was equated with the drowning Maxentius and his forces in the Tiber River at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Even more problematic is that, “the Hebrew scriptures, which had been adopted by Christians as foretelling the coming of Christ, were now used to foretell the victory of a Roman emperor over his adversaries.”24 And, after his victorious battle over Licinius near the city of Adrianople in 323 C.E., thereby consolidating the entire empire under Constantine, the conflation of myth and military victory was all the more heightened. As mentioned above, Constantine’s so-called conversion did little to interrupt the dutiful worship of the Roman gods in the empire. What it did initiate, however, was a period of Christian theological battles, beginning at the council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), over christological issues that would not be resolved until near the end of the fourth century. This inter-Christian schism (primarily argued between the rising “orthodox” and Arian factions) had negative ramifications for the empire in that consolidation of imperial power was hindered when a good part of the empire’s constituency was engaged in open hostilities, especially when the primary combatants were very powerful and influential Christian bishops. Quite curious, in contrast, was the fact that as Christians fought amongst themselves, Christian imperial attitudes toward pagan religions remained rather benign. For the most part, pagan religions were tolerated during this period and imperial laws reflected that position. In 381 C.E. the christological issue of Nicaea was settled, at least from a legal standpoint, when Emperor Theodosius—under the influence of the very powerful “orthodox” bishops, Ambrose of Milan and Athanasius of Alexandria—made the Creed of Nicaea and its high christology, the official christological position of the Roman Empire. As a result, all other forms of Christianity were suppressed under the new imperial edict and imperial power was consolidated under the Nicaean emperor and loyal bishops. Ten years later and again under the influence of Ambrose, Theodosius issues the, “first of a series of laws against paganism. This was a major change in his [and the empire’s] religious policy.”25 In the Christian ambivalent relationship with empire, the persecuted would now in some more fanatical sectors of Christianity become the persecutor. The balance of power had shifted in Christianity’s favor. Unfortunately, armed with a new capacity to suppress



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that which it deemed heretical, a rising orthodoxy became less tolerant to difference and more violent in silencing its competition. It is to these ongoing tendencies in Christian modernity that we now turn our attention.

Scene III Act 1: Our Apocalyptic Skeletons Manifest Themselves (Again) Paranoia is a powerful motivator. Sometimes it is justified, sometimes it is the result of an overactive imagination, and sometimes it is the result of fear or fear mongering. Whatever the impetus, our rationalizations of it and reactions to it can have dire consequences for the communities and world in which we (co)exist. In the post-Jones’s era on Animal Farm, Napoleon the pig instigated a state of paranoia to continue to motivate his “comrades” to work harder to maintain the farm in the most difficult of times (long winters, food shortages, harsh living conditions, and animal-on-animal violence). The state of paranoia also consolidated his power as leader of the animals (“Comrade Napoleon is always right!”) and fortified the sectarian mentality of the animals on the farm. The focus of Napoleon’s rhetoric was that the expelled pig Snowball was the cause of all of the ills on Animal Farm. The farm’s propagandist, Squealer, issued statements that indicted Snowball—who was said to return at night when the animals slept—of destroying the windmill, stealing food rations, and swaying the loyalties of a few traitors. The rhetoric was powerful in that it posited that all of the farm’s problems were the result of an external negative entity (with a few rogue animals within) while simultaneously exonerating Napoleon and his cronies of any wrongdoing. Even more seditious was the alteration of the farm’s historical record to validate the state of paranoia. The final result of this negative mindset was predictably violent. Napoleon, aided by the fanatical dogs, plots to assassinate Snowball. He also, one fateful afternoon, calls the animals into assemblage to interrogate several “suspect” animals that he argues are in contact with Snowball. By the end of the assembly, four pigs(!), three hens, three sheep, and one goose are violently executed by the dogs by order of Napoleon, a direct violation of one of the original seven commandments of Animal Farm (Commandment 6: No animal shall kill any other animal). The animal bloodshed on that day was greater than any amount shed at any time under the tenure of Jones. That very afternoon, the ante for maintaining the farm’s “apocalyptic” vision increased exorbitantly. The history of apocalyptic inclinations in modern Christendom is long and complex. For the purposes of this chapter, a succinct review of its manifestation in the post–World War II era in the United States will demonstrate its continuing legacy in contemporary times. According to one assessment:

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Statistics on the extent of literalistic prophetic belief are notoriously imprecise but the ranks of believers clearly included many millions of Americans in the last half of the twentieth century. According to a 1983 Gallup Poll, 62 percent of Americans had “no doubt” that Jesus will come to earth again. A 1980 poll by the same organization revealed that 85 percent of Americans regarded the Bible as divinely inspired, with 40 percent holding the bible as inerrant and to be taken literally, word for word. Such beliefs in inerrancy, of course, encompass the apocalyptic texts along with the rest.26

In addition to these poll results, from 1970 to the present, “evangelical, fundamentalist, holiness, and Pentecostal churches, in which Bible-prophecy belief runs high, were the fastest growing sector of American religion.27 The fifteen-million-member Southern Baptist Convention is a forerunner in perpetuating pre-millennial apocalyptic beliefs amongst its loyal adherents. Other Christian groups, which preach a decidedly acute apocalyptic position, include the Seventh-Day Adventist and Jehovah’s Witness Churches. Fringe Christian groups continue to emerge with the same imminent apocalyptic expectations—some of which have come to very violent endings, including the People’s Temple (Jim Jones), Branch Davidians (David Koresh), and Heaven’s Gate (Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles). Preachers and televangelists who also espouse or espoused a particularly apocalyptic message include: Billy Graham, Rousas Rushdoony, George Ladd, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Jack Van Impe, Jerry Falwell, Benny Hinn, and Pat Robertson. This list of names by no means exhausts the extent of end-time preachers but gives you some indication as to the popularity and mass media exposure some of these preachers and their movements have enjoyed. Another marker of apocalyptic saturation in the post–World War II era in the United States and abroad is the popularity of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth (1970). In this work, “Lindsey offered the familiar sequence of end-time events: increasing evil and wickedness, the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Antichrist’s rise, the millennium, and the last judgment.”28 According to one estimate, by the mid-1990s, “total sales in successive [thirty-six!] editions and many translations stood in excess of twenty million copies.”29 The book also gave rise to a feature film and a succession of literary sequels. The influence of apocalyptic rhetoric is also apparent in contemporary U.S. politics. The explosion of two atomic weapons over Japan in 1945 gave rise to a post–World War II Cold War nuclear hysteria that remains palpable today. The potentiality of a nuclear North Korea or Iran reinvigorates American apocalyptic sensibilities and imaginings of end-time scenarios. Disease, natural disasters, drastic social changes, and genocide have all been viewed by the more apocalyptically inclined as signs of the end. Again, this type of worldview is not limited to the so-called religious fringes. For example, “the political mobilization of religious conservatives



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in the 1980s and 1990s focused attention on the so-called New Christian Right, including their apocalyptic beliefs.”30 In 1983, President Ronald Reagan, a long-time adherent to Biblical prophecy labeled the former Soviet Union the “evil empire” which was a “literal expression of a theological position embedded in his [apocalyptic and messianic] worldview.”31 On the eve of his declaration of the 1985 Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars Initiative) Reagan confidently declared: “My fellow Americans, tonight we are launching an effort which holds the purpose of changing the course of human history,”32 a statement recognized as being “laden with messianic intent” by Los Angeles Times opinion writer, Scott Johnson.33 Under the Bush I and II administrations: The invasion[s of Iraq] obviously also included the invasion of Babylon, situated 80 kilometers south of Baghdad. “Babylon” is a name full of negative connotations to Bible readers, since one of the central, negative characters in Revelation also carries this name.34

What these apocalyptic denominations, religionists, preachers, authors, politicians, and the untold millions who demonstrate allegiance to their messages share in common is a hermeneutical predisposition toward “matching current events—particularly events that were a source for public anxiety—with biblical passages that supposedly foretold them.”35 Even more problematic is their allegiance to and perpetuation of an apocalyptic worldview that no longer reflects the initial conditions or power distribution in which it was originally written. The empire has co-opted anti-imperial texts and read themselves into the script as the protagonists! Like the animals who continued to bellow “Beasts of England” in their new world order, so too many contemporary Christians continue to frame the world and its events along the black-and-white lines of first-century apocalyptic prophecy. Under these auspices, a significant portion of the world now stands condemned.

Epilogue: The Cost of Our (Ongoing) Apocalyptic Heritage The primary thesis of this chapter has been that apocalyptic myths have a time and a place. In the hands of those who are dominated with little or no access to the political privileges that power offers, the myths serve as a foundation of futuristic hope that life will indeed be better for them if they faithfully persevere their current hardships. Part of the mythic fantasy argues that those political entities that dominate them now will be chastised and/ or destroyed in the future by their protagonist deity (passive-aggression). However, in the hands of the (now) powerful, the myths serve as a man-

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date for domination and oppression of those within and without who are opposed to their theological agendas and worldviews. Sometimes this domination includes the employment of religiously sanctioned violence against their perceived antagonists (active aggression). This is certainly the case in the United States’ appropriation of the Christian apocalyptic myth in relation to external threats: It is the combination of innocence and power that is dangerous. The great man view of history, mythicised according to the gospel of redemption, results in the justification of violence if the power to smash the enemy is placed in the hands of the perfectly pure and righteous ruler.36

Also problematic is the capacity to crush perceived threats from within. This is especially true in times of acute national paranoia (e.g., post-9/11). National debate and reflection becomes overwhelmed by irrational accusations of internal conspiracy or waning patriotism (similar to Napoleon’s accusations of treason toward Snowball). Little, if any, national self-reflection occurs during these times; innocence is assumed on behalf of the “righteous” nation. Any hostilities directed toward the righteous nation are “due to evil conspirators. Someone must have betrayed the cause, thus thwarting the natural rhythm in which goodness brings victory and sin brings defeat.”37 Under these impulsive and acerbic circumstances, how do we proceed in creating a theology of public conversation, especially one that centers attention on how to live together in a world of difference? How do we collectively move forward when, “on the boundaries where encounters take place, the Christian [apocalyptic] lens is the forfeiture of the capacity to engage the other in [their] difference as a remarkable human being[?]”38 Perhaps the time has come to sit with these volatile myths, foreground them in the hopes of understanding the conditions under which they were originally written and intended; embrace them for being representative of an historical moment when our early Christian brothers and sisters had no long-term vision for moving forward with the movement under such dismal circumstances. These were their texts written for their situation. They were not written for the empire, especially our empire. It is time to give these apocalyptic texts back to them or domesticate this literature as Paul, Luke, Matthew, John, James, and Peter (or the authors who wrote under their names) did so many centuries ago. It is the only rational and humane thing to do. It is a significant first step—in my estimation—of sincerely attempting to create a faithful theology of public conversation and responsible Christian citizenship in the twenty-first century, lest we continuously and blindly plod on like the beasts of Animal Farm.39

Response to David Sánchez Victor Anderson

Professor David Sánchez’s critical chapter performs the work of social criticism by tracking, what I will refer to here as the rather curious career of Christian apocalypses. As with his book From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths (2008), Sánchez is interested in the power that these kinds of sacred narratives have to form curious kinds of publics throughout their equally curious appropriations in distinctly curious historical moments. As with the nature of the literature, to critique such appropriations requires attention to the multipositionality of listeners and readers, on the one hand, and seers and revelators, on the other. Within such multipositionalities, we are taken into what Alfred Shutz called finite provinces of conscious life, which are characterized by dream and fantasy worlds. This is not to trivialize the importance of dreaming and fantasizing in the formation of either personalities or communities. For my generation, no dream or fantasy was more determinate than that one articulated on the Washington Mall by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which as a child I rehearsed immediately afterward on the plateau of a cut-down tree in my parents’ backyard, preaching to any tree or insect and the multitudes of lawn blades that “I have a Dream.” So, dreams and fantasies of possible worlds are as much the mediums of creative exchange among people as they are the stuff that keep life not only livable but enjoyable. But as finite provinces of conscious life, they are limited, no—they are actually cut off in time by living necessities. We can’t daily live on and engage in actual life on them. Their importance is momentous. 215

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In the actually engaged conscious lives of believers, sometimes outsiders become insiders now positioned into power, with power to script others as enemies and themselves as innocent. Within their metanarratives of overcoming, they play into a continuous mythologized saga of cosmic culture wars. Sometimes these apocalyptic culture wars result in complete victories of the innocent over oppressors and enemies. At other times, their narratives of overcoming overturn the world order of cosmic violence for the instantiation of a new world order of peace. Minimally, however, such apocalyptic imaginings provide just enough relief (however temporary from cruel life conditions, whether of slave or a laboring proletariat) from social pictures that envision a future time of justice and recompense. In the indeterminate narratives of believers, such finite moments provide enough escape to bring relative emotional and moral satisfaction for survival within worldly regimes forged by radical evil. Such finite moves of apocalyptic imaginings circulate through hope and fear, power and glory, martyrs songs and sorrow songs, in flight from the panoptic ruse of imperial repetitions of coercion and wealth, sedimenting into huristic structures of “worlds without end,” into eternal culture wars. Sánchez frames this discourse by Orwell’s Animal Farm in which ownership, hegemonic control, intonations of not only the freedom songs of transatlantic slavocracy but of an industrial working class typified by Old Major’s great and glorious hymn that sinisterly creeps through the very cultural logic of empire and capitalism. This ubiquity of our apocalyptic heritage, which I take to be Sánchez’s metanarrative of descent and power in the political formations and circulations of power operating throughout the Western center and its corresponding peripheries or margins, determines what he sees recoiling in both “the center” and “the margins” of apocalyptic imaginaries. The problem that Sánchez’s chapter foregrounds is a certain paradox of turnings within these imaginaries. I mark this by the word “curious.” Here, I want to indicate a set of reversals that calls into question both the power and work that apocalyptic imaginaries perform not only on the social psychologies of those who live within the narratives. Curious also marks off the manner in which these metanarratives sediment into the justificatory schemes of the social life-worlds of their inherents. Their representational meanings are taken for granted and recede into forgetfulness until social conditions make them retrievable, taking on new significance within ever socially changing conditions for better or worse. Sánchez thinks for worse. He proposes that we would do well today to acknowledge the duplicitous character of our apocalyptic heritage and bid it farewell if we are to move on beyond such totalizing imaginaries. He encourages us to move toward better narratives with potentials for funding possibilities for what he calls “a postapocalyptic society in a plural world.” Sánchez’s proposal is very consistent with what I, along with Romand Coles, Jeffrey Stout, et al., call a “generous pluralism.”



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Sánchez frames his discussion on the paradoxical turning, in which the great animal revolt of Orwell’s Animal Farm, is celebrated as the fruition of a realized eschatology that anticipates the “complete change in social hierarchies that the world has never known before. . . . In a future historical moment yet to be realized.” It is not long, however, after power shifts that within the ranks of the margins hierarchy disseminates, recoiling and recreating the social conditions of power, oppression, prejudice, and terror that marked the former regime. Sánchez puts the issue this way: “I have long noted the striking similarities between groups that perceive themselves as marginal, dominated, and persecuted, employing apocalyptic prophesy to establish a foundation of futuristic hope that life will indeed be better for them, if only they are more faithful, more loyal, more righteous, and persevere in the midst of current hardships”: yes, only to reiterate the power of empire that occasioned their apocalyptic longings. Sánchez then tracks this imaginary throughout the Christian canon, showing how such apocalyptic fervor has been not only life-sustaining under dire moments of civic and national alienation for early Christians; he tracks the shifting of social standing from margin(s) to center(s) that produce hermeneutical culture wars among liberated people themselves. Within such narratives of innocence and power, each vie for control of the center, each articulating a divine narrative of “right” that is reinforced by a metanarrative of divine right. This dialectic of right (doubly meant by power and innocence) disseminates into the historical rupturing of the world of the Other, on the one hand, and into domesticated narratives that mute the ruptures, installing instead apocalyptic narratives of eschatological fulfillment, on the other. This is what turned puritan hope into a social experiment in democracy with its corresponding politics of the other. To conclude my remarks, I do not think that it would be wrong to see Sánchez’s chapter as a contemporary morality tale. I do think that it would be overly simplistic and reductionistic to leave it there. Sánchez’s position is significant for purposes of this collection of essays because of its genealogical import. As he puts it: The primary thesis of this chapter has been that apocalyptic myths have a time and a place. In the hands of those who are dominated with little or no access to the political privileges that power offers, the myths serve as a foundation of futuristic hope that life will indeed be better for them if they faithfully persevere [through] their current hardships. Part of the mythic fantasy argues that those political entities that dominate them now will be chastised and/or destroyed in the future by their protagonist deity (passive-aggression). However, in the hands of the (now) powerful the myths serve as a mandate for domination and oppression of those within and without who are opposed to their theological agendas and worldviews. Sometimes this domination includes the employment

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of religiously sanctioned violence against their perceived antagonists (active aggression). This is certainly the case in the United States’ appropriation of the Christian apocalyptic myth in relation to external threats.

These narrative returns, as Edward Said would have marked them, keep on returning in our contemporary social experience, and the social consequent remains, as Sánchez’s argues, the negation of innocence for the will to power. As I read Sánchez’s argument, foregrounding our apocalyptic heritages in hope of domesticating it issues an iconoclastic directive that pushes beyond monocentric constructions of the center and margins, the center and periphery, or the us and them. Perhaps, there are resources from our many religious traditions—whether Christian or not—that may better fund powerful social pictures to move us past the stalemate of our culture wars toward energetic formations of polycentric imaginations of a generous pluralism located in multiple centers of care, advocacy, hope, and action. However, such a move will mean a farewell to innocence itself as a trope of social and political identities. Here, Sánchez’s citation from Mack’s A Myth of Innocence is well worth reiterating: “It is the combination of innocence and power that is dangerous.” I agree. As I read Sánchez, we had better learn the lessons that this curious career of apocalyptic hope displays for the sake of the very possibility of “a theology of public conversation” and polycentric formations of a generous pluralism, less we who have been on the underside of power come of age like our predecessors, reiterate in our own public practices and conversations the eternal cosmic culture wars between the center and the margins, the empire and the barbarians, the civilized and the other, and the us and them.

11 “Isn’t Life More Than Food?” Migrant Farm Work as a Challenge to Latino/a Public Theology Nancy Bedford

Each springtime in the Midwest, the end of the semester at the seminary where I teach coincides with planting time in the community garden where my family and I tend a plot. As the students write and hand in their final papers and projects, I turn over the soil and peek to see what happened under the mulch during the cold months. As I try to find ways to evaluate the fruit of the students’ labors fairly, I am also tending vegetable seedlings, and hoping for a good growing season. By the time I have all the grades in and the paperwork for the semester finished, the vegetable garden is well on its way, and I can spend time pulling out weeds, watering, or simply savoring the textures and colors of the young plants. Gardening is a pleasure, a form of expressing embodiment, and a labor of hope, but I know that neither my family’s food supply nor its livelihood depend on my horticultural efforts. It was different for my grandparents and even for my parents when they were small, because they lived off the land, working fields they did not own, as sharecroppers and renters; from their stories I learned long ago not to romanticize rural work. I know that the produce I consume today is only available to me thanks to the heavy labor of migrant farm workers, and it is out of respect for them that I’d like to explore the challenges their work poses to my own: that of a theologian in migration pondering the role of a Latino/a public theology.1 Mexican and Central American migrants, both male and female, often find work in matters that put them in close contact with the soil: in lawn work in urban and suburban areas, where they are perhaps more visible, and most especially in fields in the countryside, where they are unseen by 219

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most city dwellers. Only about one in ten farm workers in the United States are U.S. citizens. Well over a third of undocumented workers in the United States toil in sectors related to the production of food: farming, fishing and forestry, the processing of meat and fish, and food services.2 It is estimated that 84 percent of farm workers speak Spanish as their first language, with an added 4 percent speaking indigenous languages from Latin America or other non-English languages. About three-fourths of farm workers make under $10,000 per year, although corporate agribusiness could easily afford to pay better wages.3 Indeed, the profit levels of agribusinesses such as Cargill have increased exponentially since the implementation of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) as of 1994, even while millions of small farmers in Mexico have been forced off their lands and family farmers in the United States and Canada have struggled to stay afloat.4 Now Mexican laborers work in Iowa cornfields tending the crop that their ancestors learned to plant, germinate, and harvest five thousand years ago.5 Meanwhile, genetically modified corn begins to affect other corn plants, north and south of the border. Migrant farm workers, often banded together in families, tend to move with the crops. They may pick tomatoes in Southern Florida in the spring, peaches in Georgia in the summer, and apples in Ohio and Illinois or Northern crops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania toward the end of the growing season, by which time they can cycle back to Southern Florida or Southern California for winter crops.6 When the border between Mexico and the United States was less militarized and more porous, many migrant agricultural workers cycled in and out of Mexico with the seasons, but in recent years more of them have found themselves locked into a precarious undocumented existence in the United States in order to be able to continue to work in U.S. fields. Despite the highly mechanized and industrialized character of contemporary U.S. agriculture, many crops (such as asparagus, artichoke, cabbage, cilantro, cucumbers, lettuce, berries and peas, many among other fruits and vegetables) continue to be human-labor intensive. Much of the work, such the harvesting of strawberries, is literally back-breaking, since it requires a constant attitude of bending over. Current and former migrant farm workers sometimes express their experiences in poems. Natividad Almanza writes about how she prefers to pick blueberries because she does not have to bend over to get to the bushes.7 Gloria Velásquez reminisces about how she spent summer vacation during her youth, bent over in the fields, hoeing beets under the pitiless sun.8 Though the wages paid to farm workers are very low, farm work is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States. The loss of fingers, back injuries resulting from falls, and daily exposure to toxic pesticides are common, as are molestation and rape, all exacerbated by a lack of access to



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health care.9 A further ironic twist to this situation is that although so much of the food production in the United States rests on the backs of Latinos and Latinas, access to healthy and safe food is more precarious for children, both foreign and U.S. born, whose mothers are noncitizen Latinas.10 In other words, food insecurity characterizes the lives of those whose work secures the food of many. For those who work as migrant farm laborers, it is difficult even to find a place to cook food, as the trailers and other housing available often do not have working ovens.11 Women are a distinct minority if all farm workers are taken into account (about 21 percent of the total), yet their presence in migrant harvesting work is significant, and growing. Indeed, about half of all migrant farm workers travel in family groups that include women and children. The conditions in this line of work are particularly harrowing for Latinas, and lead to higher than average incidences of cervical cancer, HIV, type II diabetes, and hypertension.12 Because of language barriers and a lack of access to communication technology and transportation, migrant families are also often socially and culturally isolated; this, along with constant mobility, are factors that feed into a greater probability of violence against women.13 A precarious legal status, unfavorable work conditions, and lack of social support can contribute to undermine their well-being and power within relationships. This, not primarily cultural background or patterns of behavior brought from their communities of origin, seems to be what contributes to a lack of egalitarian gender norms.14 Local domestic violence shelters are generally unaware of the needs of migrant women farm workers who suffer under intimate-partner violence, and unequipped to deal with them, though some grassroots organizations do exist to address the violence, often organized by migrant women themselves.15 Latinas are not merely passive victims of injustice waiting to be “helped,” but important social agents able to find ways to convert their migration into a new form of symbolic capital and to reconfigure power relations.16 This is true not only for well-known activists in the history of the defense of farm workers’ rights, such as Luisa Moreno in the first half of the twentieth century or Dolores Huerta in the second half, but for women whose names are known perhaps only to the people around them. At the same time, the fact that Latina farm workers do exercise agency is not an excuse for the rest of us to wash our hands of our own complicities with the injustices of the food production system. As Marilyn Chandler McEntyre points out in her analysis of two works of literature by Latinas dealing with the abuse of the earth and of migrant farm workers, in the face of difficult and unjust conditions, it is “all too easy to invoke buzzwords about justice and access in ways that terminate in lament.” She adds that to many of us the problems seem unwieldy and overwhelming, too large to deal with, not to mention the fact that those who benefit

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from the fruits of this unjust system have a “strong collective incentive” to ignore the situation.17 In 1983, artist Juana Alicia created a large mural (30 x 50 feet) titled Las Lechugueras (the lettuce pickers) in the Mission District of San Francisco. The mural depicted several women: two were picking lettuce, others wrapped lettuce in plastic. One of the women was heavily pregnant, and the child was visible in her transparent uterus. A man was lifting a crate of lettuce. An airplane spaying pesticide flew overhead. The Lechugueras are depicted as complex subjects, who bear the brunt of pesticides and hard labor, but who also are strong and capable of bringing forth life and sustenance.18 After twenty years, the mural, rendered in Politec acrylic paint, had become so deteriorated by wear and water, that in order to save it the artist would have had to repaint it from scratch, and decided to replace it with a mural about La Llorona.19 Like the people in the mural, the real lechugueras and lechugueros, along with those who harvest many other vegetables and fruits, have a presence that is paradoxically formidable and too easily expunged from visibility and perhaps from memory. This is one place where theology can lend a helping hand. It can serve to take us beyond mere lamentation and wringing of hands, reminding Christians of the nature and content of our convictions about human beings and the earth, as well as our commitments to justice. The weight of religious conviction with regard to the question of justice for migrants should not be underestimated; it is “comparable in magnitude to other significant determinants of immigration attitudes such as socioeconomic characteristics, economic perceptions, and racial/ethnic context.”20 Theology clearly has an impetus for its work ad intra, within the community of faith. But theology’s work “inside” the church cannot be divorced from its work ad extra, in the public arena; one necessarily leads to another. Indeed, the public voice of theology is important for the church’s own discernment because it can echo back to the church those voices that need to be amplified in order to be heard above the din. At its best, a Christian public theology brings an important gift to the table of the wider society, namely its capacity to discern and to articulate some glimmers of the “truth of reality” in a society so easily distracted by the panem et circenses—the bread and circus—validated by hegemonic common sense.21 Theology can ask: where does the bread—and by extension the produce—eaten in this circus actually come from? What are the human and natural costs involved in producing it? Is such food worth more than the life of those who harvest it? To paraphrase the words in the Sermon on the Mount: Aren’t the lives of undocumented migrant Latinas and Latinos worth more than the profits of agribusiness? A Latino/a public theology can press these questions in part because it is not beholden primarily to the pragmatic “common sense” that prevails in capitalist globalization; it is able to bring the poetic reason of faith and hope to bear on reality.



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Insignificant Lives? Stress is known to most of us: it occurs when the demands we experience seem to outweigh our resources for coping with them and responding to them. Migrant farm workers are prone to a particular kind of anxiety termed “acculturative stress,” because they not only are confronted with difficult working and living conditions, but are also constantly in the process of negotiating several cultures at once. According to stress researchers in the field of psychology, such acculturative stress can provoke anxiety, depression, feelings of marginality and alienation, heightened psychosomatic symptoms, and identity confusion.22 Another way of describing this phenomenon is provided by Phillipa Kafka, in the context of her analysis of themes in the works of Latina writers. She speaks of the “enforced psychic tourism” of Latina migrants, “forced to be other in an alien culture and triply alien and alienated because of gender and race.”23 A certain anxiety seems to come with the territory. If an undocumented status, low wages, precarious work conditions, and sexual violence are thrown in the mix, the brew quickly becomes deeply toxic and productive of a state of anxiety. In a section of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:25–33, we find several utterances that are generally referred to as the “sayings on anxiety.” The passage begins with the well-known verse 25, in which Jesus tells his hearers not to worry about what they are to eat, drink, or to wear: “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” The refrain translated as “do not be anxious” or “do not worry” is repeated three times (6:25, 31, 34) and is accompanied by descriptions of anxious people who worry needlessly about extending the span of their life (or perhaps about adding to their physical height) and about their clothing (6:27, 28).24 How might this text be read in light of the reality of Latina migrant farm workers? Does it dismiss their deprivations and stress as unworthy of attention? In reality, this section of Matthew becomes illuminating for a Latino/a public theology when it is read in the light of migrant farm labor. Sowing, reaping, gathering, toiling, and spinning are all activities mentioned in the passage, and are closely related to the kind of work migrant laborers carry out. Notably, spinning is work that in the time of Jesus was typically carried out by women, so that the text is explicitly not limited to the tasks normally carried out by men, but also understands women as involved in the work of production.25 The passage teaches that such tasks can be performed either anxiously or in faith, without anxiety: it seems to me that one task of a public theology here is to advocate for conditions in which the latter could flourish. The idea of not acting “from anxiety” (merimnáō) in the Matthew passage has to do with not living with worry, fear, or pain as the prime mode of one’s life. Being anxious means having a “divided mind,” one that cannot

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give itself over fully to the joy of living because it is weighed down with troubles and worries.26 The relevance of the text for migrant farm workers is not that they should be scolded because they worry or that they should ignore the reality that surrounds them and simply be happy, whatever their mistreatment. On the contrary, the passage encourages “those of little faith” (oligopistoi) to dare to trust in the possibility of transformation implied by faith in the God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).27 The passage serves as an encouragement for those who are most vulnerable, because they are depicted as having great value in God’s sight, while the affluent are called to identify with the poor and to share what they have, taking care—as Clement of Alexandria points out—that they not fall into the “life of gluttony that wealth is prone to choose.”28 Clearly, the logic of the text is not prosaic but rather a powerful statement of poetic reason by which the birds and the lilies of the field are not to be seen as models to be imitated (as in a fable), but as symbols of God’s tender interest in creation.29 Furthermore, as Augustine points out in his commentary on the passage, “these examples are not to be treated as allegories, so that we should inquire what the fowls of heaven or the lilies of the field mean.” The point is rather “that from smaller matters we should be persuaded respecting greater ones.”30 When the text poses the question “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (6:25) it is not discarding the need for food or for clothing, but rather underlining that the latter are a means, not the goal of existence. The expression ouchí (“is not?”) expects the hearers to agree: of course life is more than food and the body more than clothing! It is worth noting that though the Greek word psuché eg in verse 25 is sometimes rendered in English as “soul,” it is not a reference to an immortal “something” that is independent of the body. Rather it refers to life itself, in the sense of the Hebrew nephesh, which is necessarily embodied. Life and body are not opposed in the text, but basically synonymous.31 In Augustine’s words, “Let us admit that the soul in this passage stands for the present life, whose support is that corporeal nourishment.”32 Is not a holistic, embodied existence more than accumulation and material gain? Are not the lives of migrant workers more than the profits of agribusiness and of a corporate bottom line? Indeed: why are migrant farm workers so often treated as though the food they produce were worth more than their very lives? Barbara Smith and Jamie Wenders, describing the situation of migrant workers in the U.S. South, depict the characteristics of the body required by the present system of production (including food production): it is hypermobile, always ready for an erratic work schedule, always available to work anywhere it might be needed; it is reliable, always on time and constant, present until dismissed; it is disposable, expected to disappear the moment it



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is no longer needed for work; it is productive, existing only in order to work almost in robotic fashion; and it is affordable, willing to work for low wages. The testimony of a thirty-one-year old Latina with one child, who migrates each year for farmwork between Michigan and the Southwest, illustrates this: “Sometimes he [Michigan employer] calls us too early. . . . He wants us to come and we’re working here [Southwest]. . . . He might give us only like three days and then we have to wait [once they arrived to Michigan] like two weeks until the asparagus is ready and we lose all that time when we could have been working down there [Southwest].”33 The worker is expected to go to Michigan at a moment’s notice, at her own expense, only to have to wait for days, earning nothing, because when she arrives the fields are not really ripe for harvest. Such a body is prototypically youthful, healthy, male, autonomous, and lacking historical memory: it is wholly given over to satisfying the labor demands of a shifting market. Its undocumented status ensures that there will be no public complaints or calls on the state for protection. It is expected to present no complications, such as the care of children. Though women can and do take on these expected bodily characteristics, when the demands of pregnancy or motherhood get in the way of work, they are cast aside.34 It is worth paying careful attention to the symbolic representation of Latinas, especially of poor Mexican and Central American women, as willing and docile workers in the maquiladoras, in the harvest or wherever else they might be needed, whose bodies can be consumed and then discarded at will. This veiled violence of the U.S. labor market toward Latinas is not unrelated to the kind of more directly physical and graphic violence now so often seen in border towns such as Juárez.35 Judith Butler has made the point in the context of the deaths that are a result of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, that according to hegemonic logic only some lives are worth mourning, whereas others are deemed replaceable and are scarcely mentioned, if at all. Thus, “certain forms of grief become nationally recognized and amplified, whereas other losses become unthinkable and ungrievable.” She names this a “differential allocation of grievability,” which functions to indicate who is “normatively human” and who is thought to deserve a “livable life.”36 In the face of violence, she asks two important questions: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?”37 It would seem that to even mention and to grieve those whose lives do not count as normatively human can be considered an “offense” against the public, a reminder of something intolerable that is not to be mentioned.38 It seems to me that the lives of many undocumented migrant farm workers also fall into the category of “unmentionable” and “ungrievable.” The tacit “common sense” assumption is that they are not supposed to exist or to be present at all in the country, much less to deserve good treatment.

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Here again, the Matthew passage is helpful. Toward the end, it depicts Jesus as encouraging his hearers not to get distracted, but rather to seek the righteousness of God and of God’s commonweal or reign (6:33). Such striving is not to be carried out according to the logic of the system, which applauds accumulation and neither sees nor grieves for certain lives (even though their labor makes accumulation possible). It is an active doing in the rhythms of God’s reign of justice. It is not a matter of forgetting to seek for food or clothing, but of seeking them for the right reason, unselfishly. The passage ends with the reminder that “tomorrow” will bring its own worries—that these issues are never settled once and for all, but rather that the striving for justice is to be a daily matter.39 Public theology has the function of articulating clearly the fact that for God there are no “unmentionable” or “ungrievable” lives: “Is not life more than food?”

Poetic Reason One of the main reasons the words of Jesus as recorded and interpreted in the Matthew passage have resonated through the centuries is their poetic density. They are rooted in the wisdom tradition but at the same time they transmit an eschatological urgency: they evince “a merger between practical morality and eschatological readiness” and present an alternative logic to that of the dominant system.40 This ability to open up new possibilities for a pneumatic imagination, through the use of a poetic sensibility that goes where mere pragmatism and calculation fear to tread, is an important inspiration for a public theology that drinks from the wells of Latino and Latina realities. Though theology should denounce injustice, it is important that in doing so it should not simply mirror the rhetoric of those it desires to critique, but rather to point to new imaginative possibilities for justice. Jesus was a practitioner of this sort of speech: for instance, he never defines the “reign” or the “commonweal” of God in a pragmatic or scientific fashion—or indeed in any way at all. Rather, in a poetic and narrative manner, he opens up possibilities for its flourishing. When Virgilio Elizondo makes the point that Latino/a theology in the United States is “a rare combination of critical and romantic, passionate and engaged narrative” that is prophetic but also seeks to articulate dreams about a new future, he is arguably referring to the role of what I would call “poetic reason” in a Latino/a public theology.41 For my own understanding of “poetic reason” I’m drawing on the thought of the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904–1991).42 Zambrano was saddened by the fact that in modernity philosophy and poetry often seem estranged from one another. She insisted on the double need for poetry and thought, a synthesis that she termed “poetic reason.” By this she meant a knowledge that



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cannot be obtained only by intellectual means, but rather as a fruit of the intellect and of poetic sensibility, guided and directed by the latter. Poetic reason has an eschatological dimension, because the “reintegration” of philosophy and poetry has not yet been achieved; it is not easy to conceive of this “logos full of grace and truth.”43 And yet, through poetic language, that which cannot be expressed or conceived and yet is necessary, life itself, sometimes shines through.44 Furthermore, for Zambrano, poetry has to do with what is concrete and particular: “It is an encounter, a gift, a discovery by grace.”45 Poetry cannot be imposed by force, and its generous presence is not affirmed polemically.46 Because theology is forced by its very method to pay close attention to life and to circle back hermeneutically to engage the poetry of scripture and the language of doxology, it may not be as divorced from poetic reason as Zambrano perceived philosophy to be, and yet theology too tends to fall into the trap of prosaic reasoning. That is one reason that the passage in Matthew discussed above has so often been dismissed as “absurd” and “unreasonable” (since of course birds do die of hunger and work is necessary to cover basic needs) or read as a fable rather than as a powerful piece of poetic reasoning. Poetic reason points to “an other thinking” (une pensée autre) and “an other tongue” that allow us to “think otherwise,” that is to consider the possibilities that emerge when realities are taken into consideration that are normally erased from a hegemonic purview.47 Benjamin Valentín has suggested that a Latino/a public theology involves three interconnected objectives: fostering a public disposition, promoting social coalitions of struggle for justice, and “developing a discourse that can engage a broad and varied constituency within the realm of civil society.”48 In order to achieve this and to become truly public discourse, it is necessary for theology to adopt “an accessible style of reflection that a general audience of thoughtful people might understand.”49 It seems to me that at least in part this latter concern can be addressed by what I have termed “poetic reason,” because the character of its suggestive and evocative language opens up imaginative possibilities for which many people are longing, and does so in an accessible yet profound way. One important task of a Latino/a public theology is, then, quite simply to look and listen closely to what is obscured by hegemonic common sense, and to express what it sees and hears with poetic sensibility.

Where to Start Quantitative as well as qualitative evidence exists that those who attend religious services more frequently have a greater likelihood of sympathizing with a more humane and open immigration policy, while members of mi-

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nority religious groups (one study notes this tendency for Jews and LatterDay Saints in particular), are also more likely to empathize with the plight of undocumented immigrants and support generous immigration reform measures.50 This is a hopeful sign for a Latino/a public theology, if it is to follow the old adage la caridad empieza por casa, or “charity begins at home.” If theology is to have a genuine public voice it needs a certain cogency ad intra, within the church, since the church is its primary constituency, even if admittedly churches and people of faith vary enormously and no theology can speak for or to all of them. Still, public theology is a discourse for the church, even while it is also for the “world,” not least because the church lives in the world. There are a number of concrete sites of struggle, within and without our communities of faith, at which to anchor the efforts of a Latino/a public theology that takes seriously the reality of migrant farm workers. It can be as localized and specific as an analysis of how the consumer food habits within a congregation are related to the migrant farm-worker conditions, or as globalized and far-reaching as pushing for the ratification in rich countries of the United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. This convention applies human rights provisions specifically to migrant workers, holding for instance that foreign workers should be treated under the law the same way that nationals would be with respect to wages and working conditions, and that the human rights of undocumented workers be respected.51 The convention is a minimum common denominator, not a radical instrument for change, but even so, it has been resisted. It entered into force in 2003 once it had achieved the threshold of twenty ratifying countries, but significantly, to date no migrant-receiving state in the Northern Hemisphere has ratified it.52 It does not focus specifically on agricultural workers, but rather on migrants in general. For the U.S. context specifically, it would be even more urgent to revisit the provisions of NAFTA, to start working on ways to transform the Farm Bill, and to develop comprehensive immigration reform, as well as legislation directed specifically to the situation of migrant farm workers. The United Farm Workers of America, founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta,53 supports the AgJOBS bill (Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits, and Security Act) introduced in 2009. It proposes a “blue card status” to be conferred on foreign agricultural workers who have performed agricultural employment in the United States for at least 863 hours or 150 work days during the twenty-four-month period ending on December 31, 2008, or have earned at least $7,500 from U.S. agricultural employment.54 The bill would allow perhaps 75 percent of the undocumented farm workers in the United States to acquire a legal status. Such legislation would be helpful, but it would not resolve the deeper underlying questions of justice



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that haunt this society. Here, too, a Latino/a public theology needs to find its footing—and its voice, able to hammer away at the perverse logic that perceives immigrants and dissidents as potential “terrorists” and allows the short-term financial gain of agribusiness to shape agricultural, ecological, and migration policies. “Common sense” about enforcing borders and building walls needs to be “outed” as contrary to the good news of the gospel, according to which Christ came to knock down walls of separation according to the economy of shalom, not to build them up according to an economy of fear: perfect love casts out fear.55 It may well be that in taking this kind of stance a theology will be accused by some of naiveté or treacherousness toward the state, but perhaps the time has come to take such accusations in stride: God is no respecter of borders. The Epistle to Diognetus, written in the second century by the anonymous Mathetes or “Disciple,” is one of the earliest extant pieces of apologetic Christian theology, and is an example of one kind of nascent public theology. Some have speculated that the text was addressed either to the tutor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius or to a prestigious Alexandrian magistrate, both of whom were called Diognetus.56 The author uses poetic language and economic metaphors, and mentions the “sweet exchange” by which God becomes one of us, that we might become as God is, which is a benefit “surpassing all expectations.” Christ, says the author, desired us “to trust in his kindness, to esteem him as our nourisher” and teacher, our “wisdom, light, honor, glory, power and life, so what we should not be anxious concerning clothing and food.”57 Diognetus thus makes reference to Matthew 6:25, inserting it into an economy of salvation by which Christology is closely linked to the necessary and just provision of food and clothing. For this early theologian, Christology—and by extension, all of Christian theology—has to do at a very basic level with knowing that “life is more than food”—as well as that food is necessary for life. In a downto-earth version of theosis, becoming godlike means exercising distributive justice: “For it is not by ruling over [one’s] neighbors, or by seeking to hold the supremacy over those that are weaker, or by being rich, and showing violence” that happiness is found or that God is imitated, but rather by distributing whatever things one has received from God to the needy: “Then thou shalt see, while still on earth, that God in the heavens rules.”58 This early “public theology” helps us to remember that the “sweet exchange” of God’s divine economy, symbolized by what the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ can mean for us, cannot be “sweet” as long as there is violence and need among us. In the face of the precarious situation of migrant farm workers and of the land itself, a Latino/a public theology should do no less. Day in and day out, as I write this chapter, the peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants in our community garden are growing, but it is not yet time to

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harvest them in the short Midwestern summer. Day and day out, whether or not my own garden flourishes, I prepare food in my kitchen, chopping and dicing vegetables and fruits that I have not planted or harvested. As I handle them, dazzled by their beautiful shapes, colors, and aromas, I try to remember their true human and ecological cost, and not to take them for granted. Juana Alicia, the artist who painted the Lechugueras mural and who once worked in the fields herself, once remarked in an interview: “[W]e eat every day, and people don’t realize where their food comes from. And when I say grace and when we give thanks, we in this house thank the farm workers.”59 Perhaps, for a Latino/a public theology, such thankfulness would be as good a place as any to start in taking the reality of migrant farm workers to heart. Only then is it possible to start learning truly what it means that “life is more than food.”60

Response to Nancy Bedford Mark Lewis Taylor

My overall sense is that Nancy Bedford’s chapter takes off from where my chapter concludes. I ended my chapter with a call for public theology to reflect on the prodigious art forms that give expression to, and in fact help create, an alternative future for those suffering amid the racialized regimes of social control. In treating Latina/o migrant workers in the United States, Bedford, more so than did I in my chapter, deftly and eloquently shows what artful resistance looks like. Indeed, maybe I was too prosaic in my calls for a more artful public theology! Bedford portrays the plight of those workers who provide our nation’s food and other services. In the process she also foregrounds the “poetic reason” and the “pneumatic imagination” by which these workers both sustain themselves and work toward alternative worlds of flourishing. In this way, then, without either hopeless lament or romanticism, her chapter is both sobering and inspiring, as is the plight of the migrant workers about whom she writes. This is a valuable chapter for setting before us—our students, and all of us—the plight of struggle and resilient hope of these workers. Let me offer four types of responses to Bedford’s chapter. As a first point, I want to highlight two of her more memorable statements on the role of public theology. First, she sees public theology, at its best, to be working with a comprehensive and probing spirit, exposing where our food and produce come from, and what costs in human suffering lay behind the prices we pay for produce and beneath the food we prepare and consume. Second, according to Bedford this enables a public theology that creates a wider frame so that more peoples’ lives become “grievable”1 231

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in public life. I value the way these two points bring a focused intellectual project to public theology, exposing what is behind or beneath the public’s interchanges, together with an affective revisioning of whose lives are worth mourning, celebrating—or just being acknowledged as present in our public systems. With this view of public theology, Bedford sets the stage for treatment of a host of other sectors of public life. Suggestive of future directions we might all take are questions like the following: What political systems in other countries are tolerated for enabling the production and pricing of oil that our automobile-dependent culture presumes? How is the economy we all depend upon enmeshed with the increasingly privatized confinement of human bodies in our prisons and immigrant detention centers? Or, what American Indian lands had to be confiscated to make possible the buying and selling of lots where today we build our houses, shopping centers, national parks, and more? Regarding all these cases, what and who must be grieved? My second point concerns the possibility of exploring further the affective re-visioning of public theology, which Bedford has suggested. Why does Bedford find the public in need of having its “frame of grievability” widened? Given the sobering descriptions of migrant workers’ lives that Bedford and others can provide, one might hope that the sheer co-feeling of humanity for one another would readily be forthcoming. Of course that is a naïve hope; we know all too well that the human situation is marked by failures of feeling and thinking the “We” of our coexistence. My own account of why there is a veiling of the violence done to Mexican migrant workers, as also against Asian workers and professionals, against many of the world’s immigrants in our midst, as also against the African American and American Indian communities of today, has everything to do with the racialization of these “others.” Their presence/absence, visibility/invisibility has long been regulated by U.S. regimes of social control. The migration regime both regiments the centuries of racialized affect and practice that have marked U.S. history regarding those “others,” and also expresses the routinized stereotypes and neglect that white-dominant culture and power have long circulated. It might be an important move, at some point, to situate Butler’s valuable remarks on the selectivity of public framing of affects and grievability, within the context of how race and racism build the frames through which the U.S. public sees “the other,” and grieves them or not. As I say in my own chapter in this book, I cannot account for the U.S. public’s astounding silence regarding the hundreds of thousands, if not one million, Iraqi civilian lives lost since the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation,2 without citing the pervasive racism in the U.S. public that removes Iraqi “others” from the realm of the human and hence from the domain of the grievable. As a third point, I welcome the way Bedford’s article reminds us how important are the paradigms we bring to reading texts in the way she harnesses



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meanings from Matthew’s gospel for the situation of migrant workers. The title of her chapter, “Is Not Life Worth More Than Food?” is taken from Matthew 6:25–34 in the Sermon on the Mount about not being anxious. She wisely cautions against any reading that would see it as a call to tell those who are “food insecure” that food isn’t that important. The text is not to be taken as a callous “Don’t worry, be happy” message. Moreover, she can read the text as a word of encouragement to workers, as if the admonishment was: “Dare to be transformed! Life is, and can be, more than food, more than the toiling and struggle for it. Demand it!” Still more confrontingly, she uses the passage to challenge those who benefit from migrant labor, admonishing them/us to not treat workers as if they were only worth the food they produce or the work they do. Bedford drives this latter point home with her question: “Why are migrant farm workers so often treated as though the food they produce were worth more than their very lives?” With such a challenge—and I have reread the Matthean text again myself—I suggest that Bedford has wielded a wonderfully subversive reading of this passage. Although she does not put it this way, I think her reading can be seen as a powerful example of the importance of readings of scripture “against the text” in order to facilitate a liberatory impact. How many of us have heard the text read this way, that is, as a call to the powerful to make sure that workers are not spinning and toiling in anxiety? I daresay, not many. Bedford wonderfully shifts the responsibility for anxious labor onto the owners of production and onto consumers who benefit, and by extension, onto the whole racist migration regime—a regime that keeps reducing some peoples’ lives to no more than food and its production. Finally, as my fourth point, I return to “poetic reason,” such a prominent and welcome aspect of Bedford’s public theology. As already indicated, I am fully in agreement with its importance, and for challenging both philosophy and theology over its usual commitments to more prosaic reasoning and writing. As I say in my chapter, it is the symbolic force in art-full form that is transformative and that on which we as public theologians need to reflect. In closing, though, I would like to pose to Bedford and others, for future consideration, a question about the relation between poetic reason and doctrinal language in theology. I am employed in a social location of theological education that privileges all too much the prosaic disciplines of doctrinal formation in theology. I would like to propose—too provocatively, perhaps, in this closing paragraph—that a theology that can be a worthy conversation partner in the public sphere, and even in the “public” that is the church, will need to be a theology which resituates itself closer to the languages of art and poetry. This embrace of poetic reason can enrich doctrinal discourse, perhaps, but it will also have to resist the kind of widely prevalent doctrinal discourse that uses doctrines, and systems of loci, to order reflection to a transcendent realm above the sites of struggle where

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migrant workers struggle, create, and hope. All too often the theologians’ routinized trafficking in doctrinal language not only prevents it from really going “public,” but also makes it the perfect discourse for distracting the church and the public from the destruction of lives ongoing all around, and from the resilient strategies by which those enduring the destruction are yet birthing alternative worlds of hope that many cannot even imagine. Bedford has taken us her readers into such a world of struggle and hope, showing us all how life can be “more than food”—not only for those who live the threat of being ground up as so much fodder in our regimes of production, but also for any of us who wish to preserve some shred of dignity and humanity.

12 Beyond Only Difference: Necropolitics, Racialized Regimes, and U.S. Public Theology Mark Lewis Taylor

In a course, “Critical Race Theory as Theological Challenge,” I have suggested to seminary students through the years that U.S. power’s worst nightmare may be that nonwhite communities will strike a common cause in shaping coalitions, in thought and practice, for targeting the constructs of race and of whiteness in the power structure that our white Herrenvolk society and nation have become.1 Scholars and leaders marked as “white” cannot have the task of being architects or coordinators of that coalition. Instead, we must step back, acknowledging the task as carried out by women and men of coalescing nonwhite groups. Yet, we can and should also step forward to expose both the retrenched power and the complexes of white dread and discrimination, exclusion, and repression, and the always shifting-but-brutal racial calculus that white power constructs. Moreover, that exposure, as Ian F. Haney López and others have suggested, should entail a renunciation of the legal-political status— membership in a “white overclass” and its racial spoils system2—that the construct of “being white” provides.3 We all, especially whites, must give back the “white racial bribes.”4

Beyond Only Difference My purpose in this chapter is to show what “public theology” might be if it foregrounded a notion of “public” as an assemblage of racialized regimes of social control. In tandem with that purpose is an argument that adequate 235

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theorization of the U.S. public requires naming and resisting these racialized regimes, as they interplay in a mobile and fluid apparatus that not only often quashes difference and otherness in public life, but constructs them so that the dense and rich “singularly plural” and “plurally singular” qualities of social and personal being” cannot flower.5 This chapter’s purpose and argument are offered under the title “Beyond Only Difference” because I want to challenge a certain tendency in U.S. public life, and especially in theological education, to see rhetorics of difference and otherness, models of dialogue and conversation, as the primary way to pursue public discourse. Those rhetorics are necessary but not sufficient. Equally important, if not a prerequisite for taking difference seriously, is the theorization of the regimes that keep differentiated groups and voices from engaging one another, divided and thus ruled, prevented from achieving equity with white communities. Perhaps the most ready example of the problem is the reign of a certain “diversityspeak” in theological education, in which new voices are affirmed, “made room for around the table,” but without empowering those voices amid the very systems of theological discourse that long have left them excluded and repressed. In more traditional theological language, one might say that I am challenging a certain hegemony of discourses of reconciliation, and insisting on a retention of discourses of liberation from oppressive power. Again, I do this not to discount the importance of thinking difference, especially because what “liberation” means is always refracted along lines of difference. But the way those lines cross, intertwine, or are selectively accented, producing systems of power/ knowledge, requires address. In modes of liberation theory and theology such power structures have been termed “oppression,” “institutionalized violence,” “system of death,” or in Enrique Dussel’s language, “fetishized domination.”6 These exercises in naming and theory are worth continuing, however much liberation theology has developed under important criticism from within and without, to acknowledge, for example, not just class as in some of its early formulations, but also the assemblage of class with gender, sexuality, race, nation, and so on.7 In short, public theology must resist capitulating to an assimilationist liberalism that champions diversity and forgets liberation. The chapter unfolds in two major sections. First, I borrow the term “necropolitics” from Achille Mbembe and reflect on it to describe the power regimes of U.S. public life, as a politics of death and dying, embodied in an apparatus enabling the “incessant capture” of living beings.8 I consider this section the major contribution, the most crucial to contemporary public theology. The second section will be limited to a brief delineation of the trajectories that a public theology might follow if it takes seriously the necropolitics of U.S. public life.



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The U.S. Public as a Necropolitics When Mbembe writes of “necropolitics” his major concern is “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.”9 As a scholar of both modern and “late modern colonial occupation,” reflecting on power and subjectivity in Africa, as he did in his masterful On the Postcolony, Mbembe does not neglect the powerful influences of sexuality, nation-building, and class.10 He does, though, give primary place to the construct of race. In what will be crucial to my necropolitics of the U.S. public, Mbembe emphasizes that “more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples.” Drawing from Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended he adds, “the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state.” Racism, quoting Foucault again, “is the condition of the acceptability of putting to death.”11 The centrality of race and racism is, of course, affirmed by others, as well—notably Peruvian sociologist of coloniality, Aníbal Quijano, who sees race as the “most efficient instrument” and most obvious and omnipresent manifestation of the coloniality of power.12 Similarly, professor of American law Laura Gómez interprets the construct of race as “the most powerful and persistent group boundary in American history, distinguishing, to varying degrees, the experiences of those classified as non-white from those classified as white, with often devastating consequences.”13 Race is, again, in Malini Johar Scheuller’s words “the primary means of social hierarchy as well as the site of the most significant resistances.”14 I suggest that we view “the public,” then, as a set of racialized regimes of social control. Each of these regimes has two qualities that Gómez identified in the racialized experience of Mexican Americans: rigidity and fluidity.15 The rigidity is in the relentless power of whiteness (of white communities and agents) to maintain the pain of exclusion and repression. The fluidity lies in the ways white entitlement and privilege morph into new modes of imposition, pitting different nonwhite groups against one another, and defining experiences of nation, sex, gender, and class. Not every public exchange is a necropolitics, but no public exchange of practice or theory is free from U.S. society’s embeddedness in a racialized necropolitics. For analytic purposes, I discuss four racialized regimes of social control. Each of these is often glossed or masked by official media as well as by mainstream educational systems. Each is deeply rooted in U.S. history as well as virulent in the present. Each possesses a distinctive political texture and practical logic. And yet, each also has its saliency and force by striking different kinds of relations with the others. In this chapter I can hardly do

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justice to their many modes of relationship, though some of these will be noted as I move from one to the other. Mass Incarceration I begin with mass incarceration, the U.S. system of prisons, jails, and detention centers that today houses 2.3 million U,S, residents. Between 1979 and 2007 the prison population in the United States increased seven-fold.16 Just between the years of 1980 and 2000, the population had quadrupled. In 1996, the National Criminal Justice Commission report wrote that this represented “the largest and most frenetic correctional build up in the history of world cultures.”17 One in every thirty-one Americans are either behind bars or in the prison system’s collateral parole and probation system. One in every one hundred Americans are actually caged and behind bars.18 Drug arrests are what have so driven up the numbers, as part of a media-driven and law enforcement funded “war on drugs” initiated by President Reagan in 1982.19 The most dramatic feature of this still expanding carceral structure of U.S. public life is the racial disparity of those imprisoned. It is presently African Americans and Latinos/as who bear the brunt of confinement. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial/ethnic minorities and at such a high rate. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.20 African Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than are whites; Latinos three times more likely.21 The fastest-growing group of those being incarcerated is that of African American women. Three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino, although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white.22 After a long U.S. history of indigenous eradication and forced removal, Native Americans/Indians have the highest per capita incarceration rate (individuals per their group). In some regions, Asian American youth are confined at increasingly higher rates in juvenile detention, especially as South Asian refugees and immigrants enter. For at least a decade the U.S. prison population has remained about 70 percent people of color, with African Americans being nearly 50 percent. As a racialized social control system, though, mass incarceration does not just name the institutions of the imprisoned. It refers, more importantly, to the “larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison.”23 The drug war creates a new large group of felons who never really “re-enter” society upon release, but who instead live out a life of symbolic degradation, legalized discrimination, and voter disenfranchisement. This contributes to the creation of a new social undercaste that experiences racial stigmatization and a near permanent marginalization.24 The creation and control of such a group—



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largely black and Latino—is what Alexander argues is the “New Jim Crow.” A series of new laws now give police and prosecutors freedom from previous “unreasonable search and seizure” protections, and the courts have closed the doors tighter to complaints of racial bias. The instruments of imprisonment, court processes, and enforced stigmatization, according to Alexander, function like the specific “black codes” and “convict leasing laws” that many states passed to undermine Reconstruction, laying foundations for the Jim Crow era. Mass incarceration, then, reconstitutes a highly controlled racialized group of predominantly blacks and Latinos/as, after the civil rights era of the 1960s had presumed to dismantle Jim Crow. The “New Jim Crow” not only approximates Jim Crow as racialized control, but also recycles the legacy of slavery, and thus is a veritable third form of racialized caste system, corrosive of democratic structure in U.S. society.25 The Migration Regime Alexander’s analysis of mass incarceration today is but a start in understanding the power structure of U.S. public life as a system of racialized political control. It is mandatory that analysis of public life treat of this incarceration system and its near-permanent stigmatization of racialized bodies. Yet, Alexander’s analytic, situating mass incarceration in the past epochs of Jim Crow, and then slavery behind it, can give the impression that racialized political control in the United States is only or largely about controlling the black body. It is that, viciously and continuously; yet, understanding that perpetual violation of black bodies and families requires understanding the ways other nonwhite bodies are submitted to control and stereotype. Alexander herself acknowledges that studies of other groups need to supplement hers, noting, for example, how slavery in North America entailed positioning planter elite whites against not only blacks but also Native Americans.26 This political calculus of land-owning white and male elites, who positioned lower-class whites in relation to both African and indigenous groups, may be seen as inaugural and exemplary of the racially mediated migration regime that the United States would later erect, maintained to this day. Governing elites from Euro-American heritages would define and regulate inflow and outflow of other peoples, determine whether they belong in the United States or not, largely in terms of whether they were white, or white enough. If not white or not white enough, they could be tolerated within the United States and its territories, but only if constitutive of a compliant labor pool for the owners of wealth and production. If, however, they became too successful, by rivaling white workers or challenging white-led corporate power, then racialized violence and exclusion were easily the result. The Chinese, for example, were never, could never be, deemed “white.” In

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the 1840s they were allowed entry into the U.S. West to help build and service cities and systems, notably completing the transcontinental railroad on which so much U.S. nation-building depended.27 When Chinese presence and success became threatening to white workers, both working-class and ruling elites coalesced to unleash a culture of violence and ostracism that included daily harassment, exclusion from public schools, burning of homes, lynchings, being shot on-site, and culminated, at times, as in Los Angeles of 1871 and San Francisco of 1877, in full-fledged pogrom attacks.28 Finally, by 1882 the anti-Chinese sentiment reached fever pitch and resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act, with a ban later on entry of all “Asiatics” in a 1917 Congressional immigration bill.29 Meanwhile, also in the 1840s, the United States was beginning its colonization of Mexico, predominantly Northern Mexico, with white settlers moving into regions of what is today New Mexico, California, and Colorado. This culminated in the war against Mexico, whereby the United States, by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, took half of Mexico and tens of thousands of its inhabitants. It was during the period of New Mexico’s status as “acquired territory,” which lasted decades until statehood, that U.S. public discourse worked out the Mexican’s complex place in the U.S. racial order. Residents of New Mexico had a mixed racial status—combining Spanish heritages with those of Africans, American Indians, Mestizos—and so were seen as a threat to the whiteness deemed requisite for citizenship. With the treaty, Mexicans in the United States became citizens legally, though socially they were not extended full rights of citizenship.30 The national press, led by elite editors of the New York Times, for example, circulated all the familiar stereotypes of Mexicans—and others of Latin American descent—as “lazy,” as “greasers,” “mongrel,” and so on.31 More complexly, though, these modes of disparagement entailed what Laura Gómez terms an “off-white” status for Mexican Americans. Mexicans were neither Asian nor black, so subject to neither of those modes of control, but their sufferings, often just as severe, could take various forms, depending on whether they were depicted as a bit more white or less white. On the basis of white judgments that their Spanish heritage as colonizers of the savages in the America’s made them “white,” they could even be granted a certain white status. This Gómez refers to as the “reverse one-drop rule,” one drop of (Spanish) whiteness giving a bit of privilege, the “reverse” of recognizing the one drop of black blood that could consign a person to the sector of ignominy reserved for blacks. Hence, those of Mexican descent and other Latinos/as have occasionally self-identified as white, as well as registered their protests by self-identifying as not white.32 The overall result was a continual shifting of racial calculus by the public’s migration regime, to the end of keeping a pool of compliant workers available for the tasks of building a national project still controlled by a white elite. When the ban



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on “Asiatics” occurred in 1882 against the Chinese, then curtailed Japanese immigration in 1907 and then all Asians in 1917, the inflow of more “offwhite” peoples from Mexico could be tolerated, and in fact was demanded by many growers of southern California and Texas.33 Since that time, the arrangements set by the migration regime for Mexican Americans have been many—the “Bracero program,” “Operation Wetback,” different kinds of work visa systems deployed and dismantled. Throughout them all, and into the current period of immigration crisis, the pattern is painfully visible: grant some kind of legal status to Mexican immigrants (the definite majority of the “Latino/a” demographic in the United States) who are needed for work, grant citizenship on only a very controlled basis, allow large numbers of undocumented workers in when demands for labor require them, but, in effect, deny them all, undocumented or not, their full rights and dignity as humans inside the borders of the United States. The U.S. migration regime thus remains one entrenched in racism. Massey, Durand, and Malone document that the present system of immigration thus has yielded a large body of neglected immigrants and their families, a feminization of migration, a rise in their dependency on social services, and yet their inability to receive those public supports. The result, they conclude, is “the growing marginalization of an increasingly permanent population of the United States.”34 That racial outcaste group, then, which Alexander analyzed as produced by mass incarceration, is also populated and constructed by this migration regime and its own vicious history. We might say that the trajectory that moves from slavery to Jim Crow to the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, is interwoven by a history of U.S. colonization and racialization of controlled immigrants in and out of the United States. The most dramatic link, perhaps, between the regimes of mass incarceration and migration is evident in the 580,000 immigrants held today in detention, and throughout 350 different confinement sites.35 Some of these are new, separate and privately run facilities, others are parts of already existing jails and prisons. But that 580,000 number does not nearly account for all those whom the migration regime consigns to the sea of those whose immigration status in the United States—workers, their families, and children—make up a new permanently marginalized population in the United States. Just as mass incarceration names a racially stigmatized social outcaste group whose five to seven million people far exceed the already astounding number behind bars (the 2.3 million), so we must consider as part of the permanently marginalized outcaste group, large numbers of the undocumented workers in the United States who are some 9.3 million, the majority of whom are of Mexican (57 percent), Latin American (23 percent), and Asian descent (10 percent).36 The Arizona law, S.B. 1070, which allows officials to stop and check papers of those suspected to be “illegal” immigrants, is only

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one example of U.S. laws being distorted in racialized ways that subvert equal protection of the law for all peoples in the country, again corrosive of democratic public life. Indigenous Land Confiscation Regime U.S. public life viewed as a set of racialized political control systems must also take account of the confiscation by U.S. governments of American Indian lands, accompanied by regular neglect, forced removal, and massacre of their peoples. It is a policy that qualifies as “genocide,” though few dare speak the name.37 The devastation of Indian lands and peoples was a necessary condition for the possibility of the mass incarceration and migration regimes I have already referenced. The nation that incarcerates, that patrols its borders and regulates inflows and outflows of “other” peoples, is sustained by a regime rooted in theft and unrecompensed violation. After indigenous peoples and nations were destroyed and then shifted into reservations, they were still subject to further confiscation of their lands. According to the National Congress of American Indians, between 1887 and 1934 the U.S. government took over ninety million acres from Indian peoples, including nearly two-thirds of land that was already reservation land. The government took these ninety million acres without compensating native groups, and opened it to settlers. A 1934 Indian Reorganization Act was supposed to recover that land for Native Americans, in a “land-into-trust” policy, wherein the U.S. government was obligated to return it for the benefit of current and future generations of tribal members.38 Since 1934, though, the United States has only returned about 10 percent of this confiscated land, and most of the returned land was already within previously designated reservation land. To date, land held by Indian groups is often very arid and in remote regions. That the United States has performed so poorly in delivering on its promises regarding land comes as no surprise to those who know the history of U.S. officials’ treaty negotiations. Official executives and legislative bodies of the U.S. government ratified hundreds of formal treaties, 371 as one scholar estimates, and then in various ways defaulted and refused to honor them.39 Supreme Court cases upheld the government’s right to abrogate a treaty—from the time of James Madison, who claimed native peoples were more than compensated by settlers’ gifts of “Christianity and civilization,” to more recent times when later justices of the Supreme Court affirmed the “plenary power” of the U.S. congress to intervene in Indian affairs to do as it sees fit even if this means, again, abrogating signed treaties.40 Even the present Obama administration’s impressive settlement of the class action suit of Indians against the U.S. government is more a massive payment to individual trust holders for compensation denied them than it is a process that restores land back into trust for Indian peoples’ needs.



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The U.S. government has much at stake in the control of land. The longstanding racial justification for taking of Indian lands yields a governmentcontrolled land policy where water rights are at stake, involving water flows from such great rivers as the Colorado, Rio Grande, San Juan, Gila, and Salt Rivers, which affect the quality of life in such major cities as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and El Paso. Access to coal, uranium, and oil and gas deposits, and proceeds from them, is at stake, also accounting for the U.S. government’s maintaining its confiscation regime. Disputed fishing rights in the Northwest region of the United States involve millions of dollars each season. Outright claims to legal title of land, some 10.5 million acres in the state of Maine, for example, are often involved.41 Much is at stake, too, for Indian peoples and their well-being. The dispossession of land, crucial to Indian culture and spirituality, is intrinsic to American Indian suffering today. To be sure, they have not been annihilated; in spite of the centuries of genocidal practice, resistance has been ongoing. Nevertheless, their being uprooted from their lands, consigned to the harshest of territories and habitats, is a key element accounting for the astounding suffering that key social indicators show their communities to bear. I have already pointed out that Native Americans have the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the United States. A comparison of poverty rates show that Native Americans consistently rank highest among all groups. “Reservation Indians have a 39 percent poverty rate; NonReservations, 26 percent, African Americans 25 percent, Hispanic/Latino 23 percent, Pacific Islander, 18 percent, Asian American 13 percent and whites 9 percent.”42 This poverty persists even though Indian gaming and gambling enterprises have made new wealth available. While there is a raging debate among Indian leaders about whether casinos are a salvation or a temptation, sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and Indian Country Today report that most Indians remain mired in poverty and that non-Indian wealthy investors have lined their pockets far more than the rank-and-file tribal members.”43 Native Americans remain at the bottom in almost every measurable economic category. As the economy remains bleak, unemployment and health indicators are troubling, too, with infant mortality and sudden infant death syndrome running at the highest rates in the United States. Native Americans remain at a much higher risk than other minority populations for binge drinking and alcohol dependency, and diseases associated with impoverization, lack of opportunity, and the oft-accompanying despair.44 Indigenous nations and peoples, cooperating with world indigenous organizations and pressuring the U.S. government, have been agents for change in all these areas. Native Americans remain a growing population, thus, and by 2060 may represent a population of some five million;45 but this is a growth and a struggle for health and life waged in the wake of U.S. land confiscation regime and practice.

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The numbers of indigenous peoples has been so reduced over the decades and centuries of U.S. policy that it is difficult to claim that Native Americans add great numbers to the racially controlled U.S. outcaste population. Nevertheless, the land confiscation regime that works their suffering is crucial to the land base of the entire public regime and systems of public interchange to which U.S. politicians, business agents, political leaders, and nearly all citizens and residents presume a right of access. Native American suffering and the dispossession of their lands mark the landedness and materiality of U.S. public life. Not addressing the powers that structure the public’s use of land is a failure to address what has made the U.S. public possible. A U.S. public theology will have to place the racialized confiscation regime on its agenda. A U.S. public theology must be, at least in part, a theology of the land. The Imperial Regime Today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it has become easier to get a hearing for references to the United States as empire, as having imperial interests. The flexing of U.S. power—in an avowedly unilateral way during the George W. Bush regime of 2000–2008—unleashed studies of the United States as empire by analysts tending toward the right and center (Niall Ferguson, Andrew Bacevich46) as well as those more to a diverse Left (Chalmers Johnson, Anatole Lieven47). Previously, so strong was the view of many Americans that they were the democratic rebels from empire, the British, with a “manifest destiny” to carry the banner of freedom, that references to U.S. power as “imperial” seemed offensive to many. The United States, it was thought, could not be something that so smacked of overweening power. That era is gone. The imperial regime has been imperial, at least an intention, from the beginning, as it aimed to be an “empire of liberty.”48 As the fourth U.S. president John Quincy Adams made clear: “The world should be familiarized with the idea that our proper domain is to be the continent of North America. From the time we became an independent people, it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea.” After the United States had already gathered in nearly half of Mexico and cast its sights across the Pacific to the Philippines, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge linked the American mandate for empire to both race and religion: “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth, to lead in the regeneration of the world.”49 Its imperial regime, with this kind of aspiration, is yet another form of racialized social control, linking regimes of domestic social power to those extended over an international socius.



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What is meant by the terms “empire” or “imperial,” as used in the phrase, “imperial regime?” “Empire,” writes political theorist Michael Doyle, “is a relationship of political control by one political society over the effective sovereignty of another.”50 Long ago, journalist Felix Greene put it more tersely: imperialism is “economic exploitation of other peoples buttressed by military and political domination.”51 Another key ingredient of imperial regimes is added by postcolonial scholar, Robert J. C. Young. He reminds that an imperial state not only asserts its power, but on the basis of an ideology (say, “manifest destiny”) also seeks “expansion” of its powers.52 This is particularly important to understand the imperial regime. It projects others as far and then draws its state power near to them, or projects them as distant foreigners when bringing them near within. This proximity of distant others, though, is effected only when it is possible to maintain control. The debates in the 1840s about whether to annex Mexico, and how much of it, pivoted around questions of how expansive the U.S. empire could be, without the proximity of new citizens in its midst becoming a threat. The threat, of course, was largely articulated in racialized terms, viewing Mexicans as those who would sully the purity of the White Republic, or weaken national productivity.53 In the U.S. imperial order, the Japanese and especially Chinese, were always the distant ones, “perpetual foreigners,” and so they often set the horizons of American imperial conquest. When they were growing rapidly in America between the 1840s and 1880s, they were almost never seen as white, as potential citizens, and so they were ineligible for proximity within the empire. For them, there was no “reverse one-drop rule” conveying a bit of beneficial whiteness. Thus, when Chinese labor and entrepreneurial expertise were a threat to whites, the imperial regime was threatened, and exercised its vigorous exclusions. Asian peoples’ hard-working presence, followed by outright exclusion, makes them an extreme case of what the racialized migration regime tends to make of all immigrants—present/absent ones. Asians when “included” tend to remain “perpetual foreigner.” Immigration laws did relax after the civil rights acts of 1964–1968, making blatant exclusion seem intolerably racist. Even when entering U.S. society later, though, Asian Americans remain exceptionalized, taken into certain service and corporate sectors but as “model minority,” a term that tends to set them at odds with other groups even while masking the oppression and suffering many Asians in the U.S. experience. Asian Americans’ extreme racialization as the present/ absent ones fits perfectly the dialectic of empire that expands by projecting distant others, bringing them “near,” only when deemed fully controlled and compliant. But before these deceptive maneuvers within the homeland of the imperial regime, the expelled “Asiatics” had already been back in their own lands, brutally marked by America’s imperial regime and its assaults on their peoples

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and nations. The brutality of the U.S. domination and occupation of the Philippines in the first decade of the twentieth century even sickened Harvard philosopher William James enough to utter a “God damn the United States!” in public print.54 The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were later the lot of the Japanese in their own homeland as World War II closed. The United States garnished its unrivaled military power over Europe and Asia, by also declaring, against the advice of even some of its European allies, that the U.S. dollar should be the world currency of exchange, assuring the advantages that accrue to the United States in a dollar-based world economy.55 Throughout the world ever since, the United States has flexed its military power to back its geopolitical and economic supremacy in many nations, including the Congo, Greece, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Iran, South Africa, Spain, and more.56 Before the war-ending atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the United States had already occupied Korea, slashed a painful scar of division at the 38th parallel, and then reconstituted in Korea a governance structure of Korean elites and former Japanese bureaucrats from Japan’s forty-year brutal imperial rule over Korea. Then, the United States pursued a scorched-earth bombardment during the Korean War, unleashing aerial explosives, a decimation of land, and a killing of millions of civilians. The number dead was only rivaled by the later U.S. war against Vietnam—if indeed it was rivaled (it is hard to know, so close are the casualty numbers). It has seemed a veritable condition for entry by “perpetual foreigners” from Asia into post1970s United States (when Asian immigration was opened again) that they first had to be marked as a bombed and bombable people. As the twenty-first century has opened, early decades have featured U.S. warmaking in “West Asia” (the “Middle East”) with two wars already launched against Iraq, the latter one begun in 2003 causing the death of perhaps over a million Iraqi civilians.57 In South Central Asia, Afghanistan is being subjected to more flexible “postmodern” bombardment, a mobile drone-missile attack procedure that submits “the other” to the bomb, yet again. Arab Americans from throughout Asia occupy a precarious space in contemporary America, harassed and surveilled, as anti-Arab racism is fueled by a deep-running “Orientalist” mood that projects threat, danger, insecurity, and ungovernability upon Arabs, and especially Muslims. Europe has long done so since the Enlightenment.58 We must seriously ask if the estimated one million Iraqi civilian deaths worked by the latest assault on Iraq would be tolerable to the “U.S. public” without the imperial regime’s racialization of bombable and conquerable peoples. Indeed, this orientalizing imperial regime of the United States is no new thing, recalling how the politics of national formation in the very first decades of the fledgling United States took the Muslim world as one of the antipoles of its unfolding Christian empire. The religious character of U.S. imperial formation is still evident, not simply by reference



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to this history, nor simply because there remain many Christian Zionist communities in the United States that explicitly ratify and celebrate U.S. manifest destiny.59 Just as important, if not more so, is the nearly unquestioned bond between U.S. geopolitical interests and its support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Edward Said referred to the bond as a central imperial axis for U.S. power in the volatile Middle East, naming it the “Pax Americana/Israelica.” Mbembe sees Israel’s illegal occupation as “the most accomplished form of necropower.”60 Again, this is not new. The earliest U.S. national publics took the orientalized Muslim “others” as key threat to its early Republic, and easily blended them with the additional racialized “others” they encountered: indigenous, Mexican, Caribbean, and Asian peoples.61 From the mid-twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Korea and Vietnam, from Baghdad to Afghanistan and back to Baghdad, the United States secures its imperial regime, cultivating, as Rey Chow says so well, a “self-referentiality . . . that means bombing—and eradicating—those others who are not like “us.”62

Public Theology of Necropolitics How might a public theology engage necropolitics of U.S. public life? The main problem for public theology in the United States today, as I see it, is not to come up with a new deployment of its doctrine to set out in public dialogue, or some better rendering of Christian faith in an interreligious and intercultural conversation. The major problem is to admit that theology faces necropower in the United States, and then to ask how theology might name that power, critique it, and nurture communities resisting it. The biggest challenge for public theologians, especially those working in mainstream contexts of theological education, is to admit that there is not an equal playing field out there in the public, that to get a hearing for long-excluded “others,” a contestation with the necropolitics of the day will have to be waged. Beyond this basic challenge, I will close by offering three general suggestions for areas of theological work, in light of the necropolitics we face. First, on a most general level, we may take our cues from what Mbembe identifies as three major characteristics of necropolitics. Any and all faith claims, Christian gatherings, celebrations, and announced convictions that challenge these three major characteristics of necropower should be highlighted. Mbembe illustrates these by reference to the U.S.-backed latemodern colonial occupation by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. First, there are the dynamics of territorial fragmentation, “the sealing off and expansion of settlements,” which has the objective of rendering movement difficult if not impossible and creating apartheid-like separation.63 Second, Mbembe identified a “politics of verticality” as high places are seized for

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the oversight, surveilling, and disciplining of controlled bodies. Aerial bombardments, at the heart of the U.S. imperial regime—whether from stealth bomber, Apache helicopter, or drone missile—are the most deadly and direct examples of this politics of verticality. Then, third, Mbembe names the characteristic of a “proliferation of the sites of violence.” By this he means not only the cycles of violence whereby groups wage recurring counterviolence on oppressive regimes, but rather the way the politics of verticality “the symbolics of the top (who is on top) is reiterated”—not just in public orders, but in the “private” family and friend interchanges, and in the daily exchanges of communal life. Women pay a special price as violence proliferates in the home in the form of domestic violence or haunts women wherever they have to risk walking to work and engaging the world. The feminicides of Guatemala and of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, exemplify the sinister proliferations of a violence against women amid necropolitics.64 On this most general level, then, taking our cues from Mbembe’s identification of these three characteristics of necropolitics, I suggest that whatever Christian belief and practice addresses and redresses territorial fragmentation and separation, whatever works to dismantle the politics of verticality, and whatever enables us to think and work comprehensively against proliferating violence—those will be crucial for constituting theological strategies to challenge necropower. They are needed now, more than ever. For each of Mbembe’s characteristics, certain traditional Christian emphases can be reiterated: for the problem of territorial fragmentation and separation, the affirmations of one creation and of a humanity rooted in the Creator; for the politics of verticality, a liberating love which, as in Mary’s Magnificat, “has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree” (Luke 1:5); and for the proliferation of sites of violence, there are the teachings of Jesus on prophetic peacemaking in violent settings. I stress, though, none of these traditional Christian perspectives will gain traction or be much more than platitudinous religious fluff, if they are not articulated in connection with and in light of an explicit challenge to the racialized regimes of mass incarceration, migration, native land confiscation and U.S. imperial formation. If, however, they are pointed to contest those regimes today, the power of those faith claims might be born anew. My second suggestion is an implication of the logic at work in the first. If a public theology is to engage the regimes as I have mentioned above, public theology will need to address explicitly the racialized agonism at work in U.S. necropolitics. By its “agonism” I mean not only the agony of those who are direct sufferers of racialized social control, but also the agonistic posturing and protectionism that the white overclass insists on maintaining, generation in and out. In the context of her brilliant analysis of mass incarceration in California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore let drop a fine definition of racism, one that reminds of how the politics of racism involves a politics



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of death. “Racism,” she wrote, “is state-sanctioned or extra-legal production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”65 It is precisely that kind of “vulnerability to premature death” that marks racial regimes as agonistic, and which theologians must address. Getting to the heart of racialized agonism, and its ways of dealing death in the United States (subtly or blatantly) will mean that theologians begin to write on the construct of race and on systems of racism much more intentionally than we have to date. Too often, especially in the guilds of U.S. theological education, it is assumed that the race issue is handled by announced commitments to “diversity,” or by theologians taking up a “politics of difference,” a valuation of “otherness” and so on. But addressing the racialized regimes producing human agony does not automatically follow from those usually liberal and assimilationist discourses. Exemplary of the kind of move that needs to be made is the recent book by J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008), which includes (1) an upfront address of the centrality of race in the constitution of European and Euro-American modernity, and (2) an exposure of theology’s role in reinforcing Western racism. Critiques of racism are also found as major dimensions of other theological works, mainly by scholars of color, but occasionally by some white theologians as well.66 But because of the persistent strength of assimilationist liberalism—which assumes the presence of progressive public milieu in theological education that simply needs to take in more, new voices—our examination and critique of racial regimes remains a primary task. Finally, I offer a suggestion that is possible to make, especially because those who have suffered and still suffer the agony of racialized social control, have weighed-in with a resistance that is often as imaginative as it is resilient. Public theologians need not respond ex nihilo to the necropolitical regimes I have identified. The resources we need are ready to hand, though in the minds of the theologians who dream only from the confines of provincial Eurocentric power, these resources are often invisible, or unrecognized as valuable. The sufferers of racialized social control—in all the regime forms I have discussed—have not just been weighed down, ground under, by the forces of racialized systems. They also weigh-in with a most prodigious sign-force, an artistic power that sustains them in the present, galvanizes movements in the present and future, and enables those without power now to taste an alternative future. The arts of the poor are “the weapons of the weak,” to recall James C. Scott’s terminology,67 and they are essential to an effective public theological challenge to the U.S. necropolitical.68 I have in mind the poetry and song by almost every people who have suffered the force of the regimes so tightly woven together to choking effect. There are the “sorrow songs” that Du Bois treated famously in his Souls of Black Folk. There are the arpillera quilts and sewn designs that the traumatized communities—adults and children— create in Peru, Chile and elsewhere. There are the retablos and other artistic

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modes of “popular religiosity” that have helped sustain Mexican immigrant life in the United States. There are the woodcuts and pansori singing of Korean and Korean American communities. There are the Appalachian white protest traditions of song and struggle. There are the poems of the Guantánamo Muslim detainees today, and then, too, the “raw poems” of those consigned to asylums and zones of social abandonment—all these, are testimonies to the ongoing resilience, creativity, imagination and desire—in short life—abiding in places where systems of death have sought to do their worst. Among these prodigious art forms there are also the great works of literature, especially the novels, which take one deep into the suffering, yes, but also into complexity, of individual and group struggle in hope. They convey senses of oppression and creative aspiration with concrete complexity. The hope and desire are so enmeshed with agony in such literature that many who suffer less may not recognize the hope-filled and inspiring quality of such novels as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, Kim Ronyoung’s Clay Walls, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and many more. In literature—indeed, in any artful story conveyed in song, poem, speech, or testimonio—there is a writing of what Jean-Luc Nancy called “the singular plurality of being.” In fact, it is precisely this that is needed in order to give voice to what Nancy terms “the being-in-common” of peoples, an authentic “We.”69 Strange perhaps—or, counterintuitive to those long accommodated to the legitimacy of racialized regimes—that the language for “being-incommon” comes by recognizing the prodigious art-forms emergent from the scorned underside of necropolitical regimes. The artful force of this language comes to the fore all the more powerfully when it becomes central to movements of resistance. The embrace of festival by the Zapatistas jousting with NAFTA and the corporate worlds of neocoloniality is one example of a movement that situates the arts at its center. The use by Mexican border families of painting and imaginative postering of their communities, as part of their movement to redress the disappearances and murders of their daughters in Ciudad Juárez, is still another example.70 Thus, my culminating suggestion for a public theology to challenge the racialized regimes of necropolitics urges that we reflect directly and deeply on the transformative and prodigious art at work in people’s movements. Public theologians need to point their church members and their students more to these prodigious art-forces and less to the doctrines that assure orthodoxy. Doctrine will probably still have its place, but it all too often becomes an ordering procedure for churches, one that points away from world to a divine Other who is lodged at the pinnacles of being, and so to a transcendent “He” who becomes guarantor and reinforcer of the politics of verticality, and then of fragmentation and violence that make up our necropolitical world. It is time to learn from the people’s arts, to start theology from there. That’s where the inspiration is, as well as the creativity and hope.

Response to Mark Lewis Taylor Nancy Bedford

Mark Lewis Taylor’s thought-provoking chapter begins with the recognition that scholars and leaders marked as “white” cannot have the task of being architects or coordinators of the kinds of shifting coalitions needed to target the hegemony of “whiteness.” This is a very important point; there are many issues and situations in which people coded as white should be listeners more than talkers; followers more than leaders. As a “white” person I need to continue to learn daily that things are not always all about “me.” At the same time, as central as this insight is, it is based on a premise (being marked as “white”) that tends to exclude a person as “Latina” or “Latino” if he or she does not fit into what prevalent “common sense” in this country has coded as such. My daughters, with their blue eyes and freckled skin, Germanic last name, and a wildly mixed ancestry that is as Argentine as mate and tango but that in the United States is coded as “white,” find daily in the school classroom, on the playground, and on the street that their genotype gets in the way of being recognized as who they have become since we moved to this country: Latinas in the United States. Something similar happens to “Asian” Latinos and Latinas (for instance Chinese Argentines, Korean Paraguayans or Japanese Brazilians who migrate to the United States). What does it mean for Latinos and Latinas to “pass” as white or as Asian American? How can my daughters exercise their agency as Latinas? Is there a way for them to work fruitfully, as leaders, on drafting the kinds of coalitions needed to disarticulate white privilege, or does their pale complexion get in the way of their effectiveness? I suspect that there is insight to be found here in the struggles of the black community 251

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and particularly in the lives of African Americans who “pass” for white yet are invested in dismantling white privilege. When Taylor adds in his opening paragraph that people coded as white can and should also step forward to expose both the retrenched power and the complexes of white dread and discrimination, exclusion, and repression he is opening up spaces for agency that are more than theoretical: they are much-needed oxygen and a chance for agency for those with hybrid identities who pass for white, and a challenge to them (us) to parse our more carefully what renunciation of white privilege needs to entail. Taylor usefully puts forward a notion of “public” as an assemblage of racialized regimes of social control. He is, in fact, warning us implicitly of the dangers of too readily making any category our own, even with the very best intentions, as in our use in this book of the expression “public” theology. He further presses us as public theologians to resist an assimilationist liberalism that champions diversity and forgets liberation—which is a tendency embedded even in our most progressive theological institutions. Some of our educational institutions happily incorporate “people of color” or “ethnics” (a bizarre description that seems to imply that “white” folk have no ethnicity), without substantially changing the way they have always done things: such people can also function as fetishes and commodities for consumption, without there being substantial interest in their realities, which furthermore often cannot be easily expressed in the predominant grammar of a given discipline. In this model, a few “nonwhite” persons can become honorary hegemonic citizens or play out the script of model minority; they are expected to provide color (in the various meanings of the word) but not to challenge the hegemonic way of doing things. Bluntly put, it seems that Taylor is warning us as theologians working in the United States not to forget that even discourses and categories that may be well intentioned can become demonic. The gospel of Jesus is not about assimilation but about transformation; it is not about liberalism but about liberation—but how easy it is, living in Babylon as we are, to slip into easy, nonthreatening modalities of theological double-speak that allow us to seem open-minded even as we entrench ourselves in institutional business as usual. Taylor masterfully puts before us the way in which the “public” sphere functions necropolitically. This notion is helpful to me as I think about the Latina farm workers I describe in my own chapter: the disposability of their lives is a clear instance of a how necropolitical common sense functions in the “public exchange.” Our production and consumption of food, as I can see more clearly with Taylor’s aid, is embedded in a racialized, gendered necropolitics. Clearly, all four interrelated themes that Taylor develops, namely mass incarceration, the migration regime, the confiscation of indigenous land, and U.S. imperialism, are part and parcel of a system of food production that requires a constant availability of migrant farm



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workers who can be threatened with incarceration and deportation, whose documented status is fragile, whose indigenous ancestors suffered the invasion of their lands, and who in the present find their own small farms back home—if they’ve managed to hold on to a parcel—imperiled by the economics of empire. How is a public theology to proceed in the face of these odds? Taylor suggests that the first step is for theology to admit that it “faces necropower in the United States, and then to ask how theology might name that power, critique it, and nurture communities resisting it.” One might say that theology needs first to be “convicted” of its sins of complacency and blindness. Then, as Taylor points out, it must learn to value and build upon “any and all faith claims, Christian gatherings, celebrations, and announced convictions” that challenge necropower. As a theologian for the church, but not only of the church, I find this sentence, nestled quietly and almost unobtrusively in Taylor’s chapter, very encouraging. It seems to open up some windows to let in fresh air and light: there will be places of hope and resistance to the logic of death, both within Christian communities of faith, and outside of them. If we but look for those spaces, we will find paths of faithfulness in our own Christian journey of intensification, and also ways of interfaith inspiration and cooperation, since resistance is found in many places, not all of them Christian or faith-based. Only when the praxis of resistance to necropolitics happens on the ground, Taylor seems to suggest, theological formulations and doctrines may be fruitfully revisited and bring new inspiration—but unless theological discourse and praxis are shot through with resistance, they will continue to be dead bones in the driest of valleys. The hints he provides about how to flesh out the doctrine of creation, liberating love, and peacemaking from the perspective of resistance to necropower are worth noting. A public theology would do well to heed him and develop robust proposals in those specific directions, which to me seem fruitful a way to revisit the Trinitarian doctrine of appropriations, with creation relating primarily to the first article of the Apostles Creed, liberating love to the third article (pneumatology) and peacemaking to the second (Christology)—though all three are implicated and involved in the other two. I am probably not as suspicious of “doctrine” as Taylor, but his warnings are all the more relevant to me for that reason: woe to the theology that uses doctrine to discipline and punish, and to point away from the world toward a transcendent deity who never would have become incarnate or called creation good. In the end, Taylor’s theology is akin to prophetic warnings against idolatry and is shot through with a pneumatological subtext that is no less powerful for being implicit. One problem in developing a theology of “resistance” is that it can fall into mirroring that which it desires to resist. That is why Taylor’s suggestions about the centrality of beauty and creativity are no appendix to his chapter,

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but rather need to be at the heart of any reading of his proposal. Poetry, novels, songs, and other art forms born out of resistance are never a mere counterthesis to that which they are resisting. They function, it seems to me, as an immanent window toward transcendence—not a transcendence disinterested in this reality (of the kind Taylor critiques near the end of the chapter), but one that able to be present deeply and incarnately even as it points beyond itself: the question of immanence and transcendence should not be an either/or for a public theology, but a both/and. I find a strong affinity between this section of Taylor’s chapter and my own attempt to present poetic reason as necessary for a public theology. He points, very aptly, toward several “prodigious art forms emergent from the scorned underside of necropolitical regimes.” I think he is right: theology needs to pay close attention to such art; too much of theology has forgotten the subversive power of beauty, and the fact that poetry has reasons that reason cannot know. I would press even further and say that we, as public theologians, should try to be artificers of beauty ourselves; we should try to make our theologies a thing of beauty, to the extent that each of us is able. To go beyond “only” difference requires, in the end, going beyond “only” linear reasoning and the language of abstraction and “toward” the language of art. I wonder what that might mean for the teaching and the writing of theology.

13 American Indians, Conquest, the Christian Story, and Invasive Nation-Building Tink Tinker (wazhazhe udsethe, Osage Nation)

Indian peoples [have] no particular property in any part of parcel of the country, but only a general residence there, as wild beasts have in the forest. —Reverend Robert Gray, 16091

As an American Indian scholar I am pleased and honored at this invitation to write in dialogue with latina/o theologians to explore questions of difference and solidarity. The assigned task is to argue “the intelligibility of the american experiment in nation-building” in the context of a “union of differences.” “Anchored in the theological claims of the christian story” we are to struggle together toward “an improved understanding of the common good for our pluralistic, democratic society.” This assignment presents significant challenges to any American Indian thinker. To begin with, the american experiment in nation-building has been consistently an experiment predicated on the genocide of Indian peoples. This could well mean that I am invited to engage in the continuing colonization of Indian peoples by affirming the artificial modernist state entity called the United States in some unequivocal manner as either an unmitigated good as a possible good. At least, to engage the invitation I would need to concede a territorial and cultural conquest that would nullify any American Indian claims to sovereignty. Second, as a professor in a christian school of theology, I deal explicitly with the claims of the christian story. As an American Indian scholar, however, I deal much more explicitly with a counter narrative that is rooted in the American Indian traditional world, 255

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worldview, experience, etc. More importantly, it has become increasingly clear to me over the past three decades that the christian story has been and continues to be (i.e., has continuing consequences as) a genocidal disaster for Indian communities.2 Third, the concern announced in the project invitation for the “common good” is one that I also must approach very cautiously. The common good here might be seen as somewhat resonant with American Indian philosophical, spiritual, social, and political traditions, but the language of “common good” would not be our choice of language. The notion is too deeply rooted in euro-western philosophical discourses about the good, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The term “common good” is one that is exceedingly broad in scope and even for some can be reduced to the quintessential goal of the state—going back at least to english philosopher John Locke. Since I want to challenge the modernist notion of the state, I would not expect to look to the state as a source for any common good, nor would I commit to working merely for the good of the state— given the Indian history of experience with european style states. So while I have qualms about conceding that the state we inhabit today as a site of the common good, I also question whether the state can ever be an actual democratic society—except of course in the extreme modernist and increasingly globalized notion of a constitutionally based procedural democracy, one that regularly obscures the distinction between democracy and voting. So the presumption in the assignment that ours is a democratic society, let alone a genuinely pluralistic one, seems to be rooted in american political rhetoric that, from my perspective, ultimately fails the test of reality. The terms then are problematic in many ways. Rather than talk of the common good, Indian people would tend to think in terms of harmony and balance, a goal to which we aspire for the whole of our world. Thus every Indian ceremony has the goal of balance at its heart—even ceremonies preparing a people for battle. Every act of killing, whether in battle, hunting, or harvesting vegetables, ultimately involves humans in violence requiring some further ceremonial act on our part to help restore balance in our lives and in the world around us. And that is the real goal of our common life together. We will come back to this idea in a bit. Nevertheless, let me hang with common good for the time being as something possibly if vaguely compatible in some way with our desire for balance. I suppose that all of these are important differences that we need to sort out in achieving a sense of solidarity across lines of ethnic diversity. Given these misgivings I wrote back to Professor Recinos suggesting that this left me unsure of my role in this project. To his credit, Recinos agreed that I should fully speak my mind on the issues raised by the project. So let me proceed with an argument that euro-christian democracy, along with the christian story itself, has proven to be a device of conquest for in-



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digenous peoples that has attempted to replace our cultures with the colonizer’s value system; replace our ancient community ceremonial practices with notions of individualist salvation; to remove our traditional structures of leadership and consensus building; and to assuage our lingering feelings of violation by introducing notions of “procedural democracy” whereby people confuse acts of voting with democracy itself. From this argument I will try to clarify my growing resistance to anchoring any American Indian theology in the theological claims of the christian story. Ultimately, my argument will be that the old primitive (in the best, if ironic, sense of the word, implying first or original) cultures of American Indians can provide new and healthy direction to a world radically out of balance. Much of “public theology,” of course, does explicitly embrace dialogue with nonchristian based religious folk around the world. We should learn from each of them, one might argue; and American Indians are self-confident enough in our own identity to think that it is now time that America should learn from American Indians some things explicitly about balance and harmony. My chapter will press these concerns as a counternarrative, what Emily Townes calls countermemory,3 one that resists any description of U.S. socalled democracy as an institution that represents an unmitigated good? Given the international crises that beset the world today, it seems time to be so bold as to consider alternatives to the sorts of modernist state “procedural democracies” that have come to dominate the United Nations. And it may be time to revisit the very people so radically displaced by the emergence of modern european state apparatuses, namely the indigenous peoples of the world. My chapter will do that from the perspective of traditional Indian institutions, institutions that actually better qualify as genuine democracies. From an American Indian perspective, the problem with any naive purchase on the American narrative of nation-building is that the american narrative is steeped in historical and continuing violence, from 1492 until the present, a violence deeply rooted in the theological claims of the christian story. However, before I offer a brief outline of this history of colonialist violence against Indian peoples and the entanglement of that violence with the christian story, let me mention briefly the lingering residual effects of that violence in our contemporary Indian world. Unfortunately, the violence is not just past history. I am writing out of a community that suffers chronically from what we might call community-wide incidences of post-traumatic stress syndrome, all rooted back in colonial experiences of boarding schools and terrorist incidences called massacres. We could, given more space, report that one of the results of this history of violence is that Indian peoples suffer from multiple varieties of community-wide incidences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a result, our communities are today wildly out of balance in spite of every

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effort on the part of community leaders. The immediate Indian community experience of being out of balance in today’s world is the late colonial residual of poverty. Indian poverty statistics are usually well concealed from the american public, since it would not do to disrupt the american narrative too much. Newspapers report statistics typically for “White, Black, Hispanic, and other,” where Indians are squeezed in with a variety of folk (e.g., Asians) in the “other” category. When the statistics finally do surface, Indian people show up at the bottom of the list in virtually every category of social welfare: highest unemployment rate of any ethnic group in the United States (chronically, 60 percent nationally); shortest longevity (nearly twenty years shorter than the U.S. average); higher illness rates (six times the U.S. diabetes rate; seven times the TB rate, etc.); teen suicide rates three to ten times the U.S. average;4 a school drop-out rate stuck at 50 percent; etc. These statistics are the tragic result of the violence of conquest, colonialism, “civilization,” and missionary conversion (religious and cultural)—each representing a different but thoroughly integrated strategy of White racist oppression of Indian peoples. The statistics are a constant reminder that this racism and its residual genocidal results continue in a variety of ways to hold Indian communities down and to keep us out of the american narrative except as sports team mascot names.5 They are the residual of a continuing history of racialized violence. In this context, we should note that our communities have been broadly christianized by the missionaries historically and into the present, and that fact has distinctly failed to help the people in any appreciable way. It may have, of course, managed to save certain individuals, but it has dramatically failed to save our communities. And indeed we must then remember that this was one of the principal objectives of the missionaries, precisely to destroy our communities by destroying Indian cultures and value systems, calling them satanic and diabolical. Now we can turn to that history of genocidal violence against Indian peoples that begins with the pious Cristobal Colón in 1492, who took on the monastic robe of a “gray friar.” During the seven years Colon was vice-regent of the Caribbean, with time out for his prayers, he managed to engage in the first transatlantic slave trade by sending some 1,500 Indians back to Spain to be sold into slavery and ruled over the deaths of some seven million people on one island alone.6 This history of violence continues with the episcopalian invasion of Virginia in 1607; followed by the puritan invasion of what became New England, including the so-called pilgrims; and a constant stream of spanish catholics in the southwest part of the continent. America continues a european history of violence that has been unaccounted for and usually rigorously denied. When the first european forces invaded the Americas—the spanish to the Caribbean, the english to north America—they came with clearly preconceived notions



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of conquering peoples, and with war-making technologies finely honed over several centuries of war-making in Europe.7 So terrorism and surprise ambush massacres became the tried-and-true strategies for the colonial invaders. They also arrived having already developed the theological and intellectual means for justifying and legitimating their exercise of violence. Preachers like Robert Gray were already laying the foundation theologically in England trying to build local support in 1609 for the jamestown adventure. And the Rev. Gray was actually just one of many london preachers engaged in a coordinated effort from their pulpits in 1609 and 1610 to rally the faithful behind the jamestown invasion of America, all doing their part to lay the religious and theological foundations for empire in english discourse, denigrating the aboriginal owners of the land, and constructing notions of christian superiority.8 None of these pastors, including Rev. Gray, had ever been to America, yet Gray and the others were able to make wild ethnographic claims with regard to the nature of American Indians and their rights to property.9 Thus, empire became a part of both of the english and the american telling of the christian story. John Cotton, the theologian of the boston puritan colony, did the same for John Winthrop and his army of invaders. As they prepared to embark on the Arbela for what was to become New England in 1630, Rev. Cotton preached the farewell sermon, assuring these puritan christian adventurers that their quest for Indian land was indeed just, that God wanted them to take this land and displace its current owners. Thus Cotton gave birth to the long-lived theological notion that these puritans were the “new Israel” appointed by God to conquer and occupy someone else’s land; the aboriginal owners of the land were to become the new Canaanites.10 This is the beginning of the american narrative as we have come to inherit it today. And this we might think of as the first american theology anchored in the claims of the christian story. “This land is your land; this land is my land . . . ,” but it certainly ain’t Indian land anymore! As conservative republican japanese american senator S. I. Hayakawa quipped about another piece of Indian land, the Panama Canal, more than thirty years ago, “We stole it fair and square.”11 That seems to be the continuing puritan/christian/american opinion to this day—whether voiced on the streets of north America or in the U.S. Supreme Court.12 This chosen people narrative gave rise almost immediately to the religio-political doctrine that was later to be called “Manifest Destiny,” a doctrine that is deeply rooted as a theological claim in the christian story, both in the popular mind and in the homilies of preachers.13 This is the religio-political doctrine, the christian-story metaphor, that empowered the genocidal invasion of Indian country across the breadth of the continent and continues today to fuel the contemporary american domination of the world under the guise of the globalization of capital. I should add here that it matters little to Indian people that others around

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the world, liberationists engaged in their own resistance to the globalization of U.S. power, are telling a quite different christian story. The christian story imposed on Indians by our colonizer has meant and accomplished irreparable harm to Indian communities. The terrorism and massacres of Indians began in north America with Miles Standish at Plymouth in 1622.14 The same year further south the episcopal settlers had invited the Powhatans to a feast celebrating a treaty signing between the two peoples. They proceeded to serve their guests a poisoned wine that immediately killed some two hundred Indians; then these english christians continued to slaughter another fifty by hand. This was surely an act of terrorism. To call it a massacre is simply not strong enough. A dozen years later John Winthrop’s puritan army ambushed an unarmed Pequot village of old people, women, and children (civilian noncombatants) at Mystic in 1637, slaughtering some seven hundred innocents in another terrorist attack.15 These early colonial attacks became habitually repetitive behavior throughout the U.S. conquest of the West. One of those terrorist moments was the 1864 attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village on Sand Creek in “Colorado Territory.” Here the terrorist was an ordained methodist pastor (former missionary to Wyandots and then district superintendent of the colorado methodist district) who took time off to lead a colorado militia attack against a defenseless Indian village as “Colonel” John Chivington. Don’t overlook the babies, he instructed his troops the night before the surprise dawn attack, “Nits make lice.”16 In terms of nation-building and the formation of the United States, we must note that violence is a consistent characteristic of the new republic from the beginning. It began with George Washington’s War on Native America, the title of Barbara Mann’s fine piece of archival research;17 and continued at a legal and intellectual level with the purchase of the “Louisiana Territory” by Thomas Jefferson, and his sending of Lewis and Clark to explore their new piece of property.18 For the Osage Nation, of course, that was the moment when the United States bought “our” land—from the french! We are still trying to figure that one out. Within two years, the Jefferson government (through territorial governor William Clark) was already forcing the Osages to move west and cede the land on which we were living. We have already noted that the U.S. republic, beginning with its war of independence in 1776, was from the very beginning invested in violence against American Indians. To illustrate the point, we might select just a couple of America’s favorite presidential heroes, beginning with Andrew Jackson, by far the most hated president in the minds of nearly every Indian in north America. Yet, we should be quick to note, he continues to be a favorite among Democratic Party faithful today. Almost all state Democratic Party organizations host annual fundraising dinners named after Jackson and Jefferson. Among American Indians, however, Jackson



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is particularly remembered for his deadly policy of Indian removal. He ran for the office of president on a platform calling for the removal of all Indian people from the southeastern part of the country in order to make fertile Indian farmlands available to white immigrant farmers and to everexpanding slave-labor-based, big business plantation operations. He spent the eight years of his administration implementing the policy, remembered signally among Indian people as the “Trail of Tears.” The estimate is that more than a quarter of all Cherokees (just one of the Indian nations so removed) died during the process of removal. Alexis de Tocqueville (himself a White elitist, a wealthy french tourist of the 1830s) said with no little sarcasm in tone, “The conduct of the Americans of the United States towards the aborigines is characterized . . . by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. . . . It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.”19 A few pages further he describes his own witness to a moment of the removal, a band of Choctaws crossing the Mississippi River in mid-winter: It is impossible to conceive the frightful sufferings that attend these forced migrations. . . . It was then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice. The Indians had their families with them, and they brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born and old men upon the verge of death. They possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob, was heard among the assembled crowd; all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. . . . The expulsion of the Indians often takes place at the present day in a regular and, as it were, a legal manner.

The all time favorite presidential hero, both in his own time and yet today, is George Washington, often called the “father of our country.” Long forgotten in american historical consciousness is his murderous war against Indian communities in the Ohio Valley. Long before the revolutionary war, Washington and others had been making illegal investments in lands west of the Alleghany Mountains, so a military campaign to solidify those personal investments and to remove aboriginal impediments to their ownership seemed logical enough. Using long-buried government archives in a blockbuster volume titled George Washington’s War on Native America (2005), Barbara A. Mann now describes dramatically the scorched-earth war strategies of Washington in pursuing the conquest of the Ohio River Valley.20 Moreover, she demonstrates that Washington actually precipitated this war during the revolutionary war as an onslaught intended to break the backs of the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union in

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order to open their lands, Indian lands, for White settlement. Weakened politically and militarily by the war itself, the United States enacted the Northwest Ordinance in 1789, offering Indian peoples a promise: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed.” Indeed the United States was denying any aggressive intent against Indians of the territory and renouncing any claims of discovery or conquest in their territories. As Churchill and Morris report, under Washington’s presidency, “the U.S., of course, was comporting itself otherwise, even as the Ordinance went into effect.”21 So, under Washington’s leadership, the power of the modern state extended to genocidal lying to and then murder of those whose lands it coveted. Perhaps the second-favorite presidential hero is Abraham Lincoln. It should never be forgotten that within six days of signing the Emancipation Proclamation freeing African slaves in the U.S. south he also signed the death warrants of the thirty-nine Dakota Indians who were hung in Mankato, Minnesota, the day after Christmas in 1862. It was a fine public spectacle, the single largest judicial execution in U.S. history. One can still today engage in the public gaze of Mankato photographs thanks to omniscience of the Internet. And it should be noted that the offenders were all tried in a single military tribunal. Over three hundred Indians were found guilty of murder within the span of one eight-hour day. What had been a legitimate uprising of the colonized against their treaty-violating colonizers was translated legally and instantly into a criminal act punishable by execution. Indian people, needless to say, remember these histories of violence. We remember pastor Chivington’s ruthless attack on a peaceful Cheyenne village in early winter—only two years after the Little Crow uprising. At this point most readers will begin to understand my insistence that those who would encourage American Indians to buy into the american narrative of nation-building and find our own place within it, are asking us to participate in our own oppression. And the oppression is not just the history of military violence. As Tocqueville already noted in the 1830s, the violence increasingly included legal violence. We should remember that the U.S. Congress spent the first hundred years of its existence focusing some 25 percent of its legislative energies on what White people called the “Indian problem.” The net result, of course, was a whole body of law, new additions to the rule of law (still on the books today) created merely to help the United States better control Indian people and to more efficiently separate Indian peoples from their resources, particularly their resources in land. We should add that technically none of this “federal Indian law” is constitutional; indeed as a whole it seems to be in clear violation of Article VI of the constitution where it stipulates that treaties are to be held as the



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highest law of the land. Rather than “unconstitutional,” white legal scholars prefer to euphemistically refer to it as “para-constitutional.” American violence, then, has become a consistent history of violence because violent behavior, whether public or private, personal or corporate, has a distinct tendency toward becoming an addictive pattern of behavior. Racism became very early a key strategy for rationalizing violence. Violent responses to Indian peoples created the need for—and a logic to support— further violence on the part of amer-european folk in their conquest. The addictive pattern can be seen as the same sorts of massacre behavior was repeated in Vietnam (e.g., Mai Lai), and again in Desert Storm the use of violence as the ultimate american foreign policy solution was soundly affirmed, trickling down to the rank-and-file in places like Abu Graib. The strategic use or threat of violence has continued today both in economic strategies and the imposition of nation-building on the modern colonized Other—where invariably we actually mean procedural-democracy and constitutional state-building. It continued in organizations like the School of the Americas (and will continue in whatever economic and diplomatic institutions are devised to replace the School of the Americas). It should be of little surprise that violence on the streets and in the private sphere in north America seems closely patterned after the perpetration of state and corporate violence. The practice of violence that so permeates american history and life is and has always been heavily racialized, beginning with violence against the aboriginal owners of the land. From the beginning it was also class biased, and it has been consistently and is today increasingly gendered. From the public sphere to the private, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the suburban home, violence and resort to violent solutions has become as american as apple pie. Perhaps an analogous comparison between the private and the public can help focus the concern. In a typical case of spousal abuse, the abuse does not end with a single incident. Battering will and must, by some perverse logic, continue, in order that the woman might come to assent to it. It is not enough, as Albert Memmi already noticed in his 1956 classic anticolonialist work, for the colonizer to think that he is right in his abuse of the colonized. He also needs for the colonized to believe that the conquest is just and right.22 From the systemic to the interpersonal level, White male privileging can be tracked from their control of systemic structures of power to the blatant racism and sexism of their private joke telling. The defense of White privilege requires clarity about the racialization of the Other. Even jokes communicate important information both to those in the center of the power field (usually affirming their status and privilege) and to those condemned to the periphery. Ultimately, the defense of White privilege requires that black, brown, yellow, and red people acknowledge and in some measure consent to the hierarchical structuring of privilege in which

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White is superior to Color. Whether the message is encoded in the usual coloration of political leaders or in the statistical percentages of young men of color locked up in prisons, the privileged status of Whiteness is regularly reinforced and reentrenched. In the same way, the privileging of men is consolidated and imposed on women—even in our contemporary moment of feminist resistance. To understand international politics, we need to move from the private sphere and the abuse of women or the abuse of children to the globalization of capital in the public sphere. The United States must insist, as President Clinton (a liberal Democrat?) did shortly before leaving office, that “freedom can only be measured in terms of free markets,” a sentiment rooted in the economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.23 President Obama, the newest liberal hero, is currently voicing the very same “free market” commitments even as he continues to pursue foreign policy options of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and increasingly, Pakistan. The United States is invested spiritually in its economic conquest of the world. So we must tell Two-Thirds World countries—through our economic mission agencies: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—that they must have free market systems in place in order to do business with us. And as the world’s sole reigning superpower, it becomes necessary to reinforce american privilege and the superiority of american (economic) ideology.24 So if I can summarize where this history takes me in my argument from an Indian perspective, ultimately there are two major problems with including American Indians in the project of american nation-building. First of all, american nation-building historically has been firmly predicated on the perpetration of violence against Indian peoples. And secondly, nationbuilding has been conceived and validated as religious violence squarely anchored in “the theological claims of the christian story.” Whether it was the very early notions of White english folk as God’s chosen people, the new Israel, conquering a new “promised land” or the later manifestation of this doctrine as the doctrine of manifest destiny, the motivating idea was that God wanted the Canaanites killed or removed. And like the israelite people of the hebrew bible, it turned out that assimilation (though not God’s favorite choice of action) was one of the devices used for conquest. So the debates among White Americans in the nineteenth century, for instance, was whether Indians should simply be exterminated as vermin (the only choice for most of the western presses, like the Rocky Mountain News, or Frank Baum, a south dakota editor and author of the famous children’s fantasy novel The Wizard of Oz25); or removed to less-desirable locations further away from newly invading White settlers; or, increasingly in the later nineteenth century, educated for assimilation as a domestic laboring class within the United States.26 And now in this late stage of capitalist



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colonialism, they want us to help them build this nation predicated on our own death or disappearance. Before I merely dismiss nation-building out of hand, however, we should take a closer look at what the term has come to mean in modern state parlance. What is a nation? The whole question of what is a nation is deeply rooted in european romanticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which means that discourses about nations and nation-building are deeply rooted in european economic and political movements of colonialism and empire. In the wake of the french revolution, german questions of nation-building, for instance, were addressed by romantic-era theologians and philosophers like Schleiermacher and Hegel. Why would Indian folk want to engage in furthering the american imaginary? At the same time, most perceptive american people are aware that nation is the preferred self-designation of American Indian communities. My people are the Osage Nation. The english language alternative, the one strongly preferred by the U.S. government, is the language of tribalism: Indians are tribes and have tribal governments. As Churchill argued nearly twenty years ago, the word “tribe,” while it comes from naming the ancient, primitive, and premodern among humans, may derive most directly from its use in biology and animal husbandry to taxonomically categorize animals. Wherever european empire went, the colonized were characteristically named as atavistic primitives, distinctly less than the colonizer who was making claims on their lands and their lives. So the continued use of the terms “tribe” and “tribal” to refer to Indian peoples’ communities is a colonial attempt to create Indianness as a category of abjection. Thus, Indians tend to use the word “nation” as a self-referent as a somewhat less problematic term. Yes, this too is a bow to the colonization of language, a deeply european, latinate concept as we have already implied. Yet to call ourselves nations finally is a counterclaim over against what the U.S. apparatus would reduce us to and over against what the U.S. claims for itself as a nation. What is a state? Let’s be clear. The modern state (nation-state?) is a new construct. There is nothing natural about the state. Moreover, we need to be clear historically that the emergence of the modern state coincides with the mushrooming of european colonialism and empire building. The modern state may have been born in the very events of 1492 that saw the launching of the columbian misadventure, born in the marriage of Castile and Aragon (Ferdinand and Isabella), born in the early birth of Spain as a modern country and state. It certainly grew in complexity as philosophers like John Locke pressed the voice of a larger elite than the absolute monarch in determining governance. From thence we can trace the history from England’s puritan civil war of the 1640s; England’s “glorious revolution” of 1688 a generation later; the american and french revolutions at the end of the next century. Yet the creation of the state and its apparatuses created governments

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of increasing bureaucracies and bureaucratic power that pushed european empire-building and colonial adventuring to new heights. Indeed, colonialism and the growth of state bureaucratic power played off of one another, creating enormous wealth on the basis of cheap colonial natural resources and labor. For American Indians it was our land; for far too many Africans it was their bodies. Africans provided free labor; Indian bodies were an inconvenience to manifest destiny and needed simply to be removed one way or another. Millions died in the resulting genocidal conquest. So American Indians can concede the state or affirm american nation-building only at the severe cost of our own sovereignty and national status. Like the romantic-era german nationalism of the nineteenth century, the american narrative is an ideal pressed by the political apparatus of the state and its politicians of either party, enhanced by the press (both liberal and conservative), and solidified by the churches. The romance of the american narrative is very much about nation-building just as it is embedded with the christian story in its ideology. And we should not think that American Indians can somehow universally avoid the compelling attractiveness of that narrative as it makes its claims daily on each of us. Too many young Indians, for instance, rush to live out some Indian warrior ideal and to escape reservation poverty by joining the colonizer’s army or marine corps, putting their very bodies at risk to fight the wars of the same empire that has created our poverty. The narrative, however, is not of our own doing; rather, it is imposed on us by systemic forces that seem out of our control. On the other hand it can touch us emotionally/psychologically in such deep ways that a crowd of citizens can fall into patterns of behavior that build up the narrative itself. Since the narrative is historically raced and gendered, it always is of concern when people of color, even those of us involved in some resistance to the narrative, naively buy into its romanticism. At present, the so-called tea party movement (and it is really unclear whether the metaphor is a reference to the Boston tea party of the revolutionary era or a reenactment of Alice in Wonderland’s tea party) is again surfacing the rhetoric of “save our constitution,” as if the U.S. constitution were a divine-word sacred text. While the notion of constitutional democracy is as important a part of the narrative as chanting “USA” when a U.S.-born athlete wins a gold medal, we need to remember clearly that the document was forged explicitly to protect the rights and privileges of White male land owners. The constitution is not the Word of God. Indeed the U.S. constitution was written by White, male, land-owning politicians who were under the theoretical influence of John Locke—among others, but this was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite. And Locke, we should remember, was himself a wealthy, White, male land owner, a very highly placed political figure in seventeenth-century England who was heavily invested in slave trading (the Royal Africa Company), owned african slaves through investments in Bar-



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bados plantations, and owned forty-eight thousand acres of Indian land in the Carolinas, holding the colonial title of carolina landgrave and serving as secretary to the “lords proprietor” of the Carolina Corporation, a colonial land venture. Indeed, Locke wrote, and more than a decade later revised, the “Carolina Constitution” for the corporation.27 For those who want to argue that it is time for American Indians to move beyond the past and to learn to live in the present reality, they need to remember that U.S. government predations against Indian people have not stopped but continue largely unabated, these days often in what one author calls legal micro-aggressions. Bill Clinton is remembered fondly by many Americans (especially now after eight years of a second Bush). By some accounts he was a liberal president. In 1994 Clinton invited “tribal” government leaders to his home (a.k.a., the White House) for a conference to engage in conversation between the U.S. government and Indian peoples anew. This was an extraordinary event at such a late moment in the colonialist/capitalist dominance of the continent. In his Rose Garden talk to “tribal” leaders, Clinton once again assured these Indian leaders vociferously that the United States under his leadership would respect the “government-to-government” relationship between “tribes” and Washington, D.C. The tribal leaders present, of course, were exactly those Indians who had given up on Indian sovereignty per se and decided to work the system to make the most of the existing system of dependency work to some benefit of their home communities. But to that extent we must admit that these relatives had been colonially compromised long before they ever got to the Rose Garden, that is, their minds had been colonized. Thus they applauded Clinton’s mouthing of assurances for respecting government-togovernment relations with Indians. The problem is, of course, that every little town in the United States has a government-to-government relationship with the federal government. What are, rather, reserved to Indian communities by virtue of treaties signed with the United States are nation-to-nation relationships, the one thing that american nation-building must necessarily disallow in order for it to celebrate its own legitimacy. So Clinton’s use of government-to-government language is a legal micro-aggression, one that can be found on countless U.S. government websites. Again, if we concede american nation-building we finally disavow our own nation-ness. And that, as I will argue, is a dangerous move not just for Indian peoples but for the long-term survivability of the colonizer’s self.

Missionary Conquest At this point I need to address that aspect of the assignment that asks each of us to participate in creating a public theology anchored in the theologi-

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cal claims of the christian story. I have already indicated certain misgivings with the christian story, especially insofar as that story has been thoroughly entangled with the euro-western story of colonialism, domination, empire, and the conquest of Indian peoples and Indian lands. Lumbee legal scholar Robert A. Williams articulates the intimate connection between conquest and the part played by the missionaries. He argues that the conquest must continue until “normative divergence” is completely wiped out; and in particular, he argues, “divergence from the conqueror’s religion,” if allowed to continue, would make the conquest less decisive.28 So again I need to clarify that my chapter certainly hopes to speak publicly to larger north american audiences, particularly including the white power center and the solid core of what I have called procedural democracy, but I no longer find it helpful to speak out of the christian narrative—even as I engage a critical analysis of parts of that narrative. Speaking from the midst of an aboriginal community long oppressed by the euro-western christian center of power, I have found it far more helpful to my community to make this move back toward our traditional expression of life and spiritualities. Nearly twenty years ago I wrote a book arguing that christian missionaries to Indian people regularly and customarily confused the gospel of Jesus Christ with their own cultures, and in the mission processes they regularly worked to convert Indian people culturally to the practice of european values and behaviors that actually had nothing at all to do with the so-called christ event. Ultimately, the missionaries functioned, knowingly or not, as colonial officials attempting to bring Indian behavior patterns into some (normative) pattern that could be more easily controlled by the colonizer and more easily manipulated in terms of accessing Indian land resources. Indeed it must be noted that the onslaught of european missionary outreach globally does not begin until and actually coincides with the beginning of european colonialism after 1492. For American Indians, instead of trying to rescue the christian story with some liberationist reinterpretation of it, we need to stop and ask, why did these missionaries think Indians were so in need of european christian-style salvation in the first place. Why do missionaries today (of all denominations of Christianity) feel this need to impose the christian story and its cultural artifacts on other peoples? Of course, the most successful ways of imposing the christian story on others is by denigrating whatever it is that those people have always done. And a usual strategy involves reciting ethnographic misinterpretations and fabrications rooted in stereotyping and simple depredations until they are commonsense knowledge among the colonizer class. In the Indian world, our ancient ceremonies were characteristically categorized as evil, as demonic or satanic. It is in the nature of the colonization process that the colonized have a distinct tendency to internalize these very sorts of criticism and eventually believe these deprecations



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parroted by the colonizer. Having experienced trauma on top of trauma in the conquest, and then threatened with some sort of eternal personal damnation, that is with the specter of hell, it was all too easy to give in to missionization not because of the compelling nature of the gospel, but rather just to achieve some level of survival in the face of genocide. American Indians have been hurt by the missionary propagation of the christian gospel, and there seems to be no recovery from this, since the Christianity brought to Indians was a Christianity already fully clothed in the cultural language and symbolism of the euro-west and voiced in a theology that always justified the superiority of euro-christian folk and almost invariably worked to help the state (nation?) achieve its goals of conquest. Our traditional Indian ways of living had been destroyed by the colonizer. People had been murdered, sometimes in large numbers in events called massacres. Others of our ancestors died in epidemics of diseases brought by the colonizer. Those who survived eventually saw their children around the age of six arrested by colonial government officials (both ecclesial and secular, since the missionaries were carrying out their own governments colonial policies); and without recourse to trial these children were summarily sentenced to a dozen years of incarceration in prison facilities euphemistically called “boarding schools” that were run by both the churches and the U.S. federal government. The advent of Christianity among Indian communities was part of the dramatic colonial ground shift that imposed a new cultural value system, a brand new and not too healthy way of life, along with new economic structures, new political systems of governance, new social structures, a whole new childhood education system, and a whole new worldview. Overnight, as it were, we were disallowed to speak with our ancestors or the other spiritual entities that had enlivened whole communities. To make sure that Indian people never looked back, there was a systemic attempt to categorize our former traditional existence as warlike, savage, primitive (in the wholly negative sense of the word), and childish, continuing a european intentional misrepresentation that goes back to the beginnings of the european invasion. Now today as the colonial system inspired by the christian story has begun to show its flaws more publicly, we Indians are being asked to rethink the Christianity imposed on us under colonization and conquest and to find ways to reinterpret it as a story about liberation, to make our story a new story of israelite liberation from oppression—even though by now we should be clear that israelite liberation meant the death and annihilation of another people: the Canaanites back then and the Palestinians today, just as it meant the death and annihilation of aboriginal indigenous populations like American Indians the world over wherever the christian god empowered the expansion of european empire.

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But there is yet another problem besides the history of christian violence and conquest and their accompanying racialized sense of superiority. This problematic is much more theological and cultural. It has to do with the question of worldview and cultural habits of behavior. To a great extent the cultures and worldviews of european folk and Indians are at polar opposites from one another, yet the missionaries imposed their own euro-western cultures and behaviors onto their Indian converts with little regard to the differences and what they might have meant or mean today. Examples of these include the tension between indigenous communitarian values and radical euro-western individualism. Thus christian notions of salvation are based on the radical individualism end of the spectrum and the presumed need of the individual, while Indian experiences of spirituality are always based on the needs of the community—even the so-called vision quest. Another example of cultural difference has to do with the entrenched temporality of modern euro-westerners. Everything comes down to time, even notions of salvation. In particular, the military industrial complex and capitalism itself is not even conceivable apart from notions of temporality. Production schedules; time clocks for valuing wage labor; development and the powerful euro-western myth of progress, all of these are rooted in temporality. On the other hand, Indian folk function basically out of a sense of the spatial. The location of our lands or the location of a particular ceremony is more important than what day of the week or what time of day the ceremony will happen. In this context we must add Indian notions of balance and harmony as counterpoint to euro-western notions of development and progress, especially when we remember that development and progress carry theological weight in euro-western thought systems. And I will focus more explicitly on Indian understandings of the interrelatedness of all life in the universe. As astute White observers know today, the world stands in environmental jeopardy. So one aspect of a liberationist theology in the north should involve a retelling of the christian story in ways that might help rescue the earth from destruction. It turns out, however, that our Indian ancestors had ways of doing exactly that. The Indian imaginary began with respect for the earth and all living relatives, but it also meant that Indian folk dealt with one another with respect, particularly with respect for the life of another, human or other-than-human. Thus the Osage ceremony preparing for a defense of Osage land (the so-called war ceremony) included ceremonial acts to pray for any opponent who was killed in battle. Those who came to steal our land blasted our traditional cultural ways as demonic and required that our ancestors end those ceremonies and cease telling those stories and the histories that supported our traditional theologies. Our ancestors were told they needed to replace those ways of being in the world with the new religion of the colonizer. Now, it seems,



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we are being asked to re-create something of that old way of life all over again. Only it is not that same way of life. It is a way that tries to rescue all the negative forces of euro-western culture. What remains of our cultures has been romanticized by many New Age–leaning White folk as the source of some solution for their contemporary conundrum, but they have boxed in what they think Indian culture is or ought to be in terms of their own amer-european, euro-western cultures. So any solution offered out of an Indian cultural context must necessarily be cast into some version of individualism, usually voiced in some liberal language like “sustainable development,” which allows them to both sound radical but to “have their cake and eat it too.” Allow me, then, to suggest one possibility for engaging a very different story, one of harmony and balance, one that might indeed bring respite to a planet in distress and make a way for people to live together in peace. As I have assured liberal-minded pacifists across the continent, a euro-philosophy of nonviolence will prove to be insufficient simply because of its impossibility—at least from an Indian perspective. My starting point for explaining this impossibility is the Indian principle of interrelatedness, rooted for example in the Lakota prayer “mitakuye ouyasin,” for all my relatives. The reality in our world is that human beings cannot live without taking from our relatives, the very relatives for whom we just prayed. We might even go so far as to argue that human life necessitates some perpetration of violence in the world. For humans to eat means that we must kill close relatives, whether we kill buffalos or deer; or take the life of sisters’ corn or squash. Every act of violence, even eating, disrupts the harmony of the world around us anew; it creates imbalance that must somehow be repaired. And this is one of the highest spiritual responsibilities of every human being. Thus every time we fight or hunt, when we harvest, and every time we eat, there are ceremonies that help us restore the balance in the world around us that we necessarily disrupted. Thus, it is important to Indian people to remember constantly how to perform those ceremonies. For an old Osage village to feed and take care of itself, for instance, would usually require the killing of fifty or sixty buffalos three times a year in our spring, summer, and fall hunts. We are told that there was a ceremony to be performed before each of these communal hunts, and that the ceremony was in all respects nearly identical to the ceremony (called the “war” ceremony by White interpreters) performed before a military contingent could leave the village to go out and defend the people from an enemy intruding on our lands. While those military contingencies might be completed without even killing an enemy, we knew ahead of time that this would be a possibility. And we knew for a certainty that we would indeed kill some of our sisters and brothers of the buffalo nation in a hunt. In either case the ceremony was a twelve- or thirteen-day public ceremony to make sure that

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any violence we committed was done with utmost respect for those relatives who might be killed. Another useful social device was to set aside one whole clan of Osages whose task it was to nurture and protect our relationship with the buffalo nation. Because of their responsibility for maintaining balance in the world with our buffalo relatives, those who are in the thoka udsethe (Buffalo Bull clan) are proscribed from eating buffalo meat—except as part of a ceremony. Because the people of this clan are “buffalo people,” for them to eat buffalo meat would be an act of cannibalism. The rest of the Osage Nation counted on this clan to spiritually maintain our vital relationship to this important source of nourishment and protein and to help the nation maintain harmony and balance even when we necessarily engaged in the violence of hunting. The community goal, then, is to maintain balance in our relationships with other humans and with those otherthan-human people around us. It is this deeply rooted cultural proclivity, by the way, that has made most Indian people less-than-ideal prospects for capitalist accumulation. The cultural value of generosity is structured in Indian communities to help insure community balance. To this day, personal importance in Indian communities is measured in terms of wealth given away to others rather than wealth accumulated. Blasted as diabolical or satanic by the missionaries and the U.S. government alike, the traditional Indian “give-away” was an important device for helping to maintain relationships of balance within the community. To gain initiation into the council of elders (called nónhonzhinga) a number of criteria measuring cultural values had to be met. Along with intelligence, bravery, and community, upright character was generosity. At least three times in the person’s life that person and the entire family would have had a very large give-away in which they would have given away essentially everything that they own, making them completely dependent on the community even for their subsistence. The moment of initiation would then become the occasion for a fourth such give-away, a give-away for which the person would have had seven years to collect especially valuable things to include as gifts. The primary responsibility of the person called “chief” in english translations is to insure the material wellbeing and balance of the people and to show generosity to all visitors who come into the community. We must note, however, that in our balancing of the world around us there is much more at stake than just our own village or (Osage) national well-being. If we act recklessly and thoughtlessly we could easily put the whole of the world out of balance—for others as well as for ourselves.29 Thus, it is incredibly important that we pay attention to these ceremonial obligations. In most Indian national communities there was an annual ceremony that functioned more generally to restore balance. These ceremonies, like the Plains Indian sun dance or the southeastern Green Corn



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Dance, were concerned for the balance of the whole of the world and are sometimes referred to by White interpreters as world-renewal ceremonies. In most Indian national community contexts, the killing of any one (human or other-than-human) was not allowed during such a ceremony because of the nature of the ceremony itself. Three times in four days at one Lakota sun dance I attended, a stray rattle snake crawled up out of the canyon next to the arbor and entered the arbor itself. At the first instance, some White visitors ran to get something to use to kill the snake and had to be restrained and told that they were acting inappropriately. Each time two fire keepers carefully carried the snake out of the arbor and down to the bottom of the canyon and left it there with offerings of tobacco and gentle words asking the snake to stay away until the ceremony was over. At another sun dance the cooks had to be asked to remove the fly-paper they had posted to catch flies and keep the flies out of their food preparation. Killing flies was not an option; rather, they had to be tolerated and allowed to take their share of the food. So when an Indian community prays for “all” its relatives, these other-than-human relatives are always included. Walking the earth in balance begins with one’s own community, of course. But walking in balance with the nonhuman relatives that surround us in the place where we find ourselves is equally important to our personal well-being and the well-being of the community as a whole. Like human beings, each of these relatives has its own spirit and deserves to be treated with respect by humans—even if we are hunting for food. We are approaching a discourse here about worldview, since the business of walking the earth in balance is indeed about having a particular perspective about the earth around us and our place in it, a perspective that becomes habitual cultural practice. And the ceremonial aspects of our lives as Indians carry this perspective through with distinct consistency. As Indian people gather to eat, someone will invariably take some of the feed prepared for the people and set a small dish aside for the spirits—for the ancestors and anyone else present from that invisible spirit world. Again, this is about balance and interpersonal relationships. Imbalance, not balance, has been the order of the day throughout the american colonial history of conquest and nation-building. And since imbalance becomes habit forming (along with Lockean-style individual possessiveness) it manages to continue from generation to generation and has become the order of the day in our globalizing political-economic context of climate change and global warming, just as it is in military and political coercions in U.S. foreign policy. Had George Bush engaged in a twelve- or thirteen-day ceremony (the typical length of the Osage pre-battle ceremony) before attacking Iraq or Afghanistan—especially one that might have recognized his enemies as relatives—I might have had a modicum of respect for his wars. If Georgia-Pacific or any other paper or lumber

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corporation performed religious ceremonies prior to clear-cutting a forest, if they had spoken to the trees as relatives explaining why their death was necessary, and if they had returned something of value back to the forest, then perhaps I might have less of a guilty conscience in using their products. Instead, we have a mining industry that returns hazardous waste to the environment in the form of methyl mercury (e.g., zinc mining or even hydro-electric damming) or waste from cyanide used to process gold ore. Indeed, it seems that the only notion of balance is the accounting concern for the bottom line in the profit column. If we are serious about saving the planet—and our grandchildren’s lives— then maybe we have to figure out ways to shift the culture and worldview of the dominant capitalist/socialist imaginary that seems to get moderns stuck in arguing so passionately between two different but equally anthropocentric notions of progress and development. And we need to be clear in our understanding that we cannot let anthropocentrism go without giving up progress, development, and capitalism. Could we find a way to live with some indigenous model of what I call dynamic stasis (as opposed to the oxymoron of sustainable development)? It should be clear by now in my chapter that we are talking about a very different social imaginary that would lead to a very different sort of nation-building. To live in balance together in this sense would require a very different story and a different public theology.

Response to Tink Tinker Lara Medina

As I begin writing my response to the insightful chapter of Professor Tink Tinker of the Osage Nation, I am in the midst of teaching an intensive two-week course titled “Mexican Indigenous Ways of Knowing and the Sacred,” offered through the Hispanic Summer Program housed at Princeton Theological Seminary. The students are predominantly of Latino heritages studying for graduate degrees in Christian ministry and theology. Since my own days of attending this program in the late 1980s, when U.S. Latina/o theology was just emerging, I felt a strong need to draw theological attention to the deepest sources of Latina/o cultural values. Why do Latinas/ os value community, reciprocity, the sacred within the secular, and interdependency? For me the deepest source, the cenote,1 or sacred well, of these values is our Indigenous lineages, our Indigenous ancestors, our Indigenous epistemologies or worldviews that evolved from the original inhabitants of the middle and southern regions of the American continent. I went on to write a thesis arguing that any relevant Chicana/o theology must take seriously Mexican Indigenous epistemologies to truly grasp our way of knowing and being in the world in relationship to ourselves, our communities, and the sacred. Up until now, my voice has been heard and respected in numerous academic settings, but rarely authentically engaged. I have found most Latino/a theologians, who strongly identify with “mestizo Christianity,” to have internalized the colonial belief that Indigenous beliefs should be avoided. This resistance is most profound among those theologians teaching at private institutions where Christian claims must be safeguarded. Whether conscious or not, the openness to deeply engaging 275

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with Indigenous spirituality to the point of it influencing the articulation of a U.S. Latino/a theology is sorely lacking. The work of Chicano theologian Virgilio Elizondo was the first to lift up the Indigenous worldview operating within the central icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe. His work dramatically influenced the birth of mestizo theology, but it seems that the honoring of the Indigenous stopped with the miraculous “Guadalupe event” that gave birth to “a new humanity.”2 Ada María-Isasi Díaz was the first U.S. Latina (Cuban) theologian to name the African within our mestizaje but did not elaborate further on the distinct African-ness of “mulatez.” Subsequent prolific writings of Latina/o theologians continually draw from the beliefs and practices of the Latino people, a racially mixed people comprised of Indigenous, African, and European lineages. As numerous scholars have pointed out, it is exactly our non-European bloodlines (read “dark skin”) that makes us most unacceptable, historically and currently. Considered to be a “mongrel race,” it was the degree of our dark skin that determined our status in the colonial casta system and our citizenship rights in the southwest of the United States following the violated Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.3 Our dark bodies configuring our racial status led to the “Mexican problem” within U.S. Christian churches in the twentieth century, and now feeds “anti-immigrant” legislation fundamentally targeting dark brown bodies. Our mestizaje exists precisely because of our brown and black lineages. Thus, I find the ongoing silencing of the deepest sources of our cultural values within current elaborations of mestizo theology to be quite troublesome.4 As example, the astute work of Roberto Goizueta (Cuban) reveals how U.S. Latino religious/cultural practices challenge Western Cartesian dichotomies as they “presuppose an integral, holistic, and organic anthropology”5 but he fails to identify the root source (Indigenous/African) of this holistic and organic way of being and knowing. As Elizondo stated a little more than a decade ago, “As new groups forge their geographicalsocial identity, they tend to forget their ancient origins.”6 Professor Tinker’s chapter has encouraged me to publicly state my frustrations with Latina/o theology. I fully agree with Tinker that Indigenous worldviews hold the corrective to the social and ecological ills caused by “euro-christian democracy.” Without romanticizing Indigenous traditional ways, his naming the fundamental concepts of balance leading to harmony, community, interrelatedness of all life, generosity, the significance of space or one’s relationship to a land base, and ceremony to honor the necessary taking of life, offers Christians a chance to reflect on spiritual fundamentals needed for a renewed ecology and a renewed Christ consciousness. These north American Indigenous values resonate profoundly with those of the middle and southern regions of the Americas. For ancient “Mesoamericans,” balance, reciprocity, fluidity, interdependency, sacred geography, and embodied sacred energies shaped a worldview for civilizations living



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in close relationship to the divine. Ometeotl, or divine duality, both male and female, penetrated the thought and ceremonial lives of the Mexica people. The tlamatinime, the poetic theologians preached creative arts, not war, for direct communication with the divine. Tinker’s chapter encourages me to continue my scholarship around ancient Mesocamerican spiritual and ethical concepts and their application to contemporary Chicana/o and mestizo lives. In lak Echâ•…â•… For All Our Relations

14 Nepantla Spirituality: An Emancipative Vision for Inclusion Lara Medina

I was born and live in that in-between space, nepantla, the borderlands.1 In Lak Ech-Tu Eres Mi Otro You-You Are My Other Self2

I need to begin this chapter by addressing the current legalized tactics against Indigenous peoples of this continent because they are directly related to the intent of this book publication, “to produce a dialogical public theology that centers attention on how to live together in a world of differences . . . a critical, emancipative theological vision of social and political life in our changing society.”3 This task is timely, as the American public once again needs to hear visions of theological emancipation to counter the current visions of exclusion and repression increasingly informing our public discourse. Recent legislative measures in the state of Arizona drive home how much Mexicans and other brown peoples are still not wanted in this land of the brave and the free. The passage of SB 1070 in the state of the saguaro cactus and with a state motto, “Ditat Deus or God enriches,” requires police officers to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials, unless doing so would hinder an investigation or emergency medical treatment. Lack of documentation will result in a misdemeanor, then creating a state criminal record for the individual. Furthermore, this draconian legislation allows citizens to sue local governments or public agencies if they believe federal or state immigration law is not being enforced. On the surface this law 279

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might seem focused solely on undocumented immigrants, but as Professor Roberto Rodriguez of the University of Arizona points out, The mood here is not anti-immigrant. It is anti-Mexican. The racial profiling law has little to with legalities; it is about the expressed targeting of red-brown Indigenous peoples . . . short, dark hair, dark eyes and red-brown skin. Spaniards or other Europeans are not at risk. . . . For years, those of us with red-brown skin have lived this reality anywhere along the U.S./Mexico border. Nowadays, this anti-Mexicanism, under the veneer of anti-illegal immigrant fervor, is nationwide. That is about our bodies. And I repeat the targets are Indigenous.4

Shortly after the signing of SB 1070 by Arizona governor Jan Brewer, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, targeted the teaching of ethnic studies in public schools with the passage of SB 2281. This new law threatens to withhold 10 percent of state funding from any school district or charter school that offers classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” The law does not apply to courses “for Native American pupils that are required to comply with federal law” or courses “that include the discussion of controversial aspects of history . . . the teaching of the holocaust, any other instance of genocide, or the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity.”5 While the latter exemptions might seem to redeem the intentions of this law, it is clear that the “overthrow of government and race resentment” are conflated to mean ethnic studies, the presumption being that learning about one’s nonwhite American history will inevitably lead to revolution and hatred of American whites! The intent of the law is clearly to control the consciousness of students, the minds of students, who learn the history of racialized populations in the United States. As Professor Rodriguez states, “HB 2281 . . . is about our souls . . . it closely resembles the practices of the early European friars who deemed Indigenous knowledge to be Godless and attempted to both demonize it and destroy it completely.”6 For a little more than twenty years now I have focused my thinking and writing on the religious diversity of Chicanos and Latinos, specifically how our theologies must address the Indigenous root of our very beings in order to grasp the fullness of our existence and our relationship to the sacred mystery of life, or the divine. In 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a foundational book for the development of Chicana feminist thought and praxis. I considered the book to be a “new Chicana bible.” Her articulation of the pain yet creativity of living between physical, psychological, sexual, and spiritual borders resonated profoundly with my own experiences of growing up Chicana. Straddling borders or



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the spaces “wherever two or more cultures edge each other” had become a way of life for me and other brown women constantly learning how to survive in a white-dominated society. All people of color in the United States share this challenge, but Anzaldúa addressed this space of discomfort and contradictions from a specific cultural and gendered perspective. Anzaldúa gifted Chicanas with theory to articulate our personal and communal pain leading to a “new mestiza consciousness,” one that moves toward “a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.”7 For Anzaldúa, a central aspect of this new consciousness, is the healing of the dark-skinned Indian woman within Chicana/os who has been “silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude.”8 La India’s voice, wisdom, and spirit could redeem the fragmentation of our spiritual, psychological, and physical selves that had conformed to the dualistic paradigm of Western thought and culture. One year later, the publication of Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church by Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango offered another foundational text for the articulation of Latina feminist thought and praxis. The authors wrote candidly of the alienation and hurt that Latinas have experienced in the Catholic Church and within Latino cultures due to sexism and internalized racism. Their starting point was the daily experiences of Latinas in a white-dominant society and church. By intertwining cultural theology, feminist theology, and liberation theology they offered an accessible methodology to enable Latinas to articulate their “understandings of the divine” and to effect social change. Through sharing our stories, analyzing the systemic causes of our shared pain, liturgizing from a feminist perspective, and strategizing to bring forth change, Latinas could give birth “to new elements, to a new reality.”9 Validating the fusion of Amerindian, African, and Christian beliefs and practices “as the most operative system of symbols used by Hispanic women . . . [that] could well offer needed correctives to some of the religious understandings of “official Christianity”10 sanctioned my own growing awareness of the critical need to recognize Indigenous epistemology within a Chicana/o theology. As Anzaldúa prophesied, the indigenous mother was truly emerging from the darkness “to fight for her own skin and a piece of ground to stand on, a ground from which to view the world—a perspective, a home ground where she can plumb the rich ancestral roots into her own ample mestiza heart.”11 But the question for Anzaldúa and myself arose, “How could I reconcile the two, the pagan and the Christian?”12 Reconciling the pagan and the Christian for colonized and Christianized people can be an arduous process. The reconciling must take place in the depth of one’s being rather than a mere acceptance of a syncretic symbol system or a mestiza identity formed from the best of two or more cultures. The concept of mestizaje, although useful to emphasize the racial/ethnic mixture of Chicanos and other Latinos, and the blending of cultures that

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create a mestizo/a identity, can also easily diminish the significance of the indigenous worldview within the mestizaje and the conditions under which it has struggled to survive. As Anzaldúa later stated, “Beware of el romance del mestizaje. . . . Puede ser una ficción.”13 True reconciliation between the Indigenous and the Christian requires the privileging of the mother culture, the Indigenous, until the two can coexist in mutuality and harmony and the Indigenous is no longer silenced. Since 1987, I have truly witnessed the return of our indigenous foremothers and forefathers, both mortal and divine, as they appear in the arts, writings, songs, research, and ceremonies of the Chicana/o people.14 In the various cultural productions, the iconography, symbols, colors, languages, and sacred landscapes utilized reflect a Southern Indigenous epistemology, or a way of knowing that emerged from civilizations of the middle and southern regions of this land base now known as the Americas. I argue that this epistemology is the deepest source for Chicano/Latino cultural/ spiritual values of communal responsibility, interdependency, reciprocity, sacrifice, complementary duality, truth through artistic expression, intuitive knowledge, respect for elders, humility, sacred geographies, and the interconnectedness of all living things. It is precisely this Indigenous epistemology that the early Christian missionaries abhorred and did everything in their power to destroy. And it is precisely this epistemology that grounds much of the teaching of ethnic studies in the twenty-first century. Thus, the current vigilance against red-brown peoples in the United States is also vigilance against their distinct epistemology. So how can the American, predominantly Christian, public learn to understand and respect an Indigenous way of knowing, an Indigenous emancipative theological vision? What can the American public learn from the spiritual resources/survival strategies of many of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas? The ancestral experience of violent contact, colonization, miscegenation, and transculturation beginning in the sixteenth century between Indigenous, European, and African peoples that created the mestiza, the mulatto, and the Afromestizo, also created the potential for their descendents to hold diverse worldviews and religions in balance. But colonizing powers had a different agenda and the African and Indigenous epistemology would be supplanted or forced underground. Not willing to give up their ancestral deities and being forced to accept a new way left many Indigenous people in between worlds, discerning how best to survive. The well-known phrase “idols behind altars” offered an attempt to understand one strategy of survival, but as David Carrasco so brilliantly elucidates, “There were idols behind altars but it is imperative to look at the entire scene, the idol and the altar as the relationship to be understood.”15 Indigenous peoples did not merely resist the imposition of Christianity but they responded to the foreign tradition by crafting their religiosity, developing unsanctioned



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traditions, reinforcing their community networks, and ultimately asserting their religious autonomy.16 They became Christian on their own terms and in the process Christianity was changed. The first victims of colonization found themselves in nepantla, a Nahuatl term, meaning in the middle, or the middle place. According to Nahautl scholar, Fermin Herrera, the word “nepantla” means “a middle place” and is usually attached to nouns.17 For example, “tlalli” means “land” and “tlalnepantla” means “middle of the earth.” To be “in nepantla” could then imply to be at the center. The use of nepantla was recorded by the Dominican friar, Diego Durán, in the sixteenth century in Historia de las Inidias de Nueva España y Islas de Tierra Firme. I quote the passage at length: Once I questioned an Indian regarding certain things, particularly why he had gone dragging himself about, gathering monies, with bad nights and worse days, and having gathered so much money through so much trouble he put on a wedding and invited the entire town and spent everything. Thus reprimanding him for the evil thing he had done, he answered me: Father, do not be frightened because we are still nepantla, and since I understood what he meant to say by that phrase and metaphor, which means to be in the middle, I insisted that he tell me in what middle it was in which they found themselves. He told me that since they were still not well rooted in the faith, I should not be surprised that they were still neutral, that they neither answered to one faith or the other or, better said, that they believed in God and at the same time keep their ancient customs and demonic rites. And this is what he meant by his abominable excuse that they still remained in the middle and were neutral.18

The friar’s apparent lack of regard or understanding of indigenous communal responsibility, communal obligations, and communal celebrations marking rites of passage clearly blurred his interaction with the native elder. Within indigenous epistemology, community participation symbolizes the strength of a community and is proof of one’s belonging in a community.19 Rather, the friar found this behavior to be an “evil thing” and condemned the actions. In addition to his lack of understanding the traditions of the Nahuas, the possibility of their believing in the Christian God and maintaining their ancient customs repulsed the missionary. According to the renowned scholar of Mesoamerican studies, Miguel León-Portilla, the response of the “elder Indian” exemplified “the trauma of nepantlism.” He elaborates: The ancient institutions had been condemned and mortally wounded, while the ones the friars imposed were still strange and at times incomprehensible. Consequently, the Indians found themselves nepantla, “in between.” The commitment to forcing change had wounded the very values and foundations of the indigenous world.20

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León-Portilla further adds: The violent attacks against the indigenous religion and traditions, the death of the gods, and the difficulty in accepting the new teachings as true had already affected the people deeply and had brought about, as a consequence, the appearance of nepantlism. The concept of nepantlism, “to remain in the middle,” one of the greatest dangers of culture contact ruled by the desire to impose change, retains its full significance, applicable to any meaningful understanding of similar situations.21

León-Portilla’s often quoted interpretation of the exchange of words between the friar and the “wise old native” presumes indecisiveness and great risk on the elder’s part. His use of the term “nepantla” is assumed to mean confusion and conflict, the result of imposed change. Clearly, the native peoples experienced psychological, physical, and spiritual violation, and subsequently found themselves caught or bound between worlds leading to inner and outer turmoil. But the elder himself stated, they were neutral, implying their unwillingness to take sides in the religious conquest. As a matter of survival, they would choose both religions. And as he told the friar, “Do not be frightened.” I would like to elaborate on the elder’s response and suggest a different interpretation for his decision, an interpretation that broadens the concept of nepantla and illuminates the multifacetedness of “being in the middle.” I raise the following questions: Is it is not possible that the elder was referring to his survival strategy of remaining in the middle, the neutral space by describing how his people must and could incorporate Christianity into their native worldview, but also must and could hold onto their traditional beliefs and practices? Could the elder have been maneuvering the fissures, boundaries, and borders of his changed world by claiming the middle space, the center space, the space of meaning-making where his people’s religious and cultural agency could construct new ways or simply provide space for both religions to coexist side by side? In other words, for the elder, the pagan and the Christian could coexist in harmony, in a middle space, a neutral space where one does not have power over the over. Perhaps what appeared to be a state of confusion and ambiguity to the friar, and to León-Portilla, was the manner in which the elder attempted to hold onto his dignity and the ways of his ancestors. The elder wisely and consciously chose the middle space, the center, as his worldview was large enough to encompass multiple manifestations of the divine. From this perspective, nepantla, the middle place, presumes agency, not confusion. My interpretation of nepantla in this manner suggests that the fundamental Mesoamerican cosmological concept of duality also exists within nepantla. In nepantla there is a transparent side illuminating diversity and self-determination, and a shadow side, where diversity confuses and creates disorientation.



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As such, I argue that nepantla is a multifaceted psychic and spiritual space composed of complementary opposites: obscurity and clarity. Bipolar duality consisting of complementary opposites or complementary parts is a constant within indigenous Mesoamerican understandings of the universe,22 and illuminates the duality I propose within nepantla. As duality or complementary opposites exist in all things, nepantla itself is comprised of the shadow side or the bewildering state of uncertainty, and the transparent side or the state of clarity and meaning making. According to Mexican anthropologist Sylvia Marcos, “the duality implicit in Mesoamerican cosmology was constantly in flux and never fixed or static . . . movement gave its impulse to everything . . . everything flowed between opposite poles.”23 For border people, people who live in the physical and psychological terrain where diverse cultures clash, at times converge, and ultimately coexist (not without tension) there is constant movement, constant fluidity. Whereas fluidity remains constant, the cosmos naturally reestablish equilibrium as “the critical point of balance had to be found in continual movement.”24 Maintaining balance/equilibrium in all things, including oneself, is the moral responsibility, the challenge, of all individuals. Without balanced individuals, the community cannot exist in harmony. Achieving balance required not “negating the opposite but rather by advancing towards it and embracing it, in an attempt to find the ever-shifting center of balance.”25 The confusion of nepantla must be embraced and worked through in order to reach the balanced state of clarity on the opposite pole within nepantla. The elder and his people had to move toward Christianity and embrace it as the opposite in order to survive and regain balance in their changing world. But the opposite, the native worldview, was and can continue to be held onto in order to sustain balance. My use of nepantla differs from the concept of syncretism that refers to the blending of diverse beliefs and practices into new and distinct forms. The term “syncretism” is often used to describe Latin American religions resulting from the European imposition of Christianity upon native religions. Scholars realize the limitations of this term as it can easily silence complex historical contexts, power relations, and the “phenomenological distress” in which syncretic traditions evolved. According to David Carrasco, syncretism “can be useful when viewed as a “tool for interpretation” rather than a description of social patterns.”26 As such, he suggests the redesigning of the tool to better understand the dynamics of Latino cultures and religions. Refining syncretism as shared culture, Carrasco illuminates what took place throughout colonial Latin America, in the “contact zone of incomplete and developing forms where the social and symbolic relations were permeated by conflict and loss, coercion and indigenous urging more than adherence.”27 Syncretism when understood as shared culture reveals the agency

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and ingenuity of the indigenous to transform Christianity for their benefit. For example, a crucifix made of cornhusks conjoins the sacrifice of Christ with the sacredness of maize and “the cosmo-magical powers stemming from the earth.”28 Syncretism as shared culture also exemplifies a middle space, and as such holds a place within nepantla, but as Klor de Alva points out, “Nepantlaism should never be confused with syncretism, which is, in both a historical and a psychological sense, the consequence of nepantalism.” Nepantla as a multifaceted psychological and spiritual space, provides for pre-Christian Indigenous traditions, and syncretic Christianity to coexist, side by side, in mutual harmony and respect. In nepantla, there is room for all. Nepantla provides a place where the Indigenous elders, their descendents, and their non-Indigenous neighbors can survive, rest, and prosper. In the transparency of nepantla, there are no power struggles regarding who holds “the truth.”29 Leon-Portilla’s interpretation of nepantla as a place of conflict and confusion, has influenced the writing and artistic productions of many Chicana scholars and artists, but they too have broadened its meaning. Anzaldúa refers to “mental and emotional states of perplexity . . . psychic restlessness . . . mental nepantlism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways.”30 In later work, she refers to nepantla as the site of transformation. Nepantla is referred to as “the dark cave of creativity . . . one that brings a new state of understanding.”31 Cultural theorist Laura Pérez refers to the “susto of nepantla” and the “purgatory of nepantla.”32 But she also suggests “that “in between” space al revés, in reverse; as powerful, indeed, as emblematic of the nature of being and meaning.”33 Yreina Cervantez’s lithograph triptych titled Nepantla images the severity of colonizing forces to obliterate and reconfigure the native, and the artist’s response to move “beyond nepantla,” into a place of power and self-determination. These insightful and groundbreaking works candidly describe the turmoil and self-doubt that exists within the shadow side of nepantla as well as calling the reader/viewer to transformation beyond the disorientation and obscurity of nepantla. Nepantla is the liminal space that can confuse its occupants but also has the ability to transform them.

Nepantla Spirituality in Pedagogy In my teaching about Chicano/as and religion, I encounter many students who are spiritually searching. They are searching for more knowledge about themselves and their God. Many express interest in learning about their Indigenous roots, knowledge that has been denied them in the Western educational system. Most have only studied religion in catechism classes and have never openly challenged Christian doctrine. The class intends to pro-



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vide the opportunity to question religious “truths” constructed within historical and gendered contexts so they may think critically about their own traditions and their own cultures. It is through the process of critical thinking about religion that healing from the psychic wounds of spiritual colonization can occur. My emphasis on Indigenous epistemology challenges the majority to confront their internalized biases toward non-Christian and non-Western worldviews. For Chicano/as who are products of cultural mestizaje within a legacy of colonization, reconciling the differences and discovering the similarities between Christian and Indigenous traditions offers healing. Healing in this context is about bringing forth self-knowledge and historical consciousness so that one may claim religious agency, or the ability to determine for oneself what is morally and ethically just, and what enables communication with spiritual sources. For the young women in the class, discussions about moral authority over one’s body constitute a central part of the healing process. The personal nature of the student’s interest in religion definitely influences the course design. Many students reveal their parents’ concern that in college they will leave their Christian upbringing behind and turn to indigenous ways or forget about spirituality altogether. To help the students bridge their worlds, I introduce the concept of nepantla spirituality,34 spirituality at the biological and cultural crossroads where diverse elements converge, at times in tension and at other times in cohesion. It is a spirituality that allows the Christian, the Indigenous, and all other ethically grounded religions/spiritual paths to coexist in harmony. The use of the Nahuatl term “nepantla” to distinguish this spirituality automatically privileges and reinforces the Indigenous epistemology active within nepantla. As in any relationship coexistence is not always easy, but once the tensions of nepantla are understood and confronted, and the native-Self is recovered and continuously healed, nepantla or the middle space becomes a psychological, spiritual, and political space that Chicanos and Latinos can transform as a site of meaning making and healing. Rather than limited by confusion or ambiguity, Chicanos/Latinos act as subjects in deciding how diverse religious and cultural forces can or cannot work together. Like the native Mesoamerican elder of the sixteenth century, they creatively maneuver the fissures, boundaries, and borders and consciously make choices about what aspects of diverse worldviews nurture the complexity of their spiritual and biological mestizaje, and what for them enables communication with spiritual forces. Within nepantla, Chicanos/Latinos and others can have the wisdom of the Indigenous, the Christian, and the global. A significant amount of class time is spent on understanding the Mexican Indigenous/Chicano tradition of honoring and communing with the dead through Días de los muertos. As in many Indigenous cultures around the world, with exceptions of course, the dead or the ancestors play a key part

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in cultural continuity. The ancestors guide the living, offer protection, and renew the living. Constructing sacred space in their honor, leaving them gifts of food and drink, spending time with their spirits, and sharing in oral tradition ensures family stability and most importantly reminds the living of their historical lineage. For marginalized peoples in the United States, the simple act of remembering their family history holds spiritual and political significance. Whether celebrating the dead takes place in public processions, cemeteries, gatherings in cultural centers, or in the privacy of a family altar, the tradition rejects mainstream attempts to ignore the histories and traditions of nonwhite and mixed-raced peoples. Through public ritual, marginalized “others” claim public space and reject any efforts to dismiss their presence in an increasingly segregated society. The tradition challenges a society that privileges youth and silences the dead. Teaching about this tradition underscores the distinctiveness of non-Western epistemologies where the living and the dead rely on each other. As more and more non-Latinos participate annually in this tradition they too are learning the tremendous power of maintaining ties with one’s ancestors.35 The inclusive nature of Días de los Muertos is a prime example of how the American public is learning from the richness of a Southern Indigenous epistemology. Students are required to construct ofrendas (offerings) to a deceased member of their family or community. The ofrenda can be designed in a box that can be easily carried to class. They must design the container with symbols and photos that represent the life of the deceased. In their oral presentations they offer a brief biographical sketch followed by an explanation of the symbols they chose to represent the deceased. For many of the students, building the ofrenda, explaining it to the class, and writing a summary facilitates a healing process by enabling them to confront the pain of loss. Many students express how meaningful the assignment is not only for themselves, but also for their families. Oftentimes they will have to ask a parent to tell them more about a deceased family member and the exchange facilitates the sharing of family history previously untold.36 The symbols chosen by the students to represent family members oftentimes reflects nepantla spirituality as the ofrendas contain elements of Indigenous spirituality alongside elements found meaningful in Catholic Christianity. Catholic icons share physical space with Indigenous elements such as soil, water, fire, herbs, and images of Meosamerican deities. The dual symbol system does not represent confusion, but rather choice about what objects and natural resources reflect the fullness of their identity and spirituality. To deepen the experience of nepantla spirituality I respectfully offer those students seeking further connection to Indigenous ancestral ways the opportunity to participate in a temazcal or purification/sweat ceremony, an ancient ceremony indigenous to parts of the Americas.37 Many Chicana/os have



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learned the purification ceremony from Lakota people who have been willing to share their tradition, the inipi, as a way to bring balance to the world and strength to those in solidarity with native peoples.38 Many Chicana/os who are seeking their way home to the Indigenous mother have rediscovered the sweat ceremony. As Chief Lame Deer of the Lakota states, “It gives them their identity back.”39 Some Chicana/os also have learned the tradition from their Mexican Indigenous elders or peers who have maintained the purification ceremony. While the actual sweathouse will look different depending on the tradition being followed, the sweat ceremony is a sacred ceremony for many native peoples of the Americas and must not be taken lightly. It is centered on prayer, sacrifice, and both physical and spiritual renewal. Native American (Abenaki) author, Joseph Bruchac, in his very useful book, The Native American Sweat Lodge: History and Legends, describes some of the distinctive features of the Lakota inipi and the temazcalli of the Native peoples of Mexico.40 For the inipi, which is a semi-permanent dome structure made from willow branches, the Vapor-bath sweat involves heating stones in a fire outside the lodge. The stones are carried inside, the lodge is sealed, [traditionally with animal skins but now with heavy blankets] and after cedar and sweet grass are placed on the stones, water is poured to create steam. When the sweat is concluded, the participants leave the sweat lodge.41

In contrast, the temazcalli: Is a permanent structure . . . made out of stone or adobe bricks. The fire for the temescal [sic] is built in an oven which is adjacent to the sweating chamber, sharing a wall with it and sometimes with a heating duct to conduct the fire’s heat into the chamber. The fire heats the stones so thoroughly and intensely that the heat is conducted through them into the room where the sweating takes place . . . more often than not, water is poured onto the stones of that heated wall. Often, the water has special medicinal herbs mixed in with it.42

What Bruchac does not describe for both traditions is the lengthy process of building the sweathouse, gathering the lava rocks, building the sacred fire, and the many prayers/songs and teachings that comprise crucial parts of the ceremonies. Temazcalli in Nahuatl means bathhouse or sweathouse. Tema is to bathe and calli is house. The custom of purifying and healing oneself through ritual sweating is an ancient tradition common to many northern and southern native peoples of this continent. At the time of the European invasions of the Americas the sweat bath was an integral part of the daily practice of native peoples. The Spanish missionaries wrote extensively on the tradition they encountered in Mexico. Diego Durán, the same missionary

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who encountered the elder previously discussed, described succinctly what he saw, “These bath houses can hold ten persons in a squatting position. The entrance is very low and narrow. People enter one-by-one and on all fours.”43 And Friar Bernardino de Sahagún observed that ritual participants prayed and chanted as the temazcalli “restored their bodies, their nerves. Those who are as if faint with sickness are there calmed, strengthened.”44 According to Bruchac, “For the Aztecs, the vapor bath was the favorite remedy for almost every ill.”45 Despite the presence of the sweat bath in parts of ancient Europe, for Spaniards and other Europeans from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, bathing and sinfulness went hand in hand. The emphasis on bathing that the native people valued appeared appalling to the colonizers throughout the Americas. This helps to explain their efforts to eradicate ritual sweating which was a form of cleansing and praying.46 The banning of the sweat bath for native peoples beginning in the sixteenth century proved devastating to their spiritual and physical well-being. Bruchac cites a poignant example based on an interview with a Mayan elder named Tata Julian from the pueblo Todos Santos: In the college we had to bathe in cold water. I went to the chief and said, “Señor, it is the custom in my pueblo for the naturales to take sweat baths. Here there is no sweat bath. Will you give me permission to heat a little water for a bath?” He would not give me permission. After I had been there a year and six months, we all became sick with much chor [dysentery]. All of us were sick, sick every day. They gave us just tea; no coffee. Many naturales died. We became so weak that we could not walk. More and more of the naturales died. Then my thoughts went back to Todos Santos. I knew that if I did not escape I would never see my pueblo again. Señorita, as weak as I was I escaped one night and I returned to my pueblo.47

Spanish missionaries denounced sweat baths and by 1873 the U.S. government prohibited the tradition for Native Americans. Many native peoples in the United States lost the tradition over time, however, the Lakota managed to withstand colonizing powers waged against the inipi. The Indigenous of the south also preserved this most important spiritual and cultural practice. The temazcal has been referred to as “the mother of all medicines.” As one Chicana says about her first experience in the purification ceremony: I felt like I was home. I felt like I went back five hundred years. I could feel the spiritual connection to those original ceremonies and to my ancestors, and I never felt like that before. I really felt a deep spiritual inner connection.”48

When one enters the temazcal or the inipi on all fours and kisses mother earth to ask her permission to enter, one is beginning the return to the



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Indigenous mother. Entering the temazcal or the inipi is re(entering) into the womb of the creator mother. Being enveloped by her warmth and immersed in the darkness of her womb enables the participants to purge themselves of their burdens. Sitting in a circle in the darkness reminds us all of our inherent equality. It is a visceral returning to the unconditional love of the divine mother. Offering songs, and prayers of thanksgiving to the four sacred cardinal directions of the universe, to the creator, and to one’s ancestors opens the communication between the living, the divine, and the dead. Prayers for one’s personal needs and the needs of others are shared. The lava rocks brought into the inipi embody the spirits of the ancestors. When the water is poured over them, they emit ancestral spirit and ancestral knowledge. The steam that is created offers the breath of the creator. Lakota chief Lame Deer states, “The steam in essence is the Grandfather’s breath combining together our prayers, the air, the water, the fire which is in the rocks, and our mother the earth.”49 The process of sweating in the ceremony requires physical and emotional sacrifice. It is a process of letting go of one’s fears, of letting go of material and temporal concerns. It is a process that requires trust, trust in one’s creator, and trust in the ceremonial leader. Leading a temazcal requires specialized training, ceremonial knowledge, and intuitive skills. The water pourer or ceremonial leader ministers to the participants. He or she invites participation, shares teachings, leads in prayer and song, and paces the process of the ceremony. The inipi ritual is divided into four parts coinciding with the four cardinal directions and the four stages in life. The Lakota ceremony often includes the sharing of the sacred pipe during the four resting periods when the “door” of the sweathouse is opened.50 The temazcal is oftentimes in two parts. Both ceremonies might be compared to a certain extent to the sacrament of the Eucharist within the Catholic tradition or La Santa Cena in the Pentecostal tradition in that the participants are led into communion with their creator and the participants are spiritually transformed. When the ceremony is over, the participants crawl out of the sweathouse, the womb, feeling reborn, renewed, and purified. “We rinse off and the sweat from our bodies is an offering of ourselves back to Mother Earth, who gave us life.”51 Sacrifice, reciprocity, and renewal underscore the dynamics of the purification ceremony. For students to reconcile with Christianity and the often-rigid paradigm they were taught, I draw from the theory of transformation proposed two decades ago by Chicano sociologist, David Abalos. Essential to this theory is the awareness of one’s true self or the sacred source within each individual that enables one to shape one’s life based on justice, love, and solidarity with humankind. Fragmentation or alienation occurs when one has been conditioned to image the sacred source, or God, as solely outside

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of oneself, beyond one’s personal and social reality. “A disconnection from one’s sacred sources and from one’s self leaves others to play god.”52 According to Abalos, it is the quality of the relationship between the person and the sacred that is important. He distinguishes between “three gods who correspond to three fundamentally different ways of living.” Two of these gods are false gods or idols, and only the god of transformation allows us to fully participate. Thus the god of emanation is a divinity that embraces us and protects us. But we cannot struggle or talk back. We must be perpetual children to be protected by this mother-god-Church. Others link us to the god of incoherence that will help us triumph over others if we are good. This is a capitalistic god that urges us to . . . seek power. It is only the transforming god who asks/needs our participation in completing the creation of divinity, community, world, and our own selfhood.53

The god of transformation requires humans to critique unhealthy relationships and systems of oppression, reconstruct new ones, and critique them again. This never-ending process offers liberation, or the inherent right and ability to shape one’s life and environment based on justice and solidarity. Liberation does not mean an irresponsible autonomy that allows one to do what is most advantageous for personal gain. Rather, liberation offers the freedom to create conditions that provide all persons with equal respect and opportunity. All three gods can be found within social constructions of Christianity, but the individual must choose which god they are to follow. Jesus’s work offered hope to the marginalized as he challenged the oppressive religious and political structures of his time. His message required the “transformation of all reality-personal, social, and even cosmic.”54 Jesus did not believe in a God that was totally other, totally beyond the human situation. According to liberation theologian, Jon Sobrino, “Jesus unmasked peoples’ domination of others in the name of religion, peoples’ manipulation of the mystery of God . . . to avoid the obligations of justice.”55 Jesus challenged an access to God limited to worship, prayer, or academic knowledge. For Jesus, access to God was in challenging injustice for the liberation of the oppressed. Jesus chose the god of transformation, yet the ecclesial institutions of power that came after in his name promoted the gods of emanation and incoherence. Christian doctrine has presented Jesus primarily as the necessary sacrifice for individual salvation. He is considered to have paid the price for human redemption and his death a once and for all act of penance demanded by an angry but forgiving God. Such a Christology does not concern itself with the social sin that brought Jesus to the cross or the manner in which the horror of the crucifixion affected God-self, the sacred source of life. But when the death of Jesus is understood as the result of his bold criticism of unjust religious and political systems, then the god of transforma-



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tion is revealed. This transforming love is revealed through the resurrection. When the followers of Jesus heard of his rising from the dead, they heard a power that overcame the darkness of the cross, the darkness of the social sin that had killed him. They experienced a response from God that transformed the evil and they experienced hope against injustice. Understanding the resurrection requires hope in transformation. The resurrection then calls the hopeful to responsible action in the reconstruction of oppressive structures and relationships. Thus, resurrection occurs every time marginalized people attempt to challenge oppression. Christian faith cannot rest on the notion of personal salvation but it ultimately must be a functional, just and liberating way of acting in history. To be a Christian requires a political decision as much as a spiritual decision.

Conclusion Many Chicanos and Latinos find empowering the possibility of being able to participate in both Indigenous and Christian spirituality. As one student states, I feel more at peace with myself now, there is nothing wrong with me trying to practice Indigenismo. . . . I don’t see myself as only Catholic. . . . I don’t want to leave Catholicism but, I have always felt a strong connection to the earth, to herbs, and especially to the ocean, I now feel at peace being in the middle, being in nepantla.56

Or as another student wrote, Nepantla spirituality is a useful concept because many people feel that the Catholicism alone will not satisfy their spiritual needs. Nepantla is the common ground, where both Indigenous and Christian religions can meet.

To be “en nepantla” is to exist on the border, on the boundaries of cultures and social structures, where life is in constant motion, in constant fluidity. To be “en nepantla” also means to be in the center of things, to exist in the middle places where all things come together. Nepantla, the center place is a place of balance, a place of equilibrium, or as discussed earlier a place of chaos and confusion. Border people, las mestizas y los mestizos constantly live en nepantla. We can never leave the middle space as that is where we were created, in “the contact zone.”57 As Anzaldúa stated, “As you make your way through life, nepantla itself becomes the place you live in most of the time-home.”58 How we choose to occupy our home is crucial. Nepantla spirituality offers to all peoples a choice, a choice to exclude or to include. Perhaps what Arizonian legislatures and their constituents need at

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this time is an understanding of nepantla, a good sweat ceremony, and a self-reflection with the God of Transformation. To All My Relations! Aztlan, 2010

Response to Lara Medina Tink Tinker

Some two decades ago I was given a new name (common enough in American Indian communities). It was an elder Oglala medicine man who had stopped in Denver and participated in our prayers and saw something of our work in the urban Indian community there. What he saw in me back then was an American Indian ordained cleric with a commitment to Indian traditional culture and spirituality. Along with many younger Native clergy, I had made the journey back to my father’s culture and decidedly away from my mother’s strict lutheranism. In a prayer ceremony during his stay with us he gave me the name Walks Between Two Worlds. The name, however, marks more than my own life; it begins to get at the complex state of contemporary existence for all of Native America—in one way or another. As such, I find myself very sympathetic to Professor Medina’s concern for and attachment to the Nahuatl term “nepantla” as an in-between-ness or borderland for Chicano/a folk. In an important sense, neplanta is the historical Chicano/a naming of hybridity as the postcolonial condition. And that experience of hybridity is a key residual fact of colonialism that we American Indians cannot escape. Moreover, that we share our American Indian heritage with our indigenous Chicana/o relatives is clear to most Indian folk. It was particularly clear to activists involved with Colorado AIM and Denver’s Crusade for Justice beginning in the late 1960s. But there are differences in our contemporary contexts that merit discussion. So for the sake of conversation I will state my objections to Professor Medina’s nicely argued neplanta thesis relatively pointedly despite my appreciation for her chapter’s elegance. 295

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Where I would begin to debate the issue is in Medina’s assumption that the bipolar duality represented in neplanta consists of complementary opposites that result in a contemporary state of being that can and should be embraced unequivocally. European colonial adventuring surely did result in creating tensions of binary opposites wherever their military might took them around the globe. The question is whether indigenous peoples, having been forced under the terrible pressures of conquest to compromise their own cultures, value systems, ceremonial traditions, and long-established habits and communal behaviors, can find balance and harmony in some hybrid state of being. I fully realize that it has become intellectually unpopular to speak in terms of binary oppositions these days (e.g., colonizer/colonized). The problem is, however, that the binaries have never been completely erased by Native hybridities but have in many cases become even more pronounced. I would argue that for American Indians the colonial imposing of the need for creating a borderland existence was and is devastating. It has and continues to eviscerate our cultures and our systems of values, precisely by putting our cultural traditions (especially our cultural traditions of balance and harmony) into diametric tension with the cultural values and habits of behavior of our colonizers. Radical european individualism results in a cultural system that is distinctly different from the ancient Indian cultural systems of a community-based worldview. The base of temporal thinking that came with european colonialism results in a very different set of values that was imposed willy-nilly on the spatial-based world of American Indians. Colonialism changes everything. That much is clear. Whether the resulting hybridity of native life can be remotely seen as a place of balance, however, is certainly contestable. Medina says that balance and equilibrium represent natural inclinations of the cosmos, and I would agree wholeheartedly. Yet the net result of european colonialism is a decided global situation of imbalance, an imbalance that has left Indian communities (euphemistically called reservations) in dysfunctional poverty and utter disarray. In the traditional world of American Indian life and thought, balance and harmony is the constant goal of community life and of each person. For Osages that balance meant a balance in the architecture of a village (placing the clans of the earth and sky divisions across the street from one another—in balance). In the same way it meant ceremonially protecting the relationship between the people and the buffalo or corn. So, one particular clan, the buffalo bull clan, was assigned the task maintaining the whole nation’s relationship with our buffalo siblings. Everyday acts like hunting and eating necessitate some violence against close relatives and thus disrupt the ideal of balance. All of life, then, consists of necessary disruptions of personal, community, and cosmic balance on the one hand and the appropriate ceremonial acts needed to restore balance at any given moment.



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The initial Osage experience of wakonda—the Osage word for the cosmic life force—reflects this ideal of balance. wakonda is experienced first of all as a complimentary dualism of above and below, male and female, sky and earth. The point of this dualism is that it never posits a dualism of good versus evil. Rather, the two opposites are both necessary for balance to occur and thus represent a complementary dualism. This means that something that might seem quite simple and easy, like the shift from our perception of the cosmos to calling upon the male monotheistic deity of the european colonizer, is an introduction of radical imbalance that disrupts the common good of Indian communities. For instance, the maleness of the traditional christian god—and no less so the femaleness of the popular monotheistic White feminist mother-earthgoddess—must necessarily displace and destroy any Indian notion of what White discourse would call the sacred, which for Indians requires a balance of male and female energies. At this point the claims of the euro-christian story effectively trump the indigenous story and force fatal compromises that doom Native cultures and their value system. I am fully aware that many christian Indian folk quite willingly live a neplanta hybridity, sometimes trying to be more christian than the christians, that is, White folk. While they may attempt to bring something of their own cultural values to their practice and understanding of Christianity, the culture is inevitably mangled as an exercise in hybridity where almost every subtlety of the original value system is lost. Hybridity, of course, cannot be entirely escaped, as the pressures of colonialism continually erode our cultures and our habits of behavior. Even traditional practitioners, who may have disavowed colonial christian beliefs and practices—at least, at the surface level—are shaped nevertheless by our experiences of colonialism. Our understandings are increasingly voiced in a linguistic surface structure that is shaped by colonial euro-western cultural values of individualism and competition. Many sun dances, for instance, seem to be moving toward this sort of an individual exercise in spiritual self-empowerment. Sometimes our most knowledgeable and best-trained elders find that they are suddenly using explicit phrases and the general language of New Age individualism to explain the ceremonies to outsiders. As a result more and more young Indians pick up on that New Age language used by these elders and come to embrace their traditional ceremonies with a eurowestern individualist slant. The sun dance is traditionally engaged “for the sake of the people.” That is to say, the health and balance of the community depends on the vicarious suffering of each of the dancers on behalf of the whole people. The New Age influence, however, means that young men increasingly commit to this dance in order to somehow increase their own personal power or status in the community, a terrible violation of the

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ancient tradition. Ultimately, this means that the deep structures of Indian ceremonial life have begun to alter radically even as communities seem to be holding onto the surface structures in one form or another. Like Professor Medina, I too have long participated in some of what remains of the old traditional indigenous ceremonial structures: dances, pipe ceremonies, purification ceremonies (a.k.a. “sweat” lodge), sun dances, and the like. And I have attained a certain status in my own urban (read hybrid/ neplanta) Indian community of metropolitan Denver, increasingly as a recognized spiritual/ceremonial elder. Yet it is precisely in these contexts that I can see the awful limitations of neplanta. The culture of individualism and temporality has been so deeply imprinted upon Indian folk that it has become a major challenge to reclaim our own understandings of these ceremonies and to separate the indigenous worldview from the worldview imposed on us by missionaries, educators, U.S. government regulatory agencies like the BIA, and the need for developing everyday work skills in a money economy. Our struggle now must be to protect what we still have in the ways of the deep structure values and habits of behavior and to begin the process of relearning what so many have lost. This is, I would argue, increasingly difficult to do this within the confines of the church, that is, within the confines of euro-western colonial systems and institutions.

Notes

Introduction ╇ 1.╇ Public theological discourses vary in the United States with some scholars concerned to think of the public role of the church and how Christians should relate to public life, others arguing that theology is itself public speech, and others aiming to show the public relevance of theology for addressing social issues and shaping values important to life in the wider society. ╇ 2.╇ For a work that looks at the role of religious groups in public policy debate see Martin E. Marty and Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation about Religion’s Role in Our Shared Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). ╇ 3.╇ In Western societies, thinkers like Voltaire, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Jefferson, and Madison sought to limit the role of religion in the public sphere. Indeed, in public life and with evolving secular institutions religious discourse was to be displaced by reasonable pursuit of truth. ╇ 4.╇ See Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 31. ╇ 5.╇ See Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002); Carter Heyward, God in the Balance: Christian Spirituality in Times of Terror (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2002); and John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ╇ 6.╇ Mark Juergesmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

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╇ 7.╇ For an excellent article that looks at the linguistic construction of religious terrorists see Richard Jackson, “Constructing Enemies: ‘Islamic Terrorism’ in Political and Academic Discourse,” Government & Opposition 42, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 394–426. ╇ 8.╇ Public theologians need to respond to religious violence in the twenty-first century and the associated secularized view that religion as evidenced in religiously motivated acts of terror is pathological and senseless. ╇ 9.╇ Thiemann may have some affinities with Stanley Hauerhaus, but he parts not viewing the church as “a separated community.” For Thiemann separation of the church from public life leaves faith communities without important theological resources to address the challenges of life in society. 10.╇ Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, 39–43. 11.╇ Cornél Du Torr, “Diversity in a Multicultural and Poly-Ethnic World: Challenges and Responses,” Religion & Theology 11, no. 3/4 (2004): 242. 12.╇ See Paul Chung, Public Theology in an Age of World Christianity: God’s Mission as Word-Event (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 13.╇ Victor Anderson’s Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology (New York: SUNY, 1998) argues against the idea that theology is a specialized discipline with a particular audience that reflects an outdated way to talk of public matters. He draws on classical pragmatism to explain that the public relevance of theology, especially given that theology is not exclusively concerned with explaining dogma, but has something of public importance to say in public moral argumentation. 14.╇ Duncan Forrester, “The Scope of Public Theology” Studies in Christian Ethics 17, no. 1 (2004): 6. 15.╇ Public theologians like Stanley Hauerwas believe the church as a beloved community should not be harmonized or placed at the service of American-style democratic political society. Others like David Tracy, James Gustafson, Linell Cady, Ronald Thiemann, Robin Lovin, Rebecca Chopp, Victor Anderson, and Benjamin Valentín argue in favor of understanding Christianity’s work toward the just transformation of public life. 16.╇ For the most part, the public theology associated with scholars such as John Neuhaus, Martin Marty, David Tracy, Max Stackhouse, Ronald Thiemann, Linell Cady, or David Hollenbach have not centered systematic and sustained attention on problematizing multicultural and multiethnic issues in American society. 17.╇ See John de Gruchy, “Public Theology as Christian Witness: Exploring the Genre,” International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007): 26–41. Also see Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, who ties his public theology to Christian beliefs and practices, but notes that in a pluralistic society, Christianity is one religious voice among many. 18.╇ Scott R. Paeth, “Jurgen Moltmann’s Public Theology,” Political Theology 6, no. 2 (2005): 219. 19.╇ See Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), who makes this point with respect to the nature specifically of Christian identity. 20.╇ See especially Benjamin Valentín, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity and Difference (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002).



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21.╇ Valentín, Mapping Public Theology, 74–80. 22.╇ Valentín, Mapping Public Theology, 83. 23.╇ Especially see Georgia Warnke, “Race, Gender, and Antiessentialist Politics,” Journal of Women in Culture & Society 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 93–94. 24.╇ See Linell E. Cady, Religion, Theology, and American Public Life (New York: SUNY, 1992), 92. 25.╇ See Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds—Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood, ed. Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 286. 26.╇ A very interesting work on African American political activism is Frederick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). In part, Harris examines the way African American religious culture cultivates politically relevant leadership skills, values, and understanding to participate in democratic culture, while challenging the oppressive character of white dominant culture. 27.╇ See Ezra Kopopelowitz and Matthew Diamond, “Religion That Strengthens Democracy: An Analysis of Religious Political Strategies in Israel,” Theory & Society 27, no. 5 (October 1998): 682. 28.╇ David Tracy, Theology, Critical Social Theory, and the Public Realm, in Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. D. S. Browning and F. S. Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 5.

Chapter 1: Expanding Our Academic Publics ╇ 1.╇ Fernando F. Segovia, “Toward Latino/a American Biblical Criticism: Latino(a) ness as Problematic,” in They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism, ed. Randall C. Bailey, Tat-Siong Benny Liew, Fernando F. Segovia (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 193–226. ╇ 2.╇ “Nevertheless, I believe that Latino/a theology has tended to focus predominantly on discussions of symbolic culture, identity, and difference, and has, therefore, given too little attention to the critical scrutiny of the multifaceted matrices that impinge upon the realization of a broader emancipatory political project and energy. As important as it is, I believe that the emphasis on specific localization that undergirds much of our liberationist discourse, which lends itself to an insular enchantment with matters of culture, identity, and difference, is too narrow to foster the kinds of overarching and harmonizing emancipatory visions that the goal of social justice requires in our time.” Benjamin Valentín, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity, and Difference (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), xiv. ╇ 3.╇ Benjamin Valentín, “Oye, ¿Y Ahora Que / Say. Now What?” in New Horizons in Hispanic/Latino(a) Theology, ed. Benjamin Valentín (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 107. Valentín’s new edited volume with Anthony B. Pinn, Creating Ourselves: African Americans and Hispanic Americans on Popular Culture and Religious Expressions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). ╇ 4.╇ Valentín, Mapping, 74. ╇ 5.╇ Néstor Medina, Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009).

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╇ 6.╇ See Michelle A. Gonzalez, Afro-Cuban Theology: Race, Religion, Culture, and Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), chap. 2. ╇ 7.╇ Orlando Espín, “Contours of a Latino/a Theology of Religions,” in Grace and Humanness: Theological Reflections Because of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007), 80–103. ╇ 8.╇ Valentín, “Nuevos Odres para el Vino: A Critical Contribution to Latino/a Theological Construction,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 5, no. 4 (1998): 32. ╇ 9.╇ Ana María Pineda, “The Murals: Rostros del Pueblo,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 8, no. 2 (2000): 5–17; Jeanette Rodríguez, “Tripuenteando: Journey toward Identity, the Academy, and Solidarity,” in Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World, ed. María Pilar Aquino and María José Rosado-Nunes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007), 75. 10.╇ Edwin David Aponte, “Metaphysical Blending in Latino/a Botánicas in Dallas,” in Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel A. De La Torres and Gastón Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006), 58. 11.╇ Orlando Espín and Miguel Díaz, “Introduction,” in From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology, ed. Orlando Espín and Miguel Díaz (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 1. 12.╇ Ruben Rosario Rodríguez, Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 12. 13.╇ Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 193. 14.╇ Allan Figueroa Deck, “Introduction,” in Frontiers of Hispanic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), ix. 15.╇ Espín, “Trinitarian Monotheism and the Birth of Popular Catholicism: The Case of Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” in The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 32–62; Alex GarcíaRivera, St. Martín de Porres: The “Little Stories” and the Semiotics of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995); Michelle A. Gonzalez, Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003). 16.╇ Manuel J. Mejido, “The Fundamental Problematic of U.S. Hispanic Theology,” in New Horizons in Hispanic/Latino(a) Theology, ed. Benjamín Valentín (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 172. 17.╇ Enrique Dussel, “The Political and Ecclesial Context of Liberation Theology in Latin America,” in The Emergent Gospel: Theology from the Underside of History, ed. Sergio Torres and Virginia Fabella (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978), 175. 18.╇ Rodríguez, “Tripuenteando.” 19.╇ María Pilar Aquino, “Latina Feminist Theology,” in Religion and Justice: A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology, ed. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 133–34. 20.╇ Nancy Pineda-Madrid, “Notes toward a Chicana Feminist Epistemology (and Why It Is Important for Latina Feminist Theologies),” in Aquino, Machado, and Rodríguez, A Reader In Latina Feminist Theology, 241–66. 21.╇ Aquino, “Latina Feminist Theology.” 22.╇ Gastón Espinosa, “History and Theory in the Study of Mexican American Religions,” in De La Torre and Espinosa, Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, 70.



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23.╇ Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995). 24.╇ David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3. 25.╇ While I agree with Vásquez’s assessment that liberationist Catholicism tends to emphasize the structural, this is not the case for all Catholic liberationists, both at the pastoral and academic levels. In other words, I find Vásquez’s evaluation to be a bit of an overstatement. 26.╇ David A. Badillo, Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 194. 27.╇ R. Andrew Chesnut, “A Preferential Option for the Spirit: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America’s New Religious Economy,” Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 55–56. 28.╇ Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, “Religious Education in an Immigrant Community: A Case Study,” in Hispanic Christian Thought at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Justo L. González, ed. Alvin Padilla, Roberto Goizueta, and Eldin Villafañe (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2005), 187–200. 29.╇ Nancy Pineda-Madrid, “Latina Theology,” in A Liberation Theology Primer, ed. Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Anthony Pinn (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 82. 30.╇ Arlene Sánchez Walsh, “Pentecostals,” in Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, ed. Edwin David Aponte and Miguel de la Torre (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006), 203. 31.╇ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32.╇ Various studies abound, including Juan Javier Pescador, Crossing Borders with the Santa Niño de Atocha (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); Badillo, Latinos and the New Immigrant Church. 33.╇ Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella, Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2002), viii.

Chapter 2: Escaping the Polarity of Race versus Gender and Ethnicity ╇ 1.╇ “Womanist” is a term adopted by many African American women religious scholars to identify their theological and (in many cases) political position as one that (1) uses the experience of African American women as a theological resource and (2) examines issues of race, gender, and class as interstructured oppression in order to propose theoretical and practical means for securing liberation for all of humanity and the earth. The word is adopted from Alice Walker’s definition of womanist as found in her book, Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). “Religious” indicates thinking that is grounded in matters of ultimate concern; in my case the Christian tradition is the ground for these matters. “Liberation ethical” points to the paradigm of ethical thinking that presupposes (a) morality is ideological and conceals relations of

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domination, (b) these relations must be exposed, and (c) an ethic of liberation must be based upon communitarian norms that disrupt those relations of domination. ╇ 2.╇ I am using the term “gender” to encompass the various constituencies of LGBQT community, but I will be focusing only on the debate about marriage as pertains to gay men and lesbian women. Also, although the terms “race” or “ethnicity” are sometimes used synonymously or as a hyphenated compound, in this essay I am choosing to use the terms as distinct categories that carry particular social and political meaning in the context of the United States. ╇ 3.╇ See www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week746/feature.html and www .politicsdaily.com/2009/06/15/african-americans-pastors-and-gay-rights/print/. ╇ 4.╇ See www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/05/eveningnews/main4502738 .shtml. It is my opinion that this commitment to traditional understandings of family is not surprising, especially given the ongoing struggle to overcome the ways that mainstream white sociologists and politicians (i.e., the 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro Family) have characterized black families as deviant and deficient, and their studies have been the basis of much public opinion and policy that has negatively affected the quest for familial stability in the African American community. ╇ 5.╇ This discussion of Brown v. Board of Education is informed by a paper presented by Barbara A. Holmes, JD, PhD, and Hon. Susan R. Holmes Winfield, Associate Judge Superior Court of the District of Columbia, entitled “Brown v. Board of Education: A Retrospective” at the American Academy of Religion in November 2004. ╇ 6.╇ Pamela Karwasinski and Katharine Shek, “A Guide to the No Child Left Behind Act,” www.centerfor publiceducation.org, July 3, 2007. ╇ 7.╇ See www.centerforpubliceducation.org. ╇ 8.╇ See www.centerforpubliceducation.org. ╇ 9.╇ See www.ed.gov/print/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/nationaloriginmemo.html (accessed on August 13, 2007). 10.╇ See www.supremecourtus.gov/supremecourtopinions/06slipopinion.html/ (accessed on July 12, 2007); www.cnn.com/LAW/ (accessed on July 12, 2007); http://usatoday.com (accessed on July 12, 2007). For an expanded discussion of the history of education policy and a critical analysis of that policy see Marcia Y. Riggs, “For Public Education that Practices and Promotes Peace,” in To Do Justice: Engaging Progressive Christians in Social Action (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008). 11.╇ See http://pewresearch.org/pubs/582/race-public-schools. 12.╇ See www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=16058. 13.╇ Rene Rolando Rocha, “Black/Brown Cooperation and Conflict in the Education Policymaking Process,” PhD dissertation, Texas A & M University, August 2006. 14.╇ Stephen Steinberg, “Immigration, African American, and Race Discourse,” New Politics X, no. 3 (2006), www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue39/Steinberg39.htm (accessed May 19, 2009). Steinberg makes the argument that previous and current immigrants establish their status in the United States over and against African Americans. In fact, this quote from Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” in Time (1973) cited by Steinberg sums up well his argument: “In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis



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is understood to be African Americans.” My discussion that follows does not ignore the validity of such an argument, especially presented to Euro-Americans; I am, however, pushing African Americans to take a look at the ways in which holding a moral posture premised upon this argument circumscribed greatly effective action toward liberation and justice. 15.╇ Betina Cutaia Wilkinson, Stella M. Rouse, N. Kim Nguyen, and James C. Garand, “The Real Face of the Immigration Debate? Explaining Attitudes toward Immigration Among African Americans,” (paper presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 12–15). 16.╇ Wilkinson et al., “The Real Face,” 9–13, 14. 17.╇ Wilkinson et al., “The Real Face,” 14–15. This study did not indicate any significant statistical difference in policy preference between immigration policy that affects general immigration and policy to address illegal immigration. 18.╇ Wilkinson et al., “The Real Face,” 15–16. 19.╇ Wilkinson et al., “The Real Face,” 17. 20.╇ See Rocha, “Black/Brown Cooperation and Conflict in the Education Policymaking Process.” Rocha cites Rodolfo de la Garza (“Latino Politics: A Futuristic View,” in Latinos and the Political System, ed. F. Chris Garcia [Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997], 453), who suggests that several points are likely responsible for the inability of Latinos and African Americans to form numerous and long-lasting rainbow coalitions. These include: (1) resentment among many blacks over Latino access to affirmative action programs that blacks believe were designed for them, (2) tensions because of the perception that immigration results in job displacement and the reallocation of public resources to Latinos rather than to blacks, and (3) battles over reapportionment and redistricting. Population is the foundation for allocating legislative seats. The numbers of state legislative seats is fixed, while the number of congressional seats allocated to each state may vary as a result of the census. In cities with substantial Latino and black populations, these groups often live in juxtaposition. Where Latino population growth greatly exceeds black population growth, any increase in legislative seats designed to accommodate the growth of the Latino population could come at the expense of blacks. 21.╇ William C. Fisher, David Gerber, Jorge Guitart, and Maxine Seller, eds., Identity, Community, and Pluralism in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 179. The term “nativist” was used historically (1845) to point to those whose position on immigration emphasized a distinction between and defense of those who were native born in the United States against foreigners coming into the country; foreigners were considered invaders who were a threat. For a more contemporary discussion of nationalism, see Jyoti Puri, Encountering Nationalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 22.╇ See www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15213252. 23.╇ My fullest womanist understanding of moral community includes all of God’s creation—humans, plant, animal, and the planet earth. But, for the purposes of this discussion, I am concerned with how humans live as a moral community. 24.╇ Chris Marshall, The Little Book of Biblical Justice: A Fresh Approach to the Bible’s Teachings on Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2005), chap. 3. 25.╇ Marshall, The Little Book of Biblical Justice, 48. 26.╇ Marshall, The Little Book of Biblical Justice, chap. 4.

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Chapter 3: Global Hegemonic Power, Democracy, and the Theological Praxis of the Subaltern Multitude ╇ 1.╇ See Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). ╇ 2.╇ Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 58. ╇ 3.╇ Susan Hawthorne, Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalization, Bio/Diversity (Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2002). ╇ 4.╇ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). ╇ 5.╇ Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981), 208–9. Also see Analouise Keating, “Forging El Mundo Zurdo: Changing Ourselves, Changing the World,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 519–30. ╇ 6.╇ Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998). ╇ 7.╇ Wink, The Powers That Be, 39. ╇ 8.╇ Wink, The Powers That Be, 39–40. ╇ 9.╇ Wink, The Powers That Be, 39–40. 10.╇ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 11.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xiii. 12.╇ Charles Amjad-Ali and Lester Edwin Ruiz, “Betrayed by a Kiss: Evangelicals and U.S. Empire,” in Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Heltzel (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008), 55. 13.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 59. 14.╇ Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv. 15.╇ Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23. 16.╇ See Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology Between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 21–23. Schreiter uses “antiglobalism” to refer to two of its expressions in theology, namely, revanchism, and fundamentalism. Mark Juergensmeyer uses antiglobalism to refer to fundamentalist and militant opposition to globalization. See his essay, “Religious Antiglobalism,” in Religion in Global Civil Society, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 135–48. 17.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 55. 18.╇ “Defense” presupposes an “external” threat that must be contained or defeated; “security” presupposes that the enemy is everywhere (inside and outside national borders) that must be managed, neutralized, or crushed, including the application of “preemptive strikes.” 19.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 6–7. 20.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 100. 21.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 100.



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22.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 129. 23.╇ Cited in Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, intro. 24.╇ Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 38. 25.╇ Angela West, Deadly Innocence: Feminism and the Mythology of Sin (London: Mowbray, 1995); Justo González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1990), 38–40, 75–80. 26.╇ Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 191. 27.╇ See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 17–22. 28.╇ Ann Kirkus Wetherilt, That They May Be Many: Voices of Women, Echoes of God (New York: Continuum, 1994), 117. 29.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 134. 30.╇ Hawthorne, Wild Politics, 68. 31.╇ Angela Davis in Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, foreword. 32.╇ Cited in Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 57. 33.╇ Cited in Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 60. 34.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 109; Also, Hardt and Negri, Empire, 292–93. 35.╇ Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 160. 36.╇ R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120. 37.╇ Ivan Petrella, ed., Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), xvii. 38.╇ Petrella, Latin American Liberation Theology, xv. 39.╇ Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 15th Anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), xxii. 40.╇ James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 20th Anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), xvii. 41.╇ Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xiv; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989). 42.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 206. 43.╇ Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 28. 44.╇ Eleazar S. Fernandez, Reimagining the Human: Theological Anthropology in Response to Systemic Evil (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004). 45.╇ Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 59. 46.╇ Charlotte Bunch, “Going Public with Our Vision,” in Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, ed. Virginia Cyrus (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1993), 389. 47.╇ Aida Hortado, The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 42. 48.╇ Hortado, The Color of Privilege, 42; Patricia Zavella, “The Problematic Relationship of Feminism and Chicana Studies,” Women’s Studies 17:123–34.

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49.╇ Source: www.battleinseattlebook.com/index.html (accessed September 22, 2009). 50.╇ Eleazar S. Fernandez, “Diaspora, Babel, Pentecost, and the Strangers in our Midst: Birthing a Church of Radical Hospitality,” in Postcolonial Interventions, ed. Tat-siong Benny Liew (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 147–48. Also, Mark Lewis Taylor, “Spirit and Liberation: Achieving Postcolonial Theology in the United States,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherin Keller, Michael Nausner, and Myra Rivera (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004), 40. 51.╇ Joseph Bessler, “Seminaries as Endangered Habitats in a Fragile Ecosystem: A New Ecology Model,” in Revitalizing Practice: Collaborative Models for Theological Faculties (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 9. 52.╇ Hardt and Negri, Empire, 138. 53.╇ Benjamin Valentín, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity, and Difference (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002), 105. 54.╇ Valentín, Mapping Public Theology, 107. 55.╇ Marcella María Althaus-Reid, “In the Centre There Are No Fragments: Teologías Desencajadas (Reflections on Unfitting Theologies),” in Public Theology for the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Duncan Forrester, ed. William Storrar and Andrew Norton (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 367. 56.╇ See William Schweiker, “Public Theology and the Cosmopolitan Conscience,” in Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max L. Stackhouse, ed. Deirdre King Hainsworth and Scott R. Paeth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 130. 57.╇ Raimundo Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1964), 24. 58.╇ Schweiker, “Public Theology and the Cosmopolitan Conscience,” 132. 59.╇ Holmes Rolston III, “Values in Nature,” in Environmental Ethics 3, no. 2, cited in Jay McDaniel, Of God and the Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1989), 57. 60.╇ Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Also, Schweiker, “Public Theology and the Cosmopolitan Conscience,” 134–35. 61.╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xv. 62.╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 97. 63.╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 112. 64.╇ Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1971), 36, 44. 65.╇ Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Poststructuralist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69–98. 66.╇ Cited in Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 41.

Response to Eleazar S. Fernández ╇ 1.╇ Eleazar Fernández, “Global Hegemonic Power, Democracy, and the Theological Praxis of Subaltern Multitude,” 58.



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╇ 2.╇ Jon Sobrino, The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 33. ╇ 3.╇ Fernández., “Global Hegemonic Power,” 58. ╇ 4.╇ See also his Reimagining the Human: Theological Anthropology in Response to Systemic Evil (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004). ╇ 5.╇ Fernández, “Global Hegemonic Power,” 58. ╇ 6.╇ Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Theological Language: Fullness of Silence,” in Gustavo Gutiérrez: Essential Writings, ed. James Nickoloff (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1996), 66–71.

Chapter 4: The Role of Latino/a Ethics in the Public Square ╇ 1.╇ Note, for example, the most recent publications by Latina/o theologians: Carmen Nanko-Fernández, Theologizing in Espanglish: Context, Community, and Ministry (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010); Miguel de la Torre, Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004); and Benjamín Valentín and Anthony Pinn, eds., Creating Ourselves: African Americans and Hispanic Americans on Popular Culture and Religious Expression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). ╇ 2.╇ One of every two people added to the nation’s population between July 1, 2003, and July 1, 2004, were Hispanic. www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/ releases/archives/population/005164.html. ╇ 3.╇ U.S. Census Bureau, “The Hispanic Population in the United States: March 2002” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, June 2003). Other figures include: on average, 57 percent graduate from high school while 11 percent go on to receive a bachelor’s degree or more; of Hispanic groups living under the poverty line, Puerto Ricans top the list at 26.1 percent living under the poverty line; one in three Hispanic children (30.4 percent) live in poverty although they represent only 17.7 percent of all children in the United States. The 2010 Census will be a critical tool to better asses the demographics, progress, and real needs of the Hispanic communities across the nation. It remains to be seen whether the current social climate regarding immigration law and reform will interfere with accurate and honest readings of the demographics of Hispanic communities. ╇ 4.╇ The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics defines the common good as those dimensions in the social order that help society and its members flourish through a set of rights and practices of participation, upholding the dignity of the person at the individual and corporate levels. John Langan, The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, “Common Good” (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1986), 102. This chapter focuses on the possibilities for incorporating the particular insights of Latina/o theologies into the conversation in the civil society about the good of society. Ultimately, as will be shown, this exercise entails uncovering those elements in civil society that mask racial, economic, ethnic, religious, and cultural violence in the name of a good narrowly defined by the interests of a few and the market.

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╇ 5.╇ Roberto Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (New York: Orbis Books, 1995), 188. It is important to understand that the first generation Latina/o theology did not shy away from difficult, controversial, or radical themes. Rather, theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Orlando Espín, and Jeannette Rodríguez incorporated themes about economic justice, colonialism, racism, and gender into their discussions on the cultural and religious wealth of Latina/o spirituality, rituals, and daily life. Therefore, upon closer reading, these cultural theologies were rather radical by not abstracting Latino/a religiosity from its socioeconomic and political context. ╇ 6.╇ I use “expanded” and “radicalized” interchangeably when referring to the task of this project with respect to themes in Latina/o theology because I hope to begin a process of further radicalization of these themes that a new generation of theologians can use to address issues of sociopolitical and economic liberation that were not overtly the main thrust of the discussions of the first generation of Latina/o theologians. ╇ 7.╇ Ismael García, Dignidad: Ethics Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997), 28. ╇ 8.╇ García, Dignidad, 15. ╇ 9.╇ García, Dignidad, 15. 10.╇ García, Dignidad, 44, 50. For García there is no individual morality or universal ethics. Morality is incarnated in the values, practices, and conceptions of the good a group may have, and to understand it we have to understand how a community lives on a day-to-day basis. 11.╇ García, Dignidad, 58–59. 12.╇ García, Dignidad, 63. 13.╇ Ada María Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha/In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 34, 52, 162, 177–202. Also in Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “A New Mestizaje/Mulatez: Reconceptualizing Difference,” in A Dream Unfinished: Theological Reflections on America from the Margins, ed. Eleazar S. Fernández and Fernando F. Segovia (New York: Orbis Books, 2001), 203–19. Regarding the positive use of the binomial mestizaje/mulatez, heavily influenced by the work of Virgilio Elizondo, Isasi-Díaz comments: “The insistence in Hispanic/Latina theology, including mujerista theology, on seeing and using mestizaje/mulatez as a positive element and proposing it as an ethical choice is indicative of our preoccupation with understanding and dealing with difference.” 14.╇ Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha, 56. 15.╇ Isasi-Díaz, “A New Mestizaje/Mulatez,” 216: “The cohesiveness that allows us to see ourselves as a unity revolves around five elements: the Spanish language; popular religion; social-cultural psychological survival; economic oppression; and our vision of the future. These elements are the building blocks of mestizaje/ mulatez.” Also Isasi-Díaz, “A New Mestizaje/Mulatez,” 218–19. 16.╇ Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 32–41. 17.╇ Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 108–9; 128: “I would suggest that, rather than superseding the ethical-political, the aesthetic dimension of human action is mediated by the ethical-political; it is encountered and lived out within ethical-political action, as the deepest meaning and significance of the ethical-political. The aesthetic is not a final stage beyond the ethical but the fullest sense of the ethical—and, for that reason, encountered only within the context of ethical-political action.”



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18.╇ Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 173: “The preferential option for the poor is a necessary precondition for authentic pluralism. If mutual respect and understanding presuppose a relationship of others, oppression, injustice, marginalization, and exclusion are the names we give to the denial of the particularity and otherness of certain persons, namely, the poor. Thus, as long as there are poor persons there can be no pluralism.” 19.╇ Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha, 203; Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 162. 20.╇ There should be little question that this approach to theological reflection is still considered innovative and somewhat controversial. One example serves to highlight this fact. At an ethics colloquium that included doctoral students and faculty from some of the top academic programs in New England, a Caucasian female student was presenting her paper on the anthropology of Karl Rahner. Part of her methodology for analyzing Rahner’s work stemmed from conversations her mother had had in her home as part of a parish program that matched older couples with newly married couples to discuss the challenges of marriage and young family life. When she apologized for her lengthy description of her method based on personal conversations around a kitchen table rather than an academically proven method of analysis, African American ethicist Valerie Dixon and myself informed her that womanist and mujerista theologies highly value “kitchen table theology” as an analytical tool and source of theological insight. Both theologies, as well as other liberation theologies, privilege the viewpoint and wisdom of marginalized groups of people in their contexts in developing theological discourse. 21.╇ Benjamín Valentín, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity, and Difference (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002), 45. 22.╇ Valentín, Mapping Public Theology, 4, 45, 128. 23.╇ Manuel Mejido, “Beyond the Postmodern Condition, or the Turn toward Psychoanalysis,” in Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation, ed. Ivan Petrella (New York: Orbis Books, 2005), 126–27, 133. Mejido is also concerned with the use of U.S. liberation theologies, and Latina/o theology in particular, as a participant in the discourse of civil society in the United States. In his view civil society serves the purpose of sustaining and strengthening the structures of liberal democratic capitalism such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas. He would much rather see U.S. Hispanic theologies (his preferred term) regain the liberationist meta-narrative that seeks to alter the basic assumptions of civil society rather than have it be a particular participant in the conversation (134–35). 24.╇ Otto Maduro’s comments came within a discussion that was part of the question-and-answer period at a presentation by Miguel Díaz at the Summer Workshop of the Hispanic Theological Initiative, July 2003. 25.╇ García, Dignidad, 18–25. 26.╇ Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha, 4, 34–44, 58–59. 27.╇ Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 140–72. 28.╇ Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 200. 29.╇ García, Dignidad, 90–91; Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha, 58–59; Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 180. In addition, political theologians in the United States, such as Gregory Baum and M. Shawn Copeland, have openly critiqued the inherent violence in this particular myth that relates success to hard work (regardless of condition at

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birth) in the United States, especially after September 11, 2001, and the effects of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast. 30.╇ García, Dignidad, 84–85. 31.╇ García, Dignidad, 106–12. 32.╇ This view of civil society as composed of a diversity of groups that are held together by a loose or thin vision of the common good stands in contrast to civil society as a homogeneous body that demands the assimilation of every group for the purpose of sustaining a vision of the good narrowly defined by the center of power or the political and economic elite. 33.╇ In addition, such a loose or thin vision of civil society can also serve to vilify the “other” by pointing out the increasing fragmentation in U.S. society based on interest groups alone. Samuel Huntington’s essay, “The Hispanic Challenge” (Foreign Policy, March/April 2004), is an example of the rhetoric of social fragmentation that made headway after September 11, 2001. Its claim is that the bulwark of U.S. civil society—the values inherited from Anglo-European forbearers of the country—are under serious threat from the new waves of immigrant groups (in Huntington’s case, Hispanics) that are perceived as resisting assimilation and demanding that the laws and institutions of society be changed to accommodate a group’s particular needs (such as bilingual education or driver’s license for undocumented immigrants). 34.╇ Throughout this section I am using the term “radicalization” for the sake of brevity. In reality the more appropriate term should be “re-radicalization” because in no way do I want to give the impression that the themes of Latina/o theology that I discuss here were not radical in their original formulations and subsequent use. These themes were radical in one way that highlighted the oppression, invisibility, and marginalization of the Latino/a peoples in the United States with respect to cultural and identity politics. The reradicalization I hope for will begin to highlight the economic and political dimensions of injustice. 35.╇ “Reconciliation: An Intrinsic Element of Justice,” in Explorations in Reconciliation, ed. David Tombs (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006); “Justicia: A Reconciliatory Praxis of Care and Tenderness,” in New Forms of Solidarity between the North and the South: Universalize Justice (Frankfurt am Main: IKO—Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2006). 36.╇ Orlando Espín, quoted in a University of Dayton press release, “Latina Grandmothers Are Responsible for Survival of Popular Catholicism, Says Leading Latino Scholar,” November 14, 1997, www.udayton.edu/news/nr/111497.html. 37.╇ Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús, 121. 38.╇ As a point of further clarification, the radicalization of the terms “mestizaje”/ “mulatez” through a reading of its tragic history should not be construed to mean a cosmic “regret” for the existence of an entire people. The “never again” refers to the violent conditions that led to a mestizo Latina/o peoples, much like the “never again” of the Jewish Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, or the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans refers to the violence perpetrated and not to the human offspring of that violence. 39.╇ M. Shawn Copeland, “Black Political Theologies,” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 276, 283.



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40.╇ Carmen Marie Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border: The Preferential Option for the Poor in the United States,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, ed. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 185–86, 188. 41.╇ Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border,” 191, 197. 42.╇ Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border,” 186. 43.╇ Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border,” 189. In fact, for Nanko this is all the more evident among immigrant communities for whom liberation is seen in terms of achieving the middle-class lifestyle (179). 44.╇ Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border,” 194. 45.╇ Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border,” 195. 46.╇ More recently, the new generation of Latina/o theologians are centering their theological projects on the works of Latin American liberation theologians previously unused or used very seldom in the United States. See Michael E. Lee, Bearing the Weight of Salvation: The Soteriology of Ignacio Ellacuría (Chestnut Ridge, NY: Crossroads Publishing, 2009); Ivan Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic (Retrieving Liberation Theology) (London: SCM Press, 2008); and Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Post-colonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 2007). 47.╇ The 2004 report American Catholics in the Public Square: A Report to the Catholic Community concluded that “since the middle of the last century—assimilation, the election of a Catholic president, Vatican II, and the acceptance of separation of church and state—much of Catholicism and Catholic social teaching has come to seem congenial in a liberal democratic society.” The Commonweal Foundation, American Catholics in the Public Square: A Report to the Catholic Community, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trust, 2004, www.commonweal.com. Sociologist Alan Wolfe finds that “Americans from the earliest times have shaped religion to account for their personal needs. . . . Always in a state of transition, faith in the United States, especially in the last half century or so, has been further transformed with dazzling speed. Tracing the history of Christian thought from the New Testament to the twentieth century, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr documented the many ways in which Christ could become a transformer of culture. But in the U.S. culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores. In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture—and American culture has triumphed.” Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003), 2–3. 48.╇ This is not to say that these elements are not essential to conceptions of the good in U.S. society. Human rights, the autonomy of the person, the right to private property, and equality, for example, are crucial pillars for a just society. Rather than demanding the elimination of these basic principles of a free and just society, Latina/o theology can serve as a corrective for the ways in which these principles can be corrupted from their original intent to protect the person in the face of tyrannical governments, excessive police force, and a partial justice system. In A Liberation Ethic for the One-Third World: The Preferential Option for the Poor and Challenges to Middle-Class Christianity in the United States I argue that these basic and foundational principles of U.S. society have been corrupted by overemphasis on individualism, self-reliance, upward mobility, competition, and a market-driven definition of the

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self that effectively removes the communitarian and solidarian dimensions embedded in their original meaning. See “A Liberation Ethic for the One-Third World: The Preferential Option for the Poor and Challenges to Middle-Class Christianity in the United States” (PhD diss., Boston College, January 1, 2007). 49.╇ Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “In Such a Time as This,” in Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics, and the New War, ed. John L. Berquist (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002) 296–305. 50.╇ Isasi-Díaz, “In Such a Time as This,” 298–99. 51.╇ Pew Hispanic Center, “Survey of Latino Attitudes on the War in Iraq,” February 7, 2005 (Washington, DC), 2–3. 52.╇ I here lift up the examples of two particular church bodies seeking to provide a voice in the public square: the United Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church. Both of them articulated different visions of what health-care reform guided by principles of justice, equity, and the preferential option for the poor would look like. However, they both tried to energize the public square to discuss the sort of values that would represent the good in a society that seeks to care for its weakest and most vulnerable members. 53.╇ Ileana Delgado Castro, “Ingobernables: El estado de la democracia en Puerto Rico,” El Nuevo Dia, November 6, 2005. 54.╇ League of United Latin American Citizens, “Self-Determination for Puerto Rico: Introductory Remarks by LULAC National President Rick Dovalina,” Washington, DC, September 16, 1998, http://lulac.org/advocacy/issues/puertorico/speech.html. 55.╇ See www.bls.gov/ (accessed May 14, 2010). 56.╇ See www.bls.gov/lau/ (accessed May 14, 2010). 57.╇ Samuel Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge.” 58.╇ Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge.”

Response to María Teresa Dávila ╇ 1.╇ Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation Theology, trans. John Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1976), 40. ╇ 2.╇ R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 122. ╇ 3.╇ María Teresa Dávila citing Carmen Marie Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border: The Preferential Option for the Poor in the United States,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, ed. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 189. ╇ 4.╇ Gregory Mantsios, “Class in America: Myths and Realities,” in Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 57. ╇ 5.╇ Joerg Rieger, “Liberating God-Talk: Postcolonialism and the Challenge of the Margins,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004), 218. ╇ 6.╇ Manuel Mejido is cited by Dávila. See Mejido, “Beyond the Postmodern Condition, or the Turn toward Psychoanalysis,” in Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation, ed. Ivan Petrella (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 126–27, 133.



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Chapter 5: Pluralist Separatism and Community ╇ 1.╇ Jace Weaver and Laura Adams Weaver, “The Adamant of Time: Native American Land, Architecture, and Ethics,” in Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, ed. Gregory Caicco (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007), 184. ╇ 2.╇ Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 6. ╇ 3.╇ Though the word “survivance” exists in French, Native writer and critic Gerald Vizenor repurposed it in English for Native Americans. In Vizenor’s sense it combines “survival” and “endurance.” See Jace Weaver, “A Lantern to See By: Survivance and a Journey into the Dark Heart of Oklahoma,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 326. ╇ 4.╇ Edward J. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 208; emphasis original. ╇ 5.╇ Ingebresten, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, 207. ╇ 6.╇ Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, 10. ╇ 7.╇ Quoted in Michael Harrington, The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 132. ╇ 8.╇ Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, 205. ╇ 9.╇ Congress outlawed the slave trade as of January 1, 1808, the first moment at which it could do so. Their plenary power over Indians remains. U.S. Const., Art. 1, § 8, para. 3 and Art. 1, §9, para. 1 (1787). 10.╇ Jace Weaver, “Original Simplicities and Present Complexities: Reinhold Nuebuhr, Ethnocentrism, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism,” in Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 142–43; Reinhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert, A Nation So Conceived (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 123. 11.╇ The Haudenousanee Confederacy was formed prior to white contact, as early as 900 C.E. and no later than 1500. See Bruce E. Johansen and Donald A. Grinde Jr., The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 101. 12.╇ Joseph B. Thoburn and Muriel H. Wright, Oklahoma: A History of the State and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1929), 2:656. 13.╇ Niebuhr and Heimert, A Nation So Conceived, 149. 14.╇ See, for example, M. Steven Fish and Robin S. Brooks, “Does Diversity Hurt Democracy?” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 1 (January 2004): 154–66. 15.╇ Dave Castle, “Hearts, Minds and Radical Democracy,” Red Pepper, June 1, 1998, www.redpepper.org.uk/Hearts-Minds-and-Radical-Democracy (accessed May 22, 2010). The interview was joint with Ernesto Laclau, Mouffe’s coauthor of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 16.╇ Charles Eastman, The Soul of an Indian: An Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 47. 17.╇ Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33; George E.

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Tinker, “An American Indian Theological Response to Ecojustice,” in Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice, ed. Jace Weaver (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 173. 18.╇ “What Is Restorative Justice?” Center for Restorative Justice, Suffolk University, 2010, www.suffolk.edu/rsearch/6953.html (accessed May 23, 2010). 19.╇ Restorative Justice Online, www.restorativejustice.org (accessed May 21 and 23, 2010). 20.╇ Ella Cara Deloria, Speaking of Indians (New York: Friendship Press, 1944), 34–37. 21.╇ Little Crow, August 18, 1862, reported in “Taoyeteduta Is Not a Coward,” Minnesota History (September 1962); Wayne Moquin with Charles Van Doren, eds., Great Documents in American Indian History (New York: Praeger, 1973), 171–72. Much of the discussion of Little Crow’s War is drawn from my book Turtle Goes to War: Of Military Commissions, the Constitution, and American Indian Memory (New Haven, CT: Trylon and Perisphere Press, 2002), 33–34. 22.╇ Ralph K. Andrist, The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indian (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 62. 23.╇ Andrist, The Long Death, 63–64. 24.╇ Noel Holston, “‘Dakota Conflict’ a Sad Story,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 27, 1993; Jace Weaver, “Native Americans in U.S. Society,” in Challenge: Racism, ed. Donn Downall (Nashville, TN: Cokesbury, 1994), 43. 25.╇ Tim Schouls, Shifting Boundaries: Aboriginal Identity, Pluralist Theory, and the Politics of Self-Government (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003), x, viii. 26.╇ Schouls, Shifting Boundaries, x–xi. 27.╇ Schouls, Shifting Boundaries, x–xi, 149, 113. 28.╇ Weaver, Turtle, xiv–xv; Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2006), 46. 29.╇ I relate the story of this exchange in “A Biblical Paradigm for Native Liberation,” in Jace Weaver, Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 242–45, upon which account I draw now.

Response to Jace Weaver ╇ 1.╇ Detroit Institute of Arts, Events and Exhibitions, “Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present.” ╇ 2.╇ See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). ╇ 3.╇ My definition of eros follows Georges Bataille in Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalywood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, [1957] 1986). ╇ 4.╇ Cherrie Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 161. ╇ 5.╇ See Karen Caplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem, Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnationalisms, and the State (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).



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Chapter 6: American Prophecy ╇ 1.╇ Cesar Chavez quoted in Catherine Ingram, In the Footsteps of Gandhi (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990), 120. ╇ 2.╇ Mohandas Gandhi in Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 267. ╇ 3.╇ Art Torres, quoted in Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, Cesar Chavez: A Triumph of Spirit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 173. ╇ 4.╇ See especially Manuel Orozco, The Common Sense of Non-Violence (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). ╇ 5.╇ Cherrie Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 161. ╇ 6.╇ Chavez himself has pointed out that Gandhi was also a labor leader who organized unions. Cesar Chavez quoted in Catherine Ingram, In the Footsteps of Gandhi (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990), 120. ╇ 7.╇ See Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). ╇ 8.╇ The most detailed recollections appear in Jacques Levy’s 1975 book, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: W. W. Norton). Also, Peter Matthessen’s Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1969] 2000) contains much of his autobiography. These texts are written in a classical Latin American style of the testimonio, or testimony. ╇ 9.╇ Cesar Chavez quoted in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 11. 10.╇ See Cesar Chavez, “Eulogy for Juana Estrada Chavez,” in The Words of Cesar Chavez, ed. Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2002), 221. 11.╇ Chavez in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 19. 12.╇ Chavez, “Eulogy for Juana Estrada Chavez,” 223. 13.╇ Chavez quoted in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 25. This is what Virgil Elizondo and Fred Dalton call “home-based” or casita religion. 14.╇ See especially Frederick John Dalton, The Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002). 15.╇ Chavez in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 37. 16.╇ Levy, Cesar Chavez, 77 17.╇ Levy, Cesar Chavez, 84. 18.╇ Levy, Cesar Chavez, 84–85. 19.╇ Marc Grossman, e-mail correspondence, July 16, 2010. 20.╇ See Sanford Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: The Life and Legacy of Saul Alinsky (New York: Knopf, 1989). 21.╇ Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes, 281. 22.╇ On the organic intellectual, see Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Mario T. Garcia and Jose Orosco prefer the term “community intellectual.” 23.╇ Marc Grossman, Anthony Chavez, interview, video recorded, August 19, 2010. 24.╇ Griswold and Castillo, Cesar Chavez, 3. 25.╇ See Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

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26.╇ See, for example, Pat Hoffman, The Ministry of the Dispossessed (Los Angeles: Wallace Press, 1987). See also John Gregory Dunne, Delano, 2nd ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). 27.╇ See Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams. 28.╇ Robert Kennedy quoted in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 205. 29.╇ Spencer Bennett, “Civil Religion in a New Context: The Mexican-American Faith of Cesar Chavez,” in Religion and Political Power, ed. Gustavo Benavides and M. W. Daly (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 4. 30.╇ For a classic formulation of racial theory and “internal colonialism,” see Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 31.╇ A Union in the Community, compiled from voice recording of Chavez in Detroit, May 1967, printed January, 1969 (box 9, 7), 16. 32.╇ Bill Gormley, “Cesar Chavez: The Paradoxes of Greatness,” The Pitt News, November 3, 1969. 33.╇ King quoted in Clayborne Carson, ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 123. 34.╇ King quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage, 1986), 118. 35.╇ Chavez quoted in Ingram, In The Footsteps of Gandhi, 107. 36.╇ Chavez quoted in Mathiessen, Sal si Puedes, 187. 37.╇ Eugene Nelson, Huelga: The First Hundred Days of the Great Delano Grape Strike (Delano, CA: Farm Workers Press, 1966), 52. 38.╇ Levy, Cesar Chavez, 91–92. 39.╇ Chavez quoted in Ingram, In the Footsteps of Gandhi, 119. 40.╇ For an excellent history and description of “Ahimsa” and “Satyagraha,” as well as King’s relationship to Gandhi, see Michael J. Nojeim, Gandhi and King: The Power of Non-Violent Resistance (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). 41.╇ Chavez quoted in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 289. 42.╇ Sam Kushner, Long Road to Delano (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 165. 43.╇ The telegrams are located in the Office of the President collection, at the United Farm Workers Archives at the Walter Reuther Library for Labor Studies at Wayne State University. 44.╇ See note 43. 45.╇ Chavez, in Griswald and Castillo, A Triumph of Spirit, 150 46.╇ Max Weber, “The Prophet,” in The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 46–59. 47.╇ Chavez quoted in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 84. 48.╇ Chavez quoted in Levy, Cesar Chavez, 270. 49.╇ For a good compilation of Chavez’s aphorisms, see Ilan Stavans, ed., Cesar Chavez: An Organizer’s Tale (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), 235–38. 50.╇ Orosco, Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Non-Violence, 110. 51.╇ Orosco, Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Non-Violence, 113. 52.╇ Chavez in Matthiessen, Sal si Puedes, 27. 53.╇ King, Why We Can’t Wait, 27. 54.╇ Quoted in Mario T. Garcia, ed., The Gospel of Cesar Chavez: My Faith in Action (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward, 2007), 119.



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55.╇ King in Carson, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 25.

Response to Luis Leon ╇ 1.╇ Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 53–59. ╇ 2.╇ Weaver, That the People Might Live, 54–55. ╇ 3.╇ Reinhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert, A Nation So Conceived (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 11.

Chapter 7: “Salvation and Transformation” ╇ 1.╇ For an analysis of Rev. Luis Cortes (American Baptist) and Nueva Esperanza, which was founded in 1987, see Catherine Wilson, The Politics of Latino Faith: Religion, Identity, and Urban Community (New York: New York University Press, 2008), and Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Sustaining Hope, Creating Opportunities: The Challenge of Ministry among Hispanic Immigrants (Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2003), 30–33. For information on Rev. Miguel Rivera (Pentecostal) and CONLAMIC, which was organized in 1998, see their website: www.conlamic .org/pages_sp.php?pagina=pg_mision.php. Like the NHCLC, CONLAMIC did not fully move into the national limelight until the 2006 debate over comprehensive immigration reform. For a general discussion of Latino Protestant and Catholic faith based activism over the past 150 years see Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda, eds., Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). All references to the Latino Religions and Politics (LRAP) national survey (n = 1,104) are found in the following seventy-page study: Gastón Espinosa, Latino Religion and Politics: Catholics, Protestants, the 2008 Election, and Beyond (Claremont, CA: Claremont McKenna College, 2009). I wish to thank Rick Hunter of SDR Consulting and Elise Edwards for respectively carrying out the data analyses and helping to prepare the manuscript for publication. I also wish to thank The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science for permission to reprint portions of this chapter. ╇ 2.╇ The NHCLC website lists many of these leaders on their national website under the title of “History”: www.nhclc.org/history. In their statement about “Who We Are” they write: “We stand committed to reconciling the vertical and horizontal elements of the Christian Cross. A Cross that is Covenant and Community, Salvation and Transformation, Righteousness and Justice, John 3:16 and Matthew 25, Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr.” www.nhclc.org/who-we-are. Adrian CampoFlores, “The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez: Ministering to the Needs of His People,” Newsweek, December 31, 2007; Ben Smith, “Hispanics Turn Cold Shoulder to McCain,” Politico, October 9, 2008; Tim Stafford, “The Call of Samuel: Samuel Rodriguez Wants to Build a Bridge between Hispanic and Anglo Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, September 2006; Gastón Espinosa, Email Interview with Samuel Rodriguez, April 12, 2009; Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Sustaining Hope, 30–33.

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╇ 3.╇ For evidence of the fear of mixing religion and politics see Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, Latino Religions, 284–85. ╇ 4.╇ The NHCLC website provides film footage and still photos of meeting and working with Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Sam Brownback, John McCain and other Republican and Democratic leaders on comprehensive immigration reform. They were also quoted, identified, and/or profiled on CNN, Newsweek, Bill Moyers, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, USA Today, NBC, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, MSNBC, Fox News, Charisma magazine, Christianity Today, Promise Keepers, Telemundo, Univision, and in countless other smaller newspapers, radio shows, and media outlets. For evidence of these profiles see their website (www.nhclc.org/who-we-are) and an advanced Google search. This chapter could have just as well have focused on the work that Luis Cortes and Nueva Esperanza and Rev. Miguel Rivera and CONLAMIC are carrying out on behalf of comprehensive immigration reform. I’ve selected the NHCLC because its Pentecostal origins, leadership, and relative youthfulness make it something of an anomaly in the world of Latino faith-based political activism. Also, very little has been written on Rodriguez and this organization. For more on Cortes and Nueva Esperanza see Wilson, The Politics of Latino Faith. ╇ 5.╇ Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 230–35, 245–47, 320–33; Edwin I. Hernández, Kenneth G. Davis, Milagros Peña, Georgian Schiopu, Jeffry Smith, and Matthew T. Loveland, Faith and Values in Action: Religion, Politics, and Social Attitudes Among U.S. Latinos/as (Notre Dame, IN: Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame, 2007). ╇ 6.╇ Robert Bernstein, “U.S. Hispanic Population Surpasses 45 Million: Now 15 Percent of Total” (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau Public Information Office, May 1, 2008). ╇ 7.╇ See note 11. Self-identification is the standard sociological and social-science method of classifying respondents. This approach is more exact and representative of how Latinos view their religious identity. This strikes me as a more appropriate approach than projecting a theological framework and classification onto an individual or a community because it tends to exclude groups on the basis of theological definitions of what constitutes orthodox or traditional Christian doctrine, which invariably forces one to take a normative position. This study sought to further analyze the “no religion” respondents because previous studies have indicated that a large percentage of these individuals also reported that they believe in God, attend church, pray, and read the Bible on a daily or weekly basis. We found that more than a third (34 percent) of the “no religion” respondents said that they actually believed in God and self-identified as Christian, Catholic, or Protestant, but were either not practicing their religion at the time of the survey or literally did not have any one particular religious tradition or church that they preferred over another at the time. For this reason, they stated that they had no religion. However, this information above and below indicated that a more precise reading of their comments is that they had no religious preference at the time of the survey rather than not believing in God. This point is consistent with other research that found that many Americans and Latinos have varying levels of religious commitment and often multiple religious identities.



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For example, the LRAP survey found that another 46 percent of the “no religion” respondent population (on top of the 34 percent noted above) reported that they believed in God or were spiritual but did not have any one particular religious tradition they preferred over another (17 percent) or that they had no desire to know God personally or did practice any religion (29 percent) at the time of the survey. In total, 80 percent of the “no religion” respondents said they were Christian, believed in God, and/or were spiritual. They thus selected “no religion” as their answer on the survey for reasons other than not actually believing in God or not having a religion in the Western, Euro-centric, and academic notion. In fact, only 17 percent of the “no religion” respondents selected as their explanation the option: “I literally have no personal religious belief or faith in God or in organized religion.” Despite this, there is no doubt that the rate of Latinos that actually self-identify as having no religion does in fact increase with each successive generation, albeit in a much more limited manner than previously believed. In light of this, the Latino population is more religious and Christian than hitherto reported because past methodological approaches and analyses have not fully refined and analyzed more precisely what respondents mean by their “no religion” or “no religious preference” answers. This study found that although the number of people selecting no religion may increase slightly by generation, it is nonetheless at least a third smaller with respect to Christian identity than most studies have hitherto reported. Although beyond the scope of this present study, this methodological oversight in analyzing the “no religion” respondents may also hold true for how social scientists have analyzed the religious identity of the general U.S. population. If the larger theoretical findings in this study hold true for larger national surveys, then not only is the Latino community more religious and Christian than previously believed, but so too is the general U.S. population. This would be a significant finding if it holds for the nation because it would highlight the continuing importance and influence of immigration and racial-ethnic minorities in American religion and politics. This finding is supported by the fact that the (eighteen million) Latin American immigrants along with (sixteen million) immigrants from other countries who arrive in the United States are disproportionately Protestant (15 percent) while back home they make up 7.5 percent of the population. Past research has found that 87 percent of Latin Americans and 85 percent of Mexicans in Mexico are Roman Catholic. Research has also found that the people of Mexican ancestry who tend to arrive in the United States are disproportionately Protestant (15 percent) per their percentage back home (7.5 percent). Similarly, immigrants from Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, the Philippines, Vietnam, and many other countries who arrive in the United States are disproportionately more Christian than the population from their home countries. This has led sociologist Stephen R. Warner to argue that American Christianity is undergoing a de-Europeanization process. If the present immigration, birth rate, and religious-identity patterns hold in the future, this trend may also suggest that we are undergoing the racial-ethnic re-Christianization of American religion. For a more detailed analysis of misclassifying the religious identity of Latinos in social-science research, see Gastón Espinosa, “Methodological Reflections of Social Science Research on Latino Religions,” in Rethinking Latino/a Religion and Identity (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006), 13–45. For related discussions, see Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, “Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics

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and Generations,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 165–90; Darren E. Sherkat, “Tracking the Restructuring of American Religion: Religious Affiliation and Patterns of Religious Mobility, 1973–1988,” Social Forces 79, no. 4 (2001): 1462–92; Brian Steensland, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Robert D. Woodberry, “The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art,” Social Forces 79, no. 1 (September 2000): 291–318; Andrew Greeley, “Defections among Hispanics,” America (July 30, 1988): 61–62; Andrew Greeley, “Defections among Hispanics (Update),” America 27 (September 1997): 12–13; Gastón Espinosa, “The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 26, no. 2 (2004): 262–92; Stephen R. Warner, “The De-Europeanization of American Christianity” in A Nation of Religions: Pluralism in the American Public Square, ed. Stephen Prothero (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 233–55. For the 25,000 Latino Protestant church figure, see www.nhclc.org/who-we-are. ╇ 8.╇ Luis Lugo and Allison Pond, “¡Here come ‘Los Evangélicos’!” The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, June 6, 2007), 1–4. Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, eds., Latino Religions, 6. ╇ 9.╇ Paul Taylor and Richard Fry, “Hispanics and the 2008 Election: A Swing Vote” (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2007), i–ii. Gastón Espinosa, Latino Religion and Politics: Catholics, Protestants, the 2008 Election, and Beyond (Claremont, CA: Claremont McKenna College, 2009), 10. This study has published the results of the Latino Religions and Politics National Survey (October 1–7, 2008; n = 1,104). 10.╇ Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda, Hispanic Churches in American Public Life: Summary of Findings (Notre Dame, IN: Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame, 2003), 16. These findings and figures were largely confirmed in Hernández et al., Faith and Values in Action, 6. 11.╇ Green notes that Latino Protestants made up 2.5 percent of the U.S. electorate in 2004. That same year, Latino Protestants made up 32 percent of the Latino Christian electorate—an increase of 7 percent over 2000, when they made up 25 percent. For the 2008 figure see the exit polls published by the National Election Poll: www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/. There are a number of EuroAmerican-led Protestant and non-Catholic traditions that have numerically large Spanish-language districts, Spanish-language Bible schools, and high concentrations of churches in key electoral rich states such as California (Assemblies of God, Apostolic Assembly, Victory Outreach International, CLADIC), Texas (Assemblies of God, CLADIC), Missouri (Church of God, Cleveland, TN, Assemblies of God, Church of God of Prophecy), Pennsylvania (American Baptist), Georgia (Southern Baptist), Ohio (United Pentecostal Church), and New York (Assembly of Christian Churches, Damascus Christian Church, Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Church of God, MI, Jehovah’s Witness). Green, The Faith Factor, 7; Lugo and Pond, “¡Here Come ‘Los Evangélicos’!”; Bishop Gerald R. Barnes, Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the New Millennium: A Report of the Bishops’ Committee on Hispanic Affairs (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1999). 12.╇ Taylor and Fry, “Hispanics and the 2008 Election,” i–17; Roberto Suro, Richard Fry, and Jeffrey Passel, Hispanics and the 2004 Election: Population, Electorate, and Voters (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2005); Gastón Espinosa, ed., “Latinos, Religion, and the American Presidency,” in Religion, Race, and the American



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Presidency (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 231–74. 13.╇ For Latino voting patterns in the 1996–2008 elections see chapters 10 and 11 of Espinosa, Religion, Race, and the American Presidency, 246–85. 14.╇ For an analysis of Catholic and Latino Protestant Evangelical responses to the 2006 immigration reform debate see Gastón Espinosa, “‘Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote’: Latino Religions, Politics, and Activism in Contemporary U.S. Civil Society,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 612 (July 2007): 152–71. For an analysis of Rodriguez’s background see Espinosa, Latino Religion and Politics, 65n49. 15.╇ Their mission statement is taken from the NHCLC website: www.nhclc.org/ our-mission. 16.╇ National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, 2006. www.nhclc.org/ (hereafter NHCLC). 17.╇ Alan Cooperman, “Letter on Immigration Deepens Split Among Evangelicals,” Washington Post, April 5, 2006. 18.╇ Campo-Flores, “The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez”; Smith, “Hispanics Turn Cold Shoulder to McCain”; Stafford, “The Call of Samuel”; Gastón Espinosa, E-mail interview with Samuel Rodriguez, April 12, 2009. 19.╇ For evidence, see Espinosa, “Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote,” and the NHCLC website press release (www.nhclc.org/press-release) and media (www .nhclc.org/media-gallery) pages. 20.╇ Samuel Rodríguez, “Open Letter to Evangelicals on Immigration Reform,” April 1, 2006. 21.╇ Samuel Rodríguez, David Neff, Ron Sider, Ann Buwalda, Jim Wallis, Clive Calver, “Open Letter to President Bush and Congress,” March 1, 2006. 22.╇ Samuel Rodríguez and Mark V. Gonzáles, “Letter to President George W. Bush and Congress,” September 1, 2006; Espinosa, “Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote.” 23.╇ The White House, “President Bush Attends National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast,” June 8, 2006, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060608-1.html. 24.╇ Sidney Blumenthal, “An American Idea Shatters: The Reawakening of a Virulent Nationalism Is Tearing Apart Bush’s Conservative Coalition,” Guardian UK, May 18, 2006; Cooperman, “Letter on Immigration.” 25.╇ For evidence, see Espinosa, “Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote,” and the NHCLC website press release (www.nhclc.org/press-release) and media (www .nhclc.org/media-gallery) pages. 26.╇ David Schwartz, “Arizona Governor Signs Toughest Immigration Law,” Reuters, April 23, 2010; Randall C. Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration,” New York Times, April 23, 2010. 27.╇ Schwartz, “Arizona Governor Signs Toughest Immigration Law”; Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration.” 28.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals Call Arizona Bill SB1070 ‘Legislative Nativism,’ Declare a 40-Day National Fast for Justice in Arizona,” April 20, 2010, www .nhclc.org/news/hispanic-evangelicals-call-arizona-bill-sb1070-legislative-nativism -declare-40-day-national-fas. 29.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 30.╇ Teresa Watanabe, “Cardinal Mahony Criticizes Arizona Immigration Bill,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2010; Teresa Watanabe, “Arizona State Senator Fires

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Back at Cardinal Mahony over Immigration Bill,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2010; Schwartz, “Arizona Governor Signs Toughest Immigration Law”; Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration.” 31.╇ Watanabe, “Cardinal Mahony Criticizes Arizona Immigration Bill”; Watanabe, “Arizona State Senator Fires Back at Cardinal Mahony over Immigration Bill.” 32.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals”; Julia Preston, “Latino Religious Leader Rodriguez Courts the Left, Right for Immigration Reform,” Washington Post, March 21, 2010. 33.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 34.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals”; Espinosa, Religion, Race, and the American Presidency, 237. 35.╇ NCHCL, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 36.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 37.╇ For a discussion on César Chávez’s faith-based strategies, see the chapter by Luís León in Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, 53–64. For other strategies see chapters 1–2, 4–6, 9–10. NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 38.╇ NHCLC, “The Answer to America’s Immigration Dilemma: A Just Integration Strategy,” NHCLC, Winter 2010, www.nhclc.org/news/answer-americas-immigration-dilemma-just-integration-strategy. NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 39.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 40.╇ Suzy Khimm, “A Right-Wing Schism over Immigration Reform,” Mother Jones, June 2, 2010. 41.╇ NHCLC, “Hispanic Evangelicals.” 42.╇ Adelle Banks, “Evangelical Voices for Immigration Reform Grow,” Religion News Service as cited in The Christian Century, June 15, 2010, www.christiancentury .org/article.lasso?id=8502. 43.╇ Adelle M. Banks, “Evangelicals Endorse Immigration Reform, Religion News Services, posted October 9, 2009, as posted in Christianity Today, June 14, 2010, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/octoberweb-only/140.51.0.html. 44.╇ Eric Marrapodi, “Religious Conservatives Want Immigration Reform,” CNN Politics, June 9, 2010, www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/06/09/evangelicals .immigration.reform/index.html. 45.╇ Khimm, “A Right-Wing Schism.” 46.╇ Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 218. 47.╇ Sarah Posner, “So Much for Evangelical Support for Immigration Reform,” Religion Dispatches, June 7, 2010, www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/2757/so_much_for_evangelical_support_for_immigration_reform/; Baptist Press, “Evangelicals Reject Gay Partners in Immigration Bill,” June 7, 2010, www. bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=33077; Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, Hispanic Churches in American Public Life, 28.

Response to Gastón Espinosa ╇ 1.╇ It is a goal of a group that can be only achieved by cooperating with other groups. For further information, please check my chapter in this book.



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╇ 2.╇ Americas Voice, “Immigration Reform Will Strengthen the State of the Union,” CommonDream.org, www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/01/27-21 (accessed June 23, 2010). ╇ 3.╇ Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Contours of Justice: An Ancient Call for Shalom,” in God and the Victim, ed. Lisa B. Lampman and Michelle D. Shattuck (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 124. ╇ 4.╇ Wolterstorff, “The Contours of Justice.”

Chapter 8: Theology of Enhancement ╇ 1.╇ William M. Newman, American Pluralism: A Study of Minority Groups and Social Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 53. ╇ 2.╇ Newman, American Pluralism, 63. ╇ 3.╇ Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963). ╇ 4.╇ Newman, American Pluralism, 67. ╇ 5.╇ The American Heritage Dictionary (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994). ╇ 6.╇ The exclusive Korean identity corresponds to “exclusive ethnocentrism,” while the Koreanness to “inclusive ethnocentrism.” The exclusive ethnocentrism is elite, ethnocentric, and nontolerant toward other groups, while the inclusive ethnocentrism is open, ethnocentric, and tolerant toward other groups. ╇ 7.╇ Redlining refers to the illegal practices that refuse home mortgages or home insurance to some ethnic-minority areas or neighborhoods deemed financial risks. ╇ 8.╇ Muzafer Sherif, O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood, Carolyn W. Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman: Institute of Group Relations, University of Oklahoma, 1961), 151. ╇ 9.╇ Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, and Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation, 159. 10.╇ A. Billingsley and J. Giovannoni, Children of the Storm: Black Children and American Child Welfare (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1972), 8. 11.╇ Douglas S. Messey and Nancy A. Denton, “American Apartheid,” in David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi, The Inequality Reader: Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class, and Gender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006), 153. 12.╇ Messey and Denton, “American Apartheid,” 159. 13.╇ Messey and Denton, “American Apartheid,” 162. 14.╇ William A.V. Clark, “Race, Class, and Place: Evaluating Mobility Outcomes for African Americans,” Urban Affairs Review 42, no. 3 (January 1, 2007): 295–314. 15.╇ Kara Miller, “Do Colleges Redline Asian-Americans?” The Boston Globe, February 8, 2010. 16.╇ Miller, “Do Colleges Redline Asian-Americans?” 17.╇ Miller, “Do Colleges Redline Asian-Americans?” 18.╇ Jules Older, “Ivy League Schools’ Barrier to Asian Americans,” SF Gate (the weekend SF Chronicle), March 28, 2010. 19.╇ University of South Carolina: Faculty Senate, “Holistic Admissions Procedures,” www.sc.edu/faculty/holistic (accessed April 4, 2010).

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20.╇ Phillip Jackson, “Black Students Still Struggle in Post-Brown Era,” New York Amsterdam News, 22 (May 27, 2004): 37–38. 21.╇ Phillip Jackson, “Failing Our Black Children,” Black Issues in Higher Education 21, no. 16 (September 23, 2004): 89. 22.╇ Jackson, “Failing Our Black Children.” 23.╇ Pew Charitable Trusts, “Latinos and Education: Explaining the Attainment Gap,” October 7, 2009, www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_report_detail .aspx?id=55333&category=218. 24.╇ Manning Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . .,” Newsweek 138, no. 9 (2001): 22. 25.╇ Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . .” 26.╇ Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . .” 27.╇ Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come . . .” 28.╇ Calvin Bradford, board member, and National Training and Information Center, “Community Reinvestment Act,” http://proxy.ohiolink.edu:9099/ login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=32Y14 29395408&site=ehost-live (accessed March 10, 2010). 29.╇ Bradford and National Training and Information Center, “Community Reinvestment Act.” 30.╇ Peter Kwong, “The First Multicultural Riots,” in Inside the LA Riots (The Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992), 88. 31.╇ Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 32.╇ Robert C. Toh, “Blacks Pressing Japanese to Halt Slurs, Prejudice,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1990. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein recently argued that the evidence of an African and Euro-American IQ gap is overwhelming, and that intellectuals and policy makers have largely overlooked the role of IQ playing in determining wealth and social status; see Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). They largely ignored the correlation between the nature and nurture of human intelligence, but concentrated on the genetic factors of races. 33.╇ I. A. Newby, Challenge To The Court (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1967). Euro-American (Median) Scores Mississippi 41.25 Kentucky 41.50 Georgia 42.12 Arkansas 41.55

African American Scores New York Pennsylvania Ohio Illinois

(Median) 45.02 42.00 49.50 47.35

34.╇ Richard Lynn, Susan Hampson, and Mary Magee, “Home Background, Intelligence, Personality and Education as Predictors of Unemployment in Young People,” Personality and Individual Differences 5 (1984): 549–57. 35.╇ Yongsook Lee, “Koreans in Japan and the United States,” in Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrants and Involuntary Minorities, ed. Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu (New York: Garland, 1991), 139–65.



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36.╇ Geoges Devos and Eun Young Kim, “Koreans in Japan and the United States: Attitudes toward Achievement and Authority,” in Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital, and Ethnic Networks, ed. Ivan H. Light and Parminder Bhachu (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993). 37.╇ Eui Hang Shin and Hyung Park, “An Analysis of Causes of Schisms in Ethnic Churches: The Case of KA Churches,” Sociological Analysis 49 (1988): 234–35. 38.╇ Shin and Park, “An Analysis of Causes of Schisms in Ethnic Churches.” 39.╇ Mark R. Pogrebin and Eric D. Poole, “South Korean Immigrants and Crime: A Case Study,” Journal of Ethnic Studies (Fall 1989): 60. 40.╇ Won Moo Hurh and Kwang Chung Kim, Korean Immigrants in America: A Structural Analysis of Ethnic Confinement and Adhesive Adaptation (Madison, NJ: Fairleign Dickinson University Press, 1984), 127. 41.╇ Hurh and Kim, Korean Immigrants in America, 124. 42.╇ Rebecca Stafford, Elaine Buchman, and Pamela Dibona, “The Division of Labor among Cohabiting and Married Couples,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39:43–57, cited in Kim and Hurh and Kim, Korean Immigrants in America, 122. 43.╇ Stafford, Buchman, and Dibona, “The Division of Labor,” 126. 44.╇ Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 170. 45.╇ Abelman and Lie, Blue Dreams, 213. 46.╇ See Alice Yun Chai, “The Struggle of Asian and Asian American Women toward a Total Liberation,” in Spirituality and Social Responsibility: Vocational Vision of Women in the United Methodist Tradition, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 249–328. 47.╇ In addition to the committee system, Korean American United Methodist churches adopted an elder-deacon system for laity. 48.╇ Gap Min Pyong, “Severe Underrepresentation of Women in Church Leadership in the Korean Immigrant Community in the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2 (2008): 225, 225–40. 49.╇ H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951).

Chapter 9: Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been ╇ 1.╇ Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange: An African American Constructive Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). ╇ 2.╇ H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, [1943] 1993). Niebuhr, Social Sources of Denominationalism New York: Meridian Books, [1929] 1957). ╇ 3.╇ Van A. Harvey, “On the Intellectual Marginality of American Theology,” in Religion & Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 172–92; Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1991), 73. ╇ 4.╇ Victor Anderson, Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology (Albany: State University of New York: 1998), 111.

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5.╇ For details, see my earlier essay, “The Search for Public Theology in North America,” in Preaching as Theological Task, ed. Thomas Long and Edward Farley (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1996), 19–31. 6.╇ Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, 111. 7.╇ Stanley Hauer was and Romand Coles, eds., Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), series notes. 8.╇ Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). 9.╇ Romand Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate’: Practiced Receptivity Matters, or Heading West of West with Cornel West and Ella Baker,” in Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), 45–46. 10.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 45. 11.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 48. 12.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate.’” 13.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 49. 14.╇ Cited in Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 54. 15.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 54. 16.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 55. 17.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 56. 18.╇ Coles, “‘To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” 64. 19.╇ See Marla Fredericks, with Lesley Bartlett, et al., “The Marketization of Education: Public Schools for Private Ends,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2002): 5–29; “But, It’s Bible: African American Women and Television Preachers,” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, ed. R. Marie Griffith, Barbara Dianne Savage (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 266–336; “Rags to Riches: Religion, Media and the Performance of Wealth in a Neoliberal Age,” in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol J. Greenhouse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 221–98; with Dorothy Holland, et al., Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism. Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Colored Television: Black Religion in Global Context (forthcoming). 20.╇ Robert Borofsky, “Public Anthropology: A Personal Perspective,” in Public Anthropology, 2001, www.publicanthropology.org/Defining/publicanth-07Oct1 .htm. 21.╇ Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 19; my emphasis. 22.╇ Frederick, Between Sundays, 14. 23.╇ Frederick, Between Sundays, 18. 24.╇ Frederick, Colored Television: Black Religion in Global Context (unpublished; used with permission of author), 7. 25.╇ Frederick, Colored Television. 26.╇ Frederick, Colored Television. 27.╇ Frederick, Colored Television, 7; my emphasis. 28.╇ Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 177.



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29.╇ Harding, Hope and History. 30.╇ Langston Hughes, Dreams and Let American Be America Again, from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, The Poems: 1921–1940, ed. Arnold Rampersad (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 1:131, 1:154. 31.╇ Harding, Hope and History, 178.

Response to Victor Anderson ╇ 1.╇ Victor Anderson, “Is America Possible? The Land That Never has Been: Democratic Hope and Creative Exchange,” in Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation, ed. Harold J. Recinos (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 179–93. ╇ 2.╇ Vincent Harding, “Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” in Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Moment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 147–57. ╇ 3.╇ Anderson, “Is America Possible,” 2. ╇ 4.╇ Victor Anderson, “Is America Possible? The Land That Never Has Been: Democratic Hope and Creative Exchange,” unpublished abstract, 2010. ╇ 5.╇ Anderson, “Is America Possible?” (unpublished abstract), 7. ╇ 6.╇ Anderson, “Is America Possible?” (unpublished abstract), 17; emphasis mine. ╇ 7.╇ Anderson, “Is America Possible?” (unpublished abstract), 7. ╇ 8.╇ Vincent L. Wimbush, “Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2000), 2. ╇ 9.╇ Wimbush, “Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,” 10. 10.╇ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 11.╇ Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 277–313. 12.╇ James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 13.╇ See also James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 14.╇ See Marla Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); with Lesley Bartlett, Thaddeus Gulbrandsen, and Enrique Murillo, “The Marketization of Education: Public Schools for Private Ends,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2002): 5–29; “But, It’s Bible: African American Women and Television Preachers,” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 266–336; “Rags to Riches: Religion, Media and the Performance of Wealth in a Neoliberal Age,” in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, ed. Carol J. Greenhouse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 221–98; with Dorothy Holland et al., Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism. Public interests, and Private Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Colored Television: Black Religion in Global Context (unpublished).

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15.╇ Robert Borofsky, “Public Anthropology: A Personal Perspective,” in Public Anthropology, 2001, www.publicanthropology.org/Defining/publicanth-07Oct1.htm.

Chapter 10: Foregrounding Our Apocalyptic Heritage in Hopes of Domesticating it ╇ 1.╇ George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York: Signet Classic, 1996), 32–33. ╇ 2.╇ Throughout this chapter I will employ the incomplete spelling of the JudeoChristian deity, G-d, in keeping with Jewish tradition, which holds that the name of G-d is never to be written in its entirety as a sign of reverence and respect. ╇ 3.╇ Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 201. ╇ 4.╇ Robert Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Politics and Apocalypse (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007), 3–5. ╇ 5.╇ John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” in Semeia 14 (1979): 9. ╇ 6.╇ David Hellholm, “The Problem of the Apocalyptic Genre and the Apocalypse of John,” in Society of Biblical Literature 1982 Seminar Papers, ed. K. H. Richards (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 168. ╇ 7.╇ John J. Collins, “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David N. Freeman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:287. ╇ 8.╇ Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 373. ╇ 9.╇ In conjunction with the majority of contemporary New Testament scholars, I argue that 2 Thessalonians and Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Letters are productions of second- and third-generation Pauline disciples. 10.╇ An interesting exception to this tendency is the reconstructed compilation of the Q document as championed by John Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), and Burton L. Mack, Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). In their reconstructions, the theoretical Q community went from a group who formed a social group based on the aphoristic sayings of Jesus and who were later externally critiqued, thus leading to a superimposing of an apocalyptic layer onto the original aphoristic sayings tradition. A similar phenomenon is also palpable in the Johnannine corpus. Note the shift from the Gospel of John’s “realized” eschatology to the less rational apocalyptic worldview of 1 John 2:18. 11.╇ Subsequent Christian authors who also maintained this hermeneutical predisposition about Revelation include the twelfth-century Italian abbot and mystic Joachim de Fiore. 12.╇ Dimitris Kyrtatas, “The Transformation of the Texts: The Reception of John’s Revelation,” in History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History, ed. Averil Cameron (London: Duckworth, 1989), 151. 13.╇ Jorunn Okland, “Setting the Scene: The End of the Bible, the End of the World,” in The Way the World Ends? The Apocalypse of John in Culture and Ideology, ed. William J. Lyons and Jorunn Okland (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 4.



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14.╇ Eusebius, Church History, VII:25:1–2. 15.╇ Kyrtatas, “The Transformation of the Texts,” 154–56. 16.╇ David G. Bromley, “Constructing Apocalypticism: Social and Cultural Elements of Radical Organization,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, ed. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 1997), 33. 17.╇ A manageable, albeit contested, summation of this period is available in: Charles Freeman, A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State (New York: Overlook Press, 2009). 18.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381, 47. 19.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381, 57. 20.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381, 48. 21.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381, 47. 22.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381, 49. 23.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381. 24.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381; emphasis mine. 25.╇ Freeman, A.D. 381, 122. 26.╇ Paul Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic in the United States,” in The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, ed. Bernard J. McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 2003), 534; emphasis mine. 27.╇ Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic,” 534. 28.╇ Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic,” 536. 29.╇ Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic,” 537. 30.╇ Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic.” 31.╇ Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic,” 540. 32.╇ Quoted from Scott Johnson, “‘Star Wars’ Trust in Our Innocence, Not Our Nightmares,” Los Angeles Times, Opinion, May 7, 1985. 33.╇ Johnson, “‘Star Wars’ Trust in Our Innocence.” 34.╇ Okland, “Setting the Scene,” 26. 35.╇ Boyer, “The Growth of Fundamentalist Apocalyptic,” 537. 36.╇ Mack, A Myth of Innocence, 373. 37.╇ Robert Jewett, The Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), 225. 38.╇ Mack, A Myth of Innocence, 373. 39.╇ It should be noted that the hymn “Beasts of England” is eventually outlawed by Napoleon because “it is no longer needed. . . . [It] was the song of the Rebellion. But the Rebellion is now completed.” See Orwell, Animal Farm, 96–97. The hymn is replaced by the song composed by the poet Minimus, which conservatively states: Animal Farm, Animal Farm Never through me shall thou come to harm! However, “‘Beasts of England’ was perhaps hummed secretly here and there: at any rate, it was a fact that every animal on the farm knew it.” See Orwell, Animal Farm, 130. Thus, the hymn lived on in the hearts of the animals waiting to be excavated by the next crisis in social order.

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Chapter 11: “Isn’t Life More Than Food?” ╇ 1.╇ By a theology “in migration” I’m referring both to a theology carried out by migrants and to a theology capable of shifting, changing, and adjusting epistemologically to new situations and challenges. As part of that migratory theological process I find that though I started out as “Argentine,” the longer I live in this country, the more I identify with “Latino/a” perspectives, without denying that as an Anabaptist/Protestant from the South Cone my background is necessarily quite different from that of the “majority” Latino groups (Mexicans, Central Americans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans), yet finding myself to be progressively more influenced, for instance, by Mexican culture. ╇ 2.╇ R. Dennis Olson, “NAFTA’s Food and Agriculture Lessons,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 20, no. 4 (2008): 418–25. ╇ 3.╇ Charles Thompson Jr., “Introduction,” in The Human Cost of Food. Farmworkers’ Lives, Labor, and Advocacy, ed. Charles D. Thompson Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 2–19. ╇ 4.╇ Olson, “NAFTA’s Food and Agriculture Lessons,” 418–21. ╇ 5.╇ This reality is beautifully described by Dagoberto Gilb, “Las Milpas en Iowa,” Calloo 32, no.1 (2009): 146–54. ╇ 6.╇ Nano Riley, Florida’s Farmworkers in the Twenty-first Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 20–46. ╇ 7.╇ Natividad Almanza, “Trabajo,” in Estamos Aquí. Poems by Migrant Farmworkers, ed. Sylvia Kelly, Bob Holman, and Marjorie Teaser, trans. Janine Pommy Vega (New York: Bowery Books, 2007), 77. ╇ 8.╇ Gloria Velázquez, “Bella Juventud,” in The Human Cost of Food, 221. ╇ 9.╇ See Ann Aurelia López, The Farmworkers’ Journey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 107–45. 10.╇ See Ariel Kalil and Jen-Hao Chen, “Mothers’ Citizenship Status and Household Food Insecurity among Low-Income Children of Immigrants,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 121 (Fall 2008): 43–62. 11.╇ See, for instance, the testimonies in Riley, Florida’s Farmworkers, 100–104. 12.╇ Olga Mejía and Christopher McCarthy, “Acculturative Stress, Depression, and Anxiety in Migrant Farmwork College Students of Mexican Heritage,” International Journal of Stress Management 17, no. 1 (2010): 1–20. 13.╇ On this see Candace Kugel, Carmen Retzlaff, Suellen Hopfer, David M. Lawson, Erin Daley, Carmel Drewes, and Stephanie Freedman, “Familias con Voz: Community Survey Results from an Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Prevention Project with Migrant Workers,” Journal of Family Violence 24 (2009): 649–60. 14.╇ Emilio A. Parrado and Chenoa A. Flippen, “Migration and Gender among Mexican Women,” American Sociological Review 70, no. 4 (2005): 606–32, 628. 15.╇ One example is the group Líderes Campesinas in California; see the testimonies in Rachel Rodríguez, “The Power of the Collective: Battered Migrant Farmworker Women Creating Safe Spaces,” Health Care for Women International 20 (1999): 417–26. 16.╇ On this agency from the perspective of social anthropology see especially Victoria Malkin, “‘We Go to Get Ahead’: Gender and Status in Two Mexican Migrant Communities,” Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 5 (2004): 75–99, and from the



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perspective of theological anthropology my essay, “La subjectivité théologique en movement. Vers une écologie théologique féministe de la migration, Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale no. 257 (December 2009): 21–54. 17.╇ Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, “Sickness in the System: The Health Costs of the Harvest,” Journal of Medical Humanities 28 (2007): 97–104, 99. The two works she discusses are Cherrie Moraga, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (Albuquerque: West End, 1994), and Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (New York: Duttan, 1995). 18.╇ See Dyan Mazurana, “Juana Alicia’s Las Lechugueras/The Women Lettuce Workers,” Meridians 3, no. 1 (2002): 54–81, whose semiotic analysis of the mural I’ve drawn upon here. 19.╇ Norma Perez, “‘Las Lechugueras’ Will Soon Leave the Mission,” El Tecolote, December 18, 2003, http://news.eltecolote.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=c 68ff92d8766591d76cae28eb284db3b (accessed June 19, 2010). 20.╇ Benjamin Knoll, “And Who Is My Neighbor? Religion and Immigration Policy Attitudes,” Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 48, no. 2 (2009): 313–31. 21.╇ I’m using “common sense” in a Gramscian vein, that is, as referring to a set of values and beliefs held in common and somewhat unquestioningly by a given society. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 2005), 323–43. 22.╇ Mejía and McCarthy, “Acculturative Stress,” 1–4. 23.╇ Phillipa Kafka, “Saddling La Gringa: Major Themes in the Works of Latina Writers,” in Latina Writers, ed. Ilan Stavans (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2008), 3–15. 24.╇ See Daniel Patte, The Gospel according to Matthew: A Structural Commentary on Matthew’s Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 93. 25.╇ See Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary (Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 343. 26.╇ See Patte, The Gospel According to Matthew, 93, and Luz, Matthew 1–7, 342. 27.╇ Georg Strecker, Die Bergpredigt. Ein exegetischer Kommentar (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 143. 28.╇ Clement of Alexandria, “The Instructor,” II.1, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers Volume II, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 241. 29.╇ On this see Douglas R. A. Hare, Matthew. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993), 72–76. 30.╇ In other words, it is an argument a minore ad maius. Augustine, “Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount,” II.15.52, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Volume VI, ed. Philip Schaff, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 50. 31.╇ Strecker, Die Bergpredigt, 142, and Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Socio-Political and Religious Reading. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 204 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 176. 32.╇ Augustine, “Our Lord’s Sermon,” 50. 33.╇ José Rubén Parra-Cardona, Laurie A. Bulock, David R. Imig, Francisco A. Villarruel, and Steven J. Gold, “‘Trabajando Duro Todos los Días’: Learning from the Life Experiences of Mexican Origin Immigrant Families,” Family Relations 55 (July 2006): 361–75, 370.

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34.╇ Barbara Ellen Smith and Jamie Winders, “‘We’re Here to Stay’: Economic Restructuring, Latino Migration, and Place-Making in the U.S. South,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series 33 (2008): 60–72. The article goes on to explore what happens when such bodies become stable and stay in place rather than continue to migrate, that is, when the social reproduction needed to provide labor becomes visible to a community. 35.╇ On this type of symbolic violence see Alicia Schmidt Camacho, “Ciudadana Equis: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,” The New Centennial Review 5, no. 1 (2005): 255–92. 36.╇ Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), xiv–xv. 37.╇ Butler, Precarious Life, 20. 38.╇ Butler, Precarious Life, 35. 39.╇ See Carter, Matthew and the Margins, 179. 40.╇ Richard Dillon, “Ravens, Lilies and the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:25–33/ Luke 12:22–31),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53 (1991): 605–27. 41.╇ Virgilio P. Elizondo, “Theology’s Contribution to Society: The Ministry of the Theologian,” in From the Heart of Our People. Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology, ed. Orlando O. Espín and Miguel H. Díaz (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 49–53. 42.╇ Though Zambrano did not become a “Latina” in the peculiar U.S. American sense because she did not live in the United States, she spent forty years of her life in exile, in Cuba and Mexico, and later in Italy and Switzerland, and her work evinces a migratory sensibility akin to that of many Latina intellectuals in the United States. Here I am drawing on her work Filosofia y poesía (Morelia: Publicaciones de la Universidad Michoacana, 1939), written during her Mexican exile. 43.╇ Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía, 146–47. 44.╇ Joaquín Calomarde, “María Zambrano, una confesión en los claros del bosque,” in Mujeres en la historia del pensamiento, ed. Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1997), 227–47. 45.╇ Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía, 12. 46.╇ Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía, 26. 47.╇ I’m drawing somewhat freely here on Walter Mignolo’s reception and modification of Abdelkebir Khatibi and of Alfred Arteaga; see Mignolo’s book Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 64–71, 217–49. 48.╇ Benjamin Valentín, Mapping Public Theology. Beyond Culture, Identity and Difference (New York: Trinity Press International, 2002), 86. 49.╇ Valentín, Mapping, 115. 50.╇ Benjamin Knoll, “And Who Is My Neighbor?” 313–31. 51.╇ The document can be found at the UNESCO website: www.unesco.org/ new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/social-transformations/internationalmigration/international-migration-convention/ (accessed June 19, 2010). 52.╇ For the current list of signatories, see the United Nations Treaty Collection webpage at http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_ no=IV-13&chapter=4&lang=en (accessed June 19, 2010). 53.╇ Chávez and Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later merged with the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing



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Committee (AWOC) to become the UFW. The UFW’s vision statement only mentions Chávez as its “founding father,” though it does include Huerta in its history section; see www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=about&inc=about_vision.html (accessed June 19, 2010). It seems important not to erase Huerta’s role. She was criticized for putting la causa before her children, yet doggedly continued organizing farm workers (even though she was badly beaten by the police), while at the same time raising her children. On this, see Alicia Chávez, “Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers,” in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 240–54. 54.╇ The status of this bill in the U.S. Congress can be tracked at www.govtrack .us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2414 (accessed June 19, 2010). 55.╇ As Daisy Machado points out, “As long as women uncritically hold to and accept the belief in the legitimacy of national borders, the scholarship and social analysis they make about justice and about the community of women in the nation will be incomplete.” See her essay, “The Unnamed Woman: Justice, Feminists and the Undocumented Woman,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology, Religion, and Justice, ed. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 161–76, 174. 56.╇ John Anthony McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox, 2004), 102–3. 57.╇ A. Cleveland Coxe, ed., “Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus,” IX, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, vol. 1, The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 28. 58.╇ Cox, “Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus,” X, 29. 59.╇ Mazurana, “Juana Alicia’s Las Lechugueras,” 61. 60.╇ Thank you also to my research assistant, Minsun Bahk, for helping me dig up the kind of resources I needed from the social sciences for my “hermeneutical spiral” in this chapter.

Response to Nancy Bedford ╇ 1.╇ Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 10–11. ╇ 2.╇ “The Significance of the Iraqi Death Estimate,” Just Foreign Policy, www .justforeignpolicy.org/deathcount/explanation.

Chapter 12: Beyond Only Difference ╇ 1.╇ Alexander Saxton and David Roediger, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in 19th Century America (New York: Verso, 2003). More recently, see Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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╇ 2.╇ Michael Lind, “The White Overclass and the Racial Spoils System,” in The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 139–80. ╇ 3.╇ See, for example, Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 3. ╇ 4.╇ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 231–38. ╇ 5.╇ On the notion of “singular plural being,” see Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1–99. ╇ 6.╇ Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 30–35. ╇ 7.╇ For new directions in liberation theology, see Marcella Althaus-Reid, ed., Liberation Theology and Sexuality, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2009). ╇ 8.╇ Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 13. ╇ 9.╇ Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, esp. 14. 10.╇ Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 212–31. 11.╇ Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 17. 12.╇ Aníbal Quijano, “Questioning ‘Race,’” in Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 1 (2007): 45–53; first published in 1999. 13.╇ Laura Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 2. 14.╇ Malini Johar Scheuller, Locating Race: Global Sites of Postcolonial Citizenship (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 8. 15.╇ Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 146, 143. 16.╇ Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. 17.╇ Stephen Donziger, The Real War on Crime: Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission (San Francisco: HarperPerennial, 1996), 11. 18.╇ Pew Center on the States, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Washington, DC: PEW Center, February 2008), 5. 19.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 59. 20.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6, 96. 21.╇ Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, 16–17. 22.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 250n10, and Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, HR Reports,12, no. 2 (May 2000). 23.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 13. 24.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 12–13. 25.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 20–57. 26.╇ Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 23–26. See also Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994). 27.╇ Robert Chugg, “The Chinese and the Transcontinental Railroad,” Brown Quarterly 1, no. 3 (Spring 1997).



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28.╇ Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Viking, 2003), 116–29. 29.╇ Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 11. 30.╇ Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 83–87. 31.╇ Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 62–64. 32.╇ Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 150–57. 33.╇ Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), 32. 34.╇ Massey, Durand, and Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, 135–36. 35.╇ “About the U.S. Detention and Deportation System,” Detention Watch Network, http://detentionwatchnetwork.org/aboutdetention. 36.╇ Urban Institute, January 12, 2004, www.urban.org/publications/1000587.html. 37.╇ David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 255–56, 279–81. 38.╇ “Land-Into-Trust,” National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), www .ncai.org/index.php?id=57&type=123. 39.╇ These failures are the basis of much current Native American litigation. See Gerald Vizenor, Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 137. 40.╇ Sandra L. Gadwallader and Vine Deloria Jr., eds., The Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since the 1880s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), esp. 215–45. See also Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). 41.╇ Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 75–76. 42.╇ Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of the Native Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 43.╇ James May, “Gaming Leaders Denounce Magazine Slant,” Indian Country Today, December 18, 2002; “Bureau of Casino Affairs,” Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2002. For more discussion, see Vizenor, Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance, 115–23. 44.╇ “American Indian/Alaskan Native Profile,” Office of Minority Health, http:// minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlid=52. 45.╇ “The American Indian and Alaskan Native Population: 2000,” 2000 Census Brief, www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/c2kbr01-15.pdf. 46.╇ Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities & Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2005). 47.╇ Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), Anatol Lieven, American Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 48.╇ Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 47–68. 49.╇ U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, Senate Speech, 1901. Cited in Gómez, Manifest Destinies, 74.

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50.╇ Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19. 51.╇ Felix Greene, The Enemy: Notes on Imperialism and Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 96. 52.╇ Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 16–17. 53.╇ Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1985), 173–90. 54.╇ William James, “The Philippine Question,” in William James: Writings, 1902– 1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1134–35. 55.╇ Nimi Wariboko, God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 217–19. 56.╇ Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 203–15. 57.╇ See the research and scholars’ reports on “The Significance of the Iraqi Death Estimate,” Just Foreign Policy, www.justforeignpolicy.org/deathcount/explanation. 58.╇ Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 295–302. 59.╇ Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side (New York: The New Press, 2004). 60.╇ Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 27. 61.╇ Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the projecting Arab otherness onto indigenous others, see Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in a Post-Andalusian Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 62.╇ Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 15. I appreciate Wonhee Anne Joh calling my attention to this book. 63.╇ Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 27–28. 64.╇ Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 20–24, 30–47. 65.╇ J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28. 66.╇ See for example, Harold J. Recinos, Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), 5–7; Benjamin Valentín, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity, and Difference (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2002), 101–6; Eleazar S. Fernández, Reimagining the Human: Theological Anthropology in Response to Systemic Evil (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004); Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006); 43–44, 50–51. Among white theologians, see James Perkinson, White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Rosemary R. Ruether, America/Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence (London: Equinox, 2007); and Mark Lewis Taylor, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 135–49, 225–31. The new journal including theological writings, Race, Ethnicity and Religion, is a long overdue effort to take up race and racism in religious and theological studies. See www.raceandreligion.com/. 67.╇ James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).



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68.╇ The prodigious art and sign-force at work in movements that are spectral to racialized imperial power is central to my forthcoming book, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011). 69.╇ Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 63–64. See also Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 122–23. 70.╇ Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters, 1–47.

Chapter 13: American Indians, Conquest, the Christian Story, and Invasive Nation-Building ╇ 1.╇ Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London: Felix Kyngston, 1609). See also Karen B. Manahan, “Robert Gray’s A Good Speed to Virginia,” in Literature of Justification, edited by Edward J. Gallagher, http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/ justification/jamestown/essay/4/. Gallagher et al. have evidently posted Gray’s sermon online, but in a controlled access site: Early English Books Online, 2003. Early English Books Online Archive. February 1, 2006, http://gateway.proquest.com/ openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:6158. This is a very useful project. Gray’s sermon, it should be noted, was one of a series of notable sermons preached in London in 1609–1610 in order to rally support for the jamestown colony, which had been foundering since its first beachhead in 1607. ╇ 2.╇ My use of the lower case for such adjectives as “american,” “christian,” “biblical,” and so forth, is intentional. While nouns naming religious groups might be capitalized out of respect for each Christian—as for each Muslim or Buddhist— using the lower case “christian” or “biblical” for adjectives allows readers to avoid unnecessary normativizing or universalizing of the principal institutional religious quotient of the Euro-West. Likewise, I avoid capitalizing such national or regional adjectives as american, amer-european, european, euro-western, etc. I also refer to north America. It is important to my argumentation that people recognize the historical artificiality of modern regional and nation-state social constructions. For instance, who decides where the “continent” of Europe ends and that of Asia begins? No one, for instance, designates the western half of north America as a separate continent clearly divided by the Mississippi River, or alternatively the Rocky Mountains. My initial reasoning extends to other adjectival categories and even some nominal categories, such as euro, and political designations like the right and the left and regional designations like the west. Quite paradoxically, I know, I insist on capitalizing White (adjective or noun) to indicate a clear cultural pattern invested in Whiteness that is all-too-often overlooked or even denied by american Whites. Moreover, this brings parity to the insistence of African Americans on the capitalization of the word “Black” in reference to their own community (in contradistinction to the New York Times usage). Likewise, I always capitalize Indian and American Indian. ╇ 3.╇ Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice) (London: Palgrave, 2006).

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╇ 4.╇ The situation in Canada is very similar. See the canadian “ReligiousTolerance. org” for a recent accounting of teen suicides among First Nations peoples: www.religioustolerance.org/sui_nati.htm. ╇ 5.╇ See Ward Churchill, A Little Mater of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas: 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), for a much fuller accounting of this history of genocide. ╇ 6.╇ For explicit details, see the essay I cowrote with one of our doctoral students: Tink Tinker and Mark Freeland, “Thief, Slave-Trader, Murderer: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline,” Wicazo Sa Review, Spring 2008, 25–50. ╇ 7.╇ Besides the long history of christian military crusades against Muslims in Palestine, one should not forget the religious war fought during the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe pitting Catholic against Lutheran, a nasty war in which over a quarter of the men in central Europe died. Few people seem to question how these sorts of war-making by european folk affected the psyche of Europeans and what effect this had on their self-identity—both in Europe and throughout the european invasion and conquest of Native America. ╇ 8.╇ See the very fine analytic collection essays of Edward Gallagher and several of his graduate students treating this body of sermons, each preached in a local congregation before being published for wider circulation. Edward J. Gallagher, ed., The Literature of Justification, an internet publication of Lehigh University: http:// digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/justification/about/. I have in mind here especially the collection of essays included in the section titled Jamestown—Essays, http://digital .lib.lehigh.edu/trial/justification/jamestown/essay/ (accessed April 2, 2010). ╇ 9.╇ See Lumbee legal scholar Robert A. Williams Jr., “Documents of Barbarism: The Contemporary Legacy of European Racism and Colonialism in the Narrative Traditions of Federal Indian Law,” Arizona Law Review 31, no. 2 (1989): 237–78. 10.╇ Robert Warrior, “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology Today,” Christianity and Crisis 49 (1989): 261–65. See also the response to Warrior by William Baldridge, “Native American Theology: A Biblical Basis,” Christianity and Crisis 50 (1990): 180–81 11.╇ “The Nation: Ceding the Canal-Slowly,” Time, August 22, 1977, www.time .com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915288-4,00.html. 12.╇ See particularly the volume by Lumbee Indian legal scholar Robert A. Williams Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005), for plentiful examples of racism in Supreme Court opinions. 13.╇ The term was not given its formal name, of course, until new york editor John O’Sullivan used the phrase in his defense of the then current american foreign policy of violence, namely the expansionist policies of President Polk, in an editorial piece titled “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845): 5–10. 14.╇ Neal Slaisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 125–33. 15.╇ Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1975), 202–27. 16.╇ The best volume on Sand Creek is still Stan Hoig’s Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1961). See also Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of



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Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), particularly the chapter titled, “‘Nits Make Lice’: The Extermination of North American Indian, 1607–1992.” 17.╇ Barbara A. Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (New York: Praeger, 2005). 18.╇ This moment, of course, was recently and widely celebrated in the american narrative during the bicentennial of the events, idealized and romanticized for contemporary Americans in a five-part PBS series at the time. For an earlier critique of the use of media in this fashion to justify the colonial project that is America, see Elizabeth CookLynn’s essay, “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner,” in her book by the same title. 19.╇ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. M. Lerner, trans. G. Lawrence (New York: Harper, 1966), chap. 18. 20.╇ International law now bans strategies of scorched earth under the Geneva Conventions: “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive” (Article 54, Protocol 1, Geneva Conventions, 1977: http:// deoxy.org/wc/wc-proto.htm). The United States, of course, is not covered under these conventions since it never has ratified them—for fear of recrimination. 21.╇ Glenn Morris and Ward Churchill, “Key Indian Laws and Cases,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1992), 13. 22.╇ Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 89, 129–288. “In order for the colonizer to be a complete master, it is not enough for him to be so in actual fact, but he must also believe in its (the colonial system’s) legitimacy. In order for that legitimacy to be complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave, he must also accept his role. The bond between the colonizer and the colonized is thus destructive and creative. It destroys and re-creates the two partners in colonization into the colonizer and the colonized. One is disfigured into the oppressor, a partial, unpatriotic and treacherous being, worrying about his privileges and their defense; the other into an oppressed creature, whose development is broken and who compromises by his defeat.” 23.╇ See Naomi Klein’s critique of the “free market” economic policies of Friedman and his “chicago boys”: Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 24.╇ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 46; Edward Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). Hardt and Negri go a step further in assigning violence a central role in the emergence and development of modernity in general. The United States, by this accounting, is simply part of a larger european and amer-european pattern of behavior, rooted in the intellectual, political, religious, and economic development of the euro-west. The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating “development,” cruel “civilization,” and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once

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wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy western modernity has imposed on the world. Concentration camps, nuclear weapons, genocidal wars, slavery, apartheid: it is not difficult to enumerate the various scenes of the tragedy. 25.╇ The call for extermination continues into late December, 1890. Newspaperman Frank L. Baum wrote, “the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” Editorial, Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, December 30, 1890, quoted in Elliott J. Gorn, Randy Roberts, and Terry D. Bilhartz, Constructing the American Past: A Source Book of a People’s History (New York: HarperCollins, 1972), 74. Baum, best known as author of the Kansas fantasy book The Wizard of Oz, was celebrating the Wounded Knee massacre, which had happened the day before. 26.╇ See Churchill’s monograph on government run boarding schools. The churchrun boarding schools were certainly no better at all—as we now know publicly from disclosures in Canada. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2004). And note my own introduction to Churchill’s text: “Tracing a Contour of Colonialism: American Indians and the Trajectory of Educational Imperialism,” xiii–xli. 27.╇ Most likely working along with Mr. Ashley Cooper, one of the lords proprietor of the corporation and Locke’s patron. David Armitage demonstrates Locke’s involvement in the later revision of the document in 1682, in “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27. 28.╇ Robert A. Williams Jr., American Indians in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 198. 29.╇ This, of course, is precisely what we are experiencing globally today in this eco-crisis of global warming.

Response to Tink Tinker ╇ 1.╇ “Cenote” is a Nahua term derived from the Yucatecan Maya “tz’onot” and refers to deep sinkholes filled with water formed by the erosion of cracks in the dry limestone surface of the Yucatan Maya region. In such an arid region, rain, caves, and cenotes are of authoritative sacred significance as life itself depends on these sources of water. See Edward B. Kurjack, “Cenotes,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, ed. Davíd Carrasco, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 154–55. ╇ 2.╇ See Virgilio Elizondo, La Morenita: Evangelizer of the Americas (San Antonio, TX: MACC Distribution Center, 1980) for his first articulation of the “Guadalupe event” using a Mexican framework. Jeannette Rodriguez followed in her treatment of the Indigenous context for the apparition in Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). ╇ 3.╇ As one example, Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). ╇ 4.╇ For a critical analysis of mestizaje see Manuel A. Vásquez, “Rethinking Mestizaje” in Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity, ed. Miguel a. De La Torre and Gastón Espinosa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006), 129–57.



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╇ 5.╇ Roberto Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 140–51. Also see Goizueta, “The Symbolic World of Mexican American Religion,” in Horizons of the Sacred, ed. Timothy Matovina and Gary Reibe-Estrella (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) ╇ 6.╇ Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe, Mother of a New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 177.

Chapter 14: Nepantla Spirituality ╇ 1.╇ Gloria Anzaldúa, “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de la Frontera,” in La Frontera/La Border: Art about the Mexico/U.S. Border Experience (San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de La Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 1993), 114. ╇ 2.╇ In Lak Ech is an ethical concept in the Nahuatl language emphasizing the interconnectedness of all living beings. Nahuatl is the living language of the Nahua cultural complex indigenous to the middle and southern regions of the continent now known as the Americas. Nahuatl is considered an Uto-Aztecan language. ╇ 3.╇ Electronic invitation from Harold Recinos, editor of Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation, dated April 8, 2009. ╇ 4.╇ Roberto Rodriguez, “Welcome to Apartheid, Arizona USA,” Column of the Americas, http://web.me.com/columnoftheamericas, posted May 15, 2010. ╇ 5.╇ House Bill 2281, State of Arizona May 23, 2010, www.azleg.gov/ legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s. ╇ 6.╇ Rodriguez, “Welcome to Apartheid.” ╇ 7.╇ Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute, 1987), 79. ╇ 8.╇ Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera, 23. ╇ 9.╇ Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), xiii. 10.╇ Isasi-Díaz and Tarango, Hispanic Women, 67. 11.╇ Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera, 23. 12.╇ Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera, 38. 13.╇ “Beware of romanticizing mestizaje, it could be fictional.” Author’s translation. Anzaldúa, “Border Arte,” 111. 14.╇ The works of numerous Chicana/o artists, writers, and intellectuals reflect the presence of the Indigenous spirit. For example, the visual art of Yreina Cervantez, Santa Barraza, Leo Limon, Irene Perez, Michael Amescua, David Botello, Carlos Frequez, Raoul De La Soto, Ester Hernandez, Joe Galarza, Marisol Torres, and the art collective of Mujeres de Maiz, to name just a few. 15.╇ David Carrasco, “Jaguar Christians in the Contact Zone,” Enigmatic Powers: Syncretism with African and Indigenous Peoples’ Religions among Latinos, ed. Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Andres I. Pérez y Mena (New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 1995), 74. 16.╇ Roberto R. Treviño named these aspects of religious agency in his study on turn-of-the-century Tejano Catholics. See “The Handbook of Texas Online,” www .tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/print/MM/pqmcf.html.

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17.╇ Fermin Herrera is a professor of Chicano/a studies at California State University, Northridge and author of Nahuatl-English, English-Nahuatl, Hippocrene Books Concise Dictionary (2004). 18.╇ Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y Islas de Tierra Firme, vol. 2 (Mexico City: n.p., 1867–1880), 268. 19.╇ Examples of communal responsibility in helping to make celebrations a success can still be found in contemporary indigenous communities today. The communal participation is proof of one’s belonging to the community. One example occurs in the film Blossoms of Fire, by Ellen Osborne and Maureen Gosling (Oakland: Intrepidas Productions, 2000). 20.╇ Miguel León-Portilla, Endangered Cultures (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990), 10. 21.╇ León-Portilla, Endangered Cultures, 11. 22.╇ Sylvia Marcos, “The Sacred Earth,” ed. Leonardo Boff and Virgilio Elizondo, Concilium: Third World Theology 5, no. 261 (1995). 23.╇ Marcos, “The Sacred Earth,” 30. 24.╇ Marcos, “The Sacred Earth.” 25.╇ Marcos, “The Sacred Earth,” 31. 26.╇ Carrasco, “Jaguar Christians,” 71. 27.╇ Carrasco, “Jaguar Christians,” 78. 28.╇ Carrasco, “Jaguar Christians,” 76. 29.╇ While nepantla as a harmonious space might seem to contradict the mysticomilitarism that existed within the Mexica culture, it is important to remember that the poets and philosophers, the tlamatinime, advocated a peaceful coexistence with all of humanity. Mexican culture, like all cultures, was/is not homogeneous. 30.╇ Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera, 78. 31.╇ Anzaldúa, “Border Arte,” 113. 32.╇ Laura Pérez, “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 49, 55. 33.╇ Pérez, “Spirit Glyphs,” 51. 34.╇ I define spirituality as the multiple ways in which persons nurture balanced relationships with themselves, others, the world, and the sacred mystery of life, or the divine. 35.╇ For an exceptional analysis of this point see Regina M. Marchi, Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 36.╇ See Lara Medina and Gilbert R. Cadena, “Días de los Muertos: Public Ritual, Community Renewal, and Popular Religion in Los Angeles,” in Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Catholic Traditions in U.S. Catholicism, ed. Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), for a lengthy discussion of the Mexicano/Chicano tradition of honoring the dead. 37.╇ The remains of an elaborate temazcalli can be seen at Xochicalco (a flourishing religious and secular center between 700–900 C.E.) in Morelos, Mexico, and at Yaxchilán, a Mayan city (250–950 C.E.) at the border of Mexico and Guatemala. In Xochicalco the remains include a large permanent rectangular temazcalli made of stone with a built-in drainage system. In Yaxchilán there are at least eight zampul-che or sweat baths. Contemporary Indigenous people in central Mexico have



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maintained the tradition in spite of the efforts of Spanish colonizers to obliterate the practice. In Yalalag, in the Oaxaca mountain region, I observed that most families had a small temazcalli for regular use, and in Temixco, in the central valley of Mexico near Cuernavaca, I participated in a sweat ceremony conducted in a stone and adobe small hut structure. 38.╇ I have been trained according to the Lakota inipi tradition but I have also experienced the Mexican temazcal. The traditions differ in the structure of the sweat house, the use of herbs, and the prayers and songs. 39.╇ John Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 5. 40.╇ There are many other kinds of sweathouses in the Americas depending on the region, traditions, and natural resources available. The Lakota inipi and the Mexican temazcalli are the most widely used today in North America. 41.╇ Joseph Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge: History and Legends (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1993), 11. Traditionally the inipi would be covered with buffalo hides or other animal skins. 42.╇ Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge, 11–13. 43.╇ Cited in Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge, 17. 44.╇ Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge, 17. 45.╇ Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge. The practice of sweating also thrived in ancient Europe, specifically among the Greeks, Romans, Scythians (present-day Russia), Slavs, Scandinavians, and Celts, and also in the Arab world, ancient Japan, and parts of Africa. The Russian, Scandinavian, and African sweat traditions in particular had physical and spiritual therapeutic properties as does the northern and southern Indigenous American sweat bath. See Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge, 14–16. Also Mikkel Aaland, Sweat (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1978). 46.╇ Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge, 17–18. Also see Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 47.╇ Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge, 20. Quote from Maud Oakes, The Two Crosses of Todos Santos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 240. 48.╇ Interview conducted by author with Virginia Espino, March 1994. 49.╇ Lame Deer and Erdoes, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, 2. 50.╇ The sacred pipe is shared only if a pipe carrier is present in the ceremony. The pipe is an extremely sacred object; the pipe and the tobacco are used to help send prayers to the Creator. 51.╇ Lame Deer and Erdoes, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, 4. 52.╇ David Abalos, Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 5. 53.╇ Abalos, Latinos in the United States, 8. 54.╇ Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (New York: Orbis Books, 1978), 356. 55.╇ Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, 366. 56.╇ Interview conducted by author with Celia Ramos, May 2004. 57.╇ Carrasco, “Jaguar Christians,” 78. 58.╇ Gloria Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift . . . the Path of Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public Acts,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 548.

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Index

academic, 3, 7, 18, 19, 21–23, 25–26, 27, 29–32, 33, 35, 51, 52, 63, 117, 164, 165, 193, 194, 195, 275, 292, 303n25, 311n11, 321n7; achievement, 165; theology, 180, 183–84, 190, 194–97 African American, 6, 8, 37–38, 39, 49–52, 74, 82, 95, 97, 100, 121, 124, 131, 132, 163, 184–89, 196, 232, 252, 301n26, 303n1, 304n4, 326n33; African American studies, 28; and economic structure, 166, 243; and education/achievement, 41–44, 163, 165, 168; and immigration, 43–44, 304n14; and incarceration, 238–39; and justice, 45, 47–48; and Latino alliances, 139, 153, 154, 305n20; public theology, 181, 184–85, 188, 189, 190–93, 195; and racism, 168–69, 176; and same-gender marriage, 40–41; and solidarity with other minority groups, 39–40; and voting rights, 166. See also black American exceptionalism, 9, 96, 99, 111, 315

apocalyptic, 11, 199, 200–207, 209, 211–14, 216–18, 330n10 Asian Americans, 113, 174, 245; and education/achievement, 163 black, 18, 28, 37, 39, 53, 59, 82, 97, 132, 134, 147, 183, 191–92, 251, 263, 276, 340; and civil rights movement, 113–14, 121, 125, 128; discrimination against, 98, 103, 113, 120, 162, 240, 304n14; and religion, 26, 40; term, 50, 339n2. See also African American bodies, 55, 56, 119, 184, 225, 232, 237, 239, 248, 266, 276, 280, 290, 291; transnational, 55 borderlands, 279, 280 Catholic, Catholicism, 25–26, 29–31, 50, 51, 131, 135–37, 138, 147, 149, 207, 258, 281, 288, 291, 303n25, 313n47, 314n52, 319n1, 340n7; and education/achievement, 168; identity as, 293, 320n7; and Latina/o theology, 19, 22, 23; and the poor, 82 371

372

Index

Chavez, Cesar, 113, 115–29, 130–32, 134, 146, 148, 228, 334n53 Chicano, 12, 113, 119, 122, 125, 128, 131, 196, 276, 280–82, 286–87, 293, 295 civil rights movement, 1, 37, 44, 96, 113–14, 121, 131, 141, 166, 190 colonization, 59, 116, 201, 240, 241, 255, 268, 269, 282–83, 287; of language, 265 common good, 2, 4, 6–7, 11, 12, 13, 44, 80, 85, 88, 181, 192, 255–56, 297, 312n32; definition of, 309n4 conquest, 55, 81, 82, 123, 245, 263–64, 273, 296; of American Indians, 109, 255, 257, 258, 260, 261–62, 266, 267–70, 284, 340n7; of Canaan, 107, 109 democracy, 11–13, 27, 54, 68, 70, 82, 98, 100–101, 113–14, 217, 256–57, 263, 266, 268, 276; global, 57, 58, 62, 67; radical, 181–88, 191–93, 195–97 difference, 3–6, 8–13, 48, 54, 57–59, 61, 62–65, 70, 76–78, 88, 92, 99, 101, 200, 202, 211, 214, 236, 249, 254–56, 279, 287, 295, 301n2, 310n13; embodied, 45–46; ethnic, 156, 158; geographic, 167; religious and cultural, 9, 106–7, 112–13, 270 diversity, 3, 32, 42, 46, 48, 51, 54, 76, 83, 106, 132, 156–59, 167, 171, 174, 176, 236, 249, 252, 256, 280, 284, 312n32 empire, 55–56, 63, 67, 93, 214, 216, 217, 218, 245, 253, 268; British, 125, 259; Christian, 246; European, 265–66, 268, 269; Roman, 209–10; Soviet, 213; U.S., 25, 244, 245 ethics, 35, 73, 95, 310n10, 311n20; Christian, 75, 83; environmental, 2; Latina/o, 8–9, 74–76, 78–79, 83–84, 88 ethnicity, 6, 37, 38–39, 42–45, 47–48, 49–52, 58, 60, 87, 149, 155, 156, 157, 160, 252, 280; term, 304n2

food, 12, 85, 273, 288, 332, 341n20; importance of, 219–30, 231–34; production of, 11, 220–21, 230, 252 Gandhi, Mohandas, 9, 113–19, 122– 25, 126, 128, 130–31, 148, 317n6 Hispanic, 13, 20, 24, 37, 59, 73, 75–77, 79–80, 162, 258, 310n13, 311n23, 312n33; and Christianity, 133, 138–42, 147, 152–54, 281; and current issues, 84, 87; and education/ achievement, 41–43, 163, 165; and other minority groups, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 47, 173; and poverty, 243, 309n3; term, 50 immigration, 8, 38–45, 50, 89, 92, 171, 222, 279, 305n17, 305nn20–21, 321n7; of Asians, 241, 245–46; of Chinese, 98, 241, 245–46; of Japanese, 241, 246; of Koreans, 168, 241, 245–46; of Mexicans, 241; reform, 10, 133–50, 152–54, 227–28, 240, 309n3, 319n1, 320n4 imperialism, 11, 55, 82, 124, 127, 245, 252 Indigenous people, 82, 96, 103, 242, 244, 257, 279, 280, 282, 296, 344n37 Korean Americans, 159, 160, 171, 172, 173; and racism, 168–69 land, 88, 113, 117, 145, 229, 232, 239, 246, 253; acquisition/occupation of, 66, 105–6; and American Indians, 242–44, 248, 252, 259–68, 270–71, 276; in biblical accounts, 108–10, 131; “dry land” immigration policy, 50; and living, 219–20; Latinas, 12, 31, 73, 76–78, 81, 88, 221–22, 225, 251, 275, 281 Latina feminist theology, 22, 27 Latino/a theology, 4, 5, 7–9, 17–22, 24–28, 30, 226, 276, 301n2 Latino Evangelicalism, 10, 133–41, 143, 145, 147, 149–51

liberation theology, 24–25, 30–31, 69, 70, 75, 78, 80, 81, 91, 107, 153, 236, 281 Martin Luther King Jr., 126, 134, 148, 179 mestizaje, 20, 53, 59, 73, 76, 77–78, 81–82, 86, 88, 89, 276, 281–82, 287, 310n13; term, 312n38 mestizo, 147, 240, 275, 276, 277, 282, 293, 312n38 Mexican American, 30, 50, 121, 123–24, 168, 237, 240–41 migrants, 12, 58, 66, 219, 222, 223, 228, 332n1

Index

373

multicultural, 4, 10, 101, 110, 155–57, 159, 161, 167, 171, 175–76, 300n16 National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, 10, 133, 139, 152, 154 Native Americans, 9, 102, 107, 123, 132, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 290, 315n3 nepantla, 13, 28, 279, 281, 283–89, 291, 293–94, 344n29 postmodern, 11, 63, 77, 78, 79, 179, 180, 184, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 246

Contributors

Victor Anderson is Oberlin Graduate Professor of Ethics and Society, The Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. He earned his doctor of philosophy in religion from Princeton University. His publications include Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in African American Religious and Cultural Criticism and Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersection of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology. He has a third book forthcoming, entitled Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience. Anderson has published over twenty-five articles and chapters in scholarly journals and books, and has given over twenty-five public lectures at universities and colleges in the United States and England, including the Templeton Lecture on Science and Religion, the John Arthur Heck Lectures at United Theological Seminary, and the Singh Lecture on Inter-religious Dialogue at University of Birmingham, England. Nancy Bedford is Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston and Profesora Extraordinaria No Residente at Instituto Universitario ISEDET in Buenos Aires. Her research interests include migration, feminist theory, theological hermeneutics of culture, christology, pneumatology, and theological anthropology. She is the author of over fifty journal articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of five books. The latest is La porfía de la resurrección: Ensayos desde el feminismo teológico latinoamericano. Her work has been published in Spanish, English, French, German, and Dutch. She belongs to a Mennonite congregation. 375

376

Contributors

María Teresa (MT) Dávila is an assistant professor of Christian ethics at Andover Newton Theological School. She earned her PhD at Boston College (2007). The title of her dissertation, “A Liberation Ethic for the OneThird World: The Preferential Option for the Poor and Challenges to U.S. Middle-Class Christians,” explores the intersections and contrasts between authentic Christian discipleship and the sociocultural, political, and economic contexts of the United States. Her research and teaching interests cover a range of topics including Christian ethics, immigration and race, public theology, and the just war tradition. She is a Roman Catholic laywoman and native of Puerto Rico. Gastón Espinosa is the Arthur V. Stoughton Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles including Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture, Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, Rethinking Latino(a) Religions and Identity, and Religion, Race, and the American Presidency. He is chair of the five Claremont Colleges Religious Studies Program, president of La Comunidad of Hispanic Scholars of Religion at the AAR & SBL, and coeditor of the Columbia University Press Series in Religion and Politics. Eleazar S. Fernández is professor of constructive theology at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, New Brighton, Minnesota. His current research interests include globalization, particularly the issue of migration and belonging, as well as race and ethnicity, diaspora spirituality, postcolonial praxis, ecclesiology, interfaith dialogue, and global Christianities. Among his publications are Reimagining the Human: Theological Anthropology in Response to Systemic Evil, Realizing the America of our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans (coedited with Fumitaka Matsuoka); A Dream Unfinished: Theological Reflections on America from the Margins (coedited with Fernando Segovia); and Toward a Theology of Struggle. A project in progress is New Overtures: Asian North American Theology in the 21st Century (editor). Michelle A. Gonzalez is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Miami. She received her PhD in systematic and philosophical theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in 2001. Her research and teaching interests include Latino/a, Latin American, and feminist theologies, as well as interdisciplinary work in AfroCaribbean studies. She is the author of Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas; Afro-Cuban Theology: Religion, Race, Culture and Identity; Created in God’s Image: An Introduction to Feminist Theological Anthropology; Embracing Latina Spirituality: A Woman’s Perspective; Caribbean Religious History



Contributors

377

(coauthored with Ennis Edmonds); and Shopping: Christian Explorations of Daily Living. Luis Leon is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, specializing in the history of religions in the Americas. His research and teaching include methods and theories in the study of religion; Borderlands; postcolonialism; ethnicity and racial formation; gender and queer theory; and Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural studies. He received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Leon received a master of theological studies (MTS) from the Harvard University Divinity School and earned simultaneous AB degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, in Chicana studies and rhetoric. He is the author of La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the United States—Mexican Borderlands and coeditor with Gary Laderman of the Encyclopedia of Religion and American Cultures. He is currently writing a book entitled The Myth of Cesar Chavez: Religious Politics from the Borderlands, and is working on a critical study of “machismo,” focusing on the intersection of spirituality and eroticism among Latino men, tentatively entitled American Macho: Religious Erotics among Latino Men. With Laura E. Perez he is coediting a collection of essays on De-Colonizing Spirituality and Sexuality. Lara Medina holds a doctorate in American history from the Claremont Graduate University. Her research and publications focus on Chicana/o religious history, public ritual, and Chicana feminist spirituality. Her book is titled Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church. Recent published works include “Los Espiritus Siguen Hablando: Chicana Spiritualities,” reprinted in Latina/o Healing Practices: Mestizo and Indigenous Perspectives (edited by Brian W. McNeill and Joseph M. Cervantes); “Nepantla Spirituality: Negotiating Multiple Identities and Faiths Among U.S. Latinas” in Rethinking Latino(a) Religion and Identity (edited by Miguel De La Torre and Gaston Espinoza); and “Communing with the Dead: Spiritual and Cultural Healing in Chicano/a Communities” in Religion and Healing In America (edited by Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered). Medina is a professor in Chicana and Chicano studies at California University, Northridge. Andrew Sung Park is professor of theology and Christian ethics at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio. He previously taught at the Claremont School of Theology, California. His research interests include race and ethnicity, just peacebuilding, healing and liberation, global and ecological wholeness, Christology, science and religion, and Christian ethics. His publications include The Wounded Heart of God, Racial Conflict and

378

Contributors

Healing (a Gustavus Myers Award for an outstanding book on the subject of human rights in North American in 1997), God Who Needs Our Salvation (a video-tape), The Other Side of Sin (coeditor), From Hurt to Healing, and Triune Atonement: Christ’s Healing for Sinners, Victims, and the Whole Creation. In addition, he authored a number of journal articles and book chapters. He is cochair of the association of North American Korean Systematic Theologians and an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church. Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Professor Recinos received his master’s in divinity in 1982 from Union Theological Seminary, a doctor of ministry in parish ministry in 1986 from New York Theological Seminary, and a doctor of philosophy with honors (PhD) in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly publications and journals, Recinos’s publications include Hear the Cry! A Latino Pastor Challenges the Church; Jesus Weeps: Global Encounters on Our Doorstep; Who Comes in the Name of the Lord? Jesus at the Margins; and Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church. More recently, Recinos coedited with Hugo Magallanes, Jesus in the Hispanic Community: Images of Christ from Theology to Popular Religion. Professor Recinos is an ordained elder and member of the BaltimoreWashington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Marcia Y. Riggs is the J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She is often engaged as a lecturer and preacher and has published dozens of articles on ministerial and sexual ethics, moral education, and public policy. She is a recognized authority on the black woman’s club movement of the nineteenth century, the subject of her first book, Awake, Arise, and Act! A Womanist Call for Black Liberation. Her other books are Can I Get A Witness? Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women, an Anthology and Plenty Good Room: Black Women versus Male Power in the Black Church. Dr. Riggs has served on the editorial boards for the Encyclopedia on Women and Religion in North America, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and the Feasting on the Word Lectionary Commentary Series. She has also spent several years chairing committees in the American Academy of Religion and the Association of Theological Schools. She is president-elect of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. Dr. Riggs is currently developing and writing a book on an ethical theory and practice called religious ethical mediation. Religious ethical mediation prepares leaders to address religion, conflict, and violence in a transformative manner. David Sánchez is an assistant professor of New Testament studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. He is the vice president of the Acad-



Contributors

379

emy of Catholic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) and the book review editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. His research interests include modern Chicano/a muralism, postcolonial theory, and the apocalyptic legacies of the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Revelation in their modern contexts. He is the author of From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths, which was awarded the 2009 Hispanic Theological Initiative Book Award. He has published a variety of articles on contemporary Chicano/a muralism, Guadalupan studies, and apocalyptic worldviews in both antiquity and modernity. Mark Lewis Taylor is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His newly completed book is entitled, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World. Previously, his most recent book was Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Politics and American Empire, and currently he is speaking on themes of that volume. In his book, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, Taylor developed a Christology in response to U.S. empire in relation to issues of the contemporary prison-industrial complex, police brutality, and the death penalty. In addition to other books and articles, Taylor is also founder of “Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal,” a group of teachers from all levels of education organizing for a new trial for Abu-Jamal, a journalist on Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982. He has also been an activist in other movements to end U.S. war and the death penalty, pressing also for immigration rights and reform, and for change in U.S. policy toward Mexico and Latin America. Tink Tinker, a citizen of the Osage Nation (wazhazhe), is the Clifford Baldridge Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology, where he has taught for twenty-five years and brings an Indian perspective to a predominantly Amer-European school. As an American Indian academic, Tinker is committed to a scholarly endeavor that takes seriously both the liberation of Indian peoples from their historic oppression as colonized communities and the liberation of white Americans, the historic colonizers and oppressors of Indian peoples. He continues to volunteer at Four Winds American Indian Council in Denver, an American Indian community project, where he has served as a nonstipendiary director and as a traditional spiritual leader. Dr. Tinker’s publications include: American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty; Spirit and Resistance: American Indian Liberation and Political Theology; Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide; coauthor of A Native American Theology; and coeditor of Native Voices: American Indian Sovereignty and Identity. And he has written some fifty journal articles and chapters for collection.

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Contributors

Jace Weaver is Franklin Professor of Religion and Native American Studies and director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the award-winning author or editor of more than ten books and many articles in the field. His most recent books are Red Clay, 1835: Cherokee Removal and the Meaning of Sovereignty (coauthored with his wife, Laura Adams Weaver) and Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America. His current projects are the book Finding the Rosebuds: Untold Stories of the Cherokee National Female Seminary and and film The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and Transoceanic Cultural Exchange, 1000–1925. He received his JD from Columbia Law School in 1982 and his PhD in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary (affiliated with Columbia University) in 1996. He works as a consultant for the Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee National Historical Society. He splits his time between Athens, Georgia, and Tahlequah, Oklahoma.