Re-thinking Race, Re-thinking Theology - Part 1. # 145. 30/01/2024

Out of Many, One People

Welcome. A follow-up building on last week, and to be followed by Part 2 next week.

Re-thinking Race, Re-thinking Theology - Part 1.

All theology is inevitably contextual. Whenever the context changes - or the context is perceived to have changed, as in last week’s discussion of ‘re-thinking race’ - then the theology changes. That is, when the angle of the viewer shifts then new perspectives, new emphases, new discoveries emerge in the deposit of God-given revelation. Last week’s blog charted the ways in which the standard orthodoxy in understanding race in Britain, heavily influenced by the experience of the United States, needs to give way to a ‘new conversation’ reflecting the realities of the speedily changing situation in Britain. (See blogs # 125 & 126 under that heading, reviewing books by Rakib Ehsan and Tomiwa Owolade). This blog holds that the perception of race in Britain still held by the church, and especially by those who theologise for the church, is out-of-date and unfit for purpose. In turn this leads to mistaken and ineffective policies, which may win approval at reputational or presentational levels but do little to increase the effectiveness of the church’s ministry across the whole range of ethnic minority and ethnic majority people, who are the proper concerns of a church which rightly sees itself as having a call to share God’s love in Christ with the entire population of the country.

What then are the shifts in theology involved in re-thinking race?

1. Renewed emphasis on the unity of humankind.

‘So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’. Gen 1:27 is rightly seen as the foundational text for all Christian understandings of race (as the last part of the verse implies a binary understanding of gender). The consequence of the verse is that all humans deserve to be responded to with not only respect but also with awe as those bearing the image of Almighty God.

However, the slogan ‘One Race, the Human Race’, whilst a good starting point for theologising on race is a poor end point. Some account needs to be given for the fact that both humankind and British society are marked by internal divisions that we need to conceptualise and work with. The debate begins over to what extent we ought to accept and work with sub-divisions within that one humanity. How do we place diversity within that unity? And what sorts of diversity should be given prominence? Whilst we need to give full energy to both (see Blog 118: ‘Holding Together Unity & Diversity: a Theological Proposal’) at any particular moment some judgement needs to be exercised as to where and in what ways we give prominence to diversity. What I have termed the ‘standard’ view of race has brought a major emphasis on broad, simple divisions of race, such that Black and White (or Whiteness) come to the fore; with the ancillary use of terms such as ‘BAME’ or ‘UKME/GHM indicating an essentially binary view of race. This over-arching skin-colour division is seen as the indicator of much more substantive divisions of access to power and the acquiring of wealth, with the ‘black’ (or whatever other bulking up term you choose to use) always getting the worst deal. One of the few and perhaps the only thing that Kehinde Andrews and Tomiwa Owolade agree on is their repudiation of the term ‘BAME’.

As last week’s blog on ‘Re-thinking Race’ indicated this binary division of British society has decreasing traction and so is a poor starting point for thinking about race, both because inequality of outcome has various causes, not just racism; and because overt racism itself is clearly declining. Rightly organisations such as the Equiano Project or ‘Don’t Divide Us’, stressing this ‘revisionist’ reading of ‘race’ in Britain, frequently use terms such as ‘universalism’ or ‘humanism’ to lay weight on the over-arching unity of all people (though without the conceptual weight given by the Christian understanding of creation) over against identitarian efforts to stress the importance of notional racial divisions as guides to national policy,.

Further ‘race’ as customarily understood has no theological value. Skin colour is occasionally observed in the scriptures, notably with passing references to Cushite peoples, or to ‘Simeon who was called Niger’ in Acts 13:1, but is accorded no great significance. The substantive distinctions are firstly ethnicity, or peoplehood, with both Old and New Testaments littered with references to the ethnic groups that people come from (see my reference to David Firth’s ‘Including the Stranger: Foreigners in the Former Prophets’, Blog # 66). Secondly considerable attention is given to issues of wealth and power. Occasionally this connects with ethnicity, as in the whole Exodus narrative of Israel’s escape from bondage in Egypt (though to an extent this was an ethnically diverse Group – ‘a mixed crowd also went up with them’, Ex 12:38). More often it is concerned with justice and defending the rights of the poor, either within the ethnically relatively homogenous society of Israel, or with the outworking of complex social, ethnic, and religious distinctions within the early church, as in Jerusalem (Acts 6:1-7), Corinth (1 Cor11:17-13-13), or Rome (Rom 14).

Therefore majoring on a major racial binary as the most significant sub-division in our society is both socially inappropriate and theologically unjustified. The focus of ‘Black Theologies’ are either on injustices of power and the colonial legacy (Anthony Reddie) and so variants of Liberation Theologies – a vitally important area of Christian intellectual concern and praxis; or on the distinct cultural formations rising from experiencing racism (Robert Beckford). Both are localised in the (rather small) British African-Caribbean or Black British community. Enlarging their scope to present themselves as theologies of the ‘black’ binary in our society is substantially over-extending their reach.

2. Greater Awareness of the specifics of ethnicity.

When the black/white contrast control is turned down then all sorts of intermediate shades come into recognition. Last week’s blog stressed that the social context that we now live in fails to cope with the complexity implied by this simple binary ‘racial’ contrast: not just an Indian Prime Minister, but a nine-year old Tamil girl from Harrow beating international chess grandmasters, or the son of a white ex-policeman and African-Caribbean mother from Stourbridge emerging as the world’s most coveted footballer. The ‘orthodox’ view of race does a great disservice in taking our eyes off this intriguing, and I would stress, encouraging complexity. We have seen that scripture’s affirmation of the dignity of all human beings goes along with close attentiveness to their specific ethnicity. Such ethnic ascriptions in the Old Testament (the Hittite, the Moabite and so on) get lost on a casual modern reader but they point to an awareness of the significance of ethnicity.

Identifying with a colour is too crude to give a sound basis for our identity – the group will  eventually be found to be amorphous – ‘we are barely a we’ to quote Tomiwa Owolade’s apothegm. Consequently swathes of people become disinherited because of not fully falling under a particular label, and so dismissed as ‘coconuts’, ‘bananas’, ‘sell-outs’ ‘house slaves’ and so on. All of them, bullying attempts to maintain some sort of conceptual group purity. Human beings have an irreducible tendency to break free of ethnically policed confines and assert their individuality.

The unavoidable consequence of bulking up of all ethnic minorities under terms such as ‘black’ or BAME or UKME/GMH is to distance people from each other. (Perhaps a reason why some white authority figures are comfortable with it). For, as Trevor Phillips put it, ‘I have never met a BAME’. At the very heart of living in God’s kingdom is the call to love one another, above all to love the stranger. That love can only be expressed as the once featureless outline of an ‘other’ starts to take on richness, specificity and detail. Naming someone’s ethnicity is a first (but certainly not final) step to giving life to that outline. To say someone is Jamaican, Barbadian, black British, Yoruba and so on is to give me some understanding of who they are and what has formed them – though an understanding that needs to be readily amended, qualified or even nullified by experience. But for a starter, specific ethnicity is a pointer to their history, language, cultural emphases and much else. It is an element in what leads us into a respectful, reciprocal interactive relationship. When such particularity is obscured by the broad, generalising terminology that still tends to dog institutions then humane respect is weakened. Does the Church of England realise that its concern to make more UKME/GMH senior appointments by consecrating several bishops of South Indian background is not an appropriate response to its major weakness in failing to impact young African Caribbean or black British people, especially men?

Toning down the broad racial labels that so often cloud the thinking of institutions in their quest for ‘diversity’ ought to bring to the fore love for our neighbours expressed in valuing their specific ethnicity. Christopher Watkin expresses it beautifully: ‘My neighbour is neither my beloved . . . nor humanity as a whole, nor again people from my nation, ethnicity or demographic. My neighbour is an anarchic category, a happenstantial intrusion into my carefully curated networks of family, friends and coworkers, . . a subversive reshuffling of the relational cards. . . Both a love of qualities and a universal love in the abstract are loves over which we have control, but we do not control who happens to be our neighbour’ (in ‘Biblical Critical Theory’, p 416). In Britain we now have an incredible variety of neighbours. Our challenge and our joy is to meet them in their very distinctiveness.

3. A more positive assessment of power.

Underlying the propensity to conceive of race in binary terms is a suspicion of power. How we assess power is in part the result of our personal experience. Understandably people who feel that their concerns have been neglected by authorities, that they have received intimidating treatment from the police, for whom schooling has been a negative experience, or for whom fathering was either brutal or neglectful, then any exercise of power will likely be understood negatively. Such life experiences may also incline to the acceptance of political theories that carry an innate suspicion of power – either weakened derivatives of Marxism which see that power as currently exercised simply justifies the prosperous playing by their own rules to benefit themselves; or more latterly in a simplified Critical Race Theory that sees our entire framework of conceptualisation as developed by and propagated to maintain the hegemony of a white elite.

But such understanding, once more, must be tested against our current realities. An obvious rejoinder is that we have a minority ethnic Prime Minister, plus of course several other senior minority ethnic government ministers – not as the consequence of any revolutionary project to cast down the once powerful, but simply from seeking to find the most appropriate people to exercise power. Obviously this benign interpretation of the shift of power from (to use now very old-fashioned terminology) white to Black can be contested, but the big picture is unassailable – the configuration of power in modern Britain is decreasingly aligned with race, so that ‘power’ can not be seen as intractably operated against minority ethnic people.

Theologically construal of power as an intrinsically negative quality which must be ever subject to ‘criticism’ is misleading. In ‘Being Interrupted’ Al Barrett and Ruth Harley use the term ‘kin-dom’ – ‘used deliberately, ironically, to subvert, turn on their heads, our usual understandings of ‘kingdoms’ (hierarchical societies ruled over by a powerful monarch). . . It’s still very hard to imagine its meaning beyond a male-centred, patriarchical world. . . We’ve opted for the term ‘kin-dom, used by some feminist theologians, to retain the subversive sense of Jesus’ term’ (p 5). But this pitting of ‘soft’ words (kin, subvert, femininity) over against ‘hard’ words (hierarchy, powerful, monarch, patriarchical) is a misleading dichotomy. We have a loving Father whose authority over his creation is to be exercised by delegated authority, inevitably creating hierarchies of power. To be coy about the idea of ‘kingdom’ is to remove a central structure of Christian theology

Certainly kingship and power are particularly vulnerable to being exercised unjustly and harmfully, and therefore scripture repeatedly sees the king as subject to prophetic critique. Before Israel requested a king Hannah had already prophesied ‘The Lord will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to the king, and exalt the power of his anointed’ (1 Sam 2:10b). Thus David G. Firth summarises the narrative account of kingship in 1 & 2 Samuel: ‘Kings reign under Yahweh’s authority, and demonstrate their acceptance of this in their commitment to authentic worship as both a public and private act’. Thus it is ‘a model that is positive for the future’, and for all his flaws David both ‘accepts Jahweh’s right to judge and discipline him’, and recognised ‘worship and a reign submitted to God as essential’ (p 45 in ‘Apollos Old Testament Commentary on 1 & 2 Samuel’, summarising pp 41-45).

Whilst the continuing Old Testament story of idolatry and sin constantly means that model rarely delivered its potential, yet Jesus adopted and augmented ‘Kingdom’ as a central focus for his ministry, and what he subverted was not hierarchies or powerful monarchs – these are taken as given in his teaching – but their subversion in the love of and abuse of power (Matt 20:20-28).

Intrinsically power both flows from God’s overarching rule over his creation, and his delegation to humanity of ‘dominion’ (Gen 1:28). It is by humans exercising such power that over millennia the quality of life on earth has improved considerably, despite all the past (and quite possibly far worse to come) flaws which people have exercised. If our first step is the criticism of power rather than its affirmation, then too often the consequence is that those who have been critical of power, when outside it, have exercised it very badly when exercising it. When criticisms of the policing of the Notting Hill Carnival led to the greater use of stewards selected by the organisers the outcome was greater officially sanctioned violence. Post colonial regimes have rarely been greater defenders of human rights than their predecessors.

History gives us examples of Christians who embraced power not as a means of self-serving but as a means of serving people, especially when traditional sources of power had crumbled. Thus when the collapse of Roman power led into the so-called Dark Ages, the western church, as one of the few institutions that had the networks of authority and education to continue across a wide area, increasingly came to take over responsibilities of administration and societal care. ‘Christendom’ rather than the term of abuse it has tended to become, should be valued as the attempt to provide neighbours with continuing care, even if often flawed by sinful pride and greed. On a smaller scale, Baptist missionaries in Jamaica such as William Knibb attempted to maintain societal cohesion through the transition away from a society based on slave estates.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur ‘emplots’ the suspicion of power between a good creation and a ‘second naïveté’ which moves beyond criticism to a post-critical faith. Being aware of the evil of power does not blind us to its potential to be used well.

A racial binary mentality is rightly aware of ways in which power has been abused through racial violence and terror, but the model’s absence of complexity consequently generates a negative assessment of power. In contrast it should be recognised that the exercise of power by humans is built into God’s creation, that it needs be exercised with humility and love for the common good, and that the ease with which we can abuse it means that the powerful are both to be prayed for and held accountable to the prophetic word of God.

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Add Ons

Apologies for my mistake two weeks ago of saying Rani Joshi was head of South Asian Concern. It should have read South Asian Forum.

Drawing on Scripture: ‘Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord: . . .  So that the name of the Lord may be declared in Zion, and his praise in Jerusalem, when peoples gather together, and kingdoms, to worship the Lord’ (Ps 102:18,21,22). God has good purposes for kingdoms.