A Letter to My Son

published on Friday, November 12, 2010 by admin

By Dr. Brian Bantum, D’03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

This is a letter to my son that I am not sure he will understand now, but one that I hope he will look back upon to give clarity to some moments of confusion and exclusion. It is also a letter for a world that in so many ways wants something different but cannot imagine how it prevents those hopes from becoming realized.

To my beloved son,

You were only ten years old when you saw that American miracle, Barack Obama, sworn into office as president of the United States of America. Innocence seemed to be reclaimed in that moment as so many heard, in the president’s oath, centuries of guilt absolved. “To a post-racial future!” some exclaimed, hopeful for a unity that seemed so difficult to grasp even in our so-called enlightened time.

And yet, two years later you have come to discover the true “Curse of Ham,” the refusal of difference that ferments beneath the surface of every society, that reveals us all to be more savage than civil. You have now glimpsed just how much we humans thrive on difference, how we seek it out even in its most subtle forms (and that 7th graders seem particularly adept at it!)

But, as these realities seem to so often reveal, our present is never quite the simple repetition of the past. You, the child of a mulatto man and a Korean American mother, are the sum of many parts, places, stories, and possibilities. In so many ways you encapsulate what many people wish for when they imagine a “post-racial” hope.

It has pained me so to see you discover that post-racial is, in sad fact, simply a poor recalibration of an awkward arrangement made long, long ago when there were only whites and coloreds. You have stumbled into a world where a few white boys will exclude you, call you black because you are not white, and a Latino can call you a nigger without the slightest hesitation, his ignorance or his malice equally heinous crimes.

So here you are, in post-racial America.

This does not have to be the end of the story, the end of our possibilities. But you should know the world you have entered and what peculiar space you occupy. Welcome to the nebulous space of the “inter,” the in-between, the not quite, to racial ambiguity.

In the first twelve years of your life, the question of whom or what you were was a pleasantry, a curiosity. But somehow the innocent question of your identity seems to have more attached to it than you realized. Not looking Asian enough to be easily absorbed into the Asian table, not dark enough to find a home among African Americans, and, as some have felt willingly enough to tell you to your face, too dark to be white. Welcome son, to the neither/nor.

You are not the first and not the last to feel the constriction of this space. In fact, you are now a second generation “in-betweener” and sadly the world some of us hoped would emerge, where the curiosity of the mulatto, the half-breed, would be no more, has not appeared.

If left to ourselves perhaps we could hope for the space to become true individuals, to become our full selves apart from what others desire us to be or without the chains of cultural expectation.

But our world is not a world of endless possibilities and autonomous individuals. You and I are bound to each other. You and I are bound to those who refuse us and those who welcome us. All of these histories, realities, wellsprings of cultural achievement, and tragedy flow through your veins, in your face.

You and I are people of the in between, people who cannot easily seek to be simply “who we are” because our “who” is inexplicable without these peoples. Our life is not our own. We belong to many peoples but above all we belong to God (of course you knew this was coming!) This makes us what some Christians have said, “foreigners in every fatherland, and in every foreign land, a citizen.”

If being post-racial means anything, perhaps it is this: that we are always at home, and we are never home. If being a Christian means anything, it is that we are always at home, and we are never home and because of this, the exclusion and the refusals we so often endure are never the entirety of our lives.

Much, much love,

Your father

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“God in America” and Black Christianity

published on Thursday, October 21, 2010 by admin

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and
Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Last week, PBS’s Frontline/American Experience aired a most interesting three-part series entitled God in America. The series featured not one, but three Duke University Divinity School faculty members: professors Lauren Winner, Grant Wacker, and Richard Lischer.

The six-hour series can be viewed in its entirety online. I provided real-time Twitter commentary as the series was broadcast, and followed with concluding comments.

This series could not have aired at a better time. I say this for two reasons.

The first is this. Whether we’re talking about the ruckus over plans to build a Muslim center in New York City, an evangelical pastor in Florida who threatened to burn a copy of the Koran (with appeals from the highest governmental levels, he was persuaded against doing so), or Glenn Beck’s “March on Washington” and the Tea Party’s invocation of God in its calls to take “our country back,” I think it’s indisputable: the God-question is in the cultural and political air.

The power of the God in America series is the historicizing of the importance of God and religion in our country’s national discourse. Indeed, the series puts the current crises of religion and race in American culture and politics, especially since Obama’s election to the presidency, in perspective.

From the 17th century Puritan language of a “City on Hill,” first uttered by John Winthrop to interpret America (and  then taken up again by Ronald Reagan), through the American Civil War, the various waves of immigration, the fight for women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, the rise of the Religious Right, all the way to more recent debates about terrorism and gay marriage, God in America does a marvelous job of showing how religion has been at the heart of cultural and political debate. In fact, what the series profiles is how the country’s greatest historical crises have always been staged in relationship to religion or, perhaps better, as religious or theo-drama.

Given this and its masterful handling of the material, God in America deserves a wide viewing.

But for my money, God in America deserves a serious viewing for another reason: on the whole, its handling of the central place of black Christianity and the role of black churches in America is well done.

Black Christianity, at its best, has been a voice of religious sanity for the country. This comes through clearly in God in America. The show helps clarify the central role of black Christian faith in guiding the country to follow its better angels—the angels of Freedom, Justice, and Liberty for All, and to honor our responsibility to our kin and beyond. In other words, black Christianity has been a voice of humanity and humaneness in religion in America.

This comes through in particular when we hear the elder statesman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. recount his part in a march to demand the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from the jailhouse where he was being held. I was moved as he told of the group of marchers kneeling in prayer, believing that somehow God would work in the interests of righteousness to free King.

There is also the series’ recounting of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Written on the margins of a newspaper and other scraps of paper, the letter was King’s direct rebuttal of demands from mainline clergy that he cease and desist agitating for social justice. In this letter, King reworks the ways that Christian imagination is called to counter the interests of injustice in America.

We also hear King calling for economic justice for the poor, and his insistence that the United States get out of Vietnam, a war that he saw as a new form of Western imperial domination.

The series is chock full of moving scenes such as these, scenes where profound humaneness and humanity jump through the screen.

This points to what I want to get across: God in America profiles how black Christianity at its best has been a healing agent, helping shape Americans’ struggle to live by our better angels, not our lesser angels. Black Christianity has sought to move beyond fragmentation toward a different social vision, a vision of belonging and community.

But what we—and here I mean specifically black Christians—must now ask ourselves is this: To what degree are we living into the best of black Christianity that has gone before us? In other words, I am asking the question of Christian discipleship in the present. What ought Christian discipleship look like now?

 As I see it, too much of black Christianity has become about mere entertainment, on the one hand, and about judging who can—and who can’t—be “saved,” and thus who can and who can’t be in the church. As a result, the discipleship question is a decidedly open one. It is a question that demands our attention.

If the recent Eddie Long incident (and others I might have invoked) tells us anything, surely it is this.

Perhaps this is the other challenge the series God in America poses.

I recommend it heartily.

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The Last Words of Jesus: A Joint Reflection

published on Friday, April 2, 2010 by admin

By Dr. Brian Bantum, D’03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

In Christ’s last words I am reminded of the observation of one theologian regarding Christ, that there are no words outside the Word...In reflecting upon these last words of Christ I am stopped. My speech ends for a moment as I begin to hear how my own words and my own hopes clang against Christ’s words spoken to me and about me, to humanity and about humanity. But rather than being driven to remain in silence, I am compelled to sing. To sing a song that is broken and out of tune even as I seek to sing with these words spoken to us, spoken about us. As I sing, in my tone-deaf desperation to hear the tune, I am left to humbly sing of this…

Only within Christ’s words of forgiveness (“forgive them…”) am I told what I do not know (…for they know not.)

Only within Christ’s words do I find the possibility of God’s presence, of a possibility fulfilled (…you will be with me.)

Only within Christ’s words do I find kinship, a kinship reordered and returned to me, a community gathered together at the foot of the cross (…behold your son, behold your mother.)

Only in Christ’s words do I find God taking my desolation and hopelessness into himself (…why have you forsaken me?)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my own thirst and do I discover the manifold ways I sought to quench my own thirst (I thirst)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my own completion (It is finished)

Only in Christ’s words do I find my end (To you I commit my spirit.)

These last words of Christ draw us not to the finality of a moment, but to the utter completeness of Christ’s words, of the presence of all of his words within these few words. In these brief utterances we find ourselves bound up together in his words concerning us, in his words for us, in his words within us. Let us receive the Word broken for us, the Word broken within us, that our words my sound within the manger of Christ’s body, declaring the depth of his love, the profundity and mystery of his life, God’s Word to us.

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