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No Context, No Gospel

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“If the gospel is not contextualized, the Word of God will remain a logos asarkos (unincarnate word), a message that touches our lives only tangentially.”—C. René Padilla 

Una Tradición

For over fifty years, Latin@ theologians have stressed that divine-human relations, theologies, and Christian practices are culturally laden. For example, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier writes, “the nature of God is contextual and bearing witness to [the] gospel is a contextual matter.” When considering theological education, Conde-Frazier adds, “The loci of our theological education are the lakes and oceans of our lives, the intersection of the practical and the theoretical as we move toward pastoral action. Our theology never comes from a blank space.” Thus, Conde-Frazier echoes a tradition of Latin@s including C. René Padilla, Ada María Isasi-Diaz, Orlando Costas,  Justo González, and Elsa Tamez.

Like many Latin@s, I knew nothing about this tradition for most of my life. No one shared it with me; no one passed it down. In an effort to break this cycle of erasure, let me share some of what I have learned by listening to the Latin@ call for contextual theologies. 

The Word Became Enculturated 

The Son of God’s incarnation is one of the great mysteries Christians celebrate. The Son is the one “through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6); the “appointed heir of all things, through whom [God] also created the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2); and the “first born of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:15-16). Put succinctly, the Son of God is the Word (John 1:1-5). And this Word “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). The Son of God became Jesus of Nazareth.

When the Son assumed human flesh, the Son assumed a cultural identity and context. As René Padilla writes, “The Word became flesh. It was acculturized, since humans are cultural beings.” Understanding or proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ necessarily requires referring to a human culture. Again Padilla: “The climax of God’s revelation is Emmanuel. And Emmanuel is Jesus, a first-century Jew! The incarnation unmistakably demonstrates God’s intention to make himself known from within the human situation. Because of the very nature of the gospel, we know it only as a message contextualized in culture.” Padilla’s point about the necessity of a culture for people to know the gospel echoes Orlando Costas’s insight about revelation. “Biblical contextualization is rooted in the fact that the God of revelation can only be known in history. Such a revelation comes to specific peoples in concrete situations by means of particular cultural symbols and categories….Theology in the Old Testament appears as a culture-bound, historically situated reflection on the God who is known in human language. In the New Testament, however, this revelation reaches its peak: God is known in human flesh.” We can summarize Padilla and Costas thus: The Son assumed a first-century Jewish culture and revealed the image of the invisible God through it (Colossians 1:15).

Scripture equips us to say more about God’s enculturation in Christ. When the Son became Jesus of Nazareth, the Son became a colonized a Jew under Roman imperial occupation in the northern lands of Galilee, a backwater region far from Rome and Jerusalem. Moreover, some regions of Galilee were seen as worse than others. Nazareth is a case in point. This small town was a backwater within a backwater. Hence when Nathanael received an invitation to meet “Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth,” Nathanael mockingly asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Nathanael asked this question without knowing that Jesus and his parents were poor and former refugees. As René Padilla observes, “The offering Joseph and Mary [Jesus’ parents] brought on the occasion of his presentation in the Temple was the one that the Old Testament stipulated for poor people—namely, two doves or pigeons (Luke 2:23). Quite early in his life Jesus was a refugee.” The Son of God did not assume a privileged culture. He assumed a multiply marginalized one. Emmanuel carried a culture forged in oppression. And within this culture he “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). 

All Theologies are Culturally Shaped

If the incarnate Son of God assumed a multi-oppressed culture, it is also true that people can only know him from their own particular cultural locations. Consider the practice of reading Scripture. Justo González observes that all theologies arising from an interpretation of Scripture “are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective.” González notes that this truth follows from another: “If there is anything we have learned during these last decades of modernity, it is that knowledge is always perspectival.” We all read scripture from a certain perspective, a particular place. And as Oscar García-Johnson argues, “the place in which theology is formed matters. Place matters because language, culture, and traditions are never neutral carriers of ideas; they always shape what they receive according to the values and inclinations of that place and its people.” In the U.S., for example, many Anglo evangelicals summarize “the gospel” in four words, “Jesus in my place.” Translation: “Jesus taking my (substitutionary) legal place.” This linguistic shorthand neglects many components of the gospel, including its cosmic scope. Paul writes: “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). Jesus of Nazareth’s redemptive work accomplished creation’s liberation from the curse of Genesis 3. U.S. Anglo evangelicals carrying the truncated conception of the gospel in their interpretive tool kit are likely to misread or overlook passages that stress the gospel’s cosmic breadth.

The previous example illuminates how traditions mediate readings of Scripture. Oscar García-Johnson writes, “theology develops in a particular place out of the interaction, not simply between the Scriptures and culture, but between some version of the Christian tradition and the indigenous traditions of that place—both cultural and religious.” The “Jesus in my place” conception of the gospel that many Anglo evangelicals in the U.S. champion is common among U.S.-based, historically white Baptist denominations; it is largely absent in the U.S.’s historically Latin@ or Black Catholic communities. Hence, members of these different Christian traditions bring contrasting tradition-shaped lenses to their readings of Scripture and the theologies constructed from them.

Because everyone engages Scripture and constructs theology from particular cultural and tradition-shaped perspectives, Justo González argues that we should beware theologies that fail to note the social locations from which they arise.

Precisely because perspective cannot be avoided, when it is not explicitly acknowledged the result is that a particular perspective takes on the aura of universality. Thus it happens that theology from a male perspective claims to be generally human, and that North Atlantic white theology believes itself to be “normal,” while theologies from the so-called Third World or from ethnic minorities in the North Atlantic are taken to be contextual or perspectival.

There are no “universal” interpretations or theologies from nowhere. Presumptions that there are correlate strongly with historic modes of racist and nationalist hegemony. They also correlate with interpretations that fail to confront mammon.

James’ epistle frequently chastises the materially rich and offers encouragement to the materially poor. Chapter 2 is a case in point. “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?” (James 2:5-7). Elsa Tamez notes that the “poor” in 2:5 are the πτωχοι (ptochoi), “those who have absolutely nothing, not even a job; they depend on alms.” C. Leslie Mitton neglects this basic point in his commentary. Instead, Mitton identifies the poor as the spiritually devout and claims that this term refers to “the class of people for whom prosperity means little since obedience to God means everything.” This reading cannot account for the Greek term’s actual meaning, nor the role that meaning plays within James’ discussion of how the materially wealthy oppress the materially poor. And as Tamez writes, “Only someone with a job, food, and shelter could affirm such a thing. The hungry, the exploited, the jobless want at least to satisfy their basic necessities, and they turn to God with those hopes.” Many “universal” interpretations of Scripture are corrupted artifacts of the middle to upper-middle class that fail to account for God’s special concern for the poor.

Nothing we have considered excludes the possibility that a particular contextualized reading is evil. It may be. A self-conscious proponent of machismo may note this commitment and offer a misogynistic reading of Hagar’s experiences. Of course, flagging this commitment prepares readers for what they will find and keeps their claims out of a “universal” register. Interpretations or theologies with unconscious contextualization perform neither of these functions. Moreover, they consistently prove divisive. As González writes, “Unconscious contextualization…will certainly lead to fragmentation, because it is by nature sectarian, not recognizing that it is but part of the whole.” González continues:

What leads to fragmentation is not the existence of a black theology, a Hispanic theology, or theologies that explicitly take into account the theologian’s gender. What leads to fragmentation is the lack of recognition that all these theologies, as well as all expressions of traditional theology, are contextual, and therefore express the gospel as seen from a particular perspective.

As M. Daniel Carroll Rodas’s puts it, we must strive to be “self-aware contextualized interpreters” and theologians. Such awareness, Conde-Frazier writes, requires an ever-growing consciousness of “the cultural blinders and ideological filters through which we interpret the world.” Though such self-awareness is insufficient for an accurate reading or theology, it is a key component of Christian discipleship and the Christian commitment to resisting and remediating oppression. As Ada María Isasi-Díaz argues, “Who I am, where I am coming from, and where I wish to go shapes the method and content of my theological work. Though such self-revelation is always dangerous, I have entered upon it because I believe that the pretense of objectivity by theologians indicates complicity with the status quo, a status that for me and my Hispanic sisters is oppressive.” 

Contextualizing with and for Latin@ Eyes 

Latin@s should be particularly aware of the need to consider the oppressive influences that shape people’s reading of Scripture. The Iberians who colonized present-day Latin American championed biblical interpretations and theologies that justified imperial conquest and murder. The Spanish’s El Requerimiento makes this clear. And it confirms Elizabeth Conde-Frazier’s liberating insight: “Colonizers presented their own readings as the only possible readings, and it can seem that disagreeing with colonizing readings is disagreeing with the Bible itself. But this is not so, for there is a gap between the colonizers’ interpretation of the Bible and the Bible as the living Word of God.”

Of course, what is true of the Iberian colonizers is also true of twentieth-century missionary endeavors in Latin America. Again Conde-Frazier: “The seeming inflexibility of the interpretation of the Word beyond the ‘truths’ prescribed by the missionaries has created confusion for the Latin@ church in a time of crisis for the community as well as many changes in the present society, including generational changes of perspectives within her own families.” Many missionaries to Latin America proclaimed and formed Latin@s in imperial, Euro- or U.S.-centric, middle-class, whitewashed conceptions of the gospel. Yet they perpetually failed to see the cultural baggage they added to the gospel and discipleship. For them, what they offered was Christianity, pure and simple. Similar patterns hold for Latin@ evangelicals in the U.S. Most reside in congregations, parishes, and denominations draped in ropaje anglosajón with U.S.-style imperial, nationalist, racist, classist, and sexist embroidering. Even Latin@ evangelicals who avoid fellowship in these ecclesiastical communities face the reality that they dominate Christian publishing, Christian radio, and Christian film and television media. “Even if we have not come from Anglo-run church structures,” Conde-Frazier writes, “the theological ideological structures still proliferated throughout our lives.” Regardless of its pervasiveness, ropaje anglosajón is not the gospel nor a part of the biblical witness. Moreover, it is unfit for the task of helping Latin@s faithfully navigate the distinctive challenges they face. Indeed, it typically baptizes and advances beliefs, narratives, and images that legitimize these exact challenges.

Despite this evil legitimizing function, Latin@s and Latin@ communities frequently find it difficult to shed and resist ropaje anglosajón. For them, the cultural clothing is the tradition through which they understand Christianity. As Conde-Frazier observes, “The tradition has become the filter through which we read the Scriptures. When the Spirit breathes new life into the interpretation of the text, we are not always ready to hear what it says to us. If it doesn’t sound familiar, we are quick to believe that it is unorthodox or not sana doctrina (sound doctrine).” Who will shed or resist what they believe is sana docrtina? Some recognize that interpretations and theologies covered with ropaje anglosajón are not sana doctrina. Yet they also recognize that prominent people, communities, and institutions advancing these interpretations and theologies hold a disproportionate amount of money and power. Consequently, parting with the ropaje is likely to land these individuals and communities in an extremely vulnerable position. Still others are willing to take this risk, but they hesitate because they have internalized beliefs about their inferiority that decorate the ropaje.

René Padilla spoke of the Latin@ challenge to redress the problems of ropaje anglosajón in terms of “theological dependence.” He writes, “An examination of all these aspects of our church situation will show that our ‘theological dependence’ is just as real and serious as the economic dependence that characterizes the countries of the Majority World.” For Padilla, this dependency is profoundly problematic. Speaking about the gospel, Padilla declares, “as long as the gospel does not attain a profound contextualization in the local culture, in the eyes of people in that culture it will continue to be a ‘foreign religion.’” This point returns us to the epigraph. “If the gospel is not contextualized, the Word of God will remain a logos asarkos (unincarnate word), a message that touches our lives only tangentially.”

The Latin@s in the tradition we are listening to call upon Latin@s and Latin@ communities to construct interpretations and theologies that, informed by the truths about the Son’s enculturation and the contextualization of human knowing, contextualize the gospel and biblical witness to their particular social locations. These theological constructions must account for what Ada María Isasi-Díaz calls lo cotidiano—the everyday lives of Latin@s and Latin@ communities. The goal, Padilla explains, is to have ecclesiastical communities that “through death and resurrection with Christ [embody] the gospel within its own culture.” This does not entail that the gospel differs across groups, nor exclude listening to and learning from the Church catholic. Padilla is clear on both counts.

This is not to say that the message of the gospel should be one thing here and another one there. It has been given “once and for all,” and its proclamation is faithful in the degree to which it manifests the permanence of the revealed data, either here or there. Nor am I suggesting that there is a need for an “indigenous theology” characterized by local folklore and completely conditioned by the historical situation. Even less would we wish a theology that, in an effort to “contextualize” the gospel, superciliously ignores the results of long years of work in the field of biblical research carried on by theologians in Europe or North America.

Padilla and the other Latin@ theologians we have heard encourage us to learn from the Church catholic and other sources to determine the particular contextual “relevance of biblical revelation to our culture, the relation between the gospel and the problems that the church is facing in our society.”

Some will object that the emphasis on contextualizing the gospel and bible to current, concrete cultures and situations will produce syncretism—a settling for something that is the mixture of pure Christianity and a polluted culture. To this argument, Padilla offers this reply. “When there is no conscious reflection on the form that obedience to the Lordship of Jesus Christ must take in a given situation, conduct can quite easily be determined by the culture rather than by the gospel.” The resonances between Padilla, Isasi-Díaz, and González are striking. 

Una palabra final 

Latin@ theologians have taught me that we all love, follow, and learn about the enculturated Son of God from a particular context. They taught me of the need to be a self-aware interpreter and theologian working to contextualize the gospel and biblical witness to my social location and my ecclesiastical community’s. They taught me I must do this work en comunidad. And they taught me that C. René Padilla is right: “The contextualization of the gospel can only be a gift of grace granted by God to a church that is seeking to place the totality of life under the Lordship of Christ in its historical situation.”

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.


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We Speak Spanglish ¿Y qué?

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My parents are from Mexico but they have lived in the U.S. for over 35 years. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and have lived most of my life in a predominantly Latino community. I am also a Spanish professor. This is the lens from which I am writing.[1]

My dearest Spanglish, 

They despise you. They think you’re an abomination, a creature birthed from insufficiency and miseducation. They punish you in Spanish class and beat you in English class. Dicen que eres un bastardo, un malparido.  

“¡Habla bien! ¿Por qué hablas mocho? No se dice aplicación, se dice solicitud. No se llama librería, se llama biblioteca. Deja de decir esas barbaridades – jangear, mapiar, lonchar, marketa – Dios mío, le vas a provocar un paro cardiaco a la grandísima, estimadísima y respetuosísima Real Academia Española. ¿Qué diría tu abuela? Mira como se ríen de ti tus tías en México. Tu existencia es un insulto, una vergüenza. No maltrates a nuestra hermosa lengua con tus medias palabras. El idioma se respeta y tú, mentado Spanglish, eres un irrespetuoso”. 

That’s what they say, querido Spanglish. But I… I love you. You’re the language of my people, birthed from love and sacrifice. Tu existencia brotó in our communities como las estrellas brotan en el cielo. And when I hear you, I recognize myself and when I utter your words, I know I’m at home, en esa casa that my parents built con tanto sacrificio en una tierra desconocida.  

They insist, querido Spanglish, que no existes, but languages are not formed in the cradle de las academias reales. You are not held hostage by official institutions; you are held in the arms of your people and rest on the lips de tu gente.  

Tu descendiente, 

La Chicana.

Ask ten people in the U.S. Latina/o community what they think of Spanglish and you might obtain ten different answers, but their responses will never be dull. The use of Spanglish provokes emotionally-charged reactions that elicit everything from joyful expressions to furious replies. Renowned Mexican author Octavio Paz once said that Spanglish was, “neither good nor bad, but abominable” (Ni es bueno, ni es malo, sino abominable). Carlos Varo, a Spanish-Puerto Rican author called Spanglish a chronic illness, and Eduardo Seda Bonilla claimed that it was a colonial crutch, a linguistic form that is “characteristic of colonial situations where there is an attempt to eradicate and lower the language and culture of a subjugated nation”[2]. Still today, for many people, Spanglish represents just another form in which colonial English is encroaching into our space. Spanglish, perceived in this vein, is a contaminated form of Spanish that is no longer recognizable, one that bears the violence of colonial traces.

Nevertheless, there are those who vehemently support the use of Spanglish and claim that it enhances their linguistic repertoires. When the question, “Why do some people speak Spanglish” was posed on Quora, a person responded, “Because it’s fun! I enjoy saying that my daughter is malcriada, she had a huge berrinche this morning’ rather than ‘my daughter is badly behaved, she had a huge tantrum this morning’ Spanglish is more fun than either language by itself.”[3]

So, what is Spanglish? Well, linguistically, Spanglish has different manifestations. Perhaps the one most distinguishable is code-switching, when the speaker alternates between English and Spanish in a single conversation. Calques and loan words are also common in Spanglish phraseology.

  1. Code-switching: Fíjate que ayer I went to the store y me compré muchas cremas that were on sale

  2. Calques are literal translations, such as te llamo pa’tras (I’ll call you back; te llamo después), tener buen tiempo (to have a good time; pasarla bien), hacer decisiones (make decisions; tomar decisiones)

  3. Loan words: lonchar (to have lunch; almorzar), el mol (the mall; el centro comercial), friser (freezer; congelador) mapear (to mop; trapear), checar (to check; revisar), breik (break; descanso), brecas (car brakes; frenos)

Regardless of whether you personally love or hate Spanglish, it is important to acknowledge that Spanglish, similar to all languages, is rule-governed, guided by grammatical and social principles. Speakers of Spanglish abide by certain rules, albeit unconsciously, just as native speakers of Spanish and English construct sentences with ease without being cognizant of the grammatical rules that guide their speech. Read the following examples:

  1. Fernanda wants el ice cream from the casa de my madre.

  2. José se enojó and he gritó.

  3. Lorena me va dar un raite once she’s done with work.

  4. Estoy jugando soccer with Blanca.   

I surveyed twenty Spanglish speakers, asking them to identify the ones that sounded “wrong” to them and their answers revealed a high degree of consensus, as was expected. Although the four examples given above are all written using hybrid speech, not all sound right. Numbers one and two are not natural Spanglish expressions, while three and four represent normal incidences of code-switching. Interestingly, two people responded that all sentences were problematic because they were written in Spanglish, perhaps echoing what they’ve heard their whole lives – that Spanglish is incorrect.

In reality, Spanglish isn’t wrong or right, it just is, and perhaps that’s the beauty of it. Spanglish is patterned but these patterns can change over time and are extremely malleable. People can’t correct you in your Spanglish, the way they would with Spanish or English, for example. Spanglish is not a made-up language either. We didn’t make up Spanglish – Spanglish is a natural expression of who we are as bilingual and bicultural individuals living in liminal spaces. I can’t tell you how I learned Spanglish. I can tell you that I learned Spanish at home and English at school and that my life was not as linguistically compartmentalized as some might think because my friends spoke English, but also Spanish and my family spoke Spanish, but also English and I embraced that through Spanglish.

Spanglish, similar to formally recognized languages, has distinct varieties, or dialects. Ilan Stavans, who wrote an adaptation of Don Quixote in Spanglish and authored Spanglish: the Making of a New American Language (2004), explains,

“There is no one Spanglish, but a variety of Spanglishes that are alive and well in this country and that are defined by geographical location and country of origin. The Spanglish spoken by Mexican Americans in, say L.A., is different from the Spanglish spoken by Cuban Americans in Miami or the Spanglish spoken by Puerto Ricans in New York. Each of these Spanglishes has its own patterns, its own idiosyncrasies.”[4] 

Moreover, Stavans indicates that generational and geographical differences also impact the type of Spanglish that is spoken by each group. Similar to English and Spanish, Spanglish has many dialects that are influenced by a myriad of factors, including communities of contact, age, and social status.

I remember my cousins in Mexico exclaiming, ¿cómo pueden hablar así? when my cousins from the U.S. and I visited Mexico and spoke to each other in our comfort tongue. It wasn’t a question that denoted disgust, but admiration. They thought it was fascinating that we could switch between languages in the same sentence with such ease and they asked us to teach them, the same way they had taught us to speak “el idioma de la F”[5] but we couldn’t teach our Spanglish because we had acquired it organically as part of our identity as U.S. Latina/os.

I know many people in Mexico that speak English as a second language and Spanish as their native tongue, but they cannot produce Spanglish. Similarly, many native English speakers who learned Spanish as a second language are unable to speak Spanglish. Simply knowing both languages does not guarantee Spanglish proficiency. So, what is the breeding ground of Spanglish? Spanglish was born in the United States. It is in this country, in Latino communities, where it flourishes.

Dr. Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, a professor at UT Austin who has been studying bilingualism for decades claims that, “CS [code-switching] remains a stigmatized bilingual behavior, viewed as a failure on the part of the speakers to ‘control’ their languages […] Some see it as a lack of competence or even poor manners”.[6] Often times, the assumption is that speakers of Spanglish are lazy, deficient or ashamed of the Spanish language.

There’s a constant safeguarding of dual spaces and we are asked to split ourselves and to not “cross-contaminate.” This is an impossible request and one that should not be made. “To survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras,” affirmed Gloria Anzaldúa. English says, “Spanish is prohibited in my land” and Spanish replies, “Este es mi territorio, fuera el inglés” and Spanglish thrives, sin fronteras. Spanglish does not attempt to usurp either language; it is its own mode of expression. Do you criticize burritos for not being taco enough?

I told you earlier that I’m a Spanish professor pero yo no respeto el español because languages are not meant to be respected – people are. When you tell people that Spanglish es una forma incorrecta de hablar, you’re really telling them that who they are is a “wrong” version of themselves, one that should be rejected. I know it can be difficult for a lot of immigrant parents to accept that their children are culturally and linguistically different from them and, to a certain extent, I understand why so many first-generation Latina/os are resentful of Spanglish. However, we can’t forget the fact that there are millions of individuals who identify as Latina/o but were born and raised in the U.S. We were not raised in our family’s countries as monolinguals. We do not have the same culture as our parents, but mainstream U.S. culture does not represent us either. We’ve created our own spaces and have formed new cultural expressions that should not be viewed as tainted versions but as unique creations. Hablamos espanglish because it’s who we are.

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)
 
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ABOUT DRA. ITZEL meduri soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel


Footnotes

[1] Poem titled, “Querido Spanglish” by Itzel Reyes (2021)

[2] “Réquiem por una cultura: Ensayos sobre la socialización del puertorriqueño en su cultura y en ámbito del poder neocolonial” (1970).

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-talk-spanglish

[4] As quoted here: https://people.howstuffworks.com/spanglish.htm 

[5]  “El idioma de la F” is not an actual language. It is a playful way in which children could speak “in code” by adding the letter F to every vowel. For example, “te amo” would be “tefe afamofo”. I learned how to speak this “language” in Mexico and it was mainly used when we didn’t want the adults to understand our dialogue.

[6] As quoted on, “Love it or hate it, Spanglish is here to stay and it’s good exercise for your brain”  (2018).


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Taking Off Ropaje Anglosajón

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This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

I sensed a call to ministry from very early in my life, although I had no idea what that meant. Hoping to find clarity about this calling, I moved from Costa Rica to the United States to attend Bible college. Among all the options that crossed my mind about what ministry would look like, being a theologian was never one of them, mainly because I had never heard of Latinos doing theology. Until this point in my life, the only theologians I had heard about were American or European, so I subconsciously assumed they were the only people with something worth saying in this area. When during my first semester, a professor told a group of Latino students and me that Latinos in theology were not saying anything white people haven’t said before, I felt like I had no option but to believe him. Then, I came across The Story of Christianity by Justo González in my Christianity and Western Culture class. In a meeting where I expressed my surprise and joy at seeing a Latino name among my reading list for the semester, my (non-Latino) professor was the first person to tell me about the valuable voice of Latinos in theology. He encouraged me to find my voice in this theological legacy and recommended I started this journey reading González’s Mañana.

Mañana was written in English, but this was theology in a language that I was able to understand more than just cognitively; it was theology con sabor Latino. After two years in Bible college, I was not sure I wanted to be a Christian anymore. I could understand English perfectly, yet I was learning about God in a foreign language I could not grasp. The Euro-American theological language offered me dichotomies and neatly organized categories that didn’t resonate with the faith I had inherited - a faith that didn’t fit into the complementarian versus egalitarian or Arminian versus Calvinist debates. Recovering my faith meant going back to my theological hogar to sit with my theological foremothers and forefathers and discover the rich well of theology the Latino community has to offer.

Mañana was the starting point of my journey back to my theological home. To my surprise, the next stop in this pilgrimage was a look into the Catholic roots of Latin American Christianity (an unexpected place to begin as an evangélica). I wrestled through the role of the church in colonization and the pain my Spanish ancestors inflicted upon my indigenous ancestors, all in the name of Christ. In this, I discovered the second church that formed shortly after the arrival of the colonizers. In the 16th century, this second church was led by people like Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas. These Spanish missionaries devoted their lives to the true gospel that protected the dignity of the indigenous peoples, even when this meant being persecuted and rejected by the church of the hierarchy. In the following century, the mestiza Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz spent her life educating herself in theology, philosophy, literature, and more, becoming “the first Latina feminist intellectual and theologian of the Americas.”[1] Sor Juana was forced to write a statement of repentance for her views a few years before her death, but not satisfied with that, those in the church of the hierarchy that felt threatened by the truth she spoke, suppressed her works for three hundred years.[2]

Later, in the 20th century, we encounter the birth of liberation theology in 1968. This movement that has expanded and adapted to contexts outside of Latin America has as its hermeneutical hinge the perspective of the poor. In other words, liberation theology is concerned with providing pastoral and theological answers to the issues of injustice and oppression that riddle this world. Liberation theology is deeply concerned with the historical dimension of salvation, with how Christ’s salvation is reflected in the here and now through material liberation.

The next stop on my journey opened the door to a movement within the iglesia evangélica, the tradition I call home. With similar concerns to those of liberation theology but from an evangélica perspective, the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (FTL) was formed in the 1970s. The theologian Ruth Padilla DeBorst explains that the founders of the FTL “were people who sought to remain faithful to Scriptures and, at the same time, incarnated in the Latin American socio-political reality.”[3] The FTL proposed a vision of misión integral (holistic mission), a practice that “integrates the proclamation of the Kingdom of God and its justice with the demonstration of its presence in history through the action carried out by the people of God.”[4] In this way, misión integral offers a paradigm that transcends the false dichotomy of gospel proclamation versus the pursuit of justice and liberation for all people.

One of the challenges I faced during my first year learning theology in a different language was the repeated message I received from several of my professors who believed true theology is not affected by or even concerned with life experiences. In other words, they proclaimed there was such a thing as universal theology, while every other expression of theology that considered the experiences of people was a contextual theology. Justo González explains that in this framework, “North Atlantic male theology is taken to be basic, normative, universal theology, to which women, other minorities, and people from the younger churches may add their footnotes.” He adds, “White theologians do general theology; black theologians do black theology. Male theologians do general theology; female theologians do theology determined by their sex.”[5] On my journey back to my theological hogar, I found Latino theologians recognize that, in fact, all theology is contextual, and so they seek to faithfully honor their contexts by producing theology that speaks to and from them.

Padilla DeBorst argues that the radical evangélicos of the FTL, “…recognized the need to differentiate between biblical content and the ropaje anglosajón (anglo-saxon clothing) in which North-Atlantic versions of the Gospel were wrapped and exported to the rest of the world.”[6] The journey to recover my faith led me to evaluate the ropaje anglosajón I had been trying to fit into. This process of evaluation was the second of the three conversions Orlando Costas identified in his own spiritual journey. Costas’ first conversion was when he first came to saving faith in Christ, the second when he rediscovered his Latino cultural roots, and the third when he experienced a “conversion to the world” that led him to become an advocate for justice and to work towards a holistic theology that would account for the necessity these three conversions.[7] My third conversion began when I found my calling in the academic practice of theology. I found my hogar in the legacy of Latinos who have been doing theology for over 500 years, and I am humbled and honored to join this “great cloud of witnesses” from de las Casas and Sor Juana to Ruth Padilla and the FTL. I will not pursue a supposedly universal theology that speaks a language I cannot comprehend, but a contextual, specifically Costa Rican theology, a theology con sabor Latino, which is what we, Latinos in theology, have been doing desde hace rato.[8]


About Wendy Cordero rugama

Wendy is a Costa Rican theology student and WOS Instructional Designer. Her life in the US has brought her to reflect more deeply on issues of race, gender, and Latinidad. Wendy is passionate about studying how theology impacts all areas of life, especially through its intersections with the social sciences. She hopes to become a theology professor and, through that, build bridges between the academy and the church, inviting students to do scholarship embedded in their particular places.


Footnotes

[1] Chao Romero, Robert. Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. IVP Academic, 2020. 97

[2] Ibid. 97

[3] Padilla DeBorst, Ruth. Integral Mission Formation in Abya Yala (Latin America): A Study of the Centro de Estudios Teologícos Interdisciplinarios (1982-2002) and Radical Evangélicos, 2016. Boston University, PhD dissertation. 29

[4] Padilla, René qtd in Padilla DeBorst. 54

[5] González, Justo L. Mañana: Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Abington Press, 1990. 52

[6] Padilla DeBorst. 45

[7] Escobar, Samuel. “The Legacy of Orlando Costas.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 2001. 50.

[8] For a long time.

Pressure Cooker

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This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

When I was a little girl

I would get up in the morning to get ready for school

Amma was already up, 

showered and dressed before the sun 

She had prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner 

before the day had begun

The monotonous routine of the Indian woman

Was the pillar of our household

When everything else was falling apart

The rich spices were strong and bold 

like coffee, the daily aroma functioning as an alarm

Flavors that burnt my nose 

but comforted my heart


The clunky metal pressure cooker was on the stove,

Yet again

Just like me, it was imported all the way from India

And just like me, it existed as a daily functioning member of this household

And just like me, it cooked consumed rice everyday

Not a day went by in my first 11 years of existence

that white basmati rice did not enter my system

The clunky metal pressure cooker became my nemesis

As it’s whistle blew it reminded me of a train

That had the capacity to steal me and take me faraway

Reminding me of how nothing ever felt safe

Amma.

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

And just like the white rice it cooked

The whiteness boiled inside of me

Pressurizing into a pristine product for others pleasure

I bathed in the waters of the pressure cooker thinking it would cleanse me

But now I feel dirtier than ever

pain was the corpse that i buried thinking it was dead

but pain isn’t a corpse it’s a seed

once it's in the ground and nourished

it sprouts up into nasty weeds and surprises you

There is value in my culture and I don’t want to throw it away

Throw it into the melting pot to let it boil and disintegrate 

A one way ticket to a faraway place

The train is waiting. 

The whistle is screeching. 

Next stop--your life long American dream.

Amma, I never was strong enough to open the lid and escape

Why couldn’t I have been strong enough?

Why couldn’t you have been strong enough for me?

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

White rice is not enough flavor for some

But paired with too much and suddenly 

you are overwhelming

A dangerous game people play

When they control their intake

Thinking they can tolerate more spice than they can handle

The aftertaste

Leaves an unpleasant mark on their face

Eyebrows furrowed

Lips puckered

Confusion is uncomfortably sour 

Regret floods in 

as they reach for a glass of water

Foreign flavors to them

But savory memories to me

That train will take them to a museum

Where they can gawk and gaze in amazement

But walk out the minute their eyes get tired of looking

Like a field trip where the kids have to go for school credit

But the minute they get off the bus

They are no longer at school

And therefore, 

done learning

Foreign concepts to them

But second nature to me

But if only that train were taking me to my utopia

Where nothing has to be sacrificed

And I wave goodbye to all my fears as they fade off in the distance

Fear of man

Fear of exclusion

Fear of abandonment

In this faraway land, 

chickappa and chickamma will send me Indian care packages

And I open them up with excitement instead of remorse 

In this faraway land,

I never get tired of eating Indian food

And I never complain

Because this time I won’t have to learn the hard way

What I had when I had it

In this faraway land,

The nuances of my culture are known and understood by all those around me

Like we were watching an old movie we had seen a hundred times

Nobody is even wondering what will happen next

But from memory, they annoyingly recite the next character’s lines 

In this faraway land,

My heritage is defended by my loved ones 

like one would argue their favorite superhero or sports team

And instead of our culture being like a set of clothes we could donate once it didn’t fit anymore

it would be our precious keepsake we tucked away to pass down to future generations

It would be intrinsically woven inside of us

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

You see, the white rice is boiling to be plain and simple

Affordable and safe

I am made into something digestible

Spicy flavors are dangerous and to be placed on the side

Eaten in the tiniest increments only if one so chooses

We put Jesus into the pressure cooker

And cook him into a white, fluffed up rice

steamed of any unnecessary and extra components

Now He is digestible

Culturally gnosticizing the gospel 

Extracting Him of his ethnicity 

A palatable Jesus, 

we take Him in aculturally

Generational sin has the nastiest fruit

Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

the tree that was planted must uproot itself and leave

far away from getting entangled in the same old roots

of the same old trees

and if all i am to you is red on the outside and white on the inside

than you just picked the wrong apple

and there begins your sin cycle

And we produce safety

Because once the rice is cooled down it's safe to eat, right?

Because they are safe,

I have to be pressurized

Day after day

Laughing and playing the same game

To protect myself in this melting pot we call tasty

Give up the charade

It's not a melting pot where every flavor stays the same

But a pressure cooker where whatever was left disintegrates

Washed away

Washed white

White washed

The American pressure cooker

Has lost its taste

And now I am the whistle screaming


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About Shreya Ramachandran

Shreya Ramachandran is a sophomore at Moody Bible Institute, studying Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She was born in India and moved to the United States when she was two years old. After many life transitions, Shreya is beginning to embrace her identity in Christ as an Indian-American woman. Being mestizo resonates with Shreya, as she has always lived on the borderlands of culture. Shreya shares: “I am blessed by the ministry at WOS, one that deals delicately with the nuances of culture in order to equip the Church and be the Church.”

Jesus and John Wayne Review

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White Masculinity and Theology

It was in graduate school that I first heard the phrase “contextual theologies.” I was intrigued since context - both cultural and historical - is crucial to understanding theology. While reading the assignment, I realized that contextual theologies are essentially theologies with an adjective placed in front: feminist theology, womanist theology, latinx theology, LGBTQ+ theology, liberation theology, black liberation theology, etc. You may notice (as I did) a couple of categories that are missing from these “adjectival” theologies: white theology and masculine theology. The reason is that these are assumed - the “mythical norm” of theologies, as it were.[1]

Since white, masculine voices have been privileged in the field of theology for centuries (or since voices were assumed to be white and male, regardless of the truth of that assumption), any attempt to equally privilege latinx, black, female, LGBTQ+, Asian, Indigenous, or any other perspective alongside those voices is often resisted. “Those'' voices, it is argued, are too influenced by their own subjective viewpoints and focus too much on one or two aspects of theology to be taken as seriously as the other (white and masculine) voices that have dominated for centuries. As if these white, masculine voices are not equally subjective and focused on particular issues.

What Kristin Kobes du Mez accomplished in Jesus and John Wayne is tracing a history of American white, masculine, evangelical theology and to identify the historical, cultural, and political forces that influenced, guided, and focused its theological emphases for decades. In the book, Kobes du Mez draws back the curtain on the assumption that American evangelicalism has developed its theological emphases and ecclesial ethics in some sort of vacuum outside of cultural influence - that it is not just as “adjectival” as any other sort of contextual theology. Kobes du Mez argues that the guiding force behind white evangelicalism for the last 50-some years has been a “militant white masculinity.”[2]

In a fascinating study that follows, Kobes du Mez traces the history of how “militant white masculinity” has always been the guiding force behind American evangelicalism and how it was shaped by and utilized symbols such as John Wayne, William Wallace, and other “rugged, masculine figures,” the Republican party, consumerism, and even the American military as an ideal force for good in the world.[3] Kobes Du Mez takes her readers on a dizzying journey through historical periods of evangelicalism that, despite its comprehensive nature, can only really scratch the surface of white evangelical subculture and all its manifestations. Beginning her history as far back as the 1890s, when the Victorian “model of manly restraint had begun to falter” and the new economy of the early twentieth century demanded a different type of “softer” work than toiling in fields or factories (and as women began to attend college with more regularity), Kobes du Mez records that a call for a new type of more aggressive masculinity emerged.[4]  

Christianity as White, Militant, and Masculine 

Kobes du Mez’s primary argument in Jesus and John Wayne is that this “militant white masculinity” has been the guiding force behind evangelicalism for decades. In so doing, she highlights more effectively than any theology textbook I’ve ever read just how contextual white masculine theology is. Perhaps one of the most devastating moments in her book is when she outlines how white evangelicalism was used to perpetrate segregation through church polity, Christian private education, and through both its constituents’ silence about and active railing against the Civil Rights movement. She does point out that “evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement.”[5] Kobes du Mez uses Billy Graham as a prime example of one such evangelical leader who even personally removed ropes between white people and black people at his crusades and invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York City Crusade.[6] However, she also points out that he distanced himself from backing activists when they began to engage in civil disobedience, and that many white evangelicals responded similarly, finding it “hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history.”[7]

She argues that this lack of willingness among white evangelicals to continue standing by civil rights activists coupled with their silence about the demand for continued segregationist policies among their fellow white evangelicals had devastating effects. One of these was using private Christian schools to continue segregation and revealing that ultimately, white evangelicalism was more concerned with continuing its own political purposes than fighting for its black brothers and sisters. Kobes du Mez states, “Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, many southern evangelicals and fundamentalists who persisted in their unreconstructed views of race would find common cause with more ‘tolerant’ evangelicals on issues like social welfare policy and ‘law and order’ politics that would carry clear racial undertones.”[8]

Millennials from white evangelical spaces will recognize that similar patterns emerged in the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Refusal to support that statement - “Black Lives Matter” - was defended by many white evangelicals because they claimed that the movement had ties to a more liberal political agenda and that the civil rights activists within the movement were anti-police. This movement drew fault lines across white evangelicalism that, for some, resulted in splitting away from the evangelical church due to its refusal to support what they viewed as a basic civil rights issue. These divisions only became more pronounced when Donald Trump was elected as the Republican party’s candidate for the 2016 election. What was not widely recognized, however, was that these patterns had been present in white evangelicalism from its very start. The widespread reception of Jesus and John Wayne by those of us who grew up (or are still part of) white evangelicalism has been a resounding agreement that the book puts its finger on exactly what felt off as we grew up, particularly surrounding issues of race, “family values” voting, and the strong connection to the U.S. military (which is brilliantly outlined in Chapter 12, entitled, “Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo”).[9] 

Where are the Women?  

For me, one of the most eye-opening chapters of Kobes du Mez’s book was Chapter 11, provocatively entitled, “Holy Balls.” While some readers may be drawn to other chapters, this chapter described the period of my life when my faith was becoming my own. I found my heart feeling twisted as I realized how whole-heartedly I had swallowed certain parts of toxic masculinity because I truly believed Scripture demanded that I did, and because much of the Christian culture around me absolutely encouraged me to do so. Kobes du Mez begins the chapter with some less common examples of militant masculinity, such as churches hosting MMA viewing parties and Christian mixed-martial arts groups, but speaks to the heart of what was happening at the time by saying, “As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.”[10]

A poignant example of this collapsing of the margins into the mainstream is the support New Calvinism gave to two “fringe” voices in the early 2000’s: Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson. Kobes du Mez writes more in-depth about these two men and the way that they were given platforms and endorsements by the leaders of New Calvinism despite many of them expressing discomfort with their crass talk, sometimes violent focus, and even, in one case, denial that American slaves had been treated with brutality.[11] This, to me, was the gut-punch of the chapter. These two men were endorsed by other men who were at the heart of founding various church-planting networks and conferences that were wildly popular among me and my peers during college specifically, and their endorsements meant a great deal. While these organizations and coalitions claimed to hold the gospel message as the most important thing, Kobes du Mez points out that the unifying factor among many of these very doctrine-conscious men was not solely the simple gospel message, but “gender and authority.”[12]

It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.”

These two examples most brutally highlight her point about gender and authority trumping simple gospel messaging within white evangelical alliances, but so does the lack of female leadership in many churches that ascribe to this New Calvinism. Sure, there are shining exceptions, but the question I was most often asked when I stepped into a new church in the early aughts is most illustrative - “Why do you want to study theology?” which was code for “Do you want to be a pastor?” It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.

One area of critique that I have for Jesus and John Wayne is the book’s claim to analyze how white evangelicals got to where they are today, while women are conspicuously absent from many of the chapters as perpetrators of this “militant white masculinity” that Kobes Du Mez describes. It was not simply men advocating for patriarchal norms in churches, nor was it only men leading the “family values” Christian Right, but women were crucial in the formation of and enforcement of this “militant white masculinity,” and one place the book falls short is in fully demonstrating that. A notable exception is Chapter Two (entitled “God’s Gift to Man”), in which Kobes Du Mez highlights women such as Marabel Morgan and her The Total Woman course, Anita Bryant, Elisabeth Elliot, and Phyllis Schlafly. Kobes du Mez continually documents Schlafly’s influence among white evangelicals (particularly politically) throughout the book, which is utterly engrossing for anyone (like me) who had not known much about this woman before. However, Schlafly appears to be the sole woman whose contribution to “militant white masculinity” is traced throughout the entire book. While I think it is important to include white women’s culpability in the propagation of “militant white masculinity,” Kobes du Mez has recently announced that she will be publishing a new book about evangelical women called Live, Laugh, Love, and I believe she intends to address much of what she left out in Jesus and John Wayne within that book. I, for one, look forward to reading it. 

Christianity, Consumerism, and a Dangerous “Culture-Making”

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One poignant observation Kobes du Mez makes in Jesus and John Wayne is the way that white evangelicals harnessed consumerism to propagate their cultural message.[13] By doing so, they created their own culture and provided a weapons store for the culture war that consumed much of their recent history. This culture was created through celebrity culture (particularly as pertained to pastors, radio stars, and motivational speakers), radio ministry, Christian television shows, the Christian music industry, Christian films, the Christian book publishing business, and Christian bookstores.

Andy Crouch has written much about culture and culture making. In For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, he describes how Genesis informs our understanding of culture making by demonstrating how God was the first culture maker and cultivator - planting a garden, which Crouch calls “nature plus culture.”[14] He describes the call of those in the Church to create good and beautiful art and other such cultural contributions. Crouch speaks of culture making as a creative, positive endeavor that the Church ought to participate in joyfully, creating art in and for the Church as well as for the world. Through the creation story, he highlights that the problem with culture making occurs when Adam and Eve no longer wait on and partner with God, but “...take and eat, and set in motion the process by which everything that God had originally given as a gift, a sign of relationship and dependence, will be twisted into a right, something grasped from a world presumed to be threatened and threatening, something that insulates us from needing relationship or dependence.”[15]

Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

In this description of the Fall, Crouch illustrates precisely what Kobes du Mez identifies as problematic with white evangelicalism’s attempt at culture making. White evangelicals took the gift of cultural creation given by God and twisted it into a utilitarian tool used to fight a culture war - usually shouting about rights rather than gifts (whether second amendment rights, rights to gather around a flagpole at a school and pray, rights to not have to pay taxes to support people “on welfare,”, rights to defend “traditional family and cultural values,” etc.). By taking that gift of cultural creation and fashioning it into a weapon, white evangelicalism lost sight of the gift of relationship and dependence on other Christians. The reverberations of their culture war drowned out the voices of brothers and sisters who had something to contribute to the conversation about culture, and their warring cost them the opportunity to participate in culture-making alongside them.

This was not the only negative effect; when white evangelicals invited siblings of color into their spaces, they acted as gatekeepers to the culture making of that space. While siblings of color were invited to contribute to the worship teams, lead the youth groups, and act as outreach coordinators, rarely were they given roles of actual leadership to set the priorities of churches and organizations. If they stepped outside of white evangelicalism’s priorities for culture making, they were instructed to “get in line” or get out. Many chose the latter after years of being silenced and abandoned by those in leadership. Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

So, What Now?

Jesus and John Wayne provided for me the context of what was happening backstage during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The reason the book resonates so strongly with so many (particularly white) evangelicals is that it gives answers to questions we never knew how to ask. It also articulates what our young minds may not have yet had the maturity to say about the culture wars we lived through, and in many cases, were even used as agents in.

Kobes du Mez successfully articulated a succinct, utterly readable account of the last 50-some years of white American evangelicalism, and whether you agree with her thesis or not, the book’s already astounding cultural impact will force you to grapple with it in your churches, schools, and institutions. And this is a very good thing, because so many of the historical and recent events that she brings to light have needed to be wrestled with for a very long time in a way that accounts for the historical context surrounding them and without making apologies for being bold enough to articulate what was wrong about those events.

Kobes du Mez’s historical account of white evangelicalism and how we got to where we are succeeds in highlighting a theological point: all theologies are contextual theologies. Even (and especially) white masculine evangelical theology, though the way it is often taught in many university, seminary, and Sunday school classrooms over the years may argue otherwise. Just as feminist, black liberation, womanist, latinx, or any other “contextual” theology has a cultural and historical context, so does white theology and masculine theology. More than any theology textbook I’ve read, Kobes du Mez demonstrates the danger of prioritizing one viewpoint as normative, simply by laying out the history.

So, is there hope for white evangelicalism? Kobes du Mez seems to think so, ending her book by saying, “What was once done might be undone.”[16] It all depends on us. If we as white evangelicals and former white evangelicals react to her description and critique of how we got here with defensiveness and a plugging of our ears, we are only doing more of the same. However, if we begin to consider Crouch’s culture making and what Makoto Fujimara has called culture care, perhaps we can find a way forward. Any way forward must involve focusing on relationship and dependence once more - not just including diverse voices at our tables in minor roles, but in submitting to those voices humbly (even if they no longer trust our tables and have built their own). It must also involve putting in the long hard work to earn back trust, and eventually, culture-making together again, joyfully participating in creation with one another and with the God we serve together.


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About Luci Frerichs Parrish

Luci Frerichs Parrish is a Midwestern native living in the South. She lived on the South Side of Chicago for seven years, working in various non-profit and church ministries. She has an M.A. in Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School with an emphasis in Systematic Theology. Her current areas of study include systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and ecclesiology. She is a coffee enthusiast, independent bookstore fanatic, and Pittsburgh Penguins fan. She is passionate about doing theology to serve the local and global church.


Footnotes

[1] Audre Lorde defines the “mythical norm” as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

[2] Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[3] See Ted Cruz’s now-infamous quotation of William Wallace at CPAC 2021 for a relevant current example of this exact point. See also Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 37.

[6] Ibid., 37-38.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39.

[9] Ibid, 205.

[10] Ibid, 187-188.

[11] Ibid, 202.

[12] Ibid, 204.

[13] Though white evangelicals are certainly not the only American Protestants to do so!

[14] Andy Crouch, “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience?” in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, ed. W. David Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 32.

[15] Ibid, 34.

[16] Kobes du Mez, 304.

You Can Call Me by My Name

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The dreaded first day of school was especially frightening for me. The fear of being called on to introduce myself and the anticipation of meeting new people was accompanied by the terror of seeing my teachers’ faces at the exact moment in which they encountered my name. Their reactions often reminded me of the expressions of movie characters in sci-fi films when a UFO was seen descending to earth.  

Itzel y su papa. See footnotes for a correct pronunciation of the name.

Itzel y su papá. See footnotes for a correct pronunciation of the name.

Itzel, a beautiful Mayan name carefully chosen by my parents for their primogeniture. Itzel, a name that claimed my heritage and honored my indigenous ancestors. Itzel, a name gifted to me while I was still in the womb. Itzel, a name that painfully alienated me. Itzel, a name that I hated and often fantasized of changing. Itzel, a name that I daydreamt of transforming into something more “palatable;” my notebook filled with the names that I yearned to have. While most of the girls my age would write the name of the boy they liked, I used to obsessively write the names that would render me normal. They were always generic names, names that would not cause attention, names that would appear on “the most popular list of baby names.”  

To the dismay of many, my parents did not give me a middle name. They thought my first name was so beautiful that they could not possibly pair it with anything else. “Do you have a middle name?” I was commonly asked. “Do you have a nickname?” was usually the follow-up question. My dad and other family members often called me “Itzelita,” the Spanish diminutive form of “Itzel,” but I did not think “Itzelita” posed a solution. They were grasping at straws and I, too, was desperately searching for a name that would resolve their confusion. Sometimes my teachers would not ask me for a middle name or a nickname but would directly resort to usurping an authority that did not belong to them by asking if they could rename me: “Can we call you something else?” At that moment, I wanted desperately for the attention to be diverted away from me and I would hastily reply, “Call me whatever you want.” I convinced myself that my name was unimportant and that my parents were to blame for giving me such a difficult name.  

And so, I became “It-soul” for many years. Every single time my name was mispronounced I cringed internally but silence and shame prevailed. My beautiful name was ripped to pieces and what remained was ugly and hostile, unrecognizable. I avoided saying my own name, and when I found myself in an unavoidable situation, I said it quickly and quietly, hoping that it would go undetected.   

What still bewilders me is the fact that I attended schools in a Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, where most of the children had Spanish names and a strong linguistic background in Spanish. Why were they unable to pronounce my name? I suspect that it had little to do with my classmates’ ability or lack thereof to say my name. We imitated the pronunciation adopted by our teachers and authority figures at our schools and somehow convinced ourselves that we could not pronounce our own names.  

Some names are indeed difficult to pronounce for the unaccustomed tongue. I, myself, have had trouble pronouncing multiple names. I cannot, in good conscious, blame people for not knowing how to pronounce my name. What is disheartening is not that people don’t automatically know how to pronounce my name but that they do not even attempt. They glance at it once and decide that they are incapable. They find renaming me an easier endeavor than learning how to properly pronounce my name. They overuse pronouns as a cover-up and whenever possible, prefer to ignore my existence. To evade my name, they resort to sophisticated jugglery that ironically requires more cognitive work than learning how to say my name.  

Individuals of all different ethnic backgrounds have their names chronically mispronounced, including Whites. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Latino population in the United States. However, mispronouncing the names of people of color is especially harmful. In their article, “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microaggressions and the K-12 Classroom” (2012), Kohli and Solorzano contend that mispronouncing the names of students of color is a racial microaggression that, “supports a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority […] that can negate the thought, care, and significance of the name, and thus the identity of the child” (444). Mispronouncing or changing the name of a student becomes an additional form of othering: “Often unconscious and unintentionally hurtful, when these comments are made to Students of Color, they are layered insults that intersect with an ‘othering’ of race, language and culture” (448).  

To fully capture this idea, one must take into consideration the historical and political contexts in which mispronouncing and changing the names of people of color are situated. As a symbolic manifestation of disregarded humanity and stripped personhood, enslaved Africans were forcefully renamed according to the names of their masters. Seen as property with no real human value, their names were exterminated. Today, many white families enthusiastically excavate their family’s history using their names as tools and proud cultural markers, while many African Americans are only able to trace their lineage back to the masters of their ancestors. Indigenous people also suffered the violence of name modification as a vehicle of racist practices and forced assimilation. According to anthropologists David H. French and Katherine S. French[1], in Native American societies, "names have a dual role, serving also as signs (or symbols) of social identities, relationships, categories, or positions, and as vehicles for modes of social interactions. They make statements, significant ones, both about persons and about groups” (200). In a grotesque disregard of indigenous identity, indigenous people were reassigned Anglicized names for the comfort of the English-trained tongue and as part of their efforts to forcefully assimilate them into White society. As Liliana Elliott explains:

“Anglo-American names were an initial step that marked social death […] Teachers, officials, and administrators expected Native children to fully inhabit their new names by the time they emerged out of industrial school and assumed daily life in white civilization. Indeed, much of the rhetoric of assimilation reflects a belief that true personhood remained impossible until assimilation was complete[2]” (59).

Indigenous names were mocked, considered odd and incomprehensible. Rather than learning about the cultural richness and significance of these names, they were confronted with animosity and torn apart.  

Latina/o names suffered a similar fate in schools. It was a common practice for teachers to change their students’ names to an Anglicized version: Ramón became Raymond, Juanita became Jane and María became Mary, for example. As Orlando Patterson argues, "the changing of a name is almost universally a symbolic act of stripping a person of his former identity[3]" (55). A man that went by the name of Jesse told a story of how his birth name, Jesús, was permanently transformed. The nun of the religious school where he attended refused to call him Jesús, asserting that his name was blasphemous. Operating within the limits of her cultural lens, the nun failed to understand that Mexican families tend to name their children after people they consider admirable or important to their family’s legacy. Jesús, a very common name amongst Mexican families, is a way to honor Christ and not an act of defilement. That day, terrified at the “realization” that his name was profane, young Jesús went home and told his parents to call him Jesse.  

Non-Western names are perceived as an unwelcomed inconvenience and whiteness seems to believe itself deserving of ridding individuals of their identity for the sake of its convenience.  

The insistence that names must be “easily pronounced” in English is linked to the idea that English is the superior language. The linguistic dexterity that seems to be demanded of people of color is ironically not pursued by the people making these demands. Speakers of other languages are expected to pronounce English names with ease as if English was an inherently “easy” language to learn as compared to other languages. Texas Representative Betty Brown boldly stated in the matter of voter identification legislation: “rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese – I understand it’s a rather difficult language – do you think it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here.” Non-Western names are perceived as an unwelcomed inconvenience and whiteness seems to believe itself deserving of ridding individuals of their identity for the sake of its convenience.  

Names are of high importance in the Bible and serve a variety of functions. Jacob’s name was changed to Israel in Genesis 32:28: “Your name will no longer be Jacob,” the man told him. “From now on you will be called Israel, because you have fought with God and with men and have won” (NLT). God also changed the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah after God made a covenant with them. The names Jesus (he will rescue people from their sins) and Immanuel (God with us) were meaningfully chosen and their significance explained. One of the greatest gifts that God gave Adam was the power to name. Naming is a necessary component of creation, as God literally spoke the world into existence. Our names comprise a fundamental aspect of our identity. As parents, we have been entrusted with the power to name our children and as individuals, we have been given authority over our own names. Forcefully anglicizing names seems to be one of the various ways in which whiteness tries to mold people of color into their image.  

The study conducted by Kohli and Solorzano found that the social-emotional well-being of children is negatively affected when their names are mispronounced in the classroom which, in turn, harms their learning. The National Association for Bilingual Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education in California partnered to establish an initiative titled, “My Name My Identity” with the objective of raising awareness about the importance of names. Under this initiative, students and teachers are able to present their learning at school, parent and district board meetings. Some of the sample lessons that they recommend include discussion questions such as: Is there a story behind your name? Who gave you your name? What does your name mean? What is something positive about you or your name that no one can forget. While these initiatives represent a step forward in recognizing the impact of names on student learning, they must become a critical component of teacher training.  

Learning how to correctly pronounce someone’s name is an act of love. When someone takes interest in learning how to say my name correctly, I have the certainty that they care about me as a person and value me. As a child, I did not have the words nor was I aware of the scholarship that gave voice to my experience. I could not articulate why I felt the way I did, but I knew exactly how I felt – I felt small and unimportant like a piedra en un zapato; an inconvenience, a discomfort. My name was trampled every single day of the school year. I had thousands of opportunities to correct my teachers, but I was too embarrassed, afraid of “offending them.” I like to think that if I would have said something and explained how deeply it affected me, they would have corrected themselves. The truth is that my name is not inherently difficult to pronounce as many people had

led me to believe; the truth is that they had a hard time pronouncing my name but they also had the ability to learn it. Now, when people ask what they can call me, I firmly reply, “You can call me by my name.”


ABOUT DRA. ITZEL Meduri Soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel


Footnotes

[1] Goddard, Ives and William C. Sturtevant. “Personal Names,” Handbook of the North American Indians: Language. vol. 17, Smithsonian Institution, 1978. 

[2] Elliott, Liliana. Names Tell a Story: The Alteration of Student Names at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1890. 2019. University of Colorado Boulder, History Honors Thesis. https://www.colorado.edu/history/sites/default/files/attached-files/elliott_thesis.pdf

[3] Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 2018.

Another White Nod to MLK?

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Summer of 2020 inspired more conversation around the topic of performative justice. You need only look as far as social media influencers to see simple evidence of prevalent performative justice in our nation. Who spoke up, who listened, and who is continuing the work of pursuing equality and justice in large or small ways? 

Today is Martin Luther King Day. On this day influencers, marketers, educators, non-profits, and others will promote Dr. King’s ethos of peace, hope, equality, and justice. If you attended primary school in the US, you likely listened to or read King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech and wrote a reflective essay on the themes found therein, year after year. Good students had a proper respect for King; He was an American hero. Your experience in the US church also portrayed King as a man of faith, increasing his validity. Quite possibly, as a white, Christ-following American you will be sharing something from or about MLK on your social media feeds today. You will mention his memory to your young children. You will send a text of solidarity to your friends of color. And then you will move on. 

Performative justice is easiest to succumb to as white people when we are given a set of simplistic actions to justify our beliefs about what it means to be good and helpful. Holidays, monuments, and moments can become rote in both faith traditions and in our nation. Sacred remembrances can turn into mere performances of right action, actions done for self-preservation or gain. 

This was the case in Arizona. A failure to instill MLK Day as a paid state holiday led the National Football League to disqualify Phoenix as a host city for the 1993 Super Bowl.[1] This meant a projected revenue loss of over 200 million dollars for the southwest city; the game ended up going to Los Angeles.[2] In November 1992, Arizona finally approved the state holiday, nearly ten years after Ronald Reagan signed to declare the national observation of the day. I can’t help but wonder if financial gain was the tipping motivation for the state of Arizona to finally support remembering Dr. King and the civil rights movement he was killed leading. 

In his speech The Other America King spoke to the needed repentance of white Americans in this way: 

“What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single solid monistic determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of Civil Rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of good will to admit.”[3]

We have a flawed approach toward inequality and injustice in both our nation and the American church. Our commitment to change, as King said, is limited. When we do take action, Arizona proves that it is often performative--a well placed nod driven by self-preservation.

For white people of faith, Martin Luther King Day is an opportunity to evaluate if the gospel of peace King championed is something we only give nod to on a national holiday. This day is a moment where we should consider our belief of the image of God in humanity, and how that belief informs our ministry structures, educational values, financial decisions, voting, and the voices we include when developing our theology. 

As a white, Christ-following woman, I ask you today, not to share another MLK post on your Facebook page. Instead, take intentional time to listen to King’s The Other America speech, see yourself in the narrative, ask how his words bear truth for our nation today, and reflect on your role in cultivating a culture of justice and unity in the US church. Not falling into performative justice, begins with creating space for sacred remembrance.


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About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily completed her BA in Ministry to Women at Moody Bible Institute. She writes on the rural-urban divide, and issues at the intersection of faith and culture. Her hope is to contribute to the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.


Footnotes

[1] https://www.library.pima.gov/content/martin-luther-king-holiday-in-arizona/

[2] https://theundefeated.com/features/when-arizona-lost-the-super-bowl-because-the-state-didnt-recognize-martin-luther-king-jr-day/

[3] https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm

The Future of Evangelicalism is Mestizo

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As an Indian adoptee raised in Northeast Wisconsin, I grew up in a world of white faces. I was caught in between two communities, benefiting from the privileges of a white family, yet often sitting alone as the only person of color in a crowded room. Surrounded by white pastors, educators, and friends, my perception and imagination of the world were inherently shaped by a white lens. By “white,” I don’t mean to speak only to ethnicity, but imagination. Whiteness, in this way, is a theological and sociological construction in which people of all ethnicities and cultures may imagine the world. In this system, goodness, success, and power, are seen in approximation to how close one may come to mirroring this white identity. 

An honest analysis of American history reveals how whiteness is deeply embedded in evangelical practice. Since the first colonists arrived on the eastern shores, the evangelical church has borne witness to a nation governed by this white imagination, yet has intentionally remained silent and complicit. Through national genocide of First Nations people, the transatlantic slave trade, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and even in our current moment, this expression of evangelicalism has little to say about seeking justice and reparations for those who continue to be marginalized and oppressed in our nation. Instead, white evangelicals have embraced a faith centered around Christian nationalism. Rather than reckoning with our history, many have continued to believe the lie that America is a “beacon of light,” “a city on a hill” that will carry the Gospel into our modern world. 

As this history becomes more widely recognized, many scholars have argued it is necessary that we “follow Jesus out of evangelicalism” and into a “new Christianity.” This, of course, is one of many answers to the question frequently asked in recent years: is evangelicalism worth redeeming? 

In short, I do believe that the evangelical tradition is worth redeeming from its cultural heritage; and I believe evangelicals are already equipped with the theological tools to acknowledge and repent of our historical patterns of sin, both individual and systemic.

“God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers, the culture-makers.”
— Virgilio Elizondo

However, any future for American evangelicalism requires more than a simple denouncing of whiteness. In return, it must reconstruct something new. If evangelicalism seeks to be redeemed from a history of racism and nationalism, we must ask what it is being redeemed towards? In other words, to exclusively deconstruct evangelical practice is to eliminate evangelicalism as a tradition and move on to a new Christianity. To reconstruct, on the other hand, is to critique our tradition without abandoning it. It is to both claim and reckon with our history so we may be released into new possibilities — a new reality. As Brian Bantum summarizes, “This is important because in rightly seeing the de-formation, we can also see the lines of re-formation. We can see the textures of humanity and its possibilities in Christ’s person and work.”

This reality, I am convinced, is a mestizo evangelicalism: a tradition that is centered around a theology of belonging and community. This multi-ethnic vision is not antithetical to the theological commitments of evangelicalism, but rather it is a greater living-out of our core beliefs: the truthfulness of Scripture, the central, atoning work of Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the importance of evangelism. This, I believe, can be our evangelical witness for centuries to come: that we may be known as a faith that crosses racial and ethnic lines because of our shared unity in Jesus Christ. We may be known as a faith that disrupts dehumanizing racial binaries by embracing a Galilean Christ. 

In this reconstructing project we must remember, as Virgilio Elizondo wrote decades ago, this mestizo reality does not happen overnight. “God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers, the culture-makers.”

By God’s grace, this culture-shaping work was already begun by the saints who have gone before us. While white evangelicalism has centered around political dominance and cultural influence, the overlooked mestizaje of evangelicals in minority communities has been one of diligently sowing gospel seeds in the margins of society. This is the silent work of evangelicals serving in underprivileged neighborhoods, homeless shelters, prison ministries, and food pantries. It is the thousands of evangelical ministers who took up Martin Luther King’s call to march in Selma. It is the work of evangelicals who have faithfully sought to emulate the leadership and activism of those who have gone before us. It is evangelical pastors willing to condemn white supremacy and anti-blackness from the pulpit. It is the work not broadcasted on the news or written in headlines. It is the long-suffering work, the costly grace, of Christian activism.

In practice, this future looks like shared power and equity within vibrant, multi-ethnic communities.  As Dr. Eric Baretto notes, this future “puncture[s] the myth of scholarly objectivity and demonstrate[s] the persuasiveness and power of contextual theologies and readings.” In other words, hearing the Gospel preached and theology taught from a diversity of ethnic communities has the power to awaken evangelicals to a world of Christianity that extends far beyond their church buildings. This communal reading of Holy Scripture from beyond the reaches of the white imagination invites American evangelicals into the global practice of our tradition.

This vision looks like Black theologians tracing the themes of God’s liberative action alongside Latino/a theologians juxtaposing the experience of Jesus, a Galilean Jew, with “Mexican Americans living on the geographical and cultural margins of the borderlands.” It looks like reading Scripture corporately, not only in English but in Spanish, Hindi, German, Arabic, Latvian, and Greek. It is bringing our bodies, our full, ethnic self, and orienting ourselves toward one another in hope and faith. 

This is the work of moving from blindness to sight; from darkness to the full spectrum of color. It is in this moment that the world takes on a new form, words take on new meanings, and one’s perception of the world is seen in proximity to the greatness of the world around them.  

In America today, the events of 2020 have opened the eyes of many evangelicals. The dirty mud of whiteness has been wiped from their eyes and they are moving from blindness to sight. White evangelicals are listening to a theology that speaks to the terror Black Americans, Asians, and Latin@s continue to face in our nation. They are entering into something greater, a global tradition of evangelicalism that has stood for centuries. They are reimagining Christianity by reading God’s inspired word alongside their neighbors. Just a taste of this community leaves many craving more.

I have hope for my tradition because this work is faithfully being done. Across our nations, evangelicals at the grassroots are speaking up in their churches, their communities, and their institutions. As we protest, raise our voices with charity and grace, and love our neighbors as ourselves, may the tide of evangelicalism slowly turn away from whiteness and into the mestizo, Christ-centered tradition we have been called to. 

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Amar D. Peterman is a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing his studies on American religious history. He is a featured writer at Ideos and his work is published in Sojourners, The Christian Century, Faithfully Magazine, Fathom, and more. Amar holds a B.A. in Theology from Moody Bible Institute. You can follow his work on his website or on Twitter: @amarpeterman


Reconstruct

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“As a Latino growing up as the son of an undocumented pastor in the Midwest, my experience was much different from those who surrounded me. I wanted to believe in what my family and church taught me as truth but I slowly drifted away from my beliefs as a result of the testimony I received from the Anglo church and their members. Even to this day those same Protestants refer to us as ‘wetbacks, beaners, and spics.’ I find myself conflicted with my identity.”

I received this note from a student last year and it broke my heart. I, and so many others, can identify with this identity conflict in the current historic moment where racism and white nationalism have been so blatantly wedded to the church in the United States. It’s a painful place to be, and this conflict of identity has launched millions of us on a journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction.  In my observation, social media and the metaphorical bookshelves are filled with ideas—good and bad—about how to deconstruct. Almost nothing exists, however, to help us reconstruct in a healthy way.  If I may be so bold, I’d like to propose five thoughts which have helped me in my journey of Christian reconstruction over the past two decades.  

Lament

My wife Erica poignantly defines lament as “honesty in suffering.” In the path towards healthy reconstruction, the first step is to be completely honest with God. Talk with God and with friends. Let it all out. Journal. Scream if you have to. God can handle it. Don’t hold anything back. Your reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect, and your theology doesn’t have to be all figured out. Jesus understands. The Psalms are a great model, and in fact 40% of the Psalms are reflections of lament. Psalm 22 is probably the most famous: 

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest. 
Psalm 22: 1-2 

Healthy Models

As the writer of Ecclesiastes declared, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). In this difficult moment, it’s easy to feel alone and to think that we are struggling by ourselves. If we dig a little deeper, however, we’ll find that we’re not alone because the Brown Church has been deconstructing and reconstructing faith in the face of racial injustice for five hundred years. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Bartolomé De Las Casas, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Justo Gonzalez, Orlando Costas, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Alexia Salvatierra, René Padilla, and Samuel Escobar are just a few examples of those who have walked this journey before us, and whose lives and writings we can study to find healthy models of reconstruction. 

The Bible vs. “la ropa anglo-sajon”

As part of the deconstruction process, the Brown Church has always had to distinguish between what the Bible actually says and racist colonial interpretations.  Power will always try to justify itself through theology and civil religion. Every single time throughout the centuries, Brown theologians have risen up to say:  “No. The Bible does not teach that. You’re just trying to justify your greed.  You are in violation of 2,000 verses of Scripture which speak about God’s heart of love and compassion towards immigrants, the poor, and all who are marginalized.” 

“Radical evangélicos” René Padilla and Samuel Escobar put it this way: We need to learn to tell the difference between what the Bible actually teaches and the “ropa anglo-sajon,” or Anglo-Saxon cultural clothing of the gospel which has been exported to Latin America and the U.S. Latino church.[1]  And how do we know the difference? That’s why we need to know the Bible better than anyone.  

As a professor of ethnic studies at UCLA for fifteen years and a community organizer, I want to offer a warning from the other side as well. There are great things to learn from ethnic studies and secular activism, but we need biblical discernment to sift the helpful from what could be ultimately damaging.  To simply replace “la ropa anglo-sajon” with secular activist principles leads us down another path which is not the kingdom, or “kin-dom” of God. 

Reconstructing Jesús of Galilee and a Holistic Gospel 

As part of its healing process, the Brown Church has also had to decolonize its Christology and reconstruct a full-bodied, holistic gospel. As Latino theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo and Orlando Costas have taught us, Jesus was a “Galilean.” Galilee was far from the center of religious, political, and economic power in Jerusalem. Galileans like Jesus were poor, bilingual, and spoke with an accent. They were oppressed by Roman colonizers, as well as by the elites of their own people.  They were shunned as cultural “mixed breeds” or “mestizos,” and their cultural and religious purity was often called into question. Galilee was the “hood” or “barrio” of Jesus’ day, and our Lord was a Galilean. To put it another way, Jesus was “Brown.” 

As a marginalized Galilean himself, Jesus understands the suffering of our Latina/o community in this present moment. And the “good news” is that he came as Lord and Savior to make us and the whole world new. Nothing and no one is left out. Jesus transforms us as individuals to be more and more like him, and then he sends us out as agents of transformation of all the brokenness and injustice of our world. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar call this misión integral: “the mission of the whole church to the whole of humanity in all its forms, personal, communal, social, economic, ecological, and political.”[2] 

Spiritual Practices 

In my experience, personal transformation in Christ and healing of colonial wounds[3], come through specific practices. For me, the big ones have been Scripture reading, therapy, spiritual direction, and intergenerational community. 

It may sound simple and old school, but for me, reading through the Bible once a year is the central spiritual practice which sustains me. I’m on my 19th time, and the more I read, the more I find healing and hope. And also, the more I find that I have so much to learn. As Dr. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier tells us, it is within the Bible where we find hope and wisdom for the daily realities and hardships of life, and in the Scriptures where we encounter the living God who brings liberation.[4] 

Therapy and counseling have also been critical for me. I bear the scars and open wounds of machismo deep within my soul, and have gone to counseling for two decades in order to better understand myself and break free from destructive emotional patterns. 

Spiritual direction is another key practice which has helped me to reconstruct my faith and heal from racism in the church.  According to David Hoover: “The task of the Spiritual Director is to honor the questions that have no right to go away.” As Erica has shown me, “God is always present, loving and working in our lives, but sometimes it’s difficult to listen by ourselves. A spiritual director, or companion, helps us to notice and connect with the Real Director, who is God.” 

Finally, it is common in activist circles today to hear it said that we should seek the wisdom of the ancestors. I could not agree more. And as Latina/o Christians, we have so much to learn from the 500-year justice tradition of the Brown Church. This tradition of our ancestors represents a treasure trove of God-given community cultural wealth which is invaluable for our reconstruction process. But this community cultural wealth is not found just in books. By God’s design it is also deposited in the intergenerational community of the local and global church: 

“When we refer to the Church, we should define the word a little. We mean the whole Church, the Church as an ecumenical body spread around the world, and not just its particular form in a parish in a local community…That Church is one form of the Presence of God on earth, and so naturally it is powerful. It is a powerful moral and spiritual force which cannot be ignored by any movement.” César Chávez. [5]

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ABOUT DR. ROBERT CHAO ROMERO

Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005.  He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley.  Romero is award winning writer, publishing 15 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion.  

In addition to being an attorney and professor, Robert is an ordained pastor.  Together with his wife Erica, he is the co-founder of Jesus 4 Revolutionaries, a Christian ministry to activists, as well as board member of the Matthew 25 Movement in Southern California.


Author’s Note: For more resources on lament visit Soul Care with Erica.

[1] Ruth Irene Padilla DeBorst, “Integral Mission Formation in Abya Yala (Latin America): A Study of the Centro de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (1982-2002) and Radical Evangélicos” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2016), 45; Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020), 156.

[2] Tetsunao Yamamori and C. René Padilla, eds., The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission (Buenos Aires: Kairos Ediciones, 2004), 9.

[3] Oscar García-Johnson, Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 3-4. 

[4]  Loida I. Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado-Pérez, and Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Latina Evangélicas: A Theological Survey from the Margins (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 35,36.

[5] Romero, Brown Church, 137.

Double Punishment: Immigration and Anti-Blackness

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How can I adequately attempt to address the complexities of the Afro-Latino/a experience in a society where we’re considered a threat by the mere virtue of having rich, melanated skin? An experience only amplified by the plight of the Afro-descendant, Spanish-speaking immigrant here in the United States.

Afro-Latinos/as are not a monolith, so our stories are varied and complex—from South America to the Caribbean to the U.S. and worldwide. But one thing we share is our rich African ancestry.

Our Rich Diasporic Roots

My family is from Colombia. Somos Afro-Colombianos. My dad is from Buenaventura, and my mom is from Cali. They are scholars, pastors, educators, and so much more. They have ministered in Colombia and other parts of the world for over 30 years. My parents, along with the rest of my extended family, immersed me in the beautiful world of my rich diasporic roots as an Afro-Latino in Colombia.

My family would have gatherings in our neighborhood in Colombia called “Sancochados,” which were parties with food, dancing, and conversation. But the most important part was el sancocho on full display in the middle of the street inside a huge cooking pot. El sancocho is a soup inspired by rich West African roots mixed with indigenous flavor. It’s a reminder of who we are and where we came from.

During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, enslaved African women in Colombia were forced to cook only the best meals for their slave masters while they were left with scrapes and crumbs. What the slave masters didn’t realize was that these African women were taking the “scraps” to make the most delicious and nutritious meal for themselves and their families.

Sancocho was a reminder for these kidnapped, trafficked, and dehumanized African women that they weren’t slaves by identity but enslaved by circumstance. They were Black queens and kings, no matter what their masters said. And so, my family and I feast today.

Our Woundedness

That tradition shaped my identity as a young Black boy born in the United States but raised in part in Colombia, dealing with English as my second language and a dual identity. Growing up, my dad would share the complexities of the lived experiences of Afro-Colombianos in Colombia and even here stateside.

In Colombia, for example, our first black president was erased from history books for years because of the color of his skin. And my father can tell many more personal stories of racial injustice he and his family experienced in Colombia. By the time my family moved to the U.S. from Colombia, it was clear to us the disdain for los negros (and the resulting internalized self-hatred of Black people) wasn’t just an issue in Colombia pero tambien aquí en los Estados Unidos.

Internalized pain is part and parcel of the Afro-descendant community. More specifically, woundedness is a part of Afro-Latindad—a designation not merely for a racialized category or an insufficient pan-ethnic term, but an experience marred by a turbulent, misrepresented past and a difficult path forward.

Our Identity Crisis

Growing up, I had an identity crisis. Here stateside, we’re trained to homogenize communities and strip individuals of their rich and varied ancestral cultural identity. So I was not “Black” enough to be Black, even though I’m dark-skinned. I wasn’t embraced by the African American community because that’s not the culture I grew up in. But I also wasn’t “Latino” enough to be Latino, even though I’m Colombian. I didn’t look like white and light-brown actors on Telemundo. Somehow, being Black and Latino became mutually exclusive. I couldn’t be both. So who—or what—was I?

The fact that Afro-Latinos/as don’t fit into a Westernized construct of what it means to be “Black” doesn't mean that we’re not Black. And the fact that Afro-Latinos/as don’t fit into a Westernized construct of “Latinidad” doesn’t mean we’re not Latino/a. Race—a human-made social construct—is a system that assigns degrees of social capital and value based on proximity to whiteness. In this system, skin color is the main and most determining feature. This created a social reality in which there is a proportional correlation between the amount of melanin in your skin and the number and nature of disparities you face in this world.

I cannot tell you how many times I've been discriminated against by fellow Colombians or people from Latinoamérica due to the color of my skin. Growing up in Latin American culture, I've been called “negro feo” (ugly Black boy), “mico” (monkey), “sucio” (dirty), etc. That sort of verbal abuse is soul-wounding and disruptive.

In some of those difficult moments, my mother’s sweet words were a balm to my soul. She would hold me while tears ran down my black cheeks. She would tell me, “Ser negro es hermoso. No te olvides, mijo.” (“To be black is beautiful. Don’t forget that, my son”).

Immigration & Anti-Blackness

Black immigrants suffer a “double punishment” because they are immigrants in a xenophobic culture, and they are Black in a white supremacist society. In the United States, Black undocumented immigrants are detained and deported at higher rates than other racial groups. But their stories are largely left out of the bigger narrative around immigration.

It is no secret to my Afro-Latino family that this country’s immigration system is unjust and biased against immigrants of African descent. For years, my parents, sisters, and extended family dealt with debasing comments and treatment by immigration officials, as well as predatory and neglectful immigration lawyers.

But this current administration—and its president—has been the single greatest threat to my family since we immigrated here from Colombia. The rhetoric used by this administration to vilify Brown and Black immigrants has only empowered ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and immigration policy makers to remove immigrants from this country in some of the most dehumanizing ways.

Unfortunately, my family and I have personally experienced this. Just last year, our world was turned upside down when my tío and tía were unjustly deported after following the laws of the land for nearly 20 years. Their deportation had traumatic emotional, financial, organizational, and relational ramifications for our family over the last year. Their journey has only reminded us how corrupt and racist our immigration system is.

Our Anti-Black Histories

Anti-Blackness is a global issue, and it is prevalent in Latin America. During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 1500s–1800s, over 11 million Africans disembarked from slave ships. Of those 11 million Africans who survived that brutal, inhumane transport, only 450,000 came to the United States. That means only 5% African slaves came here stateside. Five percent.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to learn that anti-Black immigration policies aren’t unique to the United States. In Brazil, for example, immigration policies were put into place after 1850 in order to receive over five million European immigrants from 1872 to 1975. Why? They wanted to “whiten” the country.

Hate was not the only culprit that led to the dehumanization of the African Diaspora. It was self-interest motivated by economic gain that justified the thought that we were not human. Here in the United States, trafficked Africans were enslaved and forbidden to speak their native tongue. By the unmerciful hand of a master’s guile, these African immigrants were stripped of their God-given dignity by these slave masters who perverted God’s Word.

Anti-Blackness Today

Today’s racist ideologies, policies, and institutions perpetuate the anti-Blackness of yesterday. Afro-Latinos/as are often stifled in our societal advancement and human flourishing. Centuries of micro-aggressions are perpetuated by fear of afrodescendientes and corrupt systemic structures that further diminish God’s image-bearers (Gen. 1:26–27).

K.A. Ellis once said, “Satan is uncreative in how he deploys destructive and dehumanizing ideologies, but he’s particularly good at repackaging oppression. Looking through history, we see his tactics repeat.”

Oppression is repackaged. Acquiring knowledge about the pervasive air of anti-Blackness in our society is easy. What’s difficult is to know how we can be active and complicit in anti-Blackness and oppression against Afro-Latinos/as.

A Way Forward

Afro-Latino/as are a growing population. According to the Pew Research Center, almost a quarter of all U.S. Hispanics identified as Afro-Latinos (Afro-Caribbean or of African descent) in 2016. Within our families and communities, we need spaces where we can heal and have meaningful conversations of what it means to be Afro-Latino/a.

We need to learn and celebrate the richness of our African heritage expressed in various forms. Cumbia, for example, is a traditional Colombian dance created by enslaved Africans who worked mines. The small foot movements of the dance mimic the only movements their feet were allowed while bound by chains.

Music from Grupo Niche, ChocQuibTown, and others also proudly represent the flavor of Afro-Latinidad. Colombian star Shakira recently paid respect to Afro-Colombians during her Super Bowl performance by dancing Champeta & Mapalé—dances created by enslaved Africans in Colombia.

These kinds of positive representations are a better way forward than media and entertainment that only portrays Afro-Latinos/as as hyper-sexualized villains, criminals, and brujas (witches).

Who Are We?

Soy Afro-Colombiano. I am a product of the Afro-Latino/a Diaspora. The blood and resilience of my West African ancestry runs deep inside this beautiful, sun-kissed skin.

Somos Afro-Latino/as. We’re the African diamond exported from its homeland and extorted in foreign places. Far from home, our perceived value has depreciated by virtue of white supremacy. But it is not lost. Its true worth was never truly lost or depreciated because it’s God given.

Who are we? We’re like the sugar in coffee. You can’t see us—our value is hidden and largely untold—but best believe, we bring the flavor.

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About Jon Aragón

Jon Aragón is an Afro-Colombiano entrepreneur, advocate, and multidisciplinary designer. He serves on the teaching and preaching team at Living Faith Bible Fellowship where he also leads the small group ministry. A proud son of Colombian immigrants, Jon has a heart for the unique beauty and challenges of immigrants and Afro-Latino/a people. He’s worked with World Relief, advocating for DACA recipients and other immigration issues on Capitol Hill. He currently works with the Chasing Justice team and is the founder of Jon Doulos. He’s also the creative director and co-owner of Native Supply. Jon resides in Tampa, FL with his wife, Quina, and their daughter.

Photo by Savannah Lauren


The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of World Outspoken.

Between Plainfield and Barrio Three: Theological Reflections on Home and Belonging

This article was first published in Issue #69 of Inheritance magazine, and can be read at here.

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I spent my childhood and teenage years in a small suburban village just on the boundary of the Chicagoland area, Plainfield. Memories from that time flow with a thick, childlike belonging, a sense that this place — its people, cornfields, dilapidated business strips, skateparks, prairies, and forests — was my home, a space where I was loved, a space that I loved. This isn’t to say that I lived shielded from the ill-shaping forces that decimate this world. I am an immigrant’s son, aware of my family’s fragile and strange presence in a place of mostly white families. Still, this awareness comes with the fact that I discovered those wonderful parts of life like joy, laughter, friendship, and community in the only place I ever knew.

My parents were deeply Pentecostal, so I learned to think of home through vibrant religious language, the biblical stories of the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. Plainfield was home for me, not simply because of my attachment to this particular place, but because of the feeling of a quiet and personal presence sustaining this attachment: a suggestive whisper witnessing to the reality that God loved me, loved my family, loved my neighbors, and loved the world we inhabited. Even still, I always had a nagging sense that my father struggled to belong, struggled to make this outskirt village his home, as much as it was mine. 

Memory of Fracture

My father is from Barrio Three, South Cotabato, the Philippines.[1] When I was a child, he’d tell me stories of this island he was from, always with an erupting pride. In one story, he recalled an early morning responsibility he had to feed his family’s water buffalo. He was supposed to feed it a tiny proportion of the already eaten grass but had accidentally fallen asleep to the gentle heat of dawn and the slow graze of the animal. He spoke to me of the clear and pristine water that swayed between the islands and of the blooming and blossoming density of foliage that clothed Mindanao’s mountains. As I reflect on it now, I sense he felt rooted. He managed to feel at home in Barrio Three, at home enough to rest on top of a grazing animal.

Still, this sense of home does not take away from the tremendous difficulties that accompanied my father’s childhood. His parents — my grandparents — ranked among the lowest classes of Filipino society. Their house was pieced together by scraps of cardboard, sheets of metal, and plastic, built on land they did not own. In size, their house was probably equivalent to today’s suburban one-port garage. They had learned to keep anything nice in plastic bags because a rainstorm would soak their little house thoroughly. In tears, my grandma would send my dad off to school with tattered clothes, muddied flip flops, and a measly handful of rice for lunch.

This poverty was caused by the colonial history my father was born into. In the late 1500s, the Philippines was conquered and colonized by the Spanish empire. For a short period in the late 1800s, Filipino revolutionaries managed to overthrow this colonial regime. But after a few years of independence, the United States sent an army over and waged war until they gained control of the islands. From then until 1946, the Philippines was an official colony of the United States.[2]

This U.S.-centered education engrained within many Filipinos the idea that what was good, true, and beautiful was possessed only by those who declared themselves to be white. If Filipinos were to gain any sort of status in the eyes of their colonizers, they’d have to adopt and mimic their ways of life — everything from the language they spoke, the food they ate, and the extent to which they could lighten their skin.

The most sickening consequence of colonization was the establishment of a society organized around white supremacy. One of the ways the United States did this was through the development of an education program known as the “Pensionado program”. Through this education program, the U.S. sent Filipinos to colleges and universities in the United States, and then sent them back to the Philippines as teachers to aid in the transformation of Filipino society around U.S. cultural values. This vision was rooted in the desire to make Filipinos “educated and civilized”, according to the then-U.S. President William McKinley. This U.S.-centered education engrained within many Filipinos the idea that what was good, true, and beautiful was possessed only by those who declared themselves to be white. If Filipinos were to gain any sort of status in the eyes of their colonizers, they’d have to adopt and mimic their ways of life — everything from the language they spoke, the food they ate, and the extent to which they could lighten their skin.

This colonial legacy affected my father. The first time he went to school was the first time he encountered someone with much lighter skin. He was bedazzled by the fairness of this light-skinned person. In his memory, he recalls them being clean, kept up, and having nice clothes. The tragedy is borne out of the comparison he begins to make after seeing them. His skin is dark, deeply dark because of his work out in the tropic sun, and he recalled it as being scorched and dirt-crusted, signifying everything that fair skin is not: poverty and inferiority.

This inferiority became a driving force for his immigration to the United States. After working some time as a merchant marine, he decided to move to Chicago to prove that he could become everything the color of his skin seemed to deny. And for some time, it appeared to work. He started a family, managed a successful business, sent his children to good universities, and semi-retired at the age of 50 to focus on humanitarian work.

But this kind of success did not exist without a slow wounding alienation. He worked 20-hour shifts, was diagnosed with a blood disease due to high levels of stress, strained his marriage, attempted multiple failed business ventures, and slowly grew distant from his sons and family. In it all, I’m sure he was ever reminded of this infinite chasm that separated his instability from the stability of those white families that surrounded us. In the shadow of this alienation, I could sense the looming belief of inferiority become more real to him. In his eyes, the stability of white families, the size of their houses, and the ease with which they appeared to navigate Plainfield only magnified the instability of our family, the struggle to pay for our house, and his failing business ventures. The tragedy of comparison was back, and this drove him to work with greater intensity. During this time, he started taking trips back to the Philippines for longer periods. First, one month; then two months; then four. I saw him less, talked to him less, and his presence slowly faded to absence as he delved deeper into his attempt to become what he saw in those successful white individuals.

Eventually, my father returned to the Philippines because he decided he couldn’t live here. When he left, he told me that he felt he could either be Filipino or human, and that in the United States, the former was incompatible with the latter. That is what colonialism and white supremacy do. They crush the possibility of belonging either through poverty or shame, which forces you to leave a place you once learned to rest in; they teach that only white people belong in certain places and have the authority to make a place like Plainfield home. Such alienation can plunge a person so deeply into a pool of confusion, anxiety, and crippling pain that one wants out in any way possible; we don’t realize how these forces can strangle the souls of those caught in them.[3]

Belonging Amidst Fracture

My father’s alienation must be close to what the exiled Israelites must have felt so far from Jerusalem. Like the Israelites, my dad’s sense of belonging was fractured by forces and powers he could not control, and he found himself searching for life within the swirl of this violence. The Israelites were forced into such a position as the Babylonian empire invaded their land, pillaged villages, and decimated Jerusalem and the temple, the dwelling place of God. The survivors were then sent into a foreign land, and this exilic state is all the more extraordinary that even in Babylon, they continued to affirm the idea that their creaturely existence on earth meant that God had not abandoned them.

Scholars believe that the Old Testament was collected in today’s form during this traumatic period of Israelite destruction.[4] In the ashes of a destroyed temple, away from the promised land, Jewish readers gathered around to listen to prayers: “O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!” Despite the shadow of their devastation, they pray on: “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hands are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.” In their view, there is no relationship to creation that is not mediated by God. All of creation lives in the palms of God. And if God is the liberating God whose divine will is for Israel’s flourishing, exile cannot undo this fact. So long as they were creatures in creation, they exhaled God’s promise with every breath they took, signifying a freedom that at any point could dawn. This was both a comfort and a call: If it were true that their bodies signaled liberation, then they had the responsibility to witness in their actions to this liberating end.

The New Testament heightens and expands this liberating promise. The gospels, for example, declare Jesus to be God-in-flesh and liberator of the world. But Jesus wasn’t just any god, nor was his message of liberation quite what Israel expected. He threatened the religious establishment, denounced the corruption of the temple, and proclaimed a new kingdom oriented around love for those who were oppressed.[5] His message entailed a promise of freedom and flourishing to those who found themselves to be outcasts of societies — Gentiles, the sick, the dying, the poor — everyone who the Jewish elites and the Roman Empire ostracized from community. In other words, Jesus formed a community of the alienated and lowly, oriented around his message that the kingdom was near. He opened up a space that centered love of neighbor and justice as essential actions.[6]

A High Responsibility

In truth, my dad’s story is just one among many. Though existence exhales the promise of liberation, this breath is often brutally cut short by colonialism and white supremacy’s annihilation of life. This can be seen in high rates of infection and death among Black and Latinx communities and by the ongoing racialized police violence, highlighted in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. That Kyle Rittenhouse could kill two people protesting in solidarity with Blake only stresses the extent to which white supremacy ensnares us all. We remain trapped in the myth that this land only belongs to those who are white.

But this land is also God’s pasture, a space opened up to be a place of belonging for the exiled and alienated, for racialized minority communities, for my father, and for myself. Christians, then, are here imbued with a high responsibility: We must — whether in protest, policymaking, writing, community organizing, teaching, or pastoring — bear witness against white supremacy and colonialism to God’s liberation, to Jesus’s kingdom of the alienated, and make a space for all to belong. If colonialism and white supremacy are witnesses trying to proclaim my father’s inferiority, then scripture is an equally powerful counter-witness. No matter where I or my father choose to claim as home, I pray that we might bear witness to the reality of belonging, and trust that quiet but liberating whisper of love.

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About Colton Bernasol 

Colton is from Plainfield Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He is a graduate from Wheaton College with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Biblical and Theological studies. Currently, he is a student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where he is pursuing a Masters in Theological Studies with a concentration in Theology and Ethics. He is interested in questions at the intersection of theology, race, and colonialism. Read more at his website


[1] See Godofredo Bernasol, Jr. “Fresh Milk is Like Heaven: A Walk with God and a Life of Missions”. Stories from my dad are drawn from my memory and his memoir. I admit that I have a complex relationship with this book. On the one hand, it was written 11 years ago, when his business was successful, and he believed that he fulfilled both God’s will and the American Dream. They were equated in his mind. On the other hand, this book highlights the struggle of a Filipino immigrant in the United States. It’s a treasure of stories told from the perspective of someone I not only love, but also someone searching for meaning in an immensely beautiful, painful, and complex life. 

[2] For a short and accessible survey of American colonization of the Philippines, see Erika Lee, “The Making of Asian America: A History”. See also Anthony Christian Ocampo, “The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race”. 

[3] See Willie James Jennings, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race”. This book has been immensely helpful in thinking about the relationship between colonialism and white supremacy and how these forces have alienated us from place.

[4] See Jacob L. Wright, “The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible”.

[5] For classic accounts of God’s desire to liberate creation, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, Caridad Inda, and John Eagleson,“A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation". See also James H. Cone, “God of the Oppressed".

[6] For a reading of how Jesus creates a new community of belonging, see Willie James Jennings, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race” and his commentary “Acts”.

Representando donde quiera: The Afro-Latin@ lived experience

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“Negro soy desde hace muchos siglos” - Jorge Artel[1]

I was 10 years old. I was living in this country for about a year in Washington Heights. Washington Heights is a mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Manhattan, NYC. There, through the many Latin@ kids I met while in school, I realized I was part of a larger community of Latin@s. My experience outside of NYC, specifically in Hackettstown, NJ, a small town in central New Jersey, reminded me of another important part of my identity. There, I briefly lived with some close friends of the family while learning to acclimate to the U.S. I knew very little English, and some of the boys in my Sixth-grade class invited me to play a game of American Football. My team won. I don’t know how, but according to one of the boys from the losing team, “You only won because you have the nigger on your team.”  I, without knowing a word of English or any of the customs here, could not understand why a fight suddenly broke out amongst the boys with whom I played, but what triggered it was the word nigger and everything it means historically in the United States. Not only did I learn English very quickly then, but that’s when I began to understand myself as holding multiple identities here in the U.S., not only as a Colombian boy, as a Latino boy, but also as a Black boy, an Afro-Latino boy.

Afro-Latinidad is an identity that some claim to be new, a term that some misunderstand as trendy, or an idea that people think is novel, but it is more properly understood as a word that became representative of an implicit conceptualization of Blackness amongst Latin@s that has been around for decades. The reality of Afro-Latinidad is that it is not simply a concept or a term. If we are to only focus on the specific time where this term was coined, we would have an incomplete understanding of Afro-Latinidad.  Afro-Latinidad is a lived experience that has been a part of the Latin@ identity for centuries. Simply defined, Afro-Latin@s are “people of African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and by extension those of African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean.”[2] However, as simple as this definition may seem, a consensus of the term has been difficult to standardize:

“Afro-Latin@? What’s an Afro-Latin@? Who is an Afro-Latin@? The term befuddles us because we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.”[3]

To some members of the Latin@ community, one can be either Black or Latin@, but not both.[4] This false dichotomy led many people today to think that Afro-Latinidad is a recent phenomenon when, in reality, the study and experience of Afro-Latinidad have been a part of the Latin@ identity since its origins.

“Generación tras generación, la humanidad ha enseñado una historia falsa; una historia que excluye las contribuciones de la comunidad africana y sus descendientes.” – Arturo Alfonso Schomburg[5]

A little over a century before my own racial incident in Hackettstown, another young boy from Santurce, Puerto Rico, was also told something that would change his life trajectory. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, born in 1874, was in grade school when he asked his teacher why there were no mentions of Black people’s contributions in his books. His teacher replied that it was because Black people had no history.[6] A young Arturo decided then to dedicate his life to collecting and researching everything he could about Black people’s history throughout the Diaspora. This led to the creation of one of the most internationally acclaimed research centers for the study of people of African Descent from all over the world.[7] While not credited with creating the term Afro-Latin@, it is undeniable that Schomburg’s personal experience is as an Afro-Latin@. As someone who self-identified as Negro and Puertorriqueño, his collection, research, and studies of the African Diaspora and its ties to the Americas led to the beginning of a more comprehensive understanding of what we today call Afro-Latinidad.

The term Afro-Latin@ has been used loosely in one form or another since around the 1970’s, it was then that the U.S. Census asked residents to select their racial category in addition to their Hispanic identity.[8] But the use of the term as empowerment for an understanding of Black Latinidad comes from a Diasporic understanding of Blackness. This is specifically highlighted by Prof. Miriam Jiménez Román:

“The concept of an African diaspora, while implicit for decades in this long historical trajectory, comes to the fore during these years [1980’s] and serves as the guiding paradigm in our times. Most importantly for our purposes it acknowledges the historical and continuing linkages among the estimated 180 million people of African descent in the Americas. Along with the terms “Negro,” “afrodescendiente,” and “afrolatinoamericano,” the name Afro-Latin@ has served to identify the constituency of the many vibrant anti-racist movements and causes that have been gaining momentum throughout the hemisphere for over a generation”[9]

We cannot trace the beginning of the term Afro-Latin@ to a specific moment or a specific person, but rather it is a term that expresses a lived identity that has been in the Americas for centuries. Furthermore, the term Afro-Latin@ is a result of transnational conversations between people of African Descent; it is a derivative term that comes to the United States from Latin American anti-racist movements and other pan-African movements in the world. It is important to note that the term, as important as it is, is centered in the United States and it is chiefly used to describe a reality of Latin@s of African Descent in the United States. In Latin America the term Afro is usually linked to a national understanding of one’s identity, namely Afro-Colombian, to describe someone who is Black and Colombian. However, in the United States, as the pan-ethnic term Latin@ became normalized to define a multi-ethnic people, it was necessary to create a term that highlights individuals of African Descent who are Latin@s.

Through research, started by Schomburg but continued by countless others, we realize that Afro-Latinidad is not just a term, rather, it is a lived experience, an identity, that has permeated all aspects of Latinidad. This identity, with or without a term, has roots very early in the history of the Americas[10] and has been developed and preserved through various means –those recognized by academia and those not– that served to awaken us to the reality, resistance, and permanence of Afro-Latin@s in a culture that had created a pigmentocracy to erase all vestiges of Blackness.[11]

The lived experience of Afro-Latin@s, whether here in the U.S. or in Latin America, was not preserved exclusively via written texts and other works that subscribe to a specific anthropological and archival ideology. Rather, Afro-Latin@ customs were preserved throughout the centuries via a variety of traditions, whether oral, musical, or gastronomical[12], serving to remind the world of the visibility and presence of our community both here and afar. This is important to note because the current diverse expressions of Afro-Latinidad here in the United States and throughout Latin America are emblematic and consistent with the way that Afro-Latinidad has been preserved and proclaimed for centuries.

Novels depicting quotidian Afro-Latin@ life, such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Soledad by Angie Cruz; comic books depicting Afro-Latin@ superheroes, such Miles Morales: Spider-Man; books informing the Afro-Latin@ experience in the U.S., such as From Bomba to Hip-Hop by Juan Flores; and music performed by a variety of artists from all of the different genres influenced by the African Diaspora (salsa, merengue, reggaeton, tango, cumbia, etc.), such as Ismael Rivera, Grupo Niche, Machito and His Afro-Cubans, and Tego Calderón. All these artists that write and perform songs indicative of an Afro-Latin@ experience should be considered essential when thinking of how an Afro-Latin@ expression of identity exists in multiple dimensions over time and place.[13]

In addition, many organizations and institutions have consistently emerged since Schomburg’s research and collection began to challenge a white supremacist historical record. We do not have the space here to account for all of these, but we can consider some contemporary organizations that study Afro-Latinidad as emblematic of the continuation of this line of study. Organizations and institutions such as the AfroLatin@ Forum in New York City, Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston, and the International Society of Black Latinos in Los Angeles continue the legacy laid by Schomburg. Other grass-roots efforts focused on expanding the visibility of Afro-Latin@ culture such as Latinegras, the Black Latina Movement, the Afro-Latin@ Festival; blogs such as Ain't I Latina and #IAmEnough all point to the same idea, that the Afro-Latin@ experience and identity cannot be reduced just to universities who are studying Afro-Latinidad from an academic perspective. Rather, Afro-Latinidad should be understood by the interdisciplinary nature with which it has consistently been displayed in and throughout the Americas by many people, over a variety of countries, social classes and religious affiliations, con una meta, como dice ChocQuibTown, de “Representarnos donde quiera.”[14]

For us to fully recognize, affirm, and value Afro-Latinidad as an identity, as a lived experience, and as an expression of the fullness of Latinidad, we also have to challenge our racialized theologies and challenge the use of antiquated language, theories and terminologies that all have one purpose, black erasure. Given its history, does mestizo appropriately convey the fullness of Latinidad or does it perpetuate racialized theologies that deny Black and Indigenous Latin@s? This is a necessary question to explore. A full appreciation of Blackness within Latinidad will not happen until we change how we talk about all people created in God’s image, and reaffirm what is written at the beginning of the Bible. That all people, Black people, Afro-Latin@s, are created in God’s image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our likeness, to be like us.’ (Genesis 1:26a, TFET) and “Humankind was created as God’s reflection, in the divine image God created them…” (Genesis 1:27a, TFET).

Understanding the diversity of how Afro-Latinidad is expressed can be an initiation into a broader, richer personal recognition of how our identities connect us to various people across time. I don't know when or how old the next young person will be when they have that experience with Afro-Latinidad. I certainly hope that by then we have embraced a fuller definition of Latinidad, one that no longer places Afro-Latin@s on the margins, in liminal spaces, or claims that Afro-Latinidad is something new. I hope that when this happens we are able to understand the wholeness of Latinidad and center Blackness within it.

“Quisieron borrar nuestras huellas... ¡y hoy somos miles de miles!

Quisieron callar nuestras voces... ¡y hoy somos coros y ecos!

Quisieron invisibilizar nuestro rostro... ¡y hoy nuestra presencia más grande se yergue!

Quisieron arrancarnos de nuestra tierra... ¡y hoy somos raíces en el universo!

Porque no hay Lugar en el mundo -terrestre o etéreo- donde no existan huellas -profundas y perennes- dejadas por la mujer y el hombre negro.” - Lorena Torres Herrera[15]

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Guesnerth Josué Perea is a teaching Pastor at Metro Hope Covenant Church, and one of the directors of the afrolatin@ forum, a non-profit that raises awareness of Latin@s of African descent in the United States. Josue holds a MA in Theology from Alliance Theological Seminary, a Continuing Education Certificate from Union Theological Seminary and a BA in Latin American History from CCNY. His research on Afro-Colombianidad has been part of various publications including Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora and the Journal for Colombian Studies. Josué was named by the newspaper amNewYork as one of five Colombians "making a mark" in New York City.


[1] In Laurence E. Prescott, Without Hatreds or Fears: Jorge Artel and the Struggle for Black Literary Expression in Colombia (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2000).

[2] http://www.afrolatinoforum.org/defining-afro-latin.html

[3] Román Miriam Jiménez and Juan Flores, “Introduction,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1-3.

[4] See this video for context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtkPEBDUzM&t=1s

[5] Lachatanere, Diana. The Schomburg Papers. New York: University Publications of America, 1983.

[6] Schomburg, Arturo A. "The Negro Digs Up His Past". New York, 1925.

[7] Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

[8] In Román Miriam Jiménez, Juan Flores, and John Logan, “How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 471-484.

[9] Román Miriam Jiménez and Juan Flores, “Introduction,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 2-3.

[10] “The earliest manifestations of Afro-Latin@ presence actually predate the very founding of the country and even the first English settlements. As reflected in Peter Wood’s title of the opening reading, the “earliest Africans in North America” were in fact Afro-Latin@s.” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 4.

[11] For more info see Telles, Edward Eric. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

[12] “Latinos use sound and music to narrate a history of resistance and create a sense of belonging.” - Petra R. Rivera-Rideau et al., “Rethinking the Archive,” in Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan., 2016).

[13] Not to mention the many different visual artists that have kept Afro-Latinidad at the forefront such as Firelei Baez, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons and William Vilalongo just to name a few.

[14] Full video and song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wzqWhwt8zE

[15] Guiomar Cuesta Escobar, Alfredo Ocampo Zamorano, and Lorena Torres Herrera, “Siempre Presentes,” in ¡Negras Somos!: Antología De 21 Mujeres Poetas Afrocolombianas De La región pacífica (Bogotá́, Colombia: Apidama Ediciones, 2013).