Salve Regina University Digital Commons @ Salve Regina Master's Theses Salve's Dissertations and Theses 11-2019 Written in Black, White, and Red: An Exploration of Civilizer Theology in American History Jeremy McGinniss Salve Regina University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/masters_theses Part of the American Studies Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Religion Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, and the Sociology of Religion Commons McGinniss, Jeremy, "Written in Black, White, and Red: An Exploration of Civilizer Theology in American History" (2019). Master's Theses. 6. https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/masters_theses/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Salve's Dissertations and Theses at Digital Commons @ Salve Regina. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Salve Regina. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Written in Black, White, and Red: An Exploration of Civilizer Theology in American History Jeremy McGinniss Salve Regina University HUM590: Humanities Thesis November 2019 McGinniss 2 Chapter One: Introduction & Methodology 3 Chapter Two: Cultural Decay 27 Chapter Three: Authority 47 Chapter Four: Violence 72 Chapter Five: Towards an Equitable Theology 96 Bibliography 103 McGinniss 3 Chapter One: Introduction & Methodology Introduction Howard Thurman published his evocative and challenging work Jesus and the Disinherited in 1949 wherein he posed the question to which he would seek an answer throughout his entire life. “Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin?” (Thurman 1996, 7) Thurman, born in 1899, lived the vast majority of his life in a segregated America, within “a climate of separateness” which Thurman recognized as extending to, and maintained by religious life and practice. (Thurman 1959, 121) Thurman actively challenged this separateness through his writing and work including the establishment of The Church for the Fellowship of All People in San Francisco in 1944 as a tangible demonstration of “an interracial church….a racially integrated organization…” (Thurman 1959, 109) Thurman referred to this work as “The Religion of Jesus and challenged the normative vision of Christianity, one that propelled and glorified whiteness.” (McCray 2019, 48) Thurman’s life and work were focused on the creation and sustaining of an equitable vision of Christianity as a means towards remaking the social, theological and political frameworks shaping American society. In his autobiography, published in 1979 four years before his death, Thurman, bookending his question first posed in Jesus and the Disinherited, asked “What adjustment could be made to accommodate the ethic of a religion like Christianity to the political and economic demands of imperialism? What is the anatomy of the process by which the powerful and the powerless and draw their support and inspiration from the worship of the same God and the teaching from the identical source?” (Thurman 1979, 116) McGinniss 4 In 2017, Dr. Ibram Kendi captured the essence of Thurman’s questions with the term “civilizer theology” defined as “…[the process of] civiliz[ing] away the wayward behaviors of people, particularly the really bad people [who have been]…racialized as black.” (Greer 2017) In 2016 Dr. Kendi was recognized as a substantial and erudite national voice when his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America won the National Book Award. In 2019, he published the searching How to be Anti-Racist and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that same year. Amid a rigorous writing, speaking and teaching schedule, Kendi also works as the Founding Director of The Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University. Like Thurman, Kendi’s work and writing engages the “climate of separateness” that has characterized American life, seeking to understand how American life can hold the ideals of liberty and equality while simultaneously reinforcing a climate of separateness through practices, systems and structures. Thurman and Kendi are linked in a scholar-activist tradition, connected to the work of Cornel West, James Cone, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and others which recognizes the importance of religion in the history and construction of American society while seeking to challenge the practice of religion that is interested in its own power. Thurman and Kendi are representative of a scholar-activist tradition that challenges the idealization of two foundational American ideals, liberty and equality, in their relationship to the horrors of slavery, systems of segregation and traditions of oppression that exist alongside those same ideals. Additionally, Kendi and Thurman are active participants in an intellectual tradition that challenges the expectations and perceptions of society through writing and public speaking applying these to lived experience. Their challenge of civilizer theology is not limited to the academic realm but extends to the spiritual and lived. Hypothesis Following Kendi and Thurman, this paper proposes an extended definition and discusses examples of civilizer theology within the perceptions and practices of white Protestant American Christianity faith traditions. This paper will be searching for patterns to provide insight into the ways that these faith traditions have been interpolated with racially biased social norms and political ideologies. Specifically, how have the Christian scriptures and theological questions been interpreted, mediated and received to have been subsequently enmeshed rhetorically within McGinniss 5 a larger shared political and social community? The process of researching for this paper indicates there is not a shared term that theologians, scholars and other writers have agreed upon to refer to the use of the language of theology or religion that reinforces racist systems and practices. In part the argument presented in this paper proposes that civilizer theology is a term well-qualified to fill the role. Examples are selected guided by the following theoretical construct which identifies three significant dispositions characterizing civilizer theology: first, cultural decay/moral decline; secondly, authority; thirdly, violence. The following sections, rationale, structure and literature review, provide reasoning and arguement for why this construct was chosen. These dispositions are deployed in defending absolutist claims to power, as well as a support for using racial bias to perpetuate beliefs regarding group superiority and are typically expressed as organizing themes and/or focal concerns. In turn, this paper will examine how the theological language of justification is employed by members of faith traditions and shaped by the dispositions of civilizer theology. This is not simply a case of religion being exploited as a political tool. The political sphere is a place where believers can support specific socio-economic policies that they believe echo scriptural interpretation and exegesis, specifically in the context of white Protestant theological practice. This paper’s hypothesis is that theological interpretation, application and exegesis, mediated by the three dispositions, are deliberately applied to support socio-economic, cultural and political ends with the goal of maintaining power structures to the benefit of a particular group. Conceptually, theological interpretation frames the application and purpose of violence (state-sponsored or extra-legal), identifies instances or points of cultural decay/moral decline (the resolution or prevention of which may require violence), and, provides justification for considering state-sponsored violence or extra-legal violent acts as appropriate or legal. This interpretive practice serves to set boundaries of authority while simultaneously preserving that authority in referring the theological framework for support of claims to authority. Rationale The examples provided in this paper in support of the stated hypothesis demonstrate how each of the three dispositions works as a starting point in the maintenance of power structures while also showing the interdependence of the three dispositions. The tracing of the dispositions McGinniss 6 through the provided examples connect past with present to demonstrate how Protestant faith traditions motivated by civilizer theology maintain a societal framework with the goal of retaining power in order to shape culture, civilization and religious practice. This paper posits civilizer theology as a self-referential, self-fulfilling framework which actively shapes the expectations, behaviors and practices of societal norms that drive cultural practices. Subsequently this understanding actively shapes, and is shaped by, theological practice, interpretation and justification.1 The examples employed focus on the intersections of society, culture, race and theology to examine the multiple responses to the question “what meanings do religious beliefs and practices give to life?” (Asad 2011, 37) as those meanings have interpreted American ideals of equality and liberty based on the color of a person’s skin. Civilizer theology is “an argument about competing claims to Christian orthodoxy…”; which voices and elements are defining practice and establishing tradition. (Dailey