The Possibilities of Evangelicalism
thinking an American Studies thesis. part 3.
Thoughts I have while writing my undergrad thesis on implicit white supremacy in my favorite band growing up, Audio Adrenaline.
There is so much imaginative work that goes into having faith. We don’t actually know what God is like, or if he actually exists. People in every religion have testimonies as to how personally connected they’ve felt to God and how he‘s touched them or talked to them. Evangelicals don’t have the lock on a personal relationship with God. All people with faith are undertaking some sort of imaginative project that they hope is ultimately true.
So what happens when people imagine a white God and establish a religious system around that whiteness? Can the two come apart, or is the religion destined to always be a thing of whiteness?
This is the knot I have been trying to untangle for a few months now. It has led to a mental block in trying to write this thesis, because I kept circling back to a fundamental problem. Can whiteness be separated from modern Evangelicalism? Can this mode of belief be redeemed? For so long, I have believed the answer was no.
In writing an American Studies thesis, and not a Religious Studies one, I am not parsing out theology in order to come up with a theological solution. I believe my argument needs to be centered around the political and cultural implications of their theology, which is the part I am interested in, anyway. I don’t think an American Studies paper should center on the idea that theological beliefs need to be changed in order for there to be a solution.
But I couldn’t write that, because I didn’t believe it.
Yet I also knew that Evangelicals are not the only ones who support white supremacy or have internal racism to deal with, and I was aware that I have friends who are Evangelicals and are committed to living out an anti-racist, justice-focused faith. But I also knew that I couldn’t write a paper that affirms the beliefs that come across in the music, because when I see Evangelical beliefs, I just see whiteness, and critiquing that is the point of this project!
Around and around my brain went, trying to figure out how to get myself out of this predicament. Maybe this is why people haven’t studied Evangelical pop culture very much, I thought. Maybe the argument that it is just too niche of a category was just an excuse. How does one analyze the negative political and cultural implications of a theology, without demanding the theology must also go?
Then, to my great relief, I spent a semester learning from and talking to Dr. Ashon Crawley, whose continuous mantra was ‘otherwise possibility’. His generosity to the people of the faith that formed him, even though he no longer subscribes to that belief, while also not looking away from the harm that they have done, was so immensely helpful.
In his book, Black Pentecostal Breath, he says, “Otherwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. And what is is about being, about existence, about ontology…otherwise possibilities exist and the register of imagination…that is, the way we think the world—has to be altered in order to get at what’s there.”
Otherwise possibilities exist, and our imagination has to be altered in order to see them.
I have finally come to the realization that the Evangelicalism of the past does not have to dictate the Evangelicalism of the future, and that in fact, Evangelical theology provides a very good template for how a people could address the sins of white supremacy.
For one, Evangelicals love talking about sin and confessing it and trying to stay away from it. The orientation could totally pivot from trying to avoid feminism and having sex, to trying to avoid upholding white supremacy. For as many heterosexual marriage and parenting books and conferences they create, they could easily do the same for fighting whiteness, and learning how to live in solidarity with people of color.
Evangelicals place an extremely high priority on the Bible. Good news! There are many verses in the Bible about justice for the poor, oppressed, and vulnerable, and there are so many theologians who have done work around this. They could learn from Paulo Freire, Mitri Raheb, Justo González, Elsa Tamez, Walter Brueggemann, Gustavo Gutierrez, Oscar Romero, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Delores Williams, Wilda Gafney, James Cone, or William Jones for a start.
Evangelicals also love the cross, and the necessity of Jesus to die for our sins. While I personally love Delores Williams’ argument that Jesus defeated Satan in the wilderness and therefore defeated the power of sin with his life and not his death, an evangelical argument could be made that the sin of white supremacy was put to death on the cross; as Williams says, “the image of Jesus on the cross is the image of human sin in its most desecrated form…the cross thus becomes an image of defilement, a gross manifestation of collective human sin.”
Then of course, there’s evangelism. Telling people the good news of how Jesus has freed us from the power of white supremacy, that he came to destroy the systems that keep us oppressed and oppressing others would be both incredibly compelling, as well as revealing the ‘offense of the cross’.
The otherwise possibility of Evangelicalism is that it could stand against white supremacy even more forcefully than it’s stood with it. Evangelicals only need to have the imagination that believes this God exists.