Blessed and Beautiful

Multiethnic Churches and the Preaching that Sustains Them

Lamb

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871987
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Colleges can do it. Hospitals can do it. Workplaces can do it. Why does the church in the United States still find it so difficult to integrate across racial and ethnic divides? In Blessed and Beautiful Lisa Lamb trains her sights on one often overlooked facet of forging life together: the magnetic power of shared memories. Those common narratives bind ethnic groups together and keep them apart. This book explores the sociological and theological dimensions of social memory and considers the particularly powerful tool preaching could be for shaping individuals who are willing to risk remembering their people's past in church and for shaping churches capable of hearing those stories. While keenly aware of the complex dynamics involved, Lamb ultimately gives pastors and other church leaders a glimmer of hope as they seek to build reconciled communities of faith.

1

Race, Ethnicity, and Culture

As we prepare to address the challenges and opportunities of building ethnically diverse congregations, we need to take a closer look at salient aspects of the terms race, ethnicity, and culture, both as modern scholars have conceived those terms and as postmodern scholars continue to construct their meaning. A central challenge in discussions of multiethnic churches is how (and whether) they are capable of fostering healthy ethnic identity in their members. Ethnic-specific churches have historically been strong settings for transmitting and preserving values and traditions, especially for marginalized minority communities. Are multiethnic churches able to do the same, or is strong identity formation a necessary loss of affiliation with them? A survey of terms will sharpen our response to that question. We will be particularly interested in the insights that come from viewing ethnic groups and cultures through the lens of memory, understanding them as communities of memory. John Higham writes, “[A] means of generalizing about American ethnic groups, and distinguishing among them, lies at hand, surprisingly neglected. It lies in the recognition that all such groups arise from, or must create, a community of memory . . . memory is what binds an ethnic group together, assigning its tasks and maintaining its identity. Memory recalls and fixates a particular origin, from which it projects a continuity of subsequent experience.”1 Can a multiethnic congregation house those memories that shape identity? To what extent should we expect it to, and toward what ends?

Memory’s capacities and vicissitudes will focus our discussions of ethnic identity, reconciliation, and intergroup relations, both sociologically and theologically. Some currently popular postmodern conceptions of ethnicity and culture, while highlighting neglected aspects, are at risk of losing the dimension of the shared past, due to their emphasis on individual choice and on present and future-oriented aspects of identity construction. Cultures must reckon with the past—and they always do, whether through denial, distortion, nostalgia, or courageous truth-telling. William James Booth, arguing for the importance of a sense of continuity with the past, observes,

The groups of identity politics, then, are actors with histories and projects, groups that sometimes speak of past injustices inflicted by earlier generations of other groups, and as such they must in some sense be continuous actors. Indeed, this would seem fundamental to speaking . . . about a group as something other than a mere passing aggregate, a transient aggregate of shared interests or views. Enduringness, and with it accountability, matter and are at the core of our claims about political or group membership. The absence of reflection on these issues from current identity debates is a loss of a vital element in our understanding of the moral/political life of a community.2

Shared memories, often undisclosed to outsiders, function powerfully to unite ethnic and other groups within themselves, to distinguish them from other groups, and to keep alive both vibrant ethnic heritage and bitter hostilities. All societies, and the ethnic groups that may reside within them, find ways to narrate wounds suffered and wounds inflicted, triumphant moments, and honorable deeds done. Some do so in ways that allow them to celebrate, mourn, and transcend their past, and that enable them to forge meaningful connections with other cultures. Other groups’ narrations leave them mired in the past and stranded in isolation. The church is uniquely equipped to stand at the nexus of multiple, and at times contested, narrations of history in ways that honor the past(s) and call its various members toward a reconciled future. The proclamation of Scripture can propel the church to remember well together, in ways that highlight particular hermeneutical vantage points, while crafting language that creates new interpretive and relational spaces congregants may inhabit together.3

Here we will seek to place emerging secular understandings of social identity in conversation with theological perspectives on culture. Discourse surrounding them has seen seismic shifts in how theorists approach them. Central to these discussions is the changing notion of identity itself, whether individual or collective. Modern, Western notions of identity have tended to stress social groups of various kinds as bounded objects, with a high degree of internal homogeneity. This is less and less true in postmodern discourse. Richard Handler notes, “In current scholarly analyses of collective identities, there is a tension between the notion that identity is essential, fundamental, unitary, and unchanging, and the notion that identities are constructed and reconstructed through historical action.”4

Race and Racial Theory

Historic Use of the Term

All three terms are elusive and complex, but the term race has had by far the most troublesome and tainted history. Its use in the past four hundred years has been rooted in categorizations of groups of people according to geographical origin and phenotype. In part due to the perceived need to legitimate colonialist subjugation of others, a hierarchy of value and privilege inevitably accompanied that typology, particularly in the areas of beauty and intelligence. Biological determinism and essentialism informed the racial taxonomic schemes of such eighteenth-century European scientists as Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and German anatomist Friederich Blumenbach.5 Scientists now so widely acknowledge that this type of racial theory is based on flawed assumptions, that it is questionable whether race is even a useful term today. It has inevitably led to what Douglas Sharp calls the, “universe-maintenance scheme legitimating the racialized social order.”6 Sweeping theories of genetically determined racial differences are simply no longer in play in the scientific or sociological community today.

Throughout the history of the United States, racial classification discourse has shifted, in part depending on the political aims of those in power. Race has been magnified and used as a tool of oppression, and it has been artificially erased at other times, in attempts to unite the nation. Political institutions, made up primarily of members of the dominant culture, blurred ethnic difference in the creation of whiteness, at various times classifying Arab, Polish, Italian, Armenian, and numerous other immigrants as white, and at times not. The same courts and civil institutions denied rights and freedoms to Native and African Americans on the basis of such policies as blood quantum requirements for tribal membership, and the “one drop rule” for establishing Black identity (and often for denying basic civil rights).

The vision of national unity led North American institutions to meet the challenge of rising immigration numbers with the melting pot image and its accompanying assimilation strategies. The years following the Civil Rights movement saw a rise in the rhetoric of sameness. The ideal of color-blindness came to dominate. Clarence J. Pendleton, the chair of the 1985 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, reported to the nation, “We are working on a color-blind society that has opportunities for all and guarantees success for none.”7 The cost of the rhetoric of melting pots and color-blindness, and aspects of the assertions made by those who argue that we have achieved a “post-racial” society, has been the loss of identity, pride, and recognized spaces in which marginalized voices find a hearing. The melting pot metaphor, and the ideology behind it, may overlook or deny numerous factors of history that still cause access to opportunity to be influenced by pigmentation. The current challenge is to develop an understanding of race that does not obscure or negate difference, yet does not root that difference in biology in a way that leads to a determinist or essentialist understanding.

This tension in terminology is a microcosm of the dilemma of the postmodern era, with its skepticism of all totalizing schemas, or “incredulity toward meta-narratives,” as Jean-Francois Lyotard now famously phrased it.8 For the twentieth century, even more than most, difference proved to be a source and locus of violence and exclusion, particularly in Europe. Enlightenment thinkers in the liberal tradition of Kant, Locke, and Descartes had urged the modern world to step outside the particularities of history and cultural context, appealing to universal principles based on the foundation of reason alone. Postmodernists have objected strenuously to the assumption of neutrality inherent in that quest for certainty. They have brought to the surface the hermeneutical processes that have always been at play in descriptions of truth, and the ways those processes are influenced by our social, economic, and geographical location. Kevin Vanhoozer notes, “Postmodernity is the condition of being so exposed to plurality and otherness that one becomes conscious of the contingency of one’s own language, cultur...