Hello friends,
Today’s newsletter is the second in a series I’m doing this Lent, inviting us into a deeper journey of collective repentance that can put whiteness to death along with the plantations it builds again and again.
If you missed the first installment, I’m linking it below. I hope you’ll spend a little time with it as it lays a foundation for how we’re approaching this whole journey.
If you’re a new subscriber to Toward Solidarity: Hello! Thank you so much! I’m not sure where y’all keep coming from, but I sure am grateful. Below is my most recent “so what’s this newsletter about?” post if you’re still trying to figure it out.
I’m unexpectedly writing this intro from a coffee shop shaded by the massive live oak trees in “downtown” Richmond—the county seat of the area I grew up in Texas. Being here in person is an unexpected irony, since this lenten series is diving into the history of this very community. I bringing up my location to set up a different point though. I’m here to look after my dad who’s been having a series of health complications following a heart surgery last month. He’s going to be ok eventually, but my folks needed help and my amazing partner took the kids and blessed me to go. Friends, I write a lot about the capital “S” Sufferings we bring upon ourselves and our neighbors through injustice. But I press “send” on these emails always so mindful that—in the midst of wanting to care about all of the big “S” problems and do something about them—each of us are in the midst of the little “s” sufferings that fill a life. My heart is with you, whatever you find yourself amidst in this vulnerable journey called being human.
With love,
Nathan
“There is a manner of knowing that is shaped out of a concern to defend oneself against the real. The correct manner of knowing defends the real.”
— Jon Sobrino, Spirituality of Liberation
“My final prayer:
O my body, make me always a man who questions!”
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin / White Masks
“Welcome to the real.”
- Willie Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary
When I was in 5th grade, my family started attending a little non-denominational bible church. It’s the place that formed me most through junior high and high school youth groups. Plenty can be said about that place. For me, it was a safe and loving home. A beautiful community in so many ways. A place where I learned how to love others and follow Jesus.1 It is part of my story, and I wouldn’t trade any part of it. But then again, I was a “fine young man”—a straight white boy who had the right to teach to women (though women did not have the right to teach high school boys) and whose sexual orientation was affirmed (even if purity culture left me bent in other ways). That little community is a case study in how goodness of heart and the best of intentions can coexist with ideologies and theologies that wound and exclude. Plenty can be said. This is not an essay about any of that, though. This is an essay about how the religion of whiteness dulls us to reality and steals from our imagination the kind of questions that allow us to find our way back.2
This is an invitation to take another step along this Lenten journey of putting whiteness and its plantations to death.
My childhood church had no building of our own. We rented a variety of spaces where we would set up and tear down chairs, roll sound systems out of the white church trailer, and pitch an altar so low-church we practically hid it. The two primary homes for our church were the cafeterias of Frost Elementary and B.F. Terry High School. In all my years worshiping and praying in those school buildings, in two decades living in those communities, I never once remember someone asking about where the names of those schools came from. We never wondered what those names said about the morality of our community. Nor did we question if those stories, or our disinterest in them, had anything to say about our faith.
Here are the stories of those names.
Frost Elementary was named for a Mr. Samuel Miles Frost. Frost was an early white settler colonist who worked on the Hunter Plantation where he set up one of the first schools chartered under the Texas Republic. It was, of course, an all white school that barred slaves from education. Frost is thus held up as a local hero of education. That it was a segregationist education meant to form future generations of slave masters is the other side of a coin left unflipped. Samuel’s son Henry Frost, raised in that environment, was a “notorious anti-black agitator” who would die fighting to reestablish white supremacy in our county two decades after the Civil War (a story I will tell a couple weeks deeper into this Lenten journey of repentance and transformation).
The other cafeteria where we shared the body and blood of Christ took its name from Benjamin Franklin Terry. Terry was the master of a sugar plantation who owned thirteen enslaved human beings at the time he left to fight for the Confederate Army. He grew famous as Colonel of the infamous Eighth Texas Cavalry Regiment, better known as Terry’s Texas Rangers. Terry was killed in battle and baptized yet another local hero. Students of his namesake high school still chant the slogan of that regiment—the school’s mascot—that died to protect the white right to own Black human chattle: “Rangers Never Quit.”
There’s an intermediary set of stories too, harder to dig up, about the people who, decades after those two slaveholders died, selected their names and voted to honor them with places above the entrances children would pass through each day. Those people who determined what image they wanted the children of our community to be formed into—or continue to serve.
Slaveholder religion can look and feel so innocuous. So very humble. All you have to do is be (selectively) kind and ask no questions. The consequence for the people I grew up with is that instead of being a movement after Jesus who overturned false idols and the injustices they perpetuate, my church worshiped inside them. We were not a people whose faith prompted us to ask questions. Living as we do in landscapes haunted by the still living ghosts of slavery’s racializing violence, our image of God and our own identities remained melted down and pressed into the reassuring idols of whiteness.
Just like my childhood church “worked” in most ways for me, the same is true for people buying homes and raising their children in suburbs around here with names like New Territory, First Colony, Texana Colony, and (my “favorite”) Plantation Colony. In one suburb named Pecan Grove (where my childhood pastors lived) you can join the Plantation Country Club (built to look the part) on Plantation Drive, then take a walk next door among the oak trees at Plantation Memorial Park—a memorial not to the lives held enslaved on that land but to “honor our armed forces.”3 These plantations are the continuation of the same slave plantations on which Texas was founded, continuations of the same process that turned slave plantations into convict labor plantations after the war and state-owned prison farms by the time I was born next to them.
None of this is subtle. Yet it remains unseen. Or refuses to be seen. As always, James Baldwin said it best.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this.4
When things work for you, you tend not to ask many critical questions. When things do not work, whiteness teaches its adherent to ask questions which either lay the blame on individualized responsibility or on a scapegoat (immigrants, liberals, welfare receivers, criminals and other code words for people of color). But life is pretty good if you have enough money in Sugar Land. Why let it all get blown up by a some hundred year old bones? Surely there is discontinuity between what happened on that land before and what is happening now?5
These questions are expressions of a spirituality of denial.
If Frantz Fanon found that his body (as a Black colonized subject in the crosshairs of imperial violence) continually evoked questions from him about the nature of reality, then whiteness is precisely about constructing a web of defenses against questions that would lead us to face reality and, perhaps, be moved by that encounter to overturn the order of things which has been working so well for our comfort.
For today I’m skipping over two important questions: What is the inner nature and genealogy of this spirituality of denial? And how does one make the break from captivity to white spirituality into a spirituality of solidarity and liberation? I’m skipping not because they are unimportant—they are, in fact, essential, if not entirely answerable questions.
Rather, as we journey deeper into this lenten season, I want us to catch a glimpse of an alternative spiritual life. Could we become a people so transformed that our continuous “final prayer” is one that opens our eyes to an unfolding reality?
I want us to be drawn out of comforts built on violence by a vision of embodied life struggling in the facts of history. Could this Lent be the season we repent of the lies and comforts of this plantation world to prepare ourselves for the solidarity of communion with the abolitionist God?
If we are looking for a people whose eyes are opening to the forces of domination structuring their world (and the religiosity complacent and complicit with it) then Acts is the place to go. Here we find a subaltern movement of people who are experiencing this liberating revelation thanks to the presence and practice of a certain Spirit or spirituality. As they encounter “the real” they are led, as one must always be by such encounters, into radically different social relations.
In his commentary on the book, Willie Jennings gives us a vision for what it can happen if, through the Spirit(uality) of Christ, we face reality and participate in its restoration.
It begins in divine desire. Desire so deep it cuts through the lies and ties that bind us to the world as it is, opening our hearts to new ways of being in relationship.
“[The book of Acts shows us] a God whose weapon of choice is the divine desire placed in us by the Spirit. That desire has the power to press through centuries of animosity and hatred and beckon people to want one another and envision lives woven together. Such a life never asks people to forget their past or deny their present, but to step together into a future that will not yield to the given order of isolations, but yields to the Spirit that is poured out on all flesh. Segregation is an ancient strategy for creating a world, and it continues to work because it teaches us to see the world in slices, fragmented pieces of geographic space that we may own and control. Segregationist ways of thinking and living permeate this world including the church, dimming our sight of ourselves as creatures and our connection to other creatures, and weakening our ability to discern where and to whom the Spirit wants to lead us. We need people of faith who will yield to the Spirit in this present moment.”6
What if, like the nascent movement formed in the wake of resurrection, our desire for the love of God and neighbor was more powerful than our desire to ensure things keep going on as normally and safely (for some of us) as they have always gone? There’s a resonance here with Augustine, for whom sins are good desires meant to be satisfied in the Creator but which become warped and redirected toward created things. Except Augustine followed that logic in a direction that allowed him to make peace with the empire that was beginning to make peace with Christianity, whereas Jennings is suggesting that being filled with and driven by the divine desire offered by the Spirit leads us to see the reality of empires—everything that seeks to divide, isolate, and dominate—for the anti-Christ, anti-creation, anti-love forces of oppression that they are.
We begin to hate these divisions. We long for reconnection and “envision lives woven together.” Here is a spirituality that implants a “divine desire” that led followers of Jesus, for centuries after, to reject the ways of power, property, ownership and caste segregations that structured the plantation society of Rome. Instead this Spirit made them a people who gave things away to the poor, cared for one another and every outcast, and shared all things in common.
Let’s end with a few reflections on practice.
In his book Spiritual of Liberation: Toward Political Holiness, Jon Sobrino offers some guidance on the kind of spiritual life—or “life with spirit,” as he says—that faces up to the histories and forces of death in the landscape around us and drive us to seek life and liberation alongside the oppressed.
Life with such a spirit does not begin with any technique. It does not begin with silence or solitude. It does not begin with any mystical revelation. Helpful as each of these may be to the path Sobrino invites us to, they are not its beginning.
The path of this spiritual practice begins with facing the real. Here is what Sobrino says it would entail:
“Any genuine spirituality will demand, in the concrete: (1) honesty about the real,
(2) fidelity to the real, and (3) a certain ‘correspondence’ by which we permit ourselves to be carried along by the ‘more’ of the real.”7
That list is a far cry from any traditional book on prayer I’ve ever read. Let’s take a look at these three conditions for a genuine spirituality one by one.
1) Honesty about the real
Dishonesty, for Sobrino, means doing an injustice to what the majority of human beings are actually experiencing by denying the reality of their sufferings. The injustice of that denial reproduces the injustices of their sufferings.
Honesty about the real, then, means being honest about what the majority of creation is experiencing. “God’s creation is being assaulted and vitiated,” Sobrino says. Honesty does not stop by asking “what is happening?” It continues by asking about the causes and sources of these conditions. “Because this reality is not simply natural, but historical—being the result of action taken by some human beings against others—this reality is sinful.”8
Facing reality, a no and a yes are demanded of us. The no is a no to death. “The yes,” Sobrino shares, “demanded by reality is a yes to life. And inasmuch as the greater portion of human creation lies prostrate in the death of subjection, this yes to life becomes a yes to the restoration of life: a yes, then, not only to life, but to the bestowal of life. Thus reality itself demands what we might define generally as love." Sobrino wants to put a fine point on this lest there be any confusion. “In the concrete,” he goes on, “spirituality will have to establish and maintain that form of love for which the greater part of reality calls out: justice.”9
This work of honestly facing the real and resisting the injustice found there is what it means to be a contemplative in action alive in history.
2) Fidelity to the real
Seeing reality for what it is in the light of love it becomes easier to reject the current order of things which our culture (and spiritualities of denial) expect us to accept as the only natural and rational way things are, always have been, and always must be. In the light of love that exposes the violence, fragility, and constructed nature of the current order built on the bones of the oppressed, these claims look ridiculous. A society that makes every public school a monument to slaveholders is not neutral. It is unacceptable to practice a spiritual life that is neutral in regards to that reality. To be neutral on a society built upon and built to celebrate oppression is to be complicit in oppression.
Sobrino says that once we have faced reality, we have to follow where it leads us. “Fidelity to the real is simply and solely perseverance in our original honesty, however we may be burdened with, yes, engulfed in, the negative element in history.” Following this path cannot be taken lightly as though it has no costs. Sobrino knew this well, having seen many of his dear friends and fellow priests murdered for their solidarity with revolutionary struggles in El Salvado. Walking in fidelity to the revelation of the real amounts to following Jesus—and there are few things more dangerous. As Sobrino reminds us, “this fidelity to the real is exemplified in Jesus’ cross.”10
3) Willingness to be swept along by the ‘more’ of reality
Here is where we become caught up in movement. When our realization evolves through repentance into participation with something radically different. This is where our solidarity has flipped from “defending ourselves against reality” to “defending reality” and the “bestowal of life” which we call love and justice. Our old allegiances no longer hold.
Once we face reality and commit ourselves to fidelity with what we have seen, Sobrino tells us that “our enterprise will have to be concretized in various ways, and Jesus and the practice of liberation have concretized it in various ways. But the variety of concretions must not conceal the heart of the matter: hope and love are the way we correspond to the ‘more’ of reality in its ceaseless quest for plentitude.”11
Through the Spirit, we are swept along by our encounter with the real away from the desires of whiteness into the desires of God for shalom among all the community of creation. We are swept from the desires of racial capitalism toward the longing for all to share equally in the bounty and work of the world. Swept into resisting the forces of death. We are swept into new identities. Swept into building the new creation.
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Friends, we do not need any spirituality that extracts us from time and place. We need spiritual lives that invite the Spirit who turns us to face and transform history’s presence.
May this journey toward the liberation of the real become our sacred path.
Lord, grant us the courage.
There is truth and contradiction in this statement. I have experienced in my life a strange degree of continuity when it comes to my own faith as a journey of following Jesus. It has been that continuity of following that has, in many ways, been exactly what led me away from conservatism toward the radical politics I hold today. However, my image of Jesus — what Jesus did and was about — has changed dramatically. So is the Jesus I learned to follow in youth group the same one I’m following today? This is one of those mysteries I just have to hold more than resolve.
This is also not an essay about the relationships between evangelicalism, whiteness, conspiracy theories, and the politics it breeds, but…y’all can connect the dots, right?
It’s extremely difficult to find good maps of exactly where the plantations were in Fort Bend County, TX. Mostly along the banks of the Brazos and Oyster Creek, but also further west along the San Bernard (as I described on Juneteenth). I’ve emailed the local museum and historical society asking if they have any. They said no, nothing till the post-bellum era. Nevertheless, best I can tell, the plantation Frost started his school on and the plantation Pecan Grove was built on were either the same one or neighbors.
James Baldwin, Price of the Ticket
I don’t have space to go into this, but for my liberal readers elsewhere in the country, let this dive into the waters of my childhood home in Texas not feel like a way to look down on southerners while denying you too are immersed in places soaked in the spirituality of denial. I lived in Colorado where the peaks were named for soldiers who committed genocide on the plains. I lived in California where racial exclusionary covenants are still on the deeds of heavily white neighborhoods. I live in Boston, a city founded to fulfill the vision Rev. Cotton Mather cast in his famous sermon, “God’s Promise to His Plantation.”
Willie Jennings, Acts, p. 12
Sobrino, Spirituality of Liberation, 14
Sobrino, 15
Sobrino, 16
Sobrino, 18
Sobrino, 19. By the way, love seeing this word “plentitude” again which is a great excuse to reference an earlier Toward Solidarity essay I still love inspired Paolo Freire’s writings on solidarity and the oppressor: “Only in the Plentitude of Love”