CONCLUSION

A different story of race needs to be told, one that helps people grasp the depth and power of racial perception. Many theorists and historians are trying to tell the story of race beginning, of the origins of a concept of race. Some believe race conceptuality has its determinative origins in the Enlightenment and in modernity. For my part, I join the chorus of voices that spy out racial formation before the Enlightenment, before common notions of modernity’s beginnings, and in the earliest moments of modern colonialism. Yet I want to draw attention not simply to a medieval beginning of racial vision but also to a theological beginning. There is more here in this beginning and in my position than an alternative beginning of the race story. The story of race is also the story of place.

Geography matters for race as well as for identity, vision, and the hope of how one might live life. It is this deep connection between place and identity that will be difficult for many to grasp because people have been formed in a world in which such connections are only imagined, only fictions enabled solely by volition and market desire, the parents of private property. We cannot go back to a different world, the world where animals, landscape, and people together form an identity, collective and individual. But the first task of this text was to try to illumine the power of the racial imagination as exactly a power that draws its life from copying a centered existence between animals, landscape, and peoples. That power found expression through theological voice that gave shape to racial anthropology and nurtured its power to stand in for landscape in its facilitating characteristics.

There is no mystery to race. But until we reckon with its substitution for place and place-centered identity, its power will remain and remain mysteriously ever renewing with each generation of race-formed children. In truth, it is easy to imagine a time and a day in which race will not matter. Indeed if one has enough money, race does not matter now. If one is born in a particular place, with particular opportunities, educational, economic, social, political, even cultural, race can be rendered nondeterminative for one’s social horizon, economic imagination, and cultural reflections. But as I have sought to show here, the elimination of race is beside the point. The world has been changed, and the earth has been taken from us—or should I say continues to be taken from us and given back to us changed, transformed into a mass of potential. Thus our lives, even if one day freed from racial calculations, suffer right now from a less helpful freedom, freedom from the ground, the dirt, landscapes, and animals, from life collaborative with the rhythms of God’s other creatures and from the possibilities of imagining a joining to other peoples exactly in and through joining their lives on the ground.

In effect, a postracial future, if imagined inside the current order of things, will be only a continuing reflex of the commodification and transformation of space. That is, it would be peoples freed to be anything they wish, enabled by marketability and consumer-identity building possibilities. I don’t say this to engender an unrelenting pessimism but to point to the need for a slower, more carefully imagined postracial future. That future requires an intense consideration of the formative power of whiteness. As I have shown in this text, whiteness must be analyzed not simply as substantiation of European hegemonic gestures but more precisely in its identity-facilitating characteristics, its judgment constituting features, and its global deployments of embodied visions of the true, the good, and the beautiful. To analyze whiteness requires nothing less than a theological consideration.

Theology, however, needs a different narration. I have offered that different narration in three aspects. First, it was crucial to locate a theological account of the colonialist moment. Postcolonial theory has drawn great wisdom from the disciplinary wells of philosophy, literary studies, sociology, history, feminist theory, and anthropology, to name only a few sources, but the decisive trajectories that flow out of the theological imagination of the West remain an untapped resource for deliberation. What is needed, however, is not primarily a historical account of the phenomenon of theology at the arche of colonialism, for example, the medieval theological character of colonialist imagination; rather, theological reflection itself can aid in our analysis of the world that has come upon us. It can also reveal the redemptive elements buried inside the colonialist operation, elements that truly can open up possibilities of a new world beyond the tragedy of the remade one. Theology in this regard is indeed filled with hope but also analytical, enabling a clearer grasp of the machinations of death and the demonic at work in the world. Theological reflection also opens up the possibility of a conversation that has yet to happen: a Christianity born of the colonialist wound speaking to itself in its global reality, pressing deeply inside the miracle of its existence, battered, bruised, marginalized, yet believing, loving, Christian. For better or worse, many of those whom Fanon called the wretched of the earth became and are in fact Christians. Yet the postcolonial has yet to encounter this Christianity—Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, syncretistic—and consider its struggles, sometimes reflecting the death of the colonial imagination and at other times showing new life, new possibilities gesturing toward the joining.

Second, it was also important to begin to restore to theology a richer sense of its identity from the colonialist moment forward. Sadly, Christianity and its theologians live in conceptual worlds that have not in any substantive way reckoned with the ramifications of colonialism for Christian identity or the identity of theology. The intellectuals whom theological education in the West produces continue to have a massive gap in their conceptual imaginations. The historical trajectory that shapes the curriculum of most seminaries focuses intensely on the early church, its New Testament and Christian antiquity origins, culminating in the deliberations of the councils, then moves to the high medieval period, turns steadily toward the Reformation, moves quickly through scholasticism, circles around key figures of the Enlightenment, and then lands on contemporary theological figures and movements, with some attention to missions and “contextual voices and problems.” The problem here is not curricular coverage but how curricular sensibilities betray the concealment of modern identity formation with its constant social performances of detachment, distorting translation, and failed intimacy.

I yearn for a vision of Christian intellectual identity that is compelling and attractive, embodying not simply the cunning of reason but the power of love that constantly gestures toward joining, toward the desire to hear, to know, and to embrace. Such an identity articulates its judgments, its discernments, its prohibitions, even its risky negations of social forms and practices deeply inside the gestures of joining and longing. Here theology elicits life patterns that mirror God’s own seeking of the creation and of the creature turned away from the divine voice. More important, such a theological identity enters imaginatively into various social forms and imagines the divine presence joining, working, living, and loving inside boundary-defying relationships. This kind of Christian intellectual identity depends on a conceptual recalibration that draws direction from its crucial originating trajectory, the relation of Gentiles to Israel.

Third, it was absolutely necessary that I narrate Christian identity from within the Gentile-Jewish relational matrix and specifically the epistemological implications of Gentile existence for the social performance of Christianity. But it was also necessary to capture the deep connections between the loss of that sense of identity and the conceptual problems arising inside Christianity within the colonialist moment. Only by analyzing this mutual enabling of a supersessionist sensibility coupled with visions of life from within white supremacist imaginings can one begin to discern the precise nature of Christian hubris performed in its educational and aesthetic expressions. That Christian hubris gave life to a destructive form of joining, in effect, to borrow from Bonhoeffer, a sicut deus form of communion in place of an imago dei form of communion. Its characteristics are tragic:

If it is true that race and theology require this kind of narration in order to grasp some of our current difficulties, then what remains is to see how these different narrations might help facilitate a different social imagination. I anticipate some resistance to the fundamental claim of this work, that Christian social imagination is diseased and disfigured. In making such a claim I am not saying that the church is lost, moribund, or impotent. Rather, I want my readers to capture sight of a loss, almost imperceptible, yet articulated powerfully in the remaining slender testimonies of Native American peoples and other aboriginal peoples. This loss points not only to deep psychic cuts and gashes in the social imaginary of western peoples, but also to an abiding mutilation of a Christian vision of creation and our own creatureliness. The loss is nothing less than the loss of a sense of our own creatureliness. I want Christians to recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance of Christianity that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscape, animals, place, and space, leaving such realities to the machinations of capitalistic calculations and the commodity chains of private property. Such Christian identity can only inevitably lodge itself in the materiality of racial existence.

A social imagination that begins to take place seriously begins to grasp the textures of the social in a comprehensive way. At one level, I hope to open up a new dialogue between disciplines that rarely interact—geography, theology, postcolonial theory, race theory, ecology, Native American studies, and so forth. In this regard, I hope for a conversation between those deeply involved in the formation of space and those concerned with identity formation —urban planners, ecologists, scientists, real estate brokers, developers joined in conversation with theologians, ethicists, literary and postcolonial theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. I also carry great hope for a new more serious conversation between Jews and Christians. At another level, my hope is more than academic. By attending to the spatial dynamics at play in the formation of social existence, we would be able to imagine reconfigurations of living spaces that might promote more just societies. Such living spaces may open up the possibilities of different ways of life that announce invitations for joining. Of course, our imaginations have been so conditioned by economically determined spatial strictures that increasingly different peoples do in fact live next to each other and remain profoundly isolated. Thus spatial reconfiguration must stand within a wider analysis and intervention into the ways identity formation has been channeled away from place.

To change one’s way of imagining connection and one’s way of desiring joining is no small thing. Yet I am convinced that such a change is not only necessary but now stands before human communities as the only real option for survival in a world of dwindling natural resources and tightening global economic chains of commodification. To imagine along the direction I suggest in this book would be nothing less than a theological act, indeed, as I suggest, a Christian act of imagining. And if, as I believe, Christian life is indeed a way forward for the world, then it must reemerge as a compelling new invitation to life together.