Author / daviddawson462742281

Unknown's avatar

Posts by daviddawson462742281

Walking with Jesus learning to be like Him. Human Development Consultant. BA Humanities University of the Nations, MA Global Leadership Fuller Theological Seminary. Married to Kati and dad to Emily, Gabriel and Laura. Love surfing, cooking, expat life, jazz.
by daviddawson462742281

How Critical Race Theory is Received in Europe

Theory of Race and Iberian Christendom, part 4

Lessons From CRT

Du Bois’ gift theory emphasizes the special contributions each race can give to human culture (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). In contrast, Jennings’ depiction of race doesn’t seem open to such a positive potential. Du Bois attributes these gifts to the common experiences of a race of people, which generate characteristics that can be life-giving to global humanity. Jennings’ ORS theory doesn’t seem open to this type of redemptive vision because the modern concept of race is essentially flawed and harmful.

Du Bois’ description of white supremacy as positing that whites are not negatively affected by race in comparison to other races (Farmer & Farmer, 2020) is intriguing. If the white race is burdened with the task of leading the lost non-white cultures of the world to the “lily-white ‘heaven’ of humanity” (Farmer & Farmer, 2020), this is a deeply negative view of human cultures. It is as if the cultures of Europe up to the 3rd century were wiped away as they were baptized into the gospel. This means that whites should reject any part of their culture before the dawn of Christendom. This seems like a good starting point for convincing white European Christians of the terrible implications of white supremacy. 

Bell’s concept of an “idolatrous faith” that sees whiteness as a “property right” to protect is a powerful concept (Golden, 2022). The primordial human instinct of protecting one’s individual and collective status is something hard to deny. Bell describes Christianity as becoming “divorced from its implementation” through this idolatrous faith (Golden, 2022). This is a helpful description of what happened with the advent of supersessionism in Europe which led to the co-opting of the gospel as a pretext for racial domination. 

Bell’s concept of the enduring challenge of racism seems to agree with Jenning’s (2010) notion of the white-black binary. It can be debated whether the white-black binary applies across all cultures in today’s globalized world. But it seems reasonable that the white-black binary is a harmful reality existing in some parts of the world and influencing others. The black-white binary should be recognized if not necessarily eradicated, a la Bell’s racial realism. Bell’s concept of idolatrous faith depicts the “deep cognitive structure” of racism. And his critique of Enlightenment approaches to eradicate racism through reason is compelling (Golden, 2022). Bell’s commentary on the relation between racism and religious structure can convince Christians already wary of the evils of institutionalized religion. 

Williams’ argues convincingly that white US-Americans hold a deep fear of blacks, but the same fear cannot be expected globally to wherever whites and blacks coexist (Scholar, 2006). That said, Willams’ motif of racial fear can be used as a point of reference in dialogues about xenophobic and discriminatory phenomena in other cultures. Her argument for the greater influence of structural factors rather than personal factors as explanation for crime has merit. But caution is needed to avoid using such a notion to relieve individuals of their personal responsibility (Scholar, 2006).

Williams seems more hopeful than Bell in the possibility of real racial justice in the US-American context. She accepts that the color-blind society desired by liberals is impossible without addressing racism (Scholar, 2006). While color-blindness may be a vision to inspire us, in the present Williams argues for putting away fear, seeking accountability, and creatively finding solutions to racial injustice (Scholar, 2006). 

Evaluation of CRT Applied to European Context

Morley (2022) analyzed applications and reactions to CRT in global contexts related to issues such as migration and the environment. She states that “global crises such as migration and climate change are laying bare the persistent impacts of structural racism and colonial subordination around the world”. She sees CRT as offering valuable insights for people involved practically and academically on human rights issues that cross borders. Morley contends that “racial and colonial logics (…) pervade international law and its application”. She sees much benefit in practitioners and scholars working on human rights “centering race, and its connection with empire, in their work” (Morley, 2022). 

Indeed, recent protests of anti-black racism and police brutality in the U.S. have reverberated across the globe. Many groups around the world, including US-Americans, turned to the United Nations Human Rights Council and other international bodies to “seek justice and hold the state accountable for racial justice” (Morley, 2022). The US-American leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement aligned themselves with other “racialized and marginalized” groups around the world, such as Palestinians. Black migrants stranded in Tijuana trying to cross over into the U.S. adopted the phrase “No puedo respirar” (“I can’t breathe”) associating themselves with the “racial logics oppressing black Americans” (Morley, 2022). 

Morley (2020) uses the example of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) which convened in 2019 and 2020 to uncover, “‘how international law originated in and still perpetuates empire,’ a term that encompasses the European colonial powers of the past and the settler- and neo-colonialism of the present day”. The impetus for TWAIL was the Asian-African Bandung Conference convened in 1955 to address “the role of the Third World in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonization”. Questions addressed included: 

whether the decolonization period, and the international law and institutions that have arisen from it, has actually led to the sovereign equality of formerly-colonized states within the international system.! Or is the sovereignty of these Third World states contingent on whether it serves the interests of First World nation-states?. 

One powerful example is as follows: 

The international community legitimized foreign intervention into Libya in part because the Arab League had endorsed it. Yet, the African Union, with which Libya aligned itself, had been advocating for a non-military solution instead of intervention. By reframing Libya as Arab and not African, the international community was able to characterize its intervention as legitimate. Subsequently, when the European Union’s focus shifted to preventing unauthorized African migration, the narrative was again racialized. The migrants were framed as Black Africans moving through Libya, an Arab transit country, to reach Europe. In this context, Europe now sought to partner with Libya to ensure that it enforced its borders and prevented Africans from transiting through the country. (Morley, 2020)  

Moschel (2007) states that CRT has had little attention in the continental European legal world, which up till the early 1990s was under the illusion that racism “belonged to history”. But starting in the 1990s racist or xenophobic events began to occur almost daily in every state within the European Union. Spain and Portugal, not considered to that time as “immigrant nations” were not an exception. This new phenomenon has been termed “new racism”, coinciding with the collapse of Communism and the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. The end of communism also meant that liberal, deregulated market economics now spread across the globe initiating the era of globalization. As a result, poorer countries’ economies and societal structures were disrupted leading to increased immigration to Europe. The European nations as well were thrown into a crisis stemming from the breakdown of traditional societal and political structures” which led to insuring and isolation which “transformed into scapegoating of ‘other’ groups” (Moschel, 2007). 

But analysts have posited that Europe and US-America have a measure of difference related to perceptions and histories of race and racism (Moschel, 2007). The concept of racism consisting of a dominant majority that targets other minority groups as being biologically inferior and consolidating this posture into social and political structures is common to both Europe and US-America. Some research posits that racism in the United States is based on the historical construction of discrimination based on skin color in hostility towards Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, applied in the modes of slavery, segregation, and miscegenation (Moschel, 2007).

In Europe, on the other hand, “social fault lines and mechanisms of oppression were often defined in religious terms” (Rubin, 1999). The history of Europe is full of religious holy wars, pogroms, and persecution in which Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and other religious “others” were discriminated against (Moschel, 2007). In other words, while in US-America color of skin was primordial to racism, in Europe it was mainly connected to the Holocaust and antisemitism. The rejection in Europe of scientific racism during the 1950s and 1960s explains in part why the discourse on racism preferred terms such as “prejudice, intolerance, antisemitism, of xenophobia”. From this perspective, the grounds for explaining racism are cultural differences instead of biological ones (Moschel, 2007). 

In addition to this, Europeans tend to “distance themselves from laws concerning slavery, segregation, miscegenation and the related one-drop of blood rule” (Moschel, 2007). The rationale is that particularly after World War II such racial laws were abolished in Europe, if they ever existed at all. As such, the problems that American racial laws address don’t apply in Europe. As a result, it has been argued that dealing with racism in Europe is harder because there is no “clear legal symbol to fight against”. On the international level, three institutions address legal approaches to racism in Europe: the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union. Then each individual member nation has its own provisions prohibiting racial discrimination in their constitutions. As is the case with many critical legal movements, CRT is focused on national systems resulting in a predominantly internal domestic critique (Moschel, 2007). 

The rigid structure of the law studies in Universities in Europe also represents an obstacle to CRT development (Moschel, 2007). The system is more rigid under strict government control, therefore changes in curriculum and introduction of new courses is much more difficult. Affirmative action in Europe is very underdeveloped, only France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have significant projects aimed at certain categories of immigrants. Affirmative action is often seen as “positive discrimination” which would violate the principle of equality (Moschel, 2007). 

In Europe, topics of nationality and citizenship generally dominate discussions on race, ethnicity, and immigration because of the European Union (Moschel, 2007). At the core of the vision of the European Union is the notion of equality between citizens of member states. Therefore, what emerges is a bifurcated system with two separate groups with different status based on citizenship within the European Union. Ironically this means that the EU fosters racism in some ways even as it seeks to combat it. One group can travel and work freely while the other need entry and residence visas (Moschel 2007, Levaeau, 2002). 

Analysis of the Spanish Development of Concept of Race

While my context of service is the Iberian diaspora, I will limit a specific national inquiry in this paper to Spain. The combination of political unification and imperial expansion in the 15th century under the patronage of the Catholic Spanish obligated the peoples of Iberia and to face “troubling and enduring questions about national and racial identity” (Feros, 2017). From that time until now, the unification of Spain continues to be provisional with Catalonia still seeking to reaffirm its sovereignty. Therefore, debates about the meaning of the Spanish nation and the identity of its citizens remain constant in the early 21st century, exacerbated by the presence of “foreign” populations such as Jews, Muslims, and Latin Americans. Research into Spanish race relations emphasizes the need to understand how Spanish identity emerged as well as notions of human and cultural diversity in what came to be Spain (Feros, 2017). 

Historically, it has been generally established that Spain was first settled by peoples from the Mediterranean, North Africa, and later by Northern European Celts (Feros, 2017). The impetus for unification came from foreign arrivals – Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, and Visigoths – drawn by the peninsula’s maritime ports, resources, and climate. As the first to gain control of the entire peninsula, the Romans left a profound mark on what they termed “Hispania” – in the form of language, culture, and politics. The invasions of Moors in the early 8th century began a Muslim presence of almost 800 years in Iberia and one ended in 1492 with the complete conquest of Granada by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela. The result was the imposition of Catholicism as the single religion on the entire Iberian Peninsula, seen as the “bond that would force all its inhabitants to see themselves as members of one community” (Feros, 2017).

Nevertheless, for all the history of the Iberian Peninsula, there has been a “prolonged contest between distinct visions of the nation and the patria” (Feros, 2017). In Spain, the controversy was whether the monarch’s subjects should view it as their fatherland or Catalonia, Valencia, or Castile. This contestation was contested during the entire early modern period and into the nineteenth century. However, whereas in Britain and much of the rest of Europe the dispute was over different forms of Christianity, in Spain Catholicism reigned supreme, politics and culture being the point of contestation there (Feros, 2017). 

Some Spanish historians agree with the ORS hypothesis that the definition of race emerged through the invention of the Spain as the “ideal nation or race, with laudable origins and exemplary physical and mental characteristics, preserved immaculately across time and space” (Feros, 2017). Spanish-ness was composed of traits and qualities that separated the Spanish from other nations – Europeans but most of all Jews, Arabs, American natives, and Africans who lived in Spain’s colonies (Feros, 2017). 

Sociological research into Spanish identity today points to the fact that all the identities or nations of the Iberian Peninsula were invented – Catalan, Castilian, Basque, and Portuguese. The construction of the Spanish nation was based on the “collaboration between the elites and peoples of the various kingdoms and provinces, a shared quest for those elements that unified rather than differentiated” (Feros, 2017). It was this conception that motivated the constitution of Cádiz in 1812, where all regional differences were subsumed in an “all-encompassing Spanish identity and nation”. But today this idea is questioned with the rise in the 1990s of xenophobic attacks against immigrants of Arab and Latin American origin. Whereas until the 1980s Spain was more an exporter than recipient of immigrants, thereafter it came to have similar numbers to that of France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, all countries with larger overall populations (Feros, 2017). 

Considering debates regarding racism in Spain, as well as Catalan independence, most scholars and journalists invoke the absence of racialist theories during the early modern period in the country (Feros, 2017). Both Spanish and foreign scholars have sought to reinvent Spain as a “racial paradise for Jews and Muslims, (…) Native Americans and Africans”. This has been the predominant discourse of Spaniards from the 18th to 20th centuries, a national identity as “religiously and racially universalist”. But recent sociological research indicates that such interpretations “go against the weight of historical evidence”, showing the early modern Spaniards did not believe in “the equality of distinct peoples” nor did they defend the need of “uniting all of these peoples through racial mixture”. The ideal of “Convivencia between Christians, Jews, and Moriscos” didn’t exist during the Medieval period nor the early modern. The way forward for racial unity in Spain has been posited as substitution the “imposition of uniformity” with the recognition and acceptance of ethnic and cultural difference” (Feros, 2017). 

References

by daviddawson462742281

Theory of Race and Iberian Christendom, part 3

Supersessionism and Critical Race Theory

Intro to CRT

CRT is predominantly a US-American field of study. It originated in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Patricia J. Williams, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, and Mari Matsuda (Critical Race Theory (CRT) | Definition, Principles, & Facts | Britannica, 2024).

According to Richard Delgado (2012), whereas traditional civil rights envision gradual progress, CRT questions this possibility in a society founded on modern liberalism. In examination here are concepts such as equality, legal argument, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral precepts of institutional law. Delgado (2012) describes key early developments in the emergence of CRT, beginning with the notion of legal indeterminacy – that most cases can be decided either way according to emphasis of one line of authority versus another (Delgado, 2012). While law has an alleged impartiality, it is used as a tool of privilege and power. In other words, law is politics, merely a tool for oppression (Benitez, 2015). 

CRT also incorporated a “skepticism of triumphalist history”, and the notion that favorable precedent tends to decay through bureaucracy (Delgado, 2012). CRT also built upon feminism’s insights into the relationship between power and the formation of social roles, patriarchy, and other forms of domination. Lastly, from conventional civil rights thinking CRT drew a concern for addressing historical wrongs and the need to seek legal and practical action. Although initially focused on black American issues, other subgroups soon emerged within CRT including Asian, Latinex, and Queer. Writing in 2012, Delgado describes relations between different groups represented within CRT as being mostly good, maintained through regular meetings. Other ethnic groups having joined in smaller numbers include Native American and Middle Eastern (Delgado, 2012). 

CRT drew from the earlier work of W. E. B. Du Bois, who was highly skeptical of supposed scientific or biological bases of race. Scientific racism or biological racism is a pseudoscientific theory systematized in the 19th century. It posits that categories of distinct “races” exist in the human species, and that racial discrimination can be justified by empirical data (Garros, 2006). Early in the Enlightenment, thinkers such as François Bernier had divided humanity into four different races, based simply on his observations as a world traveler (Bernier, 1684). A long canon of Western racial theory developed in Europe and North America, producing such abhorrent theories as Nordicism, promoted by American eugenicist Madison Grant and used to justify immigration restrictions (Lindsay, 1917).

Du Bois coupled his suspicion of scientific racism with radical political views and critical social theory (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). Rather than searching for a scientific definition of race, as a black man Du Bois sought to find or create a means for the social, political, and cultural survival of his people. Being rooted in Du Bois’ work, initially CRT was almost wholly directed towards African American studies (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). 

Du Bois developed gift theory which emphasized that “each race has specific and special ‘gifts’ to contribute to national and international culture and civilization” (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). The concepts of race proposed by Du Bois were not biologically determined, but “predicated on historical, cultural, social, and political ‘common’ characteristics and ‘common’ experiences shared by continental and diasporan Africans”. These characteristics represent gifts or “race-specific and culture-specific contributions” to global humanity and the growth of civilization (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). 

Rather than promote one political solution to problems of racism, Du Bois, “empirically developed a discourse on race in order to critique racism and provide a discursive point of departure for African American and Pan-African radical politics and revolutionary social movement” (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). He sought to offer models of discourse that could help critically understand race and mitigate against anti-black racism in contemporary society (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). 

Du Bois was also a precursor for what would come to be known as critical white studies. Skillfully and boldly, he pointed to the essence of whiteness, chronicling its prominence related to understandings of race. To be white was to be raceless, powerful, or at least to have restrictive access to power (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). Du Bois described the colonial logic of the white world as considering race something that stains the social status of “sub-humans”, i.e., non-whites. This logic pollutes the political thinking of whites, thus reducing them to a state of impotence, irrationality, and needing clear paradigms about their identity and the nature of the world. The implication is that since whites are not negatively affected by race, they have been “burdened by God” with the task of leading the “lost, raced ‘natives’, ‘barbarians’, ‘savages’, and sub-humans” to the “lily-white ‘heaven’ of humanity”. And of course, God is also white according to the colonial logic of a “white supremacist world” (Farmer & Farmer, 2020, p. 21).

Du Bois was also an early advocate of the race/class thesis that argued that the class struggle present for centuries in human history had been coupled with the modern concept of race, capitalism, and colonialism with the effect of exacerbating race/class conflicts. For Du Bois, the West’s weapon of choice in its efforts to establish global capitalism were theories of race and racism (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). 

Key Thinkers of CRT

When CRT did emerge in the U.S. in the 1970s, one of its most important proponents was Derrick Bell. Bell was raised as an Evangelical Christian but went on to write critically about the relation between racism and Christianity (Golden, 2022). Bell explored how Christianity was used to inspire racist ideologies, such as the Old Testament curse of Ham as a justification for slavery of blacks and the New Testament acquiescence to slavery as an “earthly institution”. Bell referred to racism as an “idolatrous faith” whose focus moves from worshipping God to worshipping the self. The focus of devotion becomes the “superiority of the white self and white race”. Bell describes the superiority of this faith as connected with the insistence that Whiteness is a “property right”. Whiteness affords whites with a privileged status that they seek to protect. In this idolatrous faith, “the true spirit of Christianity becomes divorced from its implementation” (Golden, 2022). 

Throughout his work, Bell recognized that eliminating racism is an endless challenge (Golden, 2022). For Bell, the religious basis for racism is both a historical and contemporary reality which most racist Christians will not recognize. He observed how racist theology offers a comprehensive system of “meaning, value, and loyalty” providing “stability and reassurance” in a world of economic inequality. This faith perspective can justify the lack of common economic interests across races, with those of lesser means. In conceiving of racism as faith, Bell expresses its “deep cognitive structure”. This is especially important considering Enlightenment approaches to eradicate racism through reason. But the postmodern refutation of the secularist hypothesis demonstrates that racism will have to be dealt with as “enduring and foundational” (Golden, 2022). 

Bell also explored the relation between racism and religious structure, “the transposition between the positive, originating spirit of Christianity and its institutionalization, the difference between a faith and the organizational structure developed to perpetuate it” (Golden, 2022). Towards the end of his life, Bell posited that Jesus recognized that the revolution that was needed was more about spiritual reformation than political change. This task begins with personal responsibility but also leads to instigation of change in others. The crucial discovery is how to create spiritual reformation in others that converts the perspective of a minority into the consensus of the majority. It is impossible to challenge racism without promoting spiritual reformation. At the same time, we must recognize that faith and spirit can also motivate resistance to change related to racism. The mixture of faith and racism prevents some From seeing (Golden, 2022). 

Bell’s idea of radical racial realism argued that “race is not an anomaly to American structures but constitutive of American sociopolitical life. Racism is a permanent part of the DNA of America” (Golden, 2022). He asserted that black people would never achieve full equality in the U.S. But Bell did not see racial realism as denying hope, rather, he means for it to help readers “rethink our strategies of resistance and languages of hope”. By this perspective, expectations regarding racial justice must be grounded in “transcending racism instead of eradicating racism”. Bell describes this transcending task as defiance, which views victory against racism considering agency. Such advocacy is committed to not letting racism have the last say. He describes this as a defiant hope that helps oppressed racialized communities to reclaim their humanity and agency as they envision better worlds (Golden, 2022)

The second CRT scholar whose thought we will briefly explore is Patricia J. Williams. Williams argues that at the heart of myths and media sensationalism around African Americans in positions of authority and of crimes involving blacks is a “crippling fear of the other which divides societies against themselves, to everyone’s loss and no one’s gain” (Scholar, 2006). She argues that American cities are divided according to race stemming from a settler history where good and evil are perceived battling for control. Thus, while crises of urban crime and poverty are portrayed as rooted in individual causality, the true causes are structural (Scholar, 2006). 

In the case of terrorists, the evildoers among the population are rooted out in a “secularized casting-out-of-demons from the Beloved Community” (Scholar, 2006). But while individual human rights are asserted, they are endangered by the fomentation of fear directed towards certain enemies of the good. Williams writes on America’s history of lynching or scapegoating blacks, Jews, or Catholics where police permitted vigilante justice. She sees a similar paradigm playing out on the global stage since 9/11 that undermines America’s reputation and security (Scholar, 2006). 

Williams proposes that the color-blind society desired by liberals is impossible until the reality of racism is dealt with (Scholar, 2006). Personal experience and actions are related to structural dynamics, and each of us must answer for our actions. Although color-blindness is a legitimate goal at some point in the future, at present we need accountability. To fulfill the vision of human rights in the American Constitution, we must put away fear, seek public and private accountability, and be creative and imaginative in seeking solutions (Scholar, 2006).

References

by daviddawson462742281

Theory of Race and Iberian Christendom, part 2

Brief Presentation of Jennings’ ORS Thesis

The Connection Between Supersessionism and Theory of Race

Let us begin with some key sections of Jennings work on the connection between supersessionsm and theory of race. Jennings (2010) analyzes various Iberian Catholic supersessionist texts from the colonial era, one of which is the writings of Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano. Writing in the 16th century, Valignano was concerned with whether colonized peoples’ adoption of Christian practices came from the effects of salvation or was a mere facade to cover either ulterior motives or impregnable ignorance. Not only in question was the natives’ possibility of salvation, but future candidacy for ecclesiastical office. Jennings argues that supersessionism was foundational to such questions related to race in Iberian Catholicism. He sees supersessionsim as “a distortion that was growing in power and extension with each new generation”, but that had reached an inflection point during the early colonial era. Jennings goes as far as to describe supersessionism as “the most decisive and central theological distortion” existing not only in the church of Valignano’s time, but also today (Jennings, 2010).

According to Jennings (2010), during Valignano’s time the predominant theology claimed that for God Israel has been replaced by the church. This meant that Christian identity was encompassed by the white European race. As such, the people of God were wholly removed from Jewish and Muslim identity. In Iberian Catholicism, these were the two deeply suspect groups related to Christian conversion. The converted Muslims were referred to as moriscos (“moorish”) and converted Jews as conversos or marranos (“swine”). But the legitimacy of Jews and Arabs conversion to Christianity was suspect from the time of the Reconquista and the Inquisition. This suspicion was rooted in the theology that had discarded Israel from its constitutive place in Christianity. The result was a vacuum that was filled by the white European. Israel’s election had now been transferred to a new geographic home with its visual contours and symbols. Just as Israel had been chosen as the fulcrum from which Christianity projected, supersessionism established Europe as the fulcrum from which salvation emanated (Jennings, 2010). Jennings states that during the age of discovery and conquest, 

supersessionist thinking burrowed deeply inside the logic of evangelism and emerged joined to whiteness in a new, more sophisticated, concealed form. Indeed, supersessionist thinking is the womb in which whiteness will mature. Any attempt to address supersessionism must carefully attend to the formation of the racial scale and the advent of a new vision of Christian social space (Jennings, 2010)

The Emergence of a White-Black Binary

During the colonial era, Iberian Catholicism’s self-perception was as the agent of redemptive, divine change ordained by God. The churches of Spain and Portugal saw their position as those who condition the world rather than those who are conditioned by it. And in this way Iberian Catholicism mirrored the role and action of God in creation (Jennings, 2010). Jennings argues that the decisive point here regarding the origins of Western race theory is that “creative authority, a creative regime” was “channeled through white presence”. And all peoples involved in the colonial project were touched by this creative administration. Thus, racial being was conceived of as an act of continuous interaction where becoming is oriented around whiteness. The white colonialists imagined a world of interlocking cultures which they were somehow separate and distinct from (Jennings, 2010). 

Jennings (2010) describes a white-black binary representing opposite ends of a spectrum. Therefore, just as the colonial landscape must be refashioned, ethnic identity must be refashioned as well. The indigenous peoples needed to be brought from “chaos to faith”, just as the colonial territories had to be “cleared, organized, and brought into productive civilization”. The only stable state possible from such a perspective is one of transition founded on racial attribution. Jennings states that “reciprocity of racial being was in play in the formation of the New World racial order, but that reciprocity must never be construed as creative equality”. Racial being existed in its becoming within the dual realities of “conference” and “creativity”. And this becoming is not mere assimilation, but an agency that arises in the racial imagination made possible by whiteness. As I understand him here, Jennings is saying that whereas white race was a fixed reality, all other races developed upon a continuum related to whiteness. And upon this continuum each non-white race upgraded or degraded in relation whiteness (Jennings, 2010). 

Key to understanding the importance of the emergence of Jennings’ (2010) concept of whiteness is the new order let loose by colonialism. The identity that comes from the “life-giving collaboration (…) between place and bodies, people and animals” is lost. Jennings describes this as the “reimagination of bodies”. This does not presuppose that native existence was unchanging prior to colonialism. Jennings describes this loss in the present tense as a consequence that continues till the present. Thus, what is lost is the possibility of identity developing in engagement with new spaces. Indigenous peoples are beckoned towards a progressively narrowing identity and narrative (Jennings, 2010). 

According to Jennings (2010), modern populations ever since have lived in a “dual trajectory of constantly shifting geographic spaces made more mutable by the dictates of capitalistic logic and racial identities that are free-floating and changeable, yet constantly stabilized through the reciprocity of racial being”. Without land as a root of identity, historical racial classifications continue to provide a rationale for collective intervention in the former homelands and traditional cultures of indigenous peoples (Jennings, 2010). 

The Disappearance of the Gentile

Jennings (2010) also explores the writing of Jesuit missionary to South America José da Acosta Porres. Acosta thought of himself as representing the Old Testament people of God adhering to covenant and teaching true worship from false. Israel had received the revelation of the one true God. Acosta saw Iberian Catholicism as replacing Israel and assuming the role of denouncing all non-Christian religious practice as idolatrous. As such, Acosta is unable to remember both himself and the Spanish people as Gentiles that were once in the same position as the indigenous Americans. To remember oneself as a former Gentile ignorant of the gospel does not imply acceptance of idolatry and denial of demonic presence in indigenous religion. But remembering his own Gentile origins could have made Acosta open to points of contact between indigenous religion and Christianity. Supersessionism, therefore, blocked Acosta from seeing the possibility of new expressions of Christian life emerging in the Americas. Such expressions could have introduced the gospel while accepting compatible contributions from indigenous culture. According to Jennings, 

What triggers this demonic imagination and conceals redemptive cultural analogies is Acosta’s vision of native intellectual and cultural inferiority. The symbolic Christian imaginary within which Acosta functioned believed Indians lacked intelligence because they lacked European languages and especially their signifiers for God. (Jennings, 2010, p. 97-8)

I end this section on Jennings’ ORS theory transitioning to its contextualization within academia and racial activism. Not only because Jennings is a black US-American theologian speaking against racism, but because of antecedent ideas he draws upon, I propose seeing ORS within the lineage of US-American civil rights theory and praxis. 

References

by daviddawson462742281

Theory of Race and Iberian Christendom, part 1

Towards a Theory of Race Supporting Mission as Intercultural Reconciliation

I am involved in advocacy for a post-supersessionist vision of Christian mission. My proposal is mission as intercultural reconciliation, hereafter referred to as MIR. The biblical basis for MIR is found poignantly in Paul’s declaration: 

For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near; (New American Standard Version, 1995, Eph. 2:14-17)

Unfortunately, this vision was thwarted by supersessionist theology that abolished the Jewish expression in the church. This biblical interpretive framework affirmed that, “the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God” (Cunningham, 2017). 

The prophetic symbol of the “one new man” formed of formerly alienated peoples was substituted by a vision of a church united by the nullification of cultural identity. The instinct of catholicity was born out of which came emphases on episcopal lineage and uniform doctrine and practice. The history of Christianity that ensued has been one of serial fragmentation with each separating group claiming to represent the purest culture, devoid of human infiltration and contamination. 

My context of service is the Iberian diaspora – Spain, Portugal and their colonies in the Americas – where I have served as a missionary for the past 30 years. In his book The Christian Imagination, Willie Jennings (2010) argues that Christian identity became encompassed by European (white) identity during the colonial era through Catholic missions springing forth from the Counter Reformation in the 15th century. This Christian identity had been wholly removed from Muslim identity during La Reconquista when the Iberian Peninsula was retaken from the Moors, just as it had been removed from Jewish identity during the Inquisition. 

Although supersessionism came to prominence as early as the second century, it was at the commencement of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism that this doctrine became the rationale for the displacement of indigenous peoples and their categorization according to their proximity or distance from the “people of God” embodied by the white European colonizers. Willie Jennings (2010) proposes that supersessionism is primordial to the development of the modern concept of race, i.e., origin of race as supersessionism, hereafter referred to as ORS.

But some have argued that the ORS thesis asks the supersessionism of 15-18th century Iberian Catholic colonizers to bear more responsibility than is reasonable (McDermott, 2023). I believe that ORS has potentially fruitful ramifications for post-colonial race relations. I agree with Jennings that Iberian Catholic colonialism in the early modern era contributed to the Western concept of race. That theories of race based in Western colonialism have had catastrophic effects on humanity is something I take for granted. However, I feel that some social science research on racial theory is based too heavily on a US-American perspective. Both CRT and ORS are cases in point, borrowing too heavily on the US-American historical experience to serve as a global paradigm for racial justice today. In fact, this paper will explore the ambiguous meaning of the term race as it is used in the U.S. versus Europe. The thesis of this paper is that ORS is helpful to mission as intercultural reconciliation, but it requires adjustment to engage the European/Iberian context.

In this essay I will give a brief presentation of Jennings’ ORS thesis followed by a section contextualizing ORS within Critical Race Theory (CRT). In the late 20th century, CRT emerged in the US-America becoming one of the most prominent recent developments in the social sciences related to race in the popular imagination. This body of inquiry critiques the foundations of modern liberalism, being skeptical towards the ideas of equality and Enlightenment rationalism. CRT focuses on the formation of social roles, patriarchy, forms of domination, and is concerned with addressing historical wrongs in legal and practical ways (p. 5). CRT also draws upon critical white studies, which investigates the essence of whiteness and its prominence related to understandings of race (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). 

The next section of the essay critiques ORS considering the European and Iberian context. Here I will draw from European and Iberian analysis of popular contemporary US-American race theory. Since the ORS thesis is little known in European social science literature, I focus on the reception of CRT as a proxy. My premise is that both ORS and CRT are part of the US-American genealogy of black civil rights theory (and praxis) and both theories share many common themes. To conclude, I will offer some suggestions for post-supersessionist mission as intercultural reconciliation (MIR) in the European/Iberian context. 

References

by daviddawson462742281

Vertical, Horizontal, and Circular Reconciliation

Major Ideas of Al Tizon’s Whole and Reconciled and Application to Ecumenism

Tizon (2018) proposes that in our diverse, fragmented, and globalized world the ministry of reconciliation is central to a current concept and practice of mission (p. xvi). The church’s mission must be holistic in a way that goes beyond uniting word and deed, but that puts the world back together (p. xvi). As a work of missiology, Tizon defines the term as the investigation of the point of contact between faith and culture which informs those who promote the fruitfulness of this interaction (p. 1). 

A globalized world needs to experience the love of God in the small actions of individual believers (p. 19). This world can be described as post-Christendom as the faith has lost coherence in societies significatively founded upon its influence. On the bright side, this reality makes the need for a mission of reconciliation a clear priority. Current post-colonial ideology poses a challenge to the church as it rightfully disassociates itself from shameful distortions of mission while seeking to restore the true biblical vision. The practice of collective repentance is proposed as a legitimate practice accompanied by practical restitution wherever possible. False and half gospels of bigotry, prosperity, apathy, and social liberation lead millions of sincere seekers astray from the essence of the biblical vision (p. 63). A kingdom vision can be summarized as manifest where God’s reign exists, resulting in reconciliation with God, with fellow humans, and with creation – vertical, horizontal and circular (p. 28-86). 

The biblical vision of human being is integral, consisting of body and soul as inseparable, ideally in communion with God, others, and creation (p. 98). The trinity is the foundation for the church’s mission as an expression of God’s nature, in wholeness, community, diversity, and reconciliation. As the church has spread across the globe this reconciling mission places it in a prime position to spread this intergroup healing wherever conflict exists. This mission is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit, sustaining joy in suffering and bringing holistic transformation. But such spirituality does not ignore the historic and present injustices that exist between human individuals and groups. Although the non-holistic concept of mission is largely a Western one, it has been largely exported to the church of the Global South, and therefore must be addressed across the globe. A complete vision of mission has developed through emphases such as societal transformation, signs and wonders, ecumenism, and social justice. This vision can be seen ultimately in Revelation 7 in what can be termed the Great Reconciliation (p. 112-168). 

Holistic mission cannot be reduced to a reconciliation of streams in Christianity that argue for the supremacy of evangelism versus social concern, beyond a balance between word and deed (p. 173). Again, the vision of integral mission must be vertical, horizontal, and circular – moving from a concept of Great Commission to Whole Commission. In conclusion, in a world of fragmented groups that shock against each other in a sea that all share, the church cannot ignore the mission of reconciliation. This must be done on the individual, intimate level of human relationships, not on big picture notions of ideological unity. This will require humility, vulnerability, confession, forgiveness, lament, and continuous steps towards justice. And all these efforts must be done in the fellowship of Christ’s body, not realized bey separate groups self-satisfied with their good works independent of their global brethren (p. 176-205). 

Questions After Reading

During the reading, I wondered about how the author’s experience has been different than my own as a person of color. As an immigrant to the U.S. from the Philippines, Tizon has experienced alienation and marginalization that a while male like me has not. Reading this book caused me to question how much I am aware of my privilege in US-American society, even as a missionary overseas for most of my life. Tizon does not shy from critical analysis of many aspects of Western Christianity, particularly US-American Evangelicalism. Tizon explores the extension of Western Evangelical doctrinal and practical phenomenon to missions. As a product of US-American missions I was stung by some of Tizon’s denunciations and wondered if he ran the risk of dishonoring a valuable legacy.

I wondered if certain aspects of Western Christianity that can be seen in the Global South – such as megachurches, individualism, and disembodied rationality – should be seen as the product of collaboration and synergy. Someone like Tizon and myself who have been steeped in the experience of US-American Christian institutions may erroneously diminish the agency of Global South Christianity as it has developed. Care should be taken against this type of reductive analysis even when the church of the Global South shares similarities to Western Christianity in several key areas. 

Implications for My Research on Iberian Postcolonial Ecumenism

I have been engaged in the Iberian diaspora world of Spanish and Portuguese speaking post-colonial nations from childhood through my career as a missionary. My research includes addressing questions of race and identity among descendants of both the colonizers and colonized in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world. This is a vast demographic, but they are linked in ways that are particularly important for theories of race that still divide the world and the body of Christ. As I travel between Ibera and Latin America, I seek to bring awareness to the distortion in church history that resulted from the treaty of Tordesillas that gave the Spanish and Portuguese empires a colonizing mission directly from the Vatican. Tizon’s work is relevant to the question of the identity of the people of God as it was conceived by the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. These sailors, traders, and missionaries received an identification that abolished the notion of Jew and Gentile described by Paul in Ephesians 2:12-17 as the new man. Instead of the body of Messiah being seen as the reconciliation of two formerly exclusive and adverse groups, the first division in the history of the church occurred. 

As I advocate at ecumenical gatherings of Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant, Messianic Jewish, and Pentecostal believers in Christ, the motif of mission as reconciliation is central. Tizon’s vision goes to the heart of what the ecumenical projects I serve in Europe and the Americas seek to address. However, I feel a sense of caution when critiquing the foundation of modern missions which I inherited. I consider myself to be someone standing on the shoulders of missionary giants who went before me. I am aware of the liability that the color of my skin and eyes, my language and my sex, all of these represent those of the Western Christian colonizer in all its ambiguity. Tizon’s work encourages me to seek constant awareness of the privilege I enjoy – even as to say these seems today like a politically correct troupe of self-abasement. However, Tizon’s contribution, in comparison to much postcolonial writing, is highly practical and specific. Therefore, this work provides me with not mere guilt and speculation of the sickness and wounds that are present in the global church today. Tizon provides a roadmap towards healing that Christians from many streams of the faith can follow. 

References

Tizon, Al (2018). Whole and Reconciled: Gospel, Church, and Mission in a Fractured World. Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

by daviddawson462742281

Jewish Legacy and Race Relations in Portuguese Catholicism

The declaration Nostra Etate of the Second Vatican Council recognizes that many of the church fathers espoused supersessionist theology until it became the standard formulation of Catholicism’s relationship with Judaism in the Middle Ages. This theological position is described as such:

the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God (Cunningham, 2017, p. 12-13).

Nostra Etate presented the relationship between the Catholic church and the Jewish people in a new theological framework. Previously there were great reservations between the Catholic church and Judaism due to the history of Catholic antisemitism, forced conversion, pogroms and the holocaust that occurred in Christian Europe (Cunningham, 2017, p. 3). But the holocaust prompted the Catholic church to reevaluate their relationship to the Jewish people. Since Vatican II these two mutually skeptical communities made progress towards friendship and partnership. In 1974, pope John Paul VI established the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews entrusted with the task of “accompanying and fostering religious dialogue with Judaism”. This endeavor is theologically connected with the Council for Promoting Christian Unity considering the perception that this is the “first and most far-reaching breach among the chosen people” (Cunningham, 2017, p. 3).

Crucially, Nostra Etate declares the intention of the Catholic church to “become acquainted with Judaism as it defines itself, giving expression to the high esteem in which Christianity holds Judaism and stressing the great significance for the Catholic Church of dialogue with the Jews” (Cunningham, 2017, p. 4). The Catholic-Jewish dialogue that has developed has led to an awareness that:

Christians and Jews are irrevocably inter-dependent, and that the dialogue between the two is not a matter of choice but of duty as far as theology is concerned. Jews and Christians can enrich one another in mutual friendship. Without her Jewish roots the Church would be in danger of losing its soteriological anchoring in salvation history and would slide into an ultimately unhistorical Gnosis. Pope Francis states that “while it is true that certain Christian beliefs are unacceptable to Judaism, and that the Church cannot refrain from proclaiming Jesus as Lord and Messiah, there exists as well a rich complementarity which allows us to read the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures together and to help one another to mine the riches of God’s word. We can also share many ethical convictions and a common concern for justice and the development of peoples. (Cunningham, 2017, p. 8).

In Majority Catholic Portugal where I live, Catholic supersessionism represents not only a theological problem for the church but is linked to postcolonial racism. Willie Jennings posits that the church replaced a rejected Israel leading to a Western ethnocentrism which coopted the gospel for colonialist ends (Jennings, 2010, p. 10). During the 15th century, blood purity laws related to Jewish “New Christians” eradicated the notion of “Gentiles” in Iberian Catholicism. During the subsequent colonial period, Western Christianity simply understood itself as the “people of God” (Supersessionism, Nations, and Race: Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology 2021 Annual Meeting – YouTube, n.d.). This attitude was an essential aspect of the justification for Western colonialism and the construction of racial theory with its continuous negative effects on Portuguese society.

Analysis of Supersessionism in Portugal through Postcolonial Theory, and this Theories Limitations

One of the earliest theories of decolonization and postcolonial theory emerged from French Algerian Frantz Fanon. Fanon described the “racialized subjectivity and the structural conditions that sustain racial domination” (Kohn & Reddy, 2024). According to Fanon, “nothing but a clear break would solve the psychological as well as social, political, and economic problems brought by the colonizer to the colonized” (Rynkiewich, 2011, p. 135). Violent uprising by the colonized against the colonizer was posited as the only solution. The rationale being that it was the colonizer who had created the native’s prohibitive world (Rynkiewich, 2011, p. 135). And Fanon placed the church in a position as fully complicit in the colonial relationship.

Following Fanon, several other theories were developed addressing the racial tensions that existed after decolonization. The Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi argued that the colonizer and colonized have “created each other, and thus the colonizer is as much caught in trap as the colonized”. Therefore, the only way to resolve the situation is for the colonizer to join forces with the colonized in the fight for independence (Rynkiewich, 2011, p. 136-7). Memmi argued that the entrapped colonizer could only be freed through a process he described as repentance (p. 137). Prospero and Caliban argued that over generations colonialism had produced two groups of people with character traits that made independence and development impossible. This was because both had been educated into a state of interdependence but simultaneously incapable of working together” (p. 137). Andre Gunter Frank proposed that the original condition of the indigenous peoples before colonialism was preferable, i.e. more “developed”. This countered the idea that the situation after colonialism was an underdeveloped native population, unless the term referred to a state caused by colonialism itself (p. 138). Wallerstein theorized that colonialism resulted in a paradigm of economic development consisting of “commodification of land, labor, and resources”, a formulation of value completely incompatible with premodern traditional cultures (p. 138).

Majority Roman Catholic Portuguese society must come to grips with the residual effects of colonialism that still affect race relations there today. Although one of the smaller Western European countries, Portugal has an oversized colonial legacy. It is still the focus of immigration from former colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America. The notion that the Western colonizer rightly educated and civilized the inferior indigenous peoples is something that Portuguese Christians need to face. Acknowledging and denouncing this historical attitude and action would do much good for race relations by acknowledging and denouncing. The Catholic Church should recognize that missionaries in their former colonies were complicit in imperial interests which were subsequently discarded as soon as hegemony was established over indigenous peoples (p. 142).

However, extreme ideologies such as settler colonialism promoted by Patrick Wolf (2006) are not a way forward for majority Catholic Portugal. Wolf argued that invasion is a structure, not an event. Therefore, all citizens of nations resulting from colonial endeavors actively participate in exploitation. The only apparent alternative is revolution and national reset, as Wolf elaborates:

As practiced by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have typically employed the organizing grammar of race. European xenophobic traditions such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or Negrophobia are considerably older than race, which, as many have shown, became discursively consolidated fairly late in the eighteenth century. But the mere fact that race is a social construct does not of itself tell us very much. As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned. (Wolfe, 2006)

Postcolonial theory rightly denounces historical offenses committed with the Catholic church’s involvement that contributed to current racial tensions in Portuguese society. However, the idea that only the inheritors of oppression and systemic racism have an objective and helpful voice is not a promising approach. To remedy problems related to race in Portugal such as immigration and class struggles all inheritors of the postcolonial situation must speak and be heard. It should be obvious that extra attention should be given to hearing the colonized as the greater victim in a decolonized society.

References

Cunningham, P. A. (2017). The Sources behind “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate (No. 4). Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 12(1), 1–39.

Jennings, W. J. (2010). The Christian imagination: Theology and the origins of race. Yale University Press; Biola Library ebooks.

Kohn, M., & Reddy, K. (2024). Colonialism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Rynkiewich, M. A. (2011). Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World. Cascade Books.

Supersessionism, Nations, and Race: Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology 2021 Annual Meeting—YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved April 22, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDlFvKAGGTo&t=2601s

Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240

by daviddawson462742281

Supersessionism and Indigenization in Iberian Christendom, pt 6

Conclusion

We have seen some of the key factors in the growth of Iberian Catholicism in the American colonies. The evangelistic methods used and the strategies for ecclesiastical structures were effective to sustain growth over time. I have argued that promoting mission as intercultural reconciliation among the Iberian diaspora requires a reckoning with its Christian foundations, renouncing supersessionism and building upon indigenization. Supersessionism was crucial during the early modern phase of Iberian missions and contributed to the cultures that form the Iberian diaspora today. This is true even for those who do not profess Catholic faith because the church’s influence on the Iberian cultures is unavoidable. But I contend that Iberian Catholic legacy should not be rejected but built upon. I have emphasized the value of the indigenization that occurred in the early phase of Catholic missions in the Americas. This indigenization emerged from the openness of some missionaries and some indigenous peoples to a new form of Christianity. Perhaps most of the missionaries saw native cultures as contributing nothing of value to Christian faith and practice. It is likely that most of the indigenous communities of the American colonies would describe their experience as being dispossessed, forcibly converted, and reinvented by colonial masters. 

I believe the primary impetus for the darkest elements of Iberian Catholic missions in the Americas was supersessionism. White Europeans appropriated the ancient messianic hope of the Jewish people, a dispossessed people powerless to oppose this offense. While it is true that Jesus fulfilled the promise that Israel would bless all nations, he never intended to start a new religion. Supersessionism presents Christianity as a universal message of salvation through faith in Jesus’ sacrifice for the sins of humanity. Iberian missionaries were correct in communicating the gift of salvation in Christ, but they erred in embodying the vision of the one new man. The message of reconciliation required the role of Israel as God’s chosen people so that no other nation could claim supremacy in the Kingdom of Christ. It was the exclusion of the special identity of Israel in salvation history that laid the grounds for Christian white supremacy. And this toxic vision fueled and justified the terrorizing colonial project. 

I believe that the heirs of Iberian Catholicism and the institutional forms that still exist should not be rejected but built upon. The indigenizing phenomenon is a wonderful part of Iberian Catholicism and should be celebrated. Mission as intercultural reconciliation is a vision that can honor the legacy of Iberian Catholicism. My hope is that the one new man vision can attract a new generation from the Iberian diaspora to the Spirit’s work today. By honoring Israel as the elder brother, the churches of every Gentile culture can find their place as part of the fulfillment of the one new man. This is the mystery Paul referred to: 

In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to people in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus. (New International Version, 2011, Eph. 3:4-6) 

by daviddawson462742281

Supersessionism and Indigenization in Iberian Christendom, pt 5

Mission as Intercultural Reconciliation in the Iberian Diaspora

As explained earlier in this research, my focus is to promote mission as intercultural reconciliation (MIR). In this series of texts, we have seen how the Catholic Church and the Iberian states mutually established each other’s legitimacy in the colonizing project. And this legitimacy stemmed from the spiritual prestige attributed to both. More than in any other European states, the occupation of high ecclesiastical positions validated the ruling elites of Spain and Portugal. The early colonial era was a time of Spanish and Portuguese exceptionalism (Yun-Casalilla, 2019). The Spanish nobility became the center of European Catholic nobility and its marital market. The Iberian colonizers were exceptionally good at reproducing political structures wedded to Catholicism in the American colonies. And aspects of the ecclesiastical structures that emerged in these colonies both inhibited and promoted the indigenization of Latin-American Catholicism (Yun-Casalilla, 2019). 

Although the Protestant lands also adhered to supersessionism, the fragmentation into several churches meant that they could not represent the “people of God” like Spain and Portugal did. Therefore, proponents of mission as intercultural reconciliation in the Iberian diaspora today face a specific type of supersessionist legacy. The Anglo-Saxon and Continental European Protestantism developed a supersessionism expressed primarily in doctrine. Protestants hammered out supersessionist ideology in centuries of polemics against the Jewish foil. But the Iberian supersessionism didn’t depend primarily on theological argument, but on the prestige and authority of the Catholic Church.

The fact that this prestige had been wounded during the Protestant Reformation gave a particular stridency to Iberian Catholicism’s supersessionism. And the culmination of the Reconquista against the Moors in 1492 strengthened the Iberian Catholic kingdom’s claim to primordial representation of the people of God. The European castles of the Medieval era – most of which were Catholic – have been considered the greatest artistic accomplishment in human history (Hoje Falamos de Notre-Dame, Não Do Nosso Senhor – Contra-Corrente, n.d.). Therefore, proponents of MIR must recognize the prestige of Catholicism in the collective imagination of the Iberian diaspora. This problematizes confronting the cultural appropriation by the West of an ancient Semitic folk religion. The ancient messianic hope of the Jewish people was seized, universalized, and institutionalized by what became European Christendom. Although the message was universal, i.e., for all peoples, white Western Europeans were the idealized heirs called to catechize the nations into Catholic culture. 

But despite supersessionism, there is much evidence that the Spirit of God was at work in the Iberian Catholic missions in the Americas. Natives were groomed for clerical functions and the task of evangelism (Hsia, 2017). And perhaps by targeting elites in these efforts, indigenous agency in the development of theology and worship was fostered. At the top of the Catholic hierarchy the theological premises of supersessionism validated the supremacy of the white European colonizer. But at the grassroots level, the experience of most indigenous members of the missions the experience of Catholicism was predominantly native not Spanish or Portuguese. The translation of Scripture into native languages using the printing press was intended to regulate the communication of the Catholic message. However, what ended up happening was the production of native Christian texts with variant versions of biblical motifs and narratives (Hsia, 2017). 

Drawing from the History of Indigenous Agency

Proponents of MIR in the Iberian diaspora can draw from the history of indigenous agency in the Americas. Unconventional teachings and practices should not be seen as resulting from an inability to understand Christian doctrine, or a desire to distort it. Rather, we should honor the helpful ways the natives reinterpreted biblical content to suit their needs. The fact that many natives found refuge from Iberian conquistadores should also be considered (Sarreal, 2014). The missions were built through a collaboration of various religious orders and native agency. By the 18th century the missions consisted of multi-generational residents steeped in this way of life. Promoting MIR among Latin American Catholics today requires understanding the two sources of the mission culture that develop. Both the missionaries and the indigenous peoples made biological, technological, organizational, and theological contributions (Sarreal, 2014). It can be argued that without the missions indigenous language and customs would have been eradicated by Iberian colonization (Sarreal, 2014). 

I have discussed the disastrous effects of disease and the imposition of social norms that violated indigenous cultures, particularly among nomadic indigenous communities (Jackson, 2015). This testimony should inform proponents of MIR regarding the damage a supersessionsist evangelistic supremacy can cause. In some contexts, the reconciliation of cultures faces a shorter “gap”, perhaps illustrated by the more fruitful reception of the gospel among the sedentary indigenous communities. But MIR practitioners must recognize when the space between cultures requires relatively greater time, patience, and Spirit-led ingenuity. 

We have also seen how indigenous resistance to evangelization fueled the passions of missionary efforts in mostly negative ways (Rivett, 2014). Opposition to the gospel was interpreted as evidence of demonic influence instead of resistance to incarceration in reducciones (Rivett, 2014). MIR offers a vision of Christian witness that seeks to see the operation of the Spirit in other cultures, even in other religions, according to the promise of the witness of the Spirit throughout the earth (John 16:8-11). 

We have seen research indicating the depth and vibrancy of scientific, technological, geographical, and anthropological work being done on the Iberian Catholic missions in the Americas (Rivett, 2014). This has been posited as contradicting the center-periphery dichotomy between European urban metropolis and primitive rural colonies (Rivett, 2014). MIR appreciates this motif in the history of missions as it engages the reversal of roles in world Christianity. MIR advocates should avoid the center-periphery perspective that has categorized much analysis of colonial missions. This caricature has omitted the agency and contributions of the majority indigenous membership of the missions. There was much oppression and subjugation by missionaries towards indigenous peoples. But the missionaries also arrived during a time of liminal turmoil among the indigenous cultures of the Americas.

Again, we must ask ourselves what the fate of these communities would have been if Iberian colonizers were not accompanied by Catholic missionaries? The point here is that MIR proposes a view of the global work of God that breaks forth across the globe. The Spirit’s work has consistently upended the status quo of Christian predominance and leadership on the world stage. MIR is flexible regarding national loyalties and is primarily concerned with identifying where the Spirit is at work and collaborating with it. When the center of the Spirit’s most vibrant activity shifts from the metropolis to the “periphery”, MIR is ready to learn from new cultural loci of Christian leadership. 

Lastly, the effectiveness of the missions’ organization of space, surveillance, and communication can be seen as either oppressive (Foucault, 1986) or cultivating. MIR recognizes that Christian doctrine has been denounced as a means for governing the soul through the rite confession and a consciousness of the all-seeing eye of God (Foucault, 2003). MIR rejects all forms of Christian surveillance and management which characterizes “ministry” that seeks to exploit and dispossess the cultural other and occupy their land (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020). On the other hand, we see in the story of Iberian missions in the Americas the careful planning of communities that had a sort of beauty. Can we say that the reducciónes were beautiful? We have seen accounts of the carefully planned streets and blocks, each house with its own orchard and garden, the house of the priest, the farmlands, and livestock spaces (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020). We have seen the vast networks of communication, map making, and land administration the missionaries promoted. MIR does not consider all forms of organization and structure in evangelistic efforts as oppressive. God can call members of his church to cross national and continental frontiers to bless other peoples in His name. This cross-cultural witness and service can include administrative and governmental work, if it defers to local authority. MIR seeks to act as a guest enjoying the hospitality of the host people of the land, which does not preclude helping build institutions of governance.

References

Foucault, Michel (1986). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics. 

Foucault, Michel (20030. Abnormal. Lectures and the College de France 1974-1975. London: Verso.

Religious transformations in the early modern Americas / edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. (2014).

Sarreal, Julia J. S. (2014). The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History. Stanford University Press

Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé (2019). Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668. Palgrave Macmillan

Zavala-Pelayo, E. (2020). Religion and space in colonial South America: A technology of geo-political rule and terrestrial-spatial subjectivity in the Jesuit missions of the Banda Oriental. Religion, 50(4)

by daviddawson462742281

Supersessionism and Indigenization in Iberian Christendom, pt 4

The Vision of Human Flourishing and the Agency of the Colonies

The science of geography emerged in the early modern period during the emerging new European empires. The field of chorography developed in which the inhabitants, climate, and vegetation of a specific geographical location are studied. Such research provided the level of detailed knowledge necessary to “support imperial power over a distant territory, varied and extensive” (Rivett, 2014). The science of geography was also essential to Spain’s American colonies, intimately connected to the catechization and subjugation of native peoples. Maps and descriptions of the Amazon Basin composed by Jesuits demonstrate the inseparable connection between Catholic missions and imperial conquest (Rivett, 2014). 

The relationship between the Iberian Crowns and emergent colonial governments is often depicted through a center-periphery dichotomy, between metropolis and colonies (Rivett, 2014). This view of a fixed opposition portrays “asymmetrical power relations between complex political and economic structures in the core, and weak or nonexisting states in the margins”. Recent scholarship has portrayed the situation of Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas differently, identifying multiple domestic centers of power with networks connecting to peripheries. With this has come the recognition of “internal regional differentiation” and the development of “local agencies” (Rivett, 2014). 

The example of Quito is exemplary, which was depicted in writings of Spanish and Creole evangelists as “a new Rome, spreading civility to the margins and leading the spiritual conquest of its own periphery” (Rivett, 2014). Up to the late 17th century, many of the evangelizers were Creoles or Spaniards who had spent most of their lives in the American colonies. Many of these were also involved in scientific work in the areas of “botany, cartography, chorography, and geography, setting the stage for future scientific developments”. The ethnographic and geographic literature they produced prepared the way for a “renewed missionary enterprise”, going “Beyond the scientific and political interest in territorial definition and recognition, these texts spoke of the possibility of spiritual conquest and redemption”. Thus, we can see that part of the impetus for the spread of Iberian Catholicism was a vision of flourishing that coupled spiritual growth with political and scientific progress (Rivett, 2014).

Recent research also indicates that the American missions of the early modern era were initially imagined as “transitional way stations to ‘civilization’, not as enduring settlements” (Bamji, 2013). The missions generally developed in the maelstrom of uprooted communities in flight caused by colonialism. Thus, Christianity in the Americas emerged in a provisional state, becoming identified principally with unsettling, upsetting, and disordering. If the indigenous peoples being dispossessed were moving towards a mission town this was interpreted as “acceptance of the Christian acculturation project”. And if these communities moved away towards the hinterlands, this was seen as a rejection of the gospel (Bamji, 2013). 

            The traditional historical depiction of the missions has been one of invasion where peaceful native environments were disrupted. But recent scholarship argues that the missions were established at a time and place of convulsion and uprooting of indigenous communities caused by colonialism. This perspective is problematic in that it separates state colonialism from religious evangelization. But it stands to reason that      the missions were established during a liminal period of turmoil and the extraordinary movements of communities. Formerly historians primarily described missions as building stark boundaries between cultures. But today some argue that missions built or extended “cultural bridges” (Bamji, 2013This line of reasoning does not make light of the violence that occurred during this meeting of cultures. But an attempt is made to “look beyond forceful imposition” to discern other means by which the American missions operated. Some have posited that the missions “pulled together overlapping networks of spiritual practitioners”, and advanced “shared intangibles such as music, language, heroic ideas, dreams, and even iconoclasm” (Bamji, 2013). Thus, these religious communities emerged as an amalgam of colonial and indigenous contributions. 

The Effectiveness of Organization of Space, Surveillance, and Communication

Michel Foucault (1986) referred to Iberian Catholic missions in the Americas as “heterotopias” that represented a “contestation of the space” in which the indigenous peoples lived. He described the missions as “absolutely regulated” sites “in which human perfection was effectively achieved”. Foucault (2003) described this “Christian pastoralism” as a means for governing the soul which developed into a model of government from above and self-government from within. The friars were obligated to know the actions of their sheep via confession, which in turn taught the sheep to govern their actions since they would become known (Foucault, 2003). And above both shepherd and sheep watched the all-knowing eye of God. 

Zavala-Pelayo (2020) describes the “hard and soft geo-political techniques” used by Jesuit missions in the Americas to promote the “universalist logic of a European Christianity that assumed as its primary task, literally, the making of a Christian orbis terrarum” (“lands of the world”). The soft geo-political techniques included the “management, control, and surveillance” of the territories, their exploration, protection, and grand-scale occupation. Much financial investment was made, for example, in protecting Spanish colonies in Argentina and Paraguay from renegade armies in the neighbor Portuguese colony of Brazil. The Jesuit occupation of vast territories was achieved through the systematic “reorganization of the local indigenous socio-politics, the restructuration of local spaces, and the creation of community spaces” (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020).

 The restructuration of space went beyond the establishment of the mission to the redistribution of spaces within the community, and donation of land to other missions (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020). The Jesuits said of the natives, “they keep their town very well organized, clean and tidy, and their homes in the same way”. The reducciónes were meant to be established near water with access to fishing, good lands with no risk of flooding and no mosquitos. These carefully planned sites were deliberately constructed in streets and blocks – one per every four Indians. Each house would have its own orchard and garden. And provision was made for the house of the priest, as well as farms for growing cotton, fruit trees and vegetables, and space for raising pigs, chickens and doves (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020).

The soft geo-political techniques the Jesuits used included the production and registry of socio-geographic knowledge, geographical counselling, and networked management (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020). The Jesuits helped settle frequent disputes regarding land borders and helped orient new settlements according to vast geographical records. A system of furlough existed so that the friars would return to mission headquarters after stipulated time periods on the field. There were very effective lines of communications between Jesuit missionaries regarding their needs, challenges, and help was able to be relatively quickly mobilized to their avail (Zavala-Pelayo, 2020). 

References

Bamji, A., Janssen, G. H., & Laven, M. (2013). The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation. Taylor & Francis Group. 

Foucault, Michel (1986). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics. 

Foucault, Michel (20030. Abnormal. Lectures and the College de France 1974-1975. London: Verso.

Religious transformations in the early modern Americas / edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. (2014).

Zavala-Pelayo, E. (2020). Religion and space in colonial South America: A technology of geo-political rule and terrestrial-spatial subjectivity in the Jesuit missions of the Banda Oriental. Religion, 50(4)

by daviddawson462742281

Supersessionism and Indigenization in Iberian Christendom, pt 3

The Socioeconomic Situation and Scope of the Missions

The social upheaval for the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who joined Catholic missions left is hard to overstate. They left “small, dispersed, and mobile communities to live in large, settled mission towns with Catholic priests” (Sarreal, 2014). For many natives, the missions were a refuge from the pressures associated with Spanish conquest. This is striking in light of the vigorous nature of the enculturation process the indigenous experienced on the missions. The Spanish Crown expected the missions to be means of forming the indigenous peoples into citizens of the empire. They were taught Catholic doctrine, European cultural practices, and settled agriculture. It is hard to think of a modern educational experience with such multidisciplinary, integrated, and all-encompassing scope (Sarreal, 2014). 

The Jesuits alone housed more than 265,000 natives in their missions by 1767 throughout the Americas (Sarreal, 2014). The Jesuit missions of the Rio de la Plata region in current-day Argentina and Uruguay are widely considered to have been “the most successful in terms of the number of indigenous inhabitants, economic prosperity, and historical importance”. To each mission, two Jesuits would be assigned, but these could never force hundreds or thousands of indigenous people to come or to stay. Instead, it was in the face of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism that multitudes of natives joined the missions. By the eighteenth century, most Guarani members of the Jesuit missions were multiple generation residents steeped in mission culture. This way of life consisted of “biological, technological, organizational, and theological systems that incorporated aspects of both native and Jesuit-inspired customs and practices”. In other missions that depended on immigration and new converts, such comprehensive cultural change was not the case. The eventual decline of the Guarani missions in the late 18th century was due to the Spanish Crown’s reforms and intervention. Even still, due to the agency of the Guarani these missions endured until the end of the colonial period (Sarreal, 2014). 

            Some historians have highlighted that Jesuit missions protected the Indians from being taken advantage of and maintained the Guaraní language and other parts of native lifestyle. But less positive analysts draw attention to Jesuits’ depriving the indigenous of freedom, forcing them to change their culture, physically abusing them, and exposing them to disease (Sarreal, 2014). Research shows that a communal structure of shared labor, collective ownership, and administration of mission property was the foundation of the “mission economy”. The native members did not generally work for pay, participate in commerce, or own their own property. Rather, they depended mainly of provisions from communal supplies and worked in groups or individually. Communal property was more prevalent, but a culture of shared ownership did not make the missions “proto-socialist societies” as has been proposed by some research. Inequalities did exist among the natives, and although a level of prosperity existed, the economic system was not efficient. Contributions from the Jesuit order were needed, as well as protection from the colonial authorities. These factors and the lack of competition led to a system that survived but could not thrive (Sarreal, 2014).

After the decline of the missions to the Guarani, reformers proposed exposing the natives to the colonial market economy to intensify acculturation and assimilation (Sarreal, 2014). The result was the destruction of the missions and the benefit of a privileged minority of natives, especially those who could use mission property. The more vulnerable who depended on the missions suffered while “skilled and well-connected” Guarani benefitted (Sarreal, 2014). While these developments represent the decline of the missions, they do not indicate a general decline of Iberian Catholicism in the Americas. For as the missions declined, a level of Christian enculturation had been achieved that laid the foundation for the Catholic church to be the majority religious (nay, exclusive) of Latin America. 

Different Indigenous Receptivity to Missions based on Sedentary Vs Nomadic

The culture of different indigenous peoples also affected how mission life developed, where it thrived and where it was harder to encourage. The encounter in 1492 and beyond between Iberian Catholic colonizers and native populations introduced the latter to Old World diseases and a “sea-change in the demographic patterns of the native populations of the Americas” (Jackson, 2015). Warfare, changes in subsistence patterns, competition between native and European men for sexual partners also contributed to severe population loss (Jackson, 2015). Significant variety existed between different populations where religious orders attempted to establish missions. The Jesuit missions of Paraguay in the Rio de la Plata region and the Chiquitos mission in current day eastern Bolivia were both established among sedentary 

Where missionaries attempted to establish missions among nomadic populations they encountered more difficulties. Imposing new sociological norms offended nomadic culture, such as different paradigms for division of labor by gender (Jackson, 2015). The more difficult process of implementing these changes among nomadic populations led missionaries to impose harsher forms of control. This led to increased conflict and disruption, which explains the different results of attempts at social and political organization among sedentary and non-sedentary indigenous communities. On the Paraguay and Chiquitos mission frontiers a “kinder and gentler form of colonial domination” was used (Jackson, 2015). 

Jackson (2015) draws attention to the difference made by the demographic situation of the different indigenous tribes evangelized by Iberian Catholic missions. Growth was sustainable where missions were established among demographically viable populations with high fertility and high mortality rates. In comparison, missions established among demographically weak populations such as nomadic hunters and gatherers were less sustainable. 

Some missions such as the Paraguay and Chiquitos offered a buffer zone from the more abusive elements of Iberian colonialism (Jackson, 2015). Jackson’s concludes that the epidemic sickness that devastated native populations was neither generated nor exacerbated at the missions. Rather, disease spread to the missions from other highly populous communities such as Buenos Aires. The mortality rates at the missions were like those of “virgin soil” epidemics of the time. In missions such as the Chiquitos that were more geographically isolated, the mortality rates were much lower (Jackson, 2015). 

The Incentivizing Power of Indigenous Resistance (on the Colonizer)

There was often violent indigenous resistance to evangelization in the peripheral areas of Spanish colonies in the Americas. This helped define missionaries as “warriors for Christ engaged in relentless struggle against defiant tribes and the demonic forces that in their view kept the indigenous population in darkness and resistance to Christianity” (Rivett, 2014). From the beginning of the Catholic missions in the Americas,

European Christian images and values made the missionizing friars the protagonists of a drama of male heroism clothed in virtue, selflessness, and utter dedication to the salvation of the souls of peoples about whom they had the greatest doubts. The purpose of evangelization was not martyrdom, even if some friars hoped for it, but when martyrdom occurred it was used to buttress the evangelization campaign and bring material and military support to the missions. (Rivett, 2014). 

Christianity was rebelled against and repudiated persistently during the 18th century (Rivett, 2014). 

            The opposition missionaries faced rose a central issue: what was the nature of the indigenous people? Some accepted Christianity and were therefore seen as different from those who didn’t. Those who rejected the gospel became the embodiment of the evil present in human nature, of those under the influence of demons. But the real reason was that hunters and gatherers in the Northern regions did not want to live in reducciones – towns set up under ecclesiastical or royal authority to facilitate colonization. It was when faced with the threat of losing their customary nomadic life and religious traditions that indigenous communties responded violently. In the late 16th century, the northern provinces known as New Spain were thought of as islands of Christian “civilization”. But they were surrounded by what were considered “barbarian” indigenous communities that resisted conversion (Rivett, 2014). 

The view that indigenous resistance was demonically empowered motivated evangelistic efforts. This was based on the Christian understanding of spiritual warfare, i.e., “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (New International Version, 2011, I Jn. 4:4). And the fear of nearby barbarous communities would not only motivate the friars to evangelize more fervently. The colonial settlers would see the conversion of neighboring indigenous communities as a necessity. The conversion of the natives would be sought scrupulously by settlers when possible, or alternatively through forced conversion and massacre. 

References

Jackson, Robert H. (2015). Demographic Change and Ethnic Survival Among the Sedentary Populations on the Jesuit Mission Frontiers of Spanish South America, 1609-1803: The Formation and Persistence of Mission Communities in a Comparative Context (Vol. 00016).

Religious transformations in the early modern Americas / edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett. (2014).

Sarreal, Julia J. S. (2014). The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History. Stanford University Press