White Theology and White Power XV

The history traced through this series leaves Christians who care about public life with an uncomfortable problem.

Withdrawal is not an adequate answer to Christian supremacy. Christians live within political, economic, educational, cultural, and civic institutions whether they acknowledge that fact or not. Churches own property, employ people, educate children, invest money, distribute charity, shape voters, publish ideas, and influence public policy. Silence can protect injustice as effectively as bad theology can.

Yet the opposite answer—that Christians should control the institutions that shape society—recreates the temptation this series has traced from Christian empire through colonialism, racial slavery, segregation, Christian nationalism, dominion theology, and contemporary political power.

Christianity therefore needs a theology that can enter public life without needing to possess it.

Jesus provides a starting point. In Mark 10, after his disciples argue about status, he contrasts their vocation with rulers who “lord it over” others. “Not so with you,” he tells them. Greatness is to take the form of service (Mark 10:42–45). The passage does not provide a modern theory of democratic government. It does something more fundamental: it denies Christians permission to treat domination as the ordinary model of Christian greatness.

That principle sits comfortably beside the Great Commandment. Love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor. The political meaning is not that government can be reduced to sentiment or that Christians must agree with everything their neighbors believe. It means the religious outsider never becomes merely an obstacle to Christian purposes. The treatment of the neighbor who rejects Christian teaching remains a theological test of Christian power.

Jeremiah offers another useful image. Judean exiles in Babylon are told to seek the peace and prosperity of the city in which they live (Jeremiah 29:7). They are commanded to contribute to the welfare of a society they do not own and whose rulers do not share their covenant.

That may be one of the clearest biblical models for Christian public responsibility in a pluralist democracy: seek the good of a city without believing the city has to belong to you.

A constructive theology of power can begin there.

It first requires truthfulness about social location. This does not mean theology becomes autobiography or that claims to universal truth disappear. It means theologians stop granting dominant traditions an exemption routinely denied to Black, womanist, liberation, Indigenous, Asian American, or postcolonial theology. Everyone reads scripture from somewhere. Institutions shape what appears obvious, what questions seem important, what experiences count as evidence, and which assumptions remain invisible.

Disclosure of location is therefore not ritual self-accusation. It is epistemic discipline. A theologian writing from within a powerful church, university, denomination, nation, race, class, or political coalition should ask what that location makes easier to see—and what it rewards the theologian for not seeing.

A theology that does not need the throne must also make power itself a theological subject.

Christian........

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