White Theology and White Power XIV

A series called White Theology and White Power would be historically irresponsible if it ended by suggesting that white Christians simply reproduced the racial, political, and economic systems surrounding them. They did not. Some defended those systems, many accommodated themselves to them, and others resisted them. The existence of those dissenters does not balance a moral ledger, nor does it excuse institutions in which they were often minorities. The countertradition matters for a more important reason: it demonstrates one of the central claims of this series. Social location influences theology without determining it. Power can make certain realities difficult to see, but it does not make moral vision impossible. The question, then, is what made correction possible.

The history suggests several answers. The Quaker movement provides an early example, although its story is slower and less heroic than popular memory sometimes allows. Friends did not begin with a unanimous antislavery position. Quakers owned enslaved people, participated in Atlantic commerce, and argued among themselves over slavery for decades. Brycchan Carey’s study of early Quaker antislavery shows a gradual and contested movement from unease toward corporate opposition.[1] That slowness is part of the theological lesson. Quaker principles did not automatically prevent Quakers from participating in slavery. What mattered was that dissenters could use the community’s own practices—testimony, conscience, equality before God, communal discipline, and sustained argument—to expose the contradiction between Christian profession and human bondage. Theology became reformative when it acquired mechanisms for turning its claims back upon the people who professed them.

Dominant communities, however, do not always discover their contradictions by themselves. Sometimes the people harmed by Christian institutions have to tell Christians what their theology has become. Frederick Douglass provides one of the clearest examples. In the appendix to his 1845 Narrative, Douglass distinguished sharply between what he called the Christianity of Christ and the slaveholding Christianity practiced around him. His criticism matters because it demonstrates something the category of countertradition can otherwise obscure: the moral correction of white Christianity was often driven by people whom white Christianity had failed to hear.[2] Black abolitionists did more than join a movement white Christians had already created. They challenged the paternalism, biblical interpretation, political caution, and racial assumptions of white abolitionists themselves. The countertradition therefore cannot be narrated as a story in which enlightened........

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