Is your Bible Anti-Black? Pt. 2

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” and “white” refers to the colors, while “Black” and “White” refer to historic racialized communities.

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרֽוּשָׁלָ֑יִם כְּאָֽהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔ר

כִּֽירִיע֖וֹת שְׁלֹמֹֽה

אַל־תִּרְאֻ֨נִי֙ שֶֽׁאֲנִ֣י שְׁחַרְחֹ֔רֶת שֶׁשְּׁזָפַ֖תְנִי הַשָּׁ֑מֶשׁ בְּנֵ֧י אִמִּ֣י נִֽחֲרוּ־בִ֗י שָׂמֻ֨נִי֙ נֹֽטֵרָ֣ה אֶת־הַכְּרָמִ֔ים כַּרְמִ֥י שֶׁלִּ֖י לֹ֥א נָטָֽרְתִּי

—Song of Songs 1:5-6

This is essay two of two for the mini-series “Is Your Bible Anti-Black.” In the first essay, I engaged renowned Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney’s critique of how the King James Version renders Song of Solomon 1:5. Whereas the original Hebrew literally reads “black am I and beautiful,” the KJV’s translators choose to write “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” Reflecting on this glaring difference, Gafney argues that the KJV’s translators “could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].” The KJV’s rendering is wrong, Gafney contends, and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page. Accepting Gafney’s argument, I extended her work by detailing the KJV’s cultural and racial context and noting how modern versions compare to it.

In this essay, I return to Song of Solomon to offer an interpretation of verses five and six. I again think with Dra. Gafney, following her lead as I listen to this ancient Song’s textual rhythms. Join us.

Setting the Stage: Song of Solomon 1:1-4

Song of Solomon shocks its readers. Whereas the song never explicitly mentions God, it repeatedly and exuberantly details human love. And this is not the love of mere friends. As Gafney observes, the text focuses on “the love of two people expressed sensuously, sexually.” More specifically, the song celebrates “the love of and between two black bodies—offered as scripture and revelation.”

The first black body the song introduces is the text’s lead woman. She is the focus of our passage and essay. And she immediately makes her romantic desires known.

May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is sweeter than wine.

Your oils have a pleasing fragrance,
Your name is like purified oil;
Therefore the young women love you.
 Draw me after you and let’s run together!
The king has brought me into his chambers. (NASB, vv. 2-4)

Intoxicating kisses, fragrant oils, an alluring name, romantic flight, and a royal bed chamber—these are the Song’s opening themes.

The beloved declares her ballad publicly. She does not conceal her sensuous love. For immediately after we read her love song, an enthusiastic, supportive chorus enters the text, greeting us and the beloved with a celebration of her imminent sexual union.

We will rejoice in you and be joyful;
We will praise your love more than wine.
Rightly do they love you. (NASB, v. 4)

All are joyful. All rejoice. All celebrate a woman’s sensuality and sexuality. All are elated about the beloved’s foreshadowed lovemaking with her beloved.

A Beautiful Black Woman: Song of Solomon 1:5

This women that the chorus celebrates as rightly loved, what does she look like? Verse five tells us.

I am black and beautiful,
You daughters of Jerusalem,
Like the tents of Kedar,
Like the curtains of Solomon. (NASB, v. 5)

As noted above, the Hebrew text literally reads “black am I and beautiful” (שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה). The order matters. As Gafney writes, the verse “emphasizes [the woman’s] blackness by opening with it.” Gafney makes a related point elsewhere: When describing the woman—the one her beloved declares the “most beautiful among women” (v.8)— “[b]lack is the first word.”

Like her beloved, the Song’s lead woman champions that black is beautiful. “I am black and beautiful.” The word “and” translates the text’s vav conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה. This basic conjunction stresses blackness’s inherent beauty. Indeed, Rabbi Marcia Falk’s translation conveys the text’s tone: “Yes, I am black! And radiant/O city women watching me.”

The Song’s lead women again highlights her blackness in verse five by comparing it to the tents of Kedar, or Qedar, and Solomon’s curtains. This analogy, Gafney notes, reveals that the women’s body “is blacker than your average brown-to-black ancient Afro-Asiatic person.” The reference to Qedar tells readers that the woman “is black as a black-haired goat.” As Gafney explains, the Song’s woman is “as black as the black goats’ hair tents woven from the famed goats of Qedar renowned for their beautiful black coats in antiquity.” Gafney’s use of “renowned” is important. As Old Testament scholar Aubrey Buster notes, the Qedar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains “were considered to be striking and beautiful” in the woman’s culture. Hence, the Song’s lead woman affirms that her blackness is strikingly beautiful, worthy of renown and communal adulation like Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. Thus, verse five starts and ends by emphasizing the woman’s beautiful black body.

Many commentators and translators miss verse five’s celebration of blackness. Gafney laments this trend among translators:

[A] myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with “I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely.” Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says. (emphasis added)

Numerous translators render verse five’s opening vav conjunction “but,” not “and.” This interpretive choice injects an aesthetic distance between blackness and beauty. Nothing in verse five requires this distance. Moreover, and more important: the conjunctive-vav’s common “and” meaning and the positive, culturally loaded invocations of beautiful black goats, tents, and curtains provide immediate linguistic and contextual grounds against this disjunctive, distancing reading.

One respected Old Testament scholar overlooks the previous two points. Tremper Longman argues that readers face a choice at verse five: “Should we translate the waw as a conjunctive ‘and’ or a disjunctive ‘but”?” For Longman, the answer is simple. “The context is actually quite clear. She is not happy with her darker-than-normal skin, so the disjunctive makes sense.” The contrast between Longman’s reading and those of Gafney and Falk is striking. So is Longman’s silence about the rest of verse five. He says nothing about Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. It’s as if they weren’t there.

Gafney, Buster, and Falk read verse five as celebrating blackness and its beauty. Longman reads it as lamenting “darker-than-normal skin.” If verse five doesn’t’ drive Longman’s interpretive decision and commentary, what does? His reading of verse six.

Sun Gazed: Song of Solomon 1:6

Desire and joy fill verses two through five. A choir praises the woman after her opening declaration of longing to be with her beloved. Then the woman celebrates her blackness. She is black and beautiful like Qeadar’s famous tents and Solomon’s splendid curtains. Given the prevalence of parallelism in Hebrew songs and poetry, we might expect the chorus to support the woman’s celebration of blackness with their own hymn of praise. But the text doesn’t meet this expectation. Instead, it introduces the Song’s first rebuke.

The translation I’ve used throughout renders verse six thus:  

Do not stare at me because I am dark,
For the sun has tanned me.
My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB, emphasis in translation)

This translation doubly obscures verse six’s first sentence. The word translated “dark” carries the connotation of “black” from verse five. Likewise, the sentence contrasts people’s staring/looking with the sun’s staring/looking. The KJV captures both details: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.” Still, the word “stare” better expresses the Hebrew meaning involved in the woman’s rebuke-saturated command to the daughters of Jerusalem. Gafney writes, “It seems the city-women can’t keep their eyes off of her. They keep staring, looking her up and down.” These stares aim to pierce, penetrate, and judge. Again Gafney:

The shout out to the daughters of Jerusalem is an acknowledgement that our bodies are always under scrutiny. We are weighed and measured, consumed and labeled acceptable or defective in a glance. The black beauty Shahorah—we can call her Ebony, Raven, Jet or Onyx—Shahorah says you call me black like that’s an insult. Let me tell you, I am black, as silky-black as the luxurious coat of a Kedari goat, like mink, only blacker.

The Song’s lead woman told the daughters of Jerusalem that she was black and beautiful in verse five. Now she tells them, Gafney writes, “don’t stare at me because my beautiful black skin has gotten even darker while I bask in the sun.”

The sun gazed upon the Song’s black woman and made her darker, gave her a tan. Some modern readers assume that the text’s implied talk of tanning entails that the Song’s lead woman is but a white woman with a tan. This reading projects a white normative gaze onto the text and ignores verse five’s repeated discussion of rich blackness. It also elides the truth that black-skinned people tan. Gafney discusses personally suffering this elision.

I am regularly asked to give an account of my presumptively alternate biology, imagined to be fundamentally different from the interrogator’s own normative experience of being human.

“Can you tan?”

“Do you burn?”

I am expected to answer when questioned. To explain myself and my race. Public access to my body is unquestioned.

And deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty.

The false assumption that Black people don’t tan which regularly confronts Gafney also occupies a place in study bibles. As Gafney recalls, “Some say...doesn’t verse 6 say that she is sunburned, therefore, she can’t be black – that’s what the notes in my study bible says.” For some readers, “being black and sunburned [is] impossible, as impossible as being black and beautiful” (emphasis in original). Even Tremper Longman joins Gafney in rejecting the assumption that the Song’s lead female is a tanned or sunburned white woman. “The woman was Semitic and likely had a dark complexion to start with. The darkness about which she complains is not her natural skin color but a tan or burn.”

Yet the differences between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings remain sharp. Longman says that the woman “likely had a dark complexion to start with.” Gafney, following verse five’s emphasis on the woman’s blackness, highlights that the woman was black and “revels in the blackness of her skin.” Longman says that the woman “complains” about her “tan or burn.” Though Gafney acknowledges that “the woman in the text ruined her beautiful black Qedari complexion with a sunburn,” Gafney never says that the woman complains about her sunburn. Instead, Gafney says that the woman “embraces the kiss of the sun” while denouncing the Jerusalem women’s glares and how her family treated her. The women’s glares are “reminder[s] that everyone won’t look at [black skinned people] and see the glory that God created.” These glares carry negative class associations with field labor. And her family’s mistreatment of her has left the Song’s lead woman unable to care for her own vineyard—for herself.

Let’s unpack the previous point. Verse six’s second half reads:

My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB)

Though the woman claims her mother, she doesn’t claim her brothers. They are “my mother’s sons.” Similarly, although the woman says her mother’s sons were angry with her, she doesn’t explain why. The text doesn’t say she did anything wrong. It does, however, stress that these sons made her care for the vineyards. The joy of agency is missing; the cruelty of coercion is present instead.   

This is not the only time the Song’s lead woman describes her “brothers” controlling her body. In the Song’s final chapter, we read them saying:

We have a little sister,
And she has no breasts;
What shall we do for our sister
On the day when she is spoken for?

If she is a wall,
We will build on her a battlement of silver;
But if she is a door,
We will barricade her with planks of cedar. (NASB, 8:8-9)

In these verses, men alone speak. We do not hear the Song’s lead woman discussing her body. We do hear the men referring to the woman’s genitals as a “wall” (i.e., premarital chastity) and a “door,” a common Near Eastern image that alluded to a prostitute. As Gafney writes, the “brothers” work “to constrain and confine her.”

And this male coercion returns us to it’s first appearance in the song, verse six. For there we read that the lead woman has not cared for her own vineyard—her own body. Because her “brothers” forced her to labor outdoors, the sun burned her. It harmed her beautiful black body. And in act of resistance, the woman rebukes the Jerusalem’s daughters for trying to inflict similar pain by staring at her. She is black. She is beautiful. She is unashamed of herself and refuses to internalize negative class associations with field labor. And she is tending to her vineyard, she is loving her body and her beloved. “It is time,” Gafney writes, “to tend our own vines and their sweet, luscious, intoxicating fruit.”

Conclusion

Let’s consider one final contrast between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings. Longman argues that “In spite of some ambiguities, [Song of Song 1:5-6] is clear about two matters: (1) the woman considers her dark skin unattractive, and (2) her dark skin is not her natural skin color but rather the result of a tan.” Both claims run afoul of verse five’s celebration of blackness, which verse six never negates. Taken together, Gafney argues, these verses teach that “Black is beautiful. Blackness is beauty. Blackness is worshipful. All blackness is divine. It is the imprint of the holy darkly radiant God in whose image we are created.”

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Is Your Bible Anti-Black

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” refers to the color while “Black” refers to the historic racialized community.

“Our theology never comes from a blank space.””

— Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Atando Cabos

“The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim…Why did [Black beauty] need public articulation to exist?””

— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Christians are people of the Book, the library of sacred texts that we call the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the inspired word of God. They are, as the apostle Paul writes, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). And so, they are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”

Yet none of these inspired texts was God-breathed through a modern language. Each was originally etched in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic—not Mandarin, Arabic, Portuguese, or Spanish. Unless you read the former ancient languages, you encounter the sacred page through the veil of translation.  

But even translators of the original biblical languages encounter scripture through a veil. What New Testament scholar C. René Padilla writes about interpreters applies to translators: “Interpreters do not live in a vacuum. They live in concrete historical situations, in particular cultures. From their cultures they derive not only their language but also patterns of thought and conduct, methods of learning, emotional reactions, values, interests and goals.” Translators are socially situated readers and interpreters. Their contexts and commitments—to say nothing of character—infuse their handling of Scripture. As Padilla argues, “whenever interpreters approach a particular biblical text they can do so only from their own perspective. This gives rise to a complex, dynamic two-way interpretive process depicted as a ‘hermeneutical circle’, in which interpreters and text are mutually engaged.”

Recognizing these dynamics, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley calls for Bible publishers to hire multi-racialized and multi-ethnic translation teams. McCaulley writes:

I’ve discovered that people of color and women have rarely led or participated in Bible translation. On one hand, this doesn’t trouble me much. It is hard to mess up the story of the Exodus, distort the message of the prophets or dismantle the story of Jesus. It is all there in every English translation.

On the other, I believe it matters who translates the Bible, and that more diverse translation committees could inspire fresh confidence among Christians of color….

The insight, experience and skills of female scholars might open our eyes to nuances that a committee of all men might miss. Christians for whom English is a second language might highlight ways in which our word choice is unclear. Similarly, [B]lack Christians may call to mind neglected aspects of the text. 

McCaulley supports his call for diverse translation teams by considering English translations of Exodus 12:38, beginning with the King James Version. When Israel leaves Egypt, “a mixed multitude went up also with them” (KJV). McCaulley notes that “Nearly all scholars agree that the original Hebrew meant to highlight that an ethnically diverse group of people left Egypt with the Jewish people. This group could have included Egyptians and other ethnic groups, such as the Cushites.” So, whereas “The translation ‘mixed multitude’ isn’t necessarily wrong,” McCaulley argues, “It simply does not communicate the power of this simple verse in a way that would be understood by those reading today. If I were translating the passage, I would say that ‘an ethnically diverse crowd’ went up out of Egypt.”

McCaulley’s alternative translation is a mild corrective of the KJV. He does not deem it wrong nor unfit for its time. Instead, McCaulley argues that it and modern English translations that speak of a “mixed multitude” leaving Egypt (e.g., ESV) neglect linguistic frequencies that carry important conceptual and contextual insights for today’s English readers.

I affirm McCaulley’s call for racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in translation teams and his proposed alternative translation of Exodus 12. I’d like to extend both by arguing that anti-Black racist ideas have crept into English Bible translations. To see what I mean, let’s turn our attention to the King James’s translation of a verse in Song of Solomon.

Is Blackness Beautiful?

Song of Solomon begins on an exuberant note. After noting that it is the song of songs and belongs to Solomon, the song’s primary female figure professes her enthusiasm to be with her beloved.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers…(vv. 2-4)

A supportive, enthusiastic chorus enters the text to celebrate this highly anticipated joining. “We will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee” (v. 4). All is right. All rejoice.

The text turns to the female’s first self-description. Here’s the original Hebrew, reading right to left:

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָ֑ם כְּאָהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔רכִּירִיע֖וֹת

Here’s how KJV reads: “I am black, but comely [beautiful], O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon” (v. 5) Those who read Hebrew will recognize that the KJV has failed its readers.

The failure comes in verse five’s opening. The KJV’s translation team renders “שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה” as “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” But as Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney observes, this translation choice is grammatically impossible. The conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה means “and”—not “but.” Moreover, as Gafney argues, because there isn’t a “but” in Hebrew, authors writing in Hebrew must compile “a bunch of stuff to make a disjunction”; they can’t simply use a conjunction that means “and.”

Gafney realized these linguistic truths as a child. From a young age, she loved learning languages and desired a more direct relationship with the biblical text. As she compared the Hebrew and KJV, she saw “it was wrong in the King James Bible that I grew up with, where it said, ‘I am black but beautiful.’” This sparked a second realization:

The people translating [that passage] could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].     

McCaulley’s alternative translation of Exodus 12:38 mildly corrects the KJV’s. Gafney’s alternative translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 is a damning corrective of the KJV. It highlights that the KJV’s rendering is wrong—and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page.

The KJV’s Racial Context

Gafney claims that the KJV’s translation team injected their anti-Black sentiments into the KJV. For many, this claim is jarring. Congregations that use the KJV rarely discuss the translation’s racial context (or content). The same holds for academic treatments of the text. David Lyle Jeffery’s, Alister McGrath’s, and David Norton’s books on the KJV say nothing about the text’s racialized context (or content). None have an index entry on “race,” “whiteness,” or “white supremacy”—let alone a sustained discussion about the anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5. Though from different parts of the globe—Canada, Ireland, and England, respectively—none of these racialized white authors ensured their books addressed the KJV’s racial dimensions. What Gafney noticed as a youth, they overlook in their mature academic writing.

Given these ecclesiastical and scholarly omissions, a word about the KJV’s racial context is in order. Let us consider two aspects of this context: international anti-Blackness and anti-Blackness in contemporary English literature and theatre.

Starting in the fifteenth century, a racial scale that prioritized “whiteness” informed European imperialism. The first recorded slave auction makes this clear. Reflecting on the year 1444, Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara writes:

[On] the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.

All depicted are slaves; not all are equal. Some are “white,” and therefore “fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” Others are “less white like mulattoes,” and, apparently, deserve little discussion. Others still are “black,” and hence “ugly”—as if they had come from Hell itself. Here is a scale that advances white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

European colonizers repackaged and disseminated Azurara’s scale as they constructed pigmentocracies—governments for and by those deemed “white.” Historian C.R. Boxer notes that, although Portugal and Spain respectively granted mesticos and mestizos a positive colonial status, “both Iberian empires remained essentially a ‘pigmentocracy’ . . . based on the conviction of white racial, moral, and intellectual superiority—just as did their Dutch, English, and French successors.” Race scholar and sociologist Howard Winant similarly observes that these European colonial powers believed they were “the whites, the masters, the true Christians.” And historian Winthrop Jordan succinctly captures this trend among the British, highlighting that, during the seventeenth century, English colonists treated “Christian, free, English, and white” as metonyms. For them, each word was equivalent.

The racialized language Jordan details has antecedents in English literature that’s contemporary with the KJV, which was published in 1611. In 1578, the widely read English travel writer George Best offered a damning account of “the Ethiopians blacknesse.” While discussing his Artic voyage, Best argued that, because Ham had sex on the Ark, God cursed Ham and his descendants to be “so blacke and loathsome that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.” Thus, Best championed a racialized curse theory which linked Blackness to ugliness and hypersexuality. Similar anti-Black ideas populate William Shakespeare’s plays.

The first Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is Aaron, the evil, deceptive, hypersexual, murderous Moor in Titus Andronicus (1594). The most famous Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is also a Moor: Othello (1604). Iago, Othello’s ensign, despises the Black Othello for marrying the White Desdemona. “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/Hath leaped into my seat,” Iago claims. And while talking to Desdemona’s father, Iago says Othello is “an old black ram/…tupping your white ewe.” Iago later tricks Othello into believing that Desdemona has betrayed him. Before Othello kills Desdemona, he cries, “Her name that was fresh/as Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black/As mine own face.” After Othello learns that he unjustly killed his wife, Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant, declares: “O! the more angel she. And you the blacker devil.” The Tempest’s (1611) Caliban also recapitulates the conceptual linking of Blackness and Satan that filled European theatre. Caliban is the bastard child of an African witch from a “vile race” and a demon. Caliban is also hypersexual.

Other English playwriters also employed anti-Black ideas and images. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605) is especially important for our discussion. Commissioned by King James I, Jonson’s play was the most expensive production made in London. Premiering in the luxurious Whitehall Palace, the play is the story of twelve ugly African princesses of the river god Niger. The princesses learn that they can be “made beautiful” if they go to “Britannia,” for there the sun “beams shine day and night, and are of force/ To blanch [make white] an Æthiop, and revive a corpse.” White women, including Queen Anne, played the Black princesses. How? They used blackface.

White supremacy and anti-Blackness occupied a privileged place in European imperialism and English literature and theatre. Shakespeare and Jonson composed and presented plays that drew upon, shaped, and perpetuated anti-Black and pro-White English sentiments. These international and cultural realities were pillars of the KJV’s racial context. 

Returning to the Song of Solomon

The KJV’s anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 reflected its cultural context. It also shaped other cultures around the globe and across the centuries. The U.S. is a case in point. As historian Mark Noll argues, the KJV was the U.S.’s national book in the nineteenth century. Biblical language and allusions filled U.S. public discourse, and “the vast majority of public Bible references came from a single translation”—the KJV. It was this translation that filled debates about the U.S.’s slavocracy and global racialized chattel slavery. Moreover, it was this translation that became a staple in African American congregations and homes. Recall that Wilda Gafney grew up on the KJV. So did Esau McCaulley.

I grew up in a [B]lack Baptist church that revered the King James Version (KJV). Whenever it was read aloud, the congregation rose to its feet. But the KJV was more than a book read on Sunday. It shaped the culture of Southern black Christianity. Its thees and thous permeated our parents’ extemporaneous prayers. It marked the rhetoric of our most powerful preachers.

McCaulley argues that his experiences are common for Black Christians in the North or South. “If Flannery O’Connor can say that the South is Christ-haunted, then we can say that [B]lack Christianity is haunted by King James.” We hear this haunting hum in James Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s books and essays.

The KJV may also haunt modern English Bible translations of Song of Solomon 1:5. Consider these twenty-six translations (emphasis added):

Like the KJV, fourteen of the twenty-six versions offer a grammatically impossible translation with “but.” Four others offer a similarly impossible translation of “yet.” Only eight versions correctly translate the text’s “and.” Consequently, eighteen of these modern English translations—an arresting sixty-nine percent—give readers a wrong translation that perpetuates an anti-Black idea about beauty that the original Hebrew rejects. Thus sayeth the Lord, indeed.

Black is Beautiful

Biblical translations matter. They help or hinder our ability to encounter God and creation. They rebuff or retrench idolatry. They foster or fizzle love of self and neighbor. Song of Solomon teaches that black is beautiful. The Song’s primary female figure is beautiful and black. There is no contrasting conjunction here. Rightly encountering God and creation require seeing and feeling this truth. So does rebuffing the historic idolatry of whiteness. So does Black self-love and love of our Black neighbors. A diverse translation team populated by members with the lived experiences, communal ties, and interpretive skill of a Wilda Gafney would empower English Bible readers to experience and celebrate these God-breathed truths.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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We Speak Spanglish ¿Y qué?

My parents are from Mexico but they have lived in the U.S. for over 35 years. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and have lived most of my life in a predominantly Latino community. I am also a Spanish professor. This is the lens from which I am writing.[1]

My dearest Spanglish, 

They despise you. They think you’re an abomination, a creature birthed from insufficiency and miseducation. They punish you in Spanish class and beat you in English class. Dicen que eres un bastardo, un malparido.  

“¡Habla bien! ¿Por qué hablas mocho? No se dice aplicación, se dice solicitud. No se llama librería, se llama biblioteca. Deja de decir esas barbaridades – jangear, mapiar, lonchar, marketa – Dios mío, le vas a provocar un paro cardiaco a la grandísima, estimadísima y respetuosísima Real Academia Española. ¿Qué diría tu abuela? Mira como se ríen de ti tus tías en México. Tu existencia es un insulto, una vergüenza. No maltrates a nuestra hermosa lengua con tus medias palabras. El idioma se respeta y tú, mentado Spanglish, eres un irrespetuoso”. 

That’s what they say, querido Spanglish. But I… I love you. You’re the language of my people, birthed from love and sacrifice. Tu existencia brotó in our communities como las estrellas brotan en el cielo. And when I hear you, I recognize myself and when I utter your words, I know I’m at home, en esa casa that my parents built con tanto sacrificio en una tierra desconocida.  

They insist, querido Spanglish, que no existes, but languages are not formed in the cradle de las academias reales. You are not held hostage by official institutions; you are held in the arms of your people and rest on the lips de tu gente.  

Tu descendiente, 

La Chicana.

Ask ten people in the U.S. Latina/o community what they think of Spanglish and you might obtain ten different answers, but their responses will never be dull. The use of Spanglish provokes emotionally-charged reactions that elicit everything from joyful expressions to furious replies. Renowned Mexican author Octavio Paz once said that Spanglish was, “neither good nor bad, but abominable” (Ni es bueno, ni es malo, sino abominable). Carlos Varo, a Spanish-Puerto Rican author called Spanglish a chronic illness, and Eduardo Seda Bonilla claimed that it was a colonial crutch, a linguistic form that is “characteristic of colonial situations where there is an attempt to eradicate and lower the language and culture of a subjugated nation”[2]. Still today, for many people, Spanglish represents just another form in which colonial English is encroaching into our space. Spanglish, perceived in this vein, is a contaminated form of Spanish that is no longer recognizable, one that bears the violence of colonial traces.

Nevertheless, there are those who vehemently support the use of Spanglish and claim that it enhances their linguistic repertoires. When the question, “Why do some people speak Spanglish” was posed on Quora, a person responded, “Because it’s fun! I enjoy saying that my daughter is malcriada, she had a huge berrinche this morning’ rather than ‘my daughter is badly behaved, she had a huge tantrum this morning’ Spanglish is more fun than either language by itself.”[3]

So, what is Spanglish? Well, linguistically, Spanglish has different manifestations. Perhaps the one most distinguishable is code-switching, when the speaker alternates between English and Spanish in a single conversation. Calques and loan words are also common in Spanglish phraseology.

1. Code-switching: Fíjate que ayer I went to the store y me compré muchas cremas that were on sale

2. Calques are literal translations, such as te llamo pa’tras (I’ll call you back; te llamo después), tener buen tiempo (to have a good time; pasarla bien), hacer decisiones (make decisions; tomar decisiones)

3. Loan words: lonchar (to have lunch; almorzar), el mol (the mall; el centro comercial), friser (freezer; congelador) mapear (to mop; trapear), checar (to check; revisar), breik (break; descanso), brecas (car brakes; frenos)

Regardless of whether you personally love or hate Spanglish, it is important to acknowledge that Spanglish, similar to all languages, is rule-governed, guided by grammatical and social principles. Speakers of Spanglish abide by certain rules, albeit unconsciously, just as native speakers of Spanish and English construct sentences with ease without being cognizant of the grammatical rules that guide their speech. Read the following examples:

1. Fernanda wants el ice cream from the casa de my madre.

2. José se enojó and he gritó.

3. Lorena me va dar un raite once she’s done with work.

4. Estoy jugando soccer with Blanca.   

I surveyed twenty Spanglish speakers, asking them to identify the ones that sounded “wrong” to them and their answers revealed a high degree of consensus, as was expected. Although the four examples given above are all written using hybrid speech, not all sound right. Numbers one and two are not natural Spanglish expressions, while three and four represent normal incidences of code-switching. Interestingly, two people responded that all sentences were problematic because they were written in Spanglish, perhaps echoing what they’ve heard their whole lives – that Spanglish is incorrect.

In reality, Spanglish isn’t wrong or right, it just is, and perhaps that’s the beauty of it. Spanglish is patterned but these patterns can change over time and are extremely malleable. People can’t correct you in your Spanglish, the way they would with Spanish or English, for example. Spanglish is not a made-up language either. We didn’t make up Spanglish – Spanglish is a natural expression of who we are as bilingual and bicultural individuals living in liminal spaces. I can’t tell you how I learned Spanglish. I can tell you that I learned Spanish at home and English at school and that my life was not as linguistically compartmentalized as some might think because my friends spoke English, but also Spanish and my family spoke Spanish, but also English and I embraced that through Spanglish.

Spanglish, similar to formally recognized languages, has distinct varieties, or dialects. Ilan Stavans, who wrote an adaptation of Don Quixote in Spanglish and authored Spanglish: the Making of a New American Language (2004), explains,

“There is no one Spanglish, but a variety of Spanglishes that are alive and well in this country and that are defined by geographical location and country of origin. The Spanglish spoken by Mexican Americans in, say L.A., is different from the Spanglish spoken by Cuban Americans in Miami or the Spanglish spoken by Puerto Ricans in New York. Each of these Spanglishes has its own patterns, its own idiosyncrasies.”[4] 

Moreover, Stavans indicates that generational and geographical differences also impact the type of Spanglish that is spoken by each group. Similar to English and Spanish, Spanglish has many dialects that are influenced by a myriad of factors, including communities of contact, age, and social status.

I remember my cousins in Mexico exclaiming, ¿cómo pueden hablar así? when my cousins from the U.S. and I visited Mexico and spoke to each other in our comfort tongue. It wasn’t a question that denoted disgust, but admiration. They thought it was fascinating that we could switch between languages in the same sentence with such ease and they asked us to teach them, the same way they had taught us to speak “el idioma de la F”[5] but we couldn’t teach our Spanglish because we had acquired it organically as part of our identity as U.S. Latina/os.

I know many people in Mexico that speak English as a second language and Spanish as their native tongue, but they cannot produce Spanglish. Similarly, many native English speakers who learned Spanish as a second language are unable to speak Spanglish. Simply knowing both languages does not guarantee Spanglish proficiency. So, what is the breeding ground of Spanglish? Spanglish was born in the United States. It is in this country, in Latino communities, where it flourishes.

Dr. Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, a professor at UT Austin who has been studying bilingualism for decades claims that, “CS [code-switching] remains a stigmatized bilingual behavior, viewed as a failure on the part of the speakers to ‘control’ their languages […] Some see it as a lack of competence or even poor manners”.[6] Often times, the assumption is that speakers of Spanglish are lazy, deficient or ashamed of the Spanish language.

There’s a constant safeguarding of dual spaces and we are asked to split ourselves and to not “cross-contaminate.” This is an impossible request and one that should not be made. “To survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras,” affirmed Gloria Anzaldúa. English says, “Spanish is prohibited in my land” and Spanish replies, “Este es mi territorio, fuera el inglés” and Spanglish thrives, sin fronteras. Spanglish does not attempt to usurp either language; it is its own mode of expression. Do you criticize burritos for not being taco enough?

I told you earlier that I’m a Spanish professor pero yo no respeto el español because languages are not meant to be respected – people are. When you tell people that Spanglish es una forma incorrecta de hablar, you’re really telling them that who they are is a “wrong” version of themselves, one that should be rejected. I know it can be difficult for a lot of immigrant parents to accept that their children are culturally and linguistically different from them and, to a certain extent, I understand why so many first-generation Latina/os are resentful of Spanglish. However, we can’t forget the fact that there are millions of individuals who identify as Latina/o but were born and raised in the U.S. We were not raised in our family’s countries as monolinguals. We do not have the same culture as our parents, but mainstream U.S. culture does not represent us either. We’ve created our own spaces and have formed new cultural expressions that should not be viewed as tainted versions but as unique creations. Hablamos espanglish because it’s who we are.

“Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
”

— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

ABOUT DRA. ITZEL meduri soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel

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Footnotes

[1] Poem titled, “Querido Spanglish” by Itzel Reyes (2021)

[2] “Réquiem por una cultura: Ensayos sobre la socialización del puertorriqueño en su cultura y en ámbito del poder neocolonial” (1970).

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-talk-spanglish

[4] As quoted here: https://people.howstuffworks.com/spanglish.htm 

[5]  “El idioma de la F” is not an actual language. It is a playful way in which children could speak “in code” by adding the letter F to every vowel. For example, “te amo” would be “tefe afamofo”. I learned how to speak this “language” in Mexico and it was mainly used when we didn’t want the adults to understand our dialogue.

[6] As quoted on, “Love it or hate it, Spanglish is here to stay and it’s good exercise for your brain”  (2018).

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Pressure Cooker

This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

When I was a little girl

I would get up in the morning to get ready for school

Amma was already up, 

showered and dressed before the sun 

She had prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner 

before the day had begun

The monotonous routine of the Indian woman

Was the pillar of our household

When everything else was falling apart

The rich spices were strong and bold 

like coffee, the daily aroma functioning as an alarm

Flavors that burnt my nose 

but comforted my heart

The clunky metal pressure cooker was on the stove,

Yet again

Just like me, it was imported all the way from India

And just like me, it existed as a daily functioning member of this household

And just like me, it cooked consumed rice everyday

Not a day went by in my first 11 years of existence

that white basmati rice did not enter my system

The clunky metal pressure cooker became my nemesis

As it’s whistle blew it reminded me of a train

That had the capacity to steal me and take me faraway

Reminding me of how nothing ever felt safe

Amma.

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

And just like the white rice it cooked

The whiteness boiled inside of me

Pressurizing into a pristine product for others pleasure

I bathed in the waters of the pressure cooker thinking it would cleanse me

But now I feel dirtier than ever

pain was the corpse that i buried thinking it was dead

but pain isn’t a corpse it’s a seed

once it's in the ground and nourished

it sprouts up into nasty weeds and surprises you

There is value in my culture and I don’t want to throw it away

Throw it into the melting pot to let it boil and disintegrate 

A one way ticket to a faraway place

The train is waiting. 

The whistle is screeching. 

Next stop--your life long American dream.

Amma, I never was strong enough to open the lid and escape

Why couldn’t I have been strong enough?

Why couldn’t you have been strong enough for me?

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

White rice is not enough flavor for some

But paired with too much and suddenly 

you are overwhelming

A dangerous game people play

When they control their intake

Thinking they can tolerate more spice than they can handle

The aftertaste

Leaves an unpleasant mark on their face

Eyebrows furrowed

Lips puckered

Confusion is uncomfortably sour 

Regret floods in 

as they reach for a glass of water

Foreign flavors to them

But savory memories to me

That train will take them to a museum

Where they can gawk and gaze in amazement

But walk out the minute their eyes get tired of looking

Like a field trip where the kids have to go for school credit

But the minute they get off the bus

They are no longer at school

And therefore, 

done learning

Foreign concepts to them

But second nature to me

But if only that train were taking me to my utopia

Where nothing has to be sacrificed

And I wave goodbye to all my fears as they fade off in the distance

Fear of man

Fear of exclusion

Fear of abandonment

In this faraway land, 

chickappa and chickamma will send me Indian care packages

And I open them up with excitement instead of remorse 

In this faraway land,

I never get tired of eating Indian food

And I never complain

Because this time I won’t have to learn the hard way

What I had when I had it

In this faraway land,

The nuances of my culture are known and understood by all those around me

Like we were watching an old movie we had seen a hundred times

Nobody is even wondering what will happen next

But from memory, they annoyingly recite the next character’s lines 

In this faraway land,

My heritage is defended by my loved ones 

like one would argue their favorite superhero or sports team

And instead of our culture being like a set of clothes we could donate once it didn’t fit anymore

it would be our precious keepsake we tucked away to pass down to future generations

It would be intrinsically woven inside of us

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

You see, the white rice is boiling to be plain and simple

Affordable and safe

I am made into something digestible

Spicy flavors are dangerous and to be placed on the side

Eaten in the tiniest increments only if one so chooses

We put Jesus into the pressure cooker

And cook him into a white, fluffed up rice

steamed of any unnecessary and extra components

Now He is digestible

Culturally gnosticizing the gospel 

Extracting Him of his ethnicity 

A palatable Jesus, 

we take Him in aculturally

Generational sin has the nastiest fruit

Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

the tree that was planted must uproot itself and leave

far away from getting entangled in the same old roots

of the same old trees

and if all i am to you is red on the outside and white on the inside

than you just picked the wrong apple

and there begins your sin cycle

And we produce safety

Because once the rice is cooled down it's safe to eat, right?

Because they are safe,

I have to be pressurized

Day after day

Laughing and playing the same game

To protect myself in this melting pot we call tasty

Give up the charade

It's not a melting pot where every flavor stays the same

But a pressure cooker where whatever was left disintegrates

Washed away

Washed white

White washed

The American pressure cooker

Has lost its taste

And now I am the whistle screaming

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About Shreya Ramachandran

Shreya Ramachandran is a sophomore at Moody Bible Institute, studying Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She was born in India and moved to the United States when she was two years old. After many life transitions, Shreya is beginning to embrace her identity in Christ as an Indian-American woman. Being mestizo resonates with Shreya, as she has always lived on the borderlands of culture. Shreya shares: “I am blessed by the ministry at WOS, one that deals delicately with the nuances of culture in order to equip the Church and be the Church.”

Cuida tu testimonio: A public theology of repentance

When I was a child, my mother would always say to me, cuida tu testimonio (watch, or take care of, your testimony). Whether she was dropping me off at school or going to a friend’s house, this dicho served as a reminder to always be on my best behavior. As the years have passed, this saying has become a guiding principle in my life, and my understanding of it has grown more profound. While as a child it only meant to not do anything that would embarrass myself or my parents, today it represents living in a manner that is worthy of my God. Mi testimonio is my Christian witness. It is the evidence of the supernatural work of Jesus in my life and my most powerful evangelistic tool for a suffering world in need of a Savior.  Mi testimonio is an expression of the image of God in me. It is my attempt to live as God’s royal representative on this side of eternity. 

I have also come to believe that while this principle applies to individuals, it also applies to collectives such as businesses, organizations, and even religious institutions. When an individual or institution fails to abide by the principle cuida tu testimonio, the integrity of their testimony is compromised, and often discredited. I believe this is the crisis of the evangelical church that has resulted in the loss of the credibility of the Church’s prophetic witness in the public square today. Ed Stetzer observes that, “tempted by power and trapped within a culture war theology, too many evangelicals tied their fate to a man who embodied neither their faith nor their vision of political character. As a result, we are finally witnessing an evangelical reckoning.”[1]

My mother also used to say, dime con quién andas y te dire quién eres (tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are). The apostle Paul similarly warned the Church at Corinth, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’”[2] In the evangelical church’s desperate attempt to gain power, influence, and control through the veins of American democracy, it has lost the hearts of its people and in turn, compromised its public witness. And while not all evangelicals have engaged in these practices, we collectively bear the name and consequences of those who have. How then can the evangelical church regain its credibility so that it can once again be a transformative agent for the American conscience and the public square? I believe the answer lies in a public theology of repentance. 

The reality of the saying, cuida tu testimonio, is that while we seek to live in a manner worthy of God, there are times that we fall short of Gods calling on our life. In the same way, just as individuals sin from time to time, so also do religious institutions, as they are comprised of individuals. To this, mi iglesia pentecostal (my Pentecostal church) taught me that the Church’s altars are always open for anyone and everyone who is willing to repent for their sins, and that Jesus is ready to meet them in that sacred place to renew and restore them once again. It is in our brokenness and not our perfection that the confidence of nuestro testimonio lies. 

For the individual, the decision to repent from one’s sin is a central element of the gospel message; it is necessary to transform the human heart. For the collective, it serves to jumpstart the process of systemic and institutional change, which can be theologically understood as a form of “social sanctification.” The evangelical church’s adoption of a public theology of repentance has the potential to result in the restoration of the integrity of its public witness by living consistently with the very message it proclaims: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”[3]  

I imagine some Christians might have reservations about the evangelical church taking a position of humility by acknowledging its sins as counterproductive to the Church’s witness to the world. After all, the Church is meant to reflect the Kingdom of God as holy and set apart from the world. Therefore, to admit any type of fault would tarnish its character. However, I believe there is no act more Christian then that of repentance, whether individual or communal. In fact, the majority of the Bible is about a loving God who restlessly calls a rebellious people to repent from their sinful ways. Furthermore, if the Church does not model the central message of the Kingdom of God to this world, how then will the world ever learn what it means to repent from one’s sins and believe in Jesus Christ? 

Therefore, the most Christian response the evangelical church can practice to cuidar su testimonio and the credibility of the gospel message it proclaims is to repent. It must repent for placing its hope in false messiahs and partisan politics, for neglecting and suppressing the cries of black, brown, and minoritized communities, and for its companionship with white supremacy and its supporting leader(s) as exemplified at the Capitol insurrection. In embracing a public theology of repentance, the evangelical church has the opportunity to demonstrate to the world what it means to turn from sin, and even teach the world how to acknowledge and address its own historical evils through Christ’s message: “repent and believe.” In doing so, the evangelical church creates room for the Spirit to renew the credibility of the Christian message, restore the testimonio of the evangelical church, and enable the gospel message to produce spiritual transformation and social change. 

The people of Israel demonstrated this firsthand, as they knew that their public repentance would lead to the spiritual and social transformation of their community. It was only the righteous kings of Israel who were brave enough to acknowledge and properly respond to Israel’s sinful condition by removing the high places, tearing down the idols, cleansing the temple, and reestablishing their covenant relationship with God. This in turn led to the restoration of their community and the blessing of their nation. Repentance attained through the purging of evil, and belief proclaimed through the renewal of covenant relationship, the message of Christ to “repent and believe” is a timeless characteristic of what it means to be a Christian community. Should the evangelical church receive the call to “humble themselves, pray and seek God’s face, and turn from their wicked ways,”[4] perhaps then, the world will believe the gospel message they proclaim as good news indeed.

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About Daniel Montañez

Daniel Montañez was born in Visalia, CA to a Mexican mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is a Ph.D. student at Boston University in the area of Theology, Ethics, and Philosophy, and an adjunct instructor for the Latino and Global Ministries Program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the founder and director of Mygration Christian Conference, a non-profit organization that seeks to explore God’s heart through the stories of migration in the Bible. He is also the national director for the Church of God Migration Crisis Initiative, a ministry that seeks to provide church leaders with the biblical, pastoral, and ministerial preparation to positively and proactively respond to the crisis facing our immigrant communities in the United States. Daniel is dedicated to serving his Latino/a community at the intersection of the Church, the academy, and the public square.

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Footnotes

[1] Stetzer, Ed. “Evangelicals Face a Reckoning: Donald Trump and the Future of Our Faith.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, January 11, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/01/10/after-donald-trump-evangelical-christians-face-reckoning-column/6601393002/?fbclid=IwAR2rJ3hrI0ld4HHRUCok788ZvoPD6B7k3lkbU3UylAVed17ZAT9NUYNchJ8. 

[2] 1 Cor 15:33 (NIV)

[3] Mark 1:15 (NIV)

[4] 2 Chr 7:14 (NIV; paraphrased)

What We Forget

Advent is the season encompassing the four Sundays which precede Christmas. Traditionally for Christians these weeks mark the beginning of our year and are defined by themes of remembering and waiting. While these weeks are latent with meaning for all Christians, I want to suggest that, for white Christians who are growing to care deeply about racial justice and reconciliation, Advent can provide an especially helpful starting point for our discipleship.

Remembering and waiting. We remember the lineage of faith to which we belong, including the generations of God’s people who anticipated the coming of the Messiah. We hear the longing in Isaiah 40:10-11, “See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” And we wait as a people who expect our Savior’s return. We understand that life as we know it in a world groaning under sin will not last forever. A day will come when the will of God will be done on earth as in heaven.

What is it about these Advent themes that can help white Christians grow in our commitment to racial justice and reconciliation? Before exploring this question, we ought to acknowledge why so many of us need to mature in these areas. For as long as there have been white churches and Christians in this country, there has been a deficit in our discipleship. Time and again, we chose racial exclusion over embodied solidarity with the rest of Christ’s body. The segregation in our churches today is not the benign result of personal or cultural preference; its roots run deep through the soil of racism and racial supremacy.

Of course, this isn’t how most of us think about ourselves or our churches. But over the years, many Christians of color have warned us about our captivity to segregation and complicity with racial injustice. For example, in 1898 Rev. Francis Grimke, the African American pastor of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., pointed to the silence of most white Christians in response to the lynchings that ran rampant throughout the country. In his sermon he asserted, “Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister… This is the charge which I make against the Anglo American pulpit today; its silence has been interpreted as an approval of these horrible outrages.”

Why has it been so hard for white Christians to confess our conformity to this wicked status quo? In large part, it has to do with what it meant to become racially white. When my ancestors arrived in this country, they did not think of themselves in racial categories. They were immigrants from Sweden and Germany and they brought with them the particularities of their histories, culture, language, etc. But upon landing on these shores, they faced a new racialized reality in which those who were white had the greatest access to the American Dream. On the other end of that hierarchy were African American and indigenous people, those most likely to experience racial oppression.

In order to assimilate, my ancestors had to discard their cultural characteristics and pick up the more recent social construct of race. They had to become white. This exchange away from cultural particularity to racial homogeneity carried innumerable consequences. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, “Each new immigrant had to figure out how and where to position themselves in the hierarchy of their adopted new land. Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority.” Because the country’s racial hierarchy was built on the plunder and exploitation of Black and Native people, newly arrived immigrants internalized these forms of racism as a necessary feature of the path toward the country’s promises. But there were other implications as well which bring us back to Advent.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

When my ancestors became white, they were engaging in an act of forgetfulness. They set aside some of the important attributes which had defined previous generations in order to access power and privilege. This was the price of admision required by the racial hierarchy and it continues to exact its toll today.

We see this legacy of forgetfulness in how many white people struggle to talk about race and racism. When I facilitate racial reconciliation workshops, it is always the white participants who stumble when asked to describe their racial identity. The difficulties only increase when we begin considering the impact of the racial hierarchy. Rather than coming to these conversations with curiosity and humility, white Christians have often reverted to defensiveness, deflection, and denial: I never owned slaves! I have Black friends! I don’t have a racist bone in my body! We’re all Christians so we shouldn’t focus on our differences!

The forgetfulness of our race engenders a false sense of innocence. Because we have not remembered the cost - to ourselves and to our neighbors of color – of becoming white, we interpret our society with the kind of boot-strapping possibility only available to the privileged. If we think about racial segregation and oppression at all, it’s with a vague evaluation of someone else’s choice. We certainly don’t assume responsibility in this story; we are but innocent bystanders.

Only we’re not. And as Christians we ought to be quick to confess not our innocence but our susceptibility to sins of all kinds, including pernicious racial ones. As Isaiah admits in another common Advent passage, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” (Isa. 64:6) Why, for a people whose hope is so rooted in the grace of God which meets us as we confess our sins, is it so painful to acknowledge that we have, in the Apostle Paul’s language, conformed to the pattern of the world? We have forgotten.

Advent, with its invitation to remember, is the antidote that many of us need. As we approach our Savior’s birth, we are reminded of the danger posed to our faith by forgetfulness. We hear the stories of those like Simeon and Anna who recognized God’s Messiah precisely because they remembered. We hear the prophets pleading with God’s people to remember who they were - a sinful people in need of God’s comprehensive salvation.

If we listen closely enough, we’ll also hear the summons to remember our own troubled stories and histories. Advent beckons us to cast off our innocence and self-righteousness, to be done with the defensiveness, deflection, and denial which keep us from unity and solidarity with our sisters and brothers of color.

Remembering is not easy; there are reasons we’d rather forget. But as with every generation who has preceded us, when we choose to remember our histories – the losses, the complicities, the sins – we will also encounter the God has not never forgotten his people, who remembers his covenant with us. And with this memory newly refreshed, we can resolutely turn to the work of justice and reconciliation, freed of the forgetfulness and false innocence which has long kept us from our family in Christ.

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About David W. Swanson

David is the founding pastor of New Community Covenant Church, a multiracial congregation on the South Side of Chicago. He also serves as the CEO of New Community Outreach, a non-profit organization working to reduce causes of trauma and raise opportunities for equity.

David’s book, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Discipleship, is available now. Read more from David at his website, dwswanson.com.

The Future of Evangelicalism is Mestizo

As an Indian adoptee raised in Northeast Wisconsin, I grew up in a world of white faces. I was caught in between two communities, benefiting from the privileges of a white family, yet often sitting alone as the only person of color in a crowded room. Surrounded by white pastors, educators, and friends, my perception and imagination of the world were inherently shaped by a white lens. By “white,” I don’t mean to speak only to ethnicity, but imagination. Whiteness, in this way, is a theological and sociological construction in which people of all ethnicities and cultures may imagine the world. In this system, goodness, success, and power, are seen in approximation to how close one may come to mirroring this white identity. 

An honest analysis of American history reveals how whiteness is deeply embedded in evangelical practice. Since the first colonists arrived on the eastern shores, the evangelical church has borne witness to a nation governed by this white imagination, yet has intentionally remained silent and complicit. Through national genocide of First Nations people, the transatlantic slave trade, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and even in our current moment, this expression of evangelicalism has little to say about seeking justice and reparations for those who continue to be marginalized and oppressed in our nation. Instead, white evangelicals have embraced a faith centered around Christian nationalism. Rather than reckoning with our history, many have continued to believe the lie that America is a “beacon of light,” “a city on a hill” that will carry the Gospel into our modern world. 

As this history becomes more widely recognized, many scholars have argued it is necessary that we “follow Jesus out of evangelicalism” and into a “new Christianity.” This, of course, is one of many answers to the question frequently asked in recent years: is evangelicalism worth redeeming? 

In short, I do believe that the evangelical tradition is worth redeeming from its cultural heritage; and I believe evangelicals are already equipped with the theological tools to acknowledge and repent of our historical patterns of sin, both individual and systemic.

““God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers, the culture-makers.””

— Virgilio Elizondo

However, any future for American evangelicalism requires more than a simple denouncing of whiteness. In return, it must reconstruct something new. If evangelicalism seeks to be redeemed from a history of racism and nationalism, we must ask what it is being redeemed towards? In other words, to exclusively deconstruct evangelical practice is to eliminate evangelicalism as a tradition and move on to a new Christianity. To reconstruct, on the other hand, is to critique our tradition without abandoning it. It is to both claim and reckon with our history so we may be released into new possibilities — a new reality. As Brian Bantum summarizes, “This is important because in rightly seeing the de-formation, we can also see the lines of re-formation. We can see the textures of humanity and its possibilities in Christ’s person and work.”

This reality, I am convinced, is a mestizo evangelicalism: a tradition that is centered around a theology of belonging and community. This multi-ethnic vision is not antithetical to the theological commitments of evangelicalism, but rather it is a greater living-out of our core beliefs: the truthfulness of Scripture, the central, atoning work of Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the importance of evangelism. This, I believe, can be our evangelical witness for centuries to come: that we may be known as a faith that crosses racial and ethnic lines because of our shared unity in Jesus Christ. We may be known as a faith that disrupts dehumanizing racial binaries by embracing a Galilean Christ. 

In this reconstructing project we must remember, as Virgilio Elizondo wrote decades ago, this mestizo reality does not happen overnight. “God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers, the culture-makers.”

By God’s grace, this culture-shaping work was already begun by the saints who have gone before us. While white evangelicalism has centered around political dominance and cultural influence, the overlooked mestizaje of evangelicals in minority communities has been one of diligently sowing gospel seeds in the margins of society. This is the silent work of evangelicals serving in underprivileged neighborhoods, homeless shelters, prison ministries, and food pantries. It is the thousands of evangelical ministers who took up Martin Luther King’s call to march in Selma. It is the work of evangelicals who have faithfully sought to emulate the leadership and activism of those who have gone before us. It is evangelical pastors willing to condemn white supremacy and anti-blackness from the pulpit. It is the work not broadcasted on the news or written in headlines. It is the long-suffering work, the costly grace, of Christian activism.

In practice, this future looks like shared power and equity within vibrant, multi-ethnic communities.  As Dr. Eric Baretto notes, this future “puncture[s] the myth of scholarly objectivity and demonstrate[s] the persuasiveness and power of contextual theologies and readings.” In other words, hearing the Gospel preached and theology taught from a diversity of ethnic communities has the power to awaken evangelicals to a world of Christianity that extends far beyond their church buildings. This communal reading of Holy Scripture from beyond the reaches of the white imagination invites American evangelicals into the global practice of our tradition.

This vision looks like Black theologians tracing the themes of God’s liberative action alongside Latino/a theologians juxtaposing the experience of Jesus, a Galilean Jew, with “Mexican Americans living on the geographical and cultural margins of the borderlands.” It looks like reading Scripture corporately, not only in English but in Spanish, Hindi, German, Arabic, Latvian, and Greek. It is bringing our bodies, our full, ethnic self, and orienting ourselves toward one another in hope and faith. 

This is the work of moving from blindness to sight; from darkness to the full spectrum of color. It is in this moment that the world takes on a new form, words take on new meanings, and one’s perception of the world is seen in proximity to the greatness of the world around them.  

In America today, the events of 2020 have opened the eyes of many evangelicals. The dirty mud of whiteness has been wiped from their eyes and they are moving from blindness to sight. White evangelicals are listening to a theology that speaks to the terror Black Americans, Asians, and Latin@s continue to face in our nation. They are entering into something greater, a global tradition of evangelicalism that has stood for centuries. They are reimagining Christianity by reading God’s inspired word alongside their neighbors. Just a taste of this community leaves many craving more.

I have hope for my tradition because this work is faithfully being done. Across our nations, evangelicals at the grassroots are speaking up in their churches, their communities, and their institutions. As we protest, raise our voices with charity and grace, and love our neighbors as ourselves, may the tide of evangelicalism slowly turn away from whiteness and into the mestizo, Christ-centered tradition we have been called to. 

Amar D. Peterman is a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing his studies on American religious history. He is a featured writer at Ideos and his work is published in Sojourners, The Christian Century, Faithfully Magazine, Fathom, and more. Amar holds a B.A. in Theology from Moody Bible Institute. You can follow his work on his website or on Twitter: @amarpeterman

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