Postmodernity and African Americans

“We (African Americans) have been postmodern since 1619.” — Rod Garvin

Let me try to unpack this statement in this roughly written blog.

I’ve been reading some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s work lately. When Bonhoeffer came to America from Germany, the only church he felt preached the Gospel in New York City was Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem … a black church that preached the Social Gospel. He was so blown away by the church that it knocked his whiteness right off of him. It’s said that when he was in the Nazi prison camp he was constantly singing the great spirituals he had learned in Harlem.

North America: 1619.

In August of 1619, Captain Jope’s ships brings the first batch of African slaves to the shores of America. He trades them for food and supplies, and essentially starts the slave trade and the resultant history you probably know.

According to the quote above, this is when black’s became postmodern. White people look at “modernity” and they see the positives, such as “science”, “progress” and “autonomy from superstition” because we were the ones reaping the positive benefits from modernity. But there is a view “from below” of modernity and this view is mainly held by non-Westerners who associate “control”, “colonialism”, “imperialism” and “progress at the poor’s expense”, etc. with modernity. It is this “view from below”, specifically proported by the Global South, women and minorities that has helped create this postmodernity explosion, especially in the more social conscience segments of Christianity.

The postmodern movement isn’t just a reaction against the philosophical pursuits of modernity, it is a reaction … from a sociological perspective … against the modern cultural pride that arose out of assuming “we knew the right way!” There is/were consequences to assuming that human reason could figure out THE truth … and those consequences were felt by those we colonized.

John Franke tells the story of how he went to Africa to teach about postmodernity. As he started teaching on postmodernity, he was interupted by one of the African Profs, who reminded John that the very term “postmodern” is a white, Western term … the rest of the world is using “postcolonialism”. The association by the African prof is this: modernity = colonialism. I wrote a blog about how modernism set in play the devaluation of the Global South and of women in general. So, if you’re interested in some farther explanation, check it out.

Let me get practical … There’s a reason Barack Obama has thrived in the present postmodern context in America. And the reason is this: black America has been postmodern – valuing local story, inclusivity, seeing things in non-absolutist terms – since they had a forced landing on the shores. See, blacks can move in this context better than us whites … especially us white males. You can understand, then, why Obama is so hated by white, liminal modern, Republicans – for one, he’s black, and two, he’s a Democrat and three, he’s the very first postmodern President.And this is also the reason why so many modern Christians find to so HARD to accept that Obama is actually a believer, despite beautifully eloquent testimonies like this from the article, “Praying with President Obama.“

I know there’s a number of Republicans who read my blog (google analytics tells me the political party of those who read my blog … I know who you are … just kidding), so understand that I’m not saying that you should vote for Obama — we should vote our conscience — but I am saying that whites (especially of the Republican type) need to be more understanding of the context from which Obama comes.

In many white believers minds, Christianity can sort of associate with modernity, but Christianity can NOT associate with postmodernity, and so, they write Obama’s faith off, not realizing how offensive this is to their black brothers and sisters. We need to remember, or at least be understanding of how white “modernity” is interpreted by others. And one of the major “practical” indicators of how bigoted we can be is when we look at a man’s faith, like Obamas, and discredit it because it’s not like ours. I’m not assuming you do this … in fact, I’m sure you don’t judge people so narrowly! But, I’m sure that you, like me, have heard people look down on Obama’s faith because of some of his persuasions and don’t realize that in some aspects their practicing the very thing that has produced postmodernity.

As believers, we’re called to be incarnational. Incarnational doesn’t mean we accept everything in our context … in our culture. But it does mean, we – like Jesus did – enter the context with the intent to redeem both IT and those in it. Us white people can learn a lot from our black brothers and sisters as we learn to move in the postmodern context. We must learn. So, let me recommend a blog … http://postmodernegro.wordpress.com/

>Technomads Like to Quilt: A Sociological Look at Today’s Culture

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Pluralism is so 1950s.

Sociological pluralism assumes boundaries and solidified tribes. In the 1950s and before, there was an identification with specific groups, at the exclusion of other groups. For instance, you could be a Baptist. If you were a Baptist, you WERE NOT a Catholic. If you were a Mason, you were not an Elk.

Yet, the 1950s were not a monoculture; in other words, there wasn’t JUST Baptists, there wasn’t JUST Catholics, there wasn’t JUST Republicans, there were a plurality of different, defined Tribes. A monoculture would be JUST Catholics (think Rome) … or JUST Presbyterians (think Geneva) … or Amish (think Lancaster County [jk])and no other types of people groups; but America has been pluralistic (in the sociological sense) from it’s birth … until now.

Today, we live in fragmentation.

We still have groups, but those groups aren’t defined exclusively. You can be a Charismatic-Catholic, or a Moderate Republican, or like Brian McLaren, a “missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.” I think it’s even possible to consider yourself “gay” and “straight” all at the some time. Just kidding.

We’ve moved from the neatly defined groups/tribes of pluralism to the blending of fragmentation. In other words, we pull the parts we like from different groups without totally identifying with one group. We are like quilts. Or, another way of saying it, we’re like a mosaic.

From a sociological perspective, via Joseph Myers, humanity over the last 2000 years had gone from nomadic (before the New Testament) to agrarian (by “agrarian” I mean farmers … farm communities … what Sarah Palin would claim as “my people”) to becoming what Myers, and others, now term as “Technomadic.” Let me back up before I move forward.

Jesus grew up in the liminal age of nomadic culture. We are growing up in a liminal agrarian culture. Agrarian cultures are marked by (per Joseph Myers): geographic proximities (your personal relationships and your tribes are determined by geography so that those who AREN’T in your tribe are often disliked or even hated), exclusive ownership, settlement ( where we clearly define our goals, beliefs and our home) and the desire to control and maintain those relationships, our possessions, beliefs and homes.

While nomadic cultures are nonexclusive in their ownership (they see property as something to be shared for the next generation and even outsiders, etc), are rarely settled, have fluctuating personal relationships (they can move around with and interact with people who they may not like) and nomads like to collaborate with others, instead of controlling and maintaining what WE have.

Myer’s theory is that we are actually moving away from the traditional agrarian sentiments of tribalism, settlement, exclusive ownership and control, and we’re moving back to a new type of nomadic lifestyle that is being aided by globalization and technology … we are becoming/emerging as “Technomads.”

And in some sense, technomads can see aspects of Christ’s culture that Agrarians cannot understand. For instance, giving things away, giving things up and being unsettled are easier for nomads and harder for agrarians.

What I’m saying is this: many see our fragmentation as something bad. “You don’t believe anything strongly!” they say. “You can’t believe both of those things … that’s illogical!” they say. But, what Myers is suggesting, and I tend to believe, is that the fragmentation of beliefs that we see in our current culture is partly due to this new move back to the nomadic culture via technology and globalization. Again, we are moving away from a sense of exclusive tribalism and towards a more cooperative inclusivism. For better or for worse, it seems we are valuing belonging above – but not in exclusion of – belief.

We like to quilt. But moreso, we tend to like the fellowship that quilting can produce.

Push back! Do you disagree? Let me know!

A Christian Heathen

“Don’t work at the funeral home … you can’t serve God there.”

As a youngster who had his heart set on fire by God, I was given two occupational possibilities by the spiritual authorities in my life: the sacred vocations of either a Pastor or a Missionary. Anything else was considered missing out on God’s will … everything else was somehow “secular.”

I had witnessed the consequences that this “sacred and secular divide” idea had on my dad. He was told, by various people, that if he really wanted to serve God, he’d quit his job and serve full-time as a missionary. I’ve seen how he’s questioned his life, wondering if he’s wasted his life away in a “secular job”. I’ve seen how he has, at one time or another, felt like a second-class citizen of the Kingdom.

Good is the enemy of best, they say. And best is definitely not being a funeral director … or an electrician, or a chef, or anything other than a pastor or a missionary, they say. “You’re wasting your life”, they say.

Let me pause here, before I continue my soap-box ranting, self-justifying promotion. Let me explain the source of this supposed “sacred” and “secular” split.

The idea has it’s incipiency in Plato’s “Forms and forms.” For Plato, what we see, experience, touch, taste, etc. is a representation (a “form”) of the universal, perfect and ideal “Form”. The “form” is this worldly, while the “Form” is otherworldly, beyond man’s full comprehension (If you’re saying to yourself, “This sort of sounds like how I think about God.” … it’s because Christians hijacked Plato’s ideas. We like to imagine God to be the perfect “Form” of man … such speculation has littered Christian theology with all sorts of fun theological terms that are more often platonic than biblical.).

This separation between the real and the ideal was “neoized”, rethought, spun, and yet still made its way somewhat intact to the more recent Enlightenment as the division between “mind” and “matter”. Stanley Grenz writes, “This fundamental dualism affected the Enlightenment view of the human person as ‘soul’ (thinking substance) and ‘body’ (physical substance)”.

Starting to sound familiar?

Again, Christians hijacked the soul/body split and determined that, “God was out to save man’s soul.” Evangelism was about winning souls. Church was about strengthening the soul. Heaven was about the soul … and hell, even Hell was about the soul. The Church stood as the mediator between this world and the next. And Pastors (or missionaries) were thus at the top of the spiritual food chain, as the shepherd of our souls, who could rescue our souls from eternal torment.

And the tendency within Christianity is to overemphasize the soul at the great expense of the body and material things, assuming as we mistakingly do, that the two are actually separate. And although this starts another discussion on the nature of heaven and the resurrection, suffice it to say here that the Bible doesn’t separate body and soul as independent of each other, but as codependent and of inseparable value.

The bottom graph, borrowed from Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways, illustrates the dualism of the sacred / secular divide.

Based on this division, everybody working a supposed secular job will certainly be looked at as second-class citizens in God’s kingdom, after all, all your work is worldly, destined to be burned up at the last day. Essentially worthless.

Do you feel the weight this idea can have?

Ever wonder why Christians weren’t at the forefront of the environmental movement? Ever wonder why supposed Christian business men will often act godless Monday through Friday at their place of work? Every wonder why Christians are frightened by the sciences? Why so few Christians head social movements? Why we have so few great artists … so few great movies … so few great musicians? Part of the reason is that so many of these things supposedly fit into the category of “worldly” and “material” and so aren’t worth the time of the spiritual believer, “who should be winning souls and not worrying about stupid trees.”

I know. I’m making massive generalizations here and using characterizations that make this epic awesomeness of a blog seem gnashing and interesting … but if you can put up with the drama, I think I have a lesson of sorts.

The only problem with this sacred / secular split is that it’s not really biblical. As far as I can tell, Jesus is Lord of all … not just the Church or the mission field. Rob Bell writes, “This is why it is impossible for a Christian to have a secular job. If you follow Jesus and you are doing what you do in his name, then it is no longer secular work; it’s sacred. You are there; God is there. The difference”, writes Bell, “IS OUR AWARENESS.” He continues, “The goal isn’t to bring everyone’s work into the church; the goal is for the church to be these unique kinds of people who are transforming the places they live and work and play because they understand the whole earth is filled with the kavod of God.”

Post-dualism, or being a “Christian heathen” is represented by the chart below. (“Christian heathen” is my term that I’m using for flavor, but the term that should be used is what Hirsch and others are calling “missional.” Being missional represents that center area which sits at the crossroads of God, Church and World).

When I chose the funeral business, I chose so because I wanted to sit at the center of the “Jesus is Lord of All” Chart. I don’t know if the funeral business is what I’m going to do forever, but I … just like my dad … have lived the reign of Jesus at my job. If you’re a chef, pray the kingdom come. If you’re a Wal-Mart custodian, pray the kingdom come. If you’re a mother, live the light of Christ. If you’re a cubical occupying block in the system, only working for the cash, who is treated poorly by your boss, get your ass out of there and find something better. Seriously, it’s about finding what you love and doing it for Jesus.

I like to call myself a “local missionary.” I’m not a foreign missionary. I’ve been to Africa, but didn’t stay. I honestly felt God’s calling to come back here, to Parkesburg. Yes, I felt called to be a funeral director for a time, working with my family at our family owned business, the Wilde Funeral Home. I’m a fully licensed, sixth generation, epic funeral director missionary guy. Bell writes, and I concur, “Missions then is less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there.”

And it’s taken me a while, but I’ve learned that Jesus isn’t so much concerned with where I’m at, as much as he is concerned with who I am. And I like to think that I am a child of God who sits at the intersection of God, the church and world, “sanctifying the everyday.”

The Kingdom is not one dimensional! The Kingdom of God spreads to every tribe, people and nation, and it also spreads to every area of life. : )

 

>Leaders in a Postmodern World

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I don’t like generalizations. They produce undue characterizations, glass ceilings and severe marginalizations. Nevertheless, no matter how experienced / educated we become, generalizations will always remain part of how we relate with the world. Robert Dunbar believes that the human person / human brain only has the maximum capacity to understand /experientially know 150 people … everybody that we meet outside of those 150 will be relegated into a category and/or generalization that we’ve created from the milieu of the those 150. In other words, we can only know a small amount of people intimately … and everybody else we put into boxes, categorizations and generalizations.

In fact, Dunbar believes that it’s only the social geniuses that can comprehend / experientially know 150 people in their complexity without using generalizations. The rest of us have a much smaller limit before we start generalizing and stereotyping. So, even though I personally dislike generalizations, they are a necessary part of how we understand the world. And, being that I’m “socially challenged” (I’m definitely not in that social genius category), I unfortunately use stereotypes all too often.

One such generalization that I use — and I guess I’ve picked it up from books that I’ve read, as well as my experiences — is that men and women process and think differently. Men tend to process in boxes (we love generalizations). Our means of process is to place things neatly in categories, whereas woman’s means of processing is to place things in connections with other things. Men’s brains are like waffles and woman’s brains are like spaghetti. This different kind of processing explains why men tend to have a one track mind, where we focus on one thing until we solve it – and get annoyed when we are asked to “switch gears” — whereas woman tend to multitask and can focus on a couple things all at the same time.

Women tend to be like Proteus. Proteus was the Greek god who could take different forms … changing his identity as the situation suited him. Many women have that ability … I’ve seen it in action. It’s not that they are being dishonest and untrue to themselves … it’s that they can change from one thing to another in a matter of moments and still maintain their effectiveness and their identity. Men (me) tend to be like wrecking balls when it comes to changing … we can do it, but not without swinging back and forth for a while and destroying the stuff/people around us while we do so. Woman … unlike men … have a protean self.

Modernity (and its father, the Enlightenment) was a man’s world, full of its reductionisms and supposed absolutes. The modern paradigm attempted to categorize things in their proper places. Life was placed in neat little boxes and too often the things that can’t be boxed, like people, relationships, spirituality and God were ignored, pushed to the side or flat out rejected. In this world, woman, as well as the Global South (Latin America, Africans, etc.) were marginalized, relegated to second-class, sometimes enslaved and unappreciated because they operated like Proteus. They were “irrational” … unwilling, and in some cases unable, to embrace the box paradigm.

Enter postmodernity, with its emphasis on local story, plurality and nonfoundationalism … with it’s cry, “I relate, therefore I am” replacing the old “I think, therefore I am.” Now. Today. It is a world that demands a fluid identity. It is a world that demands a person view the world, not in boxes, but in connections, networking and relationships. Today is a world that praises difference and thinks in a circular, nonlinear fashion. This is a world where woman and the Global South can thrive. It’s a world in which women can move, dance as they weave the lines of change, fragmentation and plurality together.

Men can learn how to move in this world, but it’s a hard learning curve that demands openness, patience with oneself and sensitivity to others. And … most importantly, men can learn from women, for women are … now more than ever … in a world that is moving towards and embracing both globalization and postmodernity (postcolonialism), great ambassadors of this protean self that we men — although we don’t have to become it, at the very least need to understand it.

In today’s world, it’s generally true that woman need to lead men as we enter into a new age.

>Viewing the World Atop the Mountain of Losers

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I’ve been reading liberation theology of late and I just want to comment on myself in light of this theological genre.

I am white. Actually, I’m shades of white. The white you see on my hands is slightly darker than the white you would see – which you never will – on my thighs. That white – the white on my thighs – is more of a ghost white as compared to the vanilla shade on my hands. Nevertheless, the shade of vanilla and the shade of ghost white still fit under the broader category of white, and as white I have a history, which is not my personal history, but that of my people … which makes it part of me cause I wouldn’t be me without them. We’re violent … maybe a way of saying it euphemistically is that we like drama. Seriously. We’re not the mellow islanders of the Caribbean, nor the chill Tibetans of the East. No, white people like to fuss about territorial lines. We like to make names for ourselves (which God has used for good, no doubt … which we can all point to and say, “Look, we’re not all that bad”). There’s nothing that creates heroes in white culture like a good war.

People like corporate celebration, like when OUR sports team wins a championship. See, I personally have no effect on the Phillies winning the World Series this year … which they will — by the way. But when they do win, we’ll claim it to be our championship … Philly’s championship; and indeed, it is ours, but we didn’t really put the cleats on and take a bat against C.C. Sabathia. Yet, when it comes to corporate guilt (sigh), we run away from that idea because “I don’t own a slave”, “I didn’t push the American Indians off their land”, even though we’re living on a people’s land that we unjustly usurped, and have an economy that in its infancy, was nourished by the labor of slaves – our slaves.

Which leads me to the second part of my heritage: I’m an American. I’m proud of this heritage, but, like a teenager questioning his parent, I can’t help but notice our major flaws. Anyways, how many of our American heroes are chill folk? Most of them are heroes because they won at something. Sure, America has been blessed, but we also wiped out the Indians with justifications like Manifest Destiny, enslaved Black people (yeah, we’ve changed but the effects continue …) and still like to sacrifice our unborn on the altar of convenience.

That Manifest Destiny thing reminds me of another aspect of myself: I’m a Christian. Do you know how much violence and wars have been fought in the name of Christ? Do you know how many wars have been produced by the Church? We’ve had some odd bed partners. For instance, the First Council of Nicaea was called by the Emperor Constantine who wanted the Christian leaders to stop the infighting over doctrinal issues by finding common ecumenical grounds in a minimalistic creed. When the Nicene Creed was adopted, Constantine FORCED the Empire to accept the Creed. How’s that for a pure history? Just like Jesus would have done, right? Sure, the contents of the Church have often been orthodoxy, but the actions have too often been heterodox. Just ask the Muslims … oh, yeah, you can’t ask them because you don’t know any of them. I don’t either, so I guess that makes us both good Christians.

Our actions have often been maleodox. What is maleodox? It’s a word I just made up as a substitute for a well thought out transition from my Christian identity to the fact that I also have an identity as a male. Men love to dominate. I guess its part of our God-given nature, but we too often don’t control that part and so we rape, dismiss and diminish the gender that has been graced with the compassionate and good parts of God’s image. And with that control, we’ve systematically silenced the voice that God has given to act as a balance to our aggressive, controlling and often imperialistic tendencies. By silencing that voice, well, our history speaks for itself. And you can read that history because we’ve written it.

I’m a white, male, American Christian. My history has been told and retold because I belong to the small segment of the winners. It’s the winners that write history. The losers, well, their history is snuffed out because they lost and too often losing has meant their death. It’s the winners that supposedly make history. But, that history isn’t very Jesus like … it’s full of guilt, violence, usurpation and imperialism. We look over the world from a mountain that we’ve built with the bodies, cultures and histories that we’ve destroyed. Sad. I guess I’m sad. In some sense very, very thankful for the opportunities to be a Christian and I’m thankful that I have the freedom to write an article that some people will read and secretly think, “If I were in control, I would silence Mr. Wilde”, yet in another sense, very sad.

>Modernity-Day Atheist

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Early Christians were considered atheistic by their “pagan” counterparts because they failed to deify Nero and/or worship other gods. The atheist label fails to stick to Christians today and is seen by many as the antithesis of what it means to be Christian. Many would contend that to be Christians means believing in God/Jesus, and, by believing in Jesus, Christians are not atheists because atheists don’t believe in God. But, I’m not entirely convinced modern Christianity and atheism are so antithetical.

Modernity/modernism (these terms are different, but I’ll use them synomously here) was once fought against by Christian apologists, and, as anything we fight against, influenced Christianity to such a degree that Christianity now stands as one of its last defenders. One such influence is the idea within Christian circles that belief is mainly epistemological, that is, it is related to mainly Christian propositions and has little to do with axiology, and, can I say, although I’m not comfortable with it, relational ontology. In other words, you are a Christian if you believe that God created the world, Jesus died for your sins and then He rose again. You believe those propositions the same way you believe the proposition, “the earth is round.” But, just like accepting “the earth is round” it really doesn’t affect your life. All this to say, Christianity is much more than epistemological beliefs, it is a Copernician revolution of self-centeredness to God-centeredness and the modern Christian view of belief (acceptance of fact) is not the antithesis of atheism.

The antithesis of atheism is not believing in a set of ideas about God, it is living God-centered. One can accept all the ideas of God, but if one doesn’t live for God he or she is a pure atheist, who lives as though God as Person is nonexistent.

What are America’s gods? Well, we certainly have a plurality of gods. And many would argue we are no longer a pluralistic society as pluralistic societies have communities of people with common beliefs, but that we live in a fragmented society, where individuals build their own belief structures … the difference being that pluralistic societies have numerous communities with different, well-defined belief sets, where in a fragmented society, everyone makes up their own belief set, which leads to the answer of the question that started off this paragraph. If we make up our belief set, who acts as the gods?

I love all the aphorisms that our children are taught today, such as, “Just believe in yourself”, “put yourself first”, “If you believe in yourself, you can do anything”, “you’ve got to find yourself”, “accept yourself”, “you can do anything you set your mind to”, “love yourself before you can love someone else”, “do what you want to do” etc. We can give Maslow the credit for much of this, but human nature itself has certainly helped this extreme self-worship that is so explicitly taught in children’s coloring books, pop movies, pop music and even Sunday School. Some psychologists have argued that this pursuit of the self isn’t necessarily narcissistic, but a self-preserving default setting for a society that lacks a singular, objective god. It just sounds like sin to me, which is why I don’t believe in myself. I’ve failed too many times, I’ve sinned – intentionally, willingly, knowingly hurt others and God for my own gain – too many times, I’ve done dumb things too many times that I’ve lost the faith of my self-loving modern brethren. You could say, I’m modern atheist.

Funny enough, there are a lot of us out there and we have all been lumped into the box of post-modern. But, I’m different, not because I want to be special, original, etc, but because I’m more than a reactionary who has disliked modernity, removed the self as god and subsequently found nothing but a void … or a nice fuzzy “relational” community. I’ve removed the self because I’ve moved past the idea of God as object, moved past the idea of god as self and moved to the musical dance (perichoresis) of God as Triune.