Can "White" People Be Saved?

Summary: Provocative and helpful look at how race impacts Theology and Missions.

I have been VERY slowly reading Can White People Be Saved. Over the past three and a half months that it took me to work through a little over 200 pages actual text I spent a lot of time thinking and re-reading.

I did not do this with every single talk, but with most chapters, I would read the chapter, then watch the talk and then sometimes read the chapter again. I think I watched most of the talks and responses and Q&A periods that are online. And I read all of the text.

Any conference book will have some chapters that are more interesting to a particular reader than others. But I was pretty engaged in most of the talks. The first two I think were the two that I spent the most time on. The title talk Can “White” People be Saved by Willie James Jenkins comes round about the subject to say yes ‘White' people can be saved, but similarly to the rich young ruler whom Jesus said needed to sell all that he had. Jenkins, as is common among many that are talking academically or from an activist position is not talking about all people that have light skin color that most call White, but of those that have claimed White identity as their marker, an identity that views racial superiority as implicitly true. There is nuance and care here, but I think the basic talk, as provocative as it is, is also essential. Many people that call themselves White do not understand the cultural assumptions that they are bringing to their Christianity, and how those assumptions impact how they think about Christianity. As Jesus said to the rich young ruler, you may have followed the law, but there is something that is hindering you from God.

The second chapter, by Andrea Smith, is talking about Decolonizing Salvation and processing Christianity through Indigenous eyes. This is probably the chapter that I felt most blindsided by. I have read a little bit about Indigenous theology, but only a little bit, and the issues brought up, like how Indigenous people tend to not identify with the Exodus story as many Liberation theologies do because of the history Indigenous people in the US. This is a chapter that completely makes sense to me once I read it, but it also concerns theological areas I had never considered because I did not have enough cultural awareness of Indigenous issues.

I just cannot talk about every chapter (but I have 74 highlights in a book that is only a bit over 200 pages and you can go read all of them on my Goodreads page.) So I will only highlight two more chapters.

Andrew Draper has a chapter on Decentering White Identity. That particularly intrigues me because I am part of a private Facebook group that is attempting to do that, PTM 101. This is not about ‘hating ourselves' as White people, but about trying to Decenter ‘Whiteness' from our identity and to center non-White, especially Black issues in how we think about culture. Because I have some attachment to Draper's topic, this is the chapter other than the first two that I had the most highlights in.

Draper's opening was clear,

“Throughout this paper, I will make the claim that whiteness is best understood as a religious system of pagan idol worship that thrives on a mutually reinforcing circularity between the image (the ideal or the form) and the social constitution of those who worship it.3 As idolatry, whiteness must be dealt with like any such cultic system: its high places must be torn down and its altars laid low.4 The purpose of this paper is to offer a few concrete practices in which White folks must engage to begin casting down our White idols.

Toward this end, I propose five practices in which White folks must engage to resist the sociopolitical order of whiteness: first, repentance for complicity in systemic sin; second, learning from theological and cultural resources not our own; third, choosing to locate our lives in places and structures in which we are necessarily guests; fourth, tangible submission to non-White ecclesial leadership; and fifth, hearing and speaking the glory of God in unfamiliar cadences.

Can “White” People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition