In our politically polarized landscape, the U.S. church’s ability to address issues around race, racism and white supremacy has become increasingly arduous. Exemplifying this difficulty, Florida recently passed laws banning students from engaging in uncomfortable questions around racial identity.
On the one hand, missionary disciples should decry such laws as structures of sin because race only functions to mediate one’s access to resources, relationships and opportunities. As I demonstrate elsewhere, race is neither intrinsic to our being nor biological. Rather, race in the U.S. is a social construct that sorts persons of different “cultural groups delimited by physical characteristics into … an imagined hierarchy of superiority and inferiority.” On the other hand, to address the personal and structural sin of racism, the U.S. church must recognize how colloquial and non-theological understandings of culture lead ordinary Americans to support such laws.
Problematically, colloquial understandings of culture often define culture too widely so that everything has its own culture. Sometimes, a poor understanding of one’s own cultural identity catalyzes the identification of work or leisure as constituting their own cultures—corporate cultures, sports cultures, gaming cultures, DIY culture, etc. Sometimes, a poor understanding of intersectionality and the American impetus toward hyper-individualization catalyzes a construal of individual identity markers as having their own culture—youth culture, mom culture, LGBTQ+ culture, etc.
Afflicting Americans across the political spectrum, these colloquial approaches to culture produce two obstacles to mission. First, they inhibit evangelization as inculturation by rendering culture as both relative and individual. Second, these approaches occlude the reality of how culture and intersectionality relate in the U.S. In intercultural interactions, culture precedes intersectionality and, except for race, intersectionality itself functions within culture.
To define culture in theological terms, it is helpful to draw on teología del pueblo, a unique, Argentine form of liberation theology known as a theology of culture. Distinct from the Peruvian variant pioneered by Gustavo Guttiérrez, teología del pueblo takes culture rather than class as its starting point and, as I detail elsewhere, this theology has thoroughly shaped the Church’s universal magisterium on mission and inculturation since Vatican II.
Thoroughly informed by Argentine teología del pueblo, Pope Francis understands culture in relation to the term people: “What does it mean to be a people? It is a … mythical concept, not in the sense of a … fable … but as a particular story that makes a universal truth tangible and visible … At the beginning of the story of every people is a quest for dignity and freedom, a history of solidarity and struggle. For the people of Israel, it was the exodus from their slavery in Egypt.” This shared experience of freedom and solidarity forms the nucleus of a people’s culture, and culture itself functions to transmit the universal truths contained in this shared experience to subsequent generations.
Bound to this understanding of people, Pope Francis describes culture as something that permeates and shapes the entirety of a people’s relationships and life: “The concept of culture … has to do with the lifestyle of a given society, the specific way in which its members relate to one another, to other creatures and to God.” Consequently, “culture embraces the totality of a people’s life.” For Francis, “the human person is always situated in a culture” because culture itself constitutes a “concrete way of relating to reality” that distinguishes peoples from each other. Indeed, Tamil people relate to God, others, self and creation in ways that are tangibly distinct from Nigerian, Swedish or Argentinian peoples.
Because culture is always tied to a people, their shared experience of freedom and solidarity and their shared way of relating to reality, an individual cannot define culture. Although a person’s identity is an intersection of different identity markers that include sex, poverty, ability and more, intersectionalities function and interact with one another differently within cultures (even as race functions asymmetrically across cultures). Put differently, a person’s intersectional identity markers do not constitute distinct cultures, but rather, individuals navigate their specific intersectionalities within culture.
In pastoral terms, this understanding of culture surfaces why some ordinary Americans who belong to the dominant white culture in the U.S. and simultaneously lack a sufficient understanding of their own cultural identity may support legislation like Florida’s law. In the efforts to dismantle racism that includes whiteness as a racial category, a simultaneous constructive project is required that might help white people understand their identity in cultural terms—the joys, gifts and shared experiences of freedom and solidarity that form the nucleus of their culture.
Without this theologically informed constructive project, ordinary people rely on colloquial understandings of culture to understand efforts aimed at dismantling structural racism. Consequently, someone could easily conflate race and culture—especially when talking about whiteness—and view efforts at antiracism as an erasure of culture. As I argue in a forthcoming article, the U.S. church needs a theologically informed approach that helps people recognize two things: (1) whiteness as race is a structure of sin that requires dismantling and (2) whiteness as culture—distinct from race—has at its nucleus an experience of freedom and solidarity. With such distinctions, skeptics of racial justice might appreciate efforts to dismantle racial whiteness not as an erasure of white culture but rather a grace-filled opportunity to purify their culture from structural sin and inculturate their culture with the Gospel.
Deepan Rajaratnam is the director of ministerial formation at St. John’s University School of Theology & Seminary.