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Article Excerpt
CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS in the 21st century continue to join other theologians and scholars of religion in the ongoing task of addressing the sociopolitical dimensions of Christian faith. (1) God has been proclaimed a practical idea to be interpreted and enacted contextually; there is widespread agreement therefore that the meaning and truth of Christian beliefs cannot be adequately investigated without consideration of the relation between those beliefs and the specific social structures, power relations, and political interests at stake in the situations in which those beliefs are held. (2) Yet the racism so deeply entrenched in the social structures and power relations in the United States remains a surprisingly marginal issue in U.S. Catholic theology, even in our political and liberationist theologies, as a recent thematic issue of Theological Studies has reminded us. Why, as Jamie Phelps asks, are U.S. Catholic theologians so much more likely to address Latin American liberation theology and the U.S. role in the oppression of the Third World than to engage Black liberation theology and the racism (especially against African-Americans) within their own communities and churches? (3)
To be sure, contemporary liberation theologians largely agree, as Peter Phan has recently noted, that oppressions "are often interlocked with each other and mutually reinforcing, so that any genuine liberation theology anywhere must fight against all forms of oppression." (4) Racism is commonly identified as one of these major forms of oppression, and White feminist theologians especially have acknowledged the importance of the perspectives on racism and other injustices that are being articulated by womanist theologians and other people of color. Still, it seems undeniable that racism as a theological topic, and the Black and womanist theologies that address it, remain marginal even in liberationist Catholic theologies in the United States.
It is my contention here that whatever bias and discomfort may be involved in this evasion of American racism, the marginalization of Black theology is also assisted by the methodological limitations of our current political theologies in the United States. Further, I will argue that the work of Cornel West, professor of Afro-American studies and of the philosophy of religion at Harvard University, can helpfully guide our efforts to overcome these limitations. With good reason, there has been a proliferation recently both in the specific injustices considered theologically, and in the methods of analyses used to address them, a proliferation that is an appropriate, necessary, and fertile part of the field of contemporary theology. Yet with so many facets of an interlocking oppression to address, there is also a risk that we will focus on those topics that are least threatening (to ourselves, to our society, and to our Church), while perhaps paying polite lip service to the importance of (someone else) addressing the very injustices in which we are most directly implicated. I will argue here that the unity of West's intellectual work, especially as rooted in the experience of his struggle to live meaningfully as a late modern American, suggests possibilities for the development of a similarly rooted and unified U.S. political theology, one that is not less multifaceted or interdisciplinary but that is more conscious of and committed to its location in the United States and so less able to marginalize Black theology and discussions of racism.
My argument here is developed in three steps. First, I briefly describe what I take to be the four major and largely distinct forms of politically-engaged theologies in the United States today. This description serves to clarify the theological discussions that provide the context for my reading of West and for which I appropriate his insights. Second, I analyze West's work, highlighting the unity of his project and the method that integrates his diverse writings. Finally, I develop the implications of his thought for the four theological approaches previously identified, with specific attention to the manner in which West's insights confirm as well as challenge some of the presuppositions of these four approaches. His work, I argue, points to the possibility of more productive collaboration among these different theologies and ultimately to a more truly liberating and less racist Catholic theology.
CURRENT U.S. POLITICAL THEOLOGIES
While the plurivocal situation of contemporary theology defies any strict categorization, nevertheless I believe it is possible to distinguish four major forms of politically engaged Christian theology in the United States today, each of which has had some influence on developments in Catholic theology. Most obviously political and most common in Catholic theology are perhaps the "liberationist" theologies, which focus on one or more particular issue(s) of injustice, such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, poverty, and environmental degradation. These liberationist theologies attempt to uncover the ways in which Christian beliefs have contributed to the legitimization of injustice; they also seek to reformulate Christian faith so that it supports a liberating rather than an oppressive ethos. Rosemary Ruether's feminist theology and James Cone's Black theology are well-known representatives of this approach and are especially interesting since both engage multiple issues in their liberationist theologies. (5) A second major form of political theology is "poststructuralist" theology, such as that developed by Mark C. Taylor and, more recently, by Catherine Keller: these theologians undertake rhetorical analyses in order to reveal the closure, indeed the repression and exclusion that constitutes theological discourse. They focus on this rhetorical closure (rather than on any structural injustice) in order to make possible more open and more playful discourse as the basis for greater personal and social freedom. (6) A third distinct approach is being developed by "public" theologians (of both the left and the right politically) who seek the inclusion of theological perspectives in national debates and who are interested in the quality of public life and democratic institutions in the United States today. These public theologians (e.g., David Tracy, Richard John Neuhaus, and William Dean) differ from liberationist theologians in that they pay most attention to delineating the public role of religion and to assessing the quality of our national discourse and our democratic institutions rather than to widespread and deeply rooted social injustices. (7) Finally, there are various "countercultural" theologians who share a belief that society most needs the countercultural witness of a Church that challenges the presuppositions of liberal society and who therefore emphasize the role of the Church as an alternative community. (8)
While this is a potentially fecund situation, it is also one of multiplicity, dividedness, and even more importantly, one suspects, a creeping sense of futility. There is much to debate, both substantively and methodologically, and, fortunately, many theologians are involved in more than one of these approaches. There have been especially rich cross-fertilizations between the liberationists and the poststructuralists, since the study of racial and gender oppressions is furthered by poststructural analyses of rhetorical exclusions. (9) However, the concerns of public theologians are rarely engaged by either of these first two groups, and the counterculturalists resist the basic methodological presuppositions of the other three groups. That is, while all four are concerned with the political implications of Christian faith, the first three are usually involved in some form of "mutually-critical correlation" between Christian faith and the insights of contemporary society, while the counterculturalists largely reject such a correlational theology as a threat to the distinctly Christian (and hence the only truly liberating) perspective of judgment on society. Not surprisingly, then, there is considerable ghettoization of these approaches, with those involved developing complex analyses on the topics important to each group and seldom positively engaging the insights of more than one of the other approaches.
If these different political theologies have not always had much influence on each other, their impact beyond the academy, on either Church or society, is even more questionable. (10) As the pendulum remains on a right-ward swing in religious and political life in the United States, one wonders if either the medium or the message able to engender a liberating praxis in society has yet been found by our political theologies. Christian faith has been reformulated, destabilized, defended as public, and articulated as an alternative social vision--but to what avail? Richard Rorty, among others, has argued that the academic "new left" has a truncated sense...
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