A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
has not. While implicitly privileging theological history in his Judeo-centric narrative of the history of race in America, Raboteau tends to frame the matter in purely historiographic terms. He relates that history is necessarily perspectival and is imbued with meaning depending on the point of observation of the subject. He names historical research a relativizing pursuit that “offers us a salutary reminder that part of faith is doubt.”99 Yet Raboteau recognizes that such an understanding need not necessitate a pluralistic “crisis of faith,” but rather a maturity consonant with “owning” a “set of values” and a “religious culture.”100 The historiographic enterprise can round off the contours of religious particularity in relativizing fashion or it can offer a humble maturity consonant with a theology of history. It is the tension between Raboteau’s historiographic dialectic and his theology of history that Carter discerns. After Raboteau frames the manner as historical relativity, he moves into what he calls “a theology of history” or the study of “salvation history.”101 This transition within the first two essays of A Fire in the Bones is a microcosm of the development of his thought.
Carter, while distancing his project from the disciplinary confines of a history of religions, nonetheless finds Raboteau’s historical research to be helpful in demonstrating the racial foundations of modernity. There are several places where Raboteau’s research specifically points to the ways in which the philosophical presuppositions of Enlightenment were resultant from the reality of the slave trade and the related intellectual complexities surrounding the issue of race. Raboteau relates that from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slavery was in large part justified in European nations by the conversion of slaves to Christianity.102 This posed an immediate problem: How would the baptism of slaves, with its requisite elevation to status of “brother,” affect the economics of enslavement? Would a slave cease to be property? If a slave was catechized in the Faith, how would education affect his “contentedness” with a subservient station? Both colonial legislation and church dogma performed calisthenics to ensure that “baptism did not alter slave status.”103 Raboteau relates that the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701 “to support missionaries to the colonies,” had as its primary purpose guiding slave masters in their gospel instruction of slaves. A pedagogical mission could proceed without fear of the possibility of emancipation:
In tract after tract, widely distributed in the colonies, officers of the society stressed the compatibility of Christianity with slavery. Masters need not fear that religion would ruin their slaves. On the contrary, Christianity would make them better slaves by convincing them to obey their owners out of a sense of moral duty . . . After all, society pamphlets explained, Christianity does not upset the social order, but supports it . . . The missionaries thus denied that spiritual equality implied worldly equality; they restricted the egalitarian impulse of Christianity to the realm of the spirit.104
Raboteau’s research implies a causal relationship between the need to justify slavery and the neo-Gnostic spiritualization of much modern American Christianity. This causal relationship is buttressed by the reality that the slave masters had to be taught to interpret the Scriptures in a non-material fashion. Incidentally, the beginnings of the slave trade coincided with Descartes turning inward to the realm of the mind. Likewise, the rationalization of slavery in Western Christianity was taking place only decades before Kant would offer a rationalized reinterpretation of Christian faith as Western moral religion. While I am not suggesting that neo-Gnostic spiritualism and Cartesian rationalism are one in the same, I am drawing attention to the fact that a turn away from the material implications of the Gospel in the didactic pursuits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century slaveholders and a rejection of realism through Kantian Idealism can both be read as influenced by fears of an elevated status for non-white peoples. I will fill out this claim in chapter 2 when interacting with Kant.
Another example given by Raboteau of a similar causal order of events is early American Evangelicalism’s shift from a Gospel potent to change the social order to a Gospel that maintained the social order while changing only the spiritual destiny of converts. He relates the early and enthusiastic response of black Americans to the forthright preaching and experiential, ecstatic worship of revivalist groups like the Methodists and Baptists.105 He paints a picture of an Evangelical revivalism that encompassed people from various ethnic and socio-economic groups. Black preachers were among those who exhorted the multiethnic crowds with the Good News of the Gospel. This reality influenced the strong abolitionism of late eighteenth-century Methodist conferences. Raboteau explains that, by and large, the denominations quickly retreated from abolition in the face of the “strong” and “immediate” pushback from aristocratic landowners. This resistance encouraged Evangelicalism to alter its early pronouncements by making slavery a matter of individual conscience that lay outside the influence of the Faith.106 As a result of this turn away from the heterogeneity of its early communal makeup, Methodist and Baptist Evangelicalism became decidedly more rationalistic and aristocratic. For Raboteau, the characteristic marks of religious modernity are to be found in the problematic early-modern intersection of race and theology.
The early promise of Evangelicalism faded as two distinct and separate Christianities emerged. Black preachers
mediated between Christianity and the experience of the slaves (and free blacks), interpreting the stories, symbols, and events of the Bible to fit the day-to-day lives of those held in bondage. And whites—try as they might—could not determine the “accuracy” of this interpretation.107
Segregated worship influenced a hermeneutical segregation not unlike the strict distinctions between disciplinary silos in the modern academy. Much like the creation of modern religious studies as a methodology detached from theology, “white” and “black” Christianity formed as separate traditions. Under the pressures of white discrimination and black self-determination, separate denominations were formed, such as the AME under the leadership of Richard Allen. While Raboteau is not decrying self-determination as a method of resistance, he is noting that such a necessity removes the possibility of mutual interpretation.
In such separate hermeneutical trajectories, the story of Israel took on quite distinct meanings. Identification with Israel became the point of departure for white and black Christians. White Christianity interpreted the Exodus as a spiritual liberation from sin, while black Christians emphasized the material significance of freedom in Christ.108 These contentions on the part of Raboteau anticipate Carter’s claim that the modern problem of race precludes both linguistic interpenetration and relational miscegenation. Raboteau’s work illumines the fundamentally racial (and thereby racist) character of modernity while suggesting the perspicuity of Carter’s development of this claim: the Rassenfrage is essentially the Judenfrage.109
Raboteau’s Dialecticism
Carter proposes an intellectual atmosphere that will “refuse dialectical intellectual arrangements altogether.”110 Despite their convergence, Raboteau-as-historian remains a dialectical thinker whose philosophical orientation feeds a racialized understanding of identity. Raboteau capitulates to the modern conception of a religious primordium that finds the apex of its expression in Western culture. This becomes evident in his optimism about the promise of America for the overcoming of racial divides.
Raboteau takes as his text the address of Puritan leader John Winthrop in his sermon “Modell of Christian Charity,” in which Winthrop echoes the Sinaitic covenant and Moses’ discourse of blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 30.111 Raboteau reads Winthrop as proclaiming that “possession of the land is contingent upon observing the moral obligations of the covenant with God.” Raboteau lauds Winthrop’s address, which reads the Europeans’ conquest of the New World as consistent with Israel’s taking of the Promised Land. The “mark of the greatness of Winthrop’s address” is that the virtues he extols are “justice, mercy, affection, meekness, gentleness, patience, generosity, and unity—not the qualities usually associated with taking or keeping possession of a land.” It would be “later and lesser sermons” that would encourage the European inhabitants of America to “much more aggressive virtues.” Raboteau is effectually reciting the traditional national mythology about the foundation of America being truth and justice and its continual progression toward a full incorporation of all people into its political