A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
Enlightenment itself offers the resources with which to interpret religion in a non-hegemonic fashion. Long’s identification of colonization and modernity as the two points at which Western intellectual reflection created the “other” bears similarities to Jennings’ and Carter’s analyses, respectively. It is in this phase of his argument that Long, even more so than Raboteau or Cone, has his finger on the pulse of the problem as identified by Carter. Not unlike Long, Carter maintains that Christianity “betrays itself” by acting as “a universal, hegemonic discourse.”231 Carter states that Long’s “challenge to the hegemony of (Christian) theology over other religions, and thus, over religion qua religion is rightly posed.”232 However, Long comes to widely divergent conclusions. Carter claims that Long’s reduction of particular theological commitments to a universal religious “primordium”233 misinterprets how Christian theology, at its best, should be understood. While Long is resistant to a Christianity that is seen as a religion crowning a hierarchy of religions, Long’s Religionswissenschaft is not radical enough. Carter maintains that Long’s science of religions renders Christian theology, and any theology for that matter, as little more than an “answering discipline” to the modern category of “religion.”234 In this manner, Long rounds off all particular theological commitments to a bland modern universal humanist religious impulse. It is this privileging of the “religious” as such that Carter will identify with the Kantian construction of race. Carter reads Long “as providing the philosophical orientation on the meaning of history that is ambiguously present in Slave Religion [Raboteau’s early work]” and “as giving the philosophical infrastructure to James H. Cone’s post-Barthian black liberation theology.”235 It is the Longian philosophy of religious studies with which Carter most clearly contrasts his own position:
As one surveys the discipline of African American religious studies, from history to theology to philosophies of religious humanism, it is indisputable that Long’s view of religion generally and his view of black religion particularly is more or less the order of the day in the field of African American religious studies. Insofar as this is the case, Long and religious scholars who are heir to his general approach to religious studies would take African American religious thought in a direction counter to the direction I start to sketch at the end of the last chapter [Cone] and that I develop further in part III [Hammon, Douglass, Lee]. Indeed, it can be said that through his interpretation of black liberation theology as an opaque discourse, Long culminates the intellectual trajectory of black liberation theology as a pure science of religion: as Wissenschaft . . . My objective in this chapter is to raise a note of serious alarm regarding this direction of the field.236
While I will focus at the end of this chapter on Carter’s alternative to this trajectory, I will first identify in Long that which so clearly troubles Carter.
Long’s diagnosis of the racialized underpinnings of the Enlightenment is similar to Carter’s:
While the reformist structure of the Enlightenment had mounted a polemic against the divisive meaning of religion in Western culture and set forth alternate meanings for the understanding of the human, the same ideological structures through various intellectual strategies paved the ground for historical evolutionary thinking, racial theories, and forms of color symbolism that made the economic and military conquest of various cultures and peoples justifiable and defensible. In this movement both religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations—they were signified.237
In his most trenchant moments, Long utilizes language that hints at the theological distortions Carter identifies. When Long maintains that “peoples throughout the world were created anew,” he gestures toward what Carter identifies as the distortion of creation that is whiteness, indicating the implications it had for anthropology and the natural sciences, with their evolutionary logic of human “progress” versus “primitivism.” Long recognizes the problematic nature of the modern project, yet finds the path forward to be in the same methodological commitments. He imbibes the orientation of the modern religious academy in ways that neither Raboteau nor Cone did:
I perceived that there was a structure for the universal in the human world that, though created from Enlightenment understandings of the human venture, expressed an opening for the authentic expression of others. Religion thus became the locus for a meaning that carried an archaic form; it was a root meaning and could thus become the basis for radical critical thought. The essays presented in this volume explore the possibilities of a form of thought that is rooted in the religious experience of black traditions.238
It is not so much the particularities of “black traditions” that are important for Long. What matters is the universal religious “root meaning”—the “primordium”—which the modern academy discerns within and through those traditions, or any traditions for that matter. While Long recognizes the problematic nature of modern classificatory schemas, he nonetheless finds hope for their overcoming through the “opening” the Enlightenment created: religion. Long defines religion as “orientation”: “how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”239 Longian religion is non-transcendent; it is a product of the human quest for self-situatedness. Long maintains that “the religion of any people is . . . experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles, and rhythms.”240 Black theology, or any theology, is nothing more than human self-actualization. The “archaic critique” of religious studies discerns what was “actually taking place” in the spiritual experiences of various peoples.241 Instead of calling modern encyclopedic methodologies into question (as does Carter), Long has in effect upped the ante in their favor. For Long, the problem is not with the modern scholarly gaze, but that the intellectual quest has been distorted by what he calls “latent” power.242
More often than not, the differences that bring a culture or a people to the attention of the investigator are not simply formed from the point of view of the intellectual problematic; they are more often than not the nuances and latencies of that power which is part of the structure of the cultural contact itself manifesting itself as intellectual curiosity.243
Long implies that if the power differential could be accounted for, the “point of view of the intellectual problematic” could produce a pure form of “cultural contact.” This is epistemologically problematic to say the least. For Long, it is not the ability of the historian, scientist, anthropologist, sociologist, or religious scholar to arrive at a satisfactory observational knowledge of the “other” that is in question. Rather, the problem is that the “pure” empirical stance has not often been achieved because of the pursuit of power: desire for conquest was “masked by the intellectual desire for knowledge of the other.”244 Long maintains that by working to get behind “the creation of discourses of power,” “what really happened” will be recognizable in the obvious “facts of history.”245 Carter’s thesis suggests that Long’s approach drastically underestimates the power that is wielded through the modern presumption of the ability to “know” and “describe.”
Carter’s vision of a Pentecostal re-ordering of language within “impure” relations calls into question the ability of the observatory stance of the modern religious academy to adequately discern the voice of the other. Carter’s analysis suggests that the best that studies of “cultural contact” can achieve is a more “positive” evaluation of the particularities of the other (which is not a completely bad development). However, this reformist evaluative structure is less radical than mutual participation. The problematic nature of Long’s descriptive tendencies can be seen as he reflects:
For example, on the descriptive level, one cannot deny that there are peoples and cultures of dark-skinned, kinky-haired human beings who do not wear clothing in the manner of the cultures of the investigators, and, in addition, they express very different meanings regarding their orientations in their worlds. While this may be true on the descriptive and analytical levels, the fact that these characteristics were noted as the basis for significant differences is often unexplored. In other words, what leads one to locate the differences within what is the common?246
Long drastically under-emphasizes the significance of the comparative aesthetic judgments he is making. For Long, the evaluative ability of the observer is assumed; he sees the problem to be the assignation