Subversives in Christ

I WAS RAISED in an African-American church, but as an adult I discovered Anabaptism. Since then I’ve sought to learn from both the wider black church and Anabaptist traditions, to the point that I now consider myself an “Anablacktivist.”

Two experiences at my undergraduate Christian college helped propel me to see the significance of these two Christian streams. The first time was a chapel service, maybe a year after 9/11. The speaker, the Catholic priest John Dear, challenged us about U.S. violence and militarism—arguing that these weren’t consistent with the life and teachings of Jesus. I leaned forward in agreement, captivated by his message, feeling that it rang true and faithful to Jesus.

Then I noticed some movement in the darkened auditorium. Droves of students disruptively got up from their chairs and headed straight for the exits, in protest of the speaker and his “subversive” message that refused to affirm everything that the U.S. was doing in the world. I found myself deeply troubled by the defensive response of my (mostly white) Christian brothers and sisters to Dear’s thoroughly Jesus-shaped critiques of U.S. empire.

The second time was at a smaller “multicultural chapel service,” with just a few white peers present. The speaker spoke of U.S. history and present reality. He directly named white supremacy, racism as a system, and the experiences of black and brown people in the U.S. Once again I leaned forward, not wanting to miss a phrase. And again I watched many of the white students walk out.

As a follower of Christ, our speaker challenged us to live differently because of our faith in Jesus Christ. Yet something inherent in my peers’ socialization had them clinging more to their white identity than to the Christian challenge. These two chapel experiences helped me contemplate the depth of the church’s troubles in the U.S. and its insubstantial Christian formation.

Scripture shows a new social configuration of relationships gathered around Jesus, grounded in justice, shalom, joy, truth, and love. However, it doesn’t take a sociologist or historian to question whether the church has ever lived that out as its norm. Some contend that Christians have often been the greatest advocates for war, racism, sexism, and poverty-inducing policies. The current division in the church in response to Ferguson and ongoing systemic anti-black violence has only provided more fuel for this criticism.

Two great shifts

These concerns are not without merit. Scores of books have been written on how Christianity shifted its dominant witness and teaching emphasis in the fourth century as it aligned itself with the prevailing social order. The original expectation that being a Christian meant living as Jesus did (1 John 2:6) became reserved for the monks and “extraordinary” Christians. Peace and nonviolence, inherent to Christian teaching for the first three centuries, was abandoned. A once marginalized minority that periodically endured persecution and oppression as a consequence for radical discipleship was now a church wielding centralized power in the social order, choosing its own preferences and comfort at the expense of the well-being of now-persecuted non-Christians.

Though the fourth-century emperor Constantine was just one factor that helped usher in this ecclesial shift in emphasis, he still represents the image and type that refashioned Jesus’ significance.

If Constantine symbolizes the shift of Christianity away from embodying Jesus’ life and teaching, then Christopher Columbus represents an equally traumatic shift. He is the image and type symbolizing the incarnation of global white supremacy. The colonial moment of 1492 was the birth of a gradual reordering of all creation under the hierarchy of white male dominance. “Christian” Europe gazed at “the other” in a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-theological manner, categorizing Europeans (now labeled white) at the top of a racial hierarchy of superiority and Christian perfection. Western missionaries and military were deployed like two complementary hands collaborating around the world for the purposes of conquest and “civilizing” mission. Indigenous communities were violently colonized under the lordship of the white Jesus. The ignored yet ugly reality is that European colonization, the Holocaust in Germany, apartheid in South Africa, and America’s practices of manifest destiny, slavery, and white supremacy are all connected to Western Christian theology and practice.

In our current U.S. context, most churches are ill-prepared to respond to crises around police brutality, the irrational, fear-induced police executions of black people, mass incarceration targeting black and brown youth, the pipeline to prison aided by defunding public schools in poor urban communities, and families struggling to survive on unlivable wages or vulnerable due to unjust immigration policies. Merely to change voting patterns is insufficient to address these crises: We need a subversive Jesus-shaped formation and identity that breaks ties with Christendom mindsets and white-dominated societal patterns, the very thing my college peers were unprepared to do.

Fortunately, there are Christian communities that were birthed on the underside of Christendom and white supremacy, precariously following Jesus for centuries in resistance.

Two of these traditions are especially fitting dialogue partners for the larger church in the United States. The 16th-century Protestant Reformation continued a Christendom orientation by practicing a magisterial, top-down approach to church that merely fragmented the church-state hierarchy, according to who occupied each territory. However, under their noses formed alternative communities that insisted on following Jesus according to his life and teaching in scripture, forming visible and voluntary churches no longer in partnership with the state. They refused to take up the sword against their enemies, and they found intimate solidarity with rebelling poor peasants that were economically exploited by state-church power. These outcasts were labeled “Anabaptists” by opponents for their refusal to recognize infant baptism (which was also the means by which infants were registered as citizens of the state).

Anabaptist communities represent a tradition that has sought to reject Constantine as lord and allow Jesus to have his rightful place, not only in their confessions but in their nonviolent embodiment of Christian life. During the Reformation thousands of Anabaptists were hunted down, drowned, burned at the stake, and otherwise tortured and killed. Entire communities were terrorized yet responded nonviolently.

Dangerous ideas

In 1619, the first African indentured servants were brought to North America for labor. By the 1660s, white supremacist slave codes were developed in every colony, identifying slavery with blackness. Anglican missionaries would eventually come through the growing colonies, easing any concerns that slave planters had around whether it was okay to keep baptized Africans enslaved. They insisted that Christianity would make better slaves if “absolute obedience” were enforced. From its inception until 1950, white supremacy was inseparably intertwined with Christian oversight, guidance, theology, and practice.

Yet right under the nose of white domination, enslaved Africans would “steal away” from mastering surveillance so they could meet Jesus in spirit and truth. Despite being taught that God legitimated the oppressive white supremacist social order, they encountered someone different. The Jesus Africans experienced was a friend, co-sufferer, liberator, and trickster that knew how to get over on powerful oppressors.

Jesus whispered dangerous ideas in their ears, telling them he had come “to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18-19). A prophetic and liberative expression of Christianity was born, helping their descendants survive white terrorism for centuries by fixing their eyes on Jesus. The black church today is multiple things, but at its best it carries on this tradition of connecting to the stone that the builders rejected while disbelieving the lie of white superiority and inviting everyone to join this new humanity that began with the crucified messiah.

A liberating convergence

With the challenges of Christendom and white supremacy blinding our past and present, the whole church ought to become careful learners of, and dialogue partners with, black and Anabaptist theology and faith. Together, we can learn that Jesus is the peacemaking God that identifies with the most vulnerable of society. God has chosen the vulnerable, poor, and oppressed to shame the dominant, wealthy, and violent people who have not honored the image of God in all people.

In Anabaptist and black theological convergence, we see God revealed in Jesus, loving both Samaritans and enemies. We realize God’s new social order is grounded by a Jesus-shaped people that refuse to “lord over” others. Jesus, as the image of God and the revelation of true humanity, embodies the way for us to follow him, true participation in Christ’s own life.

Liberation and peacemaking are God’s response to an oppressive and violent social order. Jesus is God with us—though not neutrally with us: God has decisively taken on the form of the slave and has taken up the death of the revolutionaries and rejected ones of society, obediently clashing with this order to the point of accepting a public, state-sanctioned execution.

In doing so, Jesus became a divine affirmation of the humanity of all stigmatized and rejected people, now seen as true image bearers of the triune God. With a vision and understanding that there is no shalom without following the liberating Jesus, and no freedom without following the peacemaking Jesus, the convergence of black theology and Anabaptism shapes and molds us toward a model to which all the gospel narratives bear witness: a nonviolent, insurrectionist messiah.

I like to call the convergence of these two traditions Anablacktivism. It’s about Christian formation shaped by real people over several death-filled centuries, sparing Christianity from its own hamartia, or tragic flaw, from being violent and oppressive in character and orientation.

Thankfully, without knowing it, many churches have already accepted some of the formerly controversial insights of these traditions. However, in the midst of the current challenges that we face around domination in relation to race, class, gender, and fear-induced systemic violence in the church and society, it seems that our Christian formation must be radically reimagined.

Those from dominant cultures are now invited to learn from these and other Christian communities that have encountered the Jesus of jubilee and shalom from the underside of Western Christian history. Together, we’re invited to be transformed as we walk as one with the resurrected lord.