GOSPEL‐CULTURE ENCOUNTER AT SALVADOR: RACISM

Abstract

My visit to Salvador to participate in the World Council of Churches' (WCC) Conference on World Mission and Evangelism offered me my first opportunity to experience the southern hemisphere. I had heard about Brazil before I arrived. I had heard about the poor and the street children. I had heard about sex and violence. But I was not prepared to be devastated by racism as an expression of the gospel of Jesus Christ. All the years I spent in the United States of America did not prepare me for it. On, the contrary. Salvador has shocked open my capacity to read with sustained interest literature about white racism in the United States. Let me attempt to recount it more precisely. After Salvador I came home to my church in Thailand, a country in which for obvious reasons there is no evidence of white over-black racist dichotomy. However, back at home, staring at me was the book, The Black Christ, by Kelly Brown Douglas, which I bought several years back. It was one of those books I had had on my bedside table but had never given it much attention. If anything, I judged it to be a popular publication, of little merit. Now, it had somehow got lined up neatly on my desk among other to-read-later books. Almost in diversion from whatever I had to attend to, I pulled it out to take a look. To my surprise, the things said in it came to life for the first time, like the topic of Christianity and cruelty and slaveholding Christianity and slave Christianity. Why had the book seemed so boring the first time around? Was Salvador responsible for opening my eyes to racism in the church? Can it really be that racism is and has been the dominant expression of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Yes, and not only in Brazil, but also in the United States, and beyond, seems to be the answer. With this new insight, I began to reflect on my involvement in the life and work of my church. For many years I tried to be interested in and to encourage Thai Christian arts but had never quite seen the point of Asian theologians trying to bring to the fore Asian Christian arts, aside from a liberal's notion of pluralism. The white Christ on the wall of an exclusive black cathedral on the slope of a hill in Salvador looked so funny when I first saw it; I think I simply felt amused by the parochialism of the time. The Black Christ, however, showed me the universality of that parochialism of European Christianity and the cruelty perpetrated to save the souls of the black heathens. What an incredible integration of Jesus Christ into the dualistic structure of whites over against the of all other colours. Even more farcical is the contradictory pictures of this white Christ dominating world Christianity and of the Christian children of those heathens denying that their Jesus is white. When I was in the United States in the late '70s I began to read the magazine Sojourners. A few years ago I received a Study Guide on White Racism from the magazine, but was not at all drawn to reading it. Now, some five years later, after having read The Black Christ, I decided to make an effort to use the guide hoping to see if it would have the same effect as the book itself. It did! I found words like domination so very concrete, and human equality so very abstract. For the first time I began to understand the blank expressions of alienation or the disingenuous pleasantries I have encountered several times when visiting Afro-Americans in their churches. I must have sounded like a tourist, stared like a tourist, and utterly unable to feel their pains and sorrows. …