A Call to Deliverance From Your Personal Savior

 

In his groundbreaking book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah conducts a deep sociological dive into U.S. culture and religiosity. Despite how influential the book has been for generations of sociologists and religion scholars, it nonetheless fell short.

Specifically, Bellah gave minimal attention to race. Although race and ethnicity are covered in the book, they remain on the margins of the discourse.

Missing is any profound examination concerning the Black church, Indigenous spiritual traditions, Latine hybrid religiosity, or liberative movements rooted in the gospel message. So when Bellah makes claims concerning his findings about U.S. culture and religiosity, he really is discussing a white Eurocentric culture and religiosity.

Still, the book does reveal some profound insights. Specifically, he argued that the salient characteristic of U.S. culture is an expressive and utilitarian hyper-individualism that frays the communal bonds required for civic responsibility.

The focus of Eurocentric culture is not what we owe our community, but what we can get out of it. And if the community doesn’t accept the same way of believing as I do, then to hell with them—literally.

Your Own Personal Jesus

This individualism is clearly manifested in how white Christians practice their faith. Surely you have heard some well-meaning believer tell you Jesus is their personal savior and has a plan for their personal life, which begins with their personal salvation when they accepted Jesus as their personal Lord.

If Bellah had spent more time interrogating communities of color, he might have been able to clearly demarcate the profound differences between whites and these communities, which generally stress the communal over and against the individual.

Because no one can serve two masters, people of color who seek assimilation to Eurocentric Christianity, with its emphasis on individualism, end up having to deny their culture and reject their people by putting on whiteface. Tone-deaf to communal wisdom emanating from their community, assimilation to white civilization and Christianity is detrimental, if not death-dealing, to communities of color.

But not just communities of color. It is also soul-crushing to the descendants of Europeans.

Why? Because of another salient characteristic of U.S. culture, which Bellah fails to mention, that also spills into the white culture’s manifestation of Christianity: white supremacy.

As theologian James Cone noted, a Christianity that has nothing to say about slavery or Jim and Jane Crow is satanic. I would add that any Christianity that has nothing to say about the genocide of Indigenous people for the sake of settler colonialism here in the U.S. or over there in Palestine, any Christianity that has nothing to say about the brutality of Latines in ICE’s custody, or the placing of Latine children in cages, is also satanic.

A Call to True Salvation for White People

A note: When I refer to “white people” in the following paragraphs, I am not referring to skin pigmentation, but to those who embrace this hyper-individualistic white Christianity. This includes many Black and Brown siblings (not all skin folk are kin folk), such as Marco Rubio and Clarence Thomas, who have chosen to maintain and sustain white supremacy.

If these white people want to be saved, then they must nail their sin of whiteness to the cross. Can a hermano get an “Amen”?

They must nail their hyper-individualism to the cross and stop participating in the oppression of their “other.”

¡Alleluia, gloria a Dios!

Whiteness signifies sin because it also signifies white supremacy. Anyone holding on to their supremacy will not—I said, will not—inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

If anyone truly seeks to be saved, then they must put away their false idol, they must put away their golden statues and their white Jesus, they must put away Satan, who is masquerading as an angel of light. For to insist on worshipping this white Jesus only empowers Satan’s domain, the powers and principalities of this world.

If white people want to get saved, then they must fall to their knees and worship the Brown Latine Jesús. They must sing praises to the Black Jesus. They must follow the queer Jesus. They must pray to the poor, hungry Jesus.

For Jesus is incarnated among the discarded, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the disinherited. Jesus does not dwell among the privileged, the powerful, the profiteers of oppression.

That which you did not do to the least of these—the undocumented persecuted Latine, the lynched Black, the genocided Indian, the crucified Queer—you did not do to me.

But, you might think, “I do know Jesus, and he can also be white.”

Ahhh—truly I say unto you, on that day, many will come to me and say, “Did we not march for Black Lives Matter?” “Did we not treat Latines with love and courtesy?” But truly I say unto you: “Away from me, you wicked people, for I did not know you.”

Doing good works while holding on to a white Jesus is still condemning. Solidarity without repentance and restitution is damning.

If you want to see the face of Jesus, if you want to put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the waters, then look at the face of the marginalized. Put your hand into the hand of all who are relegated to the underside of white America.

So, with every head bowed and every heart open, as Miss Ernestine plays “Just as I Am” on the piano, decide who you will follow this day. The hyper-individualist, personal, white satanic Christ of the dominant culture? Or the Christ of the oppressed?

Decide as if eternity depended on it. Because, according to Jesus in Matthew 25, it does.