A New Book for Those Who Cling to a “Post-Racial” Christianity |
A New Book for Those Who Cling to a “Post-Racial” Christianity
Religion Dispatches
2017-02-17
In The Death of Race, Brian Bantum explores the theological underpinnings of cultural understandings of race and gender.
What inspired you to write The Death of Race?
Truthfully, this wasn’t the book I had wanted to write right now. There is a tendency for theologians who write about race to become penned in. My first book, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, is certainly a book about race. But even more, it is a Christology. For my second book, I wanted to write something that would be read apart from the primary lens of race. But then Ferguson happened, then Baltimore, and every successive summer seemed to press the reality of race and the church. There are so many good books that have come from folks in or associated with the Black Lives Matter movement that I wasn’t sure what I could add to the conversation.
But as I taught and read and listened, I began to see how various Christian responses to police brutality—and racism and sexism more broadly—were grounded in various theological stories that shaped American Christians and how they saw the world. At the same time, I was thinking about my three sons, who were 17, 15, and 11 when I started writing. We had been talking about everything that was happening in the world, and I wondered how I could help them understand the Christian story in the midst of this. Why was the world like this, and why does Jesus matter?..
Read the entire interview here.
Tags: Brian Bantum, Religion Dispatches