Teaching the Bible and Race in the USA

Preamble – Written June 22, 2015

You’ve probably heard it said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. However, it’s high-time that we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that, by simply teaching more content, the world will become a better place. Knowledge didn’t stop the wake of the terror brought into the sacred community of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In this gut-wrenching moment, there’s little I can bring myself to say. I look at the words below, written by my students last fall, in a post composed months before the events of last week and I struggle to find the optimism that I once had at semester’s end.

Mother Emanuel was the church home of Denmark Vesey, a free black man who worked to organize a massive slave rebellion in South Carolina. The rebellion was prematurely thwarted by enslaved blacks who succumbed to the pressure of their masters. With a planned front of 9,000 slaves, there’s no telling what might have been were the revolt at all successful.

What we do know is that the murder of nine churchgoers took place 193-years to the day following Vesey’s planned revolt  We know that his visit to the church was not the first time white supremacists had attempted to intimidate Mother Emanuel. And we know that all over America—not just South Carolina or the South—we are seeing Civil War banners flying freely, whether in the form of the Confederate flag or in the mortal bullets that persistently require us to ask whether and how black lives matter.

We know these things and what do we have to show for it? In retrospect, my student’s words do remind me that we teachers get fifteen weeks per class to not only impart knowledge, but also to influence what they might do with it. It is in that spirit that I hope you’ll read their thoughts.

Post – Submitted May 17, 2015

I teach a number of courses at the intersection of race and religion. And by the second class period, I will undoubtedly hear some version of C. Herbert Woolston’s children hymn.

 Jesus loves the little children,

All the children of the world,

Red and yellow,

Black and white,

They are precious in His sight

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

To quote a student of mine, … “Can we TBH this for a second?”

To be honest, speaking for Jesus is way above my pay grade, but I’m not above begging for clarification, either. There’s a lot going on in this little ditty.

The song makes no bones about classifying human beings—in this case by color. But what does it mean to say that all mentioned are precious in His sight? Are we really comfortable with the idea of appraising the value of other human beings? From the Three-Fifths Compromise to the need to declare that #BlackLivesMatter, American history suggests this is so, and the good book has played a key role in cataloguing the price.

Asking again: Other than the @ONScripture piece, have any of my non-Black #SBL colleagues written on #Ferguson? If so, pls link. #aarsbl

— Nyasha Junior (@NyashaJunior) August 20, 2014

“Writing on Ferguson” for the white, patched-elbow, #sbl academic: Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written. http://t.co/wXeGoigHbW

— Brooke Lester (@AnummaBrooke) August 21, 2014

Nyasha Junior and Seminarium’s Brooke Lester have prodded biblical scholars to discuss this in the classroom. So how might we do this? News headlines suggest that maybe we should just get started and reflect on it later.

Last fall at Elizabethtown College, I taught an upper-level seminar entitled the Bible and Race in the USA. Our small class was divided evenly among Caucasian and African American participants. At the close of the semester, I asked a few students to reflect on their learning experience. With their permission, I’ve edited together their remarks into the collaborative essay below.

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Religion and race are two very controversial topics when discussed separately, let alone when you discuss their connection. Our course, The Bible and Race in the United States of America, concentrated on this complicated relationship.

Studying primary and secondary sources, like the writings of Vincent Wimbush, opened a window onto the processes that lead to racial and ethnic formations in the US. Through it, we were able to see the Bible’s pivotal role in the identity formation of Native Americans, Asian Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans, Latin@s, and Whites.

The class did not cease to shock and challenge everything that we had been taught before. For instance, the Thanksgiving story, usually depicted as a wonderful event that brought unity between white settlers and this land’s first nations, is also the story of America’s need to justify colonization—not least of which took place in the Christian education passed on in places like the Carlisle Indian School (roughly forty miles from our own campus).

Learning that there are many sides to every story motivated us to continue our search for knowledge outside of class. To map our learning, we incorporated Ann Taves’ discussion of attribution theory, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s notion of scripturalizing, Michel de Certeau’s theorizing about scriptural economies, and Pierre Bourdieu’s study of discourse. This pushed us to look back over past moments and relate them to current events and what we experience in our everyday lives.

And in our time together, we saw just how race matters in the classroom:

 

In the course of 14 weeks, I’ve had difficult conversations with both people in class and outside of the classroom. I’ve reconsidered the beliefs I have and how my beliefs shape the way I live. And I’ve made connections between the Bible and race in this country that I didn’t even know existed. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but so much can happen and change in such a short timespan if you simply sit down and talk.

 

Before coming into the class, I was at home in Philadelphia watching the news about what had happened to Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. I thought to myself that I was not going to have many conversations about this topic or others because race can be such a taboo. But as growing scholars these are the stories we should talk about because these are the stories that are currently affecting us. I came to class with my own biases about race and the Bible and was challenged to go beyond what I was looking for.

 

 

This was one of the first spaces where I was able to discuss the harsh reality that exists in US history and how Americans have used the Bible and other religious influences to support cruel actions.  I think that for many people, America is in a better and more tolerant place than it was when those things happened, so they believe it better not to study them in depth and reopen old wounds. But these problems are not going away any time soon. The news seems to be filled with acts of discrimination that are fueled by issues of race and religion.  

 

 

 

Even though one college course is not enough to fix all of these problems, it gave us the knowledge we need to see the discrepancies that exist in today’s society.

 

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Time will tell what these students will do about these discrepancies, but the creativity shown in their final research projects offer some great ideas on how we might broach the problematics of race in the biblical studies classroom.

To learn about what my students taught me in this course, check out my post, “Silence and Real Talk” on the Wabash Center’s Race Matters in the Classroom blog.

Photo Credit: “The steeple of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, SC” by Spencer Means  – CC by 2.0

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