- Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa to America” …writing about the relationship between black Americans and Christianity is very difficult for me. Especially when dealing with older (i.e. eighteenth and nineteenth century) texts. I find myself face to face with my own anger toward religion in general, and Christianity specifically, even as I cannot help but recognize the liberatory potential that I am able to see in it with othered eyes. I keep reminding myself that I need make a distinction, even if one constantly collapsing upon itself, between Christianity, writ large, and missionary discourse. Between the institutionalized and integrated system of belief and the principles/praxis of conversion. Mudimbe points out, via Eboussi-Boulanga, that missionary discourse “is a language of derision, insofar as it fundamentally ridicules the pagan’s gods. And one must not forget that since its birth Christianity has appropriated for itself both the only true way to true communication with the Divine and the only correct image of God and God’s magnificence.” Missionary discourse is a language of reduction; of black and white—though, historically, it has also been a language of white over black, of the conversion of blackness to the white which could only be the former’s saving grace. I guess one of the important things is not to attack it with a missionary logic of my own; not assume that the image of Christianity that is available to me, even if oppressive, needs to be handled by being refuted or reduced until it disappears. The issue is that I don’t know what the alternatives are. How do you handle writing about religion, when you’re neither a believer nor a dismissive critic? When you don’t want to indulge the prejudices of the secular?

- Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa to America”

…writing about the relationship between black Americans and Christianity is very difficult for me. Especially when dealing with older (i.e. eighteenth and nineteenth century) texts. I find myself face to face with my own anger toward religion in general, and Christianity specifically, even as I cannot help but recognize the liberatory potential that I am able to see in it with othered eyes.

I keep reminding myself that I need make a distinction, even if one constantly collapsing upon itself, between Christianity, writ large, and missionary discourse. Between the institutionalized and integrated system of belief and the principles/praxis of conversion. Mudimbe points out, via Eboussi-Boulanga, that missionary discourse “is a language of derision, insofar as it fundamentally ridicules the pagan’s gods. And one must not forget that since its birth Christianity has appropriated for itself both the only true way to true communication with the Divine and the only correct image of God and God’s magnificence.”

Missionary discourse is a language of reduction; of black and white—though, historically, it has also been a language of white over black, of the conversion of blackness to the white which could only be the former’s saving grace. I guess one of the important things is not to attack it with a missionary logic of my own; not assume that the image of Christianity that is available to me, even if oppressive, needs to be handled by being refuted or reduced until it disappears. The issue is that I don’t know what the alternatives are. How do you handle writing about religion, when you’re neither a believer nor a dismissive critic? When you don’t want to indulge the prejudices of the secular?

Notes

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