Undressed and From the Back and Side

Evangelicalism and the "colonialist gaze"

In chapter 2 of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Willie Jennings profiles José de Acosta, a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit missionary to Latin America. Acosta was a prolific writer whose most influential work may have been Historia natural y moral de las Indias (A Natural and Moral History of the Indies) published in 1590. The book is wide-ranging, detailing Inca and Aztec customs and history, describing the physical features, plants, and animals of the “New World,” and hypothesizing how the inhabitants of the Americas got there anyway—how these descendants of Adam emigrated so far east of Eden.

Jennings explores the lens through which Acosta interpreted indigenous peoples as he did the careful work of a naturalist. When it came time assess the moral history of the Indians, Jennings writes, “the fundamental agency that shapes [Acosta’s] narrative of Indian moral history is del demonio (“the devil”)” (96). The only way Acosta could make sense of the customs, behaviors, and beliefs of native peoples was to chalk it up to the deceptive work of Satan.

I’m isolating one layer of a multi-layered argument here, but ultimately Jennings argues that this fundamental belief (that the devil is to blame for the ignorance of the pagans) results in an assumption that European Christians have “an ability to always see through the natives—their words, their logic, their practices, their beliefs—and discern the underlying logic” behind it all: abject idolatry and demonic influence.

For weeks I’ve been struck by that phrase: an ability to always see through.

However the natives understood their own customs and rituals, however they construed their own motives and beliefs, European Christians knew better. They claimed sole power to determine the true motives and beliefs that governed the hearts and minds of the natives. Jennings calls this x-ray vision the “colonialist gaze.”

An ability to always see through.

It seems to me there’s a similar evaluative confidence in evangelicalism. After generations of discipleship in analyzing worldviews, we seem to share Acosta’s confidence that we can always see through the thoughts and motives of others. However post-modern, feminist, or critical race theorists understand their own motives and beliefs, however they construe their own aims and goals, we evangelicals claim a special power to always see through to determine their true motive. That motive, we recognize, is to propose a complete alternative account of the human problem, its solution, and the chief end of man. Put another way, the motive is to preach an alternative gospel, which makes the root influence of their projects demonic.

All this was on my mind when I took a break from Jennings and read W. E. B. DuBois’ essay “The Souls of White Folk.” Published in 1920, the essay is an incisive exploration of “whiteness” means and where the notion came from. DuBois claims an ability to see through white people—“I see in and through them,” he writes. He sees beneath their self-perceptions and justifications. He sees them “undressed and from the back and side.”

To put DuBois’s vision in Jennings’ terms, DuBois reverses the colonialist gaze.

“I see the working of their entrails,” writes DuBois. “I know their thoughts and they know that I know.”

With his x-ray powers DuBois looks through white America’s swelling words about their democracy and religion and finds behind it only rot. Regarding their faith, DuBois assesses that the “number of white individuals who are practising with even reasonable approximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday supplements.” Regarding democracy, DuBois concludes

Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow people are concerned.

DuBois recognizes that this reversed colonial gaze is uncomfortable for white folk. “This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious!”

A century after DuBois’s essay and several centuries after Acosta made the colonialist gaze a feature of Western Christianity (if Jennings is right), America’s white evangelicals find ourselves now embarrassed, now furious. Embarrassed by the profound moral failures of highly-visible founding leaders of our movement. Furious at charges leveled by secular theorists that the fuel that really powers the American evangelical engine is not the Holy Spirit but an unholy formula mixed up from nationalism, racism, mammon, and patriarchy. A growing number of critics say with DuBois, '“A nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.”

Reading Jennings and DuBois together makes me wonder if one source of our embarrassment and fury is that we are now the objects of something like the colonialist gaze. A host of theories propose to look through us and discern our real motives and beliefs. We who have historically presumed the ability to always look through the worldviews of others now squirm under x-ray vision focused at our own entrails.

Are the critics right? Can evangelical belief be reduced to the machinations of unconscious and unholy powers? The embarrassed may answer, Yes. The furious may answer, No. For both a more productive next step, I think, would be an evaluative pause by which we temporarily stop trying to look through everyone else and look along with our critics at our own insides.

Because surely the defining feature of the Christian life is not its x-ray superpower but its instinct for perpetual repentance.