Soong-Chan Rah | Racialization / Nationalization of the Image

thank you very much really appreciate your stirring and Powerful Words um thank you weaton for this very kind invitation to be here with you uh this uh this afternoon I'm trying to set up my own audio here that's okay uh no I'll put it up in just a few minutes if we can just can you mute the screen for a bit thank you uh this topic um that I will be tackling is the racialization and the nationalization of the image of God um I will be able to build uh strongly on uh Dr Jennings who

is my mentor adviser uh at Duke University um so you will hear his voice coming through in some partions of my presentation um I'll begin by uh reflecting on uh a trip to uh Ferguson Missouri that I made at the end of last year uh so I'll just kind of read through my experience and my thoughts on that at the very beginning uh in the quiet St Louis suburb of Ferguson Missouri the dead body of Michael Brown an 18-year-old African-American man lay roasting in the midday heat of an August day accounts vary but an encounter

between a white police officer and a black youth resulted in the death and desecration of a black body and the ignition of a national debate on the worth of black lives to American societ Society so that the waning months of 2014 and into 2015 on the heels of two non- indictments and the slaying of blackmen protests throughout the nation for raised asserting that black lives matter Rodney King Oscar Grant Michael Brown Eric Garner deir rice and now Walter Scott are part of a long list of black victims of violence at the hands of law enforcement

they are victims of an American narrative that seems to devalue Black Souls Black lives black bodies and black Minds so in the process of our engagement with the doctrine of the image of God we are confronted with the question how has a dysfunctional theological imagination contributed to a sociological reality that necessitates a black lives matter campaign how is a misreading of the image of God in the American Evangelical narrative elevated the dominant race and culture over and against other races and culture maybe we begin by thinking through that the power of Christian theology is the

power to engage in a Transcendent imagination that the ability to see beyond our immediate context and to see God and and see others through a lens of u a Transcendent imagination is a strength that we have as Christians but that strength can also be a weakness because the capacity for a Transcendent Vision can lead to a sense of arrogance a sense of privilege that is assumed by those who believe they possess this type of vision and that it could lead to the assumption that because we have this Transcendent imagination we hold a unique and preferred

position before God and this sense of exceptionalism is part of the problem of the racialization and the nationalization of the image of God there's much work done on this idea of the prophetic imagination Willie Jennings writes about the imaginative capacity to redefine the social Walter bugman talks about the prophetic imagination the task of prophetic Ministries to nurture nourish and evoke a Consciousness and perception alternative to the Consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us Bill kavanau also talks about this social theological imagination that can transform the individual and Society the reality of the broken

world that we live in as has been described in the previous session means that we often times engage not in a healthy theological imagination but a dysfunctional one and that this warped dysfunctional imagination has often projected whiteness as normative and has given the power of white Christianity to project a negative image of the other so let's talk about this racialization as an act of sinfulness the committing of sin through the project of racialization ation of the image of God sin is very simply defined for many of us as the act of taking God's place in

created order that we as human beings put ourselves as the standard uh that replaces God's standards and so if we believe that the standard in scripture and student standard in our theological understanding is that every human being is the is made in the image of God the sin of racism undermines that expression that the full image of God is found in only certain individuals or in certain people groups and not in all people groups and so the Distortion of this image of God in the uh in American Christianity is that often times there is an

elevation of the dominant culture the dominant race and a privileged position over others again the usurping of God's rightful determination and the replacement of his standards with our own this type of sinfulness um as I mentioned earlier has often times been expressed in the racialization and nationalization of a type of exceptionalism an exceptionalism that elevates one culture over the other and that's found first in a racialized version but also in a nationalized version maybe a belief in American exceptionalism or an American Christian exceptionalism and that we see tied into this American exceptionalism The Narrative of

triumphalism as well and I would identifies these things as a sin rooted in the racialization and nationalization of the image of God um I'll go over four categories where we also see this racialization and nationalization um and again I'm drawing very heavily from Dr jennings's work on this and I will reference his work to say if you want to explore this topic further uh his work will will get you there uh the first category is the um the the belief and this was already established in our previous session the belief that white bodies are superior

to non-white bodies or particularly black bodies and I won't go into detail because our second session today was already covering this topic the Assumption of superiority of white bodies over and against non-white bodies uh but the categor is extend it's not just about white bodies or white flesh but it is also about the assumed superiority of white Minds over and against uh nonwhite minds and I'll give you one particular example of this and that is the product of white Minds particularly in the area of language that how we understand the use of language is often

times indicative of our assumptions of white superiority in uh in in terms of the the white mind over and against non-white Minds um John willinsky writes that English is not taught as a second language but as the only medium of intelligible communication to acquire the English languages to have a stake in its claim as a world language it is to be a party to a history that runs from the colonial past that first planted English across the globe the linguistic chauvinism embodied in this notion of the native speaker sustains a colonizing the vision of the

world I would argue that wolinsky is not only speaking about a globalization of English but also maybe in Evangelical missions or in the Christian Academy as well that the language of English is the primary language of any theological discourse that English is the means by which we enter into uh the creative access necessary to go into uh nonwestern worlds that often times when we first talked about going into Nations that had previously been closed our first go-to was we will go as English teachers one of the primary narratives developing when we talked about Mission work

to uh Mongolia and to China was we will send English language teachers who will be under the guy who will be disguised as missionaries uh I'm I'm I'm told of an Asian-American pastors who was candidating within a denomination and he is an English speaker native English speaker but he also happens to speak Mandarin and a denominational official told him as he was candidating in many rural churches and churches that had were overwhelmingly uh Anglo in uh in makeup that he really shouldn't write down on his resume that he was familiar with mandarin or that he

could speak it because that might actually hurt his chances that what he should do is just say I'm a native English speaker and not actually mention that he's a mandarin speaker as well the Assumption of the superiority of white minds and white language over and against non-white languages and Minds a third category the Assumption of the superiority of white culture over and against non-white culture the first book that I read in the Seminary was a book about church and culture about culture and the relationship to Theology and after I read that book I almost left

Seminary because I was so offended by this particular particular book I won't mention the name of the book you'll be able to figure this out when I start talking about it uh the book talked about something called High culture and the way high culture was defined was Aristotle rembrand Bach dton Abbey no no that's not true um and this High culture was contrasted with something called Low culture and low culture was Andy warhol's paintings television sitcoms ban Joi Jackson what does he know about music if you spitting Michael Jackson and low culture so he had

these categories of high culture and low culture and it was a way of saying okay we're going to grade culture for a number of different using a number of different categories but I think as he was writing this book he realized I'm missing a category here which is every other cultures in the world was not categorized so a third category was created called folk culture and everything else got dumped into the category of folk culture culture African-American spirituals Korean fan dancing Native American regelia and drum circles all of these things fell into the very large

category of folk culture and it was implied pretty clearly that folk culture was not quite as good as European High culture it was better than pop culture and low culture but not quite as good as high culture Virginia Dominguez writes that any positive reference to culture almost always implies a European and neocentric culture which they claim as their own and in contrast to which they disparage others the supremacy or superiority of white culture over and against non-white culture and maybe the fourth category is the one we want to talk about more uh as an ongoing

issue the Assumption of Supremacy superiority of white theology over and against non-white Theology and the best way I can describe this is that when I engage in a theological dialogue with others I never hear of an adjectival marker describing Western theology it's just theology it's the norm it's the center but there's always an adjectival marker for non-white theology there is black theology there is Liberation theology there is mang Theology and so we assume a normative position for Western Theology and they clearly do not need to designate them as a western theology they are just theology

it is just theology but we always put a adjectival marker in other expressions of theology these issues of an assumption of superiority of white bodies white Minds white culture and white theology over and against non-white or non-western expressions of of of Christianity and and again I go back to Dr jennings's uh work white indicates High salvific viability white indicates High salvific viability and that High salvific viability is often times associated with our approximation of whiteness and I want to pick up on that theme when I give you some historical examples here so what happens in

the uh trajectory of Western evangelicalism or American evangelicalism when we have established that white is normative and that approximation to whiteness is what determines salvific viability or maybe your viability within the boundaries of Evangelical of evangelicalism um I was planning to give four examples I will give two the first two I will refer uh to other works that will be helpful the first example of this racialization and nationalization of the image of God uh is Steven nukem's work uh where he discovers in pagans in the promised land the doctrine of Discovery where the image of

God is distorted in such a way that allows for the conquest of a non non-western World by the European colonialist Steven nukem's work and of course Dr Jennings works the Christian imagination which has a wonderful section discussing uh the the distorted imagination that leads to the slave trade so those are two historic examples of the racialization and nationalization uh of the image of God uh but the two examples that I will cover with you today is one the American Evangelical relationship to the city and Ministry in the urban context and how that Ministry and engagement

often times has a racialized narrative and the second example is the work or the rise and the um and the uh emergence of black evangelicals or African-American evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s and how their narrative reflects again the racialization and nationalization of the image of God uh let's begin with the IDE uh the question of how have American evangelicals engage the city and how is that a reflective of uh of the way that the the way that whites look at the world is often times determinative of how the rest looks at the world in

other words who gets to decide what and who reflects the image of God or not and I would argue that it has been mostly Western white Christianity that makes that uh that decision the dominion over creation the Dominion to declare things as right or wrong the Dominion to declare things as and to name these things has often times been determined by Western white evangelicals so we can begin with this uh question of um how have Americans or American Christians viewed the cities in the United States well the first example is one that most of us

are familiar with when John winr the the governor of Massachusetts uh is at the at the the the Massachusetts Bay and he looks out at what will become the city of Boston and he says he envisions a city set on a hill that's why if you were to go to the city of Bost Boston you have places like Beacon Hill and Beacon Street as a reflection of this idea that the new world the North American continent the the soon to be United States of America these cities in the United States of America they're going to

be cities set on a hill New Zion and new Jerusalem's found in the new world uh William klech notes that the vision of the new world as Locust for a new city the new world prompted Christians from the 16th to the 19th century to think of America as the last and best of human societies following the westward course of Empire so we see the image of American cities As Cities set on a hill New Zion and New Jerusalem Harvey Khan writes that New England was seen as the center of uh the new religious Life Christian

Life and New England was seen as a New Jerusalem that image begins to change and it begins to change when the cities begin to change we first encounter indust industrialization where the cities become industrialized and with the Industrial Revolution we now have a high rate of urbanization so more and more people are moving into our Urban centers and that's coupled with the migration and immigration of non-anglo into our Urban centers we're familiar with these stories the first is the story of the Eastern and Southern European coming to the United States coming to uh passing by

uh great Lady Liberty coming into Staten Island and being processed in the ports moving into the urban centers of New York and Boston uh forming their own communities uh uh and and these folks are not Anglo Protestants they're not Northern or Western European Protestants they're Italian Catholics they're polish Jews they're Slavic Orthodox they're from all over the Eastern uh all over Southern and Eastern Europe and they're not bringing Protestant Faith with them they are bringing other faiths Catholics Orthodox Judaism Robert Ory notes that in the feverish imagination of antibellum anti-catholic literary provocators City neighborhoods appeared

as caves of rum and romanism mysterious and forbidding a threat to democracy so these cities that were once City set on a hill when the dominant culture looks at these cities and all of a sudden their neighbors are no longer white Anglo-Saxon Protestants they are now Roman Catholic they are now Greek Orthodox they are now polish Jews The Narrative of the city begins to change the city is no longer Jerusalem the city is now Babylon and this is Amplified with what happens post Civil War all the way through into postor War II which is the

story of not only immigration from eastern and southern Europe but the story of The Great Migration where African-Americans from the Mississippi Delta move from the south into the northern cities cities like Chicago Baltimore Philadelphia Detroit Cleveland have a huge influx of African-Americans moving into these Urban centers Isabelle wierson writes that after World War II Chicago Detroit Cleveland and other northern and western cities would witness a fitful migration of whites out of their Urban strongholds the far out precincts in the inner ring suburbs became sanctuaries for battle weary whites seeking with government incentives to replicate the

H Havens they once had in these cities the cities that were once cities set on a hill new Jerusalem's and New Zion now they were places of rum and romanism places where white flight was happening in a very significant way so the cities are now identified as Babylons and there is a New Jerusalem and that's the suburbs the suburbs of the New Jerusalem the suburbs where you will is are the places where you will build nice Christian colleges the suburbs are the places where you will have mega churches and white fly could be theologically justified

after all we don't want to live in Babylon we don't want to live in the center of all that is evil in the world world so we must flee to the suburbs think again the racialization of the image of God who gets to determine what's Jerusalem and what's Babylon who gets to say this place is okay to live in and this place is not the Gaze the dominant gaze determines that narrative so the whites move from the city to the suburbs there is a theological justification after all why would we live in Babylon we need

to move to the New Jerusalem Muslims in the suburbs and these churches actually grow winr Hudson notes that in the year 1945 $26 million were spent on new church buildings that sounds like a lot but get this 15 years later by 1960 after this massive white flight occurs $1 billion were spent on new buildings so in 15 years the new building budget goes from 26 million to $1 billion why because whites had left the urban neighborhood neigh hoods they had abandoned a lot of these churches moved to the suburbs and were building beautiful buildings out

in the suburbs post World War II now the question then is well they were building these buildings because the churches were growing yes the churches were growing because everybody moved to the suburbs this was not conversion growth that's one of the concerns about well there was so much conversion growth in these Suburban churches Herbert Gans did a study on Lev town which is one of these quintessential Suburban communities that spring up post World War II and he was tracking Church attendance and found that actually there really wasn't a change in terms of church attendance other

words people who were going to church in the city were not going to church in the suburbs people were not going to church in the city were not going to church in the suburbs the churches in the suburbs were growing because they had moved from the city to the suburbs it's sort of like there was a New York Times article a few years ago that was tracking the growth of the church in the exurbs which is even further out from the suburbs and in the exurbs they talked about these churches that literally sprang up overnight

there was nobody there you know some of these communities there's nobody there it's cornfield after cornfield and within about two or three years all these subdivisions and and uh and Suburban tracks show up these gated communities pop up well it turns out that churches Innovative capitalistic thinking Church pastors move into these communities and church PL and overnight their churches go from 0 to 2,000 and they write a book later on how to grow your church from 0 to 2000 because they're moving into neighborhoods that didn't have churches 10 years ago they didn't have people 10

years ago and now that the people that have moved they bring their Christian faith to the suburbs and these churches in the suburbs grow uh Dennison Nash and Peter Burger did a study uh several years ago on um I'm trying to remember the notes uh the title of the works are two title two different works the child the family and the religious survival in Suburbia and the second one is and a little child should Le them a test of an hypothesis that children were the source of the American religious revival so the growth of the

church is one transfer growth from the city to the suburbs and the growth of the church was because these Suburban families were having children and leading to the growth of the church in the suburbs but that perpetuates this idea that the suburbs of the New Jerusalem we did right by moving out to the suburbs it was the right choice to leave Babylon the evil city and move in to the suburbs and to form a new Jerusalem a New Zion in the suburbs and it also Justified a lot of the church growth techniques Chief among them

the homogeneous Uno principle well let's build churches that are built for people that are like us and we will attract people that are like us into these Suburban churches and grow these churches after all we we are the New Jerusalem one of the more prominent Church growth books has an image of a church in it's a it's a church in uh the suburbs of Southern California I'm not going to go into more detail than that a suburb of Southern California and there's an image of the book that he wrote about this is the kind of

person that we want and it was a 40-year-old white male with khaki pants and a golf shirt and a cell phone in one hand said this is the person we were trying to attract to the church the image of the person we want at our church which leaves out a whole lot of other people and not allowed to come to that church and so the homogeneous yuno principal began to find a theological justification after all if the cities are Babylon and the suburbs are Jerusalem then it justifies these actions whose gaze determines what is right

what is wrong what is good what is bad that is another part to the story there a third part you not only get the city seen as Jerusalem initially and mooved to The Narrative of Babylon and the new place of Jerusalem is the suburbs you now get this new phenomenon recent phenomenon of gentrification the return to the city and not only of empty nesters not only of young people but Christians and churches now want to return to the city and the problem there is that the Gaze the image still is retained from a previous generation

so the suburbs are still the New Jerusalem and the cities are still Babylon and what it does is it shapes The Narrative of what we're going to do in the cities so I thought one of the best ways to illustrate this is to look at and we can put the slides up here of book covers book covers on Urban Ministry can we put the full screen up book covers on Urban Ministry book covers an urban Ministry and these are roughly in chronological order by the way so we know the city of the story of the

city set on a hill New Jerusalem and New Zion but then you begin to hear about the secular City and they are unheavenly cities these cities are Babylon by choice they are sick cities and home is a dirty Street in these sick cities so is there hope for this city well yes if there is a church that takes on trouble and if there are those who dare to love the ghetto because there is an urban challenge we need to take our cities for God we need to send Apostles to the cities from the Jerusalem suburbs

they're going to be the change agents in these cities we're going to unleash them into the world with their skinny jeans and they will form an Unstoppable Force to do greater things in our cities cuz greater things have yet to come greater things have yet to be done in the city yay yay yay yay who gaze determines what the city looks like whose gaze determines what the suburbs look like it is the racialization and the nationalization of the image of God I'll offer one more example the story of African-American evangelicals and this story is an

interesting one that is very underrepresented I was mentioning earlier that the last time I was at the Wheaten theology conference I Was Here by accident I was actually upstairs in the archives doing some research came down and saw friends of mine here and I said what are you doing here we're here for the Wheaten theology conference so that's the other last time the other time that I've been at this conference uh accidentally uh but I was doing research on African-American evangelicals and I was looking specifically at the the emergence of the national black Evangelical Association

and I don't know if this is true now but four years ago when I was doing research on this topic there was one folder on the national black Evangelical Association one small thin folder on the nbea um so it shows that this is an underrepresent Ed story within the story of evangelicals because that story is often times dominated by white evangelicals um there are a couple of reasons for this and Ed Gilbreth who wrote a book called uh reconciliation blues and AG Miller who teaches at overin uh they both look at one it begins you

have to kind of look at the fact that it begins with the exclusion of the historic black churches from the Evangelical narrative now if you were to examine the theological foundations of the historic black church the main the logical assertions of the historic black church compare it to the Evangelical theology you would find pretty much the same theology but historically sociologically we very rarely consider historic black churches as part of the Evangelical story so there is another part of the story though that there are African-Americans who self-identified as evangelicals and actually asserted a very strong

Evangelical identity apart from the historic black churches and this group ed urges in the 1960s and 1970s and one of the key forms of that expression was the national black Evangelical Association started in 1963 U I want to talk about the different threads within the denomination uh within that movement and then talk specifically about the role of Tom Skinner and uh and his role in this as a in historical context uh one of the main threads of the national black Evangelical Association was the nage brothers who were a part of the Plymouth Brethren movement in

the Bahamas came to the United States and started planting churches in major Urban centers especially in New York and then eventually in places like Detroit uh the Plymouth Brethren as many of you know are very fundamentalists dispensationalists very conservative theologically we would identify the Plymouth Brethren with a very conservative theology the noage brothers kind of formed their own group the black Brethren who were uh found mostly in these Urban centers uh Bill panel who is now at Fuller Seminary would be one of those who came out of this tradition in Detroit among the black Brethren

uh so the one of the first important threads of the national black Evangelical Association were staunchly fundamentalist staunchly conservative theologically a second thread are African-American Pentecostals and one of the key leaders of that would be William Bentley and his wife Ruth Bentley both are part of a trinitarian Pentecostal denomination the strength of these denominations is that they held to a conservative theology but at the same time they held their own uh they had their own kind of network uh they were not under the control of white denominations they had their own network of black Pentecostal

churches but again held to a conservative Evangelical theology the third thread would be the African-Americans especially post World War II who would attend Evangelical institutions who attended Wheaten College Moody Bible Institute Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Fuller Theological Seminary Gordon Conwell Etc these pioneering African-Americans would have their the theological education formed and shaped in the context of these very uh uh strongly Evangelical institutions so if you were to look at their degrees you would say they have very strong Evangelical credentials they're graduates of our Evangelical institutions uh they were relatively small in number but they were

very influential in the formation of the nbea the nbea provided a place where those who held to a Evangelical theology could go to a place with other African-American evangelicals to talk about the issues that they were dealing with at these Evangelical institutions many of them would go on to serve in Evangelical par Church organizations like in a varsity Christian Fellowship Youth for Christ campus Crusade for Christ So This Thread this third thread would if you were to look at the resume you would say from top to bottom they were strongly Evangelical credentials they went to

weaton they worked for Youth for Christ they had the same credentials as Billy Graham some of them even worked for Billy gr so you have these uh African-American evangelicals you look at their story you look at their uh resume you could say very clearly these are died in the wool from top to bottom credential evangelicals they are car carrying evangelicals the problem though is that as these African-American evangelicals began to explore not only the foundation of their Evangelical theology but began to explore a black national identity an identity outside of white evangelicalism they were called

into question and maybe the best example of that is Tom Skinner Tom Skinner as many of you know in fact he's had gave one of the most stirring talks in Wheaten Chapel ever here in 1969 uh Tom Skinner uh is a is is kind of a a great example of black evangelicalism in the 1960s and 70s uh he grew up in a historic black church in Harlem in fact his father was a preacher at a historic black church um he was a Son of a Preacher but he was also leading a double life uh he

was the president of his youth group he was the president of his Shakespeare club was a straight A student but he was also a gang leader and he had kind of disavowed Christianity in some form even though on the surface he was a good church kid um Tom Skinner uh be was about to enter into a a huge gang war and he was getting ready to lead his gang he was a gang leader lead his gang into this war into this battle the next day uh and as he was preparing for this battle he hears

a radio program and it is a tele a radio evangelist preaching the gospel and somehow through that preaching of the Gospel through the radio program Tom Skinner becomes uh Evangelical Christian commits his life to Christ and he has this amazing testimony he goes to the gang he says I'm leaving the gang they don't beat him out he actually is able to leave the gang unscathed and then he becomes this tremendous evangelist on the streets of Harlem rents out Apollo Theater and rents out these places travels in New York City and and becomes this powerful evangelist

uh so he has this amazing testimony I was a church kid who everybody thought was the good kid but I was really a bad gang leader and then I heard this radio program and I converted to Christianity through this Evangelistic radio program and now I'm an evangelist for the kingdom of God so that you can imagine Evangelical is hearing that and says this is the story you want to get out there this is The Narrative of a personal conversion The Narrative of someone who was once a bad kid now a good kid that's the greatest

Evangelical testimony ever told and he was trotted out in a number of different contexts to tell that story other evangelists would bring him along and say you can have the one multiethnic night and you'll speak at the one multi-ethnic night and often times those are the best attended uh Evangelistic Crusades he even got a spot on radio on Christian radio and again the main thing he would do is share his powerful personal testimony and use the evangelism tools that are often very common in that time the altar calls those kinds of things that we associate

with evangelism so skino was embraced by the white Evangelical World by the main Evangelical world he was asked to come to speak at the Wheaten colleges he was given a radio spot on Moody Radio he was embraced by the white Evangelical World until until he begins to speak about justice issues social justice issues and particularly racial justice issues so during the time that Tom Skinner could approximate whiteness approximate mainstream white Evangelical Christianity there was a broad Embrace of Skinner's Ministry but as he begins to shift the focus of his talks and his Christian College presentations

in 1969 here at weaton and in 1970 at the Urbana missions conference he is less and less embraced by the majority culture evangelicals Radio St stations drop him Christian colleges stop inviting him he talks about the history of Oppression of Black America he talks about the history of Oppression within the church and I don't have time to read through a lot of these quotes they'll be in the paper but you see over and over again Skinner now beginning to raise this question of racial Justice and the radio station no longer calls him Christian colleges no

longer call him now there is question about well he was divorced in the early part of the 1970s that is true but what I'm finding is that he was pushed out of evangelicalism way before the divorce actually occurred that was the final seal that made it a done deal but even before the divorce occurred there was already the Rumblings he's not one of us he doesn't fit because salvific viability is tied in to approximation of whiteness and he had stopped doing that so who gets to determine whose gaze is normative whose perspective determines who is

made in the image of God and who is not who is acceptable and who is not I will close with some things maybe we can do as we move forward as we move forward as I've written in another context about the changing face of American Christianity the changing face especially of American evangelicalism that more and more churches are becoming not just multiethnic but also we're seeing that white evangelicalism is in Decline but it is the growth of the korean-american churches the African-American churches the Spanish speaking congregations that has been the Redemptive work of God in

the last 105 years of maintaining the church in America mainly through non-white expressions of Faith here in the United States but the question remains even as the demographics of American society and American churches change have the power dynamics change do we still live in a world where the dominant gaze is still with the dominant culture do we still live in a world where what is defined as normal theology is still defined as Western white theology do we still live in a world where conferences highlight white Christian pastors as as the example to follow do we

still live in a world where faculty of Christian colleges are overwhelmingly white do we still live in a world where denominational leadership is still overwhelmingly white even though that is not the reality of the church we live in so I ask the question once more whose gaze would determine The Narrative of American evangelicalism going forward thank you [Applause]