While the dialogue between Merton and Baldwin was not one of personal, direct friendship, nevertheless their minds, hearts, and souls were very much in the same place.
This essay will return anew to the dialogue between Merton and Baldwin on race, humanity, spiritual integrity and dignity, and the course of American and planetary history.
Engaging with performative race theory, the article concludes by making a constructive proposal for a performative theology of race that can account for the profound intersections between racism and soteriology, but also opens trajectories for transforming hegemonic discourses of race and their theological underpinnings.Īs we find ourselves in a new moment of wearisome and violent racial recrimination, as the ghoul of whiteness and white supremacy returns again more intensely than ever, manifesting in the New Jim Crow, the scandalous murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and most recently, the mass violent march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, the voices of Merton and Baldwin in concert on race are more important than ever for us to encounter, imbibe, and embody. It proposes that in this process, Christianity, Whiteness and salvation were conflated in a way that has sponsored White supremacy, disguised as innocence. Using the debate about Achille Mbembe's disinvitation from the German art festival 'Ruhrtriennale' 2020 as a case that is typical of a specifically Western European discourse on race, it first sketches a brief genealogy of the modern/colonial history of religio-racialisation and its intersections with Christian tradition, in which racial categories were forged in soteriological discourses, and in which, in turn, soteriological categories were shaped by racist discourses. This article starts from the observation that current debates about race and racism are often couched in soteriological terms such as guilt and forgiveness, or confession and exoneration, and it argues that this overlap calls for theological analysis.
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