"What Are Christians For?" 3.1

You can read parts one and two of this series on Jake Meador's book "What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World" here and here.

On one hand, in Chapter 2, The Great Uprooting: Race and the End of Nature, Meador balances the approach Carl Trueman took in "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self." Trueman's was an intellectual history of the contemporary Western preoccupation with identity. Meador's book is a social history. Both are valuable and each compliments the other. In this chapter, however, Meador's reach may have exceeded his grasp. He tries to do a great deal in a small compass and exacerbates the risks of compression by describing what he identifies as the "problem of place" in terms of Whiteness. In other words, Meador is channeling Willie James Jennings instead of Wendell Berry.

"Whiteness," in Meador's telling, entails a profound loss of geographical place-ness ("estrangement from nature") and community, and their replacement with an autonomous imposition of the will of individuals over land and other peoples. In Meador's retelling of Jennings's "The Christian Imagination," Whiteness began first with the European migration to the Western Hemisphere and then proceeded by colonial [better: imperial] conquest to the rest of the world. And typically in the name of Christ.

"The Christian Imagination" by Jennings is a powerful and powerfully-written work. It is, however, cultural history told to argue that Christians "must enter the struggle [against] land acquisition, space and place design, targeted housing development, buying, and selling which constantly reestablishes and strengthens segregationist mentalities and racial identities." Jennings brooks little of anything contrary to his thesis that the commodification of land is the original sin and that it characterizes the Heart of Whiteness. As a series of accounts, Jennings's book is not untrue--he writes a powerful brief in the present-day court of academic opinion--but using it to construct a definition of Whiteness, which Meador can then deploy as a popular "theory of everything" (at least for another chapter) is tendentious. "History is not always good versus evil or in a linear direction. History is complicated," or so writes historian Miles Smith. (A brief post with my musings about the genre of history and the dangers of historical presentism here.)

What makes the trope of Whiteness especially frustrating is that I agree with many of the specific observations that Meador makes. Even more unhelpful, characterizing the maladies of past 400 in terms of Whiteness obscures the two important questions. First, why and how were the Europeans and their American descendants so effective? I doubt that the Mongols gave a rip about the place, culture, or language of the nations they conquered but the cultural effects of their conquests were-short lived. Indeed, the Europeans who conquered and migrated to the Americas were themselves the descendants of those who had conquered the previous inhabitants of their home territories, and so on before that. While complete destruction of a conquered people sometimes happened, often a conquest led to eventual assimilation with and to the place of the conquered. Assimilation did not happen in the Americas but Meador offers no explanation as to why it turned out differently here. (Beyond the obvious, sheer numbers, I might suggest technology.) His muse, Jennings, does little more than throw up his hands:

Much is at risk in the expansion of peoples and their cultural forms over vast spaces and in their penetration by aggressive capitalist-generated dissolution ... The question facing the modern world is whether there is a form of cultural joining and cultural interaction that does not depend on or enact the dissolution trajectories of modern global economies and cultures or set in place desperate and destructive xenophobic responses to these overwhelming forces. (The Christian Imagination at 247)

And second, why has this understanding of Whiteness proved so beguiling even among the non-white peoples of the world? Quoting Jennings, only slightly out of context, it must be because "freedom from the ground, the dirt, landscapes, and animals, from life collaborative with the rhythms of God's other creatures ..." appeals to virtually everyone (The Christian Imagination at 290.)

In his next chapter (The Unmaking of Places: The Fruit of Industrialism) Meador also observes that with the Industrial Revolution, Whiteness as defined was not directed only at the natural world and non-white peoples but lower class whites as well. Technology as applied to means of extraction, production, distribution, of capital and goods, as well as living itself (among my favorites: clean water, antibiotics, and air conditioning) has led the way. In Meador's words, industrial technology is itself a culture but the "sort of culture that tends toward the view that human beings can do anything through industry if only we would remove the limits that have traditionally constrained our behavior." Transhumanism, anyone? But continuing the refrain, technology too must be Whiteness.

But what's the alternative? The combination of market capitalism and commodification, technology, and the widespread recognition of the legal personhood of the business corporation may have led to the degradation of traditional forms of life but the benefits are enormous. The mapping of individuals onto land with substantial freedom to use it as they please has displaced communal and community-centric forms of life because lots and lots of people like it. Even most of the marginalized, those without property, want to have property; they don't want to go back to the village.

So, what's Meador's solution? Perhaps subsequent chapters will provide the answers.