Listening as Hosts: Liturgically Facing Colonization and White Supremacy

By Sam Codington and Cláudio Carvalhaes

White supremacy and racialized violence have animated much of society and church in the United States. Many people of goodwill are grasping for what to do in the face of such broad-reaching and painful wounds. From tracing the emergence of the modern concept of race to observing the evolution of Confederate monuments, Listening as Hosts: Liturgically Facing Colonization and White Supremacy crafts a picture of these historical dynamics and seeks to offer forms of liturgical resistance for churches and spiritual communities. Pastors, spiritual leaders, churches, and people of no faith at all will find invitations to listen deeply, to discard oppressive expressions of Christianity, and to search for community with one another and with the earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666778892

Sam Codington

Sam Codington is the pastor of Faith Presbyterian Church in the College Area of San Diego, California. He was the moderator of San Diego Presbytery (2023). He served as a commissioner to the 225th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He received a master of divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctor of ministry from San Francisco Theological Seminary. He is married to Esther, and they have a son, Ezra.

Book preview

Introduction: Why This, Why Now?

"It is as though Christianity,

wherever it went in the modern colonies,

inverted its sense of hospitality. It claimed

to be the host, the owner of the spaces it entered,

and demanded native peoples enter its cultural logics,

its ways of being in the world, and its conceptualities."

¹

Willie James Jennings

"And the question is

can I see my face

when I face my own history

from where you’ve faced it?"

²

Pádraig Ó Tuama

"Official American religion,

just like accepted American history,

lops off the uncomfortable verses about our lives."

³

Serene Jones

They need to go back to where they came from, a middle-aged white woman said to me in a raised voice, as we sat across from each other with her nonverbal mother in a hospital bed between us. She spoke as an angry host casting out unwelcome guests. She was referring to anyone appearing or sounding non-white. I was furious, though I had heard these words used many times. She did not know me before I walked into the hospital room only minutes earlier. Her mother was a member of the church where I was a pastor, and she was a church member, but of another church. Her words were loud and bitter. It was not a dialogue. It was a monologue. I left that room angry and sad. I went home to my wife and son, and I wondered whether churches eradicated of racism would be possible. Not all racism, however, is so overt.

Listening may open the heart. When we live in positions benefiting from historical and contemporary power, as the white church in the United States does, then our first task is to listen with those forced to the edges and shadows, to listen until our hearts break open, and then to continue listening. When Clint Smith visited Whitney Plantation in Louisiana and entered a cabin where enslaved people had slept, he reflected, There was something about listening to the creak of the floor and thinking how the board must have groaned under the bodies of the people with no choice but to sleep directly on it.⁴ Can we listen to often-hidden histories with this kind of depth and vulnerability? In effect, for those of us who live in legacies of white European colonizers, our first task is to listen deeply and persistently with those living in legacies of the violently colonized, while also admitting that simplistic binaries between colonizer and colonized are superficial.⁵ Facing histories that have brought us into the current moment and that shape the current moment delves deeper into particularity, our wounds and dreams, than endeavors focused on diversity. While undertakings focused on diversity gloss over the experiences and stories of pain that shape us, facing histories of colonization name and give visibility to our wounds.

Colonization is the work of predatory empires to commodify peoples and steal land. Liturgy is the work of the people to build community with one another and with God. Liturgies of decolonization can be a form of resistance, protest, and liberation. Liturgies of decolonization do not belong only in the context of worship services on Sunday mornings. While they may launch from Sunday mornings, they enter our everyday lives, inviting us to touch and to be touched by neighbors, the human and the more than human. I desire to craft liturgies that resist and break apart the white supremacist operations of colonization, beginning with the ways in which we think, feel, and imagine as gathered communities of faith. Worship is at the heart of what I do as a pastor.

In this sense, I write toward a postcolonial perspective. Kwok Pui-Lan describes the task of postcolonial work: The prefix ‘post’ denotes not only a temporal period or political transition of power but also reading strategies, practices, and actions that challenge colonialism and its legacy. I have defined postcolonial imagination as a desire, a determination, and a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome, which takes many forms and guises. Engaging the postcolonial means to participate in a community of discourse and in actions of resistance.⁶ Moreover, she asserts, Postcolonial theology examines the sociopolitical context from which theology emerges and to which it responds . . . postcolonial theology functions as a training of the imagination and an attempt to construct a religious worldview that promotes justices, radical plurality, democratic practices, and planetary solidarity.⁷ While disentangling who the colonizers and the colonized are may not be entirely useful or even possible, working from and within the legacies in which we find ourselves is a starting place for resistance. Even as I seek to engage my own social location as being within legacies of white European colonizers, I realize that I share elements of being part of the colonized also. Simple bifurcated distinctions between the colonizers and the colonized do not account for our violently tangled lives.

One of my motivations for writing critically about colonization and liturgy involves excavating my own family’s history. As a white, heterosexual, male pastor of Anglo-European descent, I am shaped by the histories of Anglo-European colonization and the Anglo-European missionary efforts that have animated those colonization processes. I was born and raised in rural South Carolina to Presbyterian parents, both of whom grew up as children of Presbyterian missionary parents, my mom in Brazil and my dad in South Korea. When I was ten years old, I traveled with my parents to the Island of Hispaniola. They were involved in education with pastors and teachers in Haiti. On one occasion, as we were standing in the midst of a remote village of thatch-roof huts, my father knelt down next to me and said, Sam, this is their home. Do you understand? That question has remained with me for more than twenty-five years. I have been interrogating that statement and question from different angles, sometimes casually and sometimes critically. When my dad made the statement and asked the question, I did not grasp the complications of home nor of the positioning of my own social location nor of how we had arrived at the current arrangement, but at the time, this was my dad’s way of seeking to convey to me a sense of sympathy, to see the full humanity of the Haitian people. He desired for me to care for what would become two decades of partnership with teachers and pastors in Haiti. I did not comprehend my own social location as a young white boy from the Southeast of the United States standing on the Island of Hispaniola nor did I comprehend the meanings of the land and the stories in which I was inhabiting: the first patch of soil to be violently colonized four centuries earlier, those surrounding me in the village arriving there as enslaved peoples held hostage against their will, and this patch of soil being the location of the first successful liberation movement in the Americas. I was not yet listening fully within someone else’s story and on someone else’s land. I was participating in a stream of history of well-intentioned white people seeking to help the less fortunate, a gloss that conveniently preserves white goodness without critically engaging how any of us arrived into the unjust present arrangement.

When Pádraig Ó Tuama writes, Can I see my face when I face my own history from where you’ve faced it?,⁸ he helps me ask myself the question, Can I face my history of white European colonizers and missionaries from where African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, Indigenous peoples, and the earth face my history? Can I face my family’s history from where they have faced it? For much of US history, white churches have participated in a concerted effort to help white people not face and not feel our histories from any vantage point but our own. As a result, we hold substantially incomplete collective stories of the unfolding of church in America, and our hearts remain insulated from the pathos of many around us. With insulated hearts, communion remains impossible. I intend to gesture toward breaking open what insulates and inhibits our hearts from authentic communion.

Another of my motivations for writing critically about colonization and liturgy involves fighting for space for my family, my spouse and son and families who face racism in the church. I married into a first-generation Korean American family, more than a decade after standing on the Island of Hispaniola for the first time. Marrying into a first-generation immigrant family has changed how I see, think, and feel with the world. While I am not suggesting that all immigration experiences are the same—they are most assuredly not—my daily experiences and commitments have moved me to begin feeling with my own family’s social location. How my wife and son experience white-dominant spaces has caused me to question and interrogate why white people remain unaffected by histories of violent indifference toward people of color and land theft. For our family, race plays a factor in where we live, go to school, and shop for groceries. We grew even more careful during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as reports of racism increased specifically aimed toward people of Asian descent. Even in the process of writing this manuscript, my spouse has encountered racism while shopping, being told to wait as white people behind her in line were helped before her. I have witnessed how easily and commonly white people in churches trade in microaggressions and overt racism, and I have witnessed how effortlessly they dismiss and deny such behaviors. I have been faced with questions about whether it is possible at all to create spaces of belonging in churches. I want to have hope, but on the days when I do, it is still a very thin hope. I have officiated more than a few funerals for people who told African Americans now is not the right time and who in reference to African Americans said, I’m not going to invite them to church but I won’t have a problem if they come here. These statements and others like them have been made sometimes while my spouse was in the room. Though she is a second-generation Korean American and her experience is far different from African Americans’ experiences in this country, she is practicing her faith in white-dominant spaces that usually do not acknowledge her lived experience as a woman of color. Pastorally, what am I to say at the funerals of racist white people? While my naming their racism and the racist fabrics of which they were a part may be rendered as unacceptable behavior, their racism may be considered as hardly more than an unfortunate personal peccadillo about which I should keep silent. My silence then only contributes to the perpetuation of white-dominant spaces that are not safe for people of color. My silence only reinforces white-dominant spaces in which white people may continue to speak and behave with impunity with regard to racism and white supremacy. In this sense, I take a supporting and even leading role in the white supremacist institution of the church that is not safe for my own family.

Finally, my motivation for writing critically about colonization and liturgy involves my life as a pastor leading a church into a more open and grounded form of faith and life together that reckons with our racial and historical location. I am writing as a white man from the Southeast of the US, and I am writing to and within a historically and predominantly white denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA). Is it possible for me to play a role in breaking open a white supremacist institution such as the church and to contribute to creating a safe and affirming space for people of color, where people of color experience agency and empowerment? Worship services on Sunday mornings are at the heart of what I do. While I value other parts of my vocation as a pastor, writing liturgy for weekly worship services remains central to everything. I decided that if I were to address colonization and white supremacy in connection with church, it would be through liturgy. When I began exploring liturgy in connection with colonization and white supremacy, I saw that liturgy itself is interwoven with the practices of racialized segregation and oppression. This may be clear to some, but I do not think that many in our churches are aware that our liturgical practices are fundamentally formed by colonization and white supremacy. White churches have not educated ourselves about our own historical locations. Instead, we have consistently been important germination locales for the cultivation of white supremacy. History bears this out into the present moment.

In 2020, Faith Presbyterian Church in San Diego, where I am the pastor, became a Matthew 25 Church in response to an initiative by the Presbyterian Church (USA). Jesus identifies himself with the poor of the earth, as he says, "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me,