non-reified, ecstatic sense that Carter offers black identity as an icon of the divine.
What is most promising in Raboteau’s work is that which Carter deems most properly theological. Carter fills out this theological framework with his thesis of the necessity of living into the salvific story of YHWH through his people Israel and her Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, whose flesh is the particular ground of a new body politic. This is perhaps why, as Carter relates, religious scholar Donald H. Matthews accuses Raboteau of being a clandestine theologian and not confining himself to the historically “verifiable” ethnographic gaze.97 It is this ethnographic gaze that Carter holds in suspicion.
Raboteau’s Incipient Theological Trajectory
In the first two essays of A Fire in the Bones, Raboteau’s theological trajectory comes to the foreground as he utilizes the story of Israel to locate the histories of various peoples. He relates that the key interpretative distinction between the myth of European America and the stories told by African American slaves is the manner in which they related to the story of Israel. Both groups recognized that meaning in history is to be found with reference to a particular center. In the American myth, America was the New Israel who had journeyed across the sea out of tyranny to inherit a land of promise, a land manifestly destined by God to be a light to the nations. For African slaves who had been brutally forced to journey across the sea, America was not a land of promise but a land of subjugation, violence, and forced servitude: “For African-Americans, however, the myth is inverted. For us, the Middle Passage was a voyage from freedom in Africa to perpetual bondage in an America that in biblical terms did not resemble Israel but Egypt.”98 In the next chapter, I will utilize a similar methodology as I invert common interpretations of the work of Milbank.
The centrality of Israel for a theology of history will be an important insight for Carter as he identifies supersessionism as the mechanism which generated modern race. In his subversion of Milbank’s Anglo-Catholic counter-narrative, Carter will use Raboteau to suggest that early Afro-Christians “got the story right” in ways that the Anglo-Catholic tradition has not. While implicitly privileging theological history in his Judeo-centric narrative of the history of race in America, Raboteau tends to frame the matter in purely historiographic terms. He relates that history is necessarily perspectival and is imbued with meaning depending on the point of observation of the subject. He names historical research a relativizing pursuit that “offers us a salutary reminder that part of faith is doubt.”99 Yet Raboteau recognizes that such an understanding need not necessitate a pluralistic “crisis of faith,” but rather a maturity consonant with “owning” a “set of values” and a “religious culture.”100 The historiographic enterprise can round off the contours of religious particularity in relativizing fashion or it can offer a humble maturity consonant with a theology of history. It is the tension between Raboteau’s historiographic dialectic and his theology of history that Carter discerns. After Raboteau frames the manner as historical relativity, he moves into what he calls “a theology of history” or the study of “salvation history.”101 This transition within the first two essays of A Fire in the Bones is a microcosm of the development of his thought.
Carter, while distancing his project from the disciplinary confines of a history of religions, nonetheless finds Raboteau’s historical research to be helpful in demonstrating the racial foundations of modernity. There are several places where Raboteau’s research specifically points to the ways in which the philosophical presuppositions of Enlightenment were resultant from the reality of the slave trade and the related intellectual complexities surrounding the issue of race. Raboteau relates that from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slavery was in large part justified in European nations by the conversion of slaves to Christianity.102 This posed an immediate problem: How would the baptism of slaves, with its requisite elevation to status of “brother,” affect the economics of enslavement? Would a slave cease to be property? If a slave was catechized in the Faith, how would education affect his “contentedness” with a subservient station? Both colonial legislation and church dogma performed calisthenics to ensure that “baptism did not alter slave status.”103 Raboteau relates that the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701 “to support missionaries to the colonies,” had as its primary purpose guiding slave masters in their gospel instruction of slaves. A pedagogical mission could proceed without fear of the possibility of emancipation:
In tract after tract, widely distributed in the colonies, officers of the society stressed the compatibility of Christianity with slavery. Masters need not fear that religion would ruin their slaves. On the contrary, Christianity would make them better slaves by convincing them to obey their owners out of a sense of moral duty . . . After all, society pamphlets explained, Christianity does not upset the social order, but supports it . . . The missionaries thus denied that spiritual equality implied worldly equality; they restricted the egalitarian impulse of Christianity to the realm of the spirit.104
Raboteau’s research implies a causal relationship between the need to justify slavery and the neo-Gnostic spiritualization of much modern American Christianity. This causal relationship is buttressed by the reality that the slave masters had to be taught to interpret the Scriptures in a non-material fashion. Incidentally, the beginnings of the slave trade coincided with Descartes turning inward to the realm of the mind. Likewise, the rationalization of slavery in Western Christianity was taking place only decades before Kant would offer a rationalized reinterpretation of Christian faith as Western moral religion. While I am not suggesting that neo-Gnostic spiritualism and Cartesian rationalism are one in the same, I am drawing attention to the fact that a turn away from the material implications of the Gospel in the didactic pursuits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century slaveholders and a rejection of realism through Kantian Idealism can both be read as influenced by fears of an elevated status for non-white peoples. I will fill out this claim in chapter 2 when interacting with Kant.
Another example given by Raboteau of a similar causal order of events is early American Evangelicalism’s shift from a Gospel potent to change the social order to a Gospel that maintained the social order while changing only the spiritual destiny of converts. He relates the early and enthusiastic response of black Americans to the forthright preaching and experiential, ecstatic worship of revivalist groups like the Methodists and Baptists.105 He paints a picture of an Evangelical revivalism that encompassed people from various ethnic and socio-economic groups. Black preachers were among those who exhorted the multiethnic crowds with the Good News of the Gospel. This reality influenced the strong abolitionism of late eighteenth-century Methodist conferences. Raboteau explains that, by and large, the denominations quickly retreated from abolition in the face of the “strong” and “immediate” pushback from aristocratic landowners. This resistance encouraged Evangelicalism to alter its early pronouncements by making slavery a matter of individual conscience that lay outside the influence of the Faith.106 As a result of this turn away from the heterogeneity of its early communal makeup, Methodist and Baptist Evangelicalism became decidedly more rationalistic and aristocratic. For Raboteau, the characteristic marks of religious modernity are to be found in the problematic early-modern intersection of race and theology.
The early promise of Evangelicalism faded as two distinct and separate Christianities emerged. Black preachers
mediated between Christianity and the experience of the slaves (and free blacks), interpreting the stories, symbols, and events of the Bible to fit the day-to-day lives of those held in bondage. And whites—try as they might—could not determine the “accuracy” of this interpretation.107
Segregated worship influenced a hermeneutical segregation not unlike the strict distinctions between disciplinary silos in the modern academy. Much like the creation of modern religious studies as a methodology detached from theology, “white” and “black” Christianity formed as separate traditions. Under the pressures of white discrimination and black self-determination, separate denominations were formed, such as the AME under the leadership of Richard Allen. While Raboteau is not decrying self-determination as a method of resistance,
