complicates his many positive strides. Although Carter incorporates many aspects of the theological foundation laid by Cone, his relationship to Cone must be assessed as one of greater divergence than his relationship with Raboteau. We will now move to explicating Carter’s relationship to the scholar from whose trajectory he most clearly distances himself.
Charles H. Long: Signifying Race
Long and the Religious Primordium
Charles Long is a celebrated historian of religions who retired from the Religious Studies Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara after teaching at both the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate and worked closely with Mircea Eliade in establishing many of the parameters of their discipline. His work is representative of the manner in which modern religious studies tends to consider race. In this section I will show how Carter reads Long as more precisely recognizing the racial problematic than either Raboteau or Cone, yet more problematically imbibing the philosophical structure of Enlightenment than either scholar. Long’s areas of expertise include creation myths, cultural contact in modernity (including cargo cults), and African American religious history.223 His signature text is Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, which is a collection of essays that probe the nature of “religion,” cultural encounters, and the “symbols” of “Afro-American Religion.”224 In his treatment of the black religious academy, Carter substantively interacts with Long to demonstrate trends about which he has serious reservations. I will read Carter in contrast to Long in order to further explicate Carter’s theology of race and to demonstrate the contributions Carter makes toward overcoming the modern problem of whiteness.
As he analyzes the problem of race in America, Long explores the meaning of the term “signifying” for African American communities. Signification is a way in which oppressed communities offer resistance against being signified by the oppressor; Long interprets African American religious history as little more than a complex system of signification. “Signifying,” or “verbal misdirection,” is a “very clever language game,” not subject to “the rules of the discourse”225 (rules that Carter identifies as being tied into whiteness). For Long, the significations of oppressed peoples must be analyzed so as to discern the “reality” underlying the mythology; he claims that this process is often “frustrating.” Long explains that signifying creates, in the words of Saussure, an “arbitrary” bond between the “signifier and the signified,”226 a relationship which is used to subversive effect by the community on the underside of the power structures.227 Thankfully for Long, “all is not signification.”228 To the contrary, there is a “long tradition in the interpretation of symbol” that reveals an “intrinsic relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized.” It is this “long tradition,” embodied in religious studies, that Long purposes to inhabit. Rather than “reduc[ing]” all hermeneutical decisions to the “problem of the sociology of knowledge,”229 this tradition is able to offer an “archaic critique” sufficient to engage in “crawling back through . . . history” so that “the languages and experiences of signification can be seen for what they are and were.”230 “The religious experience” is the interpretive lens that is able to achieve this objectivity. For Long, the discipline of religious studies is able to get to the heart of the matter in ways theological studies is not. This claim on the part of Long is similar to Cone’s project in describing “what is really happening” in African American worship. Carter reads both as being tied into the modern descriptive project and reinforcing the white gaze.
Long’s trajectory displays key hermeneutical distinctions between his methodology and that of Carter. For Long, while the Enlightenment and colonial conquest are the “two critical issues” that have influenced Western descriptions of the “other,” particularly as the West encountered heretofore “unknown” indigenous peoples, the Enlightenment itself offers the resources with which to interpret religion in a non-hegemonic fashion. Long’s identification of colonization and modernity as the two points at which Western intellectual reflection created the “other” bears similarities to Jennings’ and Carter’s analyses, respectively. It is in this phase of his argument that Long, even more so than Raboteau or Cone, has his finger on the pulse of the problem as identified by Carter. Not unlike Long, Carter maintains that Christianity “betrays itself” by acting as “a universal, hegemonic discourse.”231 Carter states that Long’s “challenge to the hegemony of (Christian) theology over other religions, and thus, over religion qua religion is rightly posed.”232 However, Long comes to widely divergent conclusions. Carter claims that Long’s reduction of particular theological commitments to a universal religious “primordium”233 misinterprets how Christian theology, at its best, should be understood. While Long is resistant to a Christianity that is seen as a religion crowning a hierarchy of religions, Long’s Religionswissenschaft is not radical enough. Carter maintains that Long’s science of religions renders Christian theology, and any theology for that matter, as little more than an “answering discipline” to the modern category of “religion.”234 In this manner, Long rounds off all particular theological commitments to a bland modern universal humanist religious impulse. It is this privileging of the “religious” as such that Carter will identify with the Kantian construction of race. Carter reads Long “as providing the philosophical orientation on the meaning of history that is ambiguously present in Slave Religion [Raboteau’s early work]” and “as giving the philosophical infrastructure to James H. Cone’s post-Barthian black liberation theology.”235 It is the Longian philosophy of religious studies with which Carter most clearly contrasts his own position:
As one surveys the discipline of African American religious studies, from history to theology to philosophies of religious humanism, it is indisputable that Long’s view of religion generally and his view of black religion particularly is more or less the order of the day in the field of African American religious studies. Insofar as this is the case, Long and religious scholars who are heir to his general approach to religious studies would take African American religious thought in a direction counter to the direction I start to sketch at the end of the last chapter [Cone] and that I develop further in part III [Hammon, Douglass, Lee]. Indeed, it can be said that through his interpretation of black liberation theology as an opaque discourse, Long culminates the intellectual trajectory of black liberation theology as a pure science of religion: as Wissenschaft . . . My objective in this chapter is to raise a note of serious alarm regarding this direction of the field.236
While I will focus at the end of this chapter on Carter’s alternative to this trajectory, I will first identify in Long that which so clearly troubles Carter.
Long’s diagnosis of the racialized underpinnings of the Enlightenment is similar to Carter’s:
While the reformist structure of the Enlightenment had mounted a polemic against the divisive meaning of religion in Western culture and set forth alternate meanings for the understanding of the human, the same ideological structures through various intellectual strategies paved the ground for historical evolutionary thinking, racial theories, and forms of color symbolism that made the economic and military conquest of various cultures and peoples justifiable and defensible. In this movement both religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations—they were signified.237
In his most trenchant moments, Long utilizes language that hints at the theological distortions Carter identifies. When Long maintains that “peoples throughout the world were created anew,” he gestures toward what Carter identifies as the distortion of creation that is whiteness, indicating the implications it had for anthropology and the natural sciences, with their evolutionary logic of human “progress” versus “primitivism.” Long recognizes the problematic nature of the modern project, yet finds the path forward to be in the same methodological commitments. He imbibes the orientation of the modern religious academy in ways that neither Raboteau nor Cone did:
I perceived that there was a structure for the universal in the human world that, though created from Enlightenment
