Toward a Critical Theological Imagination, Part 1: Narrative Logic and Meaning Making
César ‘CJ’ Baldelomar traces the epistemic power of storytelling
Bible Quilt (1898) by Harriet Powers, who was born into slavery in Georgia. Source: Bequest of Maxim Karolik, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Humans are storytelling animals.
“Without narratives we would not be able to cope with the fragments of segmented information that constantly surge around us,” writes theologian Harvey Cox. “Narratives provide a framework that enables us to know our world.” Scholar of comparative religions and fiction writer Mircea Eliade also underscored the importance of myths and stories in providing human societies an orientation, a center in an otherwise centerless world.
The stories we tell, of course, originate in someone’s or in the community’s imagination. Myths emerge from such stories. Some examples include: the Judeo-Christian myth of Adam and Eve’s original sin; the Latin-American fable of La Llorona; and African-American stories of black bodies taking flight to escape harsh realities. (Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon contains a beautiful line that speaks to the last myth: “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it….”)
But what happens when the stories, the myths, become narrative logics that shape societies, inform human identity, and determine human action? How does this work to limit—or to expand—human imagination and, thus, theological imagination? What role does theological imagination then play in collective and individual meaning making?
These questions are especially pressing at this transformative moment. In Citizen, poet Claudia Rankine reminds us that “because white men can’t police their imagination, black men are dying.” In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and others by the police, societies around the world are challenging “official stories and narratives” and leadership structures that facilitate white supremacy, while reckoning with national histories and attempting to imagine more equitable futures.
In this three-part series, I explore the above questions within the context of theology, arguing toward a critical theological imagination, one that urgently calls for critical theology theorists in hopes of liberating imaginations to envision what never was.
Part 1: Narrative Logic and Meaning Making
American exceptionalism and expansionism
When European colonizers arrived in what is now the United States, they brought along their own stories, especially biblical ones. To justify their genocides and territorial conquests in the name of nation building, the colonizers deployed their imagination to link philosophy, theology, and law.
Panel 13: “Rich people who were taught nothing of God”—detail from Bible Quilt (1898) by H. Powers, MFA, Boston
The Doctrine of Discovery initially granted Europeans legal title to all land they acquired in the “New World.” In the decision for the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” But the Doctrine also implied that Europeans were divine instruments with cultural and social superiority to the indigenous peoples.
As instruments of the divine, the colonizers (especially in the US) understood themselves as pilgrims on a holy mission to advance God’s reign in the newly acquired territories. This view later led to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, that is, that all westward US expansion was inevitable and justified—all in the name of building God’s promised land.
The Monroe Doctrine, which relied on manifest destiny, opposed European colonization and interference in the entire Western Hemisphere but did not place limits on US actions in the region. (This would result in atrocious US interventions all throughout Latin America in the 20th century.)
The doctrines of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and Monroe would later coalesce to form American exceptionalism and expansionism, which now serve to justify, in the words of Cornel West, “aggressive militarism” abroad and at home. Abroad, West states in Democracy Matters, “this dogma takes the form of unilateral intervention, colonial invasion, and armed occupation….” And at home, “this dogma expands police power, augments the prison-industrial complex, and legitimates unchecked male power (and violence) at home and in the workplace.”
If stories about the United States of America as the world’s best country circulate, then popular imaginations will see it as an innocent warrior for justice that can do no wrong. Similarly, the myth that the US is a place of equality and opportunity leads to placing the blame for suffering on those who do not achieve “success” in this land of opportunity (as seen by the disparaging of Floyd’s character by a—now former—Catholic chaplain at MIT). Those beholden to such fantasies about America will likely ignore or dismiss discussions about structural and systemic racism, historical exclusion of peoples of color from democratic processes, and questionable foreign interventions. Things can change, but it requires being able to see the end of what never worked. What true change requires is imagination.
Imagination at an end?
“Imagination of the end is being corrupted by the end of imagination,” exclaims sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in The End of the Cognitive Empire. The collective inability––or perhaps outright refusal––to imagine other possible ways of living in the world is largely the result of a collective restraint on imagination. This cap on imagination was established through dominant narratives (as discussed above), whether religious (Christian salvation history), secular (founding of the United States as manifest destiny), or economic (capitalism as the best or only market paradigm).
Panel 8: “The falling of the stars on Nov. 13, 1833,” when people thought the end had come—detail from Bible Quilt (1898) by H. Powers, MFA, Boston
In Christian Mentality, Burton L. Mack writes that the “sense that a people makes of their practices and productions for living together in a particular time and place is written into their myths as a kind of narrative logic.” Narrative logics, in turn, “register as mental agreements about the way life should be lived.” These agreements become a mentality, a way of uncritically viewing the world through epistemological lenses that become normative and static--in other words, a normalizing of abnormal knowledge. One example is perceiving those with money and fame as more valuable than vulnerable humans, or equating brown and black peoples with criminality.
Deviation from normative mentalities leads to, à la Foucault, various disciplinary technologies (including the dominant gaze) designed to bring one’s mind and soul into alignment with the dominant mentalities. For instance, as former NFL quarterback Colin Kapernick found out, protesting white supremacy could result in loss of income, social isolation, and even public ridicule. Kapernick became a persona non grata for ‘taking a knee’ in protest of police brutality and racism while the national anthem played, and many took notice. In today’s toxic public sphere—where facts do not seem to matter—the media dictates public conversations, leading to a sort of mind control that distracts from potentially deeper matters. From personal experience, I know that to discuss deeper matters (i.e., systemic racism, global economic inequality, or gender and sexual oppression) is to risk being labeled a soft leftist, a resentful and ungrateful Communist, or a godless heretic.
A powerful disciplinary technology, then, is the ad hominem attack: Faulting, ridiculing, and dismissing the person instead of engaging his or her ideas is one way to make the person feel inferior, unwelcome, and even ashamed for holding certain beliefs.
The inability to see a world beyond our current one (to see “the end”) is colonialism’s ultimate triumph. Black and brown bodies maimed, abused, and destroyed is undoubtedly atrocious—a repugnant series of violences that set the stage for modernity. From the earlier mass genocides and slavery to the recent murders of George Floyd and others, and to the ongoing invisibility of Latinx immigrants, the US continues to put its knee on all brown and black bodies, especially those who themselves (or whose ancestors) hail from Global South nations.
Yet I find the lynching of minds as also extremely sadistic, since it results in what scholar José Medina calls “epistemic death.” A mind is lynched, for example, when whiteness, Christianity, and the United States are uncritically viewed as pinnacles of civilization. Such a mind is unable to “de-link” from myths that prevent the conjuring of other myths, particularly those adverse to the power produced and gained by dominant narratives. If one, for example, sees capitalism as the only viable economic system, envisioning other economic systems becomes difficult, if not impossible. In a similar vein, calls to defund or abolish police departments seem ridiculous if one holds static views on policing and crowd control.
This death of the mind, almost akin to what sociologist Orlando Patterson termed social death, “occurs as a result of harm to one’s epistemic capacities and agency, so deep as to annihilate one’s self,” according to Medina.
Clash of imaginations
Epistemological bullies harm epistemic capacities and agency by ignoring, dismissing, or tokenizing collective and individual imaginations on the “underside” of dominant knowledge systems.
Examples abound in academia. The very sources that professors select in, say, a social ethics course speak volumes about that professor’s epistemic inclinations. A syllabus full of mostly white-authored books. with a token sprinkle of books by authors of color, shows students of color that their views and opinions are subordinate to white ones, while showing white students that, though nonwhite opinions are worthy of some consideration, the white imagination reigns supreme. Worse still, students of color begin to accept the idea that whites remain the dominant producers of knowledge, while black and brown students can only hope to be consumers of that knowledge.
The result for those unable to produce knowledge is a diminished sense of intellectual worth, which then opens the door to an overall sense of worthlessness—a sort of ontological terror.
The first-generation college student who feels like an “impostor” at a predominantly white college is under ontological terror. Marginalized communities that do not grasp the urgent message of Black Lives Matter are under ontological terror. Students of color who fear voicing their opinions in a classroom for fear of coming across as “too aggressive” are under ontological terror. Minority professors who refrain from challenging the opinions of a white colleague for fear of reprisal are under ontological terror. The result is people trying to fit into a mold—a given narrative logic—in order to receive acknowledgement and perhaps even praise from the white establishment.
Compromised epistemological and ontological defenses leave the gates open to lynching of the mind, achieved through subtle indoctrination into dominant mentalities. One then comes to accept given narrative logics—the product of contextualized imaginations—as inevitable, timeless, and universal. But no imagination—no one narrative or logic—can claim the title of absolute Truth.
Panel 1: “Job praying for his enemies. Job crosses. Job's coffin.”—detail from Bible Quilt (1898) by H. Powers, MFA, Boston
Therefore, the clash of imaginations is indeed a social-justice issue, one with deep implications for the present and future.
