Undoing Jefferson: Moral Education and Theological Formation

Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

This summer I went through a rite of passage for many parents, I took my child on several college tours. My oldest daughter, Njeri, is a rising senior at Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. We decided to travel across part of the country making stops at several colleges. The first stop we made on our educational pilgrimage was William and Mary, a beautiful school nestled on lush grounds in the historic town of Williamsburg, Virginia. The admissions presentation was excellent and the tour guide was wonderful. As we were taking the tour the tour guide brought us to a statue of Thomas Jefferson placed near the center of the campus. I have seen pictures and statues of Jefferson before (I have been on the campus of University of Virginia), but I was stunned by this statue.

What I found striking in this pose was not the classic stance, but the sense of animation it expresses. This is Jefferson full of youthful energy, abounding in confidence and self assurance, looking out on the world as though it holds only possessive possibilities for him. The tour guide told us the story of this statue, its relation to the University of Virginia and the significance of its direction. Jefferson is looking in the opposite direction of the University of Virginia (the school he founded) and toward what is now the Sir Christopher Wren Building and William and Mary (the school that formed him). This statue is set perfectly at the height of onlookers. It is just slightly higher than the average height so that only fairly tall people would look Jefferson in the eyes as they stand next to him. But to stand next to the statue is both inspiring and a bit intimidating, calling its observers to rise to the sight of Jefferson and look out on the world with him, like him.

The statue is an example of pedagogical genius. Here students have a young version of a founding father, one who is like them but not like them, one who they know very well in terms of what he became but there in the statue captured in his becoming. Jefferson in this moment is a possibility, just like the students are possibilities, for growth, for significance, for greatness.

But as I stood there looking at this perfect statue of Jefferson, I kept thinking about a brilliant book I have been reading by Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008) This fabulous book builds on her earlier fine work, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University of Virginia Press, 1998) which gives a powerful account of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave concubine, Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed in The Hemingses of Monticello gives us not only a full picture of the Hemings family living, breathing, moving inside the colonial world, but she also gives us a glimpse of what it might have been like for Sally Hemings to be caught inside the life of Thomas Jefferson. What must life have been like for this woman whose life of bondage encompassed the complexities of love and desire, personal agency and social control, hope and longing, chattel dependence and familial belonging? Gordon-Reed gently explores this question with satisfying results but what I find so intriguing about this treatment of the Sally Heming-Thomas Jefferson relationship within the wider context of their familial network is the way the subjective reality of Jefferson the man shapes so much of Sally’s life and that of her family. Gordon-Reed notes this.

The personal Jefferson had dominated the lives of the Hemingses. Their family connections to him, first through his wife and John Wayles and then the connections he created on his own with Sally Hemings, shaped the course of the family’s existence. (Hemingses of Monticello, 654)

Jefferson’s life, as Gordon-Reed shows, is not merely the controlling center of Sally Hemings’ life, but is far more the house inside of which she explores her own identity, measures her own life span, and gauges her own significance. This would not be a unique feature of mulatto slave concubines, because in many ways such one-sidedness marked the lives of many married colonial women, although with arguably far less intensity than a female slave. What I wondered about as I stood looking at the Jefferson statue on the grounds of William and Mary was the connection between an educational process shaped in privilege and performed under the legacy of colonial power and the capacity to live a life that swallows up the lives of others. I wondered about the connection between intellectual prowess and ambition and a consuming narcissism that unrelentingly turns peoples into objects for self-edification, or actors in the play of a single life. Gordon-Reed notes the trajectory bound to Jefferson’s education.

Unlike some other sons of the planter class, Jefferson was not sent to study in England, but received the best education that Virginia could offer, and he made the most of it. Ambitious, brilliant, and hardworking a young man as he was, he could not have foreseen the heights to which he would rise, because those ‘heights’ did not exist. Although it was clear by the time he fixed his eye on Marth Wayles Skelton [his future wife] that trouble between Virginia and the mother country loomed on the horizon, he could not have imagined how the struggle would turn out and the role that he would play in it. Even without knowing that, he had every reason to believe in the brightness of his future. (Hemingses of Monticello, 95)

She lists characteristics sought for in every would-be college or graduate student and coupled with a sincere belief in a purposeful future makes such a student absolutely attractive. Yet when played out against the backdrop of a colonial world in which the trajectory of Jefferson’s greatness included the natural order of slavery, then the question of connection becomes acute. It is not a simple question of whether ambition breeds conceit, arrogance, chauvinism, and so forth. The question in America is much deeper than such a facile moral query. The question is whether we have in place educational ecologies strong enough, discerning enough, humble enough to turn ambition, brilliance, and industry toward not simply that nebulous idea of “the common good” but toward ways of life that resist using people for our self-edification or as utilities for our life-projects.

This is an urgent question given our lives in an America that consumes vast quantities of the world’s natural resources, pollutes on a massive scale, and facilitates a global financial system that can and often does adversely affected multiple economies and societies by our consumptive and economic practices. The issue here is how we overcome an imaginative practice to see the world from within a center-periphery, top-bottom frame such that the peoples of the world become simply responding subjects and objects for consumption. As a theologian and a seminary professor I have marvelous historic and contemporary voices that press me to see this problem and equally important that stands as a gracious stumbling block toward recreating the Jeffersonian trajectory – from great student to great leader and slave master. The fact that slavery ended does not mean that the Jeffersonian trajectory has ended, indeed, the truth is we are in a struggle in theological institutions, in colleges, and in universities to resists patterns of intellectual framing that deposits peoples of color, and indigenous peoples inside visions of utility for the privileged.

The way I know to undo the Jeffersonian trajectory, that is, to undo the easy slide from youthful power, privilege, and promise to educated and refined narcissist is to turn the sights of young people toward another image, of a suffering servant whose pedagogy for greatness announced a troubling reversal.

Mark 10:42-45 ⁴² So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. ⁴³ But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, ⁴⁴ and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. ⁴⁵ For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

This gospel text provides no easy answer. It does however open up a space inside of which we can bring a whole new set of questions not only to the politics of admission to institutions of higher education but also curriculums old and revered or new and celebrated regarding the aim of their education. Equally crucial, this text with its radical placement of greatness inside of service and service itself now defined by the body of Jesus presses on us in theological education the serious demand that we display how our educational ecologies tightly bind ambition, talent, and productivity to servant life in Jesus’s name. I fear that too many theological institutions yet live comfortably inside pedagogical trajectories more suited to create slave masters.

All educational programs are subject to their times. So Jefferson’s formation would inevitably reflect the sensibilities of slaveholding society. But the more decisive formation at stake here are the residual echoes of the slave master class yet at work in our educational formation processes, especially theological education. You can hear such echoes in perspectives that look out on the world paternalistically and in constant evaluation of other peoples’ abilities to express what we perceive as “the signs of civilization.” Jefferson himself shows us this sensibility in his comments on African intellectual ability in his Notes on the State of Virginia, where he exposes this evaluative imperialism:

Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet…” “[Ignatius Sancho] has approached nearer to merit in composition… [T]hough we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.[i]

Yet more comprehensively, the residual of the slave master class shows itself in the insensitivity to the asymmetrical social order of things. For so many Christians in the world, Western Christianity forms the house they must live in and negotiate. Like the Hemingses with Jefferson, so too they must find a way forward, shaping their lives with some sense of integrity and independence, even though so much of their lives are profoundly determined by what happens in America and the other G8 countries.

How can an educational process woven inside western privilege, power, and promise thwart the affects of our asymmetrical social order and the insensitivity to the voices of those who have little leverage to affect any aspect of our ways of life, those who in fact more often than not stand in relation to us as servants? The gospel passage opens up to us a basic reversal that might guide our pedagogy. It suggests we form servants. Indeed if the insight of the passage where taken seriously then the statue that might adorn a campus like William and Mary, or maybe more appropriately, a seminary campus, would not be a statue of Jefferson, important though he be for the formation of America, but a statue of Sally Hemings.

Sally Hemings (Thomas Jefferson)

All the Presidents' Girls

2009

Oil on paper

50 x 40 cm

A statue of Sally Hemings would say something very different to a talented, ambitious, industrious first year student whether coming to college or seminary. It would be an invitation to begin discerning the complex life of a servant. It would open up the possibility of asking what does it mean to be in a world that you did not create but in which you must find love, joy, peace, and most importantly a sense of calling? It would immediately raise the thorny question of what does it mean to be in service to others, not by force, but by choice. Clearly, such a question would yield good healthy conversations about race, class, gender, sexuality, power, intimacy and so forth. Only with such an image in front of us and the questions it might generate may we actually have the kind of educational process that sets our sights beyond Thomas Jefferson.

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[i] Cited in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking Word of the 18^th Century (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 12.

Grace and the Healthcare Debate

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

“There But for the Grace of God Go I.” So said President Barack Obama during a recent “town hall meeting” on Saturday August 14, 2009. It was his response to the wrenching story told by Mr. Nathan Wilkes, who introduced him to the Coloradans that filled the auditorium to hear him hear and to have him answer questions about the healthcare bills that are winding their way through the Congress.

Mr. Wilkes’s story about his son, Thomas, who was diagnosed with severe hemophilia, put a human face on the healthcare debate. His story took the debate out of the realm of figures and stats and put it in the realm of real lives of pain and tragedy.

In introducing the President, Mr. Wilkes told of how one of the questions he and his spouse had to deal with after their son’s birth was the one put to them by their doctor: “Do you have good insurance?” The care their son required caused them to max out quickly on their insurance policy. Fighting back tears, Mr. Wilkes told the audience that he and his spouse were at one point counseled to consider divorcing so that their son could qualify for Medicaid.

It was after hearing this story that President Obama uttered the, in my opinion, fitting words, though they are words that unfortunately have become culturally clichéd: “There But for the Grace of God Go I . . .”

By invoking God’s grace in relationship to our country’s national debate on healthcare, Obama, whether it was his intention or not, has opened another window onto the healthcare issue. He’s suggesting a connection -- and as a theologian, I’d say a good one -- between the question of our moral obligations to one another in the question of healthcare and what it means to be recipients of God’s grace. “There but for the grace of God go I . . .” is connected, to use the language of ole’ King Jimmy, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The healthcare question in our country is not merely about running the numbers, though it certainly involves this. It is the question of grace, which is tied to the question of morality, the question of our moral duty and obligation to those we consider in the family of humanity.

What are our moral obligations to one another on the matter of healthcare? And how, as Christians, should we be thinking about such matters given our claim to be witnesses to the triumph of life, healing, and health over death and debilitation, a triumph that comes -- and this is grace -- from of Jesus’ wounded and scarred flesh?

What is needed at this time is a clearer Christian witness to our moral duties to be one another’s keepers, and thus a clearer Christian witness to grace.

District 9 and the Creation of the Alien

By Dr. Brian Bantum
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

District 9 was undoubtedly a terrific movie. It’s plot was original and the story unfolded in both exciting and moving ways. I was enthralled from beginning to end. But something is just not sitting right. I get that the film depicts how societies refuse others and collectively ghettoize and render alien citizens who are different.

I get the whole “if you were in the shoes of the other person you might understand yourself a little better thing.”

But there is something that is keeping me from being really, really, really excited about this movie and the statements it could make about national belonging and otherness.

While the allegorical connection to the movie began with Johannesburg, the fact that these aliens really are aliens and not the people of the land raises a crucial difference in how the conception of difference functions within the movie itself. These creatures literally dropped from the sky. Of course there is going to be societal refusal. The condition the aliens would eventually be left to does well to visualize the practice of differentiation, but in many ways it clouds the processes of formation that creates differences. It is these processes of differentiation that create the spaces of the ghetto, the districts, the internment camps, etc. On the one hand the obvious difference of the aliens creates a helpful visualization of how difference is refused, but it confuses the reality of how difference is created.

The question of apartheid is not only the question of the camps, but of the creation of the conditions that would allow difference to be seen. It is a question of how those on the outside were deemed “natural” citizens. The fact that these aliens are SO different seems to play into the characterizations of difference that create these spaces in the first place. Sure, in many ways the director was trying to ask us the question, “who is really human?” But they so confused the point through a (correctly) muddled view of good/bad within each society that the only marker left was the visual to demarcate the citizen/alien.

It’s along this line that I am really not sure about this movie. The possibility of rendering a people who inhabit a land into aliens is the real miracle of the colonial project and that is the sin we have to reckon with. That we treat others who are different than us badly is obvious at this point. Sadly, the evidence is mounting exponentially. But the response to this must be more nuanced than simple decisions to stop doing it.

District 9 confronts us with the treatment of aliens and not the creation of aliens (or the creation of citizens.) I know movies aren’t supposed to be everything. I am thankful for a thoroughly thought-provoking film. At the same time I am always fearful of the ways such thought-provoking moments can problematically frame our view of the challenges before us.

Dr. Brain Bantum is Assistant Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington. He received his Ph.D. and Master of Theological Studies from Duke University. His first book Mulatto Theology will be published by Baylor University Press. For more thoughts and theology from Brian Bantum, check out his personal blog: http://brianbantum.wordpress.org

Prayer for the Nation

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
Pastor, Greenleaf Christian Church
President, North Carolina Conference, NAACP

Gracious eternal and all wise God. Thou who formed what is out of nothing, and called us into being to serve you. You, oh Lord, who weighs every nation in the balance of your own standards. Today, we acknowledge how great Thou art, the marvelous mystery of your mercy and exalt the excellence of your name.

Because your Holy Spirit brings all things to remembrance, breathe on us now, that we might remember how gracious you have been to this nation we call America. As a nation, we have our faith and frailties, strengths and shortcomings, yet you have allowed grace to be shed upon us. When we have honored your ways and when we have fallen short you have been a merciful God. Remind us that the history of this nation is more about your grace than about our greatness. When we are not where we should be, let us hear and follow what you said to Solomon, 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will I forgive their sin, and will I heal their land."

In our land we need healing, for a land so blessed by grace there is too much poverty, too much sickness, too many children dying, and too much war. We need a healing. Michael Bell and five others in Jena, or the three year unjust lock down of James Johnson in Wilson are but symbols of a justice system that needs healing. Katrina was more than a flood. It was a failure to protect the vulnerable and a metaphor of the wave of disenfranchise that flows in too many communities. We need a healing.

In your word you have said, he who rules the nation must be just and if we are to please you we must learn to do justice, care for the fatherless, support the widow, loose the bands of wickedness, pay people what they deserve, care for the sick, the homeless, and the hungry. To please you it must be said of us, “For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

Trouble the soul of this nation as you did in the days of Amos so that no one is at ease in Zion. Use our prophetic words and our prophetic actions to remind those in the seats of power that they are not God. Trouble this nation with the voice of concern and the voice of compassion. Make us mindful of the thousands without paths to the pursuit of happiness…

Shake the foundations of our conscious until we cannot help, but change our course. Move on us to study war no more. Cause us to live our lives to serve others. Teach us that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness requires justice and hope and help and caring. Expand our morality beyond the narrowness of personal piety into the broadness of public policy. Give us the strength to challenge racism, classicism, poverty, and uncheck militarism. Empower us with your Spirit that we might be a nation unto God, not unto fear; show us again that America is only here by your grace. Show us that grace carries responsibility. That a nation under grace must lead the world not merely police the world. A nation under grace must care, must remember her past so that she will not be arrogant in her present. A nation under grace must bring the world together and not tear it apart. A nation under grace cannot refer to people as aliens when we all were created with one blood. A nation under grace cannot leave cities decaying and flood victims barely surviving. Grace demands something better than that.

So Lord as you stirred up dry bones in the valley, stir up hope, and stir up righteousness. Restore the Prophets and the prophetic voices to the land. Revive the spirit of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Corretta, Harriet, Rosa, Cinque, Douglass, Dubois, Sojourner, Jordan, Wilkins and Bethune. Hold and sustain the Congressional Black Caucus whose seats are dipped in the blood of martyrs and were raised to be the conscience of this nation. Call us and challenge us again. Teach even this nation that even with all our power and all our resources we will still have to stand before your judgment one day. Give us leaders who understand that the purpose of power and influence is to help someone. Grant us a citizenry determine to be yoked together in common humanity. Let us know the only way to a more perfect union is for our laws and policies to reflect your kind of love. Let faith be a conviction not a convenience. Help us, Oh God, to smooth out every wrinkle in the flag of our community life until we are one nation under God, with one justice system for all, with living wages for all, with quality education for all. Finally, oh Lord we pray that the mind of the psalmist will be ours:

Psalm 66: 1-7

1Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands:

2Sing forth the honor of his name: make his praise glorious.

3Say unto God, How terrible art thou in thy works! through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee.

4All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee; they shall sing to thy name. Selah.

5Come and see the works of God: He is terrible in His doing toward the children of men.

6He turned the sea into dry land: they went through the flood on foot: there did we rejoice in Him.

7He ruleth by His power for ever; His eyes behold the nations: let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah.

We thank you God that your eyes still behold the nation. We thank you God that you still see injustice, you still see poverty and because you can still see it, these things don't have the last word. We thank you God that you still see America. You still see our leadership. You know how to bring down the high and lift up the humble. O God we bless your name, we lift up every voice, we declare and rejoice that you are still the God of our weary years, the God who is able to bring life out of death. Help us to know like our foreparents sung, ‘Time is filled with swift transition, naught of earth unmoved can stand, Build your hope on things eternal, Hold to God’s unchanging hand.” In the name of the Father who sticketh closer than a brother, watches us like a mother, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

A Teachable Moment

By Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson
Professor of Theology
Duke Divinity School

It would be wonderful if the recent furor over President Obama’s comments criticizing the white police officer’s treatment of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates proved to be a true “teaching moment.” While it is impossible to keep up with the constantly shifting version of reality offered by the news media on such things, at least two themes implicit in this story beg for theological reflection. First, why is “race” always attributed to minority populations and, secondly, why should Obama be criticized for getting “off track”---for not talking about “all of the American people” as one commentator put it---if he brings up race? These themes are connected and have significance for the church.

Race in the U.S. is similar to gender. Both are markers of identity typically associated with a particular group, in the first case, people of color, in the second, women. Think of the presidential election press coverage---only Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin had “gender;” only Barak Obama had “race.” This assumes that only white men have no identity markers, e.g., are simply normal human beings without interests shaped by social location. Now having “race” or “gender” does not indicate “minority” in the numerical sense---women frequently outnumber males, especially in churches. No, the “marked” vs. “unmarked” designation is about power: being “unmarked” has to do with dominance; being “marked” indicates that a group has in some sense been historically marginalized.

Theologically speaking, why isn’t historical marginalization, or being “marked,” a concern of everyone? Why is race only an “issue” for African Americans, or others designated as persons of color? Why is “whiteness” -- my race and its attendant privileges--- typically hidden and rarely if ever acknowledged? Why do we continue to engage in what race theorists like Ruth Frankenberg calls “dodging difference” or “color evasion”? Why do we whites continue to think things are fine-- we don’t see color-- when, in fact, “colorblindness,” as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it, is the new form of racism? Our egregious racial history still shapes our society; we cannot act as if things like racial profiling are only the problems of “minority” groups. Our country is in desperate need of discourse of the common good, so that when Obama raises issues of race he is respected and appreciated, not lambasted for playing the “race card.” Although complicated, messy, and scary (especially for whites), these are crucial issues for “all of the American people.”

In this “teachable moment,” public discourse could surely learn from the church. As it seeks to follow Jesus, the church replaces “individualism” with stories and faith practices around grace-filled community and concern for the “outsider.” However, most white churches have a great deal in common with the culture of color evasion. Only 2.5% of mainline churches have significantly interracial membership; evangelical churches do only slightly better with 6%. We may not be individualistic, but how often are “community” and eucharist gatherings with folks just like us? Our challenge: let this be a “teachable moment” for the church. Let us face one another across deep racial and other divides in sustained and grace-filled honesty. Let us do “welcoming community” with less color-blindness. Is talking about our different experiences with regard to race and the implications of racial difference for our lives difficult and scary? You bet; that’s why many of us don’t do it. But incarnation is by definition messy and worldly.