Ruminations in/on Church

Today at church, I experienced a weekly ritual that others in my congregation don't usually experience: realizing I am one of three people of color in the entire building. This got me thinking about whether the "church" - the people, not the gospel - racialize the foundational precept of our identity: that we are children of God.

It's a common practice to use "whiteness" as the standard for the norms to mimic. For example, when we think about success, it's often a notion of success that reflects the goals of a white society (e.g. house, white picket fence, education, nuclear family, 2-car garage, boat, etc). In other words, some scholars suggest, that this "whitening" is the de-facto consideration for a color-blind society. Thus, in order to succeed, whatever the color might be, we all need to strive to become like the white upper middle class male or female. Doing so will create this "sameness." But doing so harms and completely ignores and marginalizes the collective experience of so many people of color whose perception of the world and whose thinking has inevitably shaped who they are and ultimately what they will become. To easily quip, "color-blind" ignores all of that while attempting to achieve sameness on the terms of a particular race. That reality is often starkly different from the reality of people of color.

Thus, when it is said we are children of God, I often wonder if that precept is racialized and whether the notion of sameness is employed to make that precept meaningful for them. In other words, saying "we are children of God," "no more strangers or foreigners..." implicitly invokes the notion of a color-blind society - that is when you become like us, then you are no more strangers, to come to know one's self as a child of God is to come to accept the standards and norms of the dominant society. Thus rarely do we find comments from the church about white people needing to put their cultural identity second. Rather, numerous comments are made that people of color need to come to understand that they are children of God first, then a person of color second.

This sounds enlightening. And it is. However, not fully examining its implications, I believe does harm to those people of color striving to follow Christ, when the example of following Christ is implicitly tied to mimicking "white" mormons. Certainly, there is a degree of fault to be shared by all.

I sit in my pew at church, thinking these things, wondering if my wearing of a white shirt and tie is really a product of me wanting to obey the Prophets and Apostles or simply me subscribing to the cultural standards of what it means to be a faithful Mormon...a child of God.