Culture Shock Continued...

I mentioned that the incidents with the Westmont College Gospel Choir shirts were a transition to some of the larger issues that have been causing me culture shock here in the South. The larger related issue is over the types of music that can be allowed in church. The Westmont Gospel Choir sings a wide variety of music. Our songs include everything from old time slave songs to modern hip-hop to mainstream songs. We performed the gospel medley which includes a large selection of African-American spirituals like other pieces included an Avalon piece (The Glory of the Blood), Hezekiah Walker (Let's Dance), I'll Fly Away (we chose the Spanish version of the old spiritual), and O Sifuni Mungu (a piece in Swahili). If my classmates sat through a Gospel Choir concert, I am guessing that they would be appalled by "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2 and "Where Is The Love" by Black Eyed Peas. This is popular music (and the Black Eyed Peas piece is even rap), and you absolutely do not sing it in a worship setting. The fact that the U2 piece was actually a request from our campus pastor would be unthinable. Several debates have been started in my class by the question of what kind of music is acceptable, and the consensus seems to be that the old spirituals and the "classic" gospel, which I think is along the lines of BeBe Winans, but I'm not entirely sure, are acceptable in church, but you are probably crossing the line if you sing hip-hop, rap, or any other type of music in church. Apparently that kind of music can't be baptized by the church. I am thankful for the tradition of the Gospel Choir which has specifically chosen not to limit its music to one type of gospel. The church has a long history of baptizing the songs of the culture for use in church. This tradition reaches back into classical music and continues through the hymns of Charles Wesley and the musicians of the Great Awakenings to today. If the church can baptize rock and sing it in church, which is what we did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Westmont chapel, then it can also baptize the various forms of music popular with the Southern Black community.

In addition, race in the South is defined by black or white. After leaving Westmont, even after leaving Carson City, race was defined as Native American, Asian, Latino, African, but it certainly was not limited to Black or White. Here it is, and if you do not fit into those two labels, then the people here do not know what to do with you, nor do they seem to care. I would expect that the Divinity School would be sensative to issues of ethnicity; however, I have been disappointed. I sat through a lecture by another one of the theology and ethics professors last week where the topic was Race and Immanuel Kant. His premise was that race is a modern construction appearing when Europe began to see itself as Enlightened in contrast to the rest of the world. He sees Immanuel Kant and Max Weber as instrumental in the construction of the concept of race. I actually agree with this analysis. The problem was how he spoke about race. His whole argument was constructed on the notions of race inherent to the history of slavery and segregation in the South. I left the lecture feeling like I had never been so marginalized by a person of another minority before. It was simply assumed that my experience must match his and that of other African-Americans in the South. Well, I'm not African-American, and I'm not from the South. While I have experienced plenty of racism in conversations, my experience is distinctly different from his. When I hear him talk about how we need to be one church and understand one another, and then know that he really doesn't have an interest in hearing my story because it doesn't fit with his, I know that he hasn't provided a solution for the church either.

Labeling race as a modern construction does not change the fact that racism exists, in the South and in L.A. I, and every other ethnic minority in California, can tell you that racism still exists in the west. The difference is that it is more implicit at home. Those rare occassions where it becomes explicit shock and concern the entire community. There were two attacks in the Carson area a while back against a mosque and a synagoge. The whole community stood against those attacks - even people who would make less obvious racist comments in the car with me. The Rodney King Riots have become a symbol of the harm that racism can do. Here in North Carolina, the people do not even know about the riots. A professor used them as an example, but he did not know the name of Rodney King, and the other students did not know what he was talking about. Those acts of violence are the exception though, not the rule. The rule has been the story of my life. I have had to listen to friends' parents tell me that "Mexicans are a different breed." "We have nothing in common with each other." "The Native Americans in Carson are a large part of the gang problem." " No hispanics want to work in America. They are just a drain on the American economy." "Hispanics want to destory the American culture, and they don't care about learning English." Do those statements shock you, or are they similar to things you have said yourself? It is both a blessing and a curse that I do not look Mexican or Navajo. I was given the looks of my Irish and British ancestors, so I am not usually discriminated against because of my looks. At the same time, I am discriminated against because I do not look like a minority, so I don't fit in those communities. I also have the great burden of listening to people talk about my ethinicity without knowing that "one of them" is sitting in their company. It is not acceptable in the West to make those comments to someone's face, but I can attest to the fact that they are said often when the speakers do not think they can be heard.

Life is different here. I was shocked by an article in Durham's newspaper, the Herald Sun about White Supremecists active in the area. A White Supremecist newspaper, the Aryan Alternative ( View other articles about the paper) was thrown into the yard of an interracial couple in Durham. The paper has no formal links to the KKK, but the director of distribution, Glenn Miller, was quoted. "We don't have problems with the Ku Klux Klan, they are good people." He also said that the paper was "against legal abortion, promotion of race mixing and the flooding of America with tens of millions of non-white aliens." (Let's set aside the fact that all whites in America are descendents of immigrants who flooded the country and pushed out the Native American tribes and forced the Mexicans to leave and give their land to the US government.) The paper's front page displayed "a picture of armed soldiers on top of a military truck and black people on a street below. Beside the picture was a headlinie reading, 'White troops battle looting Africans unleashed by Katrina!' and a big headline that said, 'New Orleans: The End Result of a Multi-Racial America. SAVAGES IN THE STREET.'" The paper comes on the hills of the spray-painting of a van owned by a Jewish couple with the letters KKK and three cross burnings in the area.

I am tired of racism, and I am tired of the way the church is perpetuating these divisions. Why do we have Black churches, and White churches, and Latino churches and Chinese churches, and Korean churches, and on and on? The church is the one place where these divisions should not exist. In spite of the fact that our differences are not washed away when we enter a church, we should be worshipping together. "After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. they were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands." -Revelation 7:9-10 (TNIV) Those divisions which are a result of human sin in the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Bable are washed away in the blood of the lamb who makes us a new creation. "So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -Galatians 3:26-28 (TNIV). Once we join the church, our citizenship is in heaven, not in the kingdoms of this world. Our allegiance is to Jesus Christ, not to our nationality, our ethnicity, our sports teams, or anything else. If, like the church in Rwanda, we allow our other allegiances to take priority over our common citizenship in the blood of Christ, we are caught in idolatry. "For he himself is our peace, who ahs made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of th etwo, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, which Christ jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in teh Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit." -Ephesians 2:14-16, 19-22 (TNIV).

Culture Shock

When I moved to North Carolina, I was expecting some level of culture shock thanks to warnings from some of my friends who had moved across the country for undergrad. When I arrived here, I was actually suprised to that I was not experiencing much culture shock. What I have come to realize is that the culture of the South is subtlely different than the West coast. Instead of the immediate culture shock that I experienced on Europe Semester when I entered Germany or France and could not speak the language and was overwhelmed by the different history, the culture shock that I am experiencing in this place has hit me piece by piece.

I am learning that my presuppositions from Nevada and California are radically different than the presuppositions that come from growing up in the South. The minor differences caught my attention first.

The South still lives is a semi-Constantinian world, where Christianity can be assumed of almost all of the population. The reality may not hold true to that assumption, but I think it is still made. At any rate, I have seen clearly the differences in a couple of situations. On the bus awhile ago, a man started preaching to the riders. He was telling us that he can disprove any religious book with that same book, and he can disprove the Bible with the rest of the Bible. We dismissed him as crazy and didn't worry much about what he was saying, but that didn't stop him from preaching to us anyway. His message: 1) Song of Solomon says that all women should be lesbians but the books of law command that homosexuality is evil, and 2) Genesis says that they were naked and not ashamed, but the New Testament says to wear clothes, so really shouldn't we all be walking the streets without clothes on? Aside from the fact that Christians read the whole story of scripture and assume that it all fits together into one coherent picture, the very subject of his discourse revealed a difference from back home. At my church in Carson, we have a gentleman who has attended for several years. Any member of the church can tell you the he has lost his mental faculties, and he preaches to us often. The difference is that on the West Coast, he and others like him preach about crop circles and aliens and, for the gentleman in my church, Area 51 and UFO's (it comes with the territory when you live in Nevada).

The second situation was when I went to Wal-Mart with a friend who had to buy flannel sheets. As we walked past the book section, I was astounded to see a large selection of Christian books. The Purpose Driven Life was the focus of a large display in the center aisle. There was a whole row devoted to different types of Bibles and below them a row of different styles of Bible covers. Instead of the magazines and romance novels that you see in a Wal-Mart at home, I felt like I was standing in a Christian bookstore.

Another relatively small difference is the complete lack of education about Mormonism. In a seminar last week, I was privileged to hear one of the theology and ethics professors speak about Designer Babies and Designer families, and a student asked a question about Mormon practices. He wanted to know how her research would interact with the Fundamentalist Mormon practices of the enclaves in Utah and Arizona. In those communities, Fundamentalist Mormons practice polygamy and give birth to many children, sometimes making sure than not a year goes by without a child being born in the family. The professors response was that she wasn't sure it even happened. I can say with certainty that it does. Polygamous Mormon marriages show up in the news from time to time, and Christians have to be educated about Mormonism. I knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was a rarity in the east because they had been forced west by legalized persecution; however, I also know that they are focusing on evangelizing the South because my cousin was sent to Georgia for his mission. I suppose the lack of Mormons out here had never crossed my mind, but I am beginning to understand that it actually presents a challenge for evangelism in the West, Southwest and Mountain regions that will not be addressed here. Even the professors do not know much about the Mormon Church.

The last minor difference that I have noticed actually involves Gospel music, and it will serve as a transition to a post for tomorrow that will explain some of the major differences. I have worn my gospel choir shirt for several years at home and at Westmont, and no one thinks a thing about it. Participation in a gospel choir does not mark your stance on any major issue. I underestimated the effect that my shirt would have when I wore it to school here one day though. As I left the Divinity School, two Black (and yes, that is what they want to be called here. Apparently the South doesn't feel the need to be as politically correct as California.) students caught me and asked if I was part of a Gospel Choir. I told them that I had been and continued on my way. As I walked through one of the predominantly Black neighborhoods, students began cheering for me out of school bus windows. I did not understand that participation in a gospel choir is support of the Black community here, as opposed to the racism of another segment of the population.