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“Daddy, I want a white face” - By Paul Robert Sauer
With special thanks to Forum Letter and the American Lutheran Publicity
Bureau, we are pleased to reprint this essay by Rev. Paul Robert Sauer,
pastor of the Lutheran Church and School of Our Savior in the Bronx,
New York, and associate editor of Lutheran Forum. In this essay, Pr.
Sauer poignantly takes up issues of race, diversity, and the church,
pointing in new directions for Lutherans “to expose themselves to the
coloring rays of the Son.”
“Daddy, I want a white face”
by Paul Robert Sauer
Forum Letter, April, 2008 ©2008 American Lutheran Publicity Bureau. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Even living here in ethnically diverse New York City we had anticipated that this issue would eventually come up for our transracially adopted daughter. It didn’t make it any easier. We had done everything right—instilled in her a great pride in her Marshallese background and heritage, observed with her how beautiful her multiracial friends from church and school were. But perception is everything, and Katie had read a Disney book at school where all the princesses were white. I tried to explain to her that Mulan was Asian and Pocahontas was Native American, even if they were light skinned, but I don’t get to decide how she feels, and logical arguments don’t have any place when it comes to perceptions.
The Pew Forum on Religion (you can find it at www.religions.pewforum.org/) just released some statistical data on the ethnic makeup of America’s denominations and there was bad news for Lutherans: of all denominations in the study, we are the whitest. The Lutheran parts of the Body of Christ apparently are the pasty-white parts hidden away from the coloring rays of the sun.
Equally ineffective
The LCMS is more diverse than the ELCA (95% white versus 97% white) but claiming 5% diversity (the general population in the U.S. is 71% white) as some sort of victory is hardly worth celebrating. The numbers are even more depressing when you consider that the Mormon Church in America is only 86% white and their church officially discriminated against “people of African descent” until 1978.
Our respective Lutheran churches have taken distinctive but equally ineffective approaches to dealing with racial issues. On the one hand there is a much discussed quota system that has as its ideal raising people of color to positions of leadership within the ELCA. This in turn will give greater ownership of the church by those respective ethnic groups, or so the argument goes. The problem with this approach is that it is rooted in a failed colonial-style mentality that assumes that if you can get the “tribal leaders” the people will follow. There is no correlation between numbers of leaders and followers on the basis of race.
I learned this lesson well when I volunteered at a historically black inner-city Lutheran parish in the years before my ordination. I thought that it would be a good idea to develop a program for youth at the senior-citizen-filled church, and so I went where the youth were—to the HUD housing project down the street. When the children arrived at church the following Sunday it was not to a warm welcome. They didn’t know how to behave—after all, they weren’t “our kind of blacks” (i.e. middle-class professionals).
What difference does it make?
The other failed approach is a denial that racial differences make any difference at all. At a recent LCMS “Model Theological Symposium” one of the participants offered criticism that it was “the whitest church gathering he had ever been to,” and by all accounts he was right—statistically speaking it was an even whiter model of the church than our denomination itself. What was more disturbing is that when he raised the issue, the response by participants was by and large: “What difference does it make? We are in fact, after all, Lutherans.”
The difference is that it is not our perception that matters; other people notice. While it may be understandable that a publishing house would cater to a church that is 95% white in terms of its depictions of people, it is nevertheless frustrating to have to color in faces by hand in the Vacation Bible School and Sunday School material. You may think that such an approach is over the top, but it is not your perception that matters. A fellow adoptive parent observed this past Christmas how easy it was, as they were decorating their apartment, to celebrate a “white Christmas”—that is, a Christmas with only white figurines, decorations, and cards. It takes intentionality to make it otherwise.
Differences in perception are real, which makes racial differences in the church real as well. It is as real as the differences between racial groups that are often classified together. A Caribbean black often has different ecclesial perceptions than a deep south black who often has different perceptions than an African immigrant. In the same way Dominicans and Puerto Ricans share a language and oftentimes little else in their ecclesial piety.
Coloring rays of the Son
All of this is to say that if Lutherans are ever to expose themselves to the coloring rays of the Son, then they first have to recognize that there is a problem, and then stop trying to solve the problem with easy, program-driven solutions. Lutheranism’s racial problem will only be solved on a parish by parish, layperson by layperson basis, as people really get to know the people in their communities and as churches begin to model their communities. It will not come about through some top down program, which by its very nature cannot deal with individual perceptions. Nor will it come about as a result of some sort of charitable or guilt-driven approach. The coloring of Lutheranism will come about as individual Lutherans actually build relationships with unique individuals and then move forward as equals—with equal vulnerability and responsibility.
In January, I attended the winter theological symposium at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, which was singular for its excellent presentations and worship. The one lowlight of the gathering was a terribly awkward closing banquet at the Hilton Grand Plaza. After being introduced to the various “ethnic partners” that were present for the banquet, the almost exclusively white attendees sat down for an extravagant dinner served by an almost exclusively black serving staff (except for the white woman who was in charge and giving orders to the wait staff). The evening became downright surreal as the LCMS World Relief video highlighting their work in Africa with the Themba girls began to play. Poor black children in Africa deserving of our help . . . poor black children here in Fort Wayne taking away my dirty dishes.
Perception is everything.
Written By: host
Date Posted: 5/22/2008
Number of Views: 513
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