White Work 2.0 Part 2 - How CRCNA Representatives Are Advising Christians To Uncenter Whiteness Within The Church

A look at the advice provided by the Office Of Race Relations On How To Uncenter Whiteness

I have been slowly going through some of the CRCNA-created resources that address race relations. These are not secular resources such as those the denomination directed reader to in "The Statement About The Deaths Of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, And Breonna Taylor." Rather, these are denomination-crafted resources that are directly posted on the CRCNA’s YouTube page and directly linked to and highlighted on the racial justice subsection of Thrive.

In my last post, I began working through the White Work 2.0 webinar that was put together in 2021 by the then-Office of Race Relations and the Antioch Podcast. I also prepared a transcript of the webinar which can be downloaded here.

The focus of that post was the vision that they seemed to be crafting for racial interactions within the CRCNA. One of the facilitators of the White Work 2.0 webinar was Idella Winfield (at that time the Community Engagement Coordinator for the then-Office of Race Relations) who described the webinar as “a conversation about uncentering whiteness in preparation for the changing culture demographics.”

The conversation was shaped by an article by Tema Okun entitled “White Supremacy Culture”. And within the first part of the White Work 2.0 webinar, the participants seemed to be creating a vision for race relations in which orthodox pastors and leaders were called “oppressors” and Biblical ways of doing things were dismissed as resulting only from human, “white” culture. I saw a call to step back and unpack the way church does things without any appreciation being shown for the concept that maybe those things are done that way because they are tried and true. I saw unity being sought in inherently divisive anti-racism teachings. I saw the life-long process of seeking after God and trying to follow the teachings laid out in the Bible being cast aside in favor of life-long dedication to doing “white work.”

Once that vision was been crafted, the obvious question is what will it look like in practice? And, this next section of the webinar covers that.

One of the facilitators of the webinar, Reggie Smith (who is the CRCNA’s current Director of Diversity and has also served as the Director of the Offices of Race Relations and Social Justice), essentially asks that question, saying “[W]hite people don't want to be tagged as not a good person and at the same time want to quickly get through the issue without experiencing any pain, any suffering, any inconvenience to that. And that kind of points us to that second question. So, what does decentering whiteness look like?”

Eric Nykamp jumps in “Sometimes we start making economic arguments about spiritual matters, saying that like ‘Well, we can't lose members.’ But are we worried about all the members or the members that donate the most? And I think sometimes we forget that the church wasn't set up to be a capitalistic endeavor. It was supposed to save souls. […] and I don't think my church was unique, but we never had long discussions about people who sat in the back who had just walked in who weren't wearing very nice clothes. And, you know, they didn't look like everybody else and then they came for a Sunday and left. And we never were like wringing our hands about it. But someone who donated a lot who would show up once every three months, we would wring our hands a lot about that person. It would show up in meetings about you know what, how are we sustaining, and we would always, again, use that spiritual language to talk about the economic realities of the church. But the church isn't initially set up to be like a business. It is it is against that, it's much more about saving souls in the currency of heaven. […] So, for me, decentering whiteness has economic ramifications.”

That response is kind of a weird non-sequitur to the question “what does decentering whiteness look like?” because it would seem to presuppose a racial element to a situation that, on its face, he doesn’t even present as having a racial element. At most, if one reads into his description of the one-time visitors as not “wearing very nice clothes”, it looks like there might be an economic-class element, but, given fashion these days, I wouldn’t even presuppose that. This response is very much in line with Joe Biden’s classic gaffe of “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

Beyond that, I am still left utterly confused as to what Eric would like to see happen in that situation. On the one hand, we have a person who attends a church service once and then never returns. On the other hand, there is a person who attends church sporadically and who donates a lot of money. Eric seems to be suggesting that the church is wrong to want to draw the sporadic attender more into the regular life of the church while not worrying too much about why a person attended once and never came back.

I don’t understand what the failure is in this scenario. People attend a single church service all the time for a variety of reasons. As long as the church makes a reasonable effort to greet these people at the door, say “hi” if they attend coffee hour, and provide information about the church upon request, they’re meeting their hospitality obligations for a first-time church visit. Church leaders will quickly go insane if they start wringing their hands over every single person who attends their service once.

The person who attends sporadically but gives a lot of money would definitely seem to require more consideration than a one-off church shopper, not specifically because of the economic benefit the church receives from this person, but because that giving would seem to indicate some sort of closeness to the church that is at odds with this person’s sporadic attendance. It seems reasonable for church leaders to want to try to find a way to help someone like that become more involved in the fellowship of the church and possibly start attending more regularly given that their regular donations suggests they might like a closer relationship.

Eric goes on to make a curious statement that seems almost to be a confession. “So, for me, decentering whiteness has economic ramifications. And to realize when I am doing things to place a higher value on certain kinds of people who will benefit me with their connections, or their money, or their reputation and devaluing people who make me uncomfortable, challenge my deeply held beliefs, or maybe my beliefs that I've not really thought about very much, but I have this, this recoil reaction, when I'm having conversations with those folks. Sometimes those are the folks that I'm really supposed to get to know the most.”

Is Eric Nykamp really categorizing people by whether or not they will benefit him? Is Eric Nykamp really devaluing people who make him “uncomfortable”? Does Eric Nykamp really have a “recoil reaction” when he has conversations with “those folks”? A statement like that makes me wonder if these webinar participants are using their over-the-top anti-white rhetoric to wildly overcompensate for racism that they personally hold toward non-white people—a racism that most run-of-the-mill people in the United States today don’t share.

Melissa Stek talks about how she had been a white person on a staff of predominantly Hispanic employees who worked for a Hispanic member of Congress. “I had joined the team after my colleagues, and I was being offered opportunities, even though they had been on the team longer than I was, and I took them. In retrospect, in retrospect, what I could have and should have done to leverage my privilege was to say to our Chief of Staff, you know, ‘I think, like, why don't you give those opportunities to so-and-so and so-and-so because they've been here longer than me.’ So that, you know, that's something that I didn't do, and I wish that I could go back and change.”

Essentially, it seems like Melissa is advocating for qualified competent people to turn down job opportunities simply because they believe they have the wrong skin-color and someone with a different skin-color should have that position. Never mind that these opportunities presumably came from the Hispanic Congressperson who employed both her and her colleagues and who was more than capable of deciding which staff members they believed would be best suited for different tasks. It’s hard for me to understand how telling your Hispanic boss that they’re wrong to offer you opportunities is any less racist than simply taking those opportunities.

Eric Nykamp believes decentering whiteness should impact the prayers that are articulated during worship and the illustrations that are used in sermons. “Whose prayers get articulated in worship? When […] I was on staff four years ago, I had this inner radar that told me that if I was going to pray about the border I had to be really thoughtful about the way I've worded that. […] Did we pray about Black Lives Matter? Did we pray about the oppression of Asian elders when COVID struck? Did we pray about, you know, crime affecting certain communities more than others in my city? And to most of those questions, I would say no. […] And then later I became one of the people writing that then got edited and told you can't pray about that. Or you can but you can only pray about it in the vaguest of ways. Which again, is centering whiteness. Whose illustrations get used in the sermon? You know, who's—apart from the appropriation piece, which we could get into in a whole separate talk—but like the idea of like, who's whose songs do you sing? Who are the authors that you're citing? You know, all these sorts of things is like, are we constantly referencing whiteness? And too often I think it's yes.”

In reviewing these illustrations, decentering white seems to entail:

• Directing church attention toward people assumed to be poor

• Not taking on job opportunities if you are white and there are non-white people who are also interested in those job opportunities

• Praying for Black Lives Matter, “Asian elders when Covid struck”, and “crime affecting certain communities more than others”

• Singing different songs and citing different authors

Essentially, the webinar participants are advocating for decentering whiteness by swapping out things they associate with white people with things they associate with non-white people. This is ostensibly a Christian resource put together by a Christian denomination for members of that denomination teaching them how to think about racial issues in a way that is in line with the beliefs of that denomination, but, in spite of the religious nature and purpose of this webinar, when asked how to decenter whiteness they don’t provide a religious answer. Instead, they provide a worldly answer—i.e. continue focusing on race but swap out one racial group with another racial group.

It seems to me that a more Christian way of decentering whiteness would be to focus attention on God who is the Creator of all things and who exists above racial categories. But this suggestion was not made by any of the participants.

Somewhat absurdly, after having already started discussing how to decenter whiteness, Michelle Loyd-Paige, one of the discussion facilitators and the Executive Associate to the President of Diversity and Inclusion at Calvin University asks the question “What is whiteness? If we're saying, you know, ‘centering whiteness’ what do we mean by—what are we talking about when we're saying "centering whiteness?"

The very fact that this question was brought up almost as an afterthought really speaks to the fundamentally unserious nature of the entire discussion, which, in turn, I find concerning given that this is one of the CRCNA’s official resources on race relations.

She goes on to define whiteness thusly: “Whiteness is a way that we're—if the majority group, a majority, the most privileged group in US society would be white Americans. And so those things that are normative or are associated as normative for white people. That is what we're thinking about whiteness. We're not necessarily talking about white people. We are talking about whiteness. What it means to live and operate—essentially, what you don't have to think about. We're trying to think about, we're trying to put a spotlight on the water that fish are swimming in so that the fish can understand there's water.”

Her definition of whiteness is literally, “those things that are normative or are associated as normative for white people.” There is nothing objective in that definition, and it contains no standard by which two people can know that they are talking about the same thing.

Whiteness (definition): “those things that are normative or are associated as normative for white people.”
—Michelle Loyd-Paige

After that definition of whiteness has been given, the webinar participants move away from talking about how to decenter whiteness and instead provide examples of how whiteness is centered.

Joseph Kuilema says that centering whiteness is similar to how a lot of art and literature was produced with the assumption that the consumer would be male.

Libby Huizenga says everyone on earth is the intended audience of scripture. “…[T]he intended audience of Scripture is not white men. And it might be speaking to other people. And that other people reading from their positions are not reading with bias any more than I am. And that when other people read Scripture differently than I do, that their experience of it is just as valid as mine. And there are other people who are reading the Bible in cultural contexts that might even be closer to the original audience of Scripture than I am.”

Reggie Smith describes whiteness as “an algorithm in social media that just keeps coming back, bringing the same thing that you like. And it's not going to bring anything that you don't like. And it's tracking it, and is gathering data on that, to make sure nothing that will disturb you will ever come up.”

Libby Huizenga points to the way the Revised Common Lectionary leaves out Minor Prophets as an example of whiteness, saying, “[T]hey left out a lot of the Minor Prophets, a lot of texts that have been historically really significant to communities of color. And that's an example of how one group created a model that impacts other people and leaves out their voices.”

Eric Nykamp tells a story of traveling overseas and visiting a Chinese church which went out of its way to translate its bulletin into English for him. “[T]hey translate it into English, if they know I'm coming […] and it's not Google Translate version. I mean, it's like really, it's a good translation. And I might not have noticed that that was what was happening, because I kind of expect that I could go anywhere in the world and people will talk to me in English and will do the work ahead of time to accommodate me to make me comfortable.”

Joseph Kuilema finishes off this section of the discussion by making a claim that I think would have really benefited from deeper clarifying discussion. He says:

“I think one of the most destructive ways that whiteness centers itself for Christians, in the United States in particular, is by imagining that white Christian America is the Bible's sort of intended audience and has superseded the nation of Israel as God's chosen people in the world. Right? So, I'm drawing again off Willie Jennings here from Grand Rapids. This is a heresy called supersessionism. Right? Which imagines that, well, the Bible was originally for the Israelites, but they messed it up, Jesus came, they didn't really treat—do that well, now we have assumed the mantle of God's chosen people in the world, and off we go. Manifest Destiny, Doctrine of Discovery, the whole nine yards.

“So, I think, growing up, I more or less had this assumed to me in my church environment, right, that the Bible was written to us, that we are God's people. And we never really talked about this unbreaking covenant that God supposedly made with a particular people in a particular historical place who still exist, right? So, we just swap ourselves in, just like we do when we read a good novel; we imagine that we are the protagonist, and we have done incalculable damage to the world as white people. This is in fact, Willie Jennings would say, the origin of whiteness is at this moment when we imagine ourselves as the new people of God in the colonial world.

“So, I think, if you want to talk about centering whiteness within Christianity, one of the big ways it shows up is imagining that we are God's people, you know, and our Puritan forefathers show up in New England and refer to the native people as the Amalekites and the Moabites. Right? And what do you do to Amalekites and Moabites? You exterminate them, right? So, we see this throughout our history, and it's incredibly destructive.”

I am extremely confused by the entirety of this speech. First off, I don’t understand what he means when he claims supersessionism is heresy. When I do an internet search on supersessionism and heresy I cannot find any articles providing information on this. My understanding of supersessionism is that multiple denominations hold beliefs on how Jews and Judaism relate to Christianity that would fall within the umbrella of supersessionsim.

In fact, I was under the impression that the CRCNA itself adheres to Covenant Theology which is viewed by dispensationalists as supersessionism. So, I’m very confused when I hear supersessionism being denounced as heresy within a CRCNA-crafted resource.

I would charitably assume that he is not labeling Covenant Theology as heresy but, rather, some sort of fringe belief that falls under the supersessionism umbrella, but that leaves me wondering which Christians in the United States he is referring to when he talks about people who believe in the heresy of supersessionism. My own experience attending evangelical churches and having grown up in Calvary Chapel would lead me to believe that a lot of US Christians are dispensationalists, not supersessionists, and they believe that Jews, as a distinct category, continue to be God’s chosen people, separate from Christians, to this day.

If you take all the Christians in the United States and subtract the dispensationalists and subtract those who believe in Covenant Theology, I question how many will be left to adhere to this belief he calls supersessionism that he identifies as a heresy. And yet he spends 2 minutes talking about how this belief is “one of the most destructive ways that whiteness centers itself for Christians, in the United States in particular”. Maybe it is for the 10 people in the US who hold to it, but for everybody else watching the webinar his entire diatribe seems to have no relevance to our beliefs, the way we view Jews and people of other races, or the way we live our lives in 21^st Century America.

I don’t understand how any of this is helpful or how is provides Christian Reformed guidance on how to improve race relations in America. This section of the conversation was ostensibly on how “whiteness” can be decentered within Christianity, and this is the list these participants came up with:

• Direct church attention toward people assumed to be poor

• Don’t take job opportunities if you are white and there are non-white people who are also interested in those job opportunities.

• Pray for Black Lives Matter, “Asian elders when Covid struck”, and “crime affecting certain communities more than others”.

• Sing different (unnamed and undefined) songs during worship and cite different (unnamed and undefined) authors during sermons.

• Avoid things that are normative or are associated as normative for white people.

• When picturing your audience do not picture them as white.

• Remember that “when other people read Scripture differently than I do, that their experience of it is just as valid as mine.”

• Remember that whiteness is like “an algorithm in social media that just keeps coming back, bringing the same thing that you like. And it's not going to bring anything that you don't like. And it's tracking it, and is gathering data on that, to make sure nothing that will disturb you will ever come up.”

• Revise the Revised Common Lectionary to include more excerpts from the Minor Prophets.

• Don’t expect to be able to travel anywhere in the world and have people to accommodate you and make you comfortable. [I will say, this seems reasonable to me, but it’s funny to me that it was apparently a very big personal revelation to Eric Nykamp and that he associates this revelation specifically with race.]

• Don’t believe in the heresy of supersessionism.

I don’t know what to say to any of this other than to just ask once more: is this really what the CRCNA believes?