The Raceless Gospel

The Raceless Gospel, a proclamation that bears witness against white- body supremacy and promotes non- colonial engagement and understanding of God and Christian Scripture, advocates for the realization of the “new humanity’ evidenced by baptized believers for a coming “kin-dom.”

Through the praxis of womanist and liberation theologies and the future- casting of the African American spirituals, its framework of semantic and somatic sovereignty is sustained by resistance through self- emancipation as embodied by Harriet Tubman, self- actualization as formulated by Howard Thurman, truth- telling as named by James Baldwin, self- care as defined by Audre Lorde and rest as devised by Tricia Hersey.

It is “faith seeking understanding”— without race and its progeny. It is faith practiced without hand- me- down hatreds and racialized categories too small for human being and belonging, words that should have shrunk during baptism. The Raceless Gospel is rooted in the Christian believer’s baptismal identity, which transcends all fictitious binaries and failing dichotomies (Galatians 3:27-28; Colossians 3.10-11). It is not a color- blind prescription or a post- racial vision but an invitation to see race for what it is and as it is. Paul says it plainly to the believers in Corinth: “Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish” (First Corinthians 15:39, NRSV).

The Black and White Church are literal and physical signs of segregation in the North American Church, hanging over it in judgement. Both are a byproduct of Enlightenment’s theory on human being, belonging and identity, here being the sociopolitical construct of race and American chattel slavery. The segregation of sacred space continues in part due to the racialization of Jesus’s gospel, which calls into question the efficacy of baptismal identity and what of our categorical selves truly dies with him. Race holds these structures and systems in place without biblical or biological basis.

The Raceless Gospel is a Pentecostal (that is, the experience– not the denomination named after it) expression of a baptismal ecclesiology that is embodied, that calls the racialized body of Christ heresy, that deconstructs race and decolonizes theology for the desegregation of the global church for an undivided “kin-dom” that is coming.

The Raceless Gospel invites Christian believers to:

• Identify colonial influences and examine theological interpretations of their sacred text, which have been used to marginalize, control and otherize;
• Challenge dominant and domineering readings and interpretations of their sacred text, especially those that center Western perspectives and maintain social hierarchy; and,
• Reclaim the text for marginalized communities and incorporate their voices, perspectives, and experiences in the meaning- making of religious and spiritual messages.

The prominent concerns of The Raceless Gospel include:

• the abolition of race and its progeny;
• the rejection of white- body supremacy;
• the end of neo- colonial rule and all forms of slavery and white supremacist terrorism, especially police brutality and hate crimes; and,
• reparations for the descendants of Africans and African Americans who were enslaved, the victims of cognitive capture and thus, denied semantic and somatic sovereignty during American chattel slavery.