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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Shari (00:00):
What's wrong with saying, “I don't see color?” For many, racial color-blindness has become a virtue. But in today's episode, my guest, Montague Williams, shares his immersive experience with three youth groups to better understand what young people are longing for when it comes to their race, their identity, and their experience in the church. He offers alternatives to the demands of color-blindness and invites Christians to engage in faith practices that don't ask young people to check their bodies at the door, but instead to honestly show up with and for each other. Williams is an ordained minister and has served in congregational, nonprofit, and educational ministry over the past 20 years. He serves as Professor of Church, Culture and Society at Point Loma Nazarene University, where he's passionate about helping students discern and embrace God's call on their lives. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Montague, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Montague (01:04):
Oh, it's good to be here.
Shari (01:08):
So the book that we're talking about today is called Church in Color, and I'm curious if you can set the stage for us about why you wrote this book, what made this work really important to engage, and what made you want to pursue this particular research?
Montague (01:27):
Yeah, you know, I think many authors probably have layered reasons for writing books, and that's the case for me. In many ways, it first comes out of my own pastoral life working in youth and congregational ministry more broadly, but finding that resources for engaging youth ministry that is multi-ethnic, multiracial, predominantly BIPOC, the resources when I was serving full-time in congregational ministry, they just were not available. And so my own world of inquiry, my own questions were developed just through my pastoral life. And as I approached my own work in theology, in theological studies, I also found that so much theological work is done by beginning with abstract ideas and then trying to find ways to force that into what's happening in real life or on the ground or in people's lives. A big part of the book,
Shari (02:43):
Yeah, your job is to bridge that void.
Montague (02:47):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to do theology in a way that takes seriously what people are feeling, thinking, experiencing, the questions people have on the ground. I don't want to just start with what somebody said at some point in history,
Shari (03:07):
Well, there's no better way to do that than ethnography. But before we dig into that, I'm curious, you spent a lot of time with three particular congregations, and we'll get to that in a second, but you also mentioned the multicultural and multiethnic nature of the pastoral work that you've done. Can you say a little bit more about the significance of focusing on those types of communities?
Montague (03:32):
Well, when I was beginning my own journey into ministry as a life vocation, I saw some different congregations that my own colleagues were interested in working with. And in many ways, those fit what seemed to be, I don't know what the word might be, but maybe successful churches or churches that were famous or something along those lines. And oftentimes it was predominantly white spaces, predominantly suburban. And that just wasn't my own upbringing. It wasn't my framework. It didn't connect with the sort of blend of Christian spiritualities that made up my own life. And I just also found myself thinking I wanted to do it a little bit differently. And so I did intentionally seek out my own sense of ministry formation in context with people in the church who could also speak into my life as I learned to speak into theirs.
Shari (04:55):
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that. So could you introduce us to one of the congregations? You spent time with three. You describe all three of these youth ministries in great detail, but to give us a taste of that work for you, could you choose one of them and introduce us to this youth ministry?
Montague (05:19):
The first congregation I discuss in the book, it has a pseudonym, which is Beachland Community Church. And that congregation is, it's in a community that is close to a beach. It's adjacent to a community that's known for being quite wealthy, predominantly white, but Beachland itself is very multi-ethnic, multiracial, and has a high population of people of Dominican descent. And the youth ministry reflects the diversity: young people of Dominican descent, Cambodian descent, young people who are African-American, young people who are Honduran. And in that particular space, I find that young people had a lot of questions around race and culture, and they were wondering what it all meant for their Christian faith, or if Christian faith had anything to offer, and you'd find young people trying to bring it up in the most hilarious ways at times. The research had me playing basketball and riding in church vans and sitting on family porches. It's a really fun way to do theology. And you end up,
Shari (06:55):
Yeah. You said you wanted to do life on the ground. This is really on the ground, right?
Montague (07:01):
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So in that space, I just took some time to listen. We did one-on-one interviews, focus interviews, interviewed students, like young people, interviewed young people who used to be part of the congregation, but were no longer, we spent some time with families, spent time with the youth workers, pastors, just to get a sense of whether or not, and in what way this youth ministry helps young people engage questions around race, racism, and racial identity.
Shari (07:48):
Yeah. So you talk about observing that the young people there really did want to understand what their race and culture and identity meant. Can you give us a window in that, I'm thinking in particular of a young person I think you gave the pseudonym Hakeem. Can you tell us a little bit, just to give us more particularity around an example of a young person in this church.
Montague (08:14):
The thing that made that particular context so intriguing is just how in your face young people were about their questions. I mean, there was one day, actually it was my first day of doing participant observation just in the space during a youth ministry programming. And Hakeem is running around and there's young people, they're chasing each other around actually the church building. And he's eventually told to stop and he screams out like, “I'M BLACK!” And I just thought, wait, is he? What is that? And I got to chat with him about what that's all about. And he put out there that at times he just loves to scream that so people know that he doesn't see his Blackness as a negative. And as you unpack that, you find that he actually sees there are messages all around him that says that it is a negative. He would interact with jokes that are meant to be harmful toward him, and he would interact with it in a way to try to see what people do with it.
Montague (09:39):
Hakeem was really interested in being a leader, and actually young people saw him as a leader. Throughout the youth group, really, a lot of the young people at that church, they tried to make their thoughts clear through jokes and in acting their questions. I mean, on one church van ride, this was so intriguing to me. One church van ride, we stopped to pick up one student, and two students got out, walked up to his door, and acted like they were police ready to break in. And they banged on the door. They stood to the side with their fingers in the shape of imaginary guns, and they're like, this is the police. Come on, come on, come out. And some kids are in the van just cracking up laughing. And they end up, the student that was inside, he ends up coming out and they drag him to the van and it's all an act. And I learned that this is actually something that they do quite often. And what was most…
Shari (10:58):
So this is a repetitive drama that they play out together.
Montague (11:01):
It is. It's a rehearsal of a drama. And as you unpack it with them, they're reflecting things that they know that happens in their community. And even if you look at the racial dynamics of the young people doing it and who was the one being called out of their home and who was the one doing the banging on the door and all of that, it also spoke to their sense of awareness of how race works in the world.
Shari (11:33):
Well, this is all made more fascinating by the way that their congregation is choosing to navigate the question of race, which is functionally to not directly address it. You also identify that they have the most explicitly, you used the phrase “color-blind,” posture towards race. So can you share that a little bit as well?
Montague (11:59):
Yeah, you know, it's intriguing. I do want to say for all of the congregations I worked with throughout my research on this, in many ways, the fact that they invited me in to, to be a part of their group for a time, and to see what's going on and to learn from them, and all of that is in some ways a sort of nod to wanting to challenge color-blindness, but it still is not a full resistance to it. And this particular congregation really did long for color-blindness to be a way forward, and that ultimately means doing their best to not acknowledge race, doing their best to downplay the way race is operating in our lives. I actually talk about it in the book as, the congregations fall, each of the congregations tended to practice at least two versions of color-blindness, and one would be underestimating the influence and effects of race and racism and racial identity in the lives of young people.
Montague (13:12):
Another would be around forgetting or failing to remember the stories of race, racism, and racial identity in their communities or in the congregation itself. And a third would be just straight up dismissing students' experiences and their curiosities around race and racism and racial identity. And depending on how they do that, you know, I saw different versions. But this particular congregation was very much like, our goal is to make sure that they don't bring that conversation into the church. It doesn't belong in the church. And, you know, in some ways, that impetus, that intention, you can kind of understand where it comes from. It's partly a fear that once you begin talking about this, it's going to feel so limiting, that young people will feel like there is this factor that's going to always be a constraint on their lives. And I think that that often comes from the language that's so common where someone would say, “That happened to me because of my race.” And I think some well-meaning versions of color-blindness wants to make sure that no one feels that way. But I think that language is also part of the problem, because really when something happens due to racism, it's not because of the person's color of their skin or because of their race. It's because of the other persons or because of whatever systemic realities, racism. And so if you don't name the realities of race, you never get to that place of saying, yeah, racism is real. It exists. And what you're experiencing needs to be acknowledged.
Shari (15:12):
Yeah. One of the other things you point at is both the necessity that people bring their bodies in with them literally, and not divorce their lived experience. But you also talked about how the young people had these deep wonderings. I think you used the word “wonders.” Can you talk more about that? And underneath a joke or a performance for a guest or a researcher's presence like you, what were some of the undercurrents that you picked up?
Montague (15:46):
Yeah, I did that thing that academics do, and I kind of made up a word. So yes, I call them wonders, which is in some ways, it does really point to a sense of wonderment or wonderings. But yeah, I'm pointing to this sense of wonder, this sense of questioning, this sense of interest, and even this sense of confusion that young people have around what race really is, around how much it does have an impact on our lives, about what possibilities there are to live a life in a way that dismantles the constraints, but also can be honest about their impacts. This sense of wonder that young people have. You just see it manifested in a variety of ways. In that particular youth group, humor was a major way, and also just this improvisation of rehearsing stories that they've seen in their lives.
Montague (16:55):
One way I talk about that in the book is that they're trying to conjure a new possibility of conversation in a space that seems to not have room for it. It's like they're reaching, they're using humor to break open a conversation that they're longing to have. In human life, we have two main ways of doing that. It's humor, and it's tears. We often, you know, in ministry spaces when people are vulnerable and they get to a place of sharing honestly, and it goes to tears, it can lead to somebody else sharing honestly. And I think many people, in ministry, if you do small group kind of work, you're aware of this. And as a facilitator, you know, you try to facilitate that in a way that's not manipulative, but just really an open kind of space. But humor, interestingly, can function in a similar way if we let it, but it takes a bit of skill and it takes rapport with young people, and it takes a sense of trust.
Montague (18:09):
Young people have to trust you to hear what they're saying and to guide them to the conversation that they're trying. And in a different congregation, one young person literally said, I try to have this conversation. I mean, this is not the direct quote, you could see the direct quote in the book, but he said, I try to have these conversations and I try to use some jokes, joke it up a bit so that people feel comfortable, but then if people don't want to talk, I just stop. And he was so explicit about his attempt to use humor to break open the possibility of a conversation around something meaningful and deep and something that has to do with the realities of injustice in this world.
Shari (18:56):
Yeah, that's really fascinating that both are kind of a request to, can I be real? Can I be authentic? Can we dig into something? It’s really fascinating.
Montague (19:05):
Yes, but can I be real? Isn't that fascinating? Because can I be real, and can I be real by first joking? It's sort of, it's trying to test the space to see, can my life experience have a place here or not?
Shari (19:28):
Yeah. Can you hear it? Can you receive it? Can this space and this group hold it? So you talk about youth leaders and, well, first, I think it's important, you talk about color-blindness and some of the detrimental effects that either I think it's pretending to be color-blind can create, but you also connect it to this idea of post-racialism. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because there's a little bit of, you unpack a little bit of history and the way that these things play out that I think are important to understand.
Montague (20:10):
Sure. You know what's so interesting is when I wrote the book, I did wonder how much paying attention to the realities of post-racialism might be gone soon, but I think we've seen it on the rise again, which is, I'll give you current context to try to clarify what I'm talking about. I mean, in recent years, months, weeks, we've seen work to try to ban conversation around the history and the current effects and the current practices of racism in the world. I mean, when you have states banning books that young people are allowed to read, and those books are telling the stories of racism, what's happening is this attempt to say there's a line in history and there's a line where these things no longer matter. It stopped at a particular line. Now, in the book, I talk about how the election of Barack Obama seemed to function as that line for many, that many thought…
Montague (21:26):
…this is a line where all that stuff we talked about before, it's over. And actually, I've actually heard that in a recent meeting for my child's school when there was a whole debate about Critical Race Theory and someone in that meeting very recently said, “Well, I think we already handled all this. We've had a Black president. I think we can move on.” That kind of thing. That framing of saying, these things may have mattered before, but we have to draw a line. And at that line we have to say it doesn't matter anymore because if we say it matters, it might only keep the problem alive. And so there's this assumption that we have to act as if race-ism is not a real thing in order for it to go away. But it does not work that way. In fact, what happens is that particular belief, that trust, that -ism that we are post-race, it only hides people from the realities that they're encountering and touching every day.
Montague (22:44):
And the problem with post-racialism is, and I make this case in the book, is that it lifts up color-blindness as its primary virtue, but in a context where we take seriously this idea. And I know listeners could come from various faith traditions. I come from a Christian faith tradition, and in my understanding and in my faith and my belief in Jesus, coming from a context that's named Jesus comes from Nazareth, God reveals God's cares and concerns, God even chose to have one represent a way forward, come from the very place people thought nothing good could come from. I mean, that's in Scripture. All of that work is even a divine way of recognizing the realities that we now describe and categorize through the lens of race.
Montague (23:53):
It is a recognition that these things do matter, and if we try to erase them and try to claim them to be insignificant, we are hiding ourselves from the very issues that are operating on us. And in that sense, color-blindness is not a virtue in Christian faith, color-blindness is a vice. And even, you know, at the end of the Christian story, we find in the book of Revelation, John on Patmos, seeing what is this heavenly community. Some might say kingdom, some might say kin-dom. Martin Luther King Jr. would say Beloved Community. John sees a community that he can tell is from various people groups from around the globe. He can hear that they're from different languages. There is a sense of recognizing even in this Beloved Community, in our heavenly hope, there is not a need to erase what we look like. There's not a need to erase our physical features or a need to erase the markers of cultural realities. In fact, there's a divine recognition of those things. So to do work to enforce color-blindness is to really move away from our Christian hope.
Shari (25:27):
Yeah. So it's not this erasure of the existence of different phenotypes or different, all these different physical characteristics. Instead, it's a longing to get beyond the negative connotations that have become associated with those things.
Montague (25:41):
Exactly. And if noticing the realities of race is going to make you think negatively about somebody, then that is where you have to ask yourself like, wow. The work of racism has formed me so much that I am afraid to acknowledge that somebody comes from a group that is racially identified a certain way, because I think negatively about that group. And race is complicated. I talk about it in the book. Race is so complicated because it doesn't come from a holy place. Race does come from a problematic place. Race is imposed on us, but if we just act like it doesn't exist, then we're also hiding ourselves from the realities of how it has operated. We're hiding ourselves from the path to the solutions that we're longing for.
Shari (26:39):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.