| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation is a multidisciplinary theological critique of whiteness. The project models a critical theological analysis grounded in a mixed-methods study of white Christian discourse about race between May 2020 and February 2021, where I examine how race and antiblack racism are discussed by white Christian leaders based in Nashville, TN. Applying insights from cultural studies of emotion and critical theories of race to the results of my qualitative research, I parse the affective registers of white Christian discourse to show how an orientation of whiteness is (re)produced through everyday practices of faith. Identifying a habit of “grief reminders,” I analyze how some white Christian pastors perceive, feel, and respond to a lack of grief within their congregations in response to antiblack violence, and I explore how affective economies of grief may (re)produce an antiblack Christian theological anthropology. Given the pluriform nature of antiblackness, I also assess white Christian emotional, discursive, and material responses to gentrification, a racial project visible in recent residential and commercial developments in Nashville, TN. Tracing the racializing work of white Christian emotions, I argue that a spatial logic of whiteness directs relationships between white Christians (and their neighbors), and I show how this logic is (re)produced in everyday theologies of identity, salvation, heaven, and the church. By demonstrating how the cultivation of grief and the circulation of white spatial imaginaries involve everyday lived theologies, I show how white Christians are oriented by faith toward the reproduction of whiteness. Through a reading of Saul’s Damascene encounter (Acts 9) alongside pastoral discussions of disorientation and race, I then explore alternative theological and ethical paradigms that might allow white Christians to affectively resist the ethico-onto-epistem-ological orientations of white Christianity. This project thus models a hybrid, critical approach to constructive theology and demonstrates how an orientation of whiteness is (re)produced through the everyday habits of white Christians as they respond to antiblack racism in their nation, neighborhoods, and religious institutions. | |
