Racism and its various mutations have impacted every aspect of American life and remains a great challenge to the American Church.
Worldviews seek to answer life’s biggest questions, that of reality, origin, meaning, morality, and destiny, by forming humans to live, think, and ‘be’ a certain way in the world. Protestant Evangelicals advocate for a distinctly Christian worldview to form and shape Christian public and private life. But what happens when one’s Christian worldview struggles to grapple with seemingly abstract ideas that have real ontological and ethical impacts on human and societal formation? What are Christians to do with formative social constructs and phenomena that cannot be easily explained as non-biblical? Do these social constructs and social phenomenon even function on a worldview level or are they pre-worldview?
The social construct of race has ordered and formed every socio-cultural institution, including the evangelical Church/Evangelicalism. And, while a relatively new concept for many evangelical Christians, the social phenomenon of whiteness, and its formative power, is undergoing unprecedented analysis which is contributing to dissenting Christian movements, like deconstruction, exvangelicals, and decolonization, and distorted Christian movements like Christian Nationalism.
Modern cognitive concepts of worldview are essential for Christian formation, but they are inadequate for addressing social constructs and social phenomenon that originate in and form humans on the pre-cognitive level. Furthermore, a worldview-only approach to Christian formation will continuously prove deficient in its analysis of the intricacies of racism and its connecting logics, specifically whiteness.
This paper argues that while worldview is helpful for Christian formation, understanding how the social imaginary forms humans in a racialized society will lead to a better Christian understanding of social constructs and social phenomena, which will provide a more robust step for the Christian church to overcome racism.
To argue for this thesis, first this paper will briefly survey key works on Christian worldview and their ability to address social constructs. Next, this paper will examine Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary in conversation with James K.A. Smith’s concept of rituals of ultimate concern. This paper will then show that racism as conceived by George Kelsey and whiteness as articulated by Willie Jennings, operate as rituals of ultimate concern on the pre-cognitive level of the social imaginary for evangelicals.