The Search for a More Human Face

What is needed in theological education today is a commitment to the work of humanization. And this work requires commitment to conversion. Calling theological educators to the work of conversion is controversial, I know. Our seminaries are ecumenical and increasingly multireligious spaces where respect for, and sometimes celebration of, religious difference is often a core commitment of our practice. Simultaneously, the legacies of colonial missions are deep-seated and our hermeneutics of suspicion are fully deployed when the language of conversion is used. 

In addition, as participants in the broader academy we often understand our work not primarily as spiritual formation but as intellectual exercise. Incentives not to do all the things that come with conversion—that is, cause discomfort, invite departure from received traditions, instigate changes of life course—abound in our world of professionalized credentials and social media surveillance. However, in this moment of the global decline of democracy, the resurgence of white supremacy and ethnic nationalisms, the ongoing destruction of our shared planet, and the emergence of a technological oligarchy, we must be clear that our first work is not the work of bureaucratic management, professional certification, or intellectual curiosities. Our work as theological educators is to imagine and practice new ways of being human together.

Our forerunner in the work of theological education as conversion is the founding figure of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Bantu Steve Biko. His most famous essay, which was inspired by and wrestled with Black Liberation Theology, is “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity.” In this essay Biko diagnosed his situation (apartheid South Africa) as an “anomalous situation” that Black South Africans (that is, people who were classified as Bantu/Native, Coloured, and Asian) were forced to live in by white South African society.[1] This human-made, unnatural way of living created a spirit among all South Africans that was inhuman. Apartheid made white people oppressive, exploitative, isolated, and less than humane. It constrained Black people’s ability to exercise true freedom and too often made them acquiescent to oppressive conditions. And, over time, it came to make people really believe in the supremacy of whiteness over blackness. 

So, Biko invited Black people to re-learn what it means to truly be human. He called on Black people to love themselves, exercise shared agency, and to transform their minds. He insisted that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” and then wrote frankly and fervently in ways that sought to transform the minds of his readers. Asserting one’s humanity was the first step in honoring one’s own dignity. Only one who is secure in one’s own dignity can engage with others as equals in a shared society. In short, Biko worked for the conversion of his people away from an apartheid way of life and to a human way of life, what he called a “quest for a true humanity.” If Black South Africans were successful in this work, he believed that they might bestow “a more human face” to their own society and to the world.

We are similarly situated today. We have been malformed by living in a neoliberal world for the last fifty years. The individualizing, isolating, commodifying, and consumeristic ways of exercising agency learned in the neoliberal age have been made to seem “natural” to us by our algorithmic overlords in this most recent decade. Our exponentially increasing economic inequality is separating and segregating into a globalized apartheid. From Los Angeles to Gaza, we are racially segregated; our extraction of coltan and other minerals for modern technology enslaves many Africans for western convenience; and those most responsible for climate change are the least likely to experience its most devasting effects. It has become increasingly difficult to live a fully human life in a world like this. 

A world with a more human face would be one that does not separate and segregate but makes practical our interconnectedness. It would not fray our connections to one another but strengthen the ties that bind us together. It would seek public policies and cultural practices that recognize that our flourishing is bound together and promote such interdependence. A world like this is hard to imagine or describe because it is so far from how most of us live. In my own work, this takes its most practical expression in the integration of peacemaking circles into my teaching in and out of the classroom.[2] These practices center relationships, trust-building, storytelling, and shared values. Doing so invites humanity to emerge in oftentimes surprising ways.

In this era when international student visas are being denied, the assertion of the dignity of marginalized communities is called “reverse racism,” and racial equity and queer inclusion has been sidelined in the name of “viewpoint diversity”—in other words, when human dignity is violated daily by doubling down on separation—it is vital that theological educators remember that our task is not to train consumers, sycophants, or even professionals. Rather, in a world that increasingly forms us to be less-than-human(e), our work is to educate people to live in their true humanity and show the world a more human face. Let us call this the work of conversion.

[1] Apartheid South Africa had a racial classification system that segregated people according to four broad racial categories: Native/Bantu, Coloured, Asian, and white. Native/Bantu included all Bantu-language speaking peoples generally understood to be Black Africans who migrated to southern Africa in the centuries before white colonization. Coloured referred to a group of people from a racially mixed background that included predominantly Khoisan (an indigenous ethnic group), Malaysian (usually brought to South Africa as slaves or indentured servants), and white ancestry, and has come to be understood as a unique racial group in South Africa. It was/is also used to describe people of mixed racial ancestry more broadly. Asians referred predominantly to South Asian residents who arrived after British colonization. White was a term used to classify people of various European backgrounds, especially Dutch and British. Apartheid itself was a system created by the Afrikaans community, an ethnic group that emerged as the descendants of Dutch colonists came to understand themselves as African. Black consciousness advocated all non-white peoples to come to understand themselves as similarly racialized and oppressed and to accept the inclusive category of Black as their preferred racial and political identity.

[2] The lineage of peacemaking circles I was first taught is that which comes from Tagish and Tlingit peoples. It was taught to me by Saroeum Phoung and Shasta Cano-Martin who learned from Harold Gatensby, Phil Gatensby, and Barry Stuart.