There’s a 500-year history of social justice activism that emerged from Christianity in the Americas, and it comes to us through the Brown Church. Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero (Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at UCLA) joins Evan Rosa to discuss the history of Christian racial justice efforts in the Americas, as well as a constructive and faithful exploration of Christianity & Critical Race Theory. He is a historian, legal scholar, author, a pastor, and an organizer who wants to bring the history of Christian social justice around race to bear on the systems and structures of racism we see in the world today. He is an Asian-Latino who straddles the worlds of Chinese and Mexican heritage; Latin American history and Law; scholarship and a pastoral ministry; and a contemplative and an activist. He’s author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity—and is co-author (with Jeff M. Liou) of Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation.
There’s a 500-year history of social justice activism that emerged from Christianity in the Americas, and it comes to us through the Brown Church. Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero (Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at UCLA) joins Evan Rosa to discuss the history of Christian racial justice efforts in the Americas, as well as a constructive and faithful exploration of Christianity & Critical Race Theory. He is a historian, legal scholar, author, a pastor, and an organizer who wants to bring the history of Christian social justice around race to bear on the systems and structures of racism we see in the world today. He is an Asian-Latino who straddles the worlds of Chinese and Mexican heritage; Latin American history and Law; scholarship and a pastoral ministry; and a contemplative and an activist. He’s author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity—and is co-author (with Jeff M. Liou) of Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation.
About Robert Chao Romero
Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley. Romero has published more than 30 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and received the Latina/o Studies book award from the international Latin American Studies Association. He is author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, which received the InterVarsity Press Readers’ Choice Award for best academic title; as well as his most recent book, Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation, co-authored with Jeff M. Liou. Romero is a former Ford Foundation and U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute's Sabbatical Grant for Researchers. Robert is also an ordained minister and community organizer.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith. yale. edu.
Robert Chao Romero: Thousands of students right now are in the spiritual borderlands of race and justice and faith, and they don't know how to reconcile their faith in Jesus with their passions for issues of justice and race. The Brown Church, this tradition of justice and Christianity in Latin America, precedes our contemporary denominational divides.
So history allows us to rethink, reshape, reflect upon what's before all this mess, right? And how can we learn from the community cultural wealth? of our ancestors so that we can somehow construct a path forward. CRT is a conversation tool to get us to be able to talk about those things that exist in law, in policy, in our churches, et cetera, that hinder us from being the beloved community.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Over 500 years ago, before the Protestant Reformation, a little known priest On the outskirts of the Spanish colonies in the Americas, I noticed a problem.
Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar who spoke out against Spanish colonialism, began criticizing the enslavement and unjust treatment of indigenous people in Hispaniola, the island we now know today as comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And delivered on December 4th, 1511, Montesinos based this sermon on Matthew 3:3. Quote, I am a voice crying in the wilderness, speaking truth and justice to the power of the Spanish conquistadors. He preached, and I'm quoting here with some antiquated language about indigenous peoples. In order to make your sins against the Indians known to you, I have come up on this pulpit. I who am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island, and therefore it behooves you to listen, not with careless attention, but with all your heart and senses.
So that you may hear it, for this is going to be the strangest voice that you ever heard, the harshest and hardest and most awful and most dangerous that you ever expected to hear. He goes on, This voice says that you are in mortal sin, that you live and die in it, for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people.
Tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? Are these not men? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?
It was an act. of incredible solidarity and bold protest against an incredibly powerful and global force at the time. I mean the governor of the island was none other than Diego Columbus. The son of Christopher Columbus, and it led to Montesinos censure, but it fomented a movement that continues today.
And just one of the expressions of that continuation is in my guest, Robert Chao Romero. He's a professor of Latina studies at UCLA. He's an author, a pastor, an organizer, and a beautiful human being. When I think of Robert, I think of the many ways he embodies and represents integration and the merging of borders and boundaries.
He's an Asian Latino with both Chinese and Mexican heritage. He has two doctorates, one in Latin American History from UCLA, as well as a Juris Doctor from UC Berkeley. And he's both a scholar and a pastor, a contemplative and an activist. I asked him on the show to draw together another two elements. His 2020 book, Brown Church, 500 Years of Latina O Social Justice, Theology and Identity, and his latest book, co authored with Jeff Liu.
called Christianity and Critical Race Theory, A Faithful and Constructive Conversation. Though it's been a lightning rod and heavily politicized in recent years, Robert's approach to critical race theory in this conversation is both historically informed, theoretically open and careful, and rooted in a scriptural and theological framework built around Christian commitments.
In our conversation, Robert explores history, theology, justice activism, and a hopeful presence for how we might seek kinship. Mutual understanding, identification with the poor and the oppressed, and a whole vision for the transformative work of Christ, not just in the structures and systems of society, but yes, even in our individual lives.
Robert Chao Romero. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. Pleasure to be here. I wanted to start just asking you a little bit about your heritage. I know that as an Asian Latino, you live these two worlds. And, and when I first heard your story, I was captivated by it. I wonder if you share a little bit about how your heritage And your faith converge.
Robert Chao Romero: Absolutely. So, um, I was born to immigrant parents in Los Angeles, um, East Los Angeles. My dad is an immigrant from Mexico, Chihuahua, Mexico, which is in Northern Mexico. My mom is an immigrant from Hubei in Central China. My mom's dad actually and mom, they were pastors in China. They founded InterVarsity in China in the 1940s, um, came as religious refugees to the United States.
I was born in, in the 1970s in a moment when LA was just starting to really desegregate itself. It seems late, but that was what had happened in education and housing and all these kind of things. So I grew up in a pretty tumultuous time where race was really a live, live thing for me. And kind of all that together, I feel like that's how God has given me my calling to draw from that experience and to be on a podcast like this today.
Evan Rosa: You use this phrase in Brown Church, but you talk about spiritual borderlands, and the metaphor is really rich. One of the first words that comes to mind for me is liminality, the basically the spaces between the threshold between different spaces, but that phrasing spiritual borderlands is so rich with meaning.
based on the concept of immigration, of course, and the concept of a border that certainly is just continually at stake for the U. S. But talk about that phrase, spiritual borderlands.
Robert Chao Romero: When I wrote that phrase down, drawing from Anzaldúa, I was thinking specifically about my students at UCLA. So I've been a professor there for 18 years and for the whole time there, but especially in the last five years, I've met so many students.
Especially Latinx students who come to the university with faith, they grew up maybe in an immigrant Catholic church or an immigrant Pentecostal church, and they're like star students in their church and they go to UCLA or they go to Yale or somewhere and they come across the situation many times where their faith gets questioned.
So they come with this deep personal faith, but they're told in some classes, at least, you can't be a Christian. and care about issues of race and justice, because Christianity is only a colonial religion. It's only the religion of kind of white men, et cetera. You know, at the same time, many times when they go back home for Christmas break or summer break, they take what they learned in the university about Real issues of structural injustice in education and housing and health care, et cetera.
And they say, pastor or mom or dad, I just learned this stuff at Yale about the educational pipeline and Latinos. What does my faith have to say to this? And a lot of times they're met with blank stares or they're met with the response that says, well, don't worry about that. That's not Christianity. So many students, thousands of students.
Right now, I'm sure even more than that, actually, are in the spiritual borderlands of race, injustice, and faith, and they don't know how to reconcile their faith in Jesus. with these, with their passions for issues of justice and race.
Evan Rosa: So often it's kind of set up as two gospels, right? There's like the gospel of heavenly salvation and a gospel of earthly justice.
Is that part of some of the concerns that might be there? Is it like, like a spiritualization in some ways? Is that, does that connect for you at all?
Robert Chao Romero: It's definitely there. And I think from the Protestant side of things, Where, you know, Pentecostalism is very much influenced by that, but fortunately, as the book talks about, and I'm sure we'll get to this, there's a 500 year history of Latin American Christian justice that pushes against that binary and says, no, the good story of Jesus and the kingdom, the kingdom of God is a, it's a holistic good news.
That incorporates both personal salvation and transformation of every aspect of creation in society that has fallen and broken because of sin.
Evan Rosa: You talk about that 500 year history. I'm wondering if you're kind of referring back to this amazing story that you tell in the book. The way I've heard you introduce that before is it's like one of these first sermons on justice in the Americas.
I wonder if you'd tell that story. It's so gripping and insightful. And I think it does merge and bring together each of these, you know, gospels, if you will.
Robert Chao Romero: Yes. So please tell me. The Brown Church, again, as I define it, it's this little known 500 year history of Latin American and U. S. Latino Christian justice, both Catholic and Protestant.
Okay. In real simple terms, the Brown Church was born In 1511, in what today is the Dominican Republic, when a Dominican priest by the name of Antonio de Montesinos, this was the Sunday before Christmas in 1511, he called all the Spaniards of the island and said, you know, come to church today. I got the special message for you.
You don't want to miss it. And then, and then he has, he gathers them in their straw thatched chapel, right? You can picture the cool breeze of the wind and the salt air. And then he tells them, listen very closely to the words that I'm about to share with you. These will be the strangest words you've ever heard.
I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. And then he proceeds. to preach the first racial justice sermon in the Americas in 1511, and he says, Spaniards, God gave you the chance to share about the good news of Jesus with the native peoples. in love, but instead you've exploited this as an opportunity for violence and selfish gain.
If you don't repent, God's going to send you to hell. And they came back the next Sunday and then preached part two, right? That was the birth of the Brown Church in 1511. And notice 1511, right? That is, if my math is correct, six years before Martin Luther nails his famous theses, right? So the Brown Church actually, this tradition of justice and Christianity in Latin America, It precedes our contemporary denominational divides.
Evan Rosa: And I think this is kind of picking up on the historian in you. And I wonder, I mean, this might be a good place to ask you about your view on the importance of history for this kind of contemporary theological, sociological understanding of religion and kind of all these different valences that really do impact.
real people's lives insofar as they practice their faith and their faith instructs them to engage in public in particular ways. I know from listening to you that the significance of history to you, and I wonder if you speak to that. And I think there's an opportunity here to even think about some of the particular liberation theology and what that's trying to do in kind of bring history to bear on the present moment.
Robert Chao Romero: I think in the present moment, there are millions of people who are deconstructing and reconstructing their faith because History, contemporary history has pushed us to the point where we can no longer say, okay, yeah, Christianity and white nationalism is okay, or Christianity and, you know, racism and police violence and those kinds of things.
Like, so many millions of people are saying, wait a minute, that cannot be right. So we're deconstructing that, but people don't know what to turn to afterwards. And so many people deconstruct in a good way, again, sort of the decolonial theological movement. It's very good. Yeah. But there was 1500 years of Christianity before 1492.
So what do we go back to, right? And especially for many Latinos and Latinas, right? If you only go back to 1492, then it. You're left with still a broken identity, a broken ethnic and spiritual identity. And there's, you kind of, you kind of don't know what to do about it. So history allows us to rethink, reshape, reflect upon, you know, what's before all this mess?
And how can we learn from the community cultural wealth? of our ancestors so that we can somehow construct a path forward.
Evan Rosa: So as not to repeat those sins of the past, or to get out of particular patterns or habits. It's, it seems to me that it's an opportunity to remember instead of repeat. Amen.
Robert Chao Romero: I love that.
I like that. Yeah. And I think in the past, it's like a map, right? It's like a topographical map. There are people who have sort of constructed a map for us to know how to get out of this place, right? It doesn't have all the details, but there's a way forward.
Evan Rosa: So let's do a little more history. You told us a story of Montesinos.
I wonder if you'd also share the story of Las Casas. Yes. Bartolomé
Robert Chao Romero: de Las Casas usually gets maybe like a paragraph in a historical theology book or something in many seminaries, right? And Las Casas, he was eventually a Dominican priest, but before that he took part in the conquest. of the Caribbean, right?
As a lay catechist, eventually as a priest. So like the conquest of, you know, what is today Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, these terrible things. He took part in that originally and through the influence of People like Montesinos and others, especially Dominicans, he went through the, what I call the first story of getting woke in the history of the Americas.
He writes about it in his autobiography, and basically he's reflecting upon scripture and he's getting ready to preach a sermon, you know, coming up and the words of scripture just pierced his heart and he realized, Oh my gosh, how can I be a priest and a Christian and a follower of Jesus? and support the conquest and indigenous slavery, right?
And he describes how just like Paul or something, right? It's like the scales fell from his eyes and he spent the next 50 years advocating for the rights, the religious and civil rights of indigenous peoples. There's a story where, you know, after this happened, he went to the governor of the island who was like Christopher Columbus's son.
And he said, I want to, I give up all my Money, the slaves I own and all these things, and I have to take this new path. The governor tells him, no, I want you to be rich. I want you to be powerful. Think about it. Yeah. And Las Casas responds and says. Basically, you know, may God curse you if you give me all my things back, right?
And Las Casas then, you know, through, you know, the next certain number of decades, he promoted what was called the, he promoted the Great Debate in Spain, it was called the Great Debate, where Las Casas took all of the theological tools of scholasticism. and scripture and church history and formed the arguments against the conquest and against the slavery against indigenous peoples.
And there was another side of the debate represented by a guy named Sepulveda who did the opposite. And there was even in the crown of Spain for like at one point, a debate over whether or not the conquest was biblical and Christian or not. And many other stories like that. Las Casas was not perfect.
That should be underscored as well, but yeah, there's so much more that could be said about Las Casas, but his experience is what many of us experienced today. We grew up in the church. We just, We're kind of doing our Christianity with the status quo, and then we come to encounter racial injustice and everything changes.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, he talks about, I mean, I'm, then now I'm quoting from your account of it in Brown Church, a darkness lifting from his eyes. And it's interesting how, and I actually do also want to read. that bit of scripture that did that converting work for him. It's from an apocryphal books, Sirach 34, 18, the sacrifice of an offering unjustly acquired the gifts of the impious are unacceptable.
And that it's interesting to think about this concept and I think this might be thematic. A really important theme that I'm observing in your work is, is this sense in which an attunement and a kind of honest awareness and a responsible maybe accounting accounting. of what we see before us, injustices, that it's possible to live in this heavenly gospel, right?
That sort of removes us, right? Because we're, we're freed from our sins and we're allowed to live in the eternity of the already, and not yet. It's, there's a kind of forgetfulness sometimes of the realities of earthly life. And yet there's this You know, the scales fall from Las Casas eyes and the darkness lifts and he's able to see, and it's, it's because of the stark realities of suffering that he observes in the lives of the Native peoples there.
Your accounting of this kind of phenomena I think is really interesting. And for the ways that it kind of delineates, I think, an important contribution of liberation theology
Robert Chao Romero: as well. That's a central theme of what you might call Brown theology, you know, 500 years of Latin American and Latino theological reflection on issues of race and justice, and just.
And, you know, whether it's formal liberation theology in Latin America and the preferential option for the poor, or it's less, less well known cousin called Mission Integral or Integral Mission, which is a Protestant expression. That's a central way in which they kind of remind us of what, to use one term, what mission is about.
Right. Mission, if you will. What the goals of being church are, it's holistic, right? So like in Latin American, Misión Integral, for example, they talk about the gospel as like a plane with two wings. The gospel, like a plane with two wings, one wing being personal transformation in Christ until the image of God, you know, shines brightly within us, right, that process.
But also that the second wing being the transformation of every aspect of this broken and fallen world that, that, that is tainted because of sin, right, to use, you know, Paul's words and Colossians, right, or Ephesians, you know, God reconciling in Christ. All things, right? And so, Latin American theologians, for example, Rene Padilla, Samuel Escobar, they use that analogy of the two wings.
If you're missing either wing, the plane doesn't fly. We can be the greatest social justice advocates, but if we're missing the other wing, the plane doesn't fly. Or we can be so absorbed in personal transformation, but missing the second wing, and no matter how well intended, you know, the plane doesn't fly.
And I think that's a lot of what's happening now in this current historic moment, is so many people are realizing that something's just not right. Yeah, especially young people are like leaving the church in droves, right? And to use the analogy of the plane, they realize that the wing is missing and they're jumping out of the plane because they're like, I'm not stupid.
This plane is going down, right?
Evan Rosa: Wow. There's this word that I think it's in the neighborhood of what you're talking about. You attribute it to, just scrolling through to the book, you attribute it to, um, Paulo Freire, conscientizacion. My pronunciation is pretty rusty. This is a really rich concept. It's your description, I think, of maybe like a realization that the, you know, that one wing can't fly without the other.
You need both wings, or perhaps it's like this awakening, this becoming attuned. And, and present to, and feeling a responsibility for the reality of injustice in the world. I wonder if you'd like comment on this concept. Yeah.
Robert Chao Romero: Concientización in Spanish, to use another example, it's like the word repentance in the Bible.
Metanoeti, right? It's like, your eye is awake. A new way of seeing things, seeing the world, so kind of repentance in the sense of seeing with having a new mind, right, having a new mind, right, and realizing, you know, from a Christian perspective, that injustice is not okay with God. Right, and that there are 2, 000 verses to talk about that, right?
About God's heart, you know, for immigrants, for the poor, for widows, all those on the margins. So, there's that one aspect of the scales falling and the new mind and seeing, okay, wait a minute, if I really follow Jesus, then that's very important for me, right? Not just the personal, although the personal is important too, but also in the tradition of the Brown Church, there's also the method of Jesus as well.
That is so challenging, right? And it's full of so much tension, but of loving our neighbor as ourself, even loving our enemies, right? And still being able to bring strong prophetic words at the right time. And still loving our enemies, that is such a difficult thing to do. So that, that conscientization, I think it connotes both our eyes opening to the injustice we see, but also as part of, to keep mixing the metaphor, as we have a new mind.
We also changed the way we think that we can change the world ultimately.
Evan Rosa: I want to also hone in on, I think, like the difficulty of that method. So you described the method of Christ, which isn't just a kind of, I mean, let's like dig into what that neighbor love and what a love of enemy or love of the stranger really entails, which is a significant kind of sacrifice.
of our own to make ourselves accessible to that, to make ourselves, to open ourselves to the question at the beginning, but then to continue to open ourselves to those whose rights are being trounced and who every day their experience of the world is an experience of being demeaned, pushed to the side and marginalized.
And that, so in that sense, the method of Christ that's coming to life. And that conscientizacion is, is a challenge. It's a real deep challenge. I wonder if you could speak to the realities of what that challenge entails, and especially its embrace in contemporary society.
Robert Chao Romero: Well, I'll give you an example that is one of many I could tell, but recently, uh, my wife, Erica, who is a spiritual director, and myself, we gave a training.
to these budding spiritual directors. And the training was about all this, you know, what's the intersection of theology and race and spiritual direction. It's fascinating. And Erica and I, you know, we give a three hour training. We thought, I thought it went good. It did for most people. It went well, but someone afterwards said, after all the training based upon like decades and decades of working in this issue, they say, I don't bring culture into my spiritual direction.
I don't bring culture into my spiritual direction. Then Someone else the next day said, I couldn't sleep based upon your, your training yesterday. I couldn't sleep all night. And I concluded that God is not in it. God was not in your training. That's what they said. So love your enemy, right? How do I love, and that's not even my enemy.
Those are like people who are, you know, self professed Christians. What do I do with that? Right. How do I continue to love them, move forward? It's tough. I can tell you other examples of getting arrested and immigration protests, but that's easy. That's easy. All you do, you just put your hands behind your back and they put handcuffs on you.
That's easy compared to someone would tell you, God was not in your training. That's
Evan Rosa: interesting.
Robert Chao Romero: Intercultural growth, it happens on a continuum through a process and Intercultural theorists will say that we all begin as monocultural, ethnocentric, right? We kind of just, and that's neither good nor bad.
We're socialized into one way of seeing the world and interacting with the world, and we might not even realize that we have a culture. When someone introduces a different cultural way of understanding or being to us, the, the typical response is denial, is minimalization, right? Yeah. It's not until several steps later that we come to be able to integrate other cultural perspectives and say, well, What do I have to learn?
What do I have to learn from them? Because my way is not the only way, right? And I think that in this current historic moment, so many of our conversations about race and faith, especially, they get stuck at that first, that first stage. And we never get past the metaphorical throwing stones at each other.
And I think that's where Jesus method is so radical. Because even most people who call themselves followers of Jesus, in this heated moment, We're stuck at throwing stones at each other, let alone loving our
Evan Rosa: enemies. Here's an opportunity to kind of transition, I think, a little bit to introduce a little more from Christianity and critical race theory through the lens of the method of Jesus.
Because I think another way to think about the method of Jesus is love of neighbor. Love of the stranger, identification with the poor, identification with those on the outskirts of society, those that are rejected, that there is an eschatological vision. to that, that it's this upside down subversive kingdom of Christ that, that I think is one of the things that, and I know I'm jumping well into the concept of the, of what you're trying to do in the book, Christianity and critical race theory, but it's this idea that there might be something that Christianity even has to offer critical race theory insofar as it can provide this long term vision.
to, to the study of race in contemporary society, a long term vision that is informed by that kind of method of Christ, which is rooted in love.
Robert Chao Romero: So I would say, first of all, what CRT is and what it's not very briefly. And then I can talk about how CRT connects with this concept of the Brown Church and some of those deeper things that I'm trying to get out through the book.
So what CRT is not is some grand meta narrative of how we make the whole world new, right? So many times in Christian circles or in religious circles, people just construct this straw man of what CRT is and just knock it down with the broom or something, right? Um, CRT. That's to put my lawyer hat on, right?
And I've taught CRT for more than a decade at UCLA, right? CRT began, it's a legal movement, began as a legal movement that tries to look at the way in which the concept of race has operated in U. S. law and policy over the, over the last several hundred years. And what's the, the lasting legacy of that and how does it play out in terms of socioeconomic and political inequalities?
Quick example, from 1790 to 1952, in order to become a naturalized U. S. citizen, a person had to be defined as legally white. Legally white. So white was a legal term. It wasn't just an ethnic descriptor like, Oh, I'm Scandinavian. Oh, I'm Bolivian. White was like a legal category, right? And there were all these court cases, dozens of court cases where people of every ethnicity you can imagine.
From Japanese, to Chinese, to Italian, to Syrian, to Latino, went to the courts and said, your honor, this is why I'm white. Because if you gain that legal status of whiteness, then you wouldn't be segregated. Your kids would go to whatever schools they wanted to. You could go to the hospital. You could, you know, there's parks in your neighborhood, like all these things, right?
So CRT tries to look at, well, why did that happen? What's the legacy today?
Evan Rosa: Well, I just think it's worth pausing to reflect on what an alarming legal reality that is, but not just legal reality, right? Like the law is a convention, but beyond convention, I mean, look how deeply embedded that convention is and look at how it had such a material effect, such a real lasting physical effect over generations for that kind of legal concept to be in place and the kind of psychological encounter that any one individual arguing for their own individual whiteness under that concept of whiteness, the kind of damage and trauma that can do.
And the deep
Robert Chao Romero: consequences today, right? Because for the most part, the areas that were legally segregated and inhabited by people who were not defined as white are still the areas today throughout the country that have lower funded schools that don't have good healthcare. People don't own their homes.
And on and on and on, right? So it's like the consequences, right? And then once you kind of start examining that from a theological angle, oh my gosh, then you become Las Casas. You don't stop, you can't stop thinking about it for the next 40 years because of all the theological ramifications. So here's an, you know, some example from an example from again, yeah.
Conscientes Cisacion, right? You know, one example from the book, it's really simple and straightforward, but it's okay. If you tell people in the United States today, some people, racism still exists. Well, probably half the people will tell you, no, it doesn't. And what they mean by that is they mean. I, in my, as an individual person, I don't think racist thoughts.
I'm not going out there and then, you know, denying someone the right to enter into a restaurant or I'm not calling them racist names, although some people are, so that's a different thing. Right. But from a theological perspective, right, people have forgotten the concept of the ancient concept of social sin.
Structural sin, right? Ancient Hebrew tradition, to the patristic tradition, to on and on and on, right? There's this vibrant, robust concept, right, of social sin, structural sin, but because that, people are not kind of familiarized with that. They just say, oh, racism doesn't exist. And as a consequence, all the inequalities that your listeners will be familiar with, right, They just, it's no man's fault anymore.
That's just one example of the interception of CRT and
Evan Rosa: theology. This is an interesting one because I think it strikes to the core of the desire to be an individual and enjoy the privileges of being an individual and bearing only particular responsibilities of an individual and somehow close yourself off to the society around you as if the emergent properties of your society weren't somehow shaping who you were as an individual and that interplay between individual and community.
I mean, to, it seems to deny it, to deny the structural or systemic nature of sin, the structural or systemic nature of racism in particular, is to put yourself in a kind of difficult spot of saying, no, I'm, I, as an individual am impervious sort of completely independent of any of the societal forces around me.
And I think That's that suggestion is, I mean, it's interesting to think that we're even tempted by it, but it seems to be ridiculous to me in the moment. It's
Robert Chao Romero: like the person telling me, I don't, they don't bring their culture into spiritual direction. Of course you do. Right. Culture is, it's the water we swim in is the air that we breathe.
There is no human existence apart from our
Evan Rosa: culture. Yeah. Yeah. It's own little version of. I mean, the worship of the self, it's idolatrous in some ways to make oneself an individual that's so impervious. Um, so you go through some basic tenets of critical race theory in your book. And I wanted to walk through these.
There's four of them. And I think it'd be interesting to just kind of read them and then have you offer some commentary because I think it would kind of help, help shape a clear understanding of what it is, what the commitments are. And then I'd like to kind of then move toward, you know, its interaction with Christian theology and Christian spirituality.
So number one, the belief that racism is ordinary. So here you're quoting, racism is ordinary, not aberrational, normal science, the normal way society does business, the common everyday experience of most people of color in this country. So for
Robert Chao Romero: that first, racism is ordinary. It's the idea that for people of color, when we go about our days in the United States, Some of us more than others, like, feel the sting of racism, and when it happens, like, it always stings, but it's not surprising.
Evan Rosa: Let me just follow up with one, one thing to say, like, ordinary. Racism as ordinary, I think, really requires a kind of perspective taking. And look, I think, uh, for the most part, I won't say it's exclusive, but for the most part, it's going to be White folks who want to take issue with any of these basic tenets, and yet to understand racism as ordinary is not surprising, requires a shift of perspective.
Robert Chao Romero: Yes, it's that's a strong word. It's a strong word. But yeah, for many of us as people of color, we'll be in the, in a faculty meeting or we'll be at church and we'll experience racism, right? And most people, most people don't think twice about it, but, but we come back and we're like, can you believe that happened?
I just, I just just had an experience like that today.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Should we move to number two? Sure. Interest convergence or material determinism. And again, a quote from Delgado and Stevanchik, Because racism advances the interests of both white elites materially and working class Caucasians psychically, large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.
Robert Chao Romero: So this is the idea that like, in U. S. history, racist laws don't change unless there's something in it for the majority of society as well. The example that Derek Bell uses is Brown versus Board of Education. People have been saying, had been saying prior to that decision, well, racism is wrong.
Segregation is wrong. He says, why did it happen when it did in the 19th, early 50s, right? He says, well, because the U. S. just fought Hitler, fought the bad guys, right? And yet we were perpetuating this racial segregation at home. And if we wanted to be world leaders as a country, couldn't tolerate that anymore.
So it was both, there was a moral imperative coupled with practical interest. That's interest convergence.
Evan Rosa: This reminds me of the sort of the suggestion that economy precedes racialized thinking, even if you were to discover. that the, that some racist principle was in fact unjust that because economy is prior to it in so many ways.
And we just had this, an interview with Jonathan Tran on racism and the spirit of racial capitalism. He's talking about how economy precedes race, it's that economic thinking. And it's, it's incredible to think about how Like, to be so self interested that the wrongness of something wouldn't be sufficient to try to make a change is, is, that's alarming to
Robert Chao Romero: me.
Why don't we, why don't we change the laws for immigrants in this country? A strong majority of, of, of U. S. voters, for example, want to do something for undocumented immigrant children. Why don't we do it? Why don't we do it? Right.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So we're moving through these. Number, the tenet number three, the social construction thesis.
Again, quoting, race and races are products of social thought and relations, not objective, inherent or fixed. They correspond to no biological or genetic reality. And this is a really interesting one.
Robert Chao Romero: So example, example of this is how who was legally defined as white shifted over time. In us, uh, jurisprudence.
Right. And, and in social practice, right? Mm-Hmm. , even at first, you know, Germans were called like swarthy people who wouldn't learn the language and stuff like that. And then Irish people weren't really white and Italians weren't white. Oh, right. Those kinds of things. But Armenians were legally defined as white, but then Syrians weren't.
And it's now in 2024. If you, if you asked. Yeah. Different people, who's white or who's not, you get so many different answers, right? And that's the idea of the social construction thesis is that. This concept of race as we talk about it, it's just a created, it's a
Evan Rosa: created thing. Yeah. We're not essentially our ethnicity in that sense.
Is that right?
Robert Chao Romero: That's a deeper theological question, right? Yeah. Right. So let me just put it this way simply. So race compiles people of different ethnicities and gives them a label. And it says, these people who fit under this umbrella are, they're race A, and they're better than race B, comprised of different people, right?
I mean, the question of like, scripturally, right, for example, Revelation 21 26 talks about the glory and honor of the nations, right, that, and that passage, as your listeners will know, right, John's describing, sort of, The final renewal of all things. And what are some images and pictures to think about to help understand that?
And John says that in the new Jerusalem, that people will bring their glory and honor into it, their glory and honor. The nations will bring their glory and honor into it. So the word glory there, doxa, can be translated treasure, treasure, wealth, nations, the different ethnic groups of the world. There's this cultural treasure and wealth that each of us.
has, it's God given, it's cultural treasure and wealth. And that is of eternal value. Or John's visions of other visions of people of every tribe, language, nation, and tongue, right? So as eschatological categories, so that, that's a deeper, that's a deeper conversation.
Evan Rosa: It's a deeper conversation, but it's very much in that spirit of what I wanted to contextualize this around, which is, you know, we're going through these tenets that don't contain very much spirituality in them.
They might be picking up on. on truth insofar as it's empirically observed as a study of the law and a study of history can attest. But it's interesting to overlay it with that Christian spiritual references, in particular, this eschatology that you bring to it. So it's in light of that eschatological vision.
I mean, there's this fourth tenet, the voice of color thesis, because of their different histories and experiences with oppression. Black, American Indian, Asian, Latina, all writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. I mean, there's so much in this one because it's about communication.
It's about connection. I wonder if you can comment on this one. Yes. I think
Robert Chao Romero: about it as in, in theological language, the body of Christ. First, on one level, we all need each other, right? The hand can't say, Oh, I've got it all down. And the foot can't say, I don't need your hand. Right? So that's one level of this meeting voice of color thesis, right?
We need the different parts of the body to express to us perspectives that we wouldn't otherwise know ourselves. And Paul talks about that. Also, in 1 Corinthians, right, that God gives greater honor to the parts of the body that lack it than so that there won't be division in the body. And I think that this is what the voice of color thesis is saying, it's like, for people of color who are really being denied honor, like, we're supposed to give a special honor to their voice, because it's their experience of being on the margins, and that they are able to articulate their own experience.
Most clearly it stands to reason, but in the biblical context, it's prescriptive in the sense You need to give greater honor to the parts that lack it, so that there won't be division in the body. Yeah. It's a recipe for healthy interaction.
Evan Rosa: But it also is, yeah, I mean, but I think it's, there's also something, well, do you think there's something, I mean, just about allowing the voices of those who have been downtrodden, who have been oppressed, to speak to the pain, to speak to the experience.
Robert Chao Romero: Yes, and that's the way Jesus modeled for us. That's how Jesus modeled for us, right? And to use an example in Latino theology, they talk about the Galilee principle. This was articulated by, it's been several Latino theologians, and Latino theologians have noted They'd say, why do the Gospels talk so much about Galilee?
Jesus was raised in Galilee. He chose all of his earliest followers from Galilee, did most of his ministry in Galilee, died and rose again and said, meet me in Galilee. And what Latino theologians have said was, Galilee was like the hood of Jesus day. Galilee was a borderlands region. And people there were, were cross cultural because they not only, you know, held their Jewish culture, but they interacted with the larger Greco Roman world and they spoke with an accent and many of them were dispossessed, you know, tenant farmers and they were colonized by the Romans, right?
And when God came in human flesh to make the world new. God started in Galilee, right? God started in Galilee. And so they talk about the Galilee principle. Those that human beings reject, God calls God's very own. You
Evan Rosa: brought up borderlands again. And again, this metaphor, which is, you know, where the border is used to disconnect, to keep people out, to exclude or in from a different vantage point, to keep safe, to, to protect, to, to maintain.
Ownership and property. It really is a kind of, I mean, I think what the meaning that I'm getting now from spiritual borderlands is becoming this, like, it's a fraught place. It's a place where there is tension and there's a push and pull, but it's, you know, we're seeing that those borders are a lot fuzzier than the people that build the walls might want them to be.
And then I think In contrast to the concept of a borderland, I think of the kind of one city of the book of revelation, right? This divine city that is this final hope and vision. And I know that this is part of what you are trying to bring to you. Again, what Christianity can offer to CRT in terms of this kind of eschatological vision.
I'm wondering if you can kind of close with that, basically a comment on like the hope that you see there and the hope for a beloved community in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.
Robert Chao Romero: Absolutely. I think it's Gorman that says that the Book of Revelation is the greatest community forming document that has ever been written.
Because it holds this space where people of every tribe, language, and nation and tongue can be one. It holds the space where the city, where the gates will never close. It holds this space where all the treasure and wealth of all the people of the world You know, is offered as worship to God. Right. And as much as, as I value CRT to be fair, CRT is not intending to be a meta narrative like that.
So to be fair, but at the same time Sure. Yeah. It, it, it doesn't have that larger eschatological hope to bring us together. Yeah. And I think that's a huge contribution. that we who identify as Christian can bring to this conversation. We have this vision of
Evan Rosa: hope. You do end Christianity and CRT with this concept of image bearing as well, maybe put on your pastoral hat here too, like that vision of hope.
Um, how would you help to motivate that? For someone who's really wrestling with the question of CRT, who's having a moment that is close to conscientizacion, but is not quite there and is just kind of feeling the tension. How would you help speak to a person who's kind of in that moment of struggle and questioning?
We
Robert Chao Romero: are the image of God together. We are the image of God together. We are the body of Christ together. As in, like, First Peter, you know, we are these sacred stones, right, you know, together, right? And so the image of baptism, right, it's, this is, you know, our Western lenses see everything individually, right?
But baptism is this image of being initiated into the people, the corporate community of God. And part of what makes that possible is The truth that is communicated through communion. The first communion, which was a Passover meal, celebrating the liberation, you know, from slavery and a new exodus by which we become one people of God.
But Slavery in Egypt keeps us from that liberation, holds us back, and keeps us from being one people of God. And so I think that it's the personal, and it's the social, it's the community, that's the vision of the New Exodus. And CRT is just a tool. I don't even care if anybody even likes CRT or not, that's not my point.
CRT is a conversation tool to get us to be able to talk about those things that exist in law, in policy, in our churches, etc. Now,
Evan Rosa: I'm wondering if, if we could close now, I know that you didn't write this last paragraph. I know that your co author, Jeff. wrote it, but I found this moment to be just like a really interesting and like beautiful moment.
I was wondering if you'd read this last page to the quiet exodus of young people, but I think this is just like a really beautiful way to close the book and to close our time today.
Robert Chao Romero: We see you to the quiet exodus of young people who feel pursued bearing open and active wounds and feel raw and enraged by the grievous sins of the churches they once called home.
We pray that you will Desert wandering does not last longer than your soul can bear, while you journey through dry lands. We pray that you will encounter streams in the desert, the surprise of beloved community, and the very person of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, our helper and advocate. We pray that you will be delivered from violence of spirit, yours and others, in ways we were not.
That you'll succeed in ways we have failed. We pray that you will resist the discourse of death with the living Christ's love of neighbor and even of enemy. Finally, we pray that the noisomeness of the culture wars would neither misshape your affections nor drain your energy as you faithfully bear witness to the love of God among your friends.
And neighbors for God alone is good.
Evan Rosa: Thank you so much for your time today and for your contribution to this incredibly important aspect of contemporary encounter of Christianity. I think this is really right on as, as we've been talking about, right on the borderlands of where we need to. both of where we're moving and where we're meeting each other.
So thank you so much.
Robert Chao Romero: Thank you brother. It's been a privilege to connect today.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Robert Chao Romero, production assistants by Macy Bridge, Alexa Rollo, and Tim Berglund. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith. yale.
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