The Theology of the Oppressor: How Power Learns Not to See Itself

White Theology and White Power IX

James Cone wrote Black theology from a location that dominant American theology had often treated as marginal. Howard Thurman asked what the religion of Jesus could mean to people whose backs were against the wall. Willie James Jennings has examined how Christian imagination was formed within colonial worlds of land, race, and belonging. More than a century earlier, Frederick Douglass exposed the moral distance between the Christianity professed by slaveholding America and the Christianity of Christ. These thinkers differ substantially, but they share a methodological insight: social location affects which theological problems become visible.[1]

That insight raises a question that reaches beyond any particular theological school. What happens to theology when those producing it occupy positions of social, institutional, or political power? More specifically, what happens when power shapes not only theological conclusions, but theological perception itself—when people cease to recognize their own position as a theological problem?

I use the phrase theology of the oppressor as an analytical category, not as the name of an established school. It does not mean that every theology written by a powerful person is oppressive, nor does it mean that theological truth can be reduced to identity. Oppression also does not require that every beneficiary of an unjust arrangement hate those who are disadvantaged by it. One of the central problems examined here is precisely how morally serious people can participate in systems whose consequences they might condemn if they encountered those consequences individually.

The theology of the oppressor rarely announces itself as a theology of domination. Its power lies in its ability to make domination appear normal, inherited, objective, or invisible. The first test of such a theology, therefore, is whether it allows power to recognize itself as power.

One way power becomes invisible is through universalization. Dominant groups rarely experience themselves primarily as a special-interest group. Their institutions become the institution; their questions become the field; their cultural assumptions become ordinary. In theology, this can mean that European conflicts over church, state, doctrine, and philosophy are taught as theology itself, while theology produced through slavery, colonialism, migration, or racial violence receives an adjective. The problem is not the study of Europe. The problem is the asymmetry by which one social location is treated as universal while others are treated as contextual.[2]

Once a dominant location has been universalized, another move becomes easier: sin can be privatized. Christian traditions possess powerful accounts of personal pride, greed, hatred, lust, violence, and self-deception. Those doctrines remain indispensable. Yet when sin is defined almost exclusively as an individual act or intention, institutions can become morally invisible.

A white Christian could sincerely reject racial hatred while accepting segregated churches, segregated schools, restrictive housing practices, unequal access to employment, or political arrangements inherited from earlier exclusion. The absence of personal animus could then become evidence of moral innocence even when the institutional consequences remained unchanged. Theology that cannot name durable social patterns leaves believers without an adequate vocabulary for responsibility that exceeds personal intent.

Reinhold Niebuhr recognized a related problem when he distinguished the moral capacities of individuals from the behavior of groups. People who behave generously in personal relationships can defend the interests of their class, race, nation, denomination, or institution with remarkable tenacity. His argument does not establish that every institution is oppressive. It helps explain why appeals to individual goodwill are insufficient when power is organized collectively.[3]

Power can also learn not to see itself through providential normalization. When an institution or hierarchy has existed for generations, longevity itself begins to acquire moral weight. What was historically constructed can come to appear inherited, natural, or divinely ordered. Christians defended slavery and later segregation in part by treating an established social order as evidence that the order itself possessed legitimacy. The structure had existed for so long that changing it could be presented as dangerous, radical, or contrary to providence.

Scripture repeatedly disrupts that reasoning. Biblical power does not become righteous simply because it endures. Pharaoh’s empire does not become just because Egypt is powerful. The Hebrew prophets repeatedly judge kings, wealthy landowners, religious leaders, and nations whose social arrangements have become normal to those who benefit from them.

The encounter between Nathan and David provides an especially sharp example. David can recognize injustice when Nathan presents it as someone else’s story. Only when Nathan declares, “You are the man,” is the king forced to see himself inside the moral judgment he has already rendered. Power’s problem is not always an inability to recognize right and wrong in the abstract. Sometimes it is an inability to recognize itself as the subject of the indictment.

The prophet Amos makes a similar move. Worship, religious observance, and social legitimacy provide no immunity from judgment when economic exploitation and injustice continue alongside them. The biblical tradition does not permit the powerful to interpret their continued power as proof of God’s approval. Providence is not a theological ratification of whatever history happens to produce.

A related pattern appears when Christianity’s commitment to reconciliation is detached from repair. Christianity places extraordinary value on forgiveness, restored relationship, and the overcoming of enmity. Yet those goods can be distorted when reconciliation is demanded from injured communities before truth, accountability, restitution, or institutional change.

American racial history provides repeated examples. During the civil-rights movement, Black protesters were frequently urged to be patient, moderate, peaceful, and reconciliatory while the conditions producing protest received less urgency. Appeals to brotherhood could function as moral pressure on those demanding change rather than as a summons to those controlling the institutions that required change.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” exposed this dynamic with particular clarity. The white moderate whom King described was not necessarily committed to racial hatred. The deeper problem was a preference for order over justice and a willingness to determine the timetable by which another person’s freedom should arrive. Reconciliation becomes a form of self-protection when the powerful are permitted to define both the conditions and the timing of repair.

Theology can then complete this process through abstraction. Christians may affirm that every human being is created in the image of God while failing to ask who is excluded from a school, underpaid in a labor market, displaced from land, denied political participation, or disproportionately exposed to violence. Universal statements can be doctrinally correct while remaining socially inert.

Abstraction is not itself a theological failure. Theology necessarily reasons from particular cases toward broader claims. The danger appears when doctrine never returns to bodies, institutions, decisions, and consequences. A theology that proclaims human dignity but cannot identify whose dignity is being violated may preserve its universal language while leaving unequal realities largely untouched.

This helps explain why theology from the underside matters. Its importance is not merely that marginalized communities offer another perspective to be added to an already complete conversation. Their location can expose questions that dominant theology has been socially positioned not to notice.

Douglass understood this long before the emergence of modern liberation theology. In the appendix to his Narrative, he distinguished sharply between what he called the Christianity of Christ and the slaveholding Christianity he had encountered in America. His argument was not simply that some Christians were hypocrites. He demonstrated something more disturbing: religious institutions could develop moral vocabularies capacious enough to condemn private wrongdoing while accommodating an entire social system of domination.[4]

Cone later pressed the question more systematically. Thurman asked what Christianity looked like from among those living under threat rather than those administering the social order. Jennings asks what Christian imagination has inherited from colonial arrangements of land, race, and belonging. Their work differs, but each demonstrates why theological criticism cannot be limited to examining doctrines in isolation from the worlds in which those doctrines are interpreted.

None of these habits belongs biologically or essentially to white Christians. They are temptations of power. Any community that acquires substantial institutional authority can become vulnerable to self-protective interpretation.

That does not make the racial history of American Christianity incidental. White Christians possessed disproportionate authority to build and govern churches, denominations, schools, universities, property systems, political institutions, and intellectual traditions. They therefore possessed unusual power to make their own cultural and theological assumptions appear universal. The point is not that white Christians alone can develop a theology of the oppressor. It is that American history provides an unusually consequential case of what happens when theological authority and social power reinforce one another.

This is also why Christian countertraditions matter. Alternatives were available.

Quakers who eventually turned against slavery demonstrated that inherited religious practices could be subjected to moral scrutiny rather than defended simply because they were longstanding. Black abolitionists forced American Christianity to confront the contradiction between Christian profession and racial bondage. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in another historical context, asked what Christian discipleship required when nationalism and state power demanded theological accommodation. Dorothy Day challenged Christians to see poverty, war, labor, and social abandonment not as peripheral political questions but as matters of Christian obligation.

These figures did not share one theology or politics. Their importance lies elsewhere. They demonstrate that people can interrogate institutions from which they benefit, receive moral knowledge from communities outside their own social location, and allow Christian claims to judge power rather than sanctify it. Their existence makes complacency less defensible because they show that another way of seeing was possible.

The theology of the oppressor should therefore function as a diagnostic category rather than merely an accusation.

Does a theology make the powerful visible to themselves? Can it describe institutional sin without dissolving personal responsibility? Can it recognize that moral responsibility may exceed personal intention? Can it receive criticism from people whose experience was excluded from the dominant account? Can it distinguish reconciliation from the avoidance of accountability? Can it call its own church, nation, class, or political movement to repentance without treating criticism as betrayal?

Most importantly, can a theology identify injustice when the people benefiting from the arrangement regard that arrangement as normal?

Those questions do not weaken theology’s truth claims. They test whether those claims are being applied consistently.

The contemporary significance becomes especially clear in debates over Christian nationalism. Christian political participation is not itself oppressive. Religious citizens possess the same democratic rights as everyone else, and Christian convictions have often animated movements for abolition, civil rights, labor reform, peace, and human dignity.

The danger begins elsewhere. It begins when Christianity’s proximity to political power makes that power difficult for Christians themselves to see—when national preference begins to appear as providence, cultural dominance as neutrality, inherited privilege as natural order, and criticism of the nation’s conduct as hostility toward the faith.

At that point, the problem is no longer simply that theology is being used to defend power. Power has begun to determine what theology is capable of seeing.

That is the problem Christian nationalism forces the church to confront, and it is the subject of the next essay.

Notes

[1] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997); Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949); Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

[2] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).

[3] Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). The book is not primarily a study of race, but its account of group self-interest remains useful for analyzing institutional moral blindness.

[4] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), appendix. Douglass carefully distinguished the Christianity he understood from the teachings of Christ from the slaveholding religion practiced around him.