The White Christian Countertradition: When Theology Resisted the Power Around It
White Theology and White Power XIV
A series called White Theology and White Power would be historically irresponsible if it ended by suggesting that white Christians simply reproduced the racial, political, and economic systems surrounding them. They did not. Some defended those systems, many accommodated themselves to them, and others resisted them. The existence of those dissenters does not balance a moral ledger, nor does it excuse institutions in which they were often minorities. The countertradition matters for a more important reason: it demonstrates one of the central claims of this series. Social location influences theology without determining it. Power can make certain realities difficult to see, but it does not make moral vision impossible. The question, then, is what made correction possible.
The history suggests several answers. The Quaker movement provides an early example, although its story is slower and less heroic than popular memory sometimes allows. Friends did not begin with a unanimous antislavery position. Quakers owned enslaved people, participated in Atlantic commerce, and argued among themselves over slavery for decades. Brycchan Carey’s study of early Quaker antislavery shows a gradual and contested movement from unease toward corporate opposition.[1] That slowness is part of the theological lesson. Quaker principles did not automatically prevent Quakers from participating in slavery. What mattered was that dissenters could use the community’s own practices—testimony, conscience, equality before God, communal discipline, and sustained argument—to expose the contradiction between Christian profession and human bondage. Theology became reformative when it acquired mechanisms for turning its claims back upon the people who professed them.
Dominant communities, however, do not always discover their contradictions by themselves. Sometimes the people harmed by Christian institutions have to tell Christians what their theology has become. Frederick Douglass provides one of the clearest examples. In the appendix to his 1845 Narrative, Douglass distinguished sharply between what he called the Christianity of Christ and the slaveholding Christianity practiced around him. His criticism matters because it demonstrates something the category of countertradition can otherwise obscure: the moral correction of white Christianity was often driven by people whom white Christianity had failed to hear.[2] Black abolitionists did more than join a movement white Christians had already created. They challenged the paternalism, biblical interpretation, political caution, and racial assumptions of white abolitionists themselves. The countertradition therefore cannot be narrated as a story in which enlightened white Christians simply discovered justice. Moral sight often came through encounter with people whose suffering dominant theology had rendered peripheral.
Walter Rauschenbusch represents another mechanism of correction: expanding the Christian understanding of sin. Writing within the Social Gospel tradition in the early twentieth century, he argued that sin could become embedded in social structures rather than existing only in individual moral choices. Urban poverty, labor exploitation, economic systems, and institutional arrangements therefore belonged within Christian moral analysis.[3] Rauschenbusch did not escape the racial limitations of his era, and that qualification is important. A theologian can see one structure of injustice more clearly while remaining partially blind to another. The significance of his contribution is methodological: once theology admits that institutions can organize wrongdoing, it acquires categories for examining power that personal morality alone cannot provide.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers perhaps the clearest example of another form of correction: learning across social location. Reggie Williams has demonstrated the importance of Bonhoeffer’s time at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he encountered a Black Christianity shaped by racial violence, suffering, resistance, and the Harlem Renaissance. Bonhoeffer did not simply arrive in America carrying a complete theology that he later applied to Germany. His encounter with Black Christian life contributed to the ethical and Christological vision with which he confronted German nationalism and the racialized theology of the German Christian movement.[4] That history matters because it reverses a familiar missionary assumption. Dominant Christians are accustomed to imagining themselves as teachers. Bonhoeffer’s experience demonstrates the theological importance of becoming a student.
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement represent yet another response to power. Day did not assume that Christian public responsibility required control of the state. Houses of hospitality, voluntary poverty, labor solidarity, pacifism, and personalism created practices through which Christian convictions could become socially visible without requiring governmental possession. The movement built institutions, but its purpose was service rather than supremacy. Thomas Merton’s Faith and Violence extended the critique toward the moral invisibility of respectable power. Christians, Merton argued, could become highly sensitive to visible disorder while failing to recognize violence when it appeared through war, racial inequality, bureaucracy, or institutions regarded as legitimate. Daniel and Philip Berrigan carried related convictions into direct resistance to the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. Their methods remained controversial even among Christians who opposed the war, but that controversy illustrates the function of a genuine countertradition: legality, patriotism, institutional respectability, and majority approval cannot settle a theological question in advance.[5]
These figures should not be turned into saints of political dissent. Quaker abolitionists could retain racial prejudice. Rauschenbusch’s social analysis had serious racial limitations. White abolitionists could be paternalistic. Christian pacifists disagreed about tactics and political responsibility. Bonhoeffer’s development should not be rewritten as though Harlem alone explains his resistance to Nazism. These imperfections matter because the countertradition is not a genealogy of morally pure white Christians. It is a history of moral correction.
Several recurring practices made that correction possible. Christian communities allowed internal dissent rather than equating unity with silence. They treated the suffering of people outside dominant institutions as evidence. Some learned from traditions they had been trained to regard as marginal. They developed categories such as structural sin that made institutional wrongdoing visible. Some relinquished privilege or accepted real costs for dissent. Most importantly, they allowed Christian claims to judge the institutions from which they themselves benefited.
That provides a better definition of the white Christian countertradition. It is not theology written by good white people rather than bad white people. It is theology becoming capable of self-implication. The decisive questions are therefore whether Christians can recognize injustice when correcting it costs them something; whether a church can discover that a practice from which it benefits contradicts its confession; whether theologians can treat the testimony of people harmed by their institutions as knowledge rather than merely grievance; and whether Christian allegiance can create enough distance from racial, economic, denominational, or national self-interest to permit repentance. Finally, when repentance occurs, does anything actually change? Those questions are more useful than dividing Christian history into heroes and villains.
They also clarify what I have meant throughout this series by white theology. White theology cannot simply mean theology written by people classified as white. Bonhoeffer, Day, Merton, Quaker abolitionists, the Berrigans, and others lived within white Christian worlds without simply sacralizing those worlds. Some became more capable of seeing their location because people outside it challenged them. Others created practices that limited the power their social position made available. Their significance lies in the direction of theological movement: from presumed innocence toward accountability, from possession toward service, and from universality assumed toward universality tested.
The countertradition therefore does more than complicate the indictment developed in the earlier essays. It makes the constructive conclusion possible. If social location completely determined theology, repentance would be unintelligible. If power made self-criticism impossible, there could be no Christian answer to the history this series has traced. But the history shows otherwise. Theology can learn. Institutions can repent. Dominant Christians can hear voices they once excluded. Traditions can discover that some of their most familiar interpretations protected interests they mistook for truth.
None of this happens automatically, which is precisely why a theology of power needs disciplines capable of producing moral correction. The final essay turns to those disciplines. Christianity cannot respond to white power by pretending Christians have no power. Churches own property, educate children, employ people, distribute money, shape consciences, influence elections, create institutions, and sometimes make law. The question is how Christians can exercise those forms of power without needing supremacy to make their faith socially significant. The countertradition suggests that the answer begins when theology becomes capable of judging the people who benefit from it.
Notes
[1] Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). Carey demonstrates that Quaker antislavery emerged gradually through prolonged internal conflict rather than appearing fully formed.
[2] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845), Appendix. Douglass distinguishes the Christianity he identifies with Christ from the slaveholding Christianity practiced in the United States.
[3] Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917).
[4] Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, rev. ed. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021). Williams argues that Bonhoeffer’s engagement with Black Christianity in Harlem significantly shaped his developing Christology and ethic of resistance.
[5] Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952); Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).