2 of 4

What's the difference between being scattered in that fruitful way and assimilation, in which cultures are subsumed and forgotten?
The drive to preserve culture grows out of the belief that the only way we can protect ourselves is if we consolidate. So even small nations try to build up their power—and even small congregations and communities try to mimic the powerful. This is happening today in African Christianity. "This is the age of Africa," we hear. Given the numerical strength of Christianity in Africa, there is a growing sense that this is Africa's time to flex our muscles. Africa has come into her own now! I think Christianity has been easily drawn into the language and grammar of power.

I don't think as Christians we are called upon to conserve our culture. We are called upon to share the gifts that we have received. Those may be from our culture, or they may be from another. Coming to America from Africa, I've come to appreciate pizza, so when I go back, I take a pizza home and say, "I want you to try this!" Likewise, when I come from Africa, I bring a song or a story to share with my American congregation.

But isn't there a place for preserving culture? What would you say to an ethnic group like the Kurds who are trying to survive amid dominant cultures around them?
The gospel certainly provides skills for resisting the power of dominant cultures. But this word culture can be mystifying. I don't know what it is. When the Kurds are living in their land, they're not "protecting their culture." They are feeding their children. They are communicating in a way they can understand. Certainly, we are right to be offended and to resist if anybody would forbid the Kurds to speak Kurdish or to play their music. But what needs to be passed on is not "culture" as a whole but specific cultural goods. We need to be able to dance, sing, tell stories, and pass along the habits of eating and cooking that have been passed on to us—but I don't know what "preserving a culture" is.

Are specific places and local identities important in a life of pilgrimage?
Absolutely. Pilgrimage actually makes us more aware of localness, because it brings us into contact with specific places and people. People sometimes ask me how "the church in America" should relate to "the church in Rwanda." But that level of abstraction grows out of a tower-building mentality. There are only specific Americans from specific places with specific gifts and stories; there are only specific Rwandans.

The language of culture actually prevents us from engaging other people. It leads us to see ourselves as permanently separate from them: We have our culture, and they have theirs. It keeps us from allowing others to radically challenge us—that's just their culture, you see, and it does not have anything to do with our culture.

What would it mean for Christians to have a certain naiveté about all these things called culture? How do we inhabit what we might call tactics instead of strategies? Strategy is the posture of an army, of a nation state, of a business that is able to conduct surveillance of its territory and all others. Tactics, on the other hand, are weapons of the weak, of those who have no place to call their own, who live in a territory that is surveilled and controlled by others.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

July 2007, Vol. 51, No. 7