Ethnic labels and segregation at the Lord’s Supper table thwart Christian unity, a Baptist international leader told participants at a Christian ethics lecture series in the United States.
Neville Callam, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, delivered the 12th annual Maston Lectures April 16-17 at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary in Abilene, Texas.
“‘Ethnicity’ … is a term that is used to convey a diversity of meanings,” said Callam, a Jamaican Baptist leader and the first person of African ancestry to head the BWA. The way “ethnic” and related terms are used presents problems for the church, he added.
Neville Callam
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To illustrate, he cited occasions when European and American religious groups spoke of “ethnic churches” and “ethnics” to describe immigrants and people who are not part of the majority in those specific regions.
Sometimes, “race” and “ethnicity” are used almost interchangeably, which is inaccurate and misleading, he said.
“To speak of ethnic groups is to point to constructed identities which often depend on notions of common origins, common heritage and memories of a shared past, which are not necessarily grounded in confirmable historical fact,” Callam reported.
“In popular American usage, as also elsewhere, the label ‘ethnic’ seems to reflect a categorization of people not in order to affirm their common belonging in the species homo sapiens, but to highlight the contrast between them,” he explained.
Recounting the history of the term, Callam noted that by 1940 in America, “ethnics” was used to refer to “Jews, Italians, Irish and others deemed inferior to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”
Among Christians, “the use of the expression ‘ethnic churches’ is caught up in the politics of establishing borders, defining separate identities [and] classifying people over against each other, notwithstanding their common bonds in Jesus Christ,” he said. In that context, “the term ‘ethnic’ refers to people who are not ‘white.’”
Callam leans toward the “constructivist” perspective on ethnicity, he said. It is “the belief that ethnic groups are artificial social constructs that have no exact correspondence in actual society.”
“Terms such as ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ need to be understood as mythical concepts which play a major role in social differentiation and may actually serve to promote negative stereotypes that should be abandoned,” he said.
“Ethnicity is not about people’s essential being. It is instead about people’s affiliation. It pertains to … their behavior rather than their being,” he explained. “In some cases, it refers to the group to which people assign themselves. In other cases, it refers to the group to which people are assigned by others. In other words, ethnicity may be understood as a sign of a person’s choice of self-recognition or a sign of society’s classification of people.”
Often, discussion of ethnicity establishes “borders of inclusion and exclusion,” he said. Positively, it can provide “understanding, … rootedness and belonging in the context of a multi-ethnic society.” Negatively, it becomes “a device to stigmatize people as belonging to a marginal subgroup of a society.” It also imprisons people in one single, imprecise identity.
Christians much rethink how they use terms such as “ethnic,” “ethnics” and “ethnicity,” Callam urged.
“It is unfair to simply place people into imagined communities and then make sweeping generalizations about them based on the group identity conferred on them,” he said. “Those who do this are guilty of creating caricatures that are capable of providing grounding for just the kind of prejudices that attach themselves to the popular use of the language of ethnicity.”
Christians can demonstrate appropriate behavior by “affirming what they have in common as human beings created in the image of God and as persons being formed in the image of Christ,” he stressed.
Fortunately, Christians can demostrate unity by partaking of the Lord’s Supper, also known as Holy Communion and the Eucharist, Callam said. But unfortunately, they often fail to eat the Supper together, he added.
While they participate in the Lord’s Supper in the present, Christians also identify with past events and anticipate a future for which they long, he observed.
The communal na-ture of the Supper, in which Christians intentionally eat together, projects strong social implications about shared identity and shared values, he said.
Callam quoted British anthropologist Maurice Bloch, who said: “In all societies, sharing food is a way of establishing closeness. … Eating together is not a mere reflection of common substance, it is also a mechanism that creates it.”
As both a symbol and an agent of unification, the Lord’s Supper is “capable of overcoming the boundaries we construct through the use of ethnic categories,” Callam said, lamenting, “It is unfortunate that the Holy Communion has become a compelling sign of the disunity of the church, even though it was meant to be a symbol of the unity followers of Jesus share.”
Because of doctrinal differences over the nature, practice and meaning of Communion, denominations have divided over the symbol of Christian unity. And because they focus on genetics and cultural background, they worship indifferent churches.
“It is regrettable that the separation of people at the table of the Lord is occasioned not only by concern for doctrinal orthodoxy, but also by the distinctions we create among people on the basis of their ethnicity,” Callam noted. “The divisions in the church in the United States appear to be most evident on a Sunday morning when, separated by their ethnicities, many Christians attend their churches where they celebrate the Lord’s Supper without any sense that this reflects a scandalous failure on the church’s part.”
Marv Knox ([email protected]) is editor of the Baptist Standard.