The Human Condition: ‘Fasting from whiteness’

By Daniel Schnee on April 13, 2022.

This year the First United Church of Oak Park (Illinois) is celebrating Easter in a rather unique way: “fasting from whiteness” as a part of Lent. They will not be using any liturgy created by white people during that time, in order to “grow as Christians,” and unite with “people of all races and origins” in Christ.

Though such a fast for unity may seem ironic, an academic understanding of the word may better contextualize their efforts; whiteness being the cultural space that white people occupy. Thus, such culture can infuse all aspects of society with its positive or negative attributes.

For example, early 20th century jazz, due to its invention by African-Americans, was considered “brutal” or “savage” by some influential white people. A 1921 Ladies Home Journal article even went so far as to ask “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” But when clarinetist Benny Goodman brought his Big Band to the iconic classical music venue Carnegie Hall in 1938 it proved jazz music was thoroughly respectable when white; spiritually suspect when black. Whiteness became synonymous with morality itself.

But the problem with Oak Park’s idea of whiteness is that there is already a clear and effective word for such thinking and behaviour: hegemony, the dominating aspects of a cultural space that are used to keep others from gaining equal power and authority. Hegemony also occurs within itself, as the dominant ethnicity struggles to maintain class structures that disenfranchise its own lower and middle classes. This is one of the great downfalls of humanity, that we inevitably seek hegemony in all our systems, including religion.

To this end the Oak Park church is participating in the very thing it seeks to avoid. Their implication of hegemony as an automatic function of skin colour is ideology, not spirituality. Their actions thus frame blackness or Indigenousness as “that which is not white,” which de-centres their uniqueness and beauty. In that sense Goodman’s 1938 jazz concert was used to the same effect. Skin colour is inevitability; hegemony at work yet again.

The church’s Reverend John Edgerton himself said, “You don’t fast from things that are despicable… from things that are ugly. You fast from those things that tug at your heart.”

It is hard not to assume that Edgerton is suggesting white culture tugs at his heart in a negative way, since fasting from sin has been the de facto Lenten practice for millennia. Once again, Edgerton engages in hegemonic thinking, as he frames whiteness as monolithic, something all white people are or engage in uniformly.

I don’t think Edgerton had any bad intentions, or overtly attempted to racialize Easter. Rather, it seems his idea of fasting from white goodness to de-centre white liturgy is merely ill-conceived. Edgerton needs to include multicultural perspectives year round; create true equality, and not political equity for show. That may take some time though, as his church has now gone online after receiving multiple threats of violence and death. Once again, humanity’s worst instincts raise their ugly head.

Ultimately, the solution to hegemony is not more hegemony, neither is it violence against worshippers. The solution is the Gospel itself.