Anti-cultural Preaching

Andrew Wymer

The issue of Liturgy dealing with “Preaching and Culture,” guest-edited by Gennifer Benjamin Brooks, looks at how culture influences preaching. What follows is an extensive excerpt from Andrew Wymer whose essay in the issue is concerned with how preaching must be shaped in order to deny the violence of white cultural privilege. –– Melinda Quivik

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. . . In order to survive, the critically white preacher must stra- tegically build relationships and accrue cultural legitimacy with the congregation. Building trust will serve as a consonant background against which the preacher can commit everyday dissonant acts of cultural suicide that proclaim and lead to a more just cultural location. By enthusiastically cheering for the right team, eating the right food, speaking the right language, wearing the right clothes, telling familiar stories, using comfortable sermon styles, and avoiding participating in other cultural markers—e.g., avoiding cultural suicide in less important dimensions—the anti-cultural stance may be rendered sustainable allowing for repeated and sustained cultural suicide that eventually leads to communal cultural suicide. With anti-cultural preaching and cultural suicide at the heart of the preacher’s identity and sense of call, we can begin to recognize that preaching should be an act of sustained struggle against domination in which lives are always at stake.

Even if white preaching is positioned within the frameworks of anti-cultural preaching and cultural suicide, it cannot be completely purified of whiteness. Anti-cultural preaching imposes a cost on white culture, one that will result in varying degrees of cultural suicide, but it does not emerge pure from white culture or divorced from its violence. Rather it works in the complexity, never free from whiteness but always struggling for the end of whiteness. Such preaching does not attempt to commit cultural suicide simply for the sake of cultural suicide; rather, it is com- mitted to preaching an anti-cultural and anti-racist message in such a manner that it cannot be ignored by those who benefit from or are complicit in whiteness and that will lead to communal acts of cultural suiciding that may eventually render white culture less dangerous to those who are not deemed white.

Within this framework, cultural suicide is not just the symptom of anti-cultural preaching, it is a primary marker of responsible white preaching in the U.S., and it is important that this term be understood in a positive sense. As was noted previously and bears repeating, cultural suicide is not only a reference to the cost of anti-cultural behavior, it speaks to the potential for liberation from an evil culture. Applied to an entire cultural group, the concept of “cultural suicide” allows for hope that the Christian church and the U.S. might undergo such significant cultural change that white culture is effectively dead and no longer a dominating force in the world. This death must occur individually and socially, and I am foolish enough to believe that Christian preaching can play an important role in accomplishing this.

. . . If we are to stem the brutal violence that white culture forces upon those who have not been deemed white, then white culture must begin to die immediately. It will not do so on its own. We must begin to kill it. We must begin to kill it in ourselves. We must begin to kill it in our communities. We must begin to kill it in our nation. This is the heart of the stance of anti- cultural preaching in a culture of whiteness. . .

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The full article and the entire issue of Liturgy 35, no. 3 is available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Andrew Wymer is assistant professor of liturgical studies at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois.

Andrew Wymer, “Either a Killer or a Suicide”: White Culture, anti-Cultural Preaching, and Cultural Suicide,” Liturgy 35, no. 3 (2020): 45-53.