Liturgy and Race in the Last Fifty Years

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Renewals in Retrospect: Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship amidst the Changing Worlds of Worship,” was co-edited by Andrew Wymer, vice-president of the Liturgical Conference board and professor of worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me.

We solicited essays from a range of members of the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) looking at what has changed in liturgical scholarship and liturgical practice in the years since NAAL was founded in response to the Second Vatican Council.

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Joseph Donnella II who posits a number of questions that seek to set the worship of African-American Christians in the context of recent liturgical scholarship. –– Melinda Quivik

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The experience of Africans with Christianity predates the trans-Atlantic slave trade, yet many neglect this. Africans have been Christian since the earliest days of Christians. The reality that African American Christians continue to feel both the effects and traumatic reverberations of America’s problem with race cannot be doubted.

. . . I was asked if I would share a reflection highlighting aspects of what was referred to as the symbiotic nature of the relationship between liturgical scholarship and practice with particular attention to race in light of . . . the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy. In giving this more thought, the realization soon came that implementing such writing is akin to tiptoeing through a minefield.

Generally speaking, what exists in the minds of many about the development of historical worship practices are the result of gross oversimplifications. Amending simplifications by complexifying comprehension about what is popularly believed is beyond the limitations of this article. Yet, at the very least I hope to recast a few obscurities.

We bring the world we live in and the culture(s) we live into the places and communities in which we worship. We worship, we say, so that—in the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel—we may be released from the “tyranny of the world, from the tyranny of time,” and so enter into the realm of God, the realm of the divine.

In that light, here are some questions I will address: Is racism coded within us? Are the neural pathways of those who claim “whiteness” predetermined so that those who make this claim believe that they naturally are entitled to receive and always be given the best and first of the world’s goods? . . . Does the diversity of our understandings of Christianity forever lock us into separateness? The baggage of the world we bring can stop us from acknowledging that we all are children of God, that the parentage we ascribe to God, is meant to include everyone.

What happens when the genius of Black culture(s), of African American culture(s), of nonwhite cultures are disinherited? . . . How did the world we share, the worlds which we bring to our worshiping communities, come to a state of such self-satisfaction wherein unfounded biases allow the normalization of colonialism’s intentional justification of “race” and “racism” as doctrine that continues being perpetuated?

Recently, the 1619 project of African American history has come under scrutiny for daring to suggest that a more comprehensive understanding about the origins of African presence within the American colonies (and I would add within Christianity) must make linkages to days and times that predate slavery. My intuition, when exploring the developments of truly inculturated forms of African Christian religious expression lead me to wonder why so many historians and theologians have overlooked developments within the early Christian Roman world, specifically in Roman North Africa and the Middle East? Must we forever remain captive to unchallenged and unfounded presumptions that virtually attribute any major theological or historical contributions to western Christianity as springing up out of a Euro-centric white cultural hegemony? . . . This information conveniently disregards the fact that there is an inchoate relationship between the world of early north African Christians and African Americans.

A second installment of this essay will be available later this month. The full essay is available now in the digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 37, no. 4 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Joseph Donnella II is an adjunct professor of worship and liturgy at the Ecumenical Institute of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, MD, and pastor of St. Paul’s Utica Lutheran Church in Utica, MD, after retiring as chaplain and adjunct associate professor of religion at Gettysburg College.

Joseph Donnella II, “Let the Blessings Flow: Liturgy and Race in the Last Fifty Years,” Liturgy 37, no. 4 (2022): 22-27.