Voices from the Borderland

Re-Imagining Cross-Cultural Urban Theology in the Twenty-First Century

Chris Shannahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134940899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Urban theology affirms the importance of context - notably the place of the city - in theological reflection. However, it has often been confined to particular contexts or theological camps and thus failed to engage with the fluidity of contemporary urban societies. 'Voices from the Borderland' presents an overview of urban theology, arguing that the twenty-first century demands a dialogical model of theology that enacts progressive change. The volume draws on studies of the multicultural and multi-faith British urban experience and situates these within the wider international context. The works of influential theologians in the field are examined and the dialogue between theology, globalisation, post-colonialism, postmodernism and "post-religious" urban culture critically explored. The volume is unique in bringing together urban liberation theology, urban black theology, reformist urban theology, globalisation urban theology, and post-religious urban theology.

Part I
Experience and Analysis

Introduction: Starting from Somewhere

The early years of the twenty-first century mark a tipping point in the human story. For the first time in history a majority of human beings live in urban communities, presenting contextual theologies with a new defining context for theological reflection.¹ Cities are ambivalent places. Vibrant city-space can be experienced as confusion and its breathless excitement as threatening disorder. The anonymity of the crowd can be the site of alienating loneliness. The diversity of the city can stimulate a fear of difference or its joyful celebration. Such contrasting expressions of the urban experience are highlighted by popular culture. Television and film can present the city as a home for gangsters (Boyz ’n the Hood in the USA, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in Britain²] or as a place of diversity and challenge [White Teeth, Babyfather, East is East, Brick Lane and Britz].³

The footprint of the city and its influence in commerce, politics, fashion, the media and popular culture impact directly and indirectly on the economies, cultures, tastes and psyche of suburban, small town and rural life. However, the complexity of urban life cannot be easily summarized because there is no universally agreed definition of what makes a place “urban.”⁴ This book focuses on the life of large cities, specifically inner-city communities, because, as Davey observes, “The contemporary city is a place where worlds meet.”⁵ It is in the city that the processes that shape wider society are magnified and intensified. It is in the city that the contours of a new urban form have emerged. It is in the city that the reconfiguration of oppressive hegemony is most vividly apparent and new movements for progressive social change have arisen. It is in the city that cultures are defended or re-imagined as new dialogical cultures arise in diverse communities, the place where roots and routes are continuously reconfigured. If it is to express the experience of an urbanized twenty-first century, contextual theology must engage in critical depth with this normative but fluid context. In spite of decades of suburbanization and a deep-rooted English ambivalence towards urban life which has often been expressed within the language of Christian faith, this book claims the primacy of the city as the defining crucible for contemporary theological reflection and grapples with the question: “Whose city is it anyway?”

Understanding the Inner City

Depictions of urban space often continue to present the city as a series of concentric circles. This enduring depiction of city life is most closely connected with the functionalist Chicago School of Sociology which, over half a century ago, sought to transpose an ecological framework on urban life.⁶ Within this formula the inner city is seen as a homogeneous sector that borders the city centre but is excluded from the power that resides both in the central zone and the suburban ring. Such fixed demarcations of city-space have largely collapsed in recent decades in the face of de-industrialization and the emergence of a new gentrified urban elite who have begun to reverse decades of middle-class flight from the city. In the twenty-first century it is perhaps more helpful to see the city as a series of porous overlapping circles which reflect the fluidity of the new urban world. Thus, while the term “inner city” continues to be synonymous with marginalization and poverty, its use has become increasingly contested over the past two decades. In the early 1980s Paul Harrison described the inner city as the archetype of urban oppression.⁷ Such automatic linkage must be treated with care in the twenty-first century in the light of changing patterns of work and inner-city gentrification, which Saskia Sassen suggests have led to dramatic “spatial, economic and social restructuring.”⁸ However, as Chris Baker recognizes, the gentrification of certain inner-city communities does not represent “a genuine mingling of cultures, classes, gender and age.”⁹ Doreen Massey amplifies this assessment when she speaks of “middle-class invasions of inner-city areas as attempts to enjoy different peoples as exotica, not really to engage with difference but to treat it, rather, as local colour.”¹⁰

Demographic change, gentrification and urban regeneration have undoubtedly altered the face of some inner-city communities over the last twenty years, creating increasingly fluid and complex spaces. However, the inner city remains a locus for disproportionate unemployment, underemployment, sub-standard housing, contested urban space and marginalization in the twenty-first century as the following chapters will demonstrate.

George was suffering from bronchitis.¹¹ As I visited his flat I found the lift was “out of order” again. Graffiti and the smell of urine marked the stairwell. As George opened his door I smelt the damp infecting his flat. The concrete floor in his hall was cold. George had no central heating and no washing machine. His Bengali-British neighbours had offered him food, but George refused to accept their gift: “Don’t know what they’ve put in it,” he explained. He had been brought up to look after himself, not to rely on “welfare,” not to trust “outsiders.” As I stepped onto the landing I looked out on the shining edifice of Canary Wharf and accompanying high-status apartment blocks. Turn one way, Dickensian poverty; turn the other way, the new urban elite.

George’s experience gave rise to this book. Embedded within his story are the challenges that I grapple with in the following chapters. How can urban theology engage with, articulate and reflect coherently upon George’s story as an example of life within a translocal society in a manner which draws upon diverse experiences, disciplines and cultural contexts? What kind of urban theology can resource struggles for liberation in a “post-religious” century? In this book I hope to find the answers to these questions. To aid me in my search I will draw upon a variety of disciplines, ranging from cultural studies, social theory, and diasporan studies to Black theology, theologies of liberation and urban theology. In adopting this interdisciplinary approach I aim to model a pattern of cross-cultural urban theology which engages in an integrated manner with the fluid complexity of contemporary urban life. However, because urban theology is a contextual theology, the way we use experience as a foundation for analysis and reflection is key. With this in mind it is helpful to understand that my personal story forms the entry-point into the chapters that follow.

Speaking from Experience

Autoethnography invites us to draw upon our own experience as a source of analysis and reflection which can provide a bridge between ourselves and wider society. Wolff-Michael Roth and Deborah ReedDanahay suggest that autoethnography challenges the exclusion of “self” from the research process.¹² Because personal experience does not occur in a social vacuum it becomes possible to supplement an autoethnographic approach with insights from narratology. As Martin Mcquillan suggests, “The episteme of narrative has a wider relevance outside of [its] context.”¹³ My own experience of urban life has a resonance beyond my own story and points towards a broader shared urban narrative.

The use of personal or communal experience as a point of theological departure has been consistently asserted within the extended family of contextual theologies. However, where experience is viewed uncritically or in isolation from the interweaving of the experience of others, contextual theologies can fall into one of two traps. They can become so localized that the insights they offer are of little use elsewhere. Alternatively they can dissolve into ideology, expressions of vested interests: tracts rather than reflections. Aware of this dilemma the pioneer of Black theology, James Cone, affirms Gustavo Gutiérrez’s assertion that, “Theology must be man’s critical reflection on himself, on his basic principles.”¹⁴ Nevertheless Cone insists that, “There is no truth for and about Black people that does not emerge out of the context of their experience.”¹⁵ In the field of British urban liberation theology, John Vincent and Kenneth Leech affirm the theological significance of the experience of the oppressed in inner-city Britain as the basis for urban liberation theology.¹⁶ While Robert Beckford also asserts the primacy of experience, unlike Leech and Vincent he, like Robert Schreiter and Tissa Balasuriya, recognizes the danger of essentializing heterogeneous experience and reflecting out of it in an unmediated fashion.¹⁷ It is in this light that I summarize my own story.

From 1993–2009 I worked as a Methodist Minister in three complex inner-city communities. This intimate engagement with urban life at a time of social transformation has granted me a position of hermeneutical privilege. The pastoral care of people such as George enduring grinding poverty amidst the de-industrialization of the docks of the East End and the erection of the iconic Canary Wharf has placed me face to face with the re-configuration of centre and margins as an industrial society has been supplanted by an information age and an urban fourth world has emerged in the shadow of new wealth. My work as chair of the Methodist Island Neighbourhood Project on the Isle of Dogs opened my eyes to the contested nature of urban space as Black, White and Bengali Eastenders jostled with the executives of the gentrified new city of London for affordable housing. I have witnessed communities scarred by the demonizing of difference as I have driven frightened Bengali-Eastenders through British National Party (BNP) barricades to vote in local elections. I have seen the fluidity of dialogical identity on the streets of Handsworth in inner-city Birmingham and begun to understand the significance of urban music as a means of resistance and self-expression alongside urban youth at the Earth Recording Studios in Lozells, Birmingham. As I have worked alongside British Muslims in inner-city Small Heath and Saltley I have witnessed rising levels of Islamophobia and been gripped by our commonality as we have struggled together for justice locally and as part of the broad-based organizing network, Birmingham Citizens. Week by week I have learned how the scapegoating and detention of asylum seekers has maimed those looking for sanctuary. I have begun with others to address these issues as we have forged an original “community ministry project” which strives to develop new patterns of Christian ministry alongside those who are most marginalized in inner-city Birmingham.

As a result of this experience I am learning that it is only when urban theologies begin to understand this dynamic complexity that a convincing and holistic urban liberation theology will arise. Do existing patterns of British urban theology enable such nuanced cross-cultural understanding? This is the central question that this book seeks to address. I focus my critique on the development of British urban theologies, but the interwoven character of contemporary urban societies makes it possible to read across comparable industrial and post-industrial urban contexts. Although every urban theology in every country carries its own history the globalized nature of twenty-first-century urban living raises comparable questions and challenges for all engaged in the forging of liberative patterns of urban theology and urban life. I hope therefore that those whose history and home is different from my own can draw inspiration from this “case study” of urban theology in a globalized century.

Approaching Urban Theology

All theological reflection arises from prior values and experience. This book emerges from my own long-standing experience of city-living and from a personal and theological commitment to the central emphases of a re-imagined liberation theology. I believe that in the context of the twenty-first-century “post-religious” city, the core values of liberation theology can resource a new and transformational urban theology. What are these values and how might it be possible to draw upon them in a postmodern context?

Guiding Values: A Critical Appropriation of Liberation Theology

Over the past forty years British urban theology has often been too uncritical in its desire to root Latin American liberation theology in the soil of urban Britain. It is important when using the themes and methodology of liberation theology in a twenty-first-century context to avoid romanticism and recognize that liberation theology is a contested theological paradigm. Those of us engaged in this task need to be honest about liberation theology’s limitations and recognize the yawning gulf that separates life in Latin America during the 1960s and twenty-first-century urban societies. Seven critical questions need to be asked by those seeking to draw upon the liberation motif in contemporary urban societies.

1. Can liberation theologies respond to a pivotal shift in political history from a bi-polar Cold War world to a multi-polar “post-ideological” world?
2. Can liberation theologies engage with the turn to civil society and active citizenship in place of ideological struggle and revolution as the source for discipleship?
3. Can a theology that emerged from the underside of modernity survive in a postmodern world where overarching narratives of religious and political meaning are increasingly mistrusted?
4. Do liberation theologies universalize values from a localized experiential base leading to the ideological use of experience to promote one specific model of progressive theology?¹⁸
5. How can liberation theologies develop multifaceted analyses of oppression that recognize the multidimensional of oppression on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexuality or religion, as well as economics?¹⁹
6. In a post-Cold War world how can liberation theologies draw creatively on Marxist class analysis to resource contemporary “post-ideological” liberative struggles?²⁰
7. In a diasporan world how can liberation theologies move beyond a one-dimensional approach to the Exodus, the Hebrew prophets and the ministry of Jesus to their critical appropriation as paradigms for multi-dimensional and ongoing liberative struggle within multiple contexts?²¹

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Experience and Analysis
• Part II: Reflection
• Part III: Response
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index