andygoodliff: 40 Days of Baptism: 19

J. Kameron Carter, Willie James Jennings and Brian Bantum are three theologians articulating what Jonathan Tran has called a new black theology. Here Carter, in reflection on the film The Matrix, explores race in terms of baptism. Click on the link at the bottom to read the whole article.

... A second, important scene immediately follows in which Morpheus (played by Lawrence Fishburne) offers Neo the choice of taking a red or a blue pill. If he chooses the red pill, he would be removed from the fake, but comfortably safe Matrix world. He would, so to speak, be baptized—by full immersion, no less—out of that reality and be born again into a wholly new one, a reality that the movie simply calls, interestingly, Zion. Neo's life from then on as "The One" would be an evangelically prophetic life. Baptized out of the false, yet deeply attractive reality of the Matrix world, Neo would give his life to the mission of converting that fake, unreal reality into the true reality of the age to come. Of course, there was the alternative blue pill, the taking of which would allow Neo to continue to live out the life that the Matrix created for him. He would continue on as Mr. Thomas Anderson, an educated and astute, middle class, professional, computer programmer. Taking the red pill, Neo chooses baptism. Indeed, he looks in the mirror and in not so many words says that he no longer wants the comfortable reality that was created for him. He is leaving that reality and entering another.

It is precisely at this point that The Matrix can help Christians think more deeply about what baptism means in a world structured by race, and predicated on the structural realities of whiteness. Baptism means looking in the mirror and refusing the reality that whiteness has created.

Afro-Christians—that is, persons "raced" as black in the modern world and enslaved on that basis, but who nevertheless took on the religion of their masters—historically understood Christianity and Christian baptism in precisely the terms I am suggesting in my theological interpretation of The Matrix. Their entry into Christianity was a baptismal exiting from, and a Christological dying to, the "blackness whiteness created" (to use Victor Anderson's potent phrasing from Beyond Ontological Blackness). This is precisely what it meant for such antebellum figures as Briton Hammon, the early Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, and Harriet Jacobs, to name but a few. Baptism afforded each of them a new basis of self-understanding, a new ground of identity. Their identity was no longer founded on the blackness that white enslavement created, the blackness that provided the labor for constructing the material reality we call "America." For each of them, Jesus Christ was more than an idea. As Very God and Very Man, Jesus was for them understood to be a social reality, indeed, a social field with historical depth across time and geopolitical breath across space, a reality that reconstitutes all relations inside of the social space that he is. Baptism inducts one into the social reality that is Jesus of Nazareth, but only by "exiting" one from the confining social realities that whiteness has created. For slaves, Christian baptism was, therefore, freedom, as Albert J. Raboteau lucidly argued both in his landmark text Slave Religion and, more recently, in A Fire in the Bones. It was a liberation from the ways in which race distorts humanity—the humanity of those raced as black (and, thus, slave labourers) as well as those raced white (and, thus, masters).

But, as if this were not enough, there is an even deeper challenge that Afro-Christianity poses to contemporary, Christian theology. The challenge is this:
If Afro-Christian faith imagined Christianity as liberation from the blackness that whiteness creates, so that through baptism into Christ identity could be refounded on being "sons of God" (cf. 1 John 3:1-2) and thus beyond slave existence, then Afro-Christian faith also in a quite subtle way posed the question of what it means to have whiteness exorcised, or to be baptized out of whiteness and, therefore, to exist no longer with the dispositions of mastery.
Separating the reality of Christianity and the reality of Jesus of Nazareth from the false realities that whiteness creates, early Afro-Christian faith turns the theological spotlight on whiteness itself, showing whiteness to be the perennial theological problem of our times ...