Panel: RACE, CLASS, GENDER AND BEYOND. CHANGEMAKING IN INTERSECTIONAL SOLIDARITY



369.4 - 'CONSIDER YOUR OWN CALL' A THEOLOGICAL CASE FOR SOLIDARITY THROUGH MATERIAL-INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS IN THE FACE OF IDENTITY POLITICS AND CLASS REDUCTIONISM

AUTHORS:
Larner L. (University of Roehampton ~ Luton ~ United Kingdom)
Text:
Catherine Keller suggests that the our planet 'cannot much longer abide' the human species' 'failure of solidarity with each other' and 'with the rest of the species making up the life of the planet.' Recognising the 'insufficient but immense impact' of the 'countless sub-politics of liberation theology,' she points toward their work in 'deep solidarity' (Keller: 2021, 72). Drawing from my experiences as priest and liberation theologian in a British town with high poverty and diverse ethnic, cultural and religious identity, I will suggest that a major factor in this insufficiency of liberation theologies is a failure to deconstruct a false binary between the materialist class-based analysis of early Latin American Liberation Theology and the infinitely complexifying role of intersectional analysis in what has become known as 'identity politics'. I will critically examine these perspectives and theological treatments of them, drawing particularly from Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Maxine Shaw's 'Intersectional Theology' (2018) and Joerg Rieger's 'Theology in the Capitolocene' (2022). Evaluating these approaches, I will propose a deconstruction of this binary through a deep intersectional solidarity rooted in Christian theologies of the Holy Spirit. Exploring the charge to 'consider your own call' in light of theologies of wisdom and the Holy Spirit in the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians, this deep intersectional solidarity will reject class-reductionism and the abstraction of identity. Instead, it will root solidarity in the Spirit's work raising life and matter in all its particularity into Divine Love. Offering a framework drawing from the Sophiology of Sergius Bulgakov, process-theology perspectives on divine power, and liberationist emphasis on praxis, I will argue that the emergence of solidarity must be a key emphasis for Christian theology and practice in the midst of ongoing conversations about colonialisms, religious pluralism and secularism.