Dominique Gilliard’s Theology of Power
The Limits of Using Privilege to do the Work of Christ’s Kingdom
This is the third of three posts on the subtle temptations at work within (post)evangelicalism regarding the use of coercive power for God. The exposure of abuse among evangelical leaders, the grab for political power via cries for a Christian Nation, has revealed the power issues at work in evangelicalism. But what are the more subtle ways, evangelicalism and its cousin - post-evangelicalism - slide into abuse of power? It is these more subtle temptations to use worldly power in the name of God I am seeking to interrogate with these posts.
After engaging Andy Crouch, Diane Langberg, on how their proposals subtley tempt evangelicals to rehabilitate worldly power for God’s purposes, I now turn to Dominique Gilliard. Each of these three authors have much to offer in how to navigate power. But, I argue, because they fail to distinguish between the two powers, they can be dangerous. They can tempt Christians (and the church) to blur worldly power with Godly power in such a way that we end up using worldly power in God’s name. And anytime we meld coercion (any kind of worldly power) with God, we open the path to undisciplined use of coercive power over (worldly power “over”) which almost always leads to abuse.
To remind you, in the book Reckoning with Power, I make the case for there being two powers at work in the world, not one. There is worldly power and then there is God’s power, and the two are starkly different.
God’s power works entirely differently than worldly power. Worldly power, as I define it, is power that is exercised in autonomy from God. Worldly power is “power over” and operates in human terms via position, coercion, subtle ideological means, etc., to get person B. to do what person A. (the one exercising power) wants them to do. Worldly power is always limited, can only preserve not redeem, and is open to abuse. Godly power is always power “with,” works by the Spirit, to draw people into His love. God’s power, released in Jesus, by the Spirit, never coerces. God’s power forgives, reconciles, heals, renews, transforms. God’s power is at work among us, not just in us, and works to redeem the world. Though completely different from worldly power, God’s power is nonetheless power, immeasurably great (Eph 1:19-23), able to accomplish more than we can ask or imagine (Eph 3:20).
In this post. I want to riff on Dominique Gilliard’s proposal regarding the leveraging of privilege for the Kingdom of God. Drawing from his very popular book Subversive Witness, I unwind how the use of privilege to do the work of God’s justice can actually perpetuate privilege and its problems. It portends to be the most controversial of the three posts. So please comment and tell me what you think, after you give it a read. Let’s have a conversation.
Leverage Your Privilege
“Let us leverage our privilege for justice in a broken, unjust world.” This call can actually be a temptation to blur the powers, perhaps the subtlest one yet. This call, stated well by Dominique Gilliard in his book Subversive Witness, states that “God calls privileged people to strategically leverage access, influence, and resources to subvert the status quo and advance the kingdom (p. xxiii).” This call is compelling. But does it lead us into yet another way to blur the two powers, use worldly power in the name of God? In the process, do we end up perpetuating the abuse of privilege upon even more persons?
Privilege is power that enables people to accomplish things, access money, and possess opportunity inequitably, giving them advantages over those who do not have privilege. It comes in many forms, including race, gender, citizenship, class, money, education, and sexual orientation. Gilliard says privilege is “stackable,” so that some persons possess multiple privileges of status, class, race, gender, and citizenship all because of who they are, where they come from, or to whom they were born (p. 6–7). And so privilege is “power over” that is inherited from “within” systems, that privileged people exert, sometimes unknowingly, over people and systems, to influence circumstances and people to the advantage of the one with the privilege.
The first step for Gilliard is for those with privilege to become aware of that privilege. We can’t leverage privilege if we continue to deny its existence (p.8-9). The discipline of locating our privilege enables all who have it to see this power at work subliminally in their cultures. It illumines the subtle forms of coercion, violence, and exclusion exercised by the majority that go unchecked in the culture. The “privilege” discourse helps people expose the injustices woven deep into the systems of one’s culture.
“Leverage your privilege” narrates persuasively how, once we recognize our privilege, we can use this privilege subversively (against the system) toward the undoing of racism and other forms of injustice, to reshape a culture. Gilliard’s proposal is another take on what I term “the culture solution” in Reckoning with Power.” Let us use our privilege in the culture to subvert the system (or the culture) built on the privilege. In other terms, let us use “power over” to undermine the negative effects of “power over.”
Does Leveraging Privilege Perpetuate the Privilege?
The question however in this post asks of Gilliard: Is there an avenue here to blur the two powers in the worst of ways when we use privilege to subvert privilege? When we use privilege as a form of “power over,” in the name of God’s kingdom, do we end up perpetuating that same privilege, exposing people to the same inequities, abuses, and exclusions that privilege always brings with it? Only this time endorsed by God?
As we’ve already seen (with both Crouch and Langberg), the first step in blurring the two powers is to make “power over” the only power. The power of God in Jesus is sequestered away to work in our souls only. We then essentialize “power over,” saying that it is everywhere, inescapable and inevitable. Our only choice, therefore, is to use it (for God’s purposes) or lose it. Is Gilliard leaning this direction when he says, “It is undeniable that God entrusts people with privilege and power, with a missional purpose of creating life, flourishing, and fostering shalom where death, destruction and oppression have reigned for far too long” (p. xxiii–xxiv)?
Gilliard does not shy away from the problems of privilege. He says, “Racism, patriarchy, classism, and other forms of privilege—and the isms that produce these privileges—are not of God.” These privileges and the “disparities that flow from them are the consequences of sin.”(p. xxiii–xxiv). Gilliard knows there’s something deeply wrong about this privilege, yet he believes it still can be used for Christ’s kingdom? How do we use such privilege as Christians?
As already alluded to, Gilliard calls us to leverage privilege itself to subvert the existing structures of privilege. For Gilliard there are ways we can use privilege to make space for repentance, to stand in solidarity with the unprivileged, and otherwise disrupt the systems of privilege themselves. This is what I believe Gilliard is arguing for.
But could it be this easy?
Think of me, an older white male, occupying influence because of my ethnicity, my learning of the ways of power, my education, my access to money, influence, and decision-making power. I am looked up to and reverenced because of what? The way I operate? My degrees? My posturing? My inherited pedigree? The way the culture has trained people to defer to me? What does it mean for me to use this privilege or to pass on the advantages of this privilege to others who don’t have it? Is it a good thing that I pass on this form of worldly power that is based in these learned cultural postures, hierarchies, and presumptions that cause people to defer to me?
Furthermore, am I the one, formed and jaded by this privilege, who should shepherd that privilege toward the underprivileged? Should I be the one to influence who should be the ones chosen to be platformed? Will this not perpetuate these same diseased ways of power? And yet, if I am to use my privilege, I must be the one behind its use to help others benefit from it. I’m the one to use “power over” to direct the “power over” to others who can use it for righteous ends? Add on to this the question, When I associate Christ’s name with this privileging, have I not baptized this kind of privilege with a veneer of righteousness and unleashed it in even more hideous and unchecked ways?
Feminist antiracism scholar Peggy McIntosch, in her groundbreaking essay on privilege in the 1980s, wrote that “privilege” carries “the connotation of being something everyone must want.” But then she describes what privilege does, how it “confers dominance, gives permission to control because of one’s race or sex.” She says this privilege “gives license to some people to be, at best, thoughtless, and at worst, murderous.” She says it distorts the way we see people. Unless it is rejected, McIntosch argues, it will “always reinforce our present hierarchies,” the systems that oppress and destroy people’s lives. (“White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies,” in Privilege: A Reader, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber. Boulder, CO: 2014, pp.23–24)
And so, as with all forms of “power over,” we must be cautious about the use of privilege. Yes, it can be used to accomplish some preservatory measures of justice, manage some equality among persons, allow others to participate in the existing power structures, and provide some inclusion and opportunity within the system. But can it truly subvert the systems of injustice it perpetuates? Or will we who have privilege be tempted to exercise our privilege in the name of God unhinged from God, so that now its posturing and diminishment of persons is sure to follow?
And once using privilege, are we limiting what can be accomplished for justice? Is a world possible without privilege? Could not God’s power through His presence make space for healing, reconciliation, and an entirely new way to live and be together in the tasks of our daily lives, a way of life in which privilege no longer exists?
Does Jesus Leverage Privilege?
To illustrate the subversive leveraging of privilege, Gilliard expounds on one Jesus encounter, Jesus’s meeting with the chief tax collector Zacchaeus, narrated in Luke 19:1–10 (ch. 7). He describes in depth the Roman system of tax collection Zacchaeus was a part of. Jesus, Gilliard says, calls Zacchaeus to repentance. Jesus declares that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’s house after Zacchaeus gives half of his possessions to the poor. In terms of the money he has stolen, Zacchaeus will make things right by paying it back four times (19:8). For Gilliard, Jesus uses his privilege to influence Zacchaeus toward his repentance and these reparations.
But did Jesus use any cultural privilege in regard to Zacchaeus or the system? He went to Zacchaeus’s house, “stayed” with him, ate with him, and became his “guest.” These are actions of someone who has gone “among” the persons involved, not “over,” someone who assumes no privilege. Sitting at a table was an act of fellowship, becoming an equal among others as family, giving up any postures of privilege, especially if one goes as a “guest” (v. 7). What Jesus did was an affront to those around him, because Jesus he did not posture himself over against the hated tax collector. It was out of this space of non-privilege that Zacchaeus was transformed, that he was saved, and indeed his whole house became a manifestation of that salvation.
Zacchaeus could have made things right according to the system and its encoded privileges. But instead of using the system, he called Jesus “Lord” and entered into a new system of God’s kingdom. He gave up half his wealth (he did not hold on to it to leverage it). The normal recompense for money stolen within the system, by fraud, was to repay it in full plus a tenth. Zacchaeus went beyond anything required of him within the system of privilege. It appears, then, that Jesus does not use or leverage privilege or ask Zacchaeus to do the same. Jesus offers an alternative beyond leveraging your privilege. It is by the pure power of his presence at a table that disruption and subversion happen. And the result is an overthrow of the system, as opposed to a using of it.
Neither did Jesus ask the rich young ruler to use his immense privilege. Instead he asked him, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21). In Philippians 2, the apostle makes it clear that Jesus did not regard his divine status as “something to be exploited” (2:6). Rather, he “emptied himself” of the privilege. He entered the world to be among people where he made space for the power of God to be unleashed wherever he was physically present.
God may have used the privilege of Joseph ruling over Egypt to preserve the people of Israel from starvation through a seven-year famine. As argued in Reckoning With Power, throughout the Bible, we see God allowing things to get done by persons in worldly power that help people survive, be preserved for another day, prevent horrific violence, prevent overt injustice, and perform other preservatory functions. These are indirect uses of worldly power that are allowed to work preservatory acts within God’s sovereignty. But they come with a cost. And they never accomplish the redemptive healing work of God’s justice. The power used by Joseph enslaved God’s people (Gen 47:19,25). And so it was God’s power eventually which must now work to liberate and flourish Israel out of the unjust systems perpetuated by Joseph. (Brueggemann goes deeply into this in his work)
In Conclusion
And so I am not discounting the good work of Dominique Gilliard’s Subversive Witness. It is an excellent book worth reading that helps us recognize privilege and how it is used abusively and with blindness. This is its strength. Furthermore it helps us to see places we can even use privilege sometimes to mitigate abuses, and improve people’s situations in life amid injustice. But let us also be careful to recognize the limits of what privilege can accomplish: minimal, preservatory measures of justice. And let us not allow privilege to rule exclusively as the way to engage the injustices of the world. The challenge here (as worked out in the rest of Reckoning With Power) is to make space for the unleashing of the transforming power of the presence of Christ to bring down the strongholds of privilege and transform our cultures for righteous, justice, and flourishing among all people.
I realize this riff on Gilliard’s book begs a few questions. It is in part a selection from ch. 5 of Reckoning with Power and depends on the back chapters of the book. Nonetheless I hope it starts conversations in your churches, around tables, and among leaders. You can download a discussion guide of Reckoning With Power AT THIS POST, as well as a discount offer on the book. And Dominique!! if you’re interested, please drop me a line HERE, and we’d love to have you on the Theology On Mission podcast (found HERE) sometime soon to discuss these issues and more!!!