How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2—Contrapunctus I: The Vacuum
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #11
On February 5, 2026, approximately 3,500 Christians gathered for the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The President spoke for seventy-five minutes. He catalogued his grievances, named his enemies, celebrated his victories, and made it clear that anyone who stood in his way would be dealt with.
When he finished, the room rose to its feet.
Three thousand five hundred people who claim to follow Jesus — who presumably know the Sermon on the Mount, who have heard the commandment to love their enemies, who worship a God who emptied himself to the point of death on a cross — stood and applauded a speech that violated nearly every principle their faith teaches about power, humility, and the treatment of the vulnerable.1
I watched the footage and felt my body do something before my mind caught up. My chest tightened. My jaw set. I wanted to judge those 3,500 people. I wanted to stand at a distance and name what they’d become.
I wanted to say: I would never.
And that impulse — that confident immunity — is exactly the formation this essay is about.
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Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, once told a reporter who asked about turning the other cheek: “You know, you only have two cheeks.”2
Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor, declared: “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”3
Tony Perkins and I aren’t from the same place. But we were both formed by the same Baton Rouge. He told a reporter you only have two cheeks. I went to Duke to learn why that sentence is a theological catastrophe.
But here’s what I’m only now reckoning with: the confidence that I’m different from the people who stood — the certainty that I would never have applauded that speech — is itself a formation. It’s the trophy case I’ve been building for decades.
Annapolis, ordination, doctoral work in theology — surely all of that inoculates against the grammar I’m about to trace.
It doesn’t. And the journey that taught me it doesn’t started with a question I wasn’t ready to hear.
The confidence that I’m different from the people who stood — the certainty that I would never have applauded that speech — is itself a formation. It’s the trophy case I’ve been building for decades.
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But first — what is the formation that produced that standing ovation?
Not “what’s wrong with those people?” That’s the question my body wants to ask, and it’s the wrong question. The right question is: what profane sacraments — what practices of common life, repeated across centuries — formed the people who showed up at that Prayer Breakfast already formed? And what happened to the church’s own practices that might have formed them differently?
A profane sacrament is a practice of common life that performs the formational work a sacrament performs — shaping bodies, training desires, forming people into particular kinds of community. Some are means of grace. The ones this essay traces are not.4
It’s prophecy, not prosecution. I know the other column of the ledger — the abolitionists, the martyrs, the faithful who resisted. I’m not telling that story here, not because it isn’t real but because it’s never been the story we struggle to hear.
The Hebrew canon holds Chronicles and the Prophets in tension, and the friction between them is where Israel discovers its vocation. I’m writing from the prophetic column. The critique only makes sense if the covenant is real. Prophets aren’t sent to strangers.
I’ve been trying to understand where the body-knowledge comes from — not the ideas, I can trace those, but the formation. The thing my muscles knew before my mind had a word for it.
Movement I: The Vacuum Opens
Essay 9 traced how the Reformation evacuated the practices. Essay 10 traced the crises that breached the dikes. What I haven’t yet reckoned with is what happens when this mutated faith crosses an ocean.5
I grew up assuming that whatever went wrong with the church in America went wrong in America. Slavery corrupted it. The frontier coarsened it. Revivalism cheapened it. The problems were local, and the solutions would be local — better theology, more faithful practice, recovered tradition.
I was wrong about the timeline by about three centuries.
The faith that crossed the Atlantic was already missing its immune system. The practices that had held Stoic self-sufficiency and Gnostic body-denial at bay — the thick liturgical life, the catechetical formation, the communal disciplines of prayer and fasting and mutual accountability — had been thinning for generations.
What arrived on American shores wasn’t pristine faith corrupted by bad conditions. It was a faith already vulnerable to exactly the conditions it would encounter.
What I want to trace here is how that vulnerability became an identity.
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The theologian Willie James Jennings helped me see something I’d been missing. In The Christian Imagination, he traces what he calls “displacements” — not errors in doctrine but something deeper, a mutation in the theological imagination itself that colonial encounter activated.6
It started on August 8, 1444, at the port of Lagos, Portugal, when the first large cargo of enslaved Africans was offloaded for public distribution. The chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara watched the scene — families separated, bodies sorted, people weeping — and recorded that Prince Henry sat on horseback, observing, calculating his royal fifth.
Zurara wept at what he saw. But his tears didn’t stop him from writing a narrative that justified it. In Zurara’s account, the seizure became salvation: these Africans were being delivered from heathen darkness into the light of the gospel. The enslaver became God’s providential agent.7
What Jennings wants us to see is not just the moral horror — that’s obvious — but the theological mutation happening in real time. The pope had already issued bulls authorizing Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”8
For this to make sense, several things had to happen simultaneously in the theological imagination.
First, the church had to displace Israel. The Jesus movement had always carried a supersessionist temptation — the idea that the church replaced Israel rather than being grafted into Israel’s story. In the colonial encounter, this became operational. The covenant with Abraham was reinterpreted in ways that emptied it of Jewish content while retaining the form. The Way became a “universal” religion with no particular roots, available to be poured into any container the colonial project required.9
Then place itself was displaced. In Israel’s story, land is gift — covenanted, received, held in trust. In the colonial imagination, land became commodity — discovered, claimed, extracted. The manna grammar of gift was replaced by the Pharaoh grammar of possession.10
Then the body. In incarnational theology, every body bears the divine image. Under colonial formation, some bodies became labor units — valued for what they could produce, not for whose image they bore.11
Then communion. I need to dwell here for a moment, because this is where it gets personal.
I’m an Episcopal priest. I stand behind a table at worship and break bread and say the words: The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven. I say them to every person who comes forward — every body, without sorting, without ranking. That table is supposed to be where the grammar of gift is most fully performed. Where hierarchy dissolves in shared receiving. Where every body is equally constituted by what it receives rather than what it produces.
Colonial encounter turned it into a Pharaoh table — segregated, sorted, the bread itself made to perform scarcity. In churches across the colonial world, enslaved people received communion separately, or last, or not at all. The table that was supposed to form every body equally became an instrument for ranking bodies. Perversely, the segregated table wasn’t experienced as a violation. It was experienced as order. The profane sacrament felt like a real one.12
And finally, formation itself. Manna formation — the slow reshaping of persons through practices of receiving, sharing, and trust — had been the church’s immune system. Colonial encounter replaced it with Pharaoh formation: practices designed to extract rather than transform, mining souls for heaven while mining bodies for labor.13
I grew up inside that replacement and didn’t know it. My father’s faith — earnest, sincere, built on personal discipline and moral effort — was a formation designed to produce a self that could stand alone. It never occurred to me that standing alone was the disease, not the cure.
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What Jennings made me see — and this is what I’d been missing — is that these weren’t five separate problems. They were a single mutation.
Identity shifted from being received through place, community, and covenant to being achieved through productivity and usefulness.
When you sever identity from covenant, it has to come from somewhere. And what fills the vacuum is performance. You are what you produce. You belong if you’re useful. You matter if you can demonstrate your worth.14
When you sever identity from covenant, it has to come from somewhere. And what fills the vacuum is performance. You are what you produce. You belong if you’re useful. You matter if you can demonstrate your worth.
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J. Kameron Carter showed me where this leads. In Race: A Theological Account, Carter traces how the vacuum Jennings describes got filled — not by accident but by intellectual design.
When the church reinterpreted covenant in ways that emptied it of Jewish content, it needed a replacement doctrine of creation. It needed some other way to sort human beings into those who matter and those who don’t.15
Dominative identity was that replacement. Not phenotype — Carter is precise about this — but what he calls an “anthropo-genesis,” a way of constructing the human. When Christ was abstracted from Jesus’s Jewish body and turned into a universal principle — a name for an idea rather than a person you follow — the particular flesh that had anchored the church’s identity was lost.
And into that space stepped a new sorting mechanism: the racial imagination.16
Immanuel Kant gave this its philosophical architecture. Kant explicitly called for the “euthanasia of Judaism” — not physical destruction but something more insidious: the claim that mature religion naturally outgrows its Jewish particularity the way adulthood outgrows childhood.
The developmental framing is the key, because it makes the supersession seem reasonable rather than violent — just growing up, just getting past the primitive stage. Rational autonomy replaces received tradition. The universal supersedes the particular.
And Kant mapped this developmental scheme onto race: humanity progresses from darker to lighter, from particular to universal, from embedded to autonomous.17
Here’s what troubles me about this — and I mean troubles in my chest, not just in my head. When we treat the Hebrew Scriptures as merely preparatory, when we prize rational autonomy over embodied communal practice, when we assume the church “superseded” Judaism — we are performing Kant’s program without knowing his name.
I certainly was. My father’s faith — Reinhold Niebuhr as hero, God as what Hauerwas calls “ultimate vagueness,” faith as ethical aspiration rather than embodied participation — was Kant’s euthanasia dressed in Methodist vestments.18
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John Locke provided the economic grammar. His “improvement” doctrine — the idea that land belongs to those who “improve” it, and that “improvement” means what Europeans do — is the supersessionist standard in its property form.
Just as limpieza de sangre created a purity test that Jews always failed, Locke created an improvement test that indigenous peoples always failed. Same exclusion logic. Same expropriation result.
And the same theological root: the claim that some humans can supersede others’ belonging — that the covenant between a people and their land can be voided by those who declare themselves more advanced.19
Paul Tillich would later make the connection explicit. Reflecting on two and a half centuries of Protestant theology, Tillich acknowledged he was “in agreement with Stoic philosophy” — that the soul of the wise man is “similar to God,” and that the divine Logos conquers fate through rational self-mastery.20
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And while the philosophers were rationalizing the vacuum, the merchants were filling it.
Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have named something I’m still reckoning with. For a Yoruba man or an Igbo woman to become enslaved required more than violent extraction from their natal community. It required what Marcus Rediker calls “technologies of race-making.”
The enslaver’s ship was not merely a means of conveyance — it was a machine that transformed Wolof Muslims, Biafran farmers, and Akan soldiers into “Negroes.” The account book completed what the ship began, rendering persons into units of exchange through practices of quantification and abstraction.21
Before the word “factory” meant a site of industrial production, it referred to the enslavement depots on the West African coast. The account book was already making races before anyone had a theory of race.22
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When communal identity collapses into interiority, the person must generate their own worth — and bear their own shame — entirely alone.
That is the vacuum this essay is about. Not an absence of belief — the colonizers believed fervently — but an absence of the practices that had once held faith accountable to incarnation. The theological dikes had been breached. The philosophical fuel was mixed. And each age of American capitalism would generate its own profane sacraments to fill the void.
There’s something I won’t be able to show you fully until we reach the Age of Chaos, but I want to plant the seed now. The theological vacuum Jennings and Carter diagnose didn’t open once in the colonial period and stay open. It reopened.
Wendy Brown has shown that neoliberal rationality — the conversion of every domain of human life into market terms — produces its own form of nihilism: not the dramatic nihilism of Nietzsche but the quiet nihilism of a world in which nothing has value except exchange value.23
When I trace the profane sacraments through four centuries, I’ll be tracing how that vacuum was filled and refilled — and how each refilling produced the conditions for the next emptying.
The faith that arrived in the Americas was already mutated. The formation it encountered was already extractive. And the nihilism our age is experiencing is not new. It’s the original vacuum, reopened by the very forces the profane sacraments set in motion.
My chest is still tight. I notice it now — the same tightness I felt watching the Prayer Breakfast footage, the same set in my jaw. The body doesn’t distinguish between the shame of watching 3,500 people stand and the shame of recognizing the vacuum in my own formation. It’s all one signal: something is missing that was supposed to be here.
Carter tells us what filled the vacuum: dominative identity. Locke and Kant tell us how it was rationalized. But I haven’t yet shown you how it was performed.
That’s what the next contrapunctus is about. Not the theology or the philosophy — the instruments. The specific practices, repeated across generations, that wrote the grammar into bodies. The whipping machine. The auction block. The coffle. The ledger. The lynch mob. The exclusion act.
Notes
Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026. Wehner reports on the National Prayer Breakfast of February 5, 2026, at which approximately 3,500 attendees gave President Trump a standing ovation after a seventy-five-minute speech.
Tony Perkins, quoted in Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026.
Robert Jeffress, quoted in Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026.
The distinction between sacred and profane draws on Charles Taylor’s analysis in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). “Profane sacrament” designates a practice that operates in the domain of common life while performing the identity-forming work that sacraments perform in sacred space.
See Essay 9, “Pharaoh in Greek Dress,” and Essay 10, “The Perfect Storm,” in this series.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). See especially chapters 1–3.
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 15–24. Zurara’s chronicle is Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica dos feitos notáveis que se passaram na conquista da Guiné por mandado do Infante D. Henrique (c. 1453).
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 18–20. The bulls include Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), both issued by Pope Nicholas V.
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 32–40.
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 42–58.
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 58–68.
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 68–78. The personal reflection on priestly experience at the Eucharist is the author’s. Jennings traces the colonial segregation of communion practices.
Jennings, Christian Imagination, 78–92.
This synthesis draws on Jennings’ five displacements and their cumulative effect. The shift from received identity (through covenant, place, community) to achieved identity (through productivity, usefulness, performance) is the theological engine of the vacuum.
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See especially chapter 2, “Kant’s Racial Theology.”
Carter, Race, 79–95.
Carter, Race, 80–82. Kant’s phrase “euthanasia of Judaism” appears in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798).
See Essay 7, “The Gift of Pride,” in this series.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), chapter V, “Of Property.” See also Jennings, Christian Imagination, 210–220, and James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Carter, Race, 45–48. Tillich’s acknowledgment appears in Systematic Theology, vol. 2.
Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Introduction, 7–8.
Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, Introduction, 7.
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), ch. 5, 161–188.