Title: Fire in the Whole
Author: Robert G. Callahan
Date: 2024
Publisher: Westminster John Knox
ISBN: 978 16469 84053
Quote: "I can call myself a survivor of racialized spiritual abuse."
So he can. So, in this book, he does. He does not convince me that he's survived whatever he endured long enough to have reached any really edifying insights. This web site's goal is to encourage living writers; I want to encourage this one to pursue some further lines of thought that might have given this book more lasting value than it gets from his engaging "writing voice."
Robert Callahan is an evangelical Christian who left his church, apparently, because he fell for the Very Fine People Hoax. A racist group attended a pro-Trump rally; Trump said there were very fine people at the rally; Democrats immediately began screaming, and Callahan apparently believed, that then-candidate Trump meant the racist group, specifically, as distinct from the other people who had organized the rally, which of course were the ones Trump obviously meant.
Callahan had survived numerous race-related microtraumas before the Obama administration, which led Black Americans to expect that all race conflict was going to be over, and left them feeling disappointed as a new wave of race riots broke out. He claims that that was what started him turning against the church he had been attending, that the Very Fine People Hoax was the last straw. He also asks readers to believe that he thought people's shift from tweeting "#BlackLivesMatter" meant that they didn't think Black lives mattered all that much, really--as distinct from "Black Lives Matter" having been registered as the name of a specific group many of us didn't want to support. The publishing process is slow. This book was published in 2024 yet, apart from a few throwaway references to COVID, it reads as if it were written in September 2016.
He doesn't say whether people at his church tried patiently correcting his facts, which as he presents them are subject to a good deal of correction. He says he's embraced a reasonable, nonviolent, justified anger at the church he left.
So be it, you might say. Many people have left many churches for good reasons and bad ones. I'd place Callahan in the category of people who've left for bad reasons, though he may have had better reasons that were too personal to be discussed in a book. What he tells us is basically that he left a right-wing church because his politics are left-wing. For hyped-up, specious reasons unsupported by facts. It is possible to be a left-winger for reasons based on legitimate facts, even if those facts are as specific to the individual as George Stephanopoulos' story (in All Too Human) that he replied to advertisements for jobs with both parties during the 1988 election, and joined the party that offered him a job. Callahan became obsessed with a claim that was made for rhetorical reasons and easily refuted.
What he describes is a political, not a spiritual, journey. He makes the valid point that some Christians, the ones I like to call churchians, aren't characterized by outstanding love of their neighbor. However, his quest for any new fellowship was not guided by the Bible; in fact, he tells us, he stopped reading the Bible because it reminded him of the people who had emotionally abused him by voting for Trump.
Or by being socially inept. So many Black Americans' real grievance against their White neighbors seems to be based in a fantasy that White Americans are or ought to be perfect. Callahan fixates on an incident where a White church lady didn't make conversation with him easily. She and he had taken their children to the local playground, greeted each other casually, then realized that they were acquainte from church. The woman's feet beat retreat in what, since she fled into a building where White men were standing, seemed to Callahan a racist way. Maybe it was; I don't know the woman. But Callahan doesn't prove that her thinking was closer to "That cannibal from Africa wants to eat my child" than it was to "That Democrat wants to pick a political argument" or "That trial lawyer is likely to make me sound stupid."
What White people so often find ourselves defending to our Black friends is that most White people are not, in fact, haters; are, in fact, more likely to be socially awkward or inattentive, when they want all Americans to enjoy equal rights and opportunities but either don't know what an acquaintance expects or don't think the acquaintance's expectations are reasonable. Haters are rare. Socially awkward and/or inattentive White people are common. Small towns are full of White people who are afraid, not even always without some reason, to talk to their own White cousins in public because "S/He is so much 'smarter,' went so much further in school, I don't know what to say to him/her." I've observed this pattern of behavior among biracial Americans, and am credibly informed that it's been seen even among Black Americans.
Callahan is a good enough writer, with a snarky enough sense of humor and intriguing enough lists of references, to keep me reading along, hoping the book improves. Does he, for example, realize that although fair treatment for Black Americans is not a partisan political issue, the only steps toward it he seems to recognize are partisan political issues? Does he turn to his Bible and notice the odd mix of separatism and humanitarianism in its texts, and even, perhaps, organize group studies of the humanitarian messages that run throughout the Bible? Does he...? Long story short; he doesn't. He owns his righteous anger and grief at the kind of "White Christianity" that preferred to ignore the incidents cited as triggers for riots. That's as far as he gets. He's written this book from the position of being stuck in unpleasant emotions, not having any step toward emotional resolution or societal solutions in mind.
It would be possible for this to have been a really useful study of how evangelical Christianity can be Bible-based, true to its traditional doctrine, and also supportive of Black or other minority-American believers. Well...too bad. This is documentation of how a Black man who was old enough to know better let himself be emotionally manipulated by a callous political group and has spent eight years repeating campaign falsehoods.
I'm disappointed. I was supposed to have received an advance review copy of this book in 2024. It probably arrived in a form Amazon had decided to stop supporting; I never received a readable review copy, but I received at least two things that might have been meant to be copies of this book. Other people gave the book favorable reviews; it's still on its publishers' lists. The publishers kindly sent me a copy now that the book's been published. But where are the insights into anything beyond party-line hype and hysteria, for which I've waited for two years? There aren't any. Robert Turner's Creating a Culture of Repair was rich with possibly good ideas, a book-length brainstorming about what people can do to demonstrate, accept, and cultivate good will. Robert Callahan's Fire in the Whole is devoid of ideas that don't boil down to a trendy but unhelpful "I just can't stand Republicans."
The story of how Callahan comes to understand that he's been politically exploited, turns back to the Bible, and commits to having a solid relationship with his own Black family as an emotional base for coping with the cluelessness of whatever White people he chooses to claim as friends, is the story he has to write that will be worth reading. Unfortunately he's not written that one yet.
He could profitably pursue the topic of separatism and unity in the Bible. Both Jews and Christians are told "Come out from among them and be separate" in the Old and New Testament, but they are also told, "You shall not oppress a foreigner," told that the blessing of the Sabbath is to be shared with "the foreigners within your gates," told that foreigners who accepted their religious beliefs were to be accepted into the community as equals and allowed to marry into the best of families, and so on, all the way up to the statement that "In Christ there is neither...Jew nor Greek, bond nor free." The Bible says a great deal that ought to have inspired or at least influenced whatever people did about the incidents that triggers race riots.
In some cases--and I think this is behind some of the harsh judgments of White women in recent anti-ICE demonstrations: White Christians feel more free to say it to people they see as like themselves--Christians might observe that, however unfairly they were treated, people like Rodney King ought to have been obeying applicable laws; as should the policemen who beat him. A hundred years ago, in many cases, Christians should have been (and sometimes were) the ones shouting most loudly that "in Christ" ethnic identity means nothing, that any practice of injustice toward any demographic group is taking people "out of Christ." Today that particular sin is less common and, for that reason, much less tolerable. Our grandparents or great-grandparents might have been in mortal danger if they'd said anything about the Black patient left to bleed out in front of a White hospital. Today all most of us are even required to do about race prejudice is to say, "They were here first," or, "While we particularly look for stories that add cultural diversity to our web site, all manuscripts are read in the order received before the cut-off point." Some churchgoers may, however, need further encouragement to say those easy things.
In some cases Christians might ask ourselves where we went wrong. While being legally White, I've been told--by churchgoers!--"You're stupid to try to build a business by hard work these days. A smart person would find a government grant to exploit." Now we see White Christians waxing indignant at the sheer magnitude of Somali immigrants' exploitation of government grants. Why did they all open day care services? Because government grants were offered to people opening day care services. Naturally there's no reference to this item in a book that was published in 2024, but I, as a legally White person with "background," would like to know which White Christians guided the Somalis to keep those day care centers open after the friends' children for whom they'd provided any day care they ever did were grown up. Yes, it was exploitative. Yes, abusive. Yes, taking money away from blind people and combat veterans and cancer survivors. And I'm 99% sure that some White Christians encouraged them to do it. Let them stand forth and confess.
There are a lot of things White Christians might feel moved to do, after reading the Bible, or Creating a Culture of Repair, or the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, or any number of other things. They might even ask Black or other "minority" Christians to guide them; they might even ask introvert Christians to guide them in making reparations to us, and Heaven speed the day. The danger with Fire in the Whole is that, because the Democratic Party has used hyped-up, often insincere, emotionality as a rhetorical device too often in recent years, all they'll feel moved to do after reading this book is ask for refunds. Because about all it tells them they can do is vote...for a party that has yet to find its way after inflicting poverty and race riots on Black and White Americans alike? How's that supposed to help?
An occupational hazard of Callahan's day job is that it encourages skill in making accusations at the expense of skill in saying anything more uplifting. Perhaps, as a balance to writing accusations, he should practice writing "daily devotions." Write things that tell a White American undergraduate, trying to pay bills and tuition on a student-labor job, how to practice the good will person feels toward per Black classmates. Tell a White American combat veteran, motivated to learn to walk on his "peg" but not guaranteed a full-time job when he learns, how he can become his Black neighbors' friend. Tell a White American grandmother, rearing three grandchildren, how to make Black Americans feel welcome in her little restaurant. (Most White Americans do not consider themselves rich, nor are they perceived as rich by other Americans.) Write for real people, as the individuals God made them, not the demographic groups that exist in the minds of leftist political theorists. Then I can celebrate his talent for writing by pointing to a book that people will feel better, and be better, for reading. And Heaven speed the day.
