Liberalism and Colonial Violence: Charting a New Genealogy of Spiritual Care

By Hellena Moon

This book explores the aporias of liberal democracy, freedom, care, and justice--with the seemingly at-odds ideas of neoliberal fascism, racism, sexism, and other forms of violence. As Derrick Bell and others have argued that racism is inherent in US democracy, I examine the intertwined concepts of justice and freedom with fascist ideas that unsettle democratic practices of freedom and political equality. There is ongoing tension that uproots democratic practices driven by the very ideals of democracy itself. Freedom is acquired for one group while circumscribing it for others. In analyzing the troubling neoliberal fascist leanings of our times, I explore the origins of US liberalism to diagnose our current state of politico-theological abyss. In that regard, our own field of pastoral care needs to address its complicity in the current devolving situation of the neoliberal fascist ideologies in US society. Fascist and nationalist ideologies rely foremost on perpetuating mythic ideologies, masking reality, and controlling our epistemologies. In charting a new genealogy for spiritual care, I argue that the image of care as articulated by W. E. B. DuBois--one of Third World liberation that addresses the decoloniality of the entombed soul--should be the primary genealogy of spiritual care for our field today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725252684

Hellena Moon

Hellena Moon, is part-time Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department. She is the co-editor of Postcolonial Images of Spiritual Care: Challenges of Care in a Neoliberal Age.

Book preview

Introduction

This book is a conversation about spiritual care, freedom, human rights, and the forms of violence that occur in our desires for liberation and recognition of our full humanity. I explore the idea of humanity and historicism in its relationship to the praxis and theories of spiritual care. Who is human and how is humanity understood? This book seeks to explore these questions by reevaluating Western liberal thought and the rights discourse via a postcolonial spiritual care lens. Violence has been part of the human rights and pastoral care frameworks, and in our desire for freedom and liberation we have accepted and pardoned forms of violence in our neoliberal society. We grant amnesty to the quotidian forms of violence—structural, physical, emotional, and psychic—that contribute to our oppression. I examine pastoral care as a discipline, coeval with liberalism and our country’s obsession with the myths of exceptionalism and superiority. I explore pastoral care’s work in resisting the growth of white Christian nationalism and neoliberal fascist ideologies; at the same time, I also interrogate the ways in which our work can be coopted in the cultivation of such deleterious ideologies.

My project explores the problems of Eurocentricity in pastoral theological discourse that uphold historicist projects. That is, my book addresses the concepts of historicism, Eurocentricism, and the assumption of abstract ideas and universals—that they are universal or applicable to all countries. While historicism has many definitions and variegated meanings, I employ Dipesh Chakrabarty’s definition in my project. Succinctly, historicism refers to Western superiority and the interpretation of history as a linear, stadial process in which cultures must pass through certain economic and cultural stages. Chakrabarty writes,

Historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century. Crudely, one might say that it was one important form that the ideology of progress or development took from the nineteenth century on. Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it. This first in Europe, then elsewhere structure of global historical time was historicist; different non-Western nationalisms would later produce local versions of the same narrative, replacing Europe by some locally constructed center. . . . Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance . . . that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West. In the colonies, it legitimated the idea of civilization.¹

All histories have become subservient to the dominant discourse of European history (i.e., of history as a developmental trajectory), including narratives of modernity, capitalism, or Enlightenment, no matter how ambiguously the geographical or cultural boundaries of Europe might be drawn.² Chakrabarty states, all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe.’³ Europe becomes the focal point for all histories, dominating how history and knowledge have been produced in the third world. The naming of the third world itself was a categorization of the Cold War to differentiate between the First World (capitalist Western Europe and United States) and the Second World (the Soviet Union and the socialist countries). This dominance of Europe has shaped not only how Western scholarship interprets non-Western histories but also how third world peoples themselves used Eurocentric methods to write their own histories.⁴

Chakrabarty problematizes what he sees as the profoundly intimate entanglement of the discipline of history, narratives of modernity, and the rights discourse. That is, the myth of the liberal subject is part of the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation state.⁵ Such designations of the European modern have been responsible for subordinating much of the world, justifying domination as a process of civilization or as an Enlightenment of the barbarians. Both European imperialism and third world nationalisms have uplifted the nation-state as the most desirable form of political community. They have made Europe the universal language, and universal ideas were couched in Eurocentric language. What is modern, civilized, and intellectual is defined via European political thought. Third world/Global South scholars must be fluent in European epistemologies, as Chakrabarty himself has been trained to speak and address European history.

European liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill argued that Asians and Africans were not yet ready for self-rule. A historicist framework of development via colonial rule and education, however, would cultivate the skills necessary for self-determination. Accordingly, all other histories become variations of the master story called European history. Our subjectivity is canalized and produced by this narrative. While non-Christians and people of color are assimilated and remade into the imago Dei (the white Christian liberal subject), we are immured in what Chakrabarty articulates as the waiting room of history.⁶ What was modern itself was a European construct that was used to measure third world peoples and their practices. Historicism and history are relational, whereby historicism refers to the linear, stadial history that foregrounds a European narrative of the modern and how it is achieved. For the third world person, we had to pass from a premodern condition to that of a modern one via European categories that also determined what was modern. I explore the ways in which liberalism masks myriad forms of violence and circumscribes liberation for infrahumans.⁷

The ideal of a universal liberal subject came out of Enlightenment ideals and racist theories, justifying imperial projects to enlighten parts of the savage world. Chakrabarty does not refute the idea of universals; rather, he questions the stability of a universal subject as we discern and work through the complexities of modernity.⁸ Chakrabarty proposes a project of provincializing Europe that unmasks the violence of remaking third world subjects and our histories into the universal abstract human (a.k.a., the modern European subject). Provincializing Europe is not a project of cultural relativism or cultural particularism. Rather, Chakrabarty’s work is concerned with the erasure, dominance, and violence when Europe-as-colonizer is the method that becomes inscribed into our practices, theories, and ideologies. Chakrabarty’s is an anticolonial project that interrogates liberal Western theories of democratic practices of first educate and thus develop them, and then grant them their citizenly rights historicist trajectory of development.⁹ All histories are about the European subject—the Europeanization of all subjects—or the Western interpretation of our histories and cultures that coercively remakes the third world subject.

Historicism in Human Rights Discourse

The discipline of religion is part of the historicism that remade the world into a European history of civilization. Religion—or the structures of power that shaped the contours that became interpreted as religion—helped formulate the Western androcentric liberal subject of the human rights discourse. What was universal in terms of religion, the human condition, human nature, human rights, etc., were European Christian ideals that were standards by which to judge—or to measure—other cultures, their people, and their communities. Other cultures were interpreted using European Christian categories that were formulated during a specific juncture of Christian history. What is desirable in a human rights framework of the liberal subject is the European rational human. This understanding of the spirit of human beings was influential in the catechism of the ideal liberal subject of Western human rights discourse—the androcentric rational, Christian-masked-as-secular, modern subject—who has been constructed as the norm to which we should aspire to be like. The rational alone is real according to Hegel (and this understanding of what was rational helped construct the discipline of religion and human rights), and spirit was that rationality. Talal Asad critically asks,

How does theoretical discourse actually define religion? What are the historical conditions in which it can act effectively as a demand for the imitation, or the prohibition, or the authentication of truthful utterances and practices? How does power create religion?¹⁰

To have freedom, then, meant to subscribe to the ideals of this paradigm of liberal subjectivity. The project of freedom is a Western liberal project of entrapment that is controlled by the discourses of the West. We believe that people are rational and civilized and that the discourse of liberalism is the trajectory that grants us freedom and rights, when the discourse itself has led to more violence and captivity. Leonard Tennenhouse states that the world is not rational; it is violent and unequal.¹¹ That is, people do not negotiate on equal terms. In liberal communities who allegedly embrace tolerance, we see that violence is met with greater violence when we scrutinize the problems of historicism.

A genealogy of human rights shows its early beginnings as rooted in Social Darwinist thought with the idea of progress as a struggle between lower and higher forms of life. It follows what was theorized as natural religion (beliefs, practices, and ethics) that incorporated Aristotelian hierarchical categories of all living things, with white Christians being the pinnacle of societal development.¹² Europeans were still practicing superstition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, simultaneously condemning third world others for their irrational practices.¹³ This myth of modernity—and its legitimation of colonization and violence—is further corroborated by the work of scholars who have exposed the problems of enchantment as imbricated within science and religion.¹⁴

The myth of modernity overlooks the hypocrisy of Western scientists and scholars who themselves believed in and practiced forms of enchantment. William James himself believed in psychics.¹⁵ Marie Curie—the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics (1903), as well as a prize in Chemistry (1911)—was a believer and practitioner of enchantment and spiritualism.¹⁶ The narrative of modernity—a breach with medieval-era beliefs in superstition and practices of enchantment in a specific frame of time—is itself built on fictions that undergird Western superiority. Methods of anthropology, cultural studies, and historiographies were used to hold people captive to a Western lens and perspective on what was valued and had worth. Literally, the lens of the camera became a weapon for capturing the strange rituals that were not familiar to Europeans. African life and communal practices of reverence for ancestors, nature, and spaces/places were demonized as barbaric. This was often done through a lens of pastoral care: the cura animarum that for non-Westerners who were deemed to not have a soul (Aristotle), became a method of forced—and oftentimes violent—assimilation or curative violence.¹⁷

European cultural and racial superiority is a construct that was established via the epistemologies that shaped who was superior and who was inferior based partly on religious categories. A study of religions, then, became a method of measuring and objectifying non-European peoples as backwards and primitive. The ideology of primitive religions was established by European colonizers and explorers of Africa, which originated in a racist milieu of judging practices that were deemed superstitious, nonscientific, and irrational. A provocative argument of Bruno Latour has been that we have never been modern.¹⁸ The myths of modernity have revealed new discursive territories of research that explore and interrogate the ideas, theories, and histories that have erroneously argued for Western superiority.

Such categorizations and hierophanies—expressions or materialization of the sacred—were used by Christian colonial explorers who searched for nodes of similarity with Christianity in what they defined as religion. This search for hierophanies was a colonial tactic to segregate and support scripts of racial difference, and it became a prominent tool of the empire of religion.¹⁹ Hierophanies, according to Mircea Eliade, delineated the sacred from the mundane and profane, segregating space accordingly.²⁰ In connection with his far-right politics, antisemitism, and associations with fascism, Eliade’s work on hierophanies is now deeply critiqued as ahistorical, colonialist, and entangled with theosophical comparative religion.²¹ Laurie Patton, a former student of Eliade, notes, [f]ascist thought often longed for a purity of culture outside of time, for the grand system that connected all truths in a single cultural insight. Eliade’s thinking was no exception.²² Hierophanies are more of an epistemological invention and myth than reality or discovery of uniqueness within cultures and religious truth.²³ Eliade’s work on hierophanies, then, helped construct the colonialist package of mythmaking and fantasizing of the peoples of the two-thirds world, thereby creating savage Africa and effete Asia in the imaginations of Europeans within the field of religion and religious practices. Religious practices themselves became confined to—and defined by—colonialist-era understandings of rituals that helped to reify Western cultural superiority.²⁴

Part of my project involves the critical interrogation of the origins and meanings that constitute the sacred and secular that have validated certain practices (practices that are legible to the colonizer’s worldview), while deeming other practices and rhythms of care as barbaric, primitive, or less valuable. Thus, a secular/sacred binary has privileged the values of modernity as an alleged break from the past. As a metaproject of decoloniality and the undoing of the epistemological destructive aftermath of colonialism and the fascist underpinnings of hierophanies, this book project explores the importance of resuturing the chasm between the ordinary and the sacred.

Decoloniality as Praxis

²⁵

A central idea of this book sees decoloniality as a framework for understanding practices of spiritual care. This book situates itself within the metaproject of decoloniality, which refers to the undoing and the undisciplining of the epistemological devastation of colonialism.²⁶ It refers to Aníbal Quijano’s proposal of epistemic reconstitution which explores the rich sources of native epistemologies and ways of knowing that were deemed superstitious or barbaric.²⁷ Decoloniality refers to discursively refashioning a place of habitation on top of the colonial ruins. Decoloniality employs radical theories—epistemologies that are grounded in native cultures—and practices that repurpose the tools that were used to colonize the third world/Global South. It necessitates reexamining the relationalities and relationships that helped build colonialism(s), such as epistemologies, structures of oppression and privilege, class and spiritual hierarchies, and power structures.

As a project of decoloniality, I situate the colonial matrix of power within the structures, patterns, and practices of multiple forms of violences—racialized, gendered, physical, civilizational, cultural, linguistic, ontological-existential, epistemic, spiritual, cosmological, and so forth. . . .²⁸ I seek to deconstruct ideas of uniqueness in pastoral or spiritual care as such ideas are part of the legatees of Western particularist, colonialist, and nationalist historiography. Mignolo and Walsh have stated that modernity was an invention of coloniality (modernity/coloniality).²⁹ I argue that religion and forms of pastoral care were necessary components of the discursive invention of modernity and coloniality. Hence, pastorality/modernity/coloniality are plaited topics that cannot be theorized in isolation. Religion—imbricated with politics, economics, race, gender, sexuality, and bodily normativity—was an invented methodological tool of the imperial/colonial categorization of peoples. A conversation about liberation, therefore, is not complete without discussing how religion and monocultural ethnocentric practices of pastoral care were—and are—integral tools in shaping coloniality and the colonial matrix of power.³⁰

The undoing—and the concomitant undisciplining—of the epistemological destructive aftermath of colonialism is the work of decoloniality.³¹ The damage from colonialism is not just a past episodic event; it is an ongoing emergence and occurrence. The matrix of postcolonial spiritual care and its practices, then, is about repairing the spiritual harm—to liberate the spirit from its immurement. Postcolonial spiritual care refers not to just lifting the veil of oppression but to undoing the damage behind the borders of the veil that have divided, segregated, and prevented us from healing the wounds.

Chapters

Part One: Hidden Agendas of Liberalism: Interrogating Christian Exceptionalism

Part 1 of the book explores the problems of the concepts of superiority, particularity, and exceptionalism in US political theory as part of the legatees of coloniality/modernity/pastorality. The history of pastoral care is coeval with this idea of US exceptionalism. The emphasis on pastoral care’s uniqueness is a type of spiritual nationalism and cultural nationalist ideology that further divides humanity. I examine care and its relationship with freedom, liberalism, colonialism(s), and subjectivity. I examine the aporias of freedom, language of forgiveness, and tolerance, and how our idealization of these concepts further binds us to a colonial contract.

Chapter 1, The Aporias of Freedom and the Immured Spirit, looks at the conundrums of freedom and the various contracts that have been elided in our desire to be part of the liberal subject discourse. This chapter explores how the immured spirit is the spiritual erasure and oppression of communities due to the European categorization of religions deemed sacred (those beliefs seen as similar to those of European belief systems) and profane (that which was categorized as unimportant). Not only does the immured spirit symbolize the marginalized or caged spiritual practices of previously colonized communities to prevent their/our true liberation; it also symbolizes the immured g*d—that is, the lack of imagination and creativity that could emerge if we engaged in the true work of decoloniality. The possibility and vision for liberation is immured in the traps of freedom established by a neoliberal world.

Chapter 2, Decoloniality of the Shared Wounds: Forgiveness as a Refusal of Ownership, and Belonging deconstructs ideas of uniqueness in pastoral care as such ideas are part of the legatees of Western particularist, colonialist, and nationalist historiography that helped construct a white Christian nationalist identity. As the practice and understandings of reconciliation have been so vital in addressing the 2020–22 dual pandemics of racial violence and COVID-19, I critically interrogate the idea of forgiveness and the claim of its uniqueness to Christianity. I argue that the concept of forgiveness has been misinterpreted or misunderstood as particular to our neoliberal cultural context and not necessarily particular to Christianity. Not only is forgiveness about issues of cultural and linguistic translation, power, and Western Christian hubris, feminist theologian Pamela Cooper-White has argued that it is a theological misreading of the original language that actually refers to a canceling of a balance due.³² It refers to a release from economic debt. I show the limits of forgiveness as a tool for healing. I argue that for healing to occur, we need to interrogate and problematize forgiveness and incorporate other spiritual practices to repair the harms and restore justice in selves and in society. By clement violence, I refer to the clemency or forgiveness that is expected when people experience forms of violence. The earthly violence is allegedly mild in comparison to the rewards of heavenly forgiveness. Hence, the amnesty or amnesia—forgetting—is plaited into the demos of amnesiac society.³³ The clemency of racism only fuels the anomaly thesis—that racism is somehow a unique occurrence and not systemically woven into the fabric of the American demos.

Chapter 3, Tolerance—Or the Regulation of Religions?," argues that narratives of religious tolerance are emblematic not only of the pastoral power of dominant white Christian society, but also how tolerance discourse itself is a form of power. Christians become the brokers of culture and civilization. They also get to decide what/who is tolerated and what is not. Tolerance becomes a mask of clement violence and a guise of justice, liberation, and freedom. Tolerance is a narrative of power, a discursive tool to maintain scripts of difference that sustain hierarchical structures. Tolerance manages to negotiate and make palatable the differences that can neither be elided nor understood in public life without violating the norms of the habitations of a particular community.³⁴

In this chapter, I critique the liberal tolerance model of the pastoral/spiritual care binary. Tolerance is part of the discourse of freedom that regulates our freedom. Tolerance, like freedom, is apparently conferred to ethnics and spiritual others as a condition of partaking in the liberal subject discourse. Those with the power to grant tolerance in discourses of care also control which discourses of care are ghettoized, marginalized, held captive, and elided. Tolerance, as part of the discourse of Western civilization, is also considered to be unique to Western liberalism. Fundamentalist, barbarian, non-Christian, non-Westerners are incapable of tolerance—or so go the narratives and propaganda of the West.

Part Two: Shepherding as Method

While the concept of pastoral care is not exclusive to Judeo-Christian or monotheistic care models, I problematize its usage for several reasons. In historicizing pastoral, the term has been used primarily to convey a metaphorical model of shepherding care that depicts authority and power of one species (i.e., the human) who was considered superior to the sheep (i.e., unthinking animal who needed guidance). This communicates an uneven message of leader being superior and human, while the image of flock somehow is beneath that of the leader and less than fully human (read: colonialism). A postcolonial critique of pastoral care, then, reveals how care became a mask for the reification of the Linnaean classification and hierarchical system that became the prime tool for colonial and imperial conquests, as well as environmental devastation, leading to the subjection and subjugation of Africans, Asians, and native peoples in the Americas. We in the field of pastoral theology are challenged by the legacies of colonialism and the ways in which care is—and has been—a colonizing practice, especially when third world spiritual practices were not recognized as legitimate or as on par with that of Christian practices.

In chapter 4, Shepherding as Method: Mask of Clement Violence, I challenge the association of the concept of pastoral care with such historicist understandings of the term. In that regard, I acknowledge the need to have a thoroughly historicized critique of the term, especially in the ways the image of shepherding has been used to reinforce Christian-centered norms in the practices and theories of spiritual care. I employ shepherding as method to problematize the model of particularist historiography used in postcolonial histories in the third world, reinforcing nationalist paradigms.

I critique the image of shepherding that has become synonymous for pastoral care. It is a synecdoche for pastoral care and is demonstrative of US society’s values on individualism, autonomy, and freedom. A shepherding paradigm was used by governments to describe a rule of governing people. In chapter 1, I share Niall Ferguson’s statement that the United States is a direct descendent of the British Empire, a dysfunctional descendant.³⁵ I also state that the present-day global, politico-economic climate of neoliberal fascism is not a distorted new chapter of neoliberalism from the original vision of its founders. I argue that our country’s recent leadership (of the years 2016–20) of governing in a neoliberal fascist society is symptomatic of our pathological desire to maintain the racial, sexual, and spiritual equilibrium that has sustained the socio-politico-economic hierarchies and inequalities envisioned (and sustained) via liberal and neoliberal practices and ideologies. A shepherding paradigm, then, aptly describes US political pastoral power.

The paradigm also perpetuates the fallacies of hierarchical political leadership as necessary for maintaining the Aristotelian political order, as Cedric Robinson has so brilliantly demonstrated in his work on the myths of leadership.³⁶ Instead, I argue that the metaphor is ubiquitous and systemic in its practices of governmentality and control. In critiquing Hegel, who stated that Asians and Africans had no spirit, I argue that this image of shepherd (human) with the nonspirited sheep (read: infrahuman) depicts colonialist and imperialist attitudes about spiritless Asians and Africans who were inert, subdued, and docile. It was a colonialist formula for how to care for those who needed Western tutelage to become human. The shepherding metaphor can easily be the metacritique of the androcentric human rights paradigm of the pastoral-turned-political. In showing how this paradigm is not unique to Christianity, I discuss the paradoxical elision of our humanity in a human rights paradigm and how such a paradigm circumscribes the boundaries of our humanity.

Chapter 5, Shepherding as Method & Practice: The Banality of the Shepherding Paradigm, is an ongoing exploration of the ideas I developed in the previous chapter. While the pastoral paradigm is ubiquitous, facets of the shepherding paradigm encapsulate—and are used to uphold—white Christian nationalism and supremacy. I demonstrate how a shepherding paradigm is precariously compatible with fascist ideologies. And in relation to shepherding as a model of pastoral care, I problematize the idealization of a benevolent shepherd. Such an evocation of a benevolent shepherd can be problematic and compared to the power of demagoguery in fascist ideology. There are similarities with fascist thought in a shepherding paradigm that I interrogate in this chapter. I explore the palingenesis of the pastoral American Adam that coterminously developed with racist scientific theories of polygenesis that supported white Christian nationalism.

Part Three: Mimesis and the Colonial Imago

The construction of the modern liberal subject citizen was part of the legatees of colonialism and European historiography.³⁷ It was this aspect of the civilizing projects of the Europeans and the Japanese that justified oppression of the Other. It was also under colonialism that subjects engaged in Western discourses and practices in their desire to become the modern citizen. The discourses of the liberal subject presuppose Western assimilation or a colonial contract as a precursor to attaining such rights. The paradoxes and the fictions of liberation according to Western liberal discourse is that without colonialism, Asians and Africans could not be part of the liberal discourse of enlightenment. Assimilation, civilization, and imperialism were necessary to lift colonial Koreans out from the place of backwardness, stagnancy, and isolation. At the same time, the Japanese colonizers hierarchically placed themselves as superior to the colonized Koreans by reinscribing colonial scripts of racial difference. By inventing past glories and creating cultural nationalist historiographies, the colonizers achieved the twin goals of subordination and coordination. By that, I refer to how the invention of traditions helped to subordinate Korean culture to that of Japanese culture, and coordinated and redirected Korean political energy of resistance against colonial rule to cultural nationalist projects.

In a desire for liberation from oppression (here, I refer to the pragmatic realities of economic, social, and political power), many Koreans collaborated and accepted the conditions placed upon them by the liberal discourse.³⁸ In chapter 6, "Fictions of Liberation & the Korean/American³⁹ Adam: A Paradoxical ‘Palimpsest of Colonial Identity’ of Chŏng (Jeong),"⁴⁰ I critique the cultural racial signifier, chŏng, employed by controversial Korean activist and writer Yi Kwang-su. To restore equilibrium from the devastations of colonial violence, ambivalence, and anxiety during the colonial period, cultural nationalist activists sought to excavate past glories via nationalist historiographies constructed by the Japanese. In addition, Koreans sought to rebuild their spiritual identity, appropriating Western concepts of love to modernize Korea as a nation and disavow their own past. The revitalization of chŏng by Yi Kwang-su is disturbingly connected to fascist thought. I explore the mimesis of Western nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism within Yi’s project of nation-building. I argue that Korean/American theologians are using colonial-era cultural nationalist methods and evoking a nostalgia of atavism and glory of chŏng. Koreans have built our theological identity by reproducing colonial projects.

In our postcolonial world, we are still reproducing the paradigms of stagist and developmental history that sketch a denouement to history as the Europeans wrote it, with the European subject depicted as the most evolved, most perfect. In chapter 7, The Colonial Imago: In the Waiting Room of Trauma, I decolonially explore the developmental stages of metamorphosis. I explore how the idea of colonial mimicry of Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha can be likened to the stages of metamorphosis in nature. The phases of metamorphosis and stagist colonialist historiography have similar premises: in metamorphosis, there is a radical physical transformation as if the organism has two life histories, one built on the ruins of another. The stages of metamorphosis were designated by Carl Linneaus, who believed in categories, genus, that were based on his theological beliefs and his understanding of divinity and how humans evolved into a final form of being godlike.

In critiquing historicism and provincializing Europe within the field of pastoral care, I argue that we also need to provincialize Christianity. W. E. B. Du Bois first articulated a vision of provincializing Europe and Christianity. Anton Boisen (1876–1965) is recognized as the founder of pastoral care. I boldly argue that we need to recanalize a genealogy of spiritual care that commences with the care work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963).

While Boisen was given credit for founding the field of clinical pastoral education (CPE), the field has critiqued his work for its limitations on focusing solely on the individual. Du Bois, meanwhile, was doing the work of spiritual care that has only recently been recognized as part of the framework of the field of pastoral care. He pioneered the field of spiritual care we are practicing today by focusing on public health, education, and poverty, which he saw as factors impeding the spiritual well-being and flourishing of the Black community. Du Bois was also not given due credit for being the founder of the field of public health until recently,⁴¹ but he is now regarded as one of the first to understand the connections of systemic racism, gender and class discrimination, poverty, and their impact on health. In other words, he understood that patients in the hospital must be seen in the context of their communities and society. Sitting by the bedside when a patient is ill addresses only a fraction of the story of the human being, and it does only a quarter