Abstract
Katie Cannon is described as the creator of womanist ethics, a once-new, now permanent part of the field of Christian ethics. Ten themes in her work are named, and the author elaborates on how each of these themes has worked its way into his own understanding of Christian ethics.
Keywords
Introduction
Katie Geneva Cannon occupies a unique place in the history of Christian ethics. It is exceedingly rare to create an entirely new and lasting methodology or subfield in any discipline, to blaze a trail that others follow. That methodology, in Cannon’s first work, was called “Black womanist ethics,” and today it is generally just called “womanist ethics.” In recent decades, only Stanley Hauerwas has accomplished anything of similar scope in Christian ethics, with his innovations in a neo-Anabaptist ecclesial ethic.
Unlike Hauerwas, however, Cannon not only blazed a methodological trail, she also opened access to our discipline for an entire, previously excluded, population: Black women. Cannon is looked upon with such reverence and appreciation—and her recent death is felt so keenly—in part because the Black women who have followed her recognize that she was the trailblazer. She is and always will be the foremother of Black women in Christian ethics. This is true not just because she was first, but also because she purposely chose to invest in the careers of many Black women scholars who followed her.
As a white male, I cannot speak to this cherished second dimension of Dr. Cannon’s contribution. These precious stories belong among womanist ethicists and their late foremother. I am sure some will be shared elsewhere in this collection.
In my own brief essay, I would like to point to ways in which Katie Cannon’s methodology challenged received traditions in predominant white Euro-American Christian ethics, with attention to her impact in my own work. I will focus on ten themes that are present in the very earliest expression of her ethics, her revised dissertation, Black Womanist Ethics. 1
Courtesy Union Presbyterian Seminary.
Ten Elements of Katie Cannon’s Methodological Revolution in Christian Ethics
Cannon challenged the moral goodness of the white church/es, from the first page of her first work: “How could Christians who were white, flatly and openly, refuse to treat as fellow human beings Christians who had African ancestry? Was not the essence of the Gospel mandate a call to eradicate affliction, despair, and systems of injustice?” 2
Cannon therefore challenged the moral reliability and trustworthiness of the white Christian ethical tradition, in a way that seemed shockingly brave at the time. “How long would the white church continue to be the ominous symbol of white dominance—sanctioning and assimilating the propagation of racism in the mundane interests of the ruling group?” 3
Cannon challenged the implicit assumption of most white Christian ethics that all Christians live their lives and makes their choices within the same kind of moral context. She therefore dismantled an assumption that underlay most Christian ethics before her work, that every Christian can be expected to operate within the same moral framework and with the same moral norms. “The real-lived texture of Black life requires moral agency that may run contrary to the ethical boundaries of mainline Protestantism. Black women may use action guides which have never been considered within the scope of traditional codes of faithful living.” 4
Cannon described the neglected history of Black women in the United States, periodizing that history, and clarifying that the situation of oppression faced by Black women fundamentally alters the context within which they have exercised their moral agency. “The existential situation of Afro-American women cannot be understood and explained adequately apart from [the] historical background. The history of the Black woman in the United States generates the conditions for the patterns of ethical behavior and moral wisdom which have emerged in the Black female community.” 5
Cannon was a pioneer in emphasizing that Black women face a multiplier-combination of oppressions—race, gender, and class—that this fundamentally alters the moral context in which Black women live, and sets their context sharply apart from those who are more privileged. “Black women are the most vulnerable and the most exploited members of the American society. The structure of the capitalist political economy in which Black people are commodities combined with patriarchal contempt for women has caused the Black woman to experience oppression that knows no ethical or physical bounds.” 6
Cannon indicated that Black people could have told white people about the differences in their communal histories and moral contexts and the nature of their moral agency, but white people were not paying attention—and did not, of course, until very recently, admit Black people into the authoritative educational paths and professional roles that would have credentialed them in the way white scholars and church leaders are credentialed. “For more than three and a half centuries a ‘conspiracy of silence’ rendered invisible the outstanding contributions of Blacks to the culture of humankind.” 7 “The subsequent chapters depart from most work in Christian and secular ethics. The body of data is drawn from less conventional sources but probes more intimate and private aspects of Black life.” 8
Cannon showed that Black people have been communicating nuanced moral reflection about their lives for centuries, and today’s Christian ethics must attend to these materials as authoritative sources—at least, Cannon herself would do so. She wrote, “The focus of this dissertation is to show how Black women live out a moral wisdom in their real-lived context that does not appeal to the fixed rules or absolute principles of the white-oriented, male-structured society.” 9
Cannon also emphasized the retrieval of Black women’s novels, beginning with Zora Neale Hurston’s, as sources of moral authority for womanist ethics. She showed that Black women’s literary offerings are historically reliable and morally laden. They record the functioning of Black people’s moral agency under oppression. “The Black women’s literary tradition has not previously been used to interpret and explain the community’s socio-cultural patterns from which ethical values can be gleaned…I have found that this literary tradition is the nexus between the real-lived texture of Black life and the oral-aural cultural values implicitly passed on and received from one generation to the next.” 10
Cannon’s close reading of these novels reveals, among other things, that survival of Black women, Black families and the Black community, especially through the efforts of Black women living with “invisible dignity, quiet grace, and unshouted courage,” is perhaps the best statement of the overriding moral norm that emerges from the novels of Zora Neale Hurston. This norm statement challenges both more sanguine white Christian accounts of the goal/s of the Christian moral life, but also the more hopeful/militant/eschatological/liberationist vision found in (male) Black theology. “Three phrases serve as keys to interpret Hurston’s life and literature: “the Black woman’s daring act of remaking her lost innocence into invisible dignity, her never-practiced delicacy into quiet grace, and her forced responsibility into unshouted courage.” 11
Cannon showed that the writings of Black women novelists demonstrate a commitment to honoring and preserving continuities across the generations of Black history, continuities always threatened by the racist forces that have afflicted the entire African-American experience. She thus pioneered an ethic that was communal-historical rather than individual-timeless. “Locked out of the real dynamics of human freedom in America, [Black women] implicitly pass on and receive from one generation to the next moral formulas for survival that allow them to stand over against the perversions of ethics and morality imposed on them.” 12
Reflections on My Application of Cannon’s Methodology
Taken together, Katie Cannon’s challenges and proposals constitute a dramatic challenge to the historic white Christian ethics enterprise. Here is the way in which I have come to understand and assimilate them in my own work. Cannon’s work was not my only path into these conclusions, but it has, especially in recent years, been a pivotal path. My points below correspond to the points above.
I now recognize that white European-American Christian ethics is a tradition, or better, a set of traditions, all emerging from Europe and migrating to America with the colonizers. It has a particular lineage, or a set of lineages. White Euro-American Christian ethics does not constitute the truth, or define “Biblical Ethics,” or orthodoxy, or the center of Christian ethics, or the canon of Christian ethics. In whatever version—Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant—it is a historically dominant strand of Christian ethics, but merely a strand. This is a major discovery that, unfortunately, all too many white scholars have yet to make. Further, white European-American Christian ethics is a flawed tradition. It is flawed because of its participation in sinful domination and oppression, which includes colonialism, conquest, murder, slavery, Jim Crow, and continued racism. This is especially true of the colonial powers of western Europe and the United States, which is, for most white Christian ethicists, our heritage. Therefore, the goodness, rightness, soundness, and justice of such white Christian ethics can hardly be assumed. Cannon joins other scholars from previously marginalized groups in helping white Christians and white scholars come to a more honest understanding of our own tradition. We have not always been appreciative of such help. Among other things, this means that as a white Christian ethicist, I not only can read non-white ethicists, I must read them. I must listen for how they can challenge and correct the blind spots inherent to the history I have inherited and the social location that I inhabit. I must be open to every challenge that they offer me.
Among these challenges is the radical significance of social location
One of the hidden assumptions of much historic white Christian ethics is moral universalism. Every person is treated as facing the same moral context and therefore obligated to obey the same moral rules, pursue the same moral goals, and seek to shape the same virtues—if only our studious ethicists can clarify what these are. Even in Stanley Hauerwas’ corpus of powerful works over the last forty years, these assumptions prevail. The main moral actor is the church, and the church must seek a way of life appropriate to its identity. Social location is elided. For Hauerwas, as for most historic white Christian ethics, the particular social location, branch, or offshoot of the church is not specified, because it does not (seem to) need to be.
Courtesy Union Presbyterian Seminary.
I am now convinced by Cannon (and others) that power dynamics fundamentally alter people’s social location, so fundamentally that they do not face the same moral situations. Or, more precisely, one might use a Venn diagram to suggest that there are dimensions of human or Christian moral life that are more-or-less universal and transcend social location, dimensions that are roughly similar across social locations, and dimensions that fundamentally differ based on social location. This may have been what Joseph Fletcher was trying to get at in his “situation ethics” back in the late 1950s. But what Fletcher mainly did was to think up extreme situations that might challenge assumed moral norms; for example, can you “commit adultery” if a kidnapper will kill your child unless you submit to sex with him? What does love truly require? What Fletcher did not see was that for some people (globally speaking, for a very large number of people), their lives are every day lived in extremis. As an ethicist, you do not have to dream up kidnapping scenarios to test moral theories. Just listen to the lives of those who dwell on the underside of history every day. But this was part of the blindness of privileged white Christian ethics, that we did not see this until it was called to our attention by scholars like Katie Cannon.
Cannon’s work has profoundly refined my understanding of moral agency
I define moral agency as the ability to make free and responsible moral decisions and the appropriateness of being held accountable for such decisions. In much (white) Christian ethics, discussion of the nuances of moral agency often has been confined to bioethics, to quandaries arising at the beginning and end of life. To what extent is a child, or a person under anesthesia, or someone with early Alzheimer’s, or someone with inadequate information in a health care setting, still able to function as a moral agent? And so on. But Cannon shows us that oppression fundamentally alters moral agency. Slaves, to take one obvious example, were not free. The robbing of their freedom drastically limited any responsibility they had to make moral decisions and to be held accountable for those decisions. If an underfed slave stole from a slave master, it is hard to say either that such an act was stealing or that it was immoral. It must be clear that whatever moral agency slaves exercised took place in an entirely different moral context than that of their slave masters.
Katie Cannon’s work on Black women’s moral situations, and her forays into the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, clearly demonstrate the constrained, highly limited moral agency available to Black women through most of American history. Behavior related to the most core categories of ethics—character, goals, and rules—were all deeply affected by these constraints. This is a fundamental contribution to Christian ethics, and an unsettling one—that there is no one-size-fits-all moral agency, and that relative power in a social system deeply affects moral choices—or, perhaps better, moral choice-making power.
Cannon reinforces my commitment to focus deeply on history
I remember my mentor, Glen Stassen, teaching us that Christian ethicists often partner up with at least one scientific discipline as they develop their methodology. For him, it was political science; for me, it has been history. I often have found myself drawn into deep study of specific historical periods and the moral challenges facing Christians therein. Cannon demonstrates the fruitfulness of the close study of history; in particular, of the moral situation facing specific people in specific historical contexts. In this sense, history is a source of authority for Christian ethics. Another way to say it is that ethics cannot and must not be ahistorical. An ahistorical ethic is quite likely to be naïve about the power of social location and the very strong historical forces affecting people’s moral action in real life and real time.
Part of white supremacy is the assumption that white people hold the most important knowledge. It is also the assumption that the educational and credentialing paths established by white institutions centuries ago remain the most reliable training grounds and markers of professional competence. The emergence of Katie Cannon and womanist ethics is a reminder both that vast bodies of morally serious work were being done for centuries by Black women, and that such women were blocked from any access to the very paths that defined professional Christian ethics. Even today, one can still see that members of previously marginalized groups who now have access to these educational and credentialing paths are still in the process of building networks and traditions, and they continue to face real obstacles in doing so. Katie Cannon incarnates both trends—she became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in Christian ethics, thus joining the education/credentialing tradition of white Christian academia, and she did it by demonstrating the moral wisdom available in the traditions of Black women who never before had access to such education.
One of the most important methodological issues in Christian ethics (and theology) is the sources of authority question. Where shall Christians go to learn moral truth or to hear God’s voice? Evangelical Protestants tend to emphasize Scripture, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox focus on tradition and church doctrine, Pentecostals emphasize immediate religious experience, the Wesleyan tradition evolved into a quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, and various other proposals have been made. By adding “novels by Black women authors like Zora Neale Hurston,” Cannon expanded the categories in the longstanding argument about sources of authority. No white Christian ethicist had ever cited Black women’s novels as a source. (The number of white ethicists who take novels of any type seriously as a source for their ethics was, and basically still is, relatively small.) Cannon showed that Zora Neale Hurston’s novels offered critically important moral resources for a Christian ethic. She pioneered an aspect of womanist theology and ethics in which novelists such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and others continue to carry powerful weight.
In much womanist ethics, the lived wisdom communicated in the great novels can sometimes rival Scripture itself as a source of authority. This might seem disturbing to traditionalists, but womanist ethics also reveals another fact lost to white Christian ethics; that is, the use and abuse of Scripture to justify white supremacism and slavery itself. This history is not lost on womanists, and it relativizes claims to biblical authority in womanist ethics. Having seen Scripture abused, womanists often trust Black women’s lived wisdom about their own experience more than biblical texts. Another way to say it is that womanists know, in their bones, that Scripture must be read so as to give life and aid in survival and flourishing; if read otherwise, Scripture actually works against true Christian ethics. This is a hard-won insight and one that I now firmly accept.
It has been revelatory for me to understand that the core moral norm offered in different versions of Christian ethics can vary so profoundly based on social location and the forces affecting moral agency. It is striking how deeply this stated norm varies even in white Christian ethics, including such norms as obedience (Barth), costly discipleship (Bonhoeffer), responsibility (Lehmann), Kingdom ethics (Stassen/Gushee), ethics of care (much feminist ethics), and so on. Perhaps because early Black and Latino theology (Cone and Gutierrez) emphasized liberation, as a white male scholar I once assumed that liberation would stand as the central norm of all ethics emerging from the oppressed. Katie Cannon blazed a trail in not choosing liberation as her dominant ethical motif. That path has been followed by other womanists. It is quite striking, really—survival, dignity, grace, courage—these are virtues/norms of people under tremendous pressure, whose range of agency has been deeply constrained, but who are able to recognize what moral goodness, or even moral greatness, really looks like in their very distinctive context. This is a profound contribution, and it has enriched my own Christian ethics.
Cannon’s work helps me see that social location even affects the “who” and the “when” of Christian ethics. Much white Western Christian ethics toggles between individualism, Christian communitarianism, and social/political ethics. Thus, the “who” (the implied subject) of ethics is, variously, the individual disciple, the church, or the state (or perhaps the Christian individual/church addressing the state). Meanwhile, the “when” of ethics is usually right now, in this moment of decision. For Cannon and womanist ethics after her, though, the “who” of ethics is primarily the Black community, deeply tied to Black churches but not only there, and the “when” of ethics is past, present, and future. I think this is because the African-American community has been so deeply threatened by physical and moral annihilation over its history, and in that context keeping memory alive and passing on central values to the future is all the more important. Here I see a parallel with Jewish ethics, with its own very long history of oppression playing a similar role. “Remembering for the Future” was the name of a conference on the Holocaust that I attended in the 1980s. Black womanist ethics resonates with the same themes.
Finally, Cannon’s emphasis on the pressures faced by Black women on account of their race, on account of their gender, and on account of their (very broadly experienced) economic privation has added an important dimension to my own self-understanding and my own ethics. The further claim that these oppressions intersect, cross-cut, and multiply as they combine, and that these intersections deeply affect the moral situation facing most Black women, historically and today, is a significant contribution to Christian ethics. It helps me, and other ethicists, understand our own social locations and moral situations with greater nuance, as well as that of others. It also helps map the growing and increasingly more complex conversation that is occurring in Christian ethics today among people from a bewildering array of social locations.
Conclusion
Katie Cannon was one of the most significant Christian ethicists of our time. I wish I had known her better at a personal level. But one of the joys of academia is that when any of us manage to do good work, and get it in print, it can live on as long as our civilization survives. Katie Cannon has made a permanent contribution to Christian ethics. Competent ethicists of the twenty-first century will need to engage her contributions and put them to use in their own work.
“The memory of the righteous is a blessing” (Proverbs 10:7).
Footnotes
1.
Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.)
2.
Ibid., 1.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Ibid., 2.
5.
Ibid., 6.
6.
Ibid., 4.
7.
Ibid., 1–2.
8.
Ibid., 5.
9.
Ibid., 4.
10.
Ibid., 5.
11.
Ibid., 17 (italics original).
12.
Ibid., 7.