Abstract
As is true of any region experiencing significant migration, the identity of the US South, and with it the identity of Nashville, Tennessee, is shifting. Both the city and the region have the opportunity to embrace this shift, wrestling collectively with the question of what kind of city we want to be. The lesson of the New Testament, particularly of Luke’s Gospel, is that transformation of individuals and communities often happens around the table. With new tables around which to gather and new community members to get to know, the possibility of expanding the meaning of “Southern hospitality” continually presents itself anew. Such an expansion requires both embracing the paradox of guest and host, and remembering our past rightly to learn from the mistakes and the triumphs of the ones who came before us.
In March 2019, the world watched as Christchurch, New Zealand, reeled from a terrorist attack on a local mosque, resulting in the deaths of fifty people. Just a few months earlier in October 2018, the Jewish community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grieved the loss of eleven members during a terrorist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue. Only a couple of years before these events, white supremacist terror took nine lives at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Before, after, and in between these events, black churches in the US South have continued to burn, and mosques, synagogues, and gurdwaras have received more and more threats of violence.
White supremacist violence against immigrants, minorities, and those perceived to be religiously “other” is on the rise around the world. Political events, such as the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the move toward an exit from the European Union by the United Kingdom, have revealed deep fissures in new ways. These events have made plain the fear that often characterizes interactions with difference. Today’s public white supremacist vitriol and violence, especially toward immigrants and refugees, stems in part from a fear of losing power and of losing identity. This perceived power is based, however, on suppressing difference, and this identity is based on an inaccurate version of history. Neither is worth holding onto.
The failure is, in part, theological and therefore requires a theological response. The histories and technologies that have shaped our communities, our cities, and our nations have led to a situation in which the lawyer’s question in Luke 10, “Who is my neighbor?” requires a complicated answer. In a hyper-connected world, however, we may reasonably respond that a neighbor is anyone “with whom a concrete relation is technically possible,” 1 or, put more directly, everyone is potentially my neighbor. Our physical neighbors are often quite similar to us, 2 enabling a “concrete relation.” Some, however, have difficulty envisioning those who are different as neighbors to whom and for whom they are responsible and accountable. When confronted with difference, people have the option to respond with hostility or hospitality. In affirmation of Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality is a very general name for all our relations to the Other,” and “because of the development of communication, of crossing borders, of telecommunications,” it has “new forms of urgency” in today’s world. 3
As with any aspect of socio-political change, the specific contours of this rise in fear and violence are contextual and may most effectively be addressed locally. The same is true of theological construction. As a Southerner, I set Derrida’s observations alongside the much-touted “Southern hospitality,” for which my home region is known and on which Southerners tend to pride themselves. To that end, this article reflects theologically on social shifts occurring in Nashville, Tennessee, in the US South. These theological considerations center on hospitality and begin to develop a local theology of hospitality, rooted in the possibilities provided by the image of table fellowship in the New Testament.
As is true of any region experiencing significant migration, the identity of the US South, and with it the identity of Nashville, is shifting. Living in a microcosm of the country as a whole, both the city and the region have the opportunity to embrace this shift, wrestling collectively with the question of what kind of city we want to be. The lesson of the New Testament, particularly of Luke’s Gospel, that transformation of individuals and communities often happens around the table, offers a good starting point for this wrestling with a shifting communal identity. With new tables around which to gather and new community members to get to know, the possibility of expanding the meaning of “Southern hospitality” continually presents itself anew. Such an expansion requires both embracing the paradox of guest and host, and remembering our past rightly to learn from the mistakes and the triumphs of the ones who came before us.
As early church table fellowship had the potential to break down entrenched social barriers between rich and poor, enslaved and free, Jew and Gentile, man and woman, so too does today’s table hold that same potential. Simply sharing meals together will not solve our problems. However, when we sit together, allowing ourselves to be welcomed and served by another, and when we sit together and share food, when our bodies are in proximity and we are engaged in an act essential to our survival, our defenses lower and differences seem less threatening. Sharing food transforms hostility into hospitality.
The traditional narrative of Southern hospitality requires revision. Both newcomers to the region and long-time Southerners with historically marginalized identities are showing white Southerners a way forward, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear and with tongues to taste. Even in white (or predominantly white) spaces where difference is celebrated, power remains in being the welcoming one, the one perceived to be normative, inviting otherness and difference in. People accustomed to this dynamic may take pride in being good hosts, but may yet find it difficult to imagine being in the position of guests. Adopting a posture of welcome is good and necessary, but it is not enough. To engage in a true exchange of hospitality is to allow oneself to become a guest. Gospel lessons abound on relinquishing the power of host and instead opening oneself to the vulnerability of accepting another’s welcome. The early church proclaimed Jesus’ kenotic example of laying down privilege (Phil 2). Truly to embrace hospitality is to practice a willingness to receive—not only to offer—hospitality.
The shifts in Nashville’s demographic make-up and the resulting encounters among strangers who become true companions—that is, ones who share bread—have the potential to challenge the distorted memories of misdirected nostalgia and enable an expanded vision of the future of Southern hospitality. A reconfiguration of Southern hospitality entails relinquishing the attachment to the role of host 4 and gaining an understanding of history that addresses the times when this hospitality has failed to achieve its ideal of welcome.
First, this article situates the theological inquiry in the context of the US South and its fraught history of hostility and violence toward those considered “other” by the white majority. This inquiry considers nostalgia’s role in the self-identity of the South and how it hinders a clear-eyed view of Southerners’ failure to live up to their reputation for hospitality. This failure includes erasure of the food traditions of Southerners of African and indigenous descent. Next is a description of hospitality as it has been developed in the Christian tradition. This description includes an examination of hospitable encounters in the Gospel of Luke, which center on the early Christian practice of table fellowship, and an articulation of the notions of compassion and paradox. The article then focuses on describing demographic shifts in Nashville, where immigrant communities are changing the texture of food culture and inviting us to consider “Southern cooking” anew. The article closes with two personal experiences of this phenomenon. These experiences are sources of hope that, by making “little moves against destructiveness” 5 in our interactions with our new neighbors, we may live into a new way of practicing hospitality that inspires widespread hospitality-as-resistance—resistance to the fear, hate, hostility, and violence that threaten these neighbors today.
Remembering rightly: Nostalgia and the South
The South has accumulated no shortage of stereotypes, one of which is that Southerners have a special knack for hospitality. For many in the United States, the term “Southern hospitality” evokes images of expansive front porches and sweet iced tea, scenes of the gracious reception of overnight guests, and perhaps echoes of television’s “Beverly Hillbillies” tagline, “Y’all come back now, y’hear?” as guests leave to continue on their way. Bands, inns, restaurants, songs, and magazines capitalize on the familiarity of this notion. 6 People invoking “Southern hospitality” are often alluding to a set of genteel, mannerly conventions that work together to produce an image of Southerners as polite, unobtrusively kind, welcoming, and gifted at producing excellent food from limited resources. This image is not wholly inaccurate, but “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” 7 The problem with this stereotype of the South is that the familiarity of the construct eclipses its historical reliance on racial, economic, and gendered structures, and these structures have rendered Southern culture hypocritically exclusive, hostile to people whose embodiment deviates from the normative white, male, heterosexual, Christian subject. This stereotyped view of culture is rooted in a selective way of remembering the past, consequential for our present and our future. Appeals to Southern hospitality are often appeals to racial, economic, and gendered hierarchies with an air of nostalgia for the times when these hierarchies were more pronounced. The concept might seem benign, but it is laden with racist, classist, and sexist implications; put differently, “southern manners often mask southern inequities.” 8 Most troubling is that, in what Flannery O’Connor calls the “Christ-haunted” South, 9 these inequities often have been justified by misguided appeals to Christian teaching. 10
Dominant narratives of Southern history and culture have typically been mired in a peculiar mix of “nostalgia, guilt, and white racial melancholia.” 11 To envision a new way of thinking about our past requires avoiding both the tropes that cut familiar grooves and the same old stories that only partially reveal the truth. “Put simply,” as Southern studies scholar Tara McPherson says, “we need a southern studies that is not only for white southerners” 12 and perhaps a creative vision of “new methods of minding our manners.” 13 John T. Edge, a historian and the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, surely voices the desires of many Southerners in saying that he wants “to reconcile my profound love of the South with the deep anger that boiled in me when I confronted our peculiar history.” 14 Perhaps Edge and others can take comfort in McPherson’s reminder: “The identity of a place is always multiple, in flux, and changeable, rather than fixed, unified, or stable.” 15 This truth is evident in many Southern traditions, including the foodways; even the Southern staple of barbecue has “revealed itself to be an ongoing process, not a product fixed in one time or place.” 16 The South is not and never has been static, and its inhabitants have endless opportunities to shape its ever-evolving identity. To do so, however, requires reading the past rightly.
Apparent in hasty efforts to sweep the past under the rug and in refusals to deal honestly with the continued presence of racial injustice is what Dwight N. Hopkins calls “the white identity of privileging historical amnesia.”
17
Such historical amnesia may manifest in a “forgetting of forgetting”: we cannot remember that we ought to remember, a “double oblivion.”
18
It is operative in such claims as “reverse racism,” a result of short-term and selective memory.
19
This amnesia may take a particular form of selective memory: nostalgia. Nostalgia is the result of memory coupled with sentimentality. “Nostalgia distorts the past by idealizing it,” covering over unpleasant or shameful memories, and this idealization has “moral consequences.”
20
The most shameful memory in the South is slavery. Although it “neither exhausts nor circumscribes African American experience,” still no one can “ignore the trajectory that the institution of slavery set in motion. All of us—white or red or brown or yellow or black, Mayflower descendent or immigrant, rich or poor, Southerner or Westerner, Northerner or Easterner—live today in its wake.”
21
Traces of this system live on today: . . . in the band of black poverty that curves up through the Deep South from New Orleans through South Carolina; it’s in the black and white families united today by genealogical discoveries of century-old acts of rape and forbidden love affairs; it’s in urban residential patterns that still bear the traces of decades of laws which sorted out neighborhoods according to the skin color of their residents.
22
When former Food Network star Paula Deen told an interviewer that she thought the South was less racist than the rest of the country because Southerners have always had black people as “part of our families,” 23 omitting the fact that black people were part of white people’s households but not families due to their forced enslavement, she participated in this form of nostalgia.
The kind of forgetting that erases suffering people has been rebuked by theologians for decades and continues to be worthy of rebuke. When we decide to remember the shameful parts of our past and read them rightly, affirming that such an act of remembrance is a theological imperative, we follow the example of Howard Thurman, Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, M. Shawn Copeland, Karen Baker-Fletcher, and others. According to the Christian tradition, “God in Christ . . . does have the memory of crucifixion and suffering”; 24 therefore, those with privilege have a responsibility to take suffering seriously, to give priority and authority to the voices of those who suffer oppression and exploitation, and to act in solidarity with those who have suffered in the past and suffer in the present. 25 The antidote to harmful nostalgia is what Metz and Copeland refer to as “anamnesis”: re-remembering. It is the only way, in their view, to achieve solidarity across lines of difference etched as a result of collective amnesia. “Solidarity begins in anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history,” 26 of whom Jesus is one. Included in the “dead, exploited, despised” are those who suffered and died as a direct result of racism in the United States, whether under the yoke of slavery, as a result of lynching, or as a result of social and cultural inequities, ones that continue to diminish the quality of life and well-being for marginalized persons. For Metz, the primary task of the church is to speak “about God by making the connection between the Christian message and the modern world visible and expressing the Christian tradition in this world as a dangerous memory,” 27 dangerous because of the disruption to the status quo it precipitates. The core of this dangerous memory is Jesus, the “memory of God.” 28 This memory extends beyond the hope of salvation his death and resurrection bring, as this hope “does not exonerate [Christians] from the task of committing themselves in solidarity to the overcoming of suffering caused by oppression and injustice.” 29 These dangerous memories have a kairos character, breaking in to “reveal new and dangerous insights for the present,” asking questions of the current situation. 30
What, then, should we bring to the forefront of our collective memory? From what should we erase the glaze of nostalgia? A beginning could be those emblems of stereotypical “Southern hospitality” that are material consequences of social and legal structures designed to exclude, repress, and keep some people “in their place.” These emblems may include everything from architecture to food to the arrangement of neighborhoods, many so deeply embedded in culture that to imagine them having any origin at all is difficult. One example is the expansive front porch on which gracious Southern ladies hospitably receive guests. These porches are propped up with Grecian columns, as antebellum Southern architecture “looked to classical Greece for inspiration because identifying with ancient cultures was an important part of the South’s explanation and defense of . . . slavery.” 31 Another example is that Thanksgiving staple, the sweet potato casserole. Sweet potatoes are not native to the United States. “Southerners eat sweet potato pie today because the sweet potato was imported into the South from Africa by slaves.” 32 In numerous ways, these and other commonplace artifacts of Southern culture have their roots in systemic violence and inequality.
Southern food culture demonstrates both the enduring, rich diversity of this region and the ways this diversity has been hidden over time, whitewashed by nostalgia, even though “the South was never monochromatic.” 33 The US South has never been free of hybridity, of cultural borrowing (or stealing) and blending. United States culture, and its cuisine, has always been a synthesis of African, indigenous, and European ingredients, and the South is no different. Yet the “vast nostalgia industry” 34 in which the South participates has exported images of Southern food culture that erases the fact that this food culture was built on the backs of enslaved and indigenous people. The South repeats this erasure when people prop up a white Southern cook and marvel at her or his innovation, a culinary Columbusing. 35 Staples of Southern cooking—greens simmered for hours with ham hocks, crispy buttermilk-battered fried chicken, vegetables depleted of nutritional value but made mouth-watering by bacon fat—owe their reputation and appeal to people whose names and stories are largely lost to history and whose labor, resourcefulness, and creativity never received their due honor. Many well-known chefs have built their popularity on this history without wrestling honestly with it; they have capitalized on the expertise and creativity of those whose names we will never know. Again, Paula Deen is a well-known example of this phenomenon. She rose to popularity by “exploiting stereotypes about Southern food and manners,” 36 but, in her fall from grace after revelations that she had repeatedly used a racial slur, she unwittingly exposed the hypocrisy embedded in the glossy narratives we have written about ourselves. To reject the unhelpful nostalgic remembrance of a pure, hospitable South that never was paves the way, or perhaps sets the table, for a different foundation of Southern hospitality.
Hospitality in Christian tradition
Reckoning with the South’s checkered history includes wrestling with ways the Bible and Christian tradition were used to justify atrocities and uphold systems of harm, such as the Indian Removal Act and the system of slavery and with ways the overwhelmingly Christian region remains inhospitable to people embodied in certain ways. 37 The wrestling can also take the form of a hermeneutics of retrieval, a gathering up of overlooked resources within the tradition to inspire a new way of reading and of being. Hospitality genuinely rooted in Christian tradition would actively avoid the discriminatory and exclusionary tendencies that have characterized past Southern culture.
The Greek word rendered “hospitality” in English translations of the New Testament, philoxenia (φιλοξενία), means “love to strangers” or “love of the strange.” The hospitality depicted in the New Testament is an attraction to the marginal, the outsider, the sojourner, and the one who is radically other to oneself. This notion is a stark contrast to associations such as the polite welcoming of social equals who are expected to reciprocate the welcome at some later date. Philoxenia connotes an active, loving pursuit of those who are strangest to us.
Even at the level of its etymology, hospitality has never been a straightforward concept. In Greek, Latin, French, and English, a thin line exists between welcome guest and hostile stranger. The French term hôte can refer to either the giver or the receiver of hospitality, 38 and the Latin term hostis can mean both guest and enemy. 39 In New Testament Greek, xenos (ξένος) can mean “one who comes as a stranger,” one who occupies “the status of a suppliant who ought to be treated as a guest,” or “the host, the one who extends hospitality and thus treats the stranger as a guest.” 40 Regardless of the specific translation and context, the xenos is “an entity involved in an experience of unfamiliarity.” 41 Hence, hospitality and hostility are intimately woven together; Jacques Derrida, in his ever-present cleverness, coyly termed this mystery “hostipitality.” The exchange of hospitality occurs in a liminal space, both linguistically and practically. Welcoming a stranger is always a fragile activity, and it is risky business for all parties involved. In the Mediterranean world in which the New Testament emerged, a “firmly entrenched code of hospitality” 42 demanded that strangers be treated as guests. For a traveler, welcome could literally determine life or death. The current US “hospitality industry” has enabled a loss of the sense of urgency present in the biblical text. People with relative privilege are not often called upon to open home or pantry to random traveling strangers, nor do they find themselves in need of such a welcome. The biblical witness, however, can extend to other ways of being xenoi (ξενοι), either as guest or host. As New Testament scholar John Koenig points out, philoxenia extends beyond its literal meaning of loving strangers and denotes “a delight in the whole guest–host relationship, in the mysterious reversals and gains for all parties which may take place.” 43 Thus, xenos, as a signifier of “guest” or “host,” contains within it, for any hospitable encounter, both mystery and potential benefit from a reversal of roles.
The relative vacuity of the term “hospitality” in current parlance differs significantly from this rich meaning, a stark distance from the philoxenia of early Christians. Hearing the term “hospitality” today evokes images no more radical than plentiful refreshments at a meeting or “gracious living” in the lavishly appointed homes of lifestyle magazines; 44 it may also call to mind various instantiations of the “hospitality industry,” hotels, restaurants, catering and event planning services. 45 These images are often at the limits of our imaginings of “hospitality.” Hospitality has historically referred to acts of care for another’s basic bodily needs—food, lodging, perhaps healing—but the reduction of hospitality to forms listed above, relieved of spiritual and moral weight, is a distortion of hospitality’s meaning among early Christians. This sanitized concept of hospitality is no longer a call to be concerned with the welcome of the stranger or the one characterized by difference from oneself; instead, it is associated with welcoming more of the same. Furthermore, hospitality has become an act of “private virtue,” as opposed to a communal moral imperative, 46 a “nice” appendix to the central message of the Gospel, rather than being integral to it.
One response to the diminishment of hospitality as integral to Christian theology and faith is to recall the importance of hospitality for Jesus, his disciples, and the early church. “Hospitality, in a variety of expressions, forms a notable frame of reference for the ministry of Jesus.” 47 His life and work makes clear that hospitality is fundamentally about “at-homeness” and about expanding a sense of home and extending it to any who do not feel at home in this world. Focus should be on table fellowship, house churches, and the diversity of the body of believers, recalling the dependence of Jesus, the wandering teacher, and his travel companions on the hospitality of strangers. 48 The Gospel of Luke, for example, recounts Jesus and the disciples as largely in motion from place to place and often finding themselves at the mercy of strangers. Stephanie Buckhannon Crowder draws a parallel between the disciples in Luke and black Americans who fled north on the Underground Railroad, saying, “A person who risks her life in following Jesus must rely on the mercy of others, just as she surely had to rely in every circumstance on the mercy of God. It is a chance slaves were willing to take for freedom. It is a chance believers must take in order to be free and set the captive free.” 49 Jesus’ instructions in Luke 10:3–16 indicate that to be a disciple means to be willing to submit to the hospitality of others. While one can read many of the stories in Luke as instructions for extending hospitality, a much harder lesson underlies them: to follow Jesus is often to lay down the power in being the host.
Alongside this observation, it is helpful to note the rootedness of early Christianity in marginality and otherness, 50 understanding this as a significant motivation for extending hospitality. Luke’s Gospel depicts Jesus as an outcast from his beginning: with no room elsewhere, he is born in a barn among the animals and placed in a feeding trough. 51 Luke begins with a moment of unwelcome. Jesus arrives as a guest among people who do not show him hospitality. Yet he keeps showing up.
The practice of hospitality was not unique or original to Jesus’ followers. 52 As first-century Jews, Jesus’ earliest followers would have held love of neighbor and care for strangers as essential to their religious practice, at the foundation of the law. Abraham, due to his urgent and unconditional welcoming of the three mysterious, angelic visitors in Genesis 18, was something of a “patron saint for hosts” 53 among Jews in the first century CE. Furthermore, in the imperial context of the birth of the Jesus movement, hospitality was part of daily life. What eventually set Christian hospitality apart from that of the empire, according to Christine D. Pohl, was its inclusive mode: “Hospitality, because it was such a fundamental human practice, always included family, friends, and influential contacts. The distinctive Christian contribution was the emphasis on including the poor and neediest, the ones who could not return the favor,” 54 ones including “the hungry, thirsty, naked, the stranger, and the prisoner, groups of people whose imago dei might not typically be presumed.” 55 This theme reverberates throughout Jesus’ parables, notably in Luke 14. Here, Jesus teaches that hospitality is only hospitality when it is unreturnable, when it is extended without thought of repayment. It involves welcoming the one with no social capital, the one whose welcome cannot benefit the host in any way. In Luke’s narrative, “although he is himself just an invited guest, Jesus does not shy away from offering tips on banquet etiquette . . . Humility is the key to gaining the best seat in the house.” 56 The parable Jesus tells while he is sitting at the table also indicates consequences for not accepting hospitality that is offered: if one rejects an invitation out of preoccupation with tending one’s possessions or relationships, he or she will be replaced by a guest unburdened by these things (vv 15–24). Only two chapters later, Jesus issues an even more stark warning about the dangers of refusing to extend hospitality. Lazarus, a poor beggar in Jesus’ parable, “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table” (16:21), but the rich man refuses, and Lazarus is carried off “to be with Abraham,” whereas the rich man dies and goes to “Hades.” According to Jesus, the consequences for not participating in the alternative economy of hospitality continue even after death.
This particularity of the Christian practice of hospitality—its non-reciprocal nature—is simultaneously held in tension with the reversibility of the guest–host relationship. While Christian hospitality is welcoming and caring for those who cannot reciprocate these acts, a complex shifting back and forth remains between the roles of guest and host, complicating the expected power dynamic between those who offer hospitality and those who receive it. This complexity is evident even in the fluidity of the terminology for these relationships, like xenos, discussed above. 57
This tension is a paradox in its usual sense: something apparently contradictory, a phenomenon that moves counter to logic or conventional wisdom or that creates a possibility wherein two opposing conclusions are both true. This tension is also a paradox in another sense: as something glorious or wondrous. The Greek word, παράδοξος, from which “paradox” derives its layers of meaning, is instructive in considering the hospitality prescribed in the biblical text. Paradox signifies something “contrary to opinion or exceeding expectation, strange,” but also “wonderful, remarkable.” 58 In this way, hospitable encounters in the New Testament are paradoxical. Something glorious or wondrous occurs when strangers welcome one another and eat together. Yes, a reversal or disruption of the anticipated guest–host pattern occurs, but this reversal and unexpected shift reveals something that transcends the roles. To be the welcoming one implies having power, and a host usually enjoys a position of comfort. The space remains one’s own; the terms of the encounter remain one’s own. The Gospel stories of hospitality, particularly table- and meal-based hospitality, reveal, however, that a truly hospitable encounter requires a relinquishing of this static host identity in favor of messy, wondrous, mysterious role-reversal.
Hospitality is an act of care for bodies. Jesus was viscerally affected by encounters with other people. The Gospel writers . . . used the rare word splagchnizomai to describe what Jesus felt when he encountered those on the margins (Matthew 20:34; Mark 1:41; 8:2; Luke 7:13). Greek speakers understood the word to mean “to be moved as to one’s bowels.” We would speak of “a feeling in the gut,” but it is difficult to give an adequate translation of the word.
59
This term (σπλαγχνίζομαι) comes from the word for “viscera” or “entrails,” and, “as often in the ancient world, inner body parts served as referents for psychological aspects . . . of the seat of the emotions.” 60 Both hostility and hospitality to strangers are themselves fundamentally physical responses to the presence of other bodies. The full work of hospitality, as presented in the New Testament, includes the notion of presence—actual, fleshly, bodily presence standing in for the presence of a physically absent God. 61 Hospitality always involves caring for bodily needs (food, clothing, shelter, even burying the dead), but Christian hospitality is specifically understood to include God’s being present with persons via persons being present to one another, incarnating the image of God to one another through our actions. 62 This gut-level, compassionate response to the presence of others, this splagchnizomai, is possible during hospitable encounters with one another. Being playful with the Greek, compassionate welcome often occurs precisely at the moment when people are feeding their inward parts, when they are eating. Love to strangers comes from the gut. In the early church, the loving pursuit of the stranger and the mysterious mix-up of guest and host often took place around the table of a communal meal. The differences between diners remain, but the connection that takes place in eating the same food is difficult to ignore.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus shows hospitality and welcome to unexpected people, becoming their guest in return, and vice versa. These moments involve the blatant breaking of social rules, and, significantly, many take place around tables. 63 A reference to bread in Luke’s final chapter completes the theme introduced in the Gospel’s opening image of Jesus lying in a feeding trough. In the sharing of a meal, the resurrected Jesus becomes recognizable to Cleopas and his companion (Luke 24:28–32). He appears later to the disciples, and they too share food together (Luke 24:36–43). The Bible teaches that to gather around a table with strangers is to encounter the divine. God is the divine stranger who exceeds our grasp, yet is made known to us in the mundane, everyday habits of eating, of offering to and accepting from the stranger or neighbor who bears God’s image.
Maybe what has scandalized the muttering teachers and religious leaders is not that Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2), but that he allows himself to be welcomed by them. Jesus refuses to be tied to one role, one position, and he refuses to align himself with those who wield religious and political power. He not only extends hospitality; he humbles himself to receive it as well.
Nashville
The paradoxical nature of both hospitality, theologically conceived, and the history of hospitality in the South are on full display in middle Tennessee today. Tennessee is an overwhelmingly red state. Its Republican lawmakers have pursued legal action against the federal government disputing the state’s responsibility for refugee resettlement, and a state lawmaker has suggested the National Guard gather Syrian refugees and remove them from the state. The state capital, Nashville, is nonetheless home to people from all over the world. Twelve percent of Nashville residents have emigrated from outside the United States, and the city has the largest Kurdish population in the nation. Despite recent political developments slowing the arrival of refugees and immigrants (see discussion below), some wondrous, “paradoxical” welcoming continues to take place. Some new neighbors originate from places where hospitality bears a strong resemblance to that enacted in the Bible, and encounters with these neighbors present an opportunity for long-time Nashvillians to rethink expressions of hospitality, and acknowledge that Southern hospitality is not the practice’s only form. These encounters challenge Nashville’s citizens to question the narrative that depicts these new neighbors as a threat. In a city soaked in the culinary traditions of meat-and-threes and spicy hot chicken, immigrant-owned restaurants specializing in Asian, Middle Eastern, Central American, African, and other world cuisines invite Nashvillians to see new versions of “home cooking.”
Nashville certainly takes part in the South’s “vast nostalgia industry,” McPherson’s term expounded upon earlier. The downtown area is littered with self-labeled honky-tonks and purveyors of country-western wear. The city is home to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Ryman Auditorium, known as the Mother Church of Country Music, and the Grand Ole Opry. Tourism in Nashville capitalizes on the history of country music and the aura of Americana. Glorifying the golden era of country music necessarily comes with erasure of those excluded from the predominantly white genre. 64 More concrete, and perhaps more insidious, are Nashville’s monuments to misremembering. A garish, gold- and silver-coated monument of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, greets those entering the city from the south on Interstate 65. His bust also sits inside the state capitol building. These monuments were not raised during the Civil War era. The bust was installed in 1978, and the statue was erected in 1998. 65 Nashville also boasts The Hermitage, a home of US President Andrew Jackson and the place where he died. The publicity materials for this historic site do mention the Indian Removal Act that is part of his legacy, and a memorial has been erected for the dozens of enslaved people whose remains were found in an unmarked grave on the property. However, the overwhelming focus of the tourism materials is on Jackson’s positive contributions to the history of US democracy. This highly selective remembrance of Forrest and Jackson betrays a belief that some people’s experience of history matters while other people’s does not.
Nashville’s culinary traditions reflect this nostalgia and misremembering of the past, a phenomenon perhaps best seen in Nashville’s most famous culinary invention, hot chicken. Now a popular delicacy peddled by trendy midtown restaurants, the dish is a product of Nashville’s heavily segregated past. The legend goes that Thornton Prince III had a girlfriend who wearied of his promiscuity. Aiming to punish him, this inventive woman, whose name is lost to history (as are the names of many clever and bold women), prepared his favorite dish, fried chicken, but secretly infused the batter with every pepper and spice in her pantry. Upon his return home from some late-night indiscretion, she served it to him. She expected him to spit it out, beg for water, and repent of his womanizing ways. Instead, he declared it the best thing he had ever eaten and soon capitalized on it. At first, he served it only in his black community. The first Prince’s Hot Chicken was located in a neighborhood populated only by black residents, during the height of Jim Crow. Soon enough, white people found the restaurant, and it became a favorite of country music stars, such as Lorrie Morgan. Today, KFC has “Nashville Hot Chicken” on its menu, and farm-to-table restaurants across the country are adding it to their offerings. Commercialism has rendered this culturally specific food broadly palatable by erasing its history and denying credit to the community from which it emerged, even in Nashville, where a white owner of a newer local chain, Hattie B’s, has been publicly credited with “launch(ing) the Nashville hot chicken craze.” 66 Alongside the culinary history, these events narrate the story of Nashville’s moment of resistance to Jim Crow. In the original Prince’s, through no restaurant policy but simply through the way the clientele began to arrange themselves, white customers sat in the back whereas black customers sat up front. 67 Nashville is working to develop its “Music City” identity as the place where not only country artists but also alternative and R&B and hip-hop artists come to thrive. The city’s repackaging and repurposing of hot chicken as a symbol of Southernness, but without acknowledging its origins in the black community, is a significant incident of misremembering that has consequences for all aspects of the city’s identity moving forward.
Nashville, however, remains an intriguing place from which to consider the possibility of a “future-tense South still in the making.” 68 The greater metropolitan area is growing by approximately one hundred people per day. Much of the growth is from people born outside the United States. Over the past three decades across the state, this population has risen from 1.2% to 5%, and many of these new residents have settled in Nashville. As reported in mid-2016, “thirty percent of students enrolled in metro schools speak a language other than English.” 69 In the 2015–16 fiscal year, Tennessee accepted more than two thousand refugees, and “more than half of the refugees were settled in Nashville.” 70
In the midst of this growth, however, fear and racism have been on full display, and the fact of Nashville’s booming foreign-born population took on new relevance in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Tennessee and the Nashville-Metro area have been battlegrounds in the political war over immigration and refugee resettlement. Owing to January 2017’s executive order limiting the number of refugees admitted into the country, the Nashville branch of World Relief, one of the main agencies engaged in refugee resettlement, was forced to close. In March 2017, “Tennessee became the first state in the nation . . . to sue the federal government over refugee resettlement on the grounds of the 10th Amendment,” 71 a case currently awaiting a ruling from the Sixth Circuit of Appeals. 72
The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) continues to mobilize people in Nashville to combat the fear that has characterized the support for this measure. For example, in the wake of the recent spate of raids and deportation threats by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), TIRRC has drawn attention to the “deportation pipeline” enabled by Tennessee’s prison system. They have launched a new platform titled “Beyond Welcoming” with concrete policy proposals encouraging local government leaders to take a stronger practical stand on behalf of immigrant members of the community. 73
In June 2017, the Nashville City Council gained momentum promoting a set of “Nashville Together” ordinances designed to “prevent Metro from using city funds and facilities to enforce federal immigration law.” 74 The aim was to “send a message to our immigrant communities that it is safe to engage with Metropolitan government for all the basic local government services that we provide.” 75 The proposed ordinances would have stopped short of making Nashville a “sanctuary city,” but they would have “limit[ed] the city’s cooperation with federal immigration officials beyond what is required by law.” 76
Though the proposed ordinances were eventually withdrawn, members of TIRRC were encouraged by the conversations the process started. Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of TIRRC, said, “Tennesseans want to ensure that their values of welcome and compassion are reflected in public policy.” 77 Former Mayor Megan Barry said she wants Nashville to be “as welcoming a city as possible,” and current Mayor David Briley has expressed similar views. The policy of the Nashville-Davidson area, according to the Mayor’s official web site, is one of welcome and celebration of its foreign-born residents. 78
Arriving at these positions has been an uphill battle, but the recent refusal to comply fully with immigration police, combined with several well-attended protests and demonstrations in support of refugees and other immigrants, have been encouraging developments for those in Nashville committed to making our home a home for recently arrived families as well.
One caveat, however, is that language such as that of Teatro does require interrogating: who is implicitly included in the category of “Tennesseans” and who is not; who is expected to do the welcoming, and who is expected to receive it? The posture of welcome will continue to ring hollow without acknowledgement and atonement for the ways Tennessee and Nashville have been hostile places to live, including for people whose ancestors were terrorized by Tennesseans such as the person whose bust sits proudly inside the state government’s seat of power.
Already discussed in part above, the food culture of Nashville is one area that reflects the city’s shifting demographics and, as such, has been a catalyst for shifting perspectives. Particularly for white, privileged Christians, gathering around tables together with these new neighbors is crucial and will likely demand our perspective to shift from perceiving ourselves as the ones doing the welcoming to receiving welcome at their tables instead.
For each of the past five years, TIRRC has sponsored an event called the InterNASHional Food Crawl on a stretch of road, Nolensville Pike, where many of Nashville’s foreign-born residents have settled. 79 A Salvadoran restaurant and market, known for its pupusas, is directly across the street from a Nepalese restaurant and market. This establishment sits a stone’s throw away from a Thai restaurant, which is directly across the street from a supermarket specializing in Middle Eastern products, one of various international supermarkets in the area; Korean, Indian, and Mexican markets, bakeries, and restaurants are sprinkled among auto parts stores, pawn shops, cash advance providers, and the occasional fast-food chain. Attached to Patel Brothers grocery store is Dosa Hut, serving the best South Indian food in town. Plaza Mariachi houses several kiosks run by locals from South and Central America, selling everything from quinceañera attire to ice cream; the complex hosts fashion shows, dance nights, trivia nights, and raucous watch parties for international rivalry matches in soccer. Hummus, lamb kebobs, baklava, dolmas; pupusas, empanadas, horchata; dim sum and ramen: this too is Southern cooking.
Learning to be a good guest
In addition to these widespread changes in Nashville’s public life together, recent personal encounters have also led to the reflections here. Although much of Nashville’s culinary diversity is concentrated on Nolensville Pike, in another part of the greater Nashville area, Hendersonville, one resident has made a home and a life by opening a small lunch and dinner restaurant called Café Rakka. The owner and chef, Riyad Alkasem, known to all as “Chef Rakka,” came to the United States almost thirty years ago from Raqqa, Syria. Through a series of fortuitous connections, our families have become close, and Riyad’s friendship has been one means by which I have been challenged to reevaluate what a commitment to hospitality looks like. Hospitality is deeply embedded in the rural Syrian culture in which Riyad grew up. In Raqqa, to be the most welcoming to a weary sojourner was a point of pride. For a stranger passing through, as in the Mediterranean world of the New Testament, the thin boundary between hospitality and hostility can delineate life or death in the desert. Riyad brought this commitment to hospitality with him to the United States. Despite the hostility he faced as a Muslim man living in middle Tennessee post-9/11, Riyad continued and continues to welcome people into his restaurant, people who might otherwise wish him gone, and many of his regular customers are some of the least expected. Hendersonville has long been home to the estates of several legendary country music stars; perhaps the restaurant’s most loyal diner is country music icon Ricky Skaggs. 80 Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is also a frequent guest. 81 In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, that Riyad’s political beliefs and commitments differed from those of many regulars became clear, but Riyad continued to welcome. His food, perhaps initially unfamiliar to Hendersonville residents yet now something that tastes like home, broke down barriers as people continued to return to the restaurant.
For Thanksgiving in 2018, Riyad cooked two giant turkeys plus sides for his staff, his family, and our family. The turkey was seasoned with traditional Syrian spices, prepared in the same way he might prepare something like his unrivaled chicken tikka. The mix of Tennessee and Raqqa was unfamiliar but delicious. In the midst of threats, of slurs, of other hostility, Riyad continues to welcome. His food is itself a microcosm of the jumbled, paradoxical hospitality he exudes, welcoming the traditions of Southern meat-and-threes on the same menu that offers his family’s hummus. It is a marvel; it is unfamiliar and strange, and it tells a story of who he is, and of who we can be.
I asked Riyad to come speak to a class I teach on food, faith, and identity. My students read his story, 82 and I asked them to be ready to welcome him into our classroom space and be good hosts to our guest. Riyad flipped that script; he transformed my classroom into a site where he was the host and we were his guests. He served us hummus, salad, and cookies. In that space, students, with perspectives on immigration shaped by narratives of danger and threat, ate Riyad’s food, heard his story, and experienced his welcome. As evident from their reflections, this experience made their views a little more complicated. Immigration was no longer a disembodied controversy. The students had eaten with and had been shown hospitality by an immigrant; the experience disarmed and changed them.
Another recent encounter prompted these reflections. In the fall of 2016, the community of faith to which I belong decided to partner with World Relief to form one of their Good Neighbor Teams, designed to welcome newly arrived refugee families as they settle in cities across the United States. 83 This community of faith is committed to a theology and ethic of hospitality, attuned especially to those who are excluded or marginalized. Creating a Good Neighbor Team felt like a natural outgrowth of those commitments. Our team went to trainings and assessed the level of need we were prepared to help meet. By early 2017, we had been assigned to assist a Syrian family of five, who had spent several years in a refugee camp outside Syria. I was excited about the chance to help them settle into an apartment. As mentioned above, the World Relief office in our city closed in early 2017. Disappointed but undeterred, knowing we would soon have to carry on without our caseworker and translator, our team continued preparations for welcoming this family. On the evening we were scheduled to meet them, we gathered, eager and nervous, mindful of the language barrier and afraid of offending with a cultural faux pas. We walked up the stairs to the family’s apartment with a few things we knew they might need, ready to take notice of other items we could bring later. The moment the door opened—shoes removed, halting but effusively friendly greetings in Arabic and English made, homemade cakes and other Syrian treats passed around—one thing became clear to me: they were not the guests here; we were. They were the ones making a “wider ‘at homeness’” possible for us. 84
Perhaps the best-known and most-cited text in the Gospel of Luke is the parable known as the story of “the good Samaritan.” It is so familiar, yet it exists across such a great cultural and temporal remove that its message is often diluted. When read carefully, this story does not comfort. Indeed, it intends to make those from privileged social locations squirm. Much like society today, the world Jesus inhabited . . . was ordered by boundaries with specific rules regarding how Jews should treat Gentiles or Samaritans, how priests should relate to Israelites, how men should treat women, and so on. Because the boundaries allowed for certain groups to establish their positions, power, and privilege, maintaining the boundaries was vital to social order . . . By depicting a Samaritan as the hero of the story, therefore, Jesus demolished all boundary expectations. Social position—race, religion, or region—count for nothing . . . . Anyone who has compassion and stops to help is his neighbor.
85
By the end of the story, Jesus turns the lawyer’s question back on him and has “turned the issue from the boundaries of required neighborliness to the essential nature of neighborliness.” 86 This interpretation of the story resonates with eerie similarity to dynamics in the US South, where lines of social status and function continue to define. To engage in true hospitality, a disruption of those expectations must occur. We must be able to see the stranger as the host, as the hero of the story, whether that stranger is the newly arrived refugee, the immigrant, or the one with unfamiliar religious commitments. The World Relief program in which my community of faith participated is called a Good Neighbor Team. The intent is for us to be good neighbors; however, we experienced the reversal and paradox that Jesus expresses in the parable of the “good” Samaritan: these new friends acted as neighbors to us.