It isn't nowhere to them

I was watching one of those competitive cooking shows the
other night with my six year old daughter Emma. The challenge in that
particular episode involved taking the chefs out to (as they called it)
“the middle of nowhere” and having them butcher a pig and cook it over a
fire they built from wood they gathered. I found the whole thing to be
amusing, but Emma was visible confused by what they had said. She
asked me, “How can they be in the middle of nowhere? Someone must know
where they are. They had to get there somehow, so there must be roads
and towns nearby. I bet the people who live there know where it is; it
isn’t nowhere to them.”

It is in our nature to trivialize the other. To redefine what is
precious to others according to our point of view. So what is home to
someone becomes nowhere under a certain gaze. It is this tendency to
redefine the other or the space of the other in light of our own image
or interests that shaped the entire westward expansion of the American
nation. If the land was redefined as wilderness or frontier – a wild
space that needed to be tamed by those with the science and skills to do
so – as opposed to being someone else’s home, then it was not only
permissible but our duty to claim that nowhere as our own.

The same story plays out in the religious realm. Call a place or a
group of people godforsaken or simply in need of receiving (and
incapable of giving) ministry and their identity changes. I’ve been
reading recently of the history of Hispanic churches in Texas where this
dynamic was in evidence. The studies I read demonstrated that the
denominations that started mission churches in what was then Mexico did
their best to Anglicize those they converted. The Mexicans (who when
the border shifted became Mexican-Americans) were expected to accept
hymns, liturgies, and preaching styles in an imposed cultural idiom.
They were barred from attending seminary and therefore from serving in
leadership in those denominations – in the eyes of the traditional
denominations their identity as other was as needy inferior. Outsiders
defined their somewhere as a religious nowhere in need of being shaped
and formed in an Anglo image. It is no wonder then that many Mexicans
eventually rejected traditional denominational churches and flocked to
fundamentalist churches that didn’t strip them of their culture or their
dignity, but instead provided space for such things like indigenous
expressions of music, preaching training for laypeople, and the respect
of communal self-definition in worship.