Interviewed April 14, 2022
New College Berkeley would like to introduce you to the newest members of our Advisory Board. In this post, we talked to Professor Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor at UCLA’s Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Asian American Studies. Dr. Romero wrote The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (now in paperback) and Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity Robert was interviewed about Brown Church in the New Books Network Podcast on June 3, 2022. Have a listen!
We caught up with Robert in April and he shared the following with us.
1. Please tell us a bit about your background, who and what shaped you, and how your faith informed your calling.
I was born in East Los Angeles to a Chinese immigrant mother and Mexican immigrant father, and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. I grew up in both the Chinese and Latino churches, but Jesus radically got a hold of my life when I was a first year law student at Berkeley in 1996. Through that experience everything changed for me. Before that my aspirations were to be a rich corporate lawyer, live in a big house, drive a fast car, and become governor of California. I felt Jesus gently but clearly knocking on the door of my heart telling me: You've never asked me what I want to do with your life. In response, I went to a park bench near my parents' house and asked God: What do you want to do with my life? I can become an attorney, but what kind for your sake? I can go to seminary and become a pastor. Or, here's a wild and crazy idea, I can get a Ph.D. after law school and become a professor. After many months of discernment I felt God's calling to become a professor and to use the professorial platform to address issues of race and Christianity. I've been on that journey for the past 25 years.
2. Could you share a bit about your most recent book, Brown Church? How does this book relate to your academic, scholarly, and faith-related goals? What are you working on now?
While earning tenure for UCLA I also became a pastor. Together with my wife Erica, we began a ministry called Jesus for Revolutionaries which focused on helping students understand the relationship between Jesus and justice. At the same time of doing this ministry, my academic research focused on a different topic--the history of Asians in Latin America. After getting tenure I felt God calling me to bridge my research and ministry. I distinctly remember the moment. I was remodeling my kitchen and full of dry wall, from head to toe. I was listening to one of Lauryn Hill's albums where she says that she was tired of leaving two-thirds of herself outside of the door in the music industry. She was referring to her Christian faith. That really resonated, and I said to myself: I'm tired of leaving two-thirds of myself outside the academic door. That led me to write "Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity."
The pastoral problem which "Brown Church" addresses is the flight of thousands of young Latinas/os from the church today. Many are leaving because they experience a "spiritual borderlands" in which they believe that Christianity is incompatible with pressing issues of racial justice and the discipline of Ethnic Studies. To them, I say: If you feel like you don't belong--you actually do, to the Brown Church: that prophetic ecclesial community of Latinas/os which has contested racial and social injustice in Latin America and the United States for the past 500 years. As such, “Brown Church” is a multivalent category, encompassing ethnic, historical, theological, spiritual, and socio-political dimensions. In every instance of racial and social injustice in Latin America and the United States over the centuries, the Brown Church has arisen to challenge the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo. Collectively, the Brown Church has challenged such great evils as the Spanish Conquest and Spanish colonialism, the “sistema de castas,” Manifest Destiny and U.S. settler colonialism in the Southwest, Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, and the current exploitation and marginalization of undocumented immigrants.
Together with my good friend, Jeff Liou, I'm currently working on a book titled, CRT in Christianity: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation (forthcoming, Baker Academic in spring 2023). I also have another book slated with IVP Academic on "Brown Theology" and a co-authored book on contemporary models of the Sanctuary Movement with NYU Press.
3. Please share one hope you have for the future of Christians and the church?
I hope that the US church will find healing through the global church over the next several decades. Fueled by an aging constituency and political division, the days of Euro-American Christianity are waning. Jesus as proxy for partisan political skirmishes on the right or left strays far from the historic Christian message, and the effects are manifest in the precipitous downturn of white evangelical Christianity, mainline Christianity, and even Euro-American Catholicism. Notwithstanding such numerical decline, the two brands of white nationalistic Christianity and progressive Christianity will continue to duke it out in the coming decades because they represent powerful interests and are fueled by significant financial resources. Dissatisfaction with these two dominant church approaches is expressed most clearly along generational lines as millions of young adults are rejecting formal religious affiliation. Ecclesial hope springs, however, from the diversity explosion which will increasingly define North American church life and society. Christian immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia possess thriving faith and vast treasuries of community cultural wealth which hold promise to revive the church of North America and address the most divisive cultural and political issues of the future.