Recently, one Catholic university held an event titled “Rejecting White Christianity,” which headlined a speaker who claimed to those in attendance that white people should be forced to “crucify their whiteness” and commanded the others to “ethically lie” in order to make amends for all past wrongs.
As reported by The College Fix, Carlow University, the school in question, brought in Dr. Miguel De La Torre, a professor of social ethics and “Latinx studes” from the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, to speak this past Sunday. The Fix reported, after reviewing a recording of the speech from De La Torre, that the professor “began his presentation by lambasting evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump.”
“When eight out of ten white evangelicals voted for a person who is completely against everything Christianity stands for, I don’t know what Christianity they are practicing,” exclaimed De La Torre. “But I want nothing to do with that Christianity.”
The speaker then went on to talk about the overall differences between “white theology and ethics” and “Latinx ethics,” reportedly highlighting that “white” does not refer to skin color but to ” ontological concept,” stated the report from the Fix.
“Those of us who are colored, some of us can also be white. But the good news is there is salvation,” stated De La Torre. Further along in his speech, he reportedly went on to state that salvation means “we [who are colored] have to crucify our colonized minds, and for our white brothers and sisters, they need to crucify their whiteness.”
De La Torre claimed to reject “hope,” by claiming it was just a white concept, reported the outlet.
“We embrace Euro-centric concepts like hope because it helps to pacify the oppressed during their oppression,” he stated. “It leads to spiritual liberation, and ignores physical liberation.”
“I’m defining hope through my own Latino roots. In Spanish, hope is esperanza, esperanza comes from the word esperar, which means ‘to wait.’ And we’re not quite sure what we’re waiting for, or how long we’re waiting for—and what we’re waiting for may never come. This hope in Spanish does not mean the same thing in English,” he continued.
He then went on to explain that hope was just “a middle-class excuse to do nothing.”
De La Torre stated that he uses what he claims is a “trickster ethic” in order to change society to his views of the world. This ethic, he claimed, seems to include “how to ethically lie so we can discover what is true, how to ethically steal so we can feed those who are hungry…[and] how to disrupt the structures that have trained us to oppress ourselves and to take upon our body our own discipline.”
“This empire was built on stolen resources and cheap labor,” he continued. “So hospitality is really the wrong word. What we need is restitution…By seeing this dilemma through the eyes of the margin, we come to a very different understanding of what the Christian response should be.”
One conservative nonprofit and Catholic watchdog group, TFP Student Action, stood against the event, claiming that De La Torre “advocates the overturning of order and morals by violent means.”
The public relations and communications manager for Carlow University, Sean McFarland, stated to the Fix that “viewpoints of lecturers should not be taken as either an endorsement or opposition of how the University feels about a particular issue”
“Rather, the intent of our university’s liberal arts tradition is to expose students to a variety of worldly perspectives and encourage them to think critically and individually on how they feel about the topic(s) in question,” he concluded.
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