The Lure of Power: Process, Affect, and Emergences of Christian Supremacy in a Religiously Diverse World

Power is affective and consequential: its material effects often serve as evidence of the relations of a particular cultural context, historical period, or geographical location. Conceptions of divinity, often envisaged as ultimate or total power, affect both human-divine and human-human relations; further, if divine power is imagined as Christian, then relations between Christians and religious others will be duly influenced. Thus, I aim to explore “violence, nonviolence, and the margin” through attention to the ways that open theologies and process thought, in the lineage of Alfred North Whitehead, can both disrupt hierarchies that materialize relations of margin-center but also, perhaps unintentionally, reify or reinscribe similar relations. With reference to feminist process theologians, as well as queer and affect theorist Sara Ahmed, I will contend that a reification and consolidation of uncreative, violent, and/or destructive forms of power might occur especially if Christian theological imaginings are at play.