intellectual misapprehension of human reality. Hermeneutics, therefore,
must begin by attending to these intellectual failures. Long writes:
Friedrich Schleiermacher once remarked that every hermeneutical task must
begin with the misinterpretations. This is the critical principle in every her-
meneutic. And so we can do no better than to call to mind those misinter-
pretations which have brought us to this impasse. These misinterpretations
are as much a product of a “false consciousness” as they are the result of the
atrophy of the imagination—the inability of the interpreter to come to terms
with the reality of the obvious. 35In order for American culture and religion to embrace the possibility of a
new self-assessment, they must fi rst contend with the ways in which they
have misinterpreted human existence, for:
it is by going through the misinterpretations that a new awareness of the
problem will take shape. Any new interpretation will possess not only clarity
but depth insofar as it struggles seriously with the misinterpretations. 36However, Long fi nds that American culture is remarkably skilled at lying
to itself. For example, America’s self-narrative about its origin traffi cs
in religious symbols (e.g., Puritan theocracy, the Great Awakening, the
Promised Land, the New Israel), yet remains oblivious to the vast work of
erasure that must be accomplished in order to perpetuate this myth. These
false representations of America are “inadequate inasmuch as each renders
the religious reality of non-Europeans invisible or nonreal.” 37 It is for this
reason that Carter interprets Long as seeing America as “not simply a her-
meneutical situation [but] a hermeneutical problem.” 38
Long’s method, ultimately, is Derridean in its deployment of a decon-
structive movement where black religious experience—and, America
itself—is reinterpreted in a manner which destabilizes the status of
Western/European people, rationality, and culture as the grounding cen-
ter from which all “human thought gains validity and objectifi es empiri-
cal others, who lie outside the centering consciousness, as objects to be
thought, grasped, and thus known.” 39 This is the anthropological moment
in Long’s hermeneutics—a decentering of whiteness—that is prominent in
black religious refl ection, the attempt to alter “the prevailing theological
anthropology that positioned African Americans as ‘less than.’” 40 Western
civilization (or, its racial designation of “whiteness”) is conceived as “the
236 D.T. LOYNES