Intimacy Across Borders: Race, Religion, and Migration in the U.S. Midwest

2. Two Lives

2 | Two Lives In a 1948 report titled “Racial and National Apartheid in the Bible,” South African politician E. P. Groenewald proclaimed that “the total separation of races or apartheid was the only just policy for South Africa because God had ordained the diversity of humanity. . . . ​ God willed that different people groups should live apart and maintain their cultural purity” (quoted in Kuperus 88). Church and state, scripture and the law, worked together to deny the desires produced through everyday intimacies—indeed, to deny the possibility that these intimacies would occur. As the National Party rose to power, one of the first pieces of legislation it saw passed was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, followed quickly by the Immorality Acts of 1950, which prohibited sexual relationships between people of different races.1 Purporting to speak on behalf the “Other” and for the retention of their “diversity,” the Dutch Reformed revealed their fear of racial mixture as well as their hypocrisy, for this mixture was created in no small part through colonization’s coerced encounters. To acknowledge intimacy as part of this history, however, would show the historical contingency of their claim to be God’s chosen people. “God’s people” could retain that title only if they could show a clear difference from Others, a difference that would obviously begin to blur through sexual intimacies 36 | chapter 2 and the production of mixed-race children. The child is the visual representation and reminder of the act of sex, the literal sign of bodies coming together. A similar deployment of Christianity and the law can be found in the United States a decade later, when Judge Leon M. Bazile ruled that “Almighty God created the races of White, Black, Yellow, Malay, and Red, and He placed them on separate continents. . . . ​And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no such cause for such marriages. . . . ​ The fact that He separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”2 It was Virginia in 1959, and Brazile found a married couple—Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman—guilty of violating a 1924 statute entitled “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” which prohibited interracial marriage and also declared that children born within such a marriage were illegitimate . They were sentenced to one year in jail, though the judge gave them the “option” of avoiding jail if they agreed to leave the state and not return for twenty-five years. The Supreme Court of Appeals in Virginia affirmed the decision. Finally, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, reversed the decision, ruling that state laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional and thus invalidating such laws in fifteen states. In both South Africa and the United States, Christianity was powerfully deployed to legislate desire, revealing just how threatening sexual intimacies and pleasures are to a certain kind of belief in God and nation. This chapter attempts to capture something of the relationship between the structural and the personal to which I referred in the introduction —to trace the tenuous but nevertheless powerful ways in which religious doctrine shapes bodily desires precisely because it fears the consequences of their eruption into everyday life. Intimacy, as I have argued , is a spatial concept, and it was in fact through the regulation of space that the apartheid government enforced its anti-miscegenation laws. The Population Registration Act of 1950 required each South African to be classified and registered according to racial characteristics; the Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned people of different races to specific living areas. The government did its best to ensure that the kinds of face-to-face encounters that produce desire—that occur at school, clubs, sporting events, and social activities—would not take place. Judge two lives | 37 Bazile acted on similar spatial premises when he told Loving and Jeter to leave the state: They were reminders that desire transgresses the law, even as it remains subject to its punishments. In the first part of this chapter, I juxtapose the teachings of the Reformed Church’s Heidelberg Catechism, the confessional most used in my catechism and Sunday school classes, with other experiences of my youth, illustrating the clear yet complex relationship of doctrine and desire . In the next part, I explore aspects of my husband Grant’s youth as he grew up as a...