Focusing on the intellectual artifacts of the earthly polis, we miss the formative power of its rituals. This is the inconvenient truth that is pressed upon us by the new black theology of Willie Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Brian Bantum, for example.38 The church's capitulation to ideologies of race will be a case study of our assimilation by earthly-city liturgies despite our best arguments and convictions.