Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion

By Anthony B Pinn

Given the unique history of African Americans and their diverse religious flowering in Black Christianity, the Nation of Islam, voodoo, and others, what is the heart and soul of African American religious life?

As a leader in both Black religious studies and theology, Anthony Pinn has probed the dynamism and variety of African American religious expressions. In this work, based on the Edward Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, England, he searches out the basic structure of Black religion, tracing the Black religious spirit in its many historical manifestations.

Pinn finds in the terrors of enslavement of Black bodies and subsequent oppressions the primal experience to which the Black religious impulse provides a perennial and cumulative response. Oppressions entailed the denial of personhood and creation of an object: the negro. Slave auctions, punishments, and, later, lynchings created an existential dread but also evoked a quest, a search, for complex subjectivity or authentic personhood that still fuels Black religion today.

In this 20th anniversary edition of Pinn's groundbreaking work, the author offers a new reflection on the argument in retrospect and invites a panel of five contemporary scholars to examine what it means for current and future scholarship. Contributors include Keri Day, Sylvester Johnson, Anthony G. Reddie, Calvin Warren, and Carol Wayne White.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506474748

Book preview

Cover Page for Terror and Triumph

Terror and Triumph

THE 2002 EDWARD CADBURY LECTURES

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM, UNITED KINGDOM

Terror and Triumph

The Nature of Black Religion

20th Anniversary Edition

Anthony B. Pinn

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

TERROR AND TRIUMPH

The Nature of Black Religion

Copyright © 2022 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the King James Version.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Cover image: We Have Been Believers, 1949, Lithograph on wove paper © The Charles White Archives (Sourced by The Art Institute of Chicago through Art Resource)

Cover design: Kristin Miller

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7473-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7474-8

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To Dr. Charles Long, Dr. Gordon Kaufman, and the Ancestors

Contents

Preface to the Anniversary Edition

Preface

1. Look, a Negro! How the New World African Became an Object of History

Framing the Initial Contact

The African as a Problem: Phase One

The African as a Problem: Phase Two, or Slavery

Slavery and Dehumanization

Dehumanization and Postslavery America

Part One: Constructing Terror

2. How Much for a Young Buck? Slave Auction and Identity

Slavery and the Business of Production

The Middle Passage

The Other Middle Passage

Slave Auctions: Peddling Flesh

Slave Trading and Social Arrangements

Slave Auctions and Historical Displacement: Objects Defined

Slave Auctions as Ritual of Reference

3. Rope Neckties: Lynching and Identity

The Price of Freedom

Disenfranchisement and Movement

The Good Ol’ Days: Social Order and Popular Punishment

Blacks and the Practice of Lynching

Rope, Violence, and Social Control

Destruction of Flesh and the Containment of Chaos

Lynching as Ritual of Reference

Part Two: Waging War

4. Houses of Prayer in a Hostile Land: Responses of Black Religion to Terror

Blacks and Religion

The Art of Christianization

Blacks and Independent Religious Institutions

Religion, Socioeconomic Transformation, and Political Liberation

Religion, Conduct, and Aesthetics as Liberation

Spiritual Practices, Ecstatic Behavior, and Liberation

Theological Rhetoric as Liberation

5. Covert Practices: Further Responses of Black Religion to Terror

Blacks and Their Proper Religion

Religion and Socioeconomic Development as Liberation

Health and Aesthetics as Liberation

Ethical Conduct as Liberation

Theology of Special-ness as Liberation

Theological Anthropology on Its Head

Louis Farrakhan and the Nation’s Agenda

6. I’ll Make Me a World: Black Religion as Historical Context

Fragile Cultural Memory and the Study of Religion

Method, Part One: Archaeology as Metaphor and Practice

Method, Part Two: Archaeology and the Hermeneutic of Style

Hermeneutic of Style and the Body

Display of Black Bodies: Expressive and Decorative Culture

Bodies Celebrated: Visual Arts and Literature

Bodies in Motion: The Ethics of Perpetual Rebellion

Part Three: Seeking Triumph

7. Crawling Backward: Toward a Theory of Black Religion’s Center

Dehumanization and Subjectivity

Conversion Experience and Complex Subjectivity

Conversion and the Nature of Religion

Black Religion as Quest for Complex Subjectivity

Experiencing Religion

Why Is This Religion?

8. Finding the Center: Methodological Issues Considered

Psychology of Religion and Centering

Psychology of Religion and the Hermeneutic of Inner Meaning

History of Religions and the Hermeneutic of the Ontological Dimension

Art History and the Meaning of Things

Art Criticism—Talking about Things Hidden from Sight

An Interdisciplinary Venture, or Introducing Relational Centralism

Part Four: Critical Reflections

9. We Can Feel the Spirit in This! A Black Pentecostal, Black Atlantic Dialogue with Terror and Triumph

Robert Beckford

10. Reflections on Terror and Triumph at Twenty Years: Contributions and Lingering Questions

Keri Day

11. Blackness, Indigenous Africa, and the Essence of Black Religion in Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion

Sylvester Johnson

12. The Triumph of Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion

Anthony G. Reddie

13. Rituals of Reference: Anthony Pinn, Frantz Fanon, and Ontological Yearning

Calvin Warren

14. Capturing the Beauty of Materialism: Black Bodies, Ontic Desires, and Processes of Humanization

Carol Wayne White

Notes

Selected Bibliography

African-Derived Religious Practices

Art, Art Theory, and Art Criticism

Christianity

Cultural Criticism

Disenfranchisement

Islam and the Nation of Islam

Philosophy and Critical Theory

Religious Thought

Slavery and the Slave Trade

Theory of Religion

Index to the Main Text

Preface to the Anniversary Edition

The generous invitation to give the Edward Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham (UK) was the first occasion to systematically think through the issues that define Terror and Triumph. But my sense that there was a need to reevaluate theory and method for the study of Black religion—in a sense to bridge my training as a constructive theologian with my growing concerns more deeply associated with religious studies—predates these lectures. For example, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (1998) marked my early intervention—outside the clearing of space for serious consideration of religiosity beyond the culture of Black churches—in the form of a nascent comparative Black theology aiming to promote an alternate vocabulary and grammar for the religious within African American communities.¹ However, a more expansive theological grammar and vocabulary capable of holding in tension competing faith claims wasn’t enough. While I continue to value that move, and I hope it has been of use to the fields of religious studies and theological studies, it is limited to those traditions for which theological articulation means something. This is my way of saying it was an intellectual move that most clearly meant a mode of linking divergent religious traditions—that is, those modalities of thought/practice marked by doctrines, creeds, ritual structures, and hierarchies of involvement or those, like humanism, so new to the study of Black religion that they’d not achieved solidity of presentation in a way that excluded such considerations. That is to say, Varieties of African American Religious Experience assumes presentation of religiosity through certain structural markers and a particular guiding logic: for example, humanism is to religion as Black churches are to religion.

It didn’t go far enough. That project continued to assume too much. It failed to name and address dimensions of religiosity that can’t be funneled easily through the hermeneutics primarily in use—not even when framed in terms of extrachurch orientations offered by Charles Long in his brilliant Significations.² Without claiming history of religions, and without denying my theological inclinations, I wanted to think through the more psychological and affective considerations offered by Long and tie them to the sense of embodied functionality gained from my time as a student working with Gordon Kaufman.³ I don’t know that either Kaufman or Long saw themselves reflected in Terror and Triumph. And some of Long’s students made it clear that what I offered had little to do with Long’s work. However, such a critique, while it helped me in a variety of ways, misses the aim of the text. It wasn’t an effort to simply think like Long and Kaufman but rather an effort to think with them in order to come up with my own theoretical formulation of religion.

One of the questions guiding Varieties of African American Religious Experience—What are the commonalities between opposing modalities of religiosity?—is present also in Terror and Triumph. However, the turn to psychological and affective dimensions of the question pushed me to consider what is taking place below the historical markers—which is to say a more fundamental materiality of Black religion—and to consider what motivates what we have traditionally called Black religion. Attempting to avoid a problematic reductionism, I wanted to expose what I believed was an underlying prompt that takes concrete form in the data typically presented in the study of Black religion. Thinking about Long’s sense of two creations, and the effort to crawl back to the first creation, got me thinking about the making of Black beings—that is to say, the transformation of Africans into African Americans.

There was something there—in that transformation—that spoke to the creation of Black religion that reveals the outline of its meaning and intent. Not the Middle Passage—that death-dealing journey from familiar geography to foreign and brutal lands marked by the experience of a certain type of metaphysical warping that existing grammar and vocabulary of personhood was ill-equipped to express and explore—which gave some shape to the dwarfing of Black being that prompted a cultural response.⁴ But it didn’t mark the dehumanization bottom encountered in that (1) the uncertainty of their condition, the gap in the presentation of their new circumstances and relationship to whiteness, meant dehumanization wasn’t fully encountered on the ships. They were othered, but the process wasn’t completed on the boats; (2) the descendants of those who survived the Middle Passage didn’t have direct encounter with that watery experience of othering. I thought this push against the centrality of the Middle Passage might generate more critique than was the case. Perhaps that was due to the undeniable significance of what I pointed to as the moment of dehumanization (being radically othered) fully felt. The auction block—the ritual performance of objectification by means of which Black people are transformed into tools—marked, I argued and continue to believe, the fuller weight of dehumanization felt and borne. It is an early ritual of reference by means of which the otherness of Black people is solidified through public spectacle. And with the end of the institution of formal slavery, the auction block was followed by other rituals of reference that marked Black status—for example, lynching (and more recently, the cases of murder by police protested through the Movement for Black Lives, more popularly called Black Lives Matter).

My theorization of religion as the quest for complex subjectivity marks the othering experienced with the auction block, for example, as the impetus for the formation of Black religiosity. That is to say, I understood religion as the effort to constitute life meaning over against the warping of being forged through whiteness.

Over the years, in light of invaluable conversations and responses to the book, I’ve modified my thinking of this quest for complex subjectivity. I’ve rethought this theory of religion, and I offer this modification in a new book (Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together⁵). But for a variety of obvious reasons, I won’t say more than that. Putting those changes aside, religion as the quest for complex subjectivity was meant to theorize religion in a way that didn’t confine it to the trappings of performance but rather pushed behind those practices described and analyzed in so many books and articles. This is not to say Terror and Triumph dismisses traditions. To the contrary, it recognizes them—for example, Black churches and the Nation of Islam—while attempting to dig below them, which is to say I aimed to not simply uncover the historical manifestation of religion (i.e., traditions and their content) but also expose and name the underlying and more fundamental impetus that creates them. They are the historical manifestation of a more basic and foundational impulse. This is not to say more traditional studies (and there’s no judgment in my use of the language of traditional) aren’t valuable and needed. They are important. However, my argument was, and remains, that the study of Black religion has given little attention to this more fundamental framing—and to continue the point, it is this preoccupation with religious traditions often in an apologetic tone that shapes one reason religion has figured so poorly in Black studies. I would argue it is only as scholars of Black religion have stretched theoretically and looked below the surface of religious performance that religion has figured into new and innovative discussions of Blackness and Black life.⁶

Many assumed that my theorization only applied to Black religion and not to (white) religion. This isn’t the case. I utilize this theory in relationship to Black religion as a type of case study, but this quest for complex subjectivity is applicable across the cultural spectrum. The challenges are different—the threats to well-being aren’t the same. (If that wasn’t known, the recent murder of Black women, men, and children for simply being certainly points to this difference!) However, within the context of their social world and its challenges, all humans—I intended to argue—are involved in this quest; hence I was offering a general theory of religion, applied to a particular community.

What was picked up by respondents across communities was the unfinished nature of religion. In other words, religion as a quest for complex subjectivity doesn’t resolve circumstances—doesn’t produce fully formed humans. Moving against more general framings of religion in terms of freedom, liberation, transformation, and healing and health, religion as a quest for complex subjectivity has little room for a vocabulary and grammar of outcomes. The arts—beyond my early concern with hip-hop—helped me get at this shift in thinking.

There’s something about the visual arts that helps name and express the religious. I’m certainly not the first to note this, but I hoped to bring it into the study of religion in a different way. My goal wasn’t to look for traditional religious symbols and signs within the arts; rather, I aimed to learn from the arts how to see and speak about this quest. Pop art, for example, forced the question, What is art?⁷ Philosopher of art Arthur Danto in particular provided a way to theorize the visual questions prompted by certain forms of art such as pop art. And this thinking, along with other approaches, allowed the formation of a somewhat interdisciplinary framework grounded in considerations and cultural forms beyond the written word. This made sense when trying to understand the nature and meaning of religion for a population whose history entails a very, very long period during which they were denied systematic access to the written word—but who, despite this, continued to structure mechanisms for making meaning.

My interest in the arts continues and has grown to include a wider range of forms—for example, performance art or body art as a way to further engage the connotations and consequences of embodiment for understanding Black thought in a hostile world.⁸ In thinking religion with/through art, I not only wanted to actively decenter the written word as data, but I also wanted to give greater attention to the affective dimensions of religion that are better expressed through color and form. In addition, I saw (and continue to see) attention to the arts as a personal challenge—that is to say, a way to force myself to develop ideas beyond the old forms of jargon, exclusively, and to be open to the communicative demands of artistic expression. This is not to suggest that I have retooled and can now package myself as an art critic or philosopher of art. No, I remain a student of Black thought and life who works at the intersections of religious studies and theological studies but one who sees the value (if not necessity) in an expansive array of conversation partners and intellectual forms. All of this is what the text was meant to do—to think through religion in a way that would be generative of rich conversation.

What emerges between the covers of a book is meant to be captured in only a few suggestive words by the title of the volume. In my case, the title doesn’t accomplish this goal. I wanted it simply to be titled Wrestling History: The Nature and Meaning of Black Religion. For me that title captured a key element, an important consideration that spoke to what I perceived as the always incomplete nature of religion as a quest—lodged within historical arrangements. Terror, of course, frames what people of African descent encountered in North America—a geography defined by white supremacy and deadly anti-Black racism. In that way, Terror in the title works.⁹ However, Triumph speaks a promise that is inconsistent with my premise. There is no triumph; there is only struggle—rebellion—as effort unfulfilled. But in that struggle and in that push against death, there is what we might name a space of being in place against the intentions of white supremacy. Understood this way, my aim was to suggest that subjectivity is never secured, although it might be desired. But this isn’t a conclusion to circumstances; it is simply an unfilled push for more.¹⁰

The assurances offered within various traditions are too grand and are derived from a de/historicized grammar of faith demanding a vertical arrangement of considerations that functions despite (or because of) trauma on the horizontal plane of existence. By this I mean not to name redemptive suffering discourses but rather a general read akin to what William James might call the healthy-minded posture toward the world. As a religious attitude, healthy mindedness is practiced in a general sense as we, according to James, divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.¹¹ Mine, of course, isn’t a strict read of James’s take on this posture, and I’m sure some James scholars will object to my characterization.

Be that as it may, I would suggest that in the context of Black religion, it is a willful stance—one that doesn’t involve the inability to see the misery in the world but rather is a posture that refuses a certain discourse on it. Black religion, to the degree that it is healthy minded, doesn’t mean ignorance or avoidance of the misery inflected on Black bodies but rather indicates a refusal—against history—to see circumstances as defined by this abuse. In many instances, Black religion achieves this posture by assuming vertical relationships as trumping and redefining horizontal conditions. Put another way, there are forces at work that prevent historical conditions from having the final word—or the most penetrating statement concerning life. While not indicative of all Black christianities, for instance, one hears this in the extreme in some musically articulated theologies of second sight:

I want to live above the world,

Though Satan’s darts at me are hurled;

For faith has caught the joyful sound,

The song of saints on higher ground.¹²

Or according to the other tradition explored in Terror and Triumph, the Nation of Islam, the conditions of life for Black people are epistemologically situated and resolved—and do not represent Black people’s substance. The world, in a sense, is a poetic fiction narrated through white supremacy’s trickology, but the true circumstances of the original people are far different. And herein is the sunnier side. Malcolm X remarks,

So the religion that we have, the religion of Islam, the religion that Makes Us Muslims, the religion that The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is teaching Us here in America today, is designed to undo in our minds what the white man has done to us. It’s designed to undo the type of brainwashing that we have had to undergo for four hundred years at the hands of the white man in order to bring us down to the level that we’re at today. So when you hear us often refer to black in almost a boastful way, actually we’re not boasting, we’re speaking of it in a factual sense.¹³

Over the hope in outcomes generated by these and other traditions, religion as a quest for complex subjectivity offers no guarantees and doesn’t have a vocabulary with the capacity to speak of liberation or freedom in firm, historical terms. This sense of struggle as perpetual and the limits of religion (at least on the front of ethics) are explicit in Terror and Triumph, yet these ideas haunt my work from my dissertation moving forward.

Before I began seriously reading Albert Camus, I was reading Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, and W. E. B. Du Bois—and in this way I came to appreciate and embrace something of a moralist posture. For those who are familiar with some of my more recent writings, there are clues to my affinities for moralism even in Terror and Triumph. There are numerous ways in which this is the case, but the more important include (1) the unfinished nature of religiosity, (2) the centrality of absurdity, (3) the perpetual nature of struggle, and (4) suspicion regarding affirmative claims of the future.¹⁴ The title fails to convey this, although I think the content makes this clear—particularly where perpetual rebellion is explicitly addressed in the book.

There is something about religion as an unfulfilled yearning, or quest, that circumvents assurance. It acknowledges human desire for meaning but does so with no more energy than that with which it points out the absurdity of our encounter with the world this quest is meant to expose. Religion is a No! to dehumanization and othering encountered—but this doesn’t win the day. Hence religion as I’ve theorized it in this book isn’t a fix but rather a rebellion.

---

***

Over the years my clarity with respect to the implications of my argument has come into greater focus, and this wouldn’t have been possible without the many colleagues and friends who read and responded to the book in their research and teaching. And as an addition to the existing acknowledgments published so many years ago, I want to say thank you to all of those who—over the better part of twenty years—engaged this book, wrestled with it, and critiqued it. I and my work are better for their engagement.

In addition, my graduate students over the course of my almost two decades at Rice University have read and responded to Terror and Triumph. They have reworked it, sharpened it, and—when and where necessary—jettisoned its conceptual formulations. I am grateful to them all, and I am proud of their brilliant work and accomplishments. In addition, I’m appreciative to Will Bergkamp and the Fortress Press team for making available this twentieth anniversary edition. Moving from electronic files that are almost twenty years old to a Word document that can be reworked to accommodate alterations is no small effort. So I must thank my graduate student DeAnna Daniels and my colleague Maya Reine for all their hard work in reformatting and proofing the manuscript.

Family and friends are never far away during these writing ventures, and I want to say thank you to them for all the ways in which they have cared for, sustained, and spoke truth to me over the years. Finally, I want to thank my colleagues and friends who agreed to write the pieces critically engaging Terror and Triumph found at the end of the book. They are all busy, with their own projects to complete—and so I am honored they took time to contribute such thoughtful and engaging pieces to this volume. I’ve gained a great deal from their reflections, and I’m sure they will offer readers beyond me important insights that contextualize, clarify, and correct this book.

Preface

What does it mean to be Black and religious in the United States? What is the nature of Black religion? How does one speak about and investigate what appear to be multiple manifestations of Black religion? What is the religion in Black religion? That is, what is it that makes Black religion distinctive and distinguishable as a modality of experience?

This book represents my response to these questions, all of which stem from my earlier writings. Earlier I attempted to give some shape to my understanding of the diversity of Black religion through descriptive presentations of the varieties of Black religion, including at least one unlikely category—Black humanism.¹⁵ In presenting these traditions and their theological frameworks, my goal was to challenge monolithic and myopic depictions of religious experience in Black communities, depictions that take the path of least resistance by framing all discussion in terms of the Black Church. Although the Black Church has dominated the religious landscape of Black America, other traditions are nonetheless present and have played important roles in the lives of many. My objective, however, in the following pages is more ambitious than a description of the various forms of religion found within Black communities. The questions I posed earlier call for more than this. In fact, they push for a more general study of Black religion, one that gives more precise attention to the very nature and meaning of Black religion. Through the development of an interdisciplinary approach, I seek to articulate a vision of Black religion’s nature and meaning—in terms of both its primary structure and its historical manifestations in the institutions and movements—such as the Christian churches and the Nation of Islam—that typically come to mind when Black religion is mentioned. What I mean by such ideas as religion’s basic structure and historical manifestations of religion will, I hope, become clear.

My writings up to this point made addressing the issues contained in this volume mandatory. For instance, my effort to rethink the Black religion canon begs the question of religion’s nature.¹⁶ What does it mean to be religious? What distinguishes religious experience from other forms of experience? What is the nature of religion if it is not confined to the Christian faith? How does one study religion conceived in the broad terms generated by my book Varieties of African American Religious Experience? In this volume, I address these questions in a way that I hope extends the important theoretical and methodological work started by Charles Long several decades ago—a way of looking at the manner in which religion grows from the inside out.

Readers will note that the arrangement of the chapters seeks to make clear the necessary move from data to theory. That is, experience or raw material informs the theory and method of study. Therefore, the first chapter, the introductory essay, begins this project by briefly discussing the existential and ontological challenges of the enslavement process. Chapter 1 provides the necessary intellectual context for understanding the treatment of Black bodies presented in the next two chapters. In chapters 2 and 3, the making of the negro is extended to a discussion of acts of violence, what I call rituals of reference, used to keep Africans and their descendants within their proper place. Chapters 4 and 5 address an important question: How did Africans respond to the terror, dread, and anxiety produced by the slave system and these rituals of reference? I suggest that Black religion as manifested by the Black Church and the Nation of Islam, for example, is the primary response to this existential and ontological dread or terror. In chapter 6, I discuss the ways in which religion so understood has been studied. But is there more to religion than these historically defined modes of reaction? In chapter 7, I respond in the affirmative. Yes, these institutions and movements represent the historical context for a more central reality. The Black Church, the Nation of Islam, and other expressions of African American religion are manifestations of a more basic impulse, and this basic impulse—what I will define as the quest, or feeling, for complex subjectivity—is the central nature or core of Black religion. The final chapter addresses key issues associated with the theory of religion I promote in chapter 7.

While I believe this book provides important and, in many cases, unique perspectives on the nature and meaning of Black religion, only readers can assess the usefulness of the text. And although I am responsible for any shortcomings, many people helped make this book possible. With this in mind, I am grateful to the faculty of the University of Birmingham’s Department of Theology—particularly Professors Markus Vinzent, Emmanuel Lartey, Isabel Wollaston, and Robert Beckford—and the Division of Historical Studies, particularly Professor John Haldon, who extended the invitation to deliver the Edward Cadbury Lectures. Conversation with John Hick and Anthony Reddie also proved helpful. I am also grateful to the other members of the University of Birmingham community who made the time my wife and I spent in Birmingham so enjoyable.

I also thank my wife, C.J., because her support of my work and patience with my moodiness are a display of pure grace and love. I am indebted to her for her encouragement and vision, without which this and other projects would be far less meaningful.

Fortress Press has always supported my work, and I appreciate the encouragement and patience demonstrated by Michael West as well as Zan Ceeley and the other folks in Minneapolis. Macalester College’s provost made arrangements that allowed time to complete the writing of this book, and the Religious Studies Department allowed me to rethink my schedule in important ways. I am particularly grateful to Allen Callahan, who read the manuscript, raised important questions and possibilities, and encouraged my take on the study of religion. Thank you. And of course, I thank the students in my courses during the spring 2002 semester—Religion 43-01, Religion 53-01, African American Studies 10-01—for their encouragement and enthusiastic response to many ideas presented in this volume. Their questions and comments on early presentations of the book’s major themes were greatly appreciated. Other folks from the Macalester campus have been extremely supportive: thank you to Richard Ammons, Ahmed Samatar, Robbie Seals, and Ramon Rentas for welcomed breaks from work to enjoy conversation over a good meal or a game of pool. I am also grateful to Peter Paris and the members of the Pan-African Seminar, who, over the course of our time in Ghana and Kenya, helped me think through important themes and potential pitfalls. In particular, Katie Cannon encouraged and critiqued my work on the body in ways that helped me revise my conceptual framework. I also thank Phyllis Weiner for her help with my thought on and appreciation for modern art.

Charles Long and Gordon Kaufman, to whom this volume is dedicated, have inspired and challenged me to think beyond the easy categories, and I am grateful for their work and support of my efforts.

1

Look, a Negro!

How the New World African Became an Object of History

What is Black religion? To answer this question, I explore the unique circumstances and history of Black people in the United States. I identify a common quest and shared meaning in the rich variety of religious expressions that Black religion manifests.

Although the Black Church has dominated the religious landscape of Black America, other traditions are nonetheless present and have played roles in Black life. As historian of religions Charles Long states in an often-quoted passage, The Christian faith provided a language for the meaning of religion, but not all the religious meanings of the black communities were encompassed by the Christian forms of religion.¹ In other words, while the Black Church has held a prominent place, it is only one of many available modes of religious expression. The Nation of Islam and other traditions add a richness to the religious sensibilities of Black Americans. In other works, I have outlined the content of some forms of religion that thrive within Black communities. However, my objective here is to locate in the four-hundred-year odyssey of Black people in America and in the variety of their religious expressions and practices and institutions² a common core—the heart and soul of Black religious life.

Drawing from a number of disciplines, in this volume, I seek to articulate a vision of Black religion’s nature and meaning in terms of both its primary structure and its historical manifestations in institutions and movements that typically come to mind when Black religion is mentioned. But I must note at this point that attention to the historical manifestation of religion is here focused on the Black Church and the Nation of Islam. This should not be taken as an explicit (or even implicit) suggestion that only these two forms merit attention or that only these two modes of religious expression really count. I believe my earlier work demonstrates my interest in a full range of experiences of religion in Black communities. However, in pointing to these two traditions, and by extension the presence of Christianity and Islam in more general terms, I am able to give attention to the forms of religious experience that, in terms of popular imagination and memorable rhetoric, for good or ill, dominate the Black American landscape.³

To provide a description of Black religion, it is necessary to set the stage in sociohistorical terms. This first chapter does so through a brief discussion of the initial rationale for the African presence in North America, with a particular focus on the United States.⁴ Attention to the images, language, and attitudes that served to define the nature of the African as an object of history is important. It surfaces the underlying philosophical and ideological workings that inform the slave trade. Although there are other ways to develop such a discussion, I frame it in terms of white supremacy and its ramifications. The primary concern here is the description of ideas, ideals, and an aesthetic that constitute the workings of white supremacy as well as a description of this process with respect to the creation of the negro within what becomes the United States.⁵

Framing the Initial Contact

Cornel West has argued that a normative gaze or ideal of beauty, exhibited in the human form depicted in classical Greek art, came to be seen as superior during the age of exploration. By the 1600s, this theory of ideal form was applied in natural history as a way of categorizing and ranking races. The closer a race was in appearance to the Greek body, the nearer that race was to the ideal. It takes little imagination to realize that Africans, depicted as dark skinned, having typically thicker lips, broader noses, and more coarse hair, were far from this ideal form. By implication, Africans were inferior in beauty to Europeans, who more closely resembled this subjective ideal. The discipline of physiognomy connected physical attributes and character by arguing that a beautiful face, beautiful body, beautiful nature, beautiful character, and beautiful soul were inseparable.⁶ During the eighteenth century, phrenology (the reading of skull shapes) argued for a connection between the size of the skull and the depth of character. Although these disciplines said more about the likes and dislikes, idiosyncrasies and biases, of investigators than about humanity, they held sway over popular and academic attitudes. What is more, pseudosciences like phrenology gave these assessments legitimacy, an ontological and biological grounding, and thereby provided authority for racist depictions of Africans as by nature less than fully human.⁷

While the genealogy of racism offered by Cornel West is insightful, a more historically detailed account of the development of racism is given by Winthrop Jordan. And while West and Jordan may disagree on some points, they both understand racism as a modern invention. According to Jordan, ocean voyages underway at the dawn of the modern period brought the differences between groups of people into full view and fueled increased interest in making sense of