Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter by Christopher Cameron Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Author:Christopher Cameron, Phillip Luke Sinitiere [Christopher Cameron, Phillip Luke Sinitiere]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Reference, History, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, African-American Studies, Military
ISBN: 9780826502094
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

“A Song That Speaks the Language of the Times”

Muslim and Christian Homiletic Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Need for a Spiritual Vocabulary of Admonition

Marjorie Corbman

In a radio interview in February 2016, Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, elaborated on her vision of the “spiritual” core of the movement. Standing on the side of Black lives, Cullors averred, is “spiritual work,” a “healing work.” This transformative commitment, she went on, makes it possible to imagine Black life: “Our imagination has only allowed for us to understand black people as a dying people. We have to change that. That’s our collective imagination. Someone imagined handcuffs; someone imagined guns; someone imagined a jail cell. Well, how do we imagine something different that actually centers black people, that sees them in the future? Let’s imagine something different.” As such, the movement represents more than a campaign for changes in policy. In its objective, in Cullors’s description, of “rehumanizing” the dehumanized collective imagination, Black Lives Matter is grounded in the “deeply spiritual” work of “healing justice.” At the same time, Cullors referred to the complicated relationship between mainstream Black institutional churches and contemporary activists in the Black Lives Matter movement, many of whom, as women or as LGBTQ+ individuals, have “been pushed out of the church.”1 Cullors’s statements here are consistent with Almeda Wright’s analysis of the continuity of the Black Lives Matter movement’s ambivalent relationship to religious institutions with historical Black social activism, despite popular conceptions of the civil rights period. Wright demonstrates both that the Black activist movements of the 1960s had a more complicated and at times antagonistic relationship with religious institutions than is commonly narrated and that Black youth activists today are actively engaged in drawing connections between faith and activism even despite these difficulties.2

Cullors’s interpretation of the work of “rehumanizing” the dehumanized imagination as a Black spiritual praxis that can occur in concert with or independent from traditional mainstream Black religious institutions shares much in common with religious scholar Anthony B. Pinn’s description of African American religion as a “quest for complex subjectivity” not primarily defined by the centuries-long history of white American objectification of Black humanity.3 Pinn defines this longing for “complex subjectivity” as the desire to break free from the “fixed forms of identity” derived from American racial hierarchies in order to cultivate a sense of multidimensional personal and communal identity liberated at heart from the ever-present “ghosts of dehumanization” haunting Black consciousness.4 Pinn argues that by framing study of Black religious institutions, beliefs, and practices in this way, scholars can avoid reducing Black religious identity to its historically dominant “institutional and doctrinal manifestations,” highlighting to the contrary the rich and variegated creativity of Black communities in America in envisioning a broader “life meaning” for Black people than that assigned to them by American racial violence and domination.5

Pinn’s framework for interpreting Black religion, like Cullors’s in the 2016 interview, and this volume on the whole, offers an

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