TRACES OF BLACK FREEDOM IN THE MACHINE: ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF DIGITAL BLACK RELIGION

There was a time when one wanted to learn about Black religion you went to church, the Black Church to be more specific. The “all-in-one agency” which W.E. B. DuBois described the Black Church as certainly operated as a centralized and essential aspect of Black life. Its networks have come to signify Black believers’ emancipatory visions since its beginning during slavery in America. Today Black users’ contemporary engagement with digital technology has both broadened and complicated the scholarly understanding of the Black Church and Black religion to include more than its Christian manifestation. A number of works provide important theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of black digital use, digital structures of inequality, and counter-discourse production. On the topic of digital religion, works have emphasized the importance of digital technology in mediating religious experience. Yet, despite findings that people of African descent are often early adopters of technology, at the intersections of blackness, religion, and digital technology scholarly work remains sparse. This paper provides both a survey and framework for the study of digital Black religion. The work of Black religious media scholars is paired with that of Heidi Campbell and others writing on digital religion to offer a needed approach to the articulation and study of digital Black religion as a tradition rooted in notions of freedom.

Black Religious Studies, Misogynoir, and the Matter of Breonna Taylor’s Death

This article reflects on the matter of state-sanctioned death in Black religious studies, with the murder of Breonna Taylor as its central focus. It examines how scholars of Black religion engage with the issues of state-sanctioned murder, antiblackness, and misogynoir, and it endeavors to underscore ways for Black male* scholars of Black religion to respond to the religious experiences and deaths of Black women and Black people of all gendered experiences. This article’s central claim is that if Black male* scholars of Black religion continue to underscore how Black religion has been a catalyst for Black liberation without attention to how cisheteropatriarchy functions as antiblackness, then we ultimately will be unable to speak the name of Breonna Taylor in earnest.

The Diminished Public, and Black Christian Promotion of American Civic Ideals

Black public activism has been guided largely by black affinities toward the U.S. Constitution, including its core democratic liberalist premises. This range of constitutionally defined political possibilities has both animated (and confined) a sense of public imagination and agency for many black Christians. Divergences and convergences between black religion-based public confidence and dissent are examined here, with reference to three paradigmatic approaches: (1) civil religious patriotism; (2) religious counter-publics; and (3) socio-religious liminality and semi-publics. Contrasts and continuities between these approaches are examined with attention to the impact of these approaches on a beleaguered and diminished American public realm and their relative affirmations or negations of broad understandings and undertakings of public purposes.

The Politics of Interdependent Independence in Black Religion: The Case of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal Priest

In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.

Centering Black Catholic Religio-Racial Identity, Revealing White Catholicism

In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld presents numerous instances when members of religio-racial movements contested the racial classificatory system provided by the federal government and confronted state administrators with their own alternative religio-racial identities. For Weisenfeld, these sorts of exchanges highlight, first and foremost, Black agency in religio-race making. But, as she indicates, they also make visible the contours of religio-racial whiteness as state administrators struggled to defend the status quo. In this article, I focus on how Black contestation and confrontation with racial hierarchy can reveal the racial whiteness operating beneath the surface of normative “religion.” This article draws on sources ranging from a police surveillance report to angry letters from white Catholics in order to argue that Black Catholics interrupted the presumed normativity of white Catholic religious life and, in so doing, revealed white Catholicism as a racial formation.

Black Religion and Black Power: The Nation of Islam’s Internationalism

The Nation of Islam’s influence has extended beyond the United States. This Black American Muslim movement has used the intersection of race and religion to construct a blueprint of liberation that has bonded people of African descent throughout the Diaspora. Their transnational dimensions and ideas of freedom, justice and equality have worked to challenge global white imperialism and white supremacy throughout the 20th century and beyond.