Derrida, Agamben, Wynter

This chapter explores the way race and religion are articulated together in the work of leading critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. It probes how these theorists stand on the border between philosophy of religion and theology, and it argues that it is only because of secularist assumptions that this divide between outsider’s philosophy of religion and insider’s theology can be maintained. For Derrida, both religion and race function as loose threads that can be pulled in order to unravel a system of thought. For Agamben, the protagonist of modernity, homo sacer, is both racialized and sanctified. Yet Derrida and Agamben’s accounts are skewed by a Eurocentrism and a failure to take religious ideas sufficiently seriously. The black feminist Sylvia Wynter offers an antidote, similarly linking race and religion but doing so in a way that attends to how racialization is produced theologically and goes hand in hand with patriarchy. Wynter’s work implies that philosophy of religion that refuses secularism is always black theology and that black theology must engage seriously with questions in philosophy of religion.

Baldwin

The black American writer James Baldwin famously broke with his youthful formation as a preacher, transferring his creative energies from the pulpit to the pen. The chapter argues that Baldwin’s literary endeavors can be read as black theological reflection—not in the sense that they employ theological images and tropes but in the deeper sense that they engage with theological ideas. Specifically, the chapter argues that Baldwin puts forward a black negative theology: He argues that black theology goes wrong when it tries to make positive claims about God, it goes right when it reflects on God’s continuing influence despite our inability to name God accurately. In other words, Baldwin presents a way of doing black theology in a context of secularism, where religion is managed or excluded. The chapter further argues, however, that Baldwin himself falls prey to the dangers of secularism when he prescribes love to solve the theological problem he diagnoses without sufficient attention to judgment.

Cone

James Cone is broadly recognized as the founding figure of black theology, but the chapter argues that Cone’s work after the early 1970s takes a subtle secularist turn. In his earliest, most powerful writings, Cone embraces paradox. Blackness is at once empirical reality and ontological symbol. Hope is at once this-worldly and other-worldly. The agent of historical change is at once the human and God. These and many other paradoxes echo the central paradox of Cone’s work: Jesus Christ is at once human and divine. This chapter argues that Cone’s early work proposes for black theology an aesthetics of paradox that short-circuits both white supremacy and secularism. However, as the conversation about black theology expanded, and as Cone’s work itself developed, paradox was abandoned in a misguided effort at inclusiveness. As black theologians saw parallels between anti-black oppression and other forms of oppression, and as they explored the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, migration, and other issues, black theology became tethered to worldly concerns. This chapter ponders whether it might be possible for black theology to be responsive to multiple and intersecting oppressions while also embracing a decidedly theological idiom that takes paradox as its heart.

Coda: The Birth of the Black Church

This essay reflects on the meaning of black religious community in light of the critique of black secularism performed. When paradox and tradition, sainthood and messianism, hope and love, and most of all blackness and theology are purged of the distortions wrought by secularism, what does that mean for black religious life? How can black theology be renewed in the wake of the critique of secularism? Challenging Eddie Glaude’s contention that the black church is dead, this essay shows that black religious thinkers have long understood the black church theologically. Doing shows how the black church is constantly being reborn.

The Racial Messiah: On Huey P. Newton

While the Black Panther Party has often been presented as the secularist reaction to the politically ineffective religiosity of the civil rights movement, religious histories, symbols, and concepts are closely connected with the Panthers and particularly with their photogenic leader, Huey P. Newton. Reading the iconography of Newton along with Seale’s hagiography, Seize the Time, and Newton’s own Revolutionary Suicide, this chapter suggests that the Panthers offer a black theological aesthetics that has political implications. Moving between an analysis of Newton and attempts at political reflection made by white critics, particularly Raymond Geuss, this chapter also makes a case for black theology that takes political practice seriously, that takes political practice as a form of theological practice, in contrast to those who would simply apply abstract theological concepts to political problems.

What Is Black Organizing?

There has been much scholarly attention paid to faith-based community organizing. Such organizing efforts often understand themselves as “broad-based,” drawing support from a range of religious communities, racial groups, and neighborhoods. In doing so, these organizing efforts often elide the specificity of racial and religious difference. This chapter draws on feminist critiques of community organizing traditions to develop a black theological critique—and the beginnings of an alternative approach to community organizing that draws on the longstanding organizing traditions already present in black communities. By bringing together secular and religious traditions of black organizing, and by coupling black organizing with black theological reflection, this chapter shows how black community organizing can move beyond pragmatic appeals that sideline racial and religious identity.

Mbembe

The Cameroon-born political theorist Achille Mbembe has produced a body of work that deeply engages with Christianity: the role of Christianity in postcolonial and particularly African contexts, the role of Christianity in securing Europe’s self-image, and the role of Christian ideas in providing a framework for postcolonial resistance. In Mbembe’s most recent work, he has turned his critical apparatus from postcolonial contexts to blackness more generally, engaging with questions of race and religion across Africa and the diaspora. This chapter argues that Mbembe’s work offers promising resources for black theology, but it also has crippling limitations because of underlying secularist assumptions. Mbembe helpfully diagnoses postcolonial and black contexts as suffering from what is effectively theological heresy: a distorted relationship with ultimate authority brought about by colonialism and racialization. While Mbembe’s diagnosis deeply engages with theology, his prescription is secularist, embracing plurality that black experience is said to model. The chapter juxtaposes Mbembe’s reflections on colonial and racializing heresy with theologian John Milbank’s reflections on secularist heresy to explore the limitations and possibilities of each.

Introduction

Malcolm X introduced a distinction between the black masses, “field Negros,” and black religious elites, “house Negros.” This essay argues that black secularists occupy the role once filled by black religious elites. Drawing together the insights of secularism’s critics and the best insights of black theologians, this essay suggests that new energy could be infused into black theology if black secularism is directly addressed and criticized. It outlines the new task of black theology: to unapologetically embrace blackness and religion.

The Race of the Soul: On Gillian Rose

This chapter focuses on the British social theorist and Jewish convert to Christianity Gillian Rose. What lessons can we learn about the difficulties of theorizing blackness from Rose’s reflections on her Jewishness and her gender? The chapter argues that Rose points to useful resources for challenging racializing logics, but that Rose’s focus on the racialized soul limits the possibility of struggle growing out of racialized communities. The chapter asks what it might mean to be “too black to be white and too white to be black” (Rose considered herself “too Jewish to be Christian and too Christian to be Jewish”), exploring the complications of black theological reflection when the boundaries of race blur at the same time the boundaries between the secular and the sacred blur.

For What Are Blacks to Hope?

Recent theorizing in black studies, under the label Afro-pessimism, argues that hope for ending racial injustice is misguided. Racism is deeply woven into the metaphysics, or onto-theology, of the West—an argument that is made both through readings of philosophical texts and through empirical observation, contrasting the conditions faced by blacks with other ethnic groups. This challenge has not been substantially addressed by black theologians, who often romanticize the hope implicit in, for example, slave spirituals. This chapter points to theological responses to secularization as offering a model for black theological responses to racial injustice. According to Edward Schillebeeckx, secularization purged theology of false hopes while also orienting theologians to the future. This chapter explores what it might mean for Afro-pessimist insights to purge black theology of false hopes, and it asks what might remain of Christian hope after this purgation.