(Lillian Richter, “Spirituals” (1935-1943). Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York Public Library)

Judith Weisenfeld’s writings on African American religious history have been groundbreaking. Her research focuses on a range of topics, including the relation of religion to our understandings of race, the impact of urbanization on Black religious life, Black women’s religious experiences, religion in popular culture, and religion and medicine. Her next book will examine how mostly white psychiatrists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries diagnosed Black Americans as mentally ill because of their religious practices.

Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she is also associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality. I had the pleasure of speaking with her about her work and about a new initiative to support others who are examining intersections of race and religion.

Kali Handelman: First, I’d love to know what you’re working on presently. I know you are helping to lead a new program called “The Crossroads Project” about the “role religion has played in shaping African American history, culture, economics, politics, and social life and how Black religions have contributed to American life and culture” along with Lerone Martin and Anthea Butler, both scholars of African American religious history. What kind of work are you hoping to support with Crossroads?

Judith Weisenfeld: The Crossroads Project grew out of many years of conversations with Anthea Butler and Lerone Martin about ways to honor the work of foundational scholars in African American history like Albert J. Raboteau, who was my graduate advisor, James Melvin Washington, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, David Wills, Randall Burkett, and others. With the crossroads metaphor – inspired by the BaKongo cosmogram and the idea of crossroads as a site of spiritual power and productivity – we hope to capture the crossroads of religious traditions, cultural groups, scholarly disciplines, and public venues as all vital for understanding the impact of Black religious histories, communities, and cultures. The Crossroads Project provides opportunities for scholars at all career stages, and in an array of disciplines, to discuss works in progress and to engage in mentoring. The grant also allows us to fund work by artists and members of local religious communities who are exploring African American and African diaspora religion, past and present.

The more proximate and urgent motivation for establishing the project was our sense that today’s political climate calls for new and public approaches to interpreting the historical context for, and contemporary impact of, diverse manifestations of African American religion in American public life. We’re motivated to understand the full range of religious, political, and social expressions, including Rev. Dr. William Barber’s Moral Mondays and Poor People’s Campaign, the appeal of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement among prominent hip hop artists, the African diasporic religious influences in Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the support of some Black clergy for the Trump administration, the spiritual dimensions of the Black Lives Matter movement, the increasing prominence of African and African diasporic traditions among young African Americans, and more. It feels like an important time to be engaging these questions in public, and a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation allows us to support innovative research and artistic and cultural projects. We’re enormously excited about this component of the project.

So far, we have funded a range of projects, including a Crossroads Arts Fellow who is creating a sound installation to honor the loss of Black church musicians to HIV/AIDS, and another who is making a documentary on contemporary conjure practices that explores how African diaspora spiritual practice, knowledge, and memory has helped to address trauma. Our Community Stories Fellows grants will support several oral history projects, including one on the Dar-ul-Islam movement in the United States and another on religion in Houston’s Pan-African community. Our Research Fellows’ projects focus on Gospel Blues women, oral histories capturing religious interpretations of a 1953 tornado in Waco, Texas as divine retribution for a 1916 lynching, and a mapping project of Black cemeteries in South Carolina that were flooded and submerged in the late 1930s in the creation of the state-owned hydro-electric utility. These are only a few of the innovative projects we’ve funded so far. We just announced a second cohort of fellows with wonderful projects in the works.

KH: I’m also hoping you might share a bit about your forthcoming book, Spiritual Madness: American Psychiatry, Race, and Black Religions. The book is about how psychiatrists (mostly white doctors “treating” Black patients) in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to categorize certain kinds of religious experiences as “Black” and, in doing so, to identify what they saw as “the Black mind.” This “Black mind” was then the basis for defining both mental normalcy and illness, and was used to shore up white supremacist power and limit Black Americans’ freedom. The book (like your others) balances the artful marshalling of vast types of evidence as it also reckons with what was left out of the archive. I had the honor of reading part of a manuscript draft and can’t wait for this book to be out in the world. For now, though, it would be great to learn a bit about how you came to the project, what kinds of questions you went into the research process with, and, of course, what kind of argument you are making in this book?

JW: Thanks for your enthusiasm for the project, which has been challenging in several ways. I came to it from my research for my last book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration and reading psychiatric studies from the 1930s about the mental health of followers of Father Divine in Harlem. Divine’s followers, mostly African Americans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, affirmed him as God embodied and renounced family relations to live in sex-segregated, celibate residences as Father Divine’s children. New York City authorities called some of his followers to family court because of child or spousal abandonment and, in some cases, they were sent for psychiatric evaluation that then led to published case studies by the examining psychiatrists. I was struck by the presumption in these articles of a racial predisposition to excessive religious emotion and susceptibility to “religious excitement” that might precipitate mental illness, and I wondered whether there was a broader literature in which psychiatrists engaged Black religious practices in relations to ideas about mental normalcy.

(Father Divine leads a parade in Harlem, 1936. Source: Associated Press)

I found a substantial body of speeches and published studies going back to the late nineteenth-century, in the wake of slavery, where white physicians highlighted religion as a significant factor in the state of Black mental health. I started to see how they mobilized their narrow ideas about African American religion in the diagnostic process that sometimes resulted in a commitment to an expanding system of state asylums for the insane (to use the language of the day), mostly in the U.S. south where the majority of African Americans lived. Of course, the idea of religious excitement has a longer history and broader application than the context on which I’m focusing. What strikes me as unique, however, is the process of racialization of religious excitement as Black over the course of the late nineteenth-century. That is, when applied to white religious enthusiasts, religious excitement was framed as an individual experience or problem, but with respect to African Americans, late-nineteenth-century white psychiatrists characterized religious excitement as an innate racial trait or disposition. Such characterizations became authoritative and remained influential through the first decades of the twentieth century, and these arguments about Black people’s propensity for a disabling religious excitement were deployed as part of a larger set of political, religious, and social strategies to maintain white supremacy.

My goal for the book is to explore connections between psychiatric ideas about Black religion as superstitious, emotional, and fanatical – and racialized conceptions of normal and disordered minds. I’m also exploring the implications of these ideas about Black religions and insanity in the treatment of Black patients, and the influence of these theories in public and political culture from the late nineteenth-century through the 1940s when psychiatry begins to turn from explanations focused on race to attention on social context and environment. By the late 1930s, several Black psychiatrists were contributing to the literature about mental illness among African Americans, emphasizing environment and historical oppression, but also sometimes framing religious “excess” as a problem. While we see similar arguments in religious and social scientific contexts across this period, I’m grappling with the stakes of pathologizing Black people’s theologies, religious practices, and religious communities – including various modes of connecting the spiritual world through things like Holiness and Pentecostal worship, new religious movements, and the practice of conjure – with the authority of the medical field.

One of the things that has struck me most in my research is how many of the late-nineteenth-century white doctors in southern state hospitals for the insane grew up in families that enslaved Black people or were themselves enslavers, and that most were Protestant with strong connections to Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal churches, missionary societies, and social reform committees. The social, racial, and religious locations of the white physicians who fashioned themselves as experts on Black mental health were not the only factors shaping their theories about religion. But their backgrounds and commitments certainly influenced their medical views of Black people in the years after the Civil War and emancipation. Highlighting their religious affiliations helps me to think about their understandings of religious norms and “proper” religion as they evaluated Black patients’ religious dispositions. This has me thinking about asylum medicine and early psychiatry as the engagement between two broad religious worldviews rather than a contest between white secular medical authority and Black religious ways of knowing.

In addition to reading published medical studies by white psychiatrists, I have been looking at legal paperwork through which people were committed to state hospitals and patient records, to the extent that they’ve been archived and made accessible. It is challenging to recover the perspectives of African Americans committed to hospitals and diagnosed with illness attributed to religion or “religious excitement.” Their voices are often absent in court testimony and medical records in which others characterize their behavior and state of being. It is humbling to bear witness to the fragmentary paper, or sometimes photographic record, of people in crisis or distress entering the legal and medical system, usually involuntarily, and whose lives and very being were interpreted through the lens of theories about the inherent disorder of Black religions. I have learned so much about the history of psychiatry in the United States, the infrastructure of state insane asylums, social science and statistical research about mental illness, and religious perspectives on diagnosis and care. What I hope the project will help people think about is how powerfully racialized ideas about religion, conveyed with medical authority, contributed to the social and political structures of white supremacy in the decades following the end of slavery as Black people were trying to make freedom a reality under new forms of oppression.

KH: While I was reading parts of your forthcoming book, I couldn’t help thinking about the present day (how many times do historians have to hear that? Do you get tired of it?), in particular, about the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams’s, recent announcement that the police will have the power and permission to involuntarily commit people they found to be mentally ill. There’s so much to unpack and rage at in this initiative — who gets to define mental illness? Who gets the power to, with that “diagnosis,” remove people from society and confine them? What kinds of histories of white supremacy, racism, criminalization, and “care” undergird these kinds of policies? But I wonder, given your current research, if you have any insights or questions that might help inform or inflect the conversation?

JW: There is so much enraging about the policy, not the least of which is the number of police shootings of people experiencing some sort of mental distress and how these intersect with police killings of people of color. In the case of the NYC policy, power is given to police who have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to deescalate tense situations more generally and to act on the perception of mental illness as danger, even in the absence of a threat to self or others. And, of course, involuntary commitment of unhoused people while cutting the budget for broader support does more to criminalize mental illness than address it. More recently, the mayor has announced plans to expand mental health support in the city and there seems to be a recognition that policing is not care.

I’m not a public health expert or an expert on psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, but what I see from my research on psychiatric discourse about race and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century is how racialized conceptions of mental normalcy and disorder became arenas for projection about all sorts of social concerns. The African Americans who were diagnosed as insane because of “religious excitement” in this period reported, or were characterized as, experiencing auditory, visual, and sensory contact with divine and spiritual beings, belief in travel to spiritual realms, prophetic revelations, or directives from God. In most cases it is difficult to determine from the patient records or the transcripts of commitment hearings the broader context of these individuals’ religious lives that shaped their excited religious expressions, which in some contexts would be viewed as providing beneficial spiritual information.

Sometimes only a public display of religious enthusiasm or a claim to visionary power was necessary to gain the attention of authorities. I was struck in my research by the case of William Rice, a thirty-nine-year-old brick mason in Houston, who had come to the attention of authorities in 1911 because he had been digging for treasure in his yard at the direction of “the spirit,” who had come to him several times in dreams. Neighbors concerned about the size of the hole registered a complaint, and a lunacy hearing was ordered. According to a report in the Houston Post, Rice claimed that he and his wife Ella were in communication with God and Jesus through the power of what the press described as “a cross made out of ordinary tree limbs” and a fishing pole they carried. This testimony of communication with the divine was sufficient for the judge to find Rice “guilty of lunacy,” who committed him to a state asylum. Reporting on the case drew the attention of a reader of the Houston Post, who wrote with astonishment that a complaint of “an unusual religious belief” could result in a lunacy hearing and commitment to an asylum. The reader’s alarm that there was no evidence of social harm underscored the kind of public disciplining work such court proceedings and press coverage could accomplish. I think a lot about the public stigma of press reports on lunacy hearings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how this contributed to the pathologizing of African American religions. Of course, this disciplining was carried out most fully within the space of the insane asylum, which reminds us to think beyond the policy of disappearing people to what comes after their removal from the public eye.

KH: I think it’s probably clear to readers by this point that a core question running through your work is about where and how religion and race intersect in American history. With your most recently published book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), you introduced the concept of “religio-racial” identity and movements as a way to name one of the ways religion and race have intersected. In the book’s introduction, you write that you use the term religio-racial to “capture the commitment of members of these groups [the Moorish Science Temple of America; Nation of Islam; Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation; and Peace Mission, respectively] to understanding individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race, and I refer to groups organized around this form of understanding of self and people as religio-racial movements.” You further clarify that, “in some sense, all religious groups in the United States could be characterized as religio-racial ones, given the deeply powerful, if sometimes veiled, ways the American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame,” but that you, “employ religio-racial in a more specific sense here, however, to designate a set of early twentieth-century black religious movements whose members believed that understanding black people’s true racial history and identity revealed their correct and divinely ordained religious orientation.” The concept — understandably — has had broad appeal and reach, some of which you’ve responded to formally (Roundtable: “Religio-Racial Identity” as Challenge and Critique) and informally. I’m interested in what it has been like to have the concept take off in this way — to see people thinking with it and using it in their own work — and if there any kinds of correctives or suggestions you might like to offer in guiding its direction from here?

JW: I’m surprised and humbled that people have found the term appealing and useful for their work on the intersections of race and religion. As I’ve said and written, the term came to me late in working on New World A-Coming as I struggled to find language to characterize the groups I was studying. Older literature framed them as “sects” or “cults,” which I do not find analytically useful, and the more recent language of New Religious Movements didn’t help me in framing the book’s animating interest, rooted in Black religious history in the U.S. In describing the groups as “religio-racial movements,” I wanted to highlight my interest in how religion and race functioned in them, but not argue for this as the only way to understand their goals or appeals. That is, one could (and scholars have), examine the Moorish Science Temple in the context of American Islamic groups, for example, and not foreground religio-racial identity. So, I didn’t want to foreclose other options for future scholarship.

I do get frustrated when I see “religio-racial” applied as a shorthand gesture to race without robust attention to the interaction between constructions of religion and constructions of race. As I use it, “religio-racial” is not a generic way of signaling the presence of race and religion in a particular context, but a concept that illustrates how the social actors being studied are actively engaging and building religious and racial identity together. To take the case of the Moorish Science Temple again, I came to understand their assertion of “Moorish Muslim,” or sometimes “Asiatic Muslim,” identity as rejecting long-standing American racial categories as imposed on them by white America and that bind them to a history of enslavement. Instead, they insist that they are not “Negro, “colored,” or “black,” and derive their racial identity from their understanding that Allah created them as Muslim. They also sought to locate their Moorish Muslim history in something like a “world religions” paradigm and to make thoughtful claims on religious freedom within the United States. For them, religion and race were intertwined and divinely constituted, and I explored that idea in several other groups that were part of the religious landscape of the early-twentieth-century urban North. The collectivity is also an important component of the historical context and for the religious actors whose work gave rise to the concept for me. In the groups I studied, religio-racial identity transformation incorporated individuals into the material worlds of specific communities, and the work of reconceiving the self within community and orienting that community toward a collective future was important.

In this way, “religio-racial” means more than simply Black people doing religious things, but shows active engagement with conceptions of race and religion in a given time and place. Of course, the concept does not have to apply only to people of African descent or to these new religious movements, but I hope the focus on categories of race and religion as a constructed category will avoid giving the impression of either religion or race as fixed. There is so much wonderful scholarship on race and religion being produced now that I take the adoption of the concept to be a mark of growing interest in the topic in ways that exceed the context of my own work. I have learned so much from how people have extended the concept into other arenas and my trepidation about the results of my having generated a theory or frame that people have taken up is mixed with delight and awe.

KH: Lastly, if I can continue with the slight provocations away from religious studies and history as such, I wonder what you’ve made of recent culture war maneuvers vis-à-vis curricula in American history? For instance, the total hollowing out of the AP African American Studies syllabus? Is there a way you’d like to see folks — in the academy and/or in the media — responding?

JW: There is actually a religious studies and American religious history angle to this story. The revised AP framework includes attention to religion, providing students with an introduction to various African cosmologies and a bit of history of religion in West and West Central Africa prior to the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, such as the history of Christianity in the Kingdom of Kongo. The course also explores the religious experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas, the development of Black church denominations in the antebellum North, the role of churches and religion in the abolition movement, Black church women’s racial uplift work, the significance of churches in the history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and religion in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. One thing I noted that was removed from the first draft of the AP African American Studies framework that the College Board circulated is mention of Black Liberation Theology and the work of James Cone and Jacqueline Grant within a unit on diversity in Black communities. Discussion of Black Liberation Theology has been replaced by attention to recent polling data indicating growing religious diversity in contemporary Black life. It seems to me that the result of this change is to obscure how Christian theology supported Black people’s claims to liberation from systems of racialized, gendered, and sexual oppression in the modern era in favor of a general portrait of diversity. This is part of the broader erasure of Black Lives Matter, Black queer history, and Black socialist perspectives, among other topics, from the final AP framework.

There have been excellent and robust responses to the changes and the pressure that the DeSantis administration exerted to make the course adhere more closely to the simplified American exceptionalist version of American history he is insisting on. I’ve been thinking about the way the focus on the Advanced Placement program, not available to all students, takes attention away from broader questions about school funding, resources, and curricula, and has allowed this controversy to set the terms of discussion about how African American history, African American religious history, and African American studies are represented. The AP story matters but, as we are seeing in Florida and other states’ anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns, there is much at stake in public schools at all levels regarding access to, and framing of, African American history, including religious history.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in New York City. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of several books, including most recently New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.