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On February 26, 2012, a neighborhood watch coordinator killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin while Martin was returning home with a bag of Skittles. On May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd with a knee to his neck for nine minutes. These killings of Black men transformed the discussion of race in the U.S. and beyond. They drew attention to the lingering effects of slavery in the present, and to the way that anti-Blackness affects the daily lives of Black Americans. The mass protests in responses to the killings of Martin and Floyd, along with a dozen other Black Americans whose names were mourned with hashtags, reminded Americans of all races that the civil rights movement had not solved the problem of racial injustice. Even after the election of a Black president, anti-Blackness persisted: among police, in the prison system, in the economy, in the workplace, in schools, in healthcare, in real estate – in every aspect of U.S. life.

During the civil rights movement, Christian clergy were on the frontlines, sometimes accompanied by their Jewish and Muslim counterparts. In the racial justice protests of the past decade, abbreviated with the label Black Lives Matter, clergy are often less visible. Young protesters, often female, often queer, voice suspicion of religion, and of Christianity in particular. Yet the role of religion in these two waves of Black justice movements does not contrast as starkly as it may seem. The grassroots organizers who fueled the civil rights movement a half-century ago were also often suspicious of religion (behind-the-scenes leader Ella Baker could best be described as a humanist in her religious orientation), and most Christian churches, even most Black Christian churches, did not support the movement. Religious ideas and practices swirl around Black Lives Matter organizing: languages of spirit, magic, and love; practices of prayer and political ritual; and religious leaders and institutions continue to provide critical infrastructures both in terms of organizing and theory.

Scholars of religion are taking note. They are asking: How does this most recent wave of Black justice movements make us understand Black religion and American religion in new ways? How do religious and political forms of imagination mingle in protest spaces? What new histories do we need to tell to make sense of the eclectic spirituality that we find around Black Lives Matter? And how do Black justice movements expose the limits to secular political horizons?

To address these questions, Terrence L. Johnson, a professor of African American religions at Harvard Divinity School, published We Testify with Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought from Black Power to Black Lives Matter in 2021, and Vincent Lloyd, a professor of political theology at Villanova University, published Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination in 2022. While animated by similar questions, the two books take rather different stances toward religion and toward politics. In a series of conversations with one another, we probed these differences while also reflecting on the state of discourse about race, politics, and religion – in the academy but also in the world.

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Vincent Lloyd: One of the things I particularly appreciate about your book, We Testify with Our Lives, is the way you unexpectedly shift focus. Instead of the civil rights era, your narrative centers the Black Power era. Implicitly, I think you are arguing that to understand our current, twenty-first century moment, to understand the Black Lives Matter era, we have to turn to Black Power. Further, you show how that Black Power period was not just about men: power does not equal patriarchy. And you show how there was a deep religious sensibility circulating in racial justice struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Various forms of spirituality and “sacred subjectivity,” as you call it, were inextricable from radical Black politics.

This is a hugely important contribution to both the study of Black religion and the study of Black politics. I was especially taken with an implication of using the approach you do: political liberalism – by which I mean a focus on rights, equality, and the incremental redress of injustice – is no longer the framework in which we must understand Black politics. You argue that scholars of the Black Power era have tried to squeeze the demands of those activists into a liberal framework, but by attending to the spiritual and ethical dimensions of Black Power, we can be more faithful to the political claims professed by its adherents. You vividly illustrate this point with meditations on, for example, how writer Toni Cade Bambara grounds her commitment to Black self-determination in her attention to spiritual healing.

I want to probe your thinking about the spiritual and ethical foundations of Black politics because I am broadly sympathetic to it – yet I remain hesitant about fully endorsing your argument. One hesitation I have is illustrated by what you have to say about Bambara: I struggle to see the radical potential in the discourse around healing – as in healing from social injustices. You argue that Black feminists in the 1970s demanded wholeness and health, individually and collectively, but those demands have been overshadowed by their male contemporaries’ demands for rights and power. One part of the healing discourse strikes me as compelling and correct: that individually and socially we suffer from grave diseases that require attention and care through creative response. But that formulation still feels like it is missing some essential political energy, some combustibility that is needed for radical change. And I worry that healing discourse in popular culture has been dramatically watered down over the last half century, and particularly in the last decade, with its political potential diluted.

Thinking about the politics in healing points to what I see as a deeper ambivalence I wonder about in your work. You are drawn to aspects of the Black tradition that promise radical transformation, not incremental change. And you are looking for religious resources in the Black tradition that can fuel that radical transformation. But how are we able to discern which political-theological tools will enable deep change?

Consider recent debates about prison abolition: should we demand the impossible, abolition, and only support reforms that shrink the system, or should we demand the possible, advocating for reforms that soften the suffering of those incarcerated even if those reforms might actually grow the prison system? These options map onto what some call the difference between a leftist ethos (abolition, in this case) and a liberal ethos (reform an imperfect system). While both a liberal and a leftist ethos appreciate the tragic nature of the world, what I would call the interlocking systems of domination that fill our world, the liberal commends developing tools to discern domination and respond rightly to it, pulling us toward equality and justice. The leftist feels that domination is an existential threat and envisions a world without domination. For the leftist, discerning and responding to domination is motivated by that conjured vision of another world, wholly other than the present. Because of this, the leftist is attuned to moments of surprise, when the unexpected erupts and transforms our horizon of possibility whereas the liberal pushes to expand the edges of the possible.

I would contend, therefore, that the leftist has a religious sensibility that the liberal lacks – and has hope. We only fully appreciate the nature of religion and the nature of politics when we believe they are both sites where the unexpected can interrupt the world, potentially changing things in the direction of justice. There can be a miracle, or a revolution!

Bringing this discussion into the present, in the case of Black Lives Matter, maybe that means believing that anti-Blackness needs to be uprooted by rethinking our political and social institutions from the ground up, interrupting our everyday routines, rather than growing diversity bureaucracies that offer patches and calm feelings. When I hear “religious left” these days, most of what it denotes is religious people who are liberals, who lack a full appreciation of the nature of religion and politics. I wonder whether your book might be complicating that association, opening readers to the possibility that there was a moment in U.S. history when there was a religious left that was genuinely leftist, genuinely invested in radical transformation, not plotting incremental change?

Terrence L. Johnson: Your question makes me think, first, of Joshua Cherniss’s highly engaging Liberalism in Dark Times, where he masterfully intervenes in debates on justice by examining how “tempered liberalism” is committed both to liberalism and confronting the horrors of political strife. Tempered liberalism employs political ethics as a framework for “shaping how individuals engage in politics.” Cherniss is committed to a liberalism rooted in individual rights, liberty, and equality, informed by gross inequalities and atrocities, and designed to offer an instructive tool, i.e., political ethics, to “inspire” political actors to engage politics with a deep understanding of suffering and evil in the world.

I differ from Cherniss. I attempted to argue in We Testify with Our Lives, that religion, institutionally and culturally, sets the stage for Black power and other forms of political resistance that transcended a singular voting-rights agenda. Toni Cade Bambara’s religious imaginary that you mentioned is not necessarily leftist but “multilingual” as described by Tracey Hucks and Dianne (Stewart) Diakite in their essay “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field.” As imagined in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, religion emerges as competing and overlapping sites of discourse. At times, scripture is the source of religion or spirituality; in other instances, prayer circles led by non-Christian healers serve as the primary terrain of religion.

In your book, Black Dignity, you beautifully narrate the link between Christianity and African indigenous spirituality among the founders and many of the followers of the Black Lives Matter movement. You retrieve “Black magic” to characterize the spirituality and spiritual ethos guiding contemporary racial justice movements, and you suggest that the distinction between Christianity and Black magic is nominal. Your argument, which I think assumes practitioners retrieve both traditions in ways that signal they are far more compatible than not, appears to be in line with what Yvonne Chireau argues in her acclaimed Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. At issue is the potential meaning-making value of religion in Black political struggles.

Do you see any evidence of religion as a resource for changing the terms of political engagement or establishing new practices and languages within political struggles? As you know, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham framed the nineteenth-century Black church as a “counter-public,” where political, entrepreneurial, and civic concerns surfaced alongside religious and spiritual matters. She lifted a scholarly veil to examine the institutional and cultural practices fueling Black life in terms of spirituality, education, politics, and entrepreneurship. Do you see Black Lives Matter, and Black magic, as helpful resources for uncovering new vocabularies and complicating how we might understand Black politics in light of Black Lives Matter? I don’t think we give those traditions adequate attention in Black politics. We recognize religion as symbolically important for contextualizing Black freedom struggles, but I want to suggest that African American religions inform both leftist and conservative political traditions in Black life. The notion of self and communal critique as the starting point for engaging politics can be traced to Black religion. In this context, Black preaching and scripture are “talking” texts in which the “dialogue” aims to transgress and transform familiar and traditional boundaries. Political concepts, such as double consciousness and respectability politics, bear witness to this dialogical tradition.

VL: I think we’re getting right at the heart of things, where we both are trying to make our way through difficult territory.

We both think some quite fundamental changes are needed in the way the world, and the nation, are structured – not only along lines of race but also of economics and gender, and others as well. We also both value a tragic sensibility, appreciating that we cannot create a map from here to where we want to go, that we are inevitably missing some of the ills of the world in the present, and that our efforts to achieve a more just future will inevitably result in injustices that surprise us. These two sensibilities, the imperative to radical transformation and the humility called for by a tragic sensibility, are at odds with each other. I see you grappling with those tensions in your book and in your remarks on Cherniss.

I hear you calling this problem one of “political ethics,” and I hear you urging us to turn to religion and spirituality as essential resources for response. I hesitate, though, on both of these points.

I believe it is crucially important to preserve a domain of politics that is quite worldly and quite practical. We see a problem, we get together, we pool our resources and experiences, and we try to solve it. I think of that task as having a certain autonomy, and needing a certain autonomy, from questions of ethics. Yes, we should also reflect on deep ethical problems of how to live, how we harm each other, and how we are to hope, but clarity on these points also requires a degree of autonomy from the domain of the political. The imperatives to justice and the tragic sensibility that are developed in an ethical register ought to shape us as we move into questions of politics, but once we are in that political domain, we ought to be able to maneuver in ways that are context-dependent and strategic, not continually burdened by worries about deep philosophical questions. We should send the general into battle and let her do her thing rather than micromanaging her, and I worry that the “political ethics” framing leans in the latter direction.

Which brings us to religion and spirituality. You offer the evocative suggestion that religion and spirituality might open new horizons for politics impossible in a secular frame, and that this might be one of the legacies of not only the abolition and civil rights movements, but also the Black Power movement and Black Lives Matter. This view holds a lot of appeal for me. Believe in the impossible, and it will make new things possible! I love that paradox, and I think it is true. It is at the core of Black justice movements, and it is a claim that is illegible within a secular frame.

But here is the tricky part: it is not clear to me that refusing the terms of a secular frame and embracing any particular form of spirituality and religion are the same thing. (This has caused a good deal of largely unspoken confusion in the scholarship: it makes secular critics of secularism like Saba Mahmood, liberal critics of secularism like Charles Taylor, and conservative critics of secularism like Pope Benedict appear to be aligned.) Any particular historical manifestation of religion has a lot going on around it besides a belief in the impossible. How do we zero in on the relevant parts?

It may be that certain forms of practice and discipline are the relevant parts of religion, the ones that create that imperative to believe in the impossible. Such forms of practice and discipline are found in parts of life that aren’t necessarily labeled “religion,” such as in martial arts, on a basketball team, or during meditation. Secular political organizations of the hard left also reject a secular frame, though they wouldn’t call it that, and they believe in the impossible – through cultivating certain practices and forms of discipline. Here I think, for example, of the Black revolutionary political projects of James and Grace Lee Boggs, which included study and discussion groups, electoral campaigning, and urban agriculture. I am curious, then, whether your interest in religion as linking radical imperatives and tragic sensibilities is pragmatic – religion is what we have around us – or whether you also want to make claims about the particular power of religion?

Finally, I wonder if you see Blackness, as opposed to other categories of difference and sites of injustice, posing the problem we have been discussing in distinctive ways. While the view started among Afropessimists, it is common now in Black studies to talk about the distinctiveness of Blackness, how it is unlike other categories of difference and how it raises unique questions of justice. Translated into the terms we have been using: Blackness motivates a profound imperative toward transformation, so profound that it calls for “the end of the world.” And, because anti-Blackness trains us to misconstrue what counts as humanity, it impairs the ability of people of all races to rightly see themselves and the world. From the perspective of the present, with concepts and feelings ordered by whiteness, we can have minimal, if any, trust in our judgment. (Perhaps Blacks have more realization of these limits, of the friction that points to them.)

I am still thinking through my views on these issues myself. My instinct is to say that Blackness is especially powerful because it illuminates the dynamics of domination in a particularly pure form: it points us to mastery and servitude in laboratory conditions, as it were. But I hesitate to say that the force of the justice imperative and the tragic sensibility involved are qualitatively different in the case of Blackness.

TJ: I value the precision you bring to this conversation. The distinction between politics and spirituality is a necessary starting point for imagining entry points into public debates and communal conversations. I agree that when we identify a problem, we should examine it as a collective with agreed upon resources and commitments. But once we dive into the murky waters of the problem at hand, that distinction is nebulous. We enter spaces “burdened” by the complexities of competing social identities that signal social markers bearing witness to power, beauty, powerlessness, criminality, morality, the grotesque, and more. The domains we enter are erected from the bones and blood of the slaughtered, or at a very minimum carry the memories of generations before us. The political moment of today demands serious attention to overlooked and neglected pasts.

I do not see Blackness, heterosexuality, and Afro-Christianity as social or epistemic burdens. If used creatively and in nonsectarian ways, the thick and thin social markers we carry might disclose new possibilities for solving difficult debates. In other words, we are always navigating thorny issues that complicate and sometimes compromise aspects of our thicker commitments. When this happens, we need a framework, possibly political ethics, to discern or adjudicate the best path forward.

Here are two extreme examples to help tease out my argument. I discovered the force of ethics within theological thinking in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness. He makes two points that signal the importance of theological or political ethics in social criticism: first, he criticizes “flat” and unnuanced interpretations of Blackness within Black theology of liberation; second, he introduces his reader to cultural criticism, an interpretive shift within Black theology that challenges the viability of liberation discourse for a people locked in what Delores Williams calls “perennial enslavement.” Anderson’s cultural criticism is guided by a kind of social or political ethics, a framework for reading and debunking static definitions of race and gender in favor of historically specific definitions that shift and expand based on the circumstances at hand.

On a personal note, my late grandmother, Mary Kate Johnson, seemed to always prioritize her broad understanding of community over and above other concerns, even when it meant chastising or disciplining her immediate children and siblings. She didn’t describe her decision-making process in analytic terms, but it resembled the kind of dialectics that one might find in political ethics.

In some instances, ethics is explicit in our thinking. We rely on, for example, Womanist ethics to guide scriptural interpretation or to expose gender violence. In other instances, ethics in African American contexts is a way of knowing and being that affirms, denies, or creates individual and collective norms. Kendrick Lamar’s “Auntie Diaries” is a great example of the kind of ethics I am imagining, where internal cultural norms inform our beliefs and practices. Lamar’s song explores the complicated ways Black communities confront LGBTQ+ issues. He raps:

My auntie is a man now
I watch him and his girl hold their hands down
Tip of the avenues under street lights made his
Thinkin’, “I want me a bad bitch when I get big”
They walk the corner like California king
Cold hand all up her skirt, cars whistling down the road
See, my auntie is a man now, slight bravado
Scratching the likes from lotto
Hoping that she pull up tomorrow
So I can hang out in the front seat
Six by nines, keeping the music up under me 

Lamar exposes the presence of trans life within Black communities without ignoring the painful existence of transphobia and homophobia. He sketches out the liminality of sexuality and gender performance in the hood, while punctuating the trauma of transgressing sexual norms. Neither denying nor justifying heteronormativity, Lamar reveals the open secret of Black sexuality and gender: it is as complicated and normal as any other community. Lamar’s biting lyricism is a form of social criticism akin to Anderson’s cultural criticism: exposing ways of existence that are too often ignored or taken for granted. Lamar complicates stereotypes of LGBTQ+ in Black communities by exposing the “normalcy” of trans-identity and LGBTQ+ communities in Black communal contexts.

This leads me to religion and secularism. Religion emerging from what my friend and colleague Dianne Stewart calls “African Heritage” religions, Afro-Christianity, and protest religions seems to support Saba Mahmood’s claim that the secular is neither a static category without a history nor a way of thinking about “religion” among so-called nonbelievers. Instead, the secular is an historically specific category replete with moral and political claims and beliefs. The force of secularism in liberal political contexts seems to coincide with increasing reliance on scientific racism, theological justifications for African enslavement, and individual liberty and rights. African American religions, then, are established and performed in ways that, on one hand, acknowledge the demise of religious authority in politics, and on the other hand, create the beliefs and practices designed to dismantle moral and religious justifications for slavery and segregation. The complicated nature of African American religions is the degree to which “the secular” is rejected, embraced, and recreated for theological and political purposes.

You are correct: in some instances, recent literature often assumes thinkers like Mahmood, Charles Taylor, and Pope Benedict are aligned on definitions of the secular and secularism. But this assumption takes for granted late 19^th and 20^th century African American literature and the scholarship in Black literary studies that acknowledged long ago that the secular and secularism inadequately characterized the tensions between the sacred and profane in African American religions as well as the rise of the liberalism and the liberal modern state. Your observation raises the importance of understanding how communities embrace and/or reject terms otherwise taken for granted as universal. Secularism seems to foreclose the possibility of hope and the role of faith in political struggle. Black leftist traditions like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) understood faith as the political agency exercised by African Americans.

Lastly, Blackness holds a unique space in Black studies as well as in African American religions. As recently as the U.S.-based Black Power movements in the late 1960s, theologians, scholars, and poets like Albert Cleage, James Cone, Lewis R. Gordon, the Last Poets, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, underscore in their writing (and singing) the fruitful ways blackness symbolizes previously ignored traditions and habits before Afropessimism dominated popular debates. Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks plays a critical role in Gordon’s scholarship, and to a lesser degree in Cone’s thinking as well.

Blackness, like double consciousness, respectability politics, and counter-public spheres, does a great deal of heavy lifting for many of us. It can be imprecise. It can be cumbersome. It can be confining. And Blackness is generating important historical and analytic work in contemporary Black and Africana Studies. A category that once reinforced our inhumanity and criminality is now appropriated, in many Black academic circles, to critically engage Black existence, sorrow, joy, and tragic sensibilities. In the best uses of the category, like Black preaching, jazz, and rap music, Blackness is improvisational, eccentric, and shifting. In some respects, Blackness will always point to the tragic history of African descendants. But new circumstances and conditions create different questions among intellectuals and activists. The category will take on new forms and meanings until it is no longer needed.

Terrence L. Johnson is Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His interdisciplinary research weaves together African American religions, political theory, and American history.

Vincent Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University, where he also directs the Center for Political Theology. He writes about religious ethics, political theology, and the philosophy of race.