Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 145–147 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.11 Book Review Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) Vaughn A. Booker Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance is Alisha Lola Jones’s consequential analysis of Black religious and spiritual men who represent alternative modes of religious affiliation and belonging that are, nevertheless, essential to and rooted in the vitality of their Christian contexts. Her subjects and interlocutors include “delivered” or ex-gay Black men whose pleasure comes with embodied musicianship; Black men who present as hypermasculine; Black men who are down-low or practice sexual discretion; Black men who are celibate and practicing tantra/self-pleasure; and Black men who are hetero-monogamous but into anal pleasure/exploration with their partners . Through their queer identities and sexual practices as Christians, these religious men fall under what historian Wallace Best labels “the voices of the nonreligious, quasi-religious, differently religious, doubtful, disillusioned, and unsure,” mainly signifying as the “differently religious” in their cisheteropatriarchal and hypermasculine Black religious contexts.1 1 Wallace D. Best, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 22. American Religion 2:2 146 With Flaming?, Jones examines “the rituals and social interactions of African American unmarried or unpartnered men who use gospel music-making as a means of worshiping God and performing gendered identities in and beyond Christian contexts.” As Jones argues, “these men wield and interweave a variety of multivalent sonic and visual cues, including vocal style, gesture, attire, and homiletics, to position themselves along a spectrum of gender identities. These multisensory enactments empower artists (i.e., ‘peculiar people’) to demonstrate modes of ‘competence’ that affirm their fitness to minister through speech and song” (9). Collectively, it is these men who may create (un)intentionally “a heteronormative manhood in Pentecostal worship” (201). Oftentimes their displays of “church realness” reflect roots and/or experiences in queer dance hall culture. Jones’s work to center these men reveals the ways that Black religious and spiritual practices transcend spaces as queer Black religious subjects move between them. A sacred/secular binary continues to break down with scholarship revealing that the practices of spiritual subject formation linger, wade, and cruise between inviting yet seemingly divergent locales. There is a diversity of (signaled or coded) sexualities and gender presentations in the Black Pentecostal and Baptist spaces that Jones depicts, which may not register so visibly in the textual archives of church records, preachers’ papers, sermon collections, denominational publications, or convention minutes that normally capture theological reflection and interpersonal communication. With this diversity comes a culture of discrete communication practices among Black religious men, which happen in live and produced music for queer listeners to consume, interpret, infer about, and feel seen or affirmed by. Discrete communication between Black religious subjects is also manifest in casual, samegender -loving (SGL) hookup culture, which does not pause while queer Black religious subjects attend, with their entire selves, denominational conventions, and conventions such as the Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA). In line with the history of charismatic revivalism and sexuality in America, the modern use of sexual hookup apps allows people who believe they may have made a spiritual connection with someone to commence an erotic connection, or simply a casual encounter. Here, Jones offers a novel approach to understanding sacred spaces. They contain not only the unseen, sanctifying Holy Spirit moving among the faithful; these sacred spaces are latent with the invisible, digital background data of active sexual desire and communication. Black Pentecostal and Baptist men’s strategies of cultural performance through orality—song, speech, and the vocal utterances that fall in between—as well as bodily movement or composure, demonstrate how the very act of engendering “authentic” religious ritual requires that they manage, deflect, or assuage the anxiety and scrutiny of religious audiences. With these chosen strategies, Vaughn A. Booker 147 queer Black Pentecostal musicians work to assure audiences of their spiritual...