Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging. By Keri Day

Abstract

In Keri Day’s Azusa Reimagined, the 1906 Azusa Street Revival is a fruitful source for articulating a critique of racial capitalism and democratic practices of community and care. Day is less interested in historical reconstruction (though historical research plays a significant role) than in uncovering how Azusa embodied this critique, challenging accounts of racial capitalism that ignore affect and desire and accounts of eschatological religion that paint such hopes as irredeemably quietist. Day contrasts Azusa with “white capitalist visions of Pentecost”: the Philadelphia World Fair of 1876 and the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, both of which told captivating stories about uniting disparate peoples, bringing prosperity to primitive cultures, and providing moral order amid chaos. Day describes these visions as economic and theological: they effectively cohered white Christian moral and economic values with theological language justifying racial capitalism. In contrast, Azusa countered both the supposed theological purity of white churches by its integration of slave religious practices (oral traditions, handclapping and foot stomping, praying over material objects) and the economic purity of the racial capitalist order. Azusa Reimagined centers the founding contributions of black women domestic workers—their religious leadership, theological influence, and guardianship of religious practices.