Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Trudier Harris

doi:10.3390/rel11070369

Abstract

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

Highlights

From embracing Christianity to illustrating its contradictions and shortcomings, as Gwendolyn Brooks does, African American women writers have showcased responses to Christianity that range from acceptance to rejection and to suggesting that different kinds of spirituality might be more appealing to and useful for their female characters
After Mama Lena Younger’s appearance, Christianity disappears from African American literary texts altogether or evolves into different forms of spirituality
African American women writers, are my focus here, and no work by such a writer signaled as dramatic a change in the transforming of religious belief than Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered

Summary

Introduction

From embracing Christianity to illustrating its contradictions and shortcomings, as Gwendolyn Brooks does, African American women writers have showcased responses to Christianity that range from acceptance to rejection and to suggesting that different kinds of spirituality might be more appealing to and useful for their female characters. She is one of the long-suffering black women of Christian tradition who believes that God makes a way out of no way, that all one has to do is trust in His power, His promise always to supply one’s needs.

Results

Conclusion