Mothers of the Movement: Evangelicalism and Religious Experience in Black Women’s Activism

Vaughn A Booker

doi:10.3390/rel12020141

Abstract

This article centers Black religious women’s activist memoirs, including Mamie Till Mobley’s Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) and Rep. Lucia Kay McBath’s Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith over Gun Violence: A Mother’s Story (2018), to refocus the narrative of American Evangelicalism and politics around Black women’s authoritative narratives of religious experience, expression, mourning, and activism. These memoirs document personal transformation that surrounds racial violence against these Black women’s Black sons, Emmett Till (1941–1955) and Jordan Davis (1995–2012). Their religious orientations and experiences serve to chart their pursuit of meaning and mission in the face of American brutality. Centering religious experiences spotlights a tradition of Black religious women who view their Christian salvation as authorizing an ongoing personal relationship with God. Such relationships entail God’s ongoing communication with these Christian believers through signs, dreams, visions, and “chance” encounters with other people that they must interpret while relying on their knowledge of scripture. A focus on religious experience in the narratives of activist Black women helps to make significant their human conditions—the contexts that produce their co-constitutive expressions of religious and racial awakenings as they encounter anti-Black violence. In the memoirs of Till and McBath, their sons’ murders produce questions about the place of God in the midst of (Black) suffering and their intuitive pursuit of God’s mission for them to lead the way in redressing racial injustice.

Highlights

Scholarship on Evangelical Christianity in American history often reads as if it is in response to the historian Jon Butler’s characterization of “jack-in-the-box” religion—namely, that there is only a focus on the moments where the social consensus locates the presence of a disruptive religious force in domestic, political, or international affairs
An understanding of political practices determines the understanding of religious practice, and to a problematic extent, Evangelical Christianity remains heavily defined by conservative political activism
I expand upon my previous scholarship that centers African American religious activism in the historiography of Black Freedom struggles, and my previous scholarship that centers mid- and post-Civil Rights era memoirs as documents that position African American race representation according to the life experiences theauthors view as formative, instructive, and pivotal

Summary

Introduction

Scholarship on Evangelical Christianity in American history often reads as if it is in response to the historian Jon Butler’s characterization of “jack-in-the-box” religion—namely, that there is only a focus on the moments where the social consensus locates the presence of a disruptive religious force in domestic, political, or international affairs. Put differently, a focus on Evangelical Christianity appears within a highly politicized academic framework that seeks to locate reactionary social presences. As Carter assesses, the Mothers Group is both a support resource for Black women who face significant occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, holidays) without their loved ones and a gathering “to honor their lost loved ones, claiming them as significant and valued persons—members of families and communities on earth and in heaven. The relatedness they cultivated countered larger processes of social and physical death, and it moved them all, slowly, from the devastation to the sacred development of the Crescent City.”. Hucks have advocated approaching Black religious lives with attention to phenomenological aspects: Black people’s “humanity, orientation, and imagination that register subtler dimensions of their condition as human beings who, like other human beings, have to wrestle with what it means to exist, to procreate, and to secure conditions for human survival/thriving including food production; struggling against disease and unwellness; sustaining familial and kinship networks; engaging the bounty, tenuousness and inscrutability of the visible-invisible world; and dealing with death.” A focus on religious experience in the narratives of activist Black women helps to make significant their human conditions—the contexts that produce their co-constitutive expressions of religious and racial awakenings as they encounter anti-Black violence. In the memoirs of Till and McBath, their sons’ murders produce questions about the place of God in the midst of (Black) suffering and their intuitive pursuit of God’s mission for them to lead the way in redressing racial injustice.

Scholarly Overview

Alternative Scholarly Trajectories

Conclusions