Refiguring Christianity and Black Atlantic Religion: Representation, Essentialism, and Christian Variation in the Southern Caribbean

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the analytic categories scholars use to conceptualize religious difference in the Caribbean and addresses the relatively sparse theorizing of Christianity in the study of so-called syncretic or creole religions of the African diaspora. I take the Spiritual Baptists of Trinidad and Tobago as a case study to shed light on the significant divergences between vernacular definitions of Christianity and those designations scholars use to parse and make sense of Afro-Creole diversity. I am especially interested in what is at stake analytically. Spiritual Baptists challenge conventional articulations of Christian orthodoxy and Black Atlantic religiosity by reconciling a “fundamentalist” Christian identity with an especially fluid cosmopolitan eclecticism. Drawing on comprehensive ethnographic research, I show how the unique permutations of creole variation within Spiritual Baptist faith unsettle deterministic equations of race and religion and contest the often manufactured oppositions between Christianity and African religion.