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Proquest Dissertations RICE UNIVERSITY What Meaneth this? A Postmodern 'Theory' of African American Religious Experience By : Torin Dru Alexander A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy MITTEE: Anthony®. Plinn Agnes Culten Arnold Professor of Humanities Professor of Religious Studies, Chair /arnes D. Faubion Professor (ofAnthropology ma Ofy^, U-GMrt _r Gregofy Kaplan ' Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies mmsTcm^TBmsy MAY.2Q10; • i ABSTRACT "What Meaneth This?" A Postmodern 'Theory' of African American Religious Experience by Torin Dru Alexander It is the intention of this dissertation to provide a 'theory' of African American religious experience that is guided by postmodern critical thought, with particular emphasis on methodologies attempting to grasp what is referred to as the quotidian, the ordinary, but primarily as "everyday life." It is my contention that this constitutes a promising approach that African American religionists should consider. Indeed, for almost forty years, there has been one dominant interpretative lens for the study of African American religious experience, often referred to as a hermeneutics of liberation. It is my contention that this orientation, with its emphasis on the macroscopic, is markedly inadequate. I maintain that what is needed is a focus on the microscopic. Moreover, I also assert that if there is to be a locus for opposition to oppression, it is to be found on the level of the "everyday" - that which is often passed over as insignificant or irrelevant. 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the members of my committee - Dr. Anthony B. Pinn, Dr. James D. Faubion, and Dr. Gregory Kaplan - for seeing me through to the end of this process. Also, thanks to peers and friends who supported me in this process. Finally, to my entire family but especially to my wife Charvonne who keeps me grounded and sane, much love. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - An Overview of Religious Experience 8 Chapter 2 - Examples of African American Religious Experience 47 Chapter 3 - Current Approaches to the Study of 106 African American Religious Experience Chapter 4 - Theories of the Everyday: Moving Toward an Alternative 127 Approach to the Study of African American Religious Experience Chapter 5 - Rethinking African American Religious Experience 181 Chapter 6 - Conclusion: A New Paradigm 245 Bibliography 262 What Meaneth This? A Postmodern 'Theory' of African American Religious Experience Presented in partial requirement for the PhD in Religious Studies Rice University by Torin Dru Alexander Anthony Bernard Pinn, Principal Advisor James Faubion and Gregory Kaplan, Dissertation Committee Members UMI Number: 3421432 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI" Dissertation Publishing UMI 3421432 Copyright 2010 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. uestA ® ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 1 Introduction Bewildered we are, and passion-tost, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy Throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the Plan; give us the Sign! Keep not thou silence, O God! Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely, Thou too art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing? From "A Litany at Atlanta" by W. E. B. Du Bois1 It is the intention of this dissertation to provide a 'theory' of African American religious experience that is guided by postmodern critical thought, with particular emphasis on methodologies attempting to grasp what is referred to as the quotidian, the ordinary, but primarily as "everyday life." It is my contention that this constitutes a promising approach that African American religionists should consider. Indeed, for almost forty years, there has been one dominant interpretative lens for the study of African American religious experience, often referred to as a hermeneutics of liberation. It is my contention that this orientation, with its emphasis on the macroscopic, is markedly inadequate. I maintain that what is needed is a focus on the microscopic. Moreover, I also assert that if there is to be a locus for resistance or opposition to 1W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater : Voices from within the Veil, Dover Thrift Editions (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), 14. 221 am uncomfortable with the term "theory" due to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "theoreticism" [M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, and Vadim Liapunov, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 1st ed., University of Texas Press Slavic Series ; No. 10 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 11-27] which is the reduction of human creativity to a system. Theory, in this sense, impoverishes the truth of human life by subordinating all the complexity and messiness to a static system. Yet, the use of the term "theory" persists even among those who oppose the conventional meaning. I considered having the word appear written under erasure, i.e. theory. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes erasure as "the strategy of using the only available language while not subscribing to its premises. Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary it remains legible" [Spivak's introduction to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Xiv]. I have opted here and in the title of the dissertation to use single quotes. 2 oppression, it is to be found on the level of the "everyday," that which is often passed over as insignificant or irrelevant. Unfortunately, an intentional engagement with theory and method has not been characteristic of African religionists. Indeed, I would contend that a review of African American religious scholarship from Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Benjamin E. Mays to more contemporary scholars such as C. Eric Lincoln, J. Deotis Roberts, or James Hal Cone would substantiate this claim. This assertion is not meant to denigrate the work of previous generations of scholars of African American religion, nor should it be interpreted as a vulgar valorization of theory qua theory, or method qua method. It is my contention, however, that conscientious scholars would want to know the strengths as well as the deficiencies associated with the tools they bring to bear in their research. Moreover, I maintain that African American religious scholars' lack of serious engagement with issues of a theoretical and methodological nature have led to a rather anemic analysis of African American religious experience. The dominant method utilized in the study of African American religious experience over the course of the last several decades has been a "hermeneutic of liberation" with liberation construed as a collective, communal, coherent, and coordinated endeavor over against oppressive forms of power that are macroscopic, often monolithic and hierarchical. Such power is associated with issues of white supremacy, industrial capitalism, sexism, and imperialism. Yet, as one looks at various African American religious communities, in the main they are devoid of revolutionary or militant theologies. As groups, they are neither chiliastic nor ascetic world-transforming. An 3 As various scholars have noted, particularly in such studies as Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African American Religion : Varieties of Protest and Accommodation, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee 3 interpretive and diagnostic challenge for the religious scholar involves understanding these religious communities' engagement with the world, whether it is the quite limited possibilities that many accord to the improvement of the present world, or the tendency toward the development of theodicies of reconciliation or redemptive suffering. Context The argument presented here will be important to those engaged in the study of religious experience in general and African American religious experience in particular. Moreover, it is the author's hope that those engaged in fields and/or disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and critical and cultural theory would find the work edifying. In my review of the literature on African American religion, I have yet to come across the use of theories of "everyday life and practice" in the study of African American religious experience. Indeed, it appears that little scholarship has been done with respect to the concept of "everyday life" and religion.4 For the most part, these Press, 2002) or C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). A number of different topologies can be mapped out for African American religion, depending on the schematization one wishes to apply. In the case of Baer and Singer, they have a two-dimensional grid, one axis being attitudinal (accommodationist or rejectionist) and the other in terms social strategies (material/social needs vs. emotional needs). Each of the four categories in which they classified the different religious bodies occupied a different quadrant: Mainline churches; Conversionist, Pentecostal, and Holiness Churches; Messianic/Nationalists bodies; and Thaumaturgical/Spiritualist tradition In the case of Lincoln and Mamiya, they engaged in what they called a "dialectics" with three oppositional relationships, which they defined as the priestly vs. the prophetic, the this-worldly vs. the other-worldly, and the universal vs. the particular. It is interesting to note that the first two pairings resemble those of Baer and Singer.
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