As I am in the midst of studying for my comprehensive exams I am confronted with seriously having to answer questions that I have been unable to address up until this point. My advisor for months has been repeating about the difficulty of the study process and the examination process. I explained to him that this is the part of my doctoral program that I have been waiting for. The opportunity to read, write, and sit with my thoughts. More importantly to not have to be bothered with anyone, but rather embrace solitude and work by myself. Exam study is an introvert's wet dream in that respect. My challenge for the last four years has been trying to articulate my position with respect to the study of religion, particularly African American religion. Now the fundamental questions of defining religion and my place in the field I hope to join when I complete the degree is inescapable. And, frankly, scary as shit.
Religious studies for all of the progress that has been made in including a more diverse set of narratives is still largely dominated by dead white guys who talked about rationality and being with respect to white male bodies. As an undergraduate, my very expensive liberal arts education introduced me to material that I would continue to encounter over the now 10 years that I have been pursuing postsecondary education. When I pursued my bachelor's degree I only took one course in African American religion. Being introduced to minorities in the field happened in all of two classes, both taught by the only African American professor in the department. Now that I am attending my third predominantly white, private institution I am faced with a different set of challenges: How to argue the importance of studying black people in religion and what that offers to a broader field of religion. In other words I'm continuing to argue why black lives matter to a larger landscape of thought. Just a normal day of bullshit in the academy.
So here I sit, beginning to read through the material for the exam in religious studies writ large. Guess how many person's of color are on the reading list? That's right: 1. When approaching this exam I have to answer what I think constitutes religion: Is it a conception of the mind and rational thought? Is it a fabrication of society and culture that helps to order the actions of the individual as part of the collective community? Is religion something that is a production of emotional experience?
I find it had to approach this question from a purely objective point of view because of how I understand myself and my own religiosity, not to mention my disdain for enlightenment thinkers and philosophy. Point is this: I think that religion is emotional. Experiences and the way that the world around us makes us feel constitutes religious experience. While I may mentally conceive notions of being and my place in the world, the way that these experiences feel really initiate the ability to think and ruminate on these things. When I read books like Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy, I agree with the idea that religion assists in helping the individual to combat the feeling of chaos by ordering the world around them. For black people I see this being particularly important as they continue to be confronted with being not only forcibly disengaged from feelings of personhood but also having to deal with having to navigate the world with DuBois's present double consciousness. This argues that we see the world of the majority while knowing that we stand outside of that reality. So we find ways to make sense of the things that we feel as though we cannot control while asserting control and agency over the things that we are told that we have no control over. We continue to shatter superimposed glass ceilings in order to attain a limitless existence that we know to be ours because we too, are human. And magical as shit.
So to study black religion, for me, does involve the ways in which African Americans continue to confront social frameworks that are built on their inferiority and suppression. They participate in the human need for meaning but more deeply because they are not just confronting meaninglessness but what Anthony Pinn calls the terror of fixed identity. Black people are always in the process of producing identities that speak to the reality of their experiences which happens to be tied racial identity. This problematizes studying blackness as a monolith because dominant culture suggests that black people are the same in particular ways. We fall into this myth as well in attempt to unify the black experience. However the quest for meaning, for ordering one's life, and the need to create an authentic identity suggests the uniqueness and the variety of perspectives in blackness. That's where I stand.
To study black religion is the study the possibilities of forming black identity that is sensitive to black histories, yet not limited by them. I am most compelled with the where and how of this journey toward self takes place. It is religious because it causes individuals, and communities, to pose questions that orient how one navigates the world and understands themselves, whether that is as a member of a community or an autonomous somebody. This occurs in and outside of traditional religious institutions. As the black church becomes more of a decentralized institution in the black community the journey to self is occurring in secular spaces but that lends to more fruitful grounds for asking questions of fundamental meaning because these not explicitly religious spaces are not constrained by normalized tenants of religiosity and dogmatism. Put another way, when you're in these spaces you can be yourself without restraint. And that is where the magic happens. The example that I regularly give when I am asked about my intellectual interests goes a little like this: When I get together with my sister circle we check in and talk shit. None of us mince words because we are in a safe space. It could be in my apartment, happy hour, or the bookstore. When we occupy the space it becomes a space where we are discussing life and how we are navigating it. More importantly we become the mirrors that one another can't hide from.
I am totally sold on the idea of blackness and the journey to the self. It constitutes a particular religious point of entry that respects social location. Personally and professionally, this matters. We find the extraordinary in the mundane, in ourselves; in our scrambling to figure out how to best deal with the cards we are dealt. Whether one identifies with it or not, our lives are affected and influenced by race. Personally I am deeply impacted by the culture, which manifests in my work. I definitely do it for the culture. These narratives matter and, as I said, are still proving our place at the intellectual table.