I’m lucky enough to have a job that requires me to think, read, write, teach and speak about the intersections of religion, entertainment and popular culture in American society. However, long before I began work as a college professor, I attended a church that placed as much emphasis on entertainment as instilling faith. There was a shared sense that the latter goal (i.e. instilling faith) depended upon an ability to perform the former task (i.e. entertaining).

I vividly recall the Sunday in 1985 my father took me to the church bookstore after service to purchase a copy of the first Christian rap CD, “Bible Break” by Stephen Wiley, an Oklahoma-based youth minister/rapper who became a recurring guest at my church’s annual youth retreats. By all accounts, my youth leaders sought to “keep it real” even as their real goal was to keep us “saved.”

To continue reading, go to: CNN Opinion

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Although we are only about halfway into 2010, it has already been a year full of rich public conversations about religion in America. Much of the credit can be given to the emergence of several new blogs and web portals that direct concentrated attention to the topic. Indeed, there is much material to mine as we think about “The Future of Religion,” in general, and of The Black Church, in particular.

With regard to the latter, to restate a common theme this year, it must be acknowledged that such a conversation can move once and for all from the singular to the plural. There has always been a range of black churches, in terms of theology, polity, politics, aesthetics, etc. So it is also impossible to speak of any one future for the array of institutions lumped together under the rubric, “The Black Church.” That said, there are several things that should be considered in efforts to forecast the futures of black churches…

To continue reading, go to: Washington Post’s “On Faith”

Also, check out the series of essays from which the above was selected, at: Patheos

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2003 was a pivotal year in the religious history of rap music, if for no other reason than the release of Kanye West’s debut album, The College Dropout, which featured the song “Jesus Walks.” This single signaled a new development in rap music, a genre that in its earlier years was firmly aligned with the visions of racial opposition and religious nationalism articulated by black Muslims, especially NOI and Five Percenters. As much as the song indicated a spiritual shift in hip hop—making Jesus a centerpiece of the culture—it also inaugurated a new (and related) class sensibility. No longer was the voice of “the hood,” as a stand-in for the black underclass, dominant. The College Dropout effused the anxieties of a particular black bourgeois sensibility, and the album put the lie to the myth that hip hop and middle-class identity are mutually exclusive. In fact, on the track “All Falls Down,” Kanye performed an overdose of the proverbial “conspicuous consumption” as he rapped:

I wanna act ballerific like it’s all terrific I got a couple past due bills,
I won’t get specific
I got a problem with spending before I get it
We all self conscious, I’m just the first to admit it

Continue reading “Kanye West’s Critique of Prosperity Preaching” at Religion Dispatches

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Call and Response on the State of the Black Church
by Samuel Freedman
New York Times (April 17, 2010)

In the first decade of the American nation, a former slave turned itinerant minister by the name of Richard Allen found himself preaching to a growing number of blacks in Philadelphia. He came to both a religious and organizational revelation. “I saw the necessity,” he later wrote, “of erecting a place of worship for the colored people.”

Allen’s inspiration ultimately took the forms of Bethel African Church, founded in 1794, and the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, established in 1799. As much as it can be dated to anything, the emergence of a formal African-American Christianity can be dated to Allen’s twin creations.

Over more than two centuries since then, the Black Church has become a proper noun, a fixture, a seeming monolith in American society. Its presence is as prevalent as film clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech and contestants on “American Idol” indulging in the gospel style of melisma.

To continue reading, go to: New York Times

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I recently had the opportunity to continue the “post-black church” dialogue with Eddie Glaude on bloggingheads.tv, as part of their new series on religion: “Values Added.” My conversation with Dr. Glaude is embedded below, or you can go directly to bloggingheads.tv

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RZA’s The Tao of Wu: Hip Hop Religion, Spiritual Sampling, and Race in a “Post-racial” Age

You’d think that seven years after the release of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” that there would be little need to explain the link between Hip Hop music and religion. Yet in a recent NPR interview, I was asked once again what the often profane posture of Hip Hop has to do with the sacred aspirations of spirituality. So perhaps it is still necessary to pause at the outset and offer a few examples as a reminder to readers of rap music’s long tradition of religious ruminations.

In fact, one can trace a trajectory that goes back as far MC Hammer’s 1987 debut album, Let’s Get it Started, which featured the gospel track, “Son of the King.” Such spiritual lyricism continued through the prophetic musings of Tupac Shakur, the biblical (re)imagination of Ja Rule (i.e. Rule 3:16), the Muslim message of Lupe Fiasco, and the messianic aspirations of Remy Ma, whose 2008 album was simply titled, Shesus Khryst.

to continue reading, go to Religion Dispatches

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As we near the end of the first Black History Month in age of the first black president, I want to quickly share with everyone the arrival of an important and timely book:  Watch This: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, by Jonathan L. Walton.

In case you didn’t already know, President Obama’s road to the White House revealed most clearly that African American religion continues to occupy a most pivotal place in the American cultural imagination.  Moreover, his dramatic falling out with Jeremiah Wright (I know, this conversation is already exhausted) confirmed that the common assertion of the United States as a Christian nation is a claim in need of further clarification.  While African Americans have long inserted themselves into the Christian story, the Obama-Wright show served to illustrate that not all forms of American Christianity (really, protestantisms) achieve equally footing in the public culture of the U.S.

Jonathan Walton’s “Watch This” provides a compelling a critical account of the varieties of black Christianity that now dominate airwaves both in the U.S. and around the globe.  I’ve had the privilege of dialoging with the author as the project moved from dissertation to book, and I know him to wield one the sharpest and most insightful interpretations of African American religion, in particular, and religion and culture in America, more broadly.  While I’ve just started to get into the book myself, I am confident that anyone who picks it up will learn something new about religion and race in America.

Kudos, Congratulations, and Thank you, Jonathan!

What follows is the beginning of his discussion of the book on the website ReligionDispatches:

 Ten Questions for Jonathan Walton on Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

What inspired you to write Watch This?

My interest in African American religious broadcasting came from what I perceived to be the gaps in the fields of African American religion and Religion, Media and Culture. For the most part, scholars of African American religion in general and black theology in particular theorize about Afro-Protestantism in America according to a particular historiography that privileges liberal Protestantism in general, and civil rights motifs in particular. But the prevailing narrative of the freedom fighting “black church” is in many ways inconsistent with a number of African American Christians whose view of the faith is informed by Trinity Broadcasting, the Word Network, and Streaming Faith.com. Just the same, for sociologists and communication theorists who have examined the world of evangelical religious broadcasting, it is predominantly framed as the domain of the white, Religious Right.

This book, then, is my attempt to illumine, unpack and interrogate the theological and social orientations of prominent black religious broadcasters in order to understand them as a source of attraction and ethically evaluate their dominant messages…

To continue reading go to ReligionDispatches.org.

To purchase book, go to www.nyupress.com

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It has been exactly one year since I made my last blog entry – can I still really call myself a blogger?  Anyway, 2009 was quite an eventful year for me both professionally and personally.  With regards to the latter, I entered the land of parenthood as my wife and I welcomed our son into the world on January 26.  As for the former, less than six months later I walked across the commencement stage at Harvard with the university’s first class of Ph.D.s in African American Studies (and thousands of other graduates as well).

As both a black father and a recently-minted Ph.D. in African American Studies there was perhaps no more intriguing event in 2009 than the historic election of Barack Obama.  Personal background aside, Obama’s rise to the presidency was arguably the biggest headline around the world, rivaled only by the economic collapse that serves as the background to this week’s festivities, around the world.  So much has been written about Obama that I’ve been reluctant to weigh in -  Seriously, what more can be said!  As a good friend, and colleague in the study of religion, recently bemoaned, “Since when did Obama become the arbiter of the black religious experience?”  Moreover, given the culture of celebrity and the fascination with the entire Obama family (we love you Michelle, Sasha and Malia!), they have also become the poster image for the African American family.  Want to know about black love, black parenting, etc – there’s sure to be scores of articles available on each topic that begin with an Obama invocation.

Despite being overwhelmed by Obama-mania (how quick does it take to become an empty signifier?), I’d be lying if I did not admit that I too will be celebrating this Tuesday, or acknowledge how often I’ve considered the question, as a new parent, of what it will mean for my son’s first memories of the White House will be occupied by images of a black family.  As a scholar of African American religion, there is still much that can be said of the subtle ways that Obama appealed to, but also superceded, black church traditions in his campaign.  And, as a historian I still wonder, given the current academic interest in re-thinking Black Power, what it will mean that the man who heads the United States—the last super power—is African American.  Can American imperialism also be a form of black power?

Anyway, at this point I will leave these preliminary thoughts as they are, as simply questions. But I do want to direct attention to one article that I recently read that stood out for me in the sea of stories on Obama, blackness, and the so-called “post-racial” era. Hua Hsu, a colleague and friend of mine from Harvard, who teaches at Vassar College and also happens to be formidable behind the turntables, recently examined what the Obama phenomenon says about the current state of whiteness in America.  The header to his article reads as follows:

“The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?”

To read the entire essay, click on the following link to The Atlantic on-line.

This excellent piece is certainly worth reading in its entirety.  Perhaps you’ll turn to it after coming down from the inauguration high, as we celebrate this historic moment and consider the continued promises of American democracy.  Then all of us who live our lives in the many worlds between black and white will begin the difficult work of figuring out what the Obama era will truly offer.  In the meantime, for now I will return to singing “We Shall be Free” with my wife and son, along with Garth Brooks, Shakira, Stevie Wonder and the rest of the pre-inauguration party cast.  GOBAMA!

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