It’s seriously right across the street, Sagar!
I think we want to resist formulating any kind of Black Christianity (or Black religiosity) as “idyllic.” I know you don’t mean it this way, but the history of religion is rotten with folks who think you can look at non-white people and know how religion/culture was practiced millennia ago:
It also feeds into the secularization thesis: the idea that religion evolves from indigenous religions to more codified polytheisms to monotheism to no religion at all. (Freud loved this one.) That thesis is
a) racist AF
and b) just wrong.
Religion isn’t a symptom of an immature society or individual, and religion hasn’t gone away as cultures age. I’m emphasizing this bc there’s a lot of inadvertent white supremacist assumptions in atheist/freethought circles, and I want to be sure we — as religious studies scholars for the purposes of this class — are on the same page here.
Side note: Catholics also love to claim they were the original Christians, fwiw, but historians disagree. Early Jesus people were definitely not Catholics, no matter what Augustine tells you.
This an interesting take, but I’d love to see you engage the readings more. What, specifically, is Bassard saying about Jackson’s Christianity?
