RT Article
T1 Mothers of the Movement: Evangelicalism and Religious Experience in Black Women’s Activism
JF Religions
VO 12
IS 2
A1 Booker, Vaughn A.
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1750246341
AB This article centers Black religious women’s activist memoirs, including Mamie Till Mobley’s Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) and Rep. Lucia Kay McBath’s Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith over Gun Violence: A Mother’s Story (2018), to refocus the narrative of American Evangelicalism and politics around Black women’s authoritative narratives of religious experience, expression, mourning, and activism. These memoirs document personal transformation that surrounds racial violence against these Black women’s Black sons, Emmett Till (1941-1955) and Jordan Davis (1995-2012). Their religious orientations and experiences serve to chart their pursuit of meaning and mission in the face of American brutality. Centering religious experiences spotlights a tradition of Black religious women who view their Christian salvation as authorizing an ongoing personal relationship with God. Such relationships entail God’s ongoing communication with these Christian believers through signs, dreams, visions, and “chance” encounters with other people that they must interpret while relying on their knowledge of scripture. A focus on religious experience in the narratives of activist Black women helps to make significant their human conditions—the contexts that produce their co-constitutive expressions of religious and racial awakenings as they encounter anti-Black violence. In the memoirs of Till and McBath, their sons’ murders produce questions about the place of God in the midst of (Black) suffering and their intuitive pursuit of God’s mission for them to lead the way in redressing racial injustice.
K1 Black Lives Matter
K1 Christianity
K1 Congress
K1 Emmett Till
K1 Evangelical Left
K1 Evangelicalism
K1 Jordan Davis
K1 Lucia McBath
K1 Lucy McBath
K1 Mamie Till
K1 Pentecostalism
K1 Sybrina Fulton
K1 Trayvon Martin
K1 Activism
K1 Civil Rights
K1 Gun control
K1 Gun violence
K1 maternal activism
K1 memoir
K1 Mourning
K1 Religious Experience
DO 10.3390/rel12020141