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I'm reckoning with the ways my particular journey of childhood religious formation and academic study of religion has produced a disenchantment that is both useful and antagonistic. 1/7
It particularly manifests in a stark refusal of the platitudes and comforts embedded in theodicean rhetoric. I'm not terribly interested in vindicating a particular idea of God in order to make sense of the violently absurd. 2/7
I don't pretend this is a new or unique insight. Rather, inasmuch as I adhere to faith practices organized under what we might call Christianity, I find myself pondering the dreadful consequences of a particular God-concept for Black life and being. 3/7
I ask myself what it means - in the hymnody I still hold dear - to "hold to God's unchanging hand" when the state-as-god has demonstrated its unwavering commitment to Blackness as the embodiment of negative value and being. 4/7
Dare I say I find it more faithful, if that is a proper term, to loose the hand of *that* God: to embody, as my friend @BikoMandelaGray has elsewhere written, ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.3.4.0443)
a kind of immanent atheism that dismantles such religious logic. 5/7
a kind of immanent atheism that dismantles such religious logic. 5/7
There is a shared theo-logic at work in church and state that requires nothing short of utter abolition. There is a logic of acquiescence and defense woven into a God-talk and God-concept that I can no longer accept. 6/7
There can be no liberating God whose will gives theological legitimacy and vindication to the violent and exploitative state. I cannot believe in a God that blesses *this*. 7/7
