In 'Sinners,' the Juke Joint Is More Sacred Than the Church

This article contains spoilers for Sinners.

Blues ain't like that religion they forced on us. We brought this from home. — Delta Slim

The Mississippi Delta. 1932. A young Black man (Miles Canton) drives up to a small church building. He climbs out of the car, clutching the neck of a broken guitar. He is covered in blood.

As he approaches the closed doors, a children's choir sings "This Little Light of Mine." The doors open and the young man staggers inside. The left side of his face bears deep claw marks. The pastor, unperturbed, opens his arms and demands the young man — Sammie — come forward. A sudden cut transforms the Black preacher into a white creature, its mouth open and dripping blood, its arms spread wide. This cut transforms the sanctuary into which Sammie has fled into something more sinister. Why, when the preacher invites Sammie to renounce the devil by dropping his broken guitar, do we see the creature again, inviting Sammie to surrender to him? Why is this preacher’s call to repentance juxtaposed with a hellish creature's bloody invitation? Ryan Coogler's film Sinners opens with this warning: Even a church may not be sanctuary for a Black person in the U.S.; the religion of the conqueror cannot save us from evil because that religion is, itself, evil.

Sinners returns to the previous day to tell the story of the day the Smoke/Stack twins (Michael B. Jordan in both roles) return to the Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint (an old sawmill they purchase from a Klansman). They aim to create a space where Black people can be free for a few hours. That freedom comes in the form of Sammie, whose song is so truthful that he becomes a figure of myth, his song “piercing the veil between life and death and summoning spirits of the past and future.” Unfortunately, so great a power does not go unnoticed. Sammie's potent song attracts the notice of Remmick (a charismatic and creepy Jack O'Connell), an Irish vampire who's at least 300 years old.

Coogler introduces surprising nuance to this world. When the twins buy the sawmill from the white man, he half-heartedly insists the Ku Klux Klan doesn't exist in the Delta anymore — an obvious lie. I nodded, thinking the movie was trying to pull a fast one on us. "We're getting Klan-pires,” I thought to myself. But Coogler does something far more savvy: The Klan needs no help being evil. They represent the most repugnant form of racism, what activist and scholar Ibram X. Kendi, in his book Stamped from the Beginning, identifies as segregationist racism. The Klan believes Black people are inherently and irredeemably inferior to white people, so the only solution is separation. Because of the Klan, and its more legal incarnation Jim Crow, the Chow family must operate two grocery stores on opposite sides of the street.

Remmick is something else entirely. He (rightfully) rejects the Klan as bigots, intimating that, once he's claimed Sammie, he's going to destroy the Klan next. But he has no interest in Sammie or the larger Black community in the Delta for the beauty inherent in their persons, the very beauty that so awed us in Sammie's time-collapsing performance of “I Lied to You” (and indeed every other musical performance packed into the film). Remmick only wants to absorb Sammie’s gifts for himself. He seeks to make the people in the juke joint just like him.

As such, Remmick represents a different form of racism, one Kendi identifies as assimilationism. He describes assimilationist racism:

"In embracing biological racial equality, assimilationists point to environment — hot climates, discrimination, culture, and poverty — as the creators of inferior Black behaviors … Assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals."

Assimilationist racism looks like centering white culture and values and assuming (or insisting!) that minority communities should conform to whiteness. Whether denigrating African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as improper or citing dreadlocks and afros as unprofessional, white people act under the assumption that white English and white hair are normative. When seminaries have theology classes and a Black theology seminar, the institution is declaring that the gospel is white, a modifier only necessary when people who aren’t white want a turn. When the definition of success is “be white,” the expectation — spoken or not — is for Black people to assimilate. It's not a coincidence that the various genres mashed up in the “I Lied to You” performance — blues, West African drum, rock, and hip-hop — have all been considered threats to white culture at various points in history.

This is Remmick: He promises freedom, fellowship, and love for the Black citizens of the Delta, but only if they allow him to own their songs and stories, and only if they become like him, adopting his culture (embodied in that terrifying Riverdance scene set to "Rocky Road to Dublin"). Remmick offers them a version of what Smoke and Stack aimed to build with their juke: a place of their own. All it requires is that they surrender their souls. As Mary tells the survivors, "After we kill you, we're gonna have heaven right here on Earth!"

Coogler's vampires are creatures of European folklore. They must be invited in to enter a space, and they abhor garlic — two facts Coogler uses to create incredibly tense sequences. So, it's surprising when, at the moment when Sammie begins to say the Lord's Prayer, Remmick joins him, finishing the prayer in a strong Irish brogue. “The men who stole my father's land long ago forced those words on me,” Remmick tells Sammie. “I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort."

In this moment, we see Remmick as a compassionate monster, a Nice White Racist. He knows the pain of colonization. The Irish and West African share many experiences. Both were conquered. Both had their lands stolen and Christianity forced on them. Both were treated as non-white when they first arrived on the North American continent (and racist opponents of equitable policy and practice often point to the Irish “promotion” to whiteness as evidence that, if Black Americans still face disadvantages, it’s their own fault). But Irish immigrants were just that — persons who came here of their own accord. West Africans arrived here against their wills, kidnapped by European slavers and sold in American auctions. Remmick leaves out that crucial difference when he invites Sammie and his friends to join the vampire’s bloody fellowship.

Remmick's musings on the Lord’s Prayer echo those of Delta Slim (a career-best Delroy Lindo), the old blues player who takes Sammie under his wing. Slim tells Sammie that the difference between Blues and Christianity is that the religion was forced on the Black community, while they brought music with them from Africa.

This distinction resonates with Sammie. His preacher father insists he must choose between his love for God and his love for music. But music is in Sammie's bones. Every time we see him play for an audience, we see that his art emerges from his very self, as the embodiment of his history, his culture, his personhood, his whole community, stretching back through time to West Africa and into a hope-filled future where his people can flourish and be free. Any religion that would deny his music must be false, because his music is the expression of the image of the divine in him.

The Christianity of Sammie's father is ultimately assimilationist; it insists Black people must become more white to be saved. Because Sammie's father's church has no room for blues, it also has less room for Black pain and Black joy. It is the same kind of assimilationist faith evident in many American churches, whose theology is white regardless of who’s sitting in the pews. It’s why historian and author Jemar Tisby founded the Leave Loud movement, encouraging Black Christians who, following the first election of President Donald Trump, had begun quietly exiting white religious spaces, to tell their stories. It’s been evident in the way churches want Black people in marketing photos and maybe even one or two on leadership teams but remain silent in the face of violence against Black bodies. It’s evident in our continued relegation of Black theologians to segregated shelving, only to make cameos in a February sermon.

Coogler shows us a powerful, vibrant vision of Blackness. But the beauty of Blackness, the beauty of the blues, is so powerful it cannot help but attract those who cannot abide its flourishing. The joy of the oppressed reveals their control for the lie it is (in the case of the Klan) and it reminds them of what they traded away for power (in the case of Remmick).

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone wrote that “if the Blues offered an affirmation of humanity, religion offered a way for black people to find hope.” He writes not of the assimilating colonizer Christianity practiced by the British, Remmick, or even Sammie’s preacher father. Rather, he writes of the true religion that’s found in care for the most vulnerable. As Cone writes in A Black Theology of Liberation, “God-talk is not Christian-talk unless it is directly related to the liberation of the oppressed.” True religion, then, is religion that makes Blackness its business. Cone again writes, “[God] has chosen to make the black condition God’s condition.”

White Christianity cannot save Sammie. Nor can it save Remmick. Whiteness has destroyed his access to his ancestors as well, turning him into a parasite who assimilates the gifts and culture of others to access what he's lost. The only hope any of these sinners have is the beauty and joy that arise from the image of God they bear in their own spirits, that undeniable spark of light that no darkness can overcome.

Churches should look far more like the Smoke/Stack twins’ juke joint than the church Sammie’s father ran. We should be experimental laboratories where everyone can bring their own ethnic and cultural background together to create something new and beautiful. There is no preordained pattern to this liturgy because the Spirit who enlivens us all cannot be predicted or programmed.