D. Danyelle Thomas Sees Blackness as The Sacred Text of Our Time

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

I’ll confess: Seven years after graduating from seminary, I don’t really read theology anymore. Nonetheless, I am still interested in theological questions such as, “Why are we here? What does it mean to exist? Is there actually a God?”

Since graduating, I’ve found those theological questions asked and (sometimes) answered in fiction. Books such as Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and Telephone by Percival Everett.

D. Danyelle Thomas, the digital pastor of Unfit Christian and the author of The Day That God Saw Me as Black, also finds theological meaning in fiction. One of the conversation partners for her book is the literature of Toni Morrison. I love Morrison because her characters are often struggling with life’s deepest theological questions while also proudly asserting that they are Black and beautiful. Thomas articulated this idea in her own words, saying, “I don’t navigate this world without my Blackness, so I certainly won’t navigate my relationship with God without it.”

Thomas told me that her book is “part memoir, part manifesto. It’s to help people transform their faith. I think of it as a genre-defying cultural critique of my experience of white supremacy in the Black Pentecostal experience.” To build this cultural critique, Thomas relies on the theological work of James H. Cone and Katie Geneva Cannon, her lived experience as a Black woman in the United States, and the Black church tradition in addition to Morrison’s writings.

I sat down to talk to Thomas about her book, Blackness, Christianity, and the future of the country.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Tell me a little bit about the title of your book, The Day God Saw Me as Black. How did you come up with that title and why is it important to you?

D. Danyelle Thomas: I look at it as this delineation of when I stopped engaging in a colorblind faith, in this idea that Christianity is the great equalizer for folks.

We’re still segregated in our houses of worship and our expressions of worship and our understanding and articulation of what it means to do the liberating work of Christ and to carry forth that mission. [When you see that], you realize that Christianity doesn’t equalize us. We’re not all talking about the same God. We’re using the name Jesus, but we’re not talking about it in the same way.

I just had the idea: What happens on the day that you recognize your Blackness as part of how you practice and express your faith? What happens when we stop denying ourselves and each other full liberation?

We cannot be fully liberated if we are worshiping or experiencing a God who does not see the whole of us.

So, if I want to have this relationship with God that helps me stay faithful, I have to have a God that sees everything, all of me, including the implications of what it means to live in this Black, fat, femme, queer body.

Who are some of the theologians and thinkers who have influenced you?

I would say James H. Cone has certainly been an influence. But I also look to the womanists; I’m thinking about Katie Geneva Cannon. I’m [also] thinking about Toni Morrison and Fannie Lou Hamer.

My mom, of course, is my first sight of what it is to understand God. She is my first teacher of understanding God and that being part of my life and how I move about in this world.

I also look at my father, who was a preacher. He has since passed away, but obviously both of them and their deep faith in God certainly influenced and shaped my own. So, I would say from my home to my textbooks, there are theologians who have inspired me, and they don’t all minister, but they certainly all minister to me.

You mention Toni Morrison, who I love, and I wonder if we could just spend a little time reading Morrison together.

One of the pivotal moments in her novel Beloved is when the character Baby Suggs, who is a Black woman, is in the clearing and speaks to the congregation and Morrison writes these words for Suggs: “Lay em down … Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don’t study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield.”

I wonder what comes to mind when you hear these words.

“Down by the riverside” is code for the listener who is attuned to what the sub-message is. When we talk about going down by the riverside, we’re talking about going to meet somebody who’s going to carry you to freedom. But more than that, as a practitioner of ritual work, I understand that when we go to the river, we’re also going there for baptism. We’re going there to get our liberation one way or the other. Either because we have a freedom fighter who is going to carry us, or because we are doing some ritual or magic to carry ourselves to freedom.

When we talk about laying down the sword and the shield, we’re saying, lay down all of your defenses, all the things that you have been using to fight in this world, all the things that you have been using to push back.

It’s a reminder that the self is enough. It is what’s in you that brings liberation. It’s what’s in you that brings change and transformation, not all the tools that we carry, not all the defenses that we’ve built up. For Morrison to give Baby those particular words, to use that particular hymn, speaks volumes to just how in tune she was with what it means to do liberatory work from the praxis of being a Black woman.

I’m fast-forwarding in Beloved to a point when the character Stamp Paid, who is a Black man, is having a conversation with Suggs. Suggs has gone through immense tragedy and is simply trying to survive a post-Civil War America. Stamp is trying to remind Suggs of her preaching prowess. The passage is biblical in its drama. Stamp speaks first, then Suggs follows:

“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Saturday coming. You going to Call or what?”
“If I call them and they come, what on earth I’m going to say?”
“Say the Word!” He checked his shout too late. Two whitemen burning leaves turned their heads in his direction. Bending low he whispered into her ear, “The Word. The Word.”
“That’s one other thing took away from me,” she said, and that was when he exhorted her, pleaded with her not to quit, no matter what. The Word had been given to her and she had to speak it. Had to.

I wonder what you think about that passage.

In all that you lose, when you still have the ability to speak, you have the ability to call for help.

So, in this immense tragedy, in this immense loss, to allow it to rob her of her voice will result in it robbing her of her help. What I take from this is to remember: When your eyes are blinded and you can’t see, when your mind is completely foggy because you’ve got all this emotional and mental and spiritual strain, when your hands might be tied behind your back because you are quite nearly oppressed on every side, what you still have is your voice. The minute you lose that, you lose all power. Stamp is saying you still have a voice. You still got the Word. That power is still in you. You can still call forth and call down what you need. It doesn’t ignore the grief that she’s experiencing.

Morrison said that the function of race and racism is ultimately

— a distraction.

What do you think about that?

It’s very prescient. When you are spending your time arguing identity politics from a place of value and worth and why you should be included and your humanity be recognized, this is when we get into a point of distraction.

Usually, the people who you are engaging with are well aware that you are human. They are well aware that if they took away all the things that they were using to hate you, they could only see you as another human being. That then makes us understand that racism is a choice. Sexism is a choice. Classism is a choice. No matter what reasons are influencing that choice.

In many ways, an investment in racism is a protection of your own identity. You need the falsehoods about your ideas of another race or another ethnicity to be true, and you engage in that as a form of protection so that you can continue to stay in alignment with the dominant race.

When we talk about it as a distraction, it really is just that it’s engaging in something that somebody is willfully compliant with. That doesn’t mean that people can’t come out of those ideologies. I’m reminded of when Jesus asked the man who needed to be healed, “Will you be made whole?” Jesus is well capable of doing the healing work, but he needs the consent of the person who needs to be healed. Healing is a choice. So, healing from racism is a choice. Healing from sexism and ableism and classism and all of these structures of oppression is a choice.

When you, as an oppressed person, are trying to explain to someone why you shouldn’t be oppressed, it’s a distraction to keep you from the work of actual liberation.

I’m a Christian because I’m Black and because the symbol of Jesus on the cross resonates. I’m interested in using religious myths and symbols to interpret the world and to challenge people to act in the world. I wonder for you, as your understanding of Christianity has changed, what keeps you identifying as a Christian?

Basically, it’s exactly what you named. It’s something about Jesus to me. As somebody with a very low Christology, I see so much in the lived experience of Jesus that resonates for me as a Black woman. I think about the death of Jesus. I hate to jump there, but when I think about the death of Jesus, I think about him as a man persecuted by the state for wanting to disrupt these systems of oppression, whose Black mother has to watch him die. This is how I look at Jesus.

No matter how much I decolonize and deconstruct my faith, one thing that has sustained me and kept me in this practice is that I don’t believe Jesus, or God for that matter, exclusively belongs to Christianity. Jesus himself was not a Christian.

I don’t feel a sense of guilt for separating Jesus [from that] boxed-in, orthodox Christianity. I’m like you, none of that matters to me. It’s Jesus’s words and life and actions that resonate for me, that make me feel connected to my spirit, that make me feel connected to a broader community who believes and sees Jesus like I do.

As someone who practices ancestral veneration, I could never walk away from this faith completely. My folks believe in Jesus. My folks love God as Christians. And if I want to remain connected to them and in conversation and community with them, I have to remain connected to the faith that carried them through their lives. So, even as my Christ consciousness expands, I will never — or at least I don’t think I will ever — feel the need to completely walk away from the faith. God willing, I got a lot of life in front of me.

Tell me about your faith community, Unfit Christian.

I launched Unfit Christian in 2014 and everyone was like, “Girl, please get off our Facebook and write a blog.” And so I started a blog in 2015. After my father’s passing, I started building out a Facebook group. At that time, it was just supposed to be a marketing space, but as more people started to join the space, we started having more conversations.

We started having the deep questions and meditative, reflective ideas about, What is this faith? What does it mean to us? What is that?

And as we began to expand our conversations, folks began to treat this space like sacred space. And in turn, it was recognized as such. I started calling it a digital faith community, because this is exactly what it became: a space for all of us to show up as our whole selves.

We have over 5,000 members in that space. We have clergy members in there, who can come in, and they are able to not just be clergy, they’re able to wrestle with the church, the text, and with their faith in a safe space or in a brave space. I don’t necessarily think we’re safe, but we’re definitely brave. And we have these conversations. We have folks who don’t identify as Christian, which I think is the best part because it means that you’re not in this echo chamber.

We have folks who raise their hands and say, “Hey, that wasn’t my lived experience. And so let me tell you my experience of either being atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Buddhist, or having formerly been Christian and now transitioning.”

It really gives us this very rich space to have these conversations. But more than that, it gives us what many of us were missing when we walked away from the church, but not from God: It gives us community. It gives us a space where we don’t have to explain ourselves like we would in other spaces or traditional faith spaces. It gives us that connection point of what we have shared, but it also has the beauty of being able to walk through what is dissimilar and to learn from one another and to grow in that way. I know it sounds like I’m romanticizing it, but it really is a good space.

I’ve married people — this translates into real life. I’ve done eulogies.

So, for as much as we have been virtually based, we’re doing a lot to transition ourselves to more offline spaces that [create] in-person community as well. And so I’m excited to see where this goes and grows over the next few years.

What’s a sacred text that people of consciousness can carry with them through this tumultuous time?

I’m someone who firmly believes that Black lived experience is the most sacred text. And so, as someone who understands what we have been through — and this is not to give the cliche that “God is still on the throne” — [but it is to say] we know how to take care of one another, and we [can] liberate ourselves from this very capitalistic idea of individualism and return to [a deeper] understanding of community.

I think about the Montgomery bus boycotts. A lot of people in their very nascent ideas of [activism] think protest is something that brings immediate change. [But] when you understand the Montgomery bus boycotts took 381 days, and when you recognize that in that time, folks still had to get to work, they still had to get clothing, they still had to get shoes, this makes you understand it wasn’t just the buses that were being impacted. And yet, these folks did not go without food. They did not go without clothing. The church came together, the community came together to buy shoes for folks who were walking to work. We find ways, even in the worst of oppression, to take care of one another. And so I believe that we still have the capacity and that capability.

All of us doing this work doesn’t mean that everybody’s unified. If you wait for everyone to be unified, you’ll never get anything done. But many of us, enough of us can come together as a collective and get it done.

Your survival is contingent on my survival, and my liberation is contingent on you remaining free. And so I believe, if I have to give a word, it is to remember that community is the path to liberation. And if you look at the sacred text of Black Lives Matter, and Black history, we will always see that the way that we survive is by leaning on each other, not just leaning on the Lord.