African American Spirituality as Creative Response With American Nationalism as Case Analysis

By Asante U. Todd

Creative response understands spirituality in terms of performance of ordinary acts of justice and care. Spirituality as creative response is found in the work of thinkers like Diane D. Glave, Marla Frederick, Melanie Harris, and Albert J. Raboteau. Practices of creative response share the theme of rejuvenation, where rites of rebirth renew everyday objects and ordinary events. Clementine Hunter’s 1950 painting “Cane River Baptism” is a representation and an aesthetic expression of this mode of African American spirituality.1

In realist fashion, Hunter portrays a busy river baptism scene as inspired by Christian practices among nineteenth-century slaves. A pastor baptizes members of a congregation near a whitewashed church in the rural Louisiana countryside, likely on the Cane River. Glave explains how submersion of baptismal candidates and bringing them up again symbolizes the death of the old self and the birth of a renewed self. “Baptism” is expressionist in addition to being realist, for while the real context is horrific, the beauty portrayed hopes for renaissance and an open future. Hunter portrays baptism against the background of an “agrarian civilization of bottle-green grass, mauve skies … fanlike trees, and russet soil,” and the baptized “rise to the surface of the water against a tableau of trees, cotton, and grass.”2 The painting highlights tensions between realism—that U.S. agrarian civilization was built upon brutal exploitation—and expressionism—that Blacks’ spirits take joy in creation and ritually celebrate spiritual transition to freedom and justice as proclamation and protest against that reality—and centers transformative human action that rejuvenates and heals.

On the Dialectics of Wilderness Experiences

Practices of creative response like baptism acknowledge our interconnectedness with others and nature. Pragmatic rituals accomplish this at both material and existential levels, blending the sublime with the commonplace.3 For instance, communities might “honor the dead with ceremonial burials while returning nutrients to the soil.”4 African American field laborers often saw rhythms like those of planting and harvesting or being born and dying as ordinary and open to the transcendent. Farmers consecrated and benefitted from the soil, and it was nourishment for body and spirit. Although nature may disclose the transcendent, creative response does not romanticize nature, as Black encounters with the world are often marked by (environmental) racism, sexism, classism, or heterosexism. “Wilderness” depicts this “twoness.” Wilderness is a place of both loneliness and rejuvenation, homelessness and healing, brutality and blessing. Womanist Delores S. Williams describes this mysterious “wilderness experience”:

Immediately after slavery, then, African Americans apparently had two attitudes toward wilderness. One, deriving from antebellum days, emphasized religious experience and projected positive feelings about the wilderness as sacred space. The other sense of wilderness seemed shaped by new experiences of economic insecurity, social displacement, and the new forms of oppression ex-slaves encountered in a “free” world.5

African American’s experiences of beauty and connection to the earth are not the whole story. Romantics often attempt to recover a “pure” or “originally good” nature, and political realists often see nature as an evil “Wild West frontier” to be tamed. Creative response sees both good and evil in nature. This nuanced view of nature affects our understandings of ecology, self, and community. Humans are not disembodied, disassociated minds or wills. Neither are they in wholly bounded communities. Each is a potential creative responder within a particular context, and we are all ultimately interconnected in a web of mutual interdependence. These interconnections imply links between church and world, public and private, and personal and political spaces.

Freedom, Justice, Homemaking: On the Norms of Creative Response

Creative response commends an ethics of principles and pragmatic outcomes infused with an ethos of care. Creative response remains pragmatic in its stress on the interlinked goods of freedom, justice, and homemaking. These are tripartite concepts—consisting of personal, political, and socio-economic dimensions—and are both positive and negative. Homemaking has multiple meanings, from selfpossession, to land possession, to the restoration of Black families, and includes visions of justice as equality and dignity. The image of “the garden” plays a central role in visions of freedom and homemaking. This implies that freedom, justice, and homemaking require care and stewardship, shown forth not only in various types of cultivation (e.g., gardens, communities), but also in prophetic confrontation and contestation with various unjust social systems and institutions. Creative response is thus rooted in African American prophetic traditions concerned with social justice, like those represented by venerable figures like David Walker, Frederick Douglas, and W.E.B. Du Bois, but it is also fundamentally rooted in the experiences of everyday Black folks, in their gratitude for life and its provisions, righteous discontent against unjust social conditions, and in an empathy that leads to care for self and the world.

Response as Care, Cultivation, and Contestation

Creative response orients creative human action around the themes of cultivation, caregiving, and contestation. These connote a creative work or labor along with cycles or patterns of a thing to facilitate its health and growth. African Americans cultivated soil and gardens daily, using simple tools to effectively work with nature’s gifts and humanity’s castoffs. Their horticulture emerged from both the community’s traditional agricultural methods as well as from their own individual interpretations of the tradition as they worked the land. It is within this milieu that we should understand languages of cultivation and co-creation.

Creative response views each person as a co-creator, responding to, giving meaning to, and rejuvenating the world though creative actions. The language of co-creator doesn’t reflect an imperialistic stance toward the world, but one that recognizes the power of cultivation as both a gift of the spirit and a response to pragmatic needs of the interconnected world. The central concern is to facilitate responsible, just, and fruitful interaction with nature. Creative cultivation goes hand in hand with caregiving. Emancipated African American field laborers understood that co-creation required a network of mutual support and roles designed to support familial and work relationships. With this network of caregiving as backdrop to cultivation, they harvested the fruit of creative response, like vegetables for meals and planted shrubs, trees, and flowers for aesthetic pleasure and revenue.

African American spirituality as creative response can also take shape as public contestation for civil liberties, civil rights, or other calls for justice. For example, Marla Frederick’s study of African American women in North Carolina notes how their spirituality transforms public and private institutions. “[M]uch of spirituality’s work takes place at the public level, with women openly contesting unjust laws and practices and creating communities of love and support.”6 This may mean involvement in political, civic, and/or cultural associations and groups or being active in education, community work, economics, or missionary work. Frederick highlights practices that center women’s economic advancement. Their goal is to fight for social justice including things like a living wage or better working conditions. The creative activism of African Americans occurs as Black folk respond to the day-to-day issues in their lives, many of which can only be addressed through some form of public engagement. These activist interventions stand in a long tradition of social movements in U.S. Black culture that can be considered forms of contestation as well as caregiving. Today, it has become more common for many African American groups to focus on local “quality of life” issues rather than civil rights issues, but the two sets of issues are mutually reinforcing. In these and other ways, African Americans respond creatively to community concerns and spiritual needs.

Stewards of Land and Garden

The emphasis on cultivation, caregiving, and contestation is often conveyed with language of “stewardship” and/or the metaphor of “the garden.” Such language implies that they are in sympathy with the natural environment in which they find themselves. This requires open-mindedness as one learns about environmental conditions. One learns to love “the wind and the rain, the growing things, the birds, and all the rest, the dawn, the early morning order, and to find each part of the day … and each nightfall filled with wonders,” and to recognize contemporary signs of ecological crisis.7

In nineteenth-century agrarian settings, African Americans often cultivated the land with simple tools. As good stewards, they approached nature as colaborers, so their interactions with nature weren’t marked by a sovereign will but understood as a creative response to the rhythms of the natural world. For example, Glave explains that African American women often cultivated gardens in either “mimic” or “row” patterns, both of which were responses to the natural environment and also to African horticultural traditions. In mimic gardening, one arranges things to mimic the seeming disorderliness of nature. Although it seems chaotic, the mimic arrangement creates a diversity that reduces opportunities for weeds and pests to take hold. Row system gardeners value the notion of doing things “properly” or “the right way.” Instead of imitating “disorder,” row gardeners used a uniform design and aesthetic as they labored to arrange and plant gardens. When considering stewardship, the metaphor of “the garden” suggests that creative response acknowledges the many ways to cultivate and care, rooted in different interpretations and creative applications of traditions. It also suggests that justice includes elements of both orderliness and creativity, a choreography between structure and fluidity, and sustained, symbiotic interactions with the world.

Stewardship also implies a view of environmental justice that includes African American citizenship and property ownership alongside an ethics of preservationconservation. Glave notes how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African Americans understood preservation-conservation as the study of nature with the intent to address the ills of industrialization and to beautify their surroundings. Anglo-American preservationists “embraced an aesthetic ideal of nature and promoted restricted access … to maintain or re-create pristine environments.”8 By contrast, nature study in African American culture responded to social ills like poverty, inferior housing, disease, and corporate vice. Black rural southerners were encouraged to stay on farms and to study and teach practical preservation.

Kimberly K. Smith notes that justice in African American environmental thought implies possession as land ownership, civic membership, political autonomy, and community integrity. “Black theorists had to address who had the right to buy and sell the land and what social and economic conditions were necessary for a group to effectively exercise that right. Owning the land means more than [just] acquiring it.”9 African American spirituality as creative response created a strong association between freedom, stewardship, and responsible land possession. Beyond abolishing slavery, justice means creating the conditions for independent, Black agency and for meaningful relationships in and with the world. This requires ownership and/or possession of arable land.

On American Nationalism

The spirituality as creative response was forged within a wilderness context on the underside of an American society marked primarily by American nationalism. Nationalism is identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of other nations.10 Nations are bodies of people that are in some way united, for example, by language, history, culture, or geography. Nation is rooted in the Latin nasci, suggesting that it can also use birth or descent as the uniting factor. Nationalism may serve as a source of identity, as a mode of social organization, and as a frame for political action.11 America was politically constituted with Enlightenment thought, including natural right and social contract theory, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal [and] endowed by their creator with certain unalienable [natural] rights …”12 America’s prevention of a religious political establishment by providing space for the freedom of religious exercise was exceptional among Presbyterian Scotland, Anglican England, Catholic France, and Lutheran north German states. Although religion was politically disestablished, America’s retained a white Protestant cultural establishment until the mid-twentieth century, and American Christianities and Christian symbolism have often been used for, or seen as overlapping with, state and national purposes, especially languages like covenant, liberty, chosen, and mission.13 Yet nations operate with their own distinct self-interests.

The meaning of American nationalism has changed from the days of Revolution until today. From roughly 1783, just after the Revolutionary War, until 1800, the language of “national” was used to describe Federalists like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, over against Republicans like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. From the early nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, nationalism came to mean Progress, especially in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. Early to late nineteenth-century progress was defined as westward expansion, industrialization, and urbanization. Progressives of the late nineteenth century redefined it as social, moral, and/or economic reform, domestically, and as imperialism in the Pacific Basin. For much of the twentieth century, nationalism became “creedal” or “civic,” with America taking on the identity of a “Land of Immigrants.” Here, America identified as a place where “all national origins, classes, regions, creeds, and colors” are welcomed and committed to the principles of liberty and equality for all peoples.14 Beginning in the late 1960s, the meaning shifted again to “American exceptionalism,” denoting America’s specialness due to its being chosen for a political mission to promote liberal democracy throughout the world.15 The U.S. now understands itself as responsible for instituting a new world order, rooted primarily in military power.16 After 9/11, Congress effected the PATRIOT Act, the most dramatic abridgement of civil liberties in the nation’s history, renouncing equality before the law and a government bound by law and instituting, instead, a security state rooted in national will.

Historically, American nationalism has been formed through compromises that exclude African Americans from U.S. citizenship, effectively denying the authority of the Declaration of Independence and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in application to Black populations. Nationalism thus denied the inalienable rights, equal worth, and dignity of African Americans, instead scapegoating Blacks as slaves, as distinct species, or culturally bred criminals. The Three-Fifths Compromise (1789) excluded African Americans from U.S. citizenship. Blacks submitted petitions for equal rights, initiated court challenges, and served in the military as part of the Northern Antislavery Movement. After 1804, slavery was peculiar to the South but still protected by the national government, and national progress was tied to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In the Civil War, nationalism defeated slavery and declared emancipation. Yet, the nation struggled to incorporate African Americans as citizens due to “scientific” racial ideology. This produced the first major U.S. civil rights movement and constitutional Reconstruction, but ultimately resulted in the Compromise of 1877 and the rise of Jim Crow.17 The nation would not again consider African American equality and voting rights until the 1960s. In our post-Civil Rights era, we witness the rise of a Black entrepreneurial elite, and simultaneously, race-based mass incarceration18 and a “stand your ground” culture that justifies war on Black bodies.19 Civil rights activists must ask questions about U.S. society’s entire system of representation, i.e., the established philosophicalscientific system of organization and classification of peoples.

From Idols of Pride to Beloved Community

The current contest for national sovereignty, predicated on a racial logic and reflective of the perennial sin of pride, now jeopardizes habeas corpus and participatory democracy. Religious figures as antique as St. Augustine called pride cupiditas, and late womanist Delores Williams called it “white racial narcissism.” This “national and racial arrogance” degrades black, brown, and “wild” land and elevates white, resulting in “an exaggerated concern with [white] power and control … [pathologically] using … power and authority to persecute others who are not of that [group].”20 Williams denounced the practice of national idolatry, as well as the nation’s understanding of redemption given its requirement of Black surrogacy. “[B]lack women[’s] salvation does not depend upon any form of surrogacy made sacred by [religion] … [T]heir salvation is assured by Jesus’s life of resistance and … the survival strategies … he used to help people survive the death of identity.”21

In Williams’s thinking, Jesus’s ministerial vision of abundant life and healing—also represented by the resurrection and the spirit—functions as a primal call that shows us how to live in peaceful, productive, and abundant relationship, and it beckons for creative response. In an international context of transnational terrorism and rising authoritarianism in Russia and China, may God grant us humility to see how our nationalism fosters these same threats domestically, and, as the Reverend Dr. King noted, dishonors the nation’s sacred obligation to protect the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.22 Ultimately, Black and white freedom are bound together, and freedom itself is bound to the spirit of God, shown forth in the sequence of love, justice, then reconciliation. The spirit calls us to baptismal waters, and in the old spiritual, does so under a sign: “God gave de people de rainbow sign…no more water, but fire next time.”

Notes

1. Diane Glave, Rooted in the Earth (Lawrence Hill Books: Chicago, 2010), 46–47.

2. Glave, Rooted, 48.

3. Rooted, 44.

4. Rooted, 48.

5. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk by Delores S. Williams (Orbis Book: New York, 1993), 117. Hereafter noted as Sisters.

6. Marla Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (University of California Press: Oakland, 2003), 8, 53.

7. Rooted, 72-73, quoting Mary L. Oberlin.

8. Glave, Rooted, 73.

9. African American Environmental Thought: Foundations by Kimberly K. Smith (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, 2007), 35.

10. Oxford Dictionary of Politics

11. See “Religion and Nationalism: four approaches” by Rogers Brubaker, Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 18, Issue 1, Jan. 2012, 2-20. Also see Grounds for Difference by Rogers Brubaker (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2017).

12. Brackets not only mine, but also women and men, cis and trans, white, black, brown, and yellow, and wealthy and working-class persons who have fought over the course of American history to reforge the brackets.

13. See Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835. Also see “Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality” by Curtis Stokes, The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 75, No. 1/2 (Winter - Spring, 1990), 1-15, The University of Chicago Press.

14. See After Nationalism by Samuel Goldman (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2021).

15. The New American Exceptionalism by Donald E. Pease (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2009), 33.

16. Stanley Hoffmann, “American Exceptionalism: The New Version,” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, edited by Michael Ignatieff (Princeton University Press: Cambridge, NJ, 2005).

17. Eric Foner, The Second Founding, xxviii.

18. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press: New York, NY, 2012) and William J. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge: MA, 2011).

19. See Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis Press: Maryknoll, NY, 2015).

20. Williams, Sisters, 88.

21. Williams, Sisters, 164.

Asante Todd is associate professor of Christian ethics at Austin Seminary. A graduate of The University of Texas, Austin Seminary, and Vanderbilt University, his general area of research is public theology—the ways in which theological and religious commitments impact public debate, policy, politics, and opinion. He contributed to the book Faith and Resistance in the Age of Trump (Orbis Books, 2017).

22. See Douglas, Stand.