"At first glance it would appear as though the Movement for Black Lives, or the more general Black Lives Matter movement, has lost its religion," says Ari Colston of Emory University. "But the Movement for Black Lives, its theories of liberation, and the social and political actions for which it is responsible are far from purely secular or atheistic."
In today's episode, we hear from Ari Colston as she puts forward the question of whether the Movement for Black Lives is only a secular movement.
Whereas history might associate the Civil Rights Movement with Black middle-class congregations and church leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Colston writes that the Black Lives Matter movement seems to model itself after the more populist and secular organizing frameworks of Ella Baker and the Black Panthers. Many of the millennial and Gen Z members of the movement struggle to reconcile the inactivity of the Judeo-Christian God of the Exodus with the realities of police brutality, mass incarceration, and systemic racism.
These activists stand at odds with the Black church’s predominantly reformist stances on incarceration and policing and the institutional culture of respectability politics and cisheterosexism. From the outside looking in, this troubled relationship between young Black activists and the church suggests that the “new” iteration of the Black freedom struggle is completely secular. The reality, as Colston shows, is much more complicated--and more sacred--than one might expect.
With this push away from religious institutions, what does the future look like for Black activist movements?
Listen now.
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