This essay offers a theory of masculinity and religiosity that may explain the prominent absence of African-American heterosexual men from the Black Church. In short, I propose that the phenomenon may be due to a conflict between a masculine Black-body construct and a same-sex symbolic relationship with an all-powerful male Divinity. Both "God" and "God in Christ" may be homoerotic constructs which many African-American heterosexual men are unable to negotiate sufficiently in order to find deep-felt meaning in Black churches and worship. Conversely, I submit that this same dynamic is sufficient to explain the disproportionate numbers of women and the conspicuous presence of gay men in many churches. This article will develop this thesis using ethnography to gather crucial information in order to interpret the phenomenon utilizing the insights of psychoanalysis, gender theory and philosophical discourse. This essay will, therefore, critique the problematic concept of masculinity, through a utilizing of religious and theological aesthetics to suggest an altemative mode of masculinity.
African Americans and their ancestors have been subjected to forms of violence premised upon the supremacy of the state as ultimate, immutable, transcendent. This supremacy usually manifests itself as an insidious, covert form of white supremacy coded as “law and order.” This article investigates the nature of white supremacy as state violence in the wake of the deaths of both Eric Garner and Mike Brown, arguing that the vindication of police officers is a form of theodicy, one that protects the divine state from charges of injustice and, more bluntly, evil. The response to this theodicean form of reasoning—a form that consistently subjects Black bodies to multiple forms of suffering and death and justifies that death by recourse to the power of this state—is atheism. This form of atheism is not a rejection of the traditional concept of God but rather an immanent atheism that rejects the transmutation of the state as divine and above reproach.
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