Teaching African American Religious Pluralism

Abstract

Coleman Abstract This chapter reflects on my pedagogical interrogation of classical theories of religious pluralism in light of African American cultural experiences. How does the African American cultural context change the questions posed in theories of religious pluralism? How do people navigate the contemporary manifestations of the diverse religious inputs that make up African American Christianity? What common themes, if any, persist across religious difference because of the historical, cultural and political particularity of African American experiences? I explored these questions while teaching graduate level courses in theological education at Claremont School of Theology. Across two different courses, I focused on lived experience and non-academic religious texts. This involved assigning memoirs and inspirational texts intended for practitioners, arranging site visits and hosting religious leaders as speakers. I sought theoretical propositions across various academic disciplines, and, at times, from mass-market anthologies. I ensured that the course material was relevant for all students. In these courses, students and I learned three things about African American religions relevant for the enterprise of religious pluralism: African American religiosity itself is religiously plural; African American life offers both tools and gifts for living across religious boundaries; and African American religiosity signals the markers of African American culture and politics. Investigating African American religious pluralism also serves to broaden the intellectual enterprise of religious pluralism by reconstructing its primary questions into investigations of how individuals and communities straddle and merge religious Fall 2015: Black Mega-church, African American New Thought and Indigenous Black Theology: Toward an African Centered Theology of the African-American Religious Experience do this in explicit ways. Several other black religious scholars draw on conjuring and folk religion too—Yvonne Chireau’s Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition , Katie Cannon’s Black Womanist Ethics , etc. One could even count James Cone’s use of spirituals in The Spirituals and the Blues: an Interpretation and Dwight Hopkins’s use of slave narratives in Shoes that Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology under this rubric. This list doesn’t even include the ways African theologians engage with religious pluralism in their liberation theologies.