“Here matter comes into view as matrix, as an-original ‘gathering space’ that potentiates becomings of entangled difference or ‘difference without separability.’ Here difference is precisely our shared commons. It is precisely what is shared. And yet what is shared here is not a substantial whatness. It is not an isolable or possessable or propertied quiddity that is transferred or otherwise given to pre given subjects. Rather, as the clearing for existence in all manifestations, in all of its entangled becomings and possible assemblages—in short as a horizon of belonging through heterogeneity—matter is always already a horizon of entanglement and sharing that yields differences, proliferates forms, and generates earth as a point within or a vector of cosmos… an alternate cosmology, a cosmology of a black world or of a blackness as ever-expanding, always emergent worlds. These are worlds ever and always beginning, existing in and as becoming and, in this way, as vitalistic be-ing. It constantly enfleshes itself as entangled, unpredictable multiplicities… a vitalist and therefore anti colonial imagination of matter.”
I grew up in churches that emphasized “membership” as a key category. You were a member of the church, or you weren’t, and many of the ministries of the church were defined by whether they were “for” members or “for” non-members. Things for those outside the church were “outreach and evangelism.” Things for those inside the church were “formation and discipleship.”
The “shared commons” of those congregations had to do with a shared set of beliefs, as well as a commitment to participation in the life of the community in ways that, generally speaking, consolidated similiarities. The goal was to become more like one another, and to keep those “inside” active and engaged, while helping those new to the community to adapt and conform if they joined the group. A lot of (unspoken) anxiety was caught up with the question of who was in and who was out, and whether enough of the work of the church was focused inside vs. outside the church (both literally and figuratively).
I think the church of that time, as well as most churches today, would struggle tremendously to comprehend or practice the kind of shared commons J. Kameron Carter describes (in the pull quote with which I opened this essay). Shared commons as “entangled difference.” Belonging as “heterogeneity,” community found precisely in the state of being different.
However, now in 2023, pastoring a progressive Lutheran church in Arkansas that includes, among other groups, an intentionally non-religious LGBTQIA summer camp, a Marshallese led and organized support organization called Ozark Atolls, a predominately white Lutheran worshipping congregation, plus a ton of adjacent atheist and agnostic friends who appreciate our social justice, liberation theology approach to church, a proposal like Carter’s seems so much more appealing and helpful for what the “shared commons” of our church might be, a shared commons as an always emerging and beginning again, existence as “becoming…” that sounds exactly like the struggle and joy of our present reality.
Let’s take a step back. One of J. Kameron’s contentions in The Anarchy of Black Religion is as follows: “racereligion as a construct or technology of enclosing the earth through a brutalizing political-theological and cosmological imagination that alchemizes matter by extractively (anti)blackening it, subjecting it to brutalizing logics and practices of property ownership and (also as) separability” (15).
That is to say, religion (itself a modernist invention of Western/European culture foisted on the world in order to fetishize places like Africa), is not just innocently a set of beliefs to organize ethical life and offer a path to salvation in the hereafter, but is instead the (re)invention of the organization of matter itself, subjecting matter to the violence of “racial capitalist individuation.”
This may sound like a radically different definition of religion than the popular one encountered in most Christian congregation, but it’s accurate nonetheless, and more true. Religion has offered an entire myth that justifies things like race-based chattel slavery (racial capitalist individuation), the theft of the land from Indigenous communities (brutalizing logics and practices of property ownership), and offers the modern illusion that we are each our own, and possess things that are “ours” and not “others” (individuation and separability).
I’ll offer a set of quotes from the book to help set the descriptive context:
“the modern invention of religion is predicated on enclosing and extracting from the earth, on enclosing and extracting from black mater as matter, in short, on eviscerating matter’s depth and foreclosing on alternate cosmologies or imaginations of matter(-ing), particularly, those advancing incompleteness” (23)
“in religionizing Africans under the rubric declaring them animists, fetishists, or practitioners of 'African religion’—the African was violently transubstantiated. The African was alchemized into a Negro, plasticized as flesh, made the locus of experimentation for how matter might be denuded of form in the interest of speculatively warehousing value” (33).
“a new archē of (human) being and knowing emerged with and through the simultaneous appearance of a people who would be called black and something that would be called black religion in the Atlantic World…. the nineteenth century emergence of the scientific study of religion and its refinement across the twentieth century was at the forefront of empire’s new terms of cultural order and knowing… understanding this requires coming to terms with black religion’s ambivalent relationship, indeed its anarchic relationship, to the very notion of religion as one of the world’s—the modern world’s—keywords” (8).
“The modern invention of religion works in close connection with the emergence of capitalist commerce and exchange and the idea of the state as grounding ‘the political,’ on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as undergirding a radicalized conception of ‘the human’ that itself is bound up with enclosing the earth and with an imagination of matter or a way of conceiving matter through an individuating or dividing or separating logic and practice of (anti)blackening” (3-4)
Carter argues (convincingly, I might add) that we’ve come to think about matter itself through anti blackness as religion. Many of us recognize that anti-blackness is a religion—white supremacy—but what Carter adds is that we’ve come to think about matter itself through this religion, and this way of thinking about matter “matters.” Borrowing a term from the history of Christian thought, we can say that modern religion transubstantiates matter into property, and this is the religion most of us believe far more than we believe that the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ in the liturgy.
We may cosplay the transubstantiation of the elements at Sunday worship, but we actually live by the transubstantiation of matter into property, encoding it into law and daily practice.
Carter calls for an alternative to the myth that has reigned supreme as “modern religion.”1 He proposes that the anarchy of black religion is a cross-cultural poetics, a “fugitive refusal” of the logics of the state and of humans. He wants us to imagine an alternative ways of life together, with each other, with the earth, “an alternate we-ness in diffused or dispersed, differential unity (not uniformity).”
This, he argues, is “black religion.”
I’m especially taken with his proposal of differential unity and “incompleteness” as crucial expressions of the an-archic.
If I think about the way this plays out in congregational life, I see the incompleteness in the way that church (even still today in spite of the way religion has attempted to transubstantiate it) is a kind of alternate third space, a non-capitalist community. The very things that make it uniquely “church” are what set it apart from the more completed and perfected capitalist spaces (I fully recognize that many large and economically prosperous churches do not match what I’m describing here).
In these church spaces, many aspects of life together are ad hoc, piecemeal, weak. They happen through volunteerism, through freely shared good will (mutual aid).
They could be even better clarified if they were to live out what Carter defines as faith: creative endurance under and through conditions of duress. This would require of churches that they lean into the insight of liberation theology, “opting for the poor and marginalized, and against their oppression, as essential aspects of… faith.”2
I think this way of leaning then also helps us understand what is specifically anarchic about black religion in relationship to “religion.” Anarchy is not, as popularly understood, chaos. Instead, anarchy is literally an-arche, a way of living/thinking/being/organizing without an arche, a sovereign or leader or authority.
Communities can move away from traditional ideas of sovereignty in many ways. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to rid such concepts from our worship. For example, is it helpful for Christians to use terms like “Lord,” or even “kingdom.” So much of the liturgy expresses the relationship between God, Jesus, and humanity in ways that fail the test of anarchy.
And yet all one has to do is read the life of Jesus and see how God is expressed as moving in relationship to God’s people to realize the extent to which God in Christ is far more “an-archic” than modern Christianity has given credit.
Furthermore, church life together could far more be lived in more an-archic ways. Rather than Christians living as if there were an authority to guide them in right living, for communities of faith to understand mutual, distributed sensibilities as themselves the an-archic corollary of what we might call the “kin-dom,” can be helpful.
Finally, I am stunned and transformed by Carter’s repeated point that modern religion has a “separating logic that encloses the earth.” This is perhaps the insight least frequently considered within even the more progressive parts of Christianity—that is to say, if we are going to practice an-arche, it must also apply to how we think about matter, land, property, etc. Whether it is the atolls we tested nuclear weapons on in the Marshall Islands, or the black bodies captured and sold as chattel slaves to further the U.S. economy, or the land on which we stand that we increasingly acknowledge as having been the land of others and which we separated from them and enclosed, these “separating logics” impact all the ways church life still happens today.3
This book did not read at all as I had expected, especially given the title. Of course, I should have anticipated it would be surprising and different and textually dense: it’s actually part of a series edited by J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak on Innovations in the Poetics of Study.
The work is profoundly “textual.” Which is to say it works many of its most profound proposals in conversation with other writers and texts, an approach not surprising in most philosophical or theological works but particularly clarifying in this case because the topic under consideration is literally “black religion,” with a focus on those terms.
Given the kind of reader I am, a white clergy person who primarily approaches religious studies from the framework of ecclesiological practice, it took a bit to adjust to the book, but the adjustment was productive (-and likely the point). I have not included nearly as much of the poetic and another literary analysis that makes up sections of the book, but have chosen instead to facilitate readers of this blog appreciating what is going on in a work like Carter’s by weaving in instead the “text” of congregational life and practice as I experience it.
I believe our predominately white congregation may be subject to some of the same pressures as “black religion” even though our pressures are more of the queer variety rather than racial (and in an adjacent manner also related to literal refugees, the hungry poor, and Pacific Islander neighbors), is in fact exploring through our practices the kind of post-colonial mutual aid, the an-archē, that Carter proposes is emerging in his description of “black religion.”
Carter writes: “The black study of religion conceives of black religion as instancing a material mysticism that manifests as a distinct poiēsis or artistic way of living that as such is anarchic. Anarchism gathers and names the practices of mutual aid and the programs for survival that have sustained us in the face of unimaginable violence.” Just so I would imagine that other communities have discovered that this kind of anarchism sustains them in their own situations of unimaginable violence.
For me, in our context, I would call this “queer religion.”
—
I’ll conclude with my favorite quote from the book. I won’t offer much in the way of commentary, other than to say each time I have paused to pray recently, I have reconsidered prayer along the lines of this quote, prayer not as prayer to some lord or sovereign, but rather anarchic prayer, a more disorienting prayer than the stately prayers that regulate so much of Christian worship. I think Carter’s description of prayer shares much in common with some descriptions in the New Testament of the anarchy that occurs in Christ and what emerges for our ways of speaking “with” God:
“if we can think prayer in the direction of incompleteness rather than as commerce between hierarchically distinguished sovereign subjects (a “God” who lords or master over a creature); if we can think prayer as a practice of and toward the open, practice without telos or a regulatory endgame, without sovereignty, as a practice of insovereign incompletion, as improper, anarchic refusal of stateliness, propriety, property, and the proper and thus as registering an alternate imagination of matter as sheer, indeterminate, congregate swerving… prayer as dis/orientation, indeed, an open set of practices that signals indeterminate materiality, unstably sociality, and disidentification with religion as individuating force” (22)
“In other words, through the hegemony of the empirical and of empiricism, myth in its imperial mode aims to halt potentials by imposing “the world as such” on top of the earth and on top of the imagination, in this way sedimenting in place a propertied or propertizing relationship to the earth” (121). “myth unhinged from myth’s typical gesture of securing how a people, how a tribe, storifies, imagines, or as it were, mythifies through stories about origins and endings, and how it thereby establishes, often through deathly sacrifice, a sacred-political center or orientation for itself so as to ground peoplehood and endow the idea of ‘the people’ with would-be coherence… myth that unsays myth” (126)
A Revolutionary Faith, by Raúl Zegarra, 2023.
As just one crucial example, the hey day of the church in North America was the expansion of churches to the suburbs, the building of which tacitly supported and then economically benefitted from a wide set of red lining practices.
TY for introducing this book It's an awesome review
As I read and re-read this whole missive, if that’s the right word to use, i was lost in the words used which seemed unfamiliar and I thought I was fairly intelligent. Evidently not. So it went over my head.