Table Of ContentBlack Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice
Series Editors Dwight N. Hopkins and Linda E. Thomas
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
“How Long this Road”: Race, Religion, and the Legacy of C. Eric Lincoln
Edited by Alton B. Pollard, III and Love Henry Whelchel, Jr.
African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of
Nimrod
By Anthony B. Pinn
White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity
By James W. Perkinson
The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens,
and the People of God
By Sylvester Johnson
Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic
Edited by Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins
Transformative Pastoral Leadership in the Black Church
By Jeffery L. Tribble, Sr.
Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black
Subversion
By James W. Perkinson
Women, Ethics, and Inequality in U.S. Healthcare: “To Count Among the Living”
By Aana Marie Vigen
Black Theology in Transatlantic Dialogue: Inside Looking Out, Outside Looking In
By Anthony G. Reddie
Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
By Emilie M. Townes
Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and
Sovereignty
By Jennifer Harvey
The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Mpilo Tutu
By Johnny B. Hill
Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish
Theology
By Kurt Buhring
Black Theology and Pedagogy
By Noel Leo Erskine
The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the
Unitarian Church
By Juan M. Floyd-Thomas
Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World
By James A. Noel
Bible Witness in Black Churches
By Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher
Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America
By Renee K. Harrison
Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American
Terror
By Angela D. Sims
Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural
Criticism
By Roger A. Sneed
The Tragic Vision of African American Religion
By Matthew V. Johnson
Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies
Edited by Bernadette J. Brooten with the editorial assistance of Jacqueline L.
Hazelton
Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics
By Melanie Harris
Racism and the Image of God
By Karen Teel
Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology
By Phillis Isabella Sheppard
Black Men Worshipping: Intersecting Anxieties of Race, Gender, and Christian
Embodiment
By Stacy C. Boyd
Black Men Worshipping
Intersecting Anxieties of Race, Gender, and
Christian Embodiment
Stacy C. Boyd
BLACK MEN WORSHIPPING
Copyright © Stacy C. Boyd, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11371-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29544-9 ISBN 978-0-230-33941-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230339415
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boyd, Stacy C., 1973–
Black men worshipping : intersecting anxieties of race, gender, and
Christian embodiment / Stacy C. Boyd.
p. cm.—(Black religion/womanist thought/social justice)
1. African American men—Religion. 2. African Americans in literature.
3. Religion in literature. 4. African Americans in motion pictures.
5. Religion in motion pictures. I. Title.
BR563.N4B6695 2011
277.3(cid:2)08208996073—dc22 2011013317
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of
my heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my strength, my redeemer.
Amen
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction—Anxious Masculinity:
The Phenomenology of Black Male Christian Embodiment 1
1 Messianic Masculinity: Killing Black Male Bodies
in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Green Mile 17
2 Bishop T. D. Jakes and the Search for Contemporary
Christian Masculinity 51
3 Donnie McClurkin and the Tensions of
Black Christian Sexuality 83
4 Father Stories and Hungry Sons in
Ernest J. Gaines’s In My Father’s House 115
Notes 147
Bibliography 165
Index 175
Series Editors’ Preface
There is an anxiety, an uncomfortability, an imbalance, and lack of
harmony in a black man in America when he tries to act out what
are supposed to be the natural and essential roles of being black and
male. He has to negotiate these social constructions of gender and
race literally in his body. How should he walk, talk, lead, and make
decisions? It becomes more complicated when historical definitions
are in flux that, then, engages the body in a performance of catch up
to new or modified definitions. Layer this dynamic with Christianity,
the reigning mythology in U.S. ideology. Couple it with sexuality, one
of the most open taboo subjects in American culture.
Stacy Boyd’s Black Men Worshipping: Intersecting Anxieties of
Race, Gender, and Christian Embodiment attentively and insight-
fully guides us through such constructions, layers, and mythologies.
He weaves a theoretical narrative in an aesthetic manner; perhaps,
because he draws deeply on the wisdoms of the aesthetic, note his cre-
ative deployment of fiction. He raises the bar of systematic construc-
tive epistemology, perhaps, because of novel interweaving of disparate
bodies of knowledge. We are given aestheticized fact and theoritized
art. I guess we can say this is the enjoyable stuff of the heart and the
head and of the black male Christian body.
Indeed, the plumb line question of “how do race and religion play
into the construction of what it means to be masculine in the USA?”
pervades and glues the manuscript together. For example, Boyd begins
his pioneering and quite nuanced text with the examples of mega-
gatherings of black Christian men conferencing around the theme of
black, Christian ManPower. Hundreds of thousands of black male
followers of their God Jesus are figuring out how their bodies relate
to this legendary crucified Body. Concomitantly, they discern how
black masculine embodiment performs as body in the black family, in
America, and in the Christian narrative in general.
