The Fragmented Gateway: Race, Policing, and the Black Church in America

• In Event: Religion and Political Violence

Abstract

Drawing on four years of ethnographic research, virtual focus group interviews with 54 Black faith leaders in 46 cities across the country, and a large nationwide survey (n=2,908), this paper explores the response of the Black faith community to racialized policing. In the wake of high-profile instances of racial violence, we have witnessed unprecedented mobilization in the United States since 2020. Members of the Black Church mobilized in large numbers and spent considerable efforts in response to racial violence, where there are profound disagreements in how to change policing. At the same time, they have mobilized less in other areas of enduring inequality—like housing and education—where there is much deeper agreement. In this paper, I provide a framework for understanding these dynamics: the fragmented gateway to collective repentance. I argue that members of the Black Church widely share a vision of racial justice that can be captured with the concept of collective repentance: acknowledging histories of racial sins, stopping injustice, and seeking repair from the harms done. Racial violence has served as an entrance point to seeking collective repentance because it has provided visible images of injustice along with contestable targets, but there is a great deal of fragmentation and disagreement in moving from racial violence to collective repentance more generally. Black faith communities experience this fragmentation because of disagreement about defunding the policing, external resistance to broader changes, and religious-political cross-pressures.

Author

• Matthew Denney, Johns Hopkins University