What Is African American Religion?: Facets series

Chapter 4: Remapping and Rethinking African American Religion

63 Mapping and understanding the quest for complex subjectivity introduced at the end of the last chapter is of great importance for a new definition of the nature and meaning of African American religion. But before launching into that discussion, it is important to provide a few key definitions, beginning with what is meant by the term “quest.” In short, by “quest” I intend to suggest a desired movement from being a corporeal object controlled by oppressive and essentializing forces to a complex conveyer of cultural meaning, with a creative identity expressed in the world of thought and activity (that is, subjectivity). Furthermore, this subjectivity is understood as complex in that it seeks to hold in tension many ways of existing in spaces of identification—having numerous ways of understanding and expressing oneself in relationship to oneself, others, and the world—as 4 Remapping and Rethinking African American Religion What Is African American Religion? 64 opposed to reified notions of identity that mark dehumanization. While some might question the religious significance of complex subjectivity, I argue it is distinguishable from other struggles for life meaning by its layered nature and comfort with both tension and paradox. For example, U.S. progressive politics is concerned with identity and identity-formation as they revolve around issues of democracy and citizenship. Liberal economic reform in the United States is concerned with identity within the realm of production or control over the means of production. The yearning for complex subjectivity differs in that it seeks to hold together, to bind together, all of these various threads of identity development in a way that makes them essential components of a larger, tangled, and all-encompassing sense of life meaning in more absolute terms. In arguing for complex subjectivity as the center of African American religion, I am aware of thinkers, such as philosopher Lewis Gordon, who argue humans should not be understood as subject or object, or even a combination of the two. Rather, humanity is best defined by “ambiguity,” a complexity and multidimensionality . Regarding this, he writes: “this ambiguity is an expression of the human being as a meaningful, multifaceted way of being that may involve contradictory interpretations, or at least equivocal ones. Such ambiguity stands not as Remapping and Rethinking African American Religion 65 a dilemma to be resolved, as in the case of an equivocal sentence, but as a way of living to be described.”1 My sense of complex subjectivity is meant to maintain this multidimensional notion of being. Furthermore, this quest is not achieved in one act or in one moment in which a new status is secured. Nor does it depict a separate or distinctive element of reality. Rather, it involves an unfolding, a continuous yearning and pushing for More, an expanding range of life options and movements. It must be understood that this does not entail a turn toward strict individualism. This subjectivity means individual fulfillment within the context of concern and responsibility for others. In this sense, it is the struggle to obtain meaning through a process of “becoming.” It is religious in that it addresses the search for ultimate meaning, and it is African American because it is shaped by and within the context of African American historical realities and cultural creations. Seeing Complex Subjectivity in Conversion This theoretical turn requires some descriptive material, and for that I offer a brief exploration of conversion because of the light it sheds on the theory of African American religion What Is African American Religion? 66 proposed here. That is, conversion accounts say something of importance about the underling motivation for religion and, in this way, point to the feeling or impulse that generates religion as wrestling to develop greater life meaning. My thesis is quite simple: conversion, made possible through elemental feeling for complex subjectivity, is based on a triadic structure of: (1) confrontation by historical identity often presented in terms of existential pain and some type of terror; (2) wrestling with the old consciousness and the possibility of regeneration; and (3) embrace of new consciousness and new modes of behavior effecting relationship with the community of believers—those who have had a similar response to elemental feeling—and the larger community. Literary figures often have expressed the nature of conversion in clear and crisp ways that merit serious consideration. A prime example is found in novelist James Baldwin’s autobiographical text titled Go Tell It...