CRRES Speaker Series Lecture

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

This lecture will examine the category of “Christian fatigue” as a framework that does not simply explain Black communities’ dissatisfaction or rejection of the Black Church or Black Christian formation, but as an idea that helps us explore a century’s worth of re-imagining Black religious traditions. From the end of reconstruction to the long civil rights struggle of the twentieth century, there has been and continues to be a cultural irruption in the domain of the sacred. This irruption was the entrance of alternative Christian and religious movements into the center of the Black public sphere. These movements were not wayward or irrelevant to Black communities, but they were articulating a new way of being Black, religious, and citizen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We are still responding to this history of Christian fatigue and religious revitalization, and this discussion will attempt to connect this history of 20th century Black Christian fatigue with current movements and theorizations of Black liberation in Indianapolis and throughout the country.