HDS Photograph/Justin Knight

Thomas: By kincraft, I refer to discourses, practices, and worldviews by which they constructed each other as spiritual kin. Specifically, I note that this kincraft emerges from Christian cultural sources like the transcendent ecclesial notions of Plymouth Brethrenism that write Christian believers into a “family of God.” I also note that this kincraft emerges from the adaptive kinship practices that rise out of diasporic histories and experiences, as well as lived experiences of immigration, racialization, and spatial and social mobility. But Black evangelical community life also holds an aesthetic story. Kincraft is not just a study of form and function. By denoting Black evangelical spiritual kinship as kincraft, I acknowledge the craftsmanship and collective labor that undergird Black evangelical sociality. In the words of poet Elizabeth Alexander, I write out of a “veneration of the sweat of the craft.”² My work is grounded in a profound appreciation of the dynamic tapestry of relationships patterned by ideological designs and collective intentions in contexts of teaching and learning, confiding correction and giving, a warp and weft fashioned by hands, starts, repetitions, do-overs, and repairs—a tapestry that I was able to see in sections during my time with the DBC and CBC communities.

McNeil: What were the biggest challenges you encountered while conducting fieldwork?

Thomas: The biggest challenge I encountered was the decentralized landscape of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Finding a place to do research proved really hard at first. Being grounded in the institutionalized spaces of Black churches was immensely helpful.

McNeil: How does Kincraft provide your readers a different and, dare I say, more complicated picture of evangelicalism when Black people are placed at the center of analysis?

Thomas: This is a good question and a timely one. I’d like to start by responding that there has been an increased attention to the dynamics of contemporary evangelicalism in the United States and race. This is good. In particular, the support of the group dubbed Trumpvangelicals for President Donald Trump in 2016 raised questions about the demographics and faith orientations of this constituency. And these are important questions. Nonetheless, as I teach students, “hegemony does not actually preclude alternatives; it just creates well-traveled associations.” White evangelicals do not own evangelicalism, even if they are a numeric majority, even if their worldviews feed white supremacist, imperialist, and cisheteropatriarchal forms of dominance.

And so that’s where we are with Kincraft. When Black people are placed at the center of analysis, evangelicalism becomes a religion of connection and critique; it makes family but also hosts intimate spaces with questions about family ideologies. What does family mean for people of African descent? Are ancestors displaced as they enter a universal family of God, and what is the place of heteronormative kinship ideologies in Black and mainstream neo-evangelical subcultures? Why is it so heavily prized? Is it a form of idolatry? So, the narrative of a normatized white heteropatriarchal traditionalism is not simplistically replicated; it receives questioning and critique.

Moreover, theologies of Christian kinship are challenged by Black evangelical experiences with racial exclusion. In some instances, this is a matter of commentary, the sharing of experience, and observation of racial distances rather than intervention. In some instances, their insistence on the realization of authentic Christian familial connection and fellowship across racial boundaries emerges in contexts in which evangelists engage in interracial revivalism and parachurch collaborations, as was the case with founding evangelist T. Michael Flowers and the regional interracial gospel missionary organization of which he was a part.

Nonetheless, the project does not only excavate a Black-white binary of U.S. evangelicalism. CBC and DBC members’ take on Biblicism generated intraracial religious distinctions between an authenticated Christianity they understand to be grounded in biblical literalism and an authentic, performative Christianity they understand to be rooted in ecstatic worship practices and charismatic pastoral authority. Bible study also becomes a central venue for the production of meaning and consensus, as well as the ritualization of male biblical exegesis and fraternalism. Centering Black evangelicals and their story of Black evangelicalism, then, illuminates some of the binaries of the U.S. Christian landscape, as well as some of the bridges created by members, and also intraracial religious and moral distinctions that are often obscured by the presumed stability of Blackness as a signifier of a presumable religious homogeneity. They provide us more

McNeil: Church attendance and Christian adherence have both waned in recent decades among Black millennials. What did you learn in your fieldwork about intergenerational religious dynamics among Black millennials and their parents within DBC and CBC?

Thomas: DBC and CBC members worry about their ability to reproduce religious identity across generations. To be sure, there is no way to truly ensure that your children will stay in the faith. But there are also a number of interrelated social phenomena feeding Black evangelical concerns about Black millennial religious designations: an uptick in millennials’ self-identifications as spiritual but not religious; the association of higher education with secularization and a loosening of faith; concerns about the replication of middle-class identities across generations, amid ongoing processes of racialization, downward mobility, and economic recession. For Black evangelical parents and grandparents, the religious fate of their children is situated between spiritual and material fears about doubt and debt, about the various kinds of distractions and discouragements that can contribute to young people walking away from the faith. Since my fieldwork, some of the young adults, who were peers to me in terms of age (mid-20s) during the time of fieldwork, have left the church, citing concerns with the church’s emphasis on orthodoxy to the detriment of new programming that can sustain young adult interest, worship practices, and topics of interest to younger adults.

McNeil: You delicately detail how diaspora and ethnicity play important roles in the creation of and differences between DBC, CBC, and the “Black Church.” Why are diaspora and ethnicity important characteristics that shape each church you focus on in Kincraft?

Thomas: Diaspora and ethnicity remind us of the mobilities and cultural variations that exist within Black communities in the United States. The Black in evangelical is not singular and is not an exclusive reference to African American identity, as might be assumed. In fact, the origins of the CBC and DBC communities trace back to an evangelical Plymouth Brethrenism transplanted in the Caribbean by missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And, it was mostly Afro-Caribbean evangelists who founded this religious movement from the 1950s and then a successive wave in the 1980s, when more Afro-Caribbean immigrants began migrating to Atlanta. Black evangelicalism is worked out around ethnic lines, between Caribbean progenitors and African American converts and between notions of religious difference that get mapped onto different Black ethnic groups. There are also shared experiences of mobility that African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans share. But Black evangelicalism is not singular, and making Black evangelical communities requires negotiations across intraracial differences and culturally differentiated contexts of origin and religious practice to create congregations based on shared notions of kinship. This requires work; they are not innate to Blackness.

McNeil: Recently, the world lost Black feminist theorist and thinker bell hooks, whose analysis plays a major methodological role in your fifth chapter, “Churchwomen and the Incorporation of Church and Home.” Can you describe how hooks helps you explain the “qualities and contexts of churchwomen’s everyday spiritual relationships and their impact on the community as a whole”?³

Thomas: There is a beautiful line, from Remembered Rapture, where hooks writes of Emily Dickinson’s work and mentions how Dickinson made “a sacrament of the everyday.”⁴ This helped me conceptualize the work of Black evangelical women as sisters, mothers, and prayer partners beautifully—to see how this institutional work was done within a patriarchal context of leadership, to visualize its ritual and mundane and even aesthetic quality. I’m still grateful to hooks for this context, for its origins within her own contemplation of a creative interlocutor, and that the concept came out of hooks’s appreciation for Dickinson’s rendition of the mundane. This concept of the sacrament of the everyday nicely captures the qualities and significance of Black evangelical churchwomen’s communion as well as the significance of the mundane in the study of lived religion.

McNeil: Before we close our conversation, what are you working on now?

Thomas: I am currently working on an ethnography about contemporary Black church arson, tentatively titled “From Hate to Hallows: Reframing Black Church Arson.” It has been challenging, but I’m grateful to what research collaborators have taught me. This is very new ground for me. I argue that Black church arson is not only a material event of anti-Black violence but also an interpretive event. While I spend a great deal of the text plumbing the depths of local interpretations, religion, race, and kinship (a tripartite way of thinking for me) are also part of this story as well.