Shoutin' In The Fire: An American Epistle by Danté Stewart

Rage as a spiritual virtue

Growing up as the son of a Southern Church of Christ minister, and having been a minister myself, I am deeply stirred by the writings of Reverend Danté Stewart. His book Shoutin’ In The Fire: An American Epistle has done more to ignite me about racial justice than well-known conceptual works of our era because Stewart’s memoiristic prose brings me close to his body. There, I can feel my own body—and its fear.

Inflected by the White Jesus I inherited, I have always wondered about the connection between Blackness and Christianity. When I was young, we moved frequently, staying no more than two or three years in any congregation before my father was either fired for his cantankerous approach to ministry or moved voluntarily elsewhere to further his personal aspirations. We lived in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Texas; twice in Arkansas. Everywhere we lived, the churches were all-White. I can remember only two instances in which a Black person attended our churches. Both were spouses of White members and conceptualized as such: “the spouse” of Brother or Sister So-and-So…never independently subjectivized. For our small-town churches, this “diversity” assuaged unspoken tensions and defenses about racism, which I only otherwise encountered on TV. Even then, the conversations were refracted through conceptualizations derived from curated coverage of crime, riots, and danger; or entertainment.

Twice, we lived in towns with a separate Church of Christ: the “Black congregation.” Occasionally, my family would visit the Black church, not to participate but to network—my father garnering support for an upcoming debate or public event. Unlike ours, the Black church clapped their hands and swayed during songs; they stomped their feet and shouted “Amen!” and “Praise God!” My father explained these differences as cultural liberties taken with scriptural worship protocols; to be overlooked, of course, in the spirit of “unity.” Which meant supporting him.

It’s no secret that I am no longer a Christian. But the minister within me is still “on fire for the Lord.” I question the relevance of all traditional religious constructs and their contemporary limitations in uniting an interconnected planet of humans living beyond scale. I fear that a unifying myth is already being created for us by our collective shadow in the form of Apocalypse; and I am doing my daily best to embrace the accompanying, incontestable revelations made possible by destruction. I recently met with my supervisor Shadeen Francis. I was lamenting the possible futility of fighting against everything that is already in motion. She noted that “as a comic book nerd,” she would be remiss in not mentioning the archetypal union of Apocalypse—and Genesis, his wife.

It is my resistance to Christianity that also lures me to Danté Stewart’s impassioned defense of his faith alongside its crucial interrogation. Reading his prose immediately conjured images from my own childhood.

There’s an old King James Version Bible sitting on my bookshelf. It is black, rugged; the gold lining on the pages shines as light hits it. The jacket is missing, and the threads have unloosened from one another over the years. It has been tried. It has traveled across the South, across time. Now it sits on a shelf where it keeps the company of books written by Black folk. Black folk who have read a similar Bible, who have wrestled with it, been confused by it. Black folk who have held it as tight as I do today.

When I open up this old Bible, dusty words emerge, conjuring up memories of poetic sermons and sweaty mics smelling like old metal and stank breath. I am suddenly surrounded by preachers and mothers and friends and saints and sinners who tried to love and live well—while failing, learning, and trying again. When I read these ancient scriptures, I hear the way they flowed from my momma’s lips. What was it about this book that kept her up in the middle of the night, calling on the Lord, calling out our names, calling out things that she imagined possible for all of us? What was it that kept her crying out when the world around her was burning?

When she recited scripture, she spoke it poetically, adding the old eth at the end of words like the King James Version did. Those words carried the divine. It was as transporting as fiction. Something you could only call magical, yet nothing like magic. The words were an entire world, but they were also in her Black body in this white country. These words carried both weight and worth and worship and worry and whatever “w” words you can describe—words that you put back together again when you, your body, and your country are shattered. It was honest, it was close, it flowed from her heart and her lips. This was her language. It was the language of my grandmother, the language of her mother, the language of all the Black folk between our yellow house, my grandma’s red brick house, and the white-stained brick church that told us we were somebody. Indeed, to hear this language is to hear the voice of God upon us in a land that has never truly known God or Love of Blackness.

That is the interesting thing about living in America. And being Black. And doing both while being a Christian. We are caught between. a terrifying and inescapable reality: the Bible, the country, and the body. (3-5)

Stewart details his journey away from the Black church of his youth, through college, and into ministry in largely White churches. A shattering inflection point occurred for Stewart the night Alton Sterling was murdered by police officer Blane Salamoni in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Stewart had just gotten off work and was headed to midweek Bible study. He checked his phone, discovering social media feeds that were flooded with circulating video footage captured by witnesses to Sterling’s murder—including Salamoni’s punctuating, “Stupid motherfucker,” over Sterling’s corpse.

Stewart: “Inside my truck, now in the church parking lot, I began to yell. I couldn’t escape the fear, the anger, the sadness. So I tried to compose myself.” He walked into the church and told one of the members what happened. “I was given the nod like they heard me but really didn’t” (64).

As I looked around me, I felt a sort of coldness and loneliness that I hadn’t felt before. I looked, panning the space; I was surrounded by a sea of white faces. I was always aware of it, but something felt different. Like I had a reason to notice what this might have meant. As I looked around the church, it wasn’t just that I didn’t see people who looked like me. It was that I didn’t see the sadness, the anger, the rage that was crying out in my body.

I didn’t see us, I didn’t feel us, I didn’t hear us.

We were invisible. (64, 65)

Later that week, while posting about Sterling’s murder and systemic racism in religiously affiliated social media groups, Stewart was met nearly unanimously with the typical “Jesus doesn’t see color.” Which isn’t not true, making apathy even more difficult to confront. Alton Sterling’s murder re-engaged Stewart’s personal past traumas (previously detailed in his narrative) and catalyzed a breakdown and reassemblage of his identity, religious and otherwise. Stewart’s ensuing struggle to harmonize the growing dissonance between his faith and his emergent rage becomes the axis of his subsequent analysis, elaborating on how playing White allowed him (and all of us regardless of racialization) to become a symbol of racial progress. Eventually, it was his rage that deepened his faith in both Christianity and Blackness.

I knew Black rage was a pathway to hope and liberation. I couldn’t just write about ministry anymore and just preach about hope and act as if this country wasn’t burning and we weren’t being consumed in the fire that white supremacy created. My rage meant giving up convincing white people to see that I was a human and worthy of love and worthy of being seen and worthy of being protected. My rage meant loving us, and really loving Black people, by giving us. something meaningful for our freedom and our future and remembering our pain and giving voice to our ancestors. Black Lives Matter was not just an affirmation of our dignity in the face of white apathy and white hatred. Black Lives Matter became gospel to me, good news in a world that forgot us, abused us, and terrorized us with impunity. Rage is a powerful political emotion, writes Audre Lorde. One that with clarity, can become “a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

After running from rage my whole life, it took some getting used to. I noticed that rage neither set me free nor made me feel better. But it did give me some words and some energy to fight white supremacy in myself and in the world, and all the ways white supremacy destroyed us and those we loved. It shook me out of my illusion that the world as I now knew it was the world that God wanted. It forced me to deal with the ways in which my Black body and Black children, women, and men live in a system of injustice—a system of inequality, exploitation, and disrespect. It became my public outcry that our bodies and our souls must be loved, and that our bodies and our souls mattered to God, and that our bodies and our souls must find rest.

I started to see that my Black rage in an anti-Black world was a spiritual virtue…

When I stopped running from the pain, rage showed up. And it taught me to seek freedom.

Rage revealed to me its cousin, courage, and the ways we need both for liberation. The courage to leave. The courage to refuse to believe what white people have said about me or have done to me. The courage to stare down white supremacy and be Black, love being Black, to fight for Black people.

Rage liberated me from my lies and gave me the courage to see anew the present and the future.

I knew that rage could not protect me, or my wife, or my son, or any of the Black folk I loved and cared deeply for. I knew that rage would not set us free in the ways our Black mommas and Black daddies spoke of. I knew that rage would not bring any of our dead back to life. But I knew that rage would make me rise again.

Rage has a way of making us stand up. Of freeing us from fear. Rage made me stop running, and it made me stop lying.

Soon, rage would put my faith back together in all the ways it was shattered. (93-98)

It is here that I will reference two additional authors to extend and apply Stewart’s analysis more broadly. The Christianity I inherited was radically distanced from the embodied rage described by Stewart. I believe White Christianity has been less a vehicle for embodied wisdom and more a symbiotic carrier for the colonial project toward imagined purity—wherein the destabilizing effects of rage must be suppressed and/or projected outwardly. In this sense, White Christianity largely serves as a narcissistic defense against the always already abject. In The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva explores this forever-tension between one’s sanitized self-image (of Whiteness and otherwise) and the incontrovertible truth of interconnectedness with everything that has been jettisoned in its illusory maintenance:

…the abject appears in order to uphold ‘I’ within the Other. The abject is the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away…

The more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed. (12, 13)

Similarly, Maurice Apprey argues in Analysts in the Trenches: Streets, Schools, War Zones, that we (humans) “purge ourselves of some inchoate and unmetabolized parts of ourselves—parts of ourselves we dare not admit as belonging to us and must therefore be housed elsewhere…deposited to the world of no place, namely, the death of the Other” (6, 7).

In the context of Danté Stewart’s analysis of White Christianity, White supremacy requires non-White bodies to contain these (and other) disavowed fragments—especially rage. Stewart’s rage as a spiritual virtue is both a leveling mechanism for the oppressed and a dire plea to the rest of us insulated by privilege to rejoin parts of ourselves necessary for our collective survival.

While reading Stewart’s detailed accounts of recent shootings of Alton Sterling and other Black people by police, my body began shaking. His lyrical prose brought these events closer to my White body where they vibrated against and inside my own traumas—physical violence at the hands of White men. Shoutin’ in the Fire gave me access to portions of my empathy that have been locked away in my attempts to suture these remaining trenches within me of primal fear…and rage.

Extending Stewart’s invitation, I further believe that queerness presents a potential advantage in this way: the traumas that have inflected our identities (both sexual and gender) offer profound portals to a longed-for experience of interconnectedness—a pathway to an indestructible sense of belonging. Though, for many of us, our obstacles are rooted in these very identities as men, which require deliberate (and evermore dangerous) choices to deconstruct. I am cultivating my capacity to suffer this truth more deeply and with dignity: a daily practice of divesting myself of illusory power and anchoring myself in the uncertainty that has always already been.

Watch Danté Stewart in conversation with Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir, another badass memoir for a future post.