Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Yolanda Pierce

Yolanda Pierce serves as dean of the Divinity School and Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Religion and Literature at Vanderbilt University. One of America’s vital theologians, Pierce was founding director of the Center for African American Religious Life at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and previously served as dean of Howard Divinity School. She is the acclaimed author of In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit, Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative, and the astonishing new book The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing. I am so grateful for the opportunity to talk to her about that work and hear her wisdom for all our work in the present moment.

Greg Garrett: In The Wounds Are the Witness, you write about the problem of willful amnesia and tell us that “bones don’t lie,” yet in our current context, bones seem to be ignored or left to dissolve at the bottom of the ocean. Why is it so important to pay attention to the bones, to give full attention to our history and to grapple with what is most assuredly a painful and difficult past?

Yolanda Pierce

Yolanda Pierce: I believe healing begins with memory. Memory is the act of putting “flesh” onto dry bones; it is a literal act of re-membering parts of the human story. When we remember our past, our collective history, and even those painful acts which define those identities, we proclaim that the stories of our ancestors and forebearers matter. When we pay attention to our racial histories, particularly in this nation, we give life to the forgotten peoples, towns, communities and experiences that are the foundation for our country but have been deliberately excluded from the official narrative. Putting flesh on the bones of our past is a testimony to God’s keeping power in times of crises, which is a much-needed reminder of hope for these perilous times.

GG: Your discussion of the Black girl who was assaulted by a police officer at a swimming pool in McKinney, Texas, broke my heart and will resonate with many of my Texas readers. Could you say a little about why it spoke so powerfully to you, and why the treatment of Black woman’s bodies in America is a theological issue worth everyone’s attention?

“When the most vulnerable among us can thrive, then everyone else can thrive.”

YP: I share the story of this vulnerable Black girl, assaulted by those who wield personal and state authority over her body, to examine the dynamics of race, power and justice. But it is a profoundly theological story because it reminds us that while everyone is made in the Imago Dei — the image and likeness of God — our human impulses create immoral hierarchies where some lives matter and others do not.

When the most vulnerable among us can thrive, then everyone else can thrive. When the outcast or the marginalized or the least among us are accorded dignity, then the fulness of God’s care and compassion is revealed.

GG: We first met at Washington National Cathedral, where recently Bishop Marian Budde broke the internet by calling Donald Trump to compassion. Can you tell us what the white American church could learn from wise women (you properly lament that female voices are considered “too loud, too powerful and audacious”) and also (since you “speak Black church”) what we all might learn from the Black church about being a confessional/countercultural church during Donald Trump’s presidency?

YP: While the Black church is not a monolith or a single denomination, as an institutional expression, it can trace its roots and prophetic beginnings to a crucial experience: a group of Black worshippers refusing to be removed from the altar, while kneeling in prayer, when racist norms during slavery prohibited Black worshippers from being at the front of the church.

In other words, protest and a refusal to be dehumanized is central to the Black church’s identity. Protest against the forces, powers and principalities in high places must always be a part of the work of the church, particular on behalf of the widowed or the orphaned or the stranger. Care and compassion for those who are often degraded, dismissed and dehumanized are at the core of the work of the gospel.

GG: James Baldwin is an essential voice in this and any other age, and it was a joy to encounter him in your chapter “The Innocence Is the Crime.” I’m blessed to teach a class on Baldwin at Baylor this spring, and we are daily having epiphanies. Could you talk a bit about why you think he’s an essential voice for America and, maybe more personally, how and why he speaks into your own experience?

YP: James Baldwin is a touchstone for me in so many ways. Some of it is simply because we share a similar upbringing in the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition. There are two things about Baldwin that make his life and writing so important to me.

First, he speaks truth to power with a concise, yet powerful, form of writing. His 1963 The Fire Next Time is probably one of the most important books ever written, and it’s well under 100 pages. We don’t need unduly complicated and inaccessible language to offer profoundly theological analyses.

“We don’t need unduly complicated and inaccessible language to offer profoundly theological analyses.”

Second, the language of the Bible, sacred Scripture and music of the Christian tradition are infused throughout Baldwin’s writing. When I say I “speak Black church,” it is to affirm what I see in Baldwin: the stories, songs and wisdom of Christendom always will inform how I write and why I write.

GG: You tell a story from your childhood about how a spiderweb can heal a wound, and despite all the pain and injustice recorded in your pages, I left The Wounds Are the Witness with an overwhelming sense of hope. Could you tell us please where in this moment you are finding hope and courage for this journey filled with wounds?

YP: The work of seeing God’s justice come to fruition in the world is hard and yet I have so much hope. Part of that emerges from the work I do as a dean and professor. Every year, I get to welcome classes of students who still believe God has called them to do good in the world.

Despite the chaos and the cruelty that governs so much of the politics of this current moment, my students remind me there is a remnant, those who believe in the highest call to love God and to love neighbor.

Cornel West says Christians are “prisoners of a blood-stained, tear-soaked hope.” My hope is that there is a critical mass of us willing to work toward God’s justice in this world, as it will be in the world to come.

Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.

More from this series:

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Rep. James Talarico

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Malcolm Foley 

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Jonathan Eig

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Greg Jarrell

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Robert G. Callahan II

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Andrea Russell

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Bishop Michael Curry

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Melissa Deckman

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Matthew D. Taylor

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Nancy French

Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Robert P. Jones