Ekemini Uwan
She refuses the tidy answer that there were two Christianities. One faith was handed to both parties, she says, and the enslaved practiced it more consistently than the people who owned them.
Ekemini Uwan. Public theologian and international human rights activist. MDiv, Westminster Theological Seminary. Co-host of the award-winning podcasts Truth's Table and Get in the Word with Truth's Table, and co-author, with Christina Edmondson and Michelle Higgins, of Truth's Table: Black Women's Musings on Life, Love, and Liberation (Convergent, 2022), nominated for a 2023 NAACP Image Award. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and The Witness.
Also anchors session 3.5 of the learning path
Who she is
Ekemini Uwan is a public theologian with an MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary. She co-hosts Truth's Table and co-wrote the book of the same name with Christina Edmondson and Michelle Higgins, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. She writes for The Atlantic and the Washington Post, and she is a first-generation Nigerian American, which matters to how she reads this.
She is the one in this archive who declines the easy version of the argument, and the refusal is what makes her worth reading.
What you are getting in this dossier
Her rejection of the "two Christianities" framing that almost everyone else here uses, and the theological reason she rejects it. The assumption buried inside the question that nobody names. The sacrament she says was more heinously abused than any proof text. Fannie Lou Hamer on refusing to hate. And her reframe of the whole question as a Western one.
Not two faiths
Most people here separate the slaveholder's religion from the enslaved person's. Uwan will not do it, and she explains why.
"I think I want to stop short of saying that it was a different faith entirely. I actually think it was the social location of both the enslaved Africans and the slave masters that made the difference in the faith, because I think there was a corruption of the faith, of course, on the part of the oppressor, which would be the slave masters, and the oppressed obviously would be the enslaved Africans. And so, I believe that the faith that was once and for all handed down to both parties was not corrupted, but the practice of that faith was corrupted by the oppressors for their own incentives."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
1,454 more words and 4 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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