Disruption

Black humanism, a non-theistic system of disbelief, is one of the most misunderstood Black “religions.” The misapprehension of the practice of disbelief is, in part, indebted to the sweeping assumptions that to be Black is to be religious, and by religious one means a commitment to a theistic notion of belief. Yet, Black religions is an expansive category that remains volatile and unstable. It is unstable precisely because the phrase “Black religions” fails to capture the varied religious worlds that Black people inhabit and claim as their religious tradition. In this essay, I turn toward scholar of religion Anthony Pinn’s work on Black disbelief as a way of illustrating how Black humanism disrupts the category of “Black religion.” Leaning into Pinn’s theoretical intervention of naming Black humanism as a new religious movement, I argue that Black humanism is not dissimilar to other Black new religious movements whose followers were in search of a path to rebuild in the aftermath of various social, theological, and religious earthquakes. In this sense, Black humanism, as Pinn shapes the tradition within the framework of “technology,” is a vehicle for community building, advocating for social justice, and meaning-making. Black humanism, then, is a technology (religion) of freedom which shifts the center from an immaterial theistic construction of God, to one in which humans possess the capacity to create and mold alternative futures relying on science and human effort. I argue that Pinn’s theory of Black humanism as a new religious movement urges a restructuring of how we think about and study Black religions in the diaspora.