Spirit & Power Ep 3 - "The Promise of America:" Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Visibility in the 2024 Election
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In this episode of Spirit & Power: ‘”The Promise of America:” Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Visibility in the 2024 Election.’ Dr. Leah Payne speaks with Dr. Dara Coleby Delgado, Bishop James Mills Thoburn Chair of Religious Studies, an Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies, and an affiliate faculty in Black Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College and a 2024-2025 PRRI Public Religion Fellow, about the rising political visibility of Black Pentecostals and Charismatics this election cycle.
Resources & Links:
“Black Pentecostal and charismatic Christians are boosting their visibility in politics − a shift from the past” by Dara Delgado
“Half of all Black churchgoers say services include speaking in tongues,” Pew Research Center
“The Future of “Born-Again Evangelicalism” Is Charismatic and Pentecostal,” Fanhao Nie, Ph.D., Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr., Leah Payne, Tarah Williams, Ph.D. for the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)
Books:
Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism by Estrelda Alexander
Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging by Keri Day
William Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism by Gastón Espinosa
The Black Roots and White Racism of Early Pentecostalism in the USA by Iain MacRobert
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
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On night three of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Bishop Leah D. Daughtry of the House of the Lord Church, the CEO of the 2016 and 2008 Democratic National Convention Committees, and the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, prayed over those assembled as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz formally accepted the vice presidential nomination.
For the work that must be done, for the bridges that must be built, for the walls that must
be destroyed, for the children who must be saved, for the doors that must be opened,
for the sick who must be healed, and for the last who must be first.
We ask for strength for the journey, clarity of thought, sharpness of vision, singleness
of purpose, and the courage of our convictions to make the promise of America the practice
of America.
My guest today sees Bishop Daughtry, a Pentecostal, as part of a shift in how Black Pentecostals and Charismatics are now engaging in American politics.
I'm Leah Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
This week on Spirit and Power, the promise of America.
The rising political visibility of Black Pentecostals and charismatics this election cycle.
We'll ask how Black and White Pentecostals diverged socially and politically, and we'll explore how this movement draws on a rich tradition of social engagement and the distinct spiritual experiences within Black Pentecostalism that are shaping 2024 approaches to faith and politics.
I am Dara Colby Delgado, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Allegheny College.
I am also the Bishop Thurborn Chair of Religious Studies there, and I am currently the 2024-2025 PRRI Public Religious Fellow.
Dara writes on religion and politics for outlets like Religion News Service and The Conversation.
And I invited her to talk with me about a recent article she wrote for The Conversation, Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians are boosting their visibility in politics, a shift from the past.
Dara, you write about the stories of Pentecostals and Charismatics in 2024 being tied to their origins in the early 20th century.
In your article, you root the movement in the work of William J. Seymour, an African American preacher who became involved in the holiness movement.
He was baptized Catholic, but then he got involved in Methodist and holiness circles.
And he led the now famous Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, which began in 1906.
Many people argue it was that revival that really sparked the global Pentecostal and eventually charismatic movements.
Under Seymour's leadership, the Azusa Street Mission became a hub for prayer and worship experiences of the Holy Spirit, which included speaking in tongues and healing and perhaps most notably interracial worship, which was remarkably radical for its time.
So I wonder if you could just start us off with your perspective on the origins of Pentecostalism.
I am of the generation of Pentecostal scholars who came on the wave of folks offering a more critical history.
Prior to that, it was this kind of safe meta-narrative where these folks got together on Azusa Street, and it was red and yellow, black and white, and everyone was precious in Jesus' sight.
And as Frank Bartleman said, that the Lord had washed away the color line with the Frank Bartleman, a white holiness preacher turned Pentecostal who wrote How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles chronicled the events of Azusa Street wherein believers from diverse backgrounds experienced speaking in tongues and healing and other so-called charismatic manifestations.
And so there was literally no distinction between men and women and People of color and everyone was living this fantastic life.
Well, by the time I came into Pentecostal scholarship, There were folks who were already interrogating this idea.
It wasn't just a Black man leading a multiracial congregation and everyone was getting along.
Folks had even gone a little further back and they'd said, well, we should look at his spiritual father, if you will, his teacher, Karen, and interrogate his role and think about the ways in which his anti-Black racism It informed even his ability to school someone like William J. Seymour in Pentecostalism and the experiences of the spirit and claims around glossolalia, speaking in tongues, that type of thing.
Charles Parham, a white preacher in the early 20th century, Led a Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, and is credited with kickstarting the Pentecostal movement when a student, Agnes Osmond, reportedly spoke in tongues in 1901.
William Seymour was drawn to Parham's ministry and was his student for a time, but Parham held white supremacist beliefs and opposed the interracial worship scene at Azusa Street under the leadership of Seymour.
And so that complex history between Parham and Seymour is just riddled with anti-Black racism and xenophobia.
I am a product of the scholarship that has interrogated this history, really paying attention to the schisms that were not so much doctrinal as much as they were cultural and racial.
Pentecostalism is now not just so much ex-nilio, the spirit came down, people spoke in tongues, had all these wonderful miracles and prophecies, but now people are thinking more critically about its African roots.
What does it mean for a Black man to have led the Azusa Street Revival?
And what did he bring to the religious expression that was there?
It's his mentor is saying that spirit baptism is marked by speaking in unintelligible speech.
That's how we know that you're in the club.
Then we have someone like William Seymour saying, eh, okay, yeah, we're going to have all of these activities.
We're going to have speaking in tongues, we're going to have prophecies, we're going to have miracles, but it's going to be love that's going to be the distinctive characteristic of spirit baptism.
Why is that important? He's a black man.
In the early 20th century, he is the son of enslaved people.
And those people came to this country, generations deep, with their own religiosity and their cosmology.
So when scholars are saying Pentecostalism is indebted to African spirituality, what they're actually naming is, when the first enslaved Africans came to this country, they did not claim tabula rasa.
They came with complex cosmology that included deities, ancestors, Angels, ecstatic manifestations, bodily practices that would look like what we would call today shouts or praise breaks, unintelligible speech that we might tie to speaking in tongues.
These were all parts of their spiritual expression.
Very demonstrative and also very communal.
When Seymour is leading the Azusa Street Revival, he is very much open to all types of embodied religious practices because he's been practiced into it as a Black person in the United States for generations.
This is a part of his Black identity.
And then when you pair that with the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ and what spirit baptism is supposed to do, the emphasis is going to be then less on embodied activity and much more on how does one love your neighbor.
And so when we think about Black Pentecostalism and we take this particular historical trajectory, it's not just that it's problematized, it's expanded.
I was just thinking about growing up in white Pentecostalism, hearing the same time period covered in very idealized ways, and then everyone being kind of puzzled.
Why are we so segregated?
I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on if we take for granted the idea that Pentecostalism was subject to the same racist racial hierarchies that any other form of Protestantism in the United States experienced in the early 20th century.
Can you talk a little bit about how Black Pentecostalism developed distinctly If you look at the family tree branching off very early, then you see different developments.
Can you talk about how Black Pentecostalism developed generally, but then also specifically when it's related to public life, how Pentecostals ought to shape public life?
Yeah, I love hearing folks try to explain why there are different churches that are...
That are racially dominant.
So this is the Black church system.
I love the explanations for that.
And they usually become trite, like, well, they're much more demonstrative.
There's always something that's about a flavor or something.
It's so trite and it's so reductionistic.
That is our lazy approach to thinking about the ways in which race in the United States is par for the course in American Christianity.
So when we're thinking about how Pentecostalism became this interesting family tree that is Obviously racialized.
Where there are these predominantly white organizations within the tradition and there's obviously Black or predominantly Black organizations within the tradition.
We can go back to something as early as 1914.
So 1906 to 1909, we have this wonderful revival led by a Black man.
It's a multi-racial leadership profile going on there.
Everybody's worshiping together.
Folks are leaving and then they're going to travel the 70s to be missionaries claiming that the Spirit has allowed them to speak in tongues to these other nations.
This all seems great.
But as the tradition begins to institutionalize, And they begin to realize that there's a slight delay in the second coming.
We thought that the spirit of baptism was actually going to inaugurate the second coming of Jesus, and he's late.
And not only that, our bigotry is starting to show.
Our racial biases are starting to show.
Our sexism is starting to show.
We are now three years past the clock and we're getting a little tired of each other.
We're more American than we are Pentecostal, if we're gonna be honest.
And with that also is, okay, we have to institutionalize so that we can be able to just do life while we wait.
And what does institutionalizing look like?
We have to formally create organizations and denominations that will allow us things like, I don't know, train fare for our ministers to travel.
We need to be able to marry and to bury legally.
We need to be able to ordain ministers so that we can continue to get this gospel out around the world.
So welcome to the story, Charles Harrison Mason.
who was already a Baptist man turned holiness preacher, who had already started an organization
that was known as the Church of God in Christ.
Make these cry out for the Father.
Give thy children help everywhere.
We lay hands on him, Jesus' name.
We lay hands on him, Jesus' name.
Give me the praise, oh God.
The hand of your will on tonight.
The hand of your will give tonight.
The hand of your love shone tonight.
The hand of your blood washing tonight.
The hand of your will do tonight.
The hand of your gift all tonight.
He'd already even gone through legal disputes to make sure that he could be the leader of his particular organization.
He was well-versed in how to institutionalize the Christian tradition.
So by the time he accepted the Pentecostal faith, he already brought something to the table.
He didn't just bring an open heart.
He brought how to do the business side of Pentecostalism.
And these new Pentecostals who had been waiting and floundering and were these independent contractors, if you will, these itinerant speakers who needed credentials, who needed ordination, went to Charles Harrison Mason, the Black holiness-turned-Pentecostal preacher who had the ability to ordain them and to give them the paperwork that they needed to be official as well.
Well, that was all fine, well, and good.
Until... Respectability politics and the dominant ethos of the day said this interracial mixing of white and black is not going to work.
We cannot even have mixed meetings in the South.
Remember, we're still in Jim Jane Crow.
So whatever Pentecostalism has going on in its imagination about this new apocalyptic framework where It is the new heaven and the new earth.
This is not lived out in real American life.
There is real tension, real racial tension.
We are still at the height of lynching in this country.
So the idea that folks are not only going to be worshiping together, hugging and whatever the Pentecostals were doing in their worship services, but also that a Black man was in a senior position over white men ordaining them and telling them what they could and could not do within an organizational context, out of order. Out of order.
Then we see in around 1913, 1914, along with some other doctrinal issues, we see a racial shift where those same white leaders who went to Charles Harrison Mason, the Black Pentecostal preacher from the Church of God in Christ, who needed him once upon a time to ordain them into ministry, now wanted to separate from him and create their own religious community, their own organizational community that would be predominantly white and white serving.
And so now we begin to see that it's not just that folks get together because they like the Hammond organ over a classical piano.
That they like having four-hour services versus 90 minutes.
But there are much more complicated social historical reasons for why we see these kind of splits that happen.
And that even in their best intentions to remain loosely in fellowship, there is a rift and there is a divide.
And it's a divide that will show up not only in worship styles, Not only in gender hierarchies, because we see some groups allowing women to be ordained ministers and others, but we also start to see how this shows up in public life.
Now, the one thing that they all share is that nobody wants to be a Pentecostal.
In the dominant culture, I should say.
That's the issue. We have a socioeconomic issue.
We have a group of people who are thought of as the scourge of society.
They are just always loud.
They're rabble-rousers.
They have a distinct dress code.
They have these interesting behavioral profiles and these morality things, these ethics that they hold to.
These are not your elite Baptists.
These are not your elite Congregationalists or Methodists.
These are the lowest of American Christianity.
And so we have a class barrier that prevents them from participating in American public life, much less American political life, in ways that are distinct from their American evangelical carnivores or Protestant carnivores.
But we also then add to that and complicate it and problematize it when we add race to that conversation.
Can you speak to how Black Pentecostalism generally, or maybe Kojic specifically, whichever you prefer, has developed in terms of its orientation toward public life?
Because the Church of God in Christ is the largest Black Pentecostal denomination, and they tend to be the most prolific and have the best archives.
More often than not, they get to tell the story of Black Pentecostals because when you've done a better job at staying alive and thriving and keeping records, you get to dictate how the story goes.
But this does a disservice to us because they're not the only Black Pentecostal organization within Pentecostalism.
They've actually had multiple streams that have come out of them or that rose up alongside of them.
Take, for example, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.
They are now identified as a predominantly Black Pentecostal denomination, but they started off very much a mixed racial group, and it was doctrine and race that broke them apart.
There are multiple churches and Black Pentecostal churches that are still affiliated with The dominant white organizations that articulate themselves in a particular racial and ethnic way.
Fortunately, we have the records from the Church of God at Christ.
Unfortunately, they tell the whole story sometimes.
And so it becomes our job to, as my grandmother would say, eat the apple, spit off the seeds.
The things that don't apply universally, we kind of put in a box.
And then the things that do, we use as a template.
What seems to be universal, whether it is the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the Church of God in Christ, Church of God in Prophet, these various groups, is that they all were very much committed to social engagement.
But Dara notes that social engagement is not always the same as political engagement.
This isn't political. They're not doing government work.
They're not involved in legislature and policy.
This is different from their Baptist or Methodist counterpart, their Black Methodist and Black Baptist counterpart.
They are very much still, as Black Pentecostals, engaged in social movements and reforms at a grassroots level.
What does that look like?
They are very much concerned with feeding the hungry, Clothing the naked, educating those who are quote-unquote ignorant.
They're establishing schools.
They are opening up young women's shelters for young women who are unhoused.
They are holding constant soup kitchens and giving out during the early 20th century, during the interwar period.
When the country is in crisis, Black churches writ large are showing up,
and Black Pentecostals are no different on a social level.
They're just not getting as much airplay.
Why? Again, bottom of the American religious spectrum, right?
They're not the ones who are seated in the seats of power.
They're not being consulted on major legislative or policy levels.
A lot of their work is grassroots.
A lot of their work is quiet.
A lot of their work is being done by the women.
And so you definitely know that's not going to get a whole lot of advertisement.
If the women are the ones who are organizing child care programs and things of that nature,
that's a whole different discussion for another day.
But what we do know is that Black Pentecostals have not sat on their hands waiting for the second coming.
They have recognized communal needs and they have been involved in their community lives, often on a grassroots level that looks similar and different or quite distinct from their more evangelical Protestant mainline counterparts.
When we tend to think about the civil rights movement, take for example, we think about Martin The seating of the delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party has political and moral significance.
Far beyond the borders of Mississippi are the halls of this convention.
We think about these folks who are definitely affiliated with the Black Baptist tradition.
Fannie Lou Hamer, Black Baptist.
Mr. Chairman and to the Credentials Committee, It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens.
These are folks who identified with mainline black protestant tradition.
And they tend to get a lot of airplay when we say the black church.
Oftentimes that's code for black. It's not talking about everybody.
And these were the typical folks that you see on television.
They would be in radio. They would be meeting with politicians.
Again, black Pentecostals are not in those conversations.
There's a couple of things happening there.
One Pentecostals, broadly, not even just black Pentecostals, had not developed a political theology.
They're trying to await the coming kingdom.
Their whole existence is rooted in Christ and him returning.
So they're not very much interested in this world that's passing away.
It's going to hell in a handbasket.
We're just trying to make sure that we can live and survive here while we can.
And we're not trying to get involved in government and that type of thing.
So there's that. They don't have a political theology to work with, unlike some of their counterparts.
Theologically speaking, they really still are anticipating the second coming of Christ.
We also have the class issue, which doesn't allow them to be able to enjoy certain positions of power.
So they put their hands to the plow where they are.
More from Spirit and Power and Dr.
Dara Delgado in a moment.
What I am naming in this conversation piece is what I'm observing as a turning point.
Again, Dr. Dara Delgado.
What I am noticing in terms of a shift Although we might have seen sprinkles of it maybe during a civil rights movement with someone like Bishop Brazier, who was a part of the Woodlawn Organization and civil rights activism.
He worked alongside Dr.
King in Chicago. While we might see sprinkles of folks with Dr.
King and the Memphis sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, but we don't see full-on public-facing, making themselves visible, making a claim in large numbers, not just individuals.
The ways that I think we're seeing now, that is what I'm paying attention to.
I am paying attention to the ship.
We're no longer just satisfied doing social engagement that is hidden, that is grassroots.
Now the turn has been being very politically involved, standing on actual political stages, leading in actual political focused prayers, being involved in campaigns.
Participating in voter registration drives, leading fundraising efforts, convening Pentecostal and charismatic first ladies in phone drives to raise money for a particular candidate.
This is very public-facing, in-your-face, finding themselves in seats of power in terms of campaigns, right?
This is different.
You're seeing people come out in this particular election cycle in ways that I have not been able to find either in history or in my lifetime.
And I just think that we should be paying attention to this particular demographic because they tend to get muted.
When we have larger conversations around Pentecostals and Charismatics and the Evangelicals, what the Black Pentecostal Charismatics are doing, it requires a little bit more nuance.
And I just think that our attention should maybe be drawn there because they are coming to the fore and are actually standing in front of us.
One challenge Dara identified when it comes to seeing Black charismatics, and charismatics more generally, is the fact that a growing number of them do not belong to a particular denomination.
If you are a member of the Church of God in Christ, and you got all the documentation for it, and every time you open up your mouth, you let us know that you're a member of the Church of God in Christ, we can then say you are a Black Pancop, so boom.
But if you are a part of, and I'm making this name up, Faith Highway, life, you know, change lives forever, right?
And you got neon blue and green signs, and your pastor wears gays and skinny jeans, and his wife only wears Louboutin.
I don't know.
I just know that you might be Christian because there might be a small cross hanging in the children's room, right?
It's a bit different.
I don't see the cathedral.
I don't see the purple lined pews anymore.
You don't have the elder tag that lets me know what your staffing position is in the life of the church.
You're not toting for me that you were consecrated to a bishop last year.
It's very different.
Non-denominational charismatic churches shift our identifiers for who belong.
And yet, if we would interrogate why some of those churches begin, it is oftentimes those who are the younger Gen X, elder millennials, who got frustrated with the institutionalized propositions of the churches that they grew up in.
Remember, Church of God in Christ, Church of God, Prophecy, PAW, whatever, right?
Mount Sinai Holy Church. They got sick and tired of maybe hierarchical structures.
Political apathy.
And they made a decision.
You will hear a lot of these stories where folks left some of these traditional institutional affiliated churches to go do something different.
They wanted a church that had both hands and feet, that spoke in tongues, but were also voting, that were shouting and also serving.
They wanted to do something that was much more engaged.
And we see this in particular when we think about the Black Lives Matter movement that kind of bristled Black, young Black religionists who wanted to do a lot more than just friends.
Can I ask a follow-up question?
Because when you were talking about young Black Pentecostals being turned off by certain Norms within traditional Black Pentecostalism kind of got me thinking about how something like holiness codes in white Pentecostalism have decreased significantly.
What used to be a normal thing, like Pentecostal kids don't go to school dances or they don't watch R-rated movies or movies at all.
Do you see some of that in the shift toward non-denominational?
Yeah, non-denominational churches are just, Luther would be proud.
They are the ultimate protest. We're hanging up this thesis, and I'm telling you what, I'm sick of.
You have folks who want to be much more socially and politically engaged, but there are also folks who just went and started churches outside of their home denominations because they wanted to go to the movies.
We're going to wear a pair of pants in the winter because it's cold.
They would like to put on makeup and jewelry.
So these legalistic frameworks about what holiness looked like, what salvation looked like, who was in, who was out, your sartorial choices.
Let me know what club you were a part of.
Are you holiness or not?
Are you going to hell or not?
And so there were folks that then just leased on the premise of we wanted more liberty.
What I find interesting is That the folks who left because they wanted more liberty in terms of wanting to listen to secular music and go to the movies produced kids who were like, yeah, you know what?
We want more democracy and freedom in our country.
Even though this new generation of Black charismatics may be disaffiliating in terms of church attendance, it doesn't mean that they're giving up charismatic practices and beliefs.
Now they're leaving those churches to do something much more communal, much more interpersonal, smaller.
Oftentimes they blow up and they come and say, right?
And they're still speaking in tongues.
They're still laying on hands and watching the sick recover.
They still very much believe in parking lot prophecies, right?
You're not going to get a prophecy.
But they're doing it in a way that, again, is full of jeans, makeup, movie going, maybe a little wine drinking, and also voter registration.
Volunteering for a political campaign, getting involved in political unrest movement.
Dara's mention of class in early Pentecostalism got me thinking about the role that class plays in the expansion of non-denominational forms of charismatic Christianity.
When I think about a non-denominational church, I typically think of it in classed terms.
I think of it as a fairly middle class thing.
Let's frame it in the context of American religion and its affinity for religious pluralism and its way of thinking about religiosity as a free market.
We can see that being able to break off and start a non-denominational church, I don't care how much of a sob story the pastor wants to give about, it was just me and my wife and my three kids when we didn't know what we were going to do.
It is a privilege to be able to break off and start a small business.
Because that's what non-denominational churches really are.
In our American religious free market society, you decided to start a small business, sir, ma'am.
And then you hired people, used free or cheap labor, and you got it off the ground.
So the ones that we typically know that are super successful are franchises.
So my family and I lived for a little bit in Ohio.
And what I learned about growing up in the Northeast and then moving to the Midwest, I thought the South had a monopoly on Jesus.
Y'all got nothing. Not nothing.
I saw campuses that were ridiculous in terms of American religious expression, charismatic or otherwise.
Churches that were sprawled across land and then had their affiliated schools on top of their community rec center, on top of a grandiose parking lot.
And many of those suburban churches that we would see literally sitting on like corners in a neighborhood, Also had affiliate churches somewhere in neighborhoods like Oakwood, which is in the closer area, right?
Much more hipster, get a little bit of the great, and so it attracts a younger population.
So they end up having these smaller, yet not quite small, versions of themselves spread out in these larger cities or across state lines.
Why do I bring that up?
Because, yeah, we can name someone like a T.D. Jakes.
Because it's recognizable, you see them on television.
But there are multiple versions, and probably folks who are even doing it better, who we don't even know.
And I think that that's what you're naming when you're saying that this is a particular middle-class project.
We are taking folks sometimes who do not even have a college education, who are running some of the largest multi-million dollar industries in this country, and they have absolutely nothing to do with food or clothing or anything of that nature.
They're selling Jesus. Many of them have a charismatic or Pentecostal background.
And what they're selling in terms of Jesus is not just centered in the scripture, like good evangelicals.
It's also centered on experience.
According to recent polling data, a small but significant number of Black voters support Donald Trump.
And I had to ask Dara about the charismatic factor when it comes to support for the Republican candidate, especially among African-American men like Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who appeared at the Republican National Convention.
President Donald Trump, he came during his birthday weekend.
Let me ask you a question.
Grand old party.
What would you do for your birthday if you were worth $6.7 billion?
What would you do for your birthday?
Would you come to Detroit?
Would you come into the hood hood?
He came to the hood because he cares about average, everyday Americans.
Right now there's a lot of attention being given to Theobros and the ways in which they are trying to promote this radical Christian nationalism and they are almost only ever exclusively white.
You might find a racially ambiguous Black or Latinx guy in there every now and then, but the old bros are typically those who are affiliated with J.D. Vant and have this particular thrust towards Christian nationals and wanting to not only create a Christian country, but these interesting Christian silos within states and cities, but that doctrine and those ideas that are pertaining to patriarchy That are pertaining to gender norms, that are pertaining to systems of power, are trickling into at least the social consciousness of minoritized male.
And just for the record, you know, yeah, I think the 19th Amendment should be repealed.
I think that because, well, first and foremost, because I'm a Christian.
If we had a Christian nation and women could vote, then within 50 years we would no longer have a Christian nation.
This weird return to a bygone era that I think many people don't remember.
Colonialism and slave men, right?
They're wanting to return to a patriarchal fairy tale, a revisionist history around the men go out in public places and spaces.
They hunt, they cut down things, and the women and the children stay home and they eat.
There's this kind of power structure, this hierarchical thing.
And you will hear...
Some Black men buying into that.
Not recognizing that, historically speaking, during that moment, everybody fell under the same thumb of white male supremacy.
So when you put Black men who are a part of conservative Christian spaces, who adopt a particular type of gendered power dynamics, this kind of patriarchal sexist structure, this weird hegemony around masculinity, When Black Christian males adopt that, and they adopt that kind of masculinist Christianity, That says that your wife's body is yours and the fruit of her womb is your legacy.
And everything that comes up under your household is your property.
That surely you must also have a particular opinion towards reproductive freedom.
Surely you must also want to prioritize men having economic priority in terms of the job market.
All of the things that have become part of the conservative MAGA agenda.
So these MAGA conservatives that black men are identifying with so much so that they're willing to throw their support
around Trump, I do think is very much tethered to a religiosity.
I think that there's other things that are appealing to men who might not identify as Christian,
but I think we need to pay a lot of attention to the ways in which black men who adopt a particular type
of religious conservatism have found in a MAGA conservatism a place or space for themselves that allows them to assert
a type of maybe never had power.
It's something that they can crave and they want to model.
I also just want to remind us all, particularly those of us that fall in the category between anywhere between 30 and 50, we grew up believing that Trent was the richest manor.
Some people will still believe that and still hold to the idea that he has some kind of economic power that we should all be aspiring for.
He's still the role model.
I love to watch a good...
Golden Girls reruns.
It's my comfort show. And when he gets brought out as this, the ideal man, he is wealthy, he is tall.
At that time, they thought he was beautiful.
Would you ever get married again?
Oh, I don't know. I don't think so.
How about you, Blaine? Oh, absolutely.
If the right man ever came along, of course, he'd have to have the body of a Mr.
Mel Gibson, the personality of a Mr.
Johnny Carson, and the financial resources of Mr.
Donald Trump. I don't know.
It was before my...
That's a historical mystery.
But all of that feeds into the cultural imagination, a popular imagination about who this man is and what real men should aspire.
And money is always power in this country.
And so I think that there's something that we need to look at in terms of the life of the church and what it's been preaching as of the last 15 to 20 years.
And how it has spawned these steel bros, the ways in which it's attracting minoritized men to want to reclaim some lost power by participating in this discourse.
And then we need to interrogate the ways in which a man like Donald Trump has lived in our social imagination for a very long time.
Something that's also coming to mind when you talked about how he was held up as an icon of wealth and power in the 80s and 90s, it also corresponds to the rise of televangelist I think we're good to go.
For those listening to the podcast, if you know anything about Charismatics and Pentecostals, they dominate the televangelist space.
So, black, white, whatever, they're out there just killing it on the airwaves.
Hold the roll, right? They walk into the room and it's filled with cologne.
There is well-cuffed hair.
It is this shiny, tailored suit.
He was seriously, for someone who did not embrace Christianity, he was a Paul Crouch dream.
I love that. I'm gonna explain that because that's such a great inside baseball joke.
Paul Crouch, co-founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network, was a pioneering figure in Christian television and he and his wife Jan were known for very flamboyant clothing, hair, makeup, along with a gold-plated aesthetic that would put any Trump property on notice.
What he was doing in the 80s and 90s and the rise of the Jimmy Swagger TVNs with Paul Krauts, there is something going on in our American water in terms of wealth.
Even if I'm not going to admit it in the pew that I'm looking at Donald Trump as an inspiration and an icon, I will at least superimpose his image on the pastor on the Christian television network.
The overwhelming majority of Black Pentecostals and Charismatics, according to the polls, will not be voting for Donald Trump.
I asked Dara how Black Charismatics and Pentecostals may be shaping the Democratic Party as their visibility increases.
I'm of the opinion that we should believe the numbers about the number of Black folks who identify as Democratic.
And we should also believe the numbers that we have posted, Dr.
Payne. In June of 2024, Dara Delgado and I were a part of a research team at the Public Religion Research Institute.
That conducted a survey of 2,418 adults in the United States.
Half of the 734 Black respondents identified as Pentecostal or charismatic.
We need to believe those numbers.
So we need to believe the numbers about Black folks being just inordinately democratic in their voting history, but also in their religious identity.
And we need to put those two things in conversation.
What does it look like for a Black person who is a fundamentalist in their theology?
To have a tendency to vote more progressive.
What are they trying to signal to us about their experience as Black folks?
What are they telling us about the complexities of theology that are not always quote-unquote Black and white?
And when we think about it in this current election and when there's so much at stake, not just in the ways that we've said it in the past, what we know in terms of how it's outlined in stuff like Project 2025, when we're seeing much more public-facing Pentecostal charismatic identities showing up in support of the Democratic ticket, what should we be paying attention to?
What's being articulated there?
And for me, it's not just, hey, we decided that we want to be involved.
I think they're taking quite seriously that we are always one step away from going back.
And I think that as Pentecostals, their prophetic sensibilities require them to take that seriously.
If you have a nudging of the Spirit telling you to act, You have to do so.
You have to ask not only in favor of those who are the poor and the oppressed, but you have to ask for the good of the future of those who are coming behind you.
And so you have commitment not to just sit on your hands and not just to pray, but to follow the leading of the Spirit, which is always righteousness, peace, and joy.
I don't know how determining they will be.
But I do think that if you hear those prayers, that they're not just going to sit on but act on, they're going to be making their own kind of prophetic declaration.
And those declarations are not going to be calling Kamala Harris the chosen one.
Those prophetic declarations are going to be declaring the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
They are going to be declaring that the promises of God are yes and amen.
We are going to be declaring that our enemies are the enemies of God and the Lord is faithful to put them under our feet and make them his footstool.
Those are the types of prophetic utterances that Black folks have been praying, that they have understood that the devil is not something that is wrapped in red with a pitchfork or the boogeyman that hides underneath the bed, but it is systemic injustices that are meant to be dehumanizing.
And to vote, promote a type of superiority and inferiority that leaves some in and some out.
When we listen to the cries of Black Pentecostal Charismatics as they begin to move forward on the political stage, do not look for it to be self-centered or self-aggrandizing.
Listen for the rhetoric of the Black liberation tradition as well as the Black radical tradition.
And may we build...
May we build the old waste places.
May we raise up the foundations of our future so that in generations to come, we shall be called the repairers of the breach and the restorers of streets in which to dwell.
Because we ask it in your name, we declare that it is so.
And all of God's children say, amen.
Because there's going to be an emphasis on the collective and the individual.
If you want more insights from Dr.
Dara Delgado, you can find links to her scholarship in today's notes.
You can find me at drleahpain.com and on most social media platforms at Dr.
Leah Payne. Thanks for listening.
Spirit Empower is a limited series podcast from me, Dr.
Leah Payne, with research from Carrie Gaspard.
It's produced in conjunction with Straight White American Jesus and Axis Mundi Media.
And there's even more of this week's episode available.
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