The Black Religious Liberty Curriculum

Racial JusticeReligious LibertyAnti-discrimination

Sep 24

Written By Center for Gender & Sexuality Law Columbia University

About the Curriculum

The Black Religious Liberty Curriculum (BRLC) is a twelve-part video series featuring 24 interdisciplinary scholars in conversation on topics at the intersection of race, religion, and the law. The curriculum was created to expand, reframe, and diversify the public conversation on “religious liberty.” Our ultimate aim is to encourage a more pluralistic approach to religious liberty rights. By examining religious liberty through the lived experiences of Black religious communities, we hope to better understand the history of American religious freedom and generate new ideas for how we might work toward a truly pluralistic nation.

LRRP launched this curriculum on September 24th, 2024, with a virtual panel featuring theologian and activist Dr. Sabrina Dent, religion scholar Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, and attorney Rahmah Abdulaleem.

Why “Black Religious Liberty”?

Despite our religiously and racially diverse society, conversations about “religious liberty” in the U.S. are highly focused on the beliefs and practices of a small subset of believers–namely, white conservative Christians. Other religious liberty disputes–such as mosques experiencing government surveillance, Rastafarians having their dreadlocks forcibly cut in prison, and pervasive discrimination against practitioners of African diaspora religions–often receive little public attention. This disregard has warped the public understanding of religious freedom in a way that thwarts true pluralism. This curriculum focuses on “Black Religious Liberty” because while African American communities display some of the highest rates of religious practice in the country, they have been largely overlooked in conversations on “religious freedom.”

Who Is This Curriculum For?

The Black Religious Liberty Curriculum is intended for all those interested in the complicated ways that law, race, and religion meet. While we created the curriculum with law students and scholars in mind, the project is intentionally interdisciplinary. Our speakers include law professors, historians, theologians, religious studies scholars, activists, and preachers. We have aimed to make every video accessible to a broad public audience.

What You Will Learn

Race and racism impact religious freedom.

At a bare minimum, religious liberty rights in the U.S. should protect the right to worship. And yet even this most basic freedom has been repeatedly violated throughout American history in order to reinforce white supremacy–from laws that prohibited enslaved people from gathering for religious services to the widespread surveillance of mosques in the 21st century. There is no way to separate religious freedom in the U.S. from the country’s history and current reality of pervasive racial discrimination.

Religious freedom is more than a set of legal rights and judicial opinions.

In 2021, Damon Landor, a Black Rastafarian man whose faith requires him to wear his hair in long dreadlocks, was held down and shaved by guards–even though he was holding a judicial opinion stating that Rastafarians in Louisiana have the right to wear dreadlocks while incarcerated. As Landor’s experience vividly and horrifically shows–even where the law is clear, rights are only meaningful to the extent that they are respected and enforced. Moreover, whether one can make good on their rights depends on a host of factors unrelated to legal doctrine, from whether someone has the funds to hire a lawyer to whether their faith is considered “legitimate” by state actors like judges and prison officials.

“Religious freedom” can be liberatory or oppressive.

Religious freedom has been defined in countless ways. Similarly, the rhetoric of “religious freedom” has been harnessed in service of political projects of all sorts. In the Antebellum Era, both abolitionists and enslavers defended their positions on slavery as a matter of “religious liberty.” During the Civil Rights era, lawsuits argued that “religious liberty” protected the right to marry across the color line–and the right to keep businesses segregated. At its best, religious liberty should protect everyone’s right to practice, or not practice, their faith without harming others. Absent some underlying values or limiting principles, however, “religious liberty” claims can erode rather than enhance pluralism and justice.

Curriculum Sessions

Black Religious Liberty Curriculum

Session 1: The Suppression of African Diaspora Religions

Throughout American history, African diaspora religions have been misunderstood, disparaged, and criminalized by government actors and the public. In this session, learn how legal restrictions have both stifled and shaped African diaspora religions in the U.S., from 19th-century “Voodoo” in New Orleans to 20th-century Santería in Florida.

Session 2: Religious Liberty & Slavery

In the Antebellum era, the religious lives of enslaved people were pervasively surveilled and regulated by the state and by enslavers. In this session, learn how “slaveholders’ religion” justified chattel slavery, and how both the law and Christian theology changed over time to ensure that, for Black people, “freedom in Christ” did not necessitate freedom from slavery.

Session 3: Religious Liberty & Reconstruction

In the Reconstruction era, Black Americans were entitled to Constitutional rights—including religious liberty rights—for the first time. In this session, learn how religious discourse influenced debates over the rights of freedpeople, what African Americans did with the new right to religious freedom, and how the legacy of religious institution-building in the Reconstruction era continues to have an impact today.

Session 4: Religious Liberty & Segregation

In the Jim Crow era, Southern churches and religious communities were integral to the maintenance of legally enforced white supremacy. In this session, learn how racist laws and policies were justified on religious grounds, how a theological emphasis on personal salvation served to shield the Church from responsibility for systemic racial inequalities, and how legal approaches to religious liberty during Jim Crow failed to protect Black religious freedom.

Session 5: Religious Liberty & Civil Rights

The Civil Rights Movement mobilized religion to advance not just religious liberty rights, but all the rights and freedoms ensconced in the U.S. Constitution. In this session, learn how the Black freedom struggle could be seen as “religious freedom on its feet,” and how this expansive notion of religious liberty clashed with that advanced by J. Edgar Hoover and other proponents of Christian nationalism.

Session 6: Religious Liberty & Black Power

In the Black Power era, activists and thinkers from a range of religious (and non-religious) traditions challenged the longstanding use of Christianity as a tool for white supremacy. In this session, learn how new religious movements and leaders as well as Christian thinkers incorporated Black Power ideas into their theologies–-and how the state responded to this perceived threat to the white social order.

Session 7: The Religious Freedom Restoration Act

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was passed in 1993 in an effort to—according to its supporters—protect the rights of religious minorities. In this session, learn how RFRA has, since that time, been increasingly used to limit the scope of civil rights, and how civil rights groups and Black communities have responded.

Session 8: Religious Liberty, Race & Education

Schools have been the sites of some of the most contentious disputes over both race and religion. In this session, learn about past and contemporary battles over funding private schools with public money, permitting religious schools to engage in racial and other forms of discrimination, the possibility of religious charter schools, and the Supreme Court’s increasing acceptance of religious activities in public schools.

Session 9: Religious Liberty, Race & Incarceration

In the age of mass incarceration, millions of Americans—disproportionately Black—are held in both physical and spiritual captivity at any given time. In this session, learn about how theological beliefs have influenced the creation and development of prisons, the rise and fall of faith-based calls for prison abolition, and changing legal policies toward the religious rights of incarcerated people.

Session 10: Religious Liberty, Race & National Security

The U.S. security apparatus has long treated both racial and religious minorities as potential threats to the (white, Christian) nation. In this session, learn how national security agencies were first introduced to Islam through the surveillance and suppression of Black Muslims, how these activities have continued in new forms in the post-9/11 era, and how religious liberty protections have failed to shield minority faith groups from pervasive government persecution.

Session 11: Religious Liberty, Race & Reproduction

In recent years, there has been an onslaught of legislation and litigation curtailing reproductive rights in the name of “religious freedom.” In this session, learn how Black women in the Antebellum era and today have resisted both reproductive controls and this narrow conception of “religious liberty” by fighting to make decisions about their reproductive and family lives that reflect their own diverse religious, spiritual, and moral values.

Session 12: Religious Liberty, Race & Sexuality

As with reproductive rights, an inordinate amount of “religious liberty” litigation over the past decade has focused on apparent conflicts between religious exercise and LGBTQ civil rights. In this session, learn why even theologically conservative Black Christians have been wary of these “religious liberty” lawsuits, and how people of faith—rather than fighting for a legal right to refuse and demean others—might instead seek a legal doctrine based on a mutual responsibility to care for others.

Curriculum Resources

Black Religious Liberty Curriculum

Black Religious Liberty Curriculum Discussion Guide

For those looking to discuss the videos as a group—or even reflect on them by themselves—we have created a Discussion Guide with key takeaways from each session, reflection questions, and recommendations for how to get involved in protecting religious liberty, pluralism, and racial justice in your community.

BRLC Library & Fundraising Campaign

A list of the books written by our speakers and/or referenced during the twelve Curriculum sessions.

Support the Curriculum and receive selections from this library as a thank-you!

Black Religious Liberty Curriculum Media Toolkit

Help us promote this curriculum using our official media toolkit. Download promotional graphics, view sample social media posts, and more.

Visuals

Video editing: ANKOSfilms

Graphic & web design: Daniela Sweet-Coll

Thank you to our editing team at ANKOSfilms, Rev. Jason Chesnut and Sierra Keen, who went above and beyond for this project. Thanks to those who provided invaluable advice, recommendations, and support throughout, including Danielle Boaz, Sabrina Dent, Corey D. B. Walker, Charles McCrary, Keisha McKenzie, Nicky Hentrich, Leo Seyij Allen, Mia Coward, Tiffanie Lanelle, Liz Theoharis, Susan Lawrence, Charlene Sinclair, Peter D. Thompson, Kate Ott, and Gillian Frank. For a crash course in copyright law, thanks to Shyamkrishna Balganesh. Tremendous thanks to the many librarians and archivists who assisted with sourcing and permissions for the wonderful images used in the videos. We are so appreciative of our partners from the Episcopal Divinity School, especially the Very Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, the Very Rev. Lydia Kelsey Bucklin, and the Rev. Emilee Walker-Cornetta.

Many thanks to the research assistants who contributed to this project: Saveri Nandigama, Mary Nwachukwu, and Sai Vadnerkar.

This curriculum could not have been created without support from the Columbia Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) and the Proteus Fund’s Rights, Faith, and Democracy Collaborative.

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law Columbia University