@AntheaButler -- A professional question: Would you consider it appropriate to call Phyllis Wheatley an evangelical? (asking for @JonathanMerritt who wants to know).
I'd say "no," btw. I think that's putting an anachronistic label on her -- and failing to account for the meaning-making of enslaved women -- as well as African cultural influences.
I see Wheatley as a creative force of her own -- weaving her experience, her faith, intellectual influences and experiential spirituality amid the cultural setting of the day -- and, in doing so, setting some interesting trajectories for African-American Christianity.
To paste this over with the label "evangelical" seems thin to me -- if not outright dismissive of a brilliant and gifted woman.
I believe in “the new birth” and not one of you considers me an evangelical.
Maybe in another 200 years?
