Thread by @CandiceBenbow

It’s really amazing to me how comfortable White women are with acting as if Black women don’t exist.

You can’t chronicle what Christian women leaders were doing to liberate/galvanize women in the pews and exclude BW- especially Renita Weems among others.

newyorker.com/news/on-religi…

And I get this piece is about Barr’s book (which I’ve read by the way). But the article itself speaks to a much larger issue: Black women are largely excluded from these conversations and the work they’ve done wholly ignored.

Ain’t no way you gon tell me you’re having an honest conversation about how church women wrestle with gender roles and not include Renita Weems’ ENTIRE body of work. Like…women were actually reading her in groups and re-evaluating their whole lives. That’s part of THIS history.

You absolutely cannot discuss White women’s fight against complementarism without discussing their proximity to White men and racism.

This is why womanist theology has always mattered.

This is precisely what Delores Williams was getting at in *Sisters in the Wilderness*.

For her, White women aren’t Karen; they’re Sarah. They uphold systems of racial oppression while fighting for their own equality.

Several things are happening with White evangelical women right now:

1) They’re trying to grapple with how they could have voted for President “Grab Em by the P*ssy” and turn right around and march for women’s right the day after he was inaugurated.

Double minded and unstable.

2) The impact Rachel had in this space can’t be ignored. So many looked to her and her voice. Her passing has left a void many are trying to fill.

3) Emily Joy’s #ChurchToo and others exposing purity culture *and* the sham that is conversion therapy has evangelicals scrambling.

It’s not coincidental that many White evangelical women are pushing themselves to be at the forefront of conversations concerning the future of the church. Evangelicals are losing ground and looking funny in the light. This is the rebrand.

But as many White evangelical women are just coming to terms with the dangers of complementarianism, Black church women have been pushing back and teaching more liberative ways of being for decades.

To dismiss them and their work is racist AF.

While White women were trying to decide whether they could lead Bible studies at their churches, Black women were actually creating and publishing Bible studies and doing the heavy lifting of freedom and liberation.

We talk about about not needing to hear from White men but I kinda need White women to stop talking so much in this space, too.

Because they’re taking up space and not giving deference where it is deserved.

If you’re a White woman leading/writing in the Christian faith space and you’ve not critically engaged womanist theological works to the point they challenge your articulation of trajectories etc., you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

I said what I said.

A few of you have asked for some book recommendations as an introduction of sorts to womanist theology. Here are three:

1) Just a Sister Away: Understanding the Timeless Connection Between Women of Today and Women of the Bible by Renita J. Weems

2) Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk by Delores S. Williams

3) White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response by Jacquelyn Grant