What is it about?
Water is necessary for life and figures prominently in the Christian tradition. The sacrament of Baptism, through water, symbolizes life, freedom, liberation, renewal, hope, and new birth into the body of Christ, called the Church. While Baptism represents initiation into the Christian church, white supremacists mutated its meaning for enslaved black bodies. Thus, it is incumbent upon the black Christian Church tradition to reclaim these waters as waters of liberation.
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Why is it important?
White supremacists mutated the meaning of the baptismal waters by promulgating laws abrogating manumission and liberation from its interpretation. This theological and legal distortion secured the ongoing domination and exploitation of black bodies in the slave population for the foreseeable future and eased the white slaveholder's consciousness that their slaves would not associate baptism with liberation. Thus, it is for blacks, in remembering their baptism, to reclaim the waters by viewing them through the historical, theological, and existential prism of the Red Sea, the Jordan River, and Atlantic Ocean, as sites of locating their story of deliverance in history and God's story.
Perspectives
This article focuses on what it means to be be black and baptized. It is an effort to help "detheologize" the meaning of baptism within the Western Christian tradition.
Mark C. Grafenreed
Southern Methodist University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Still I Rise: Baptism, Liberation, and White Supremacy, Journal of Black Religious Thought, July 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/27727963-02010001.
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