“I’LL BREAK IT down so that it may forever remain broken: Blackness is holy in and of itself,” writes D. Danyelle Thomas in her new book, The Day God Saw Me as Black: The Journey to Liberated Faith. The founder of the digital faith community Unfit Christian reflects on the ways that white evangelical theology has shaped the Black Church. She lovingly calls in the Black Church to liberate our mindsets around race, gender, sex, and sexuality.
Like Candice Marie Benbow’s Red Lip Theology (2022) and Lyvonne Briggs’ Sensual Faith (2023), The Day God Saw Me as Black reflects Thomas’ identity as a Black millennial womanist. Her experience growing up as a fat, Southern, Black Christian woman is central throughout.
Thomas expresses her love for the Black Church, even as she names all the ways it has been colonized and shaped by white evangelicalism — a Christian tradition “plagued by racism, sexism, classism, trans- and homo-antagonism, and systemic oppression.” These are the evangelical values, Thomas explains, that insisted “God is good all the time,” even amid violence and oppression, from the transatlantic slave trade to South African apartheid to the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Thomas, whose writing becomes more transparent, vulnerable, and personal as the book progresses, shares why she needed to question God’s goodness after the first time someone sexually violated her. “I needed God not to be good but furious that I’d been denied childhood innocence because I’d been born in a body never quite recognized as childish,” she writes, referring to the sexualization and adultification of Black girls. “But my indoctrination did not leave room for a God like this. Those who benefit from my oppression are better served by my devotion to a God who is always good, always just, and always above reproach. All the time.” Thomas’ approach to theodicy allows readers to reject Black suffering as inevitable and instead embrace a legacy of Black liberation.
The legacy of white evangelicalism has also shaped how we perceive ourselves, Thomas argues. “To create inequity, you must either convince someone that they’re inferior or create rules that codify them as being less than you,” she writes. From purity culture to “love the sinner, hate the sin” ideology to the demonization of African spiritual practices, some Christians have sought to control the bodies, sexualities, and beliefs of Black women and Black queer people by alienating us from our desires and histories. The Day God Saw Me as Black, in contrast, urges readers to see our bodies, traditions, and sexualities as God-given and God-designed. “I’m inviting you into my search for the light of God in darkness formed by the shadows of sexist, classist, and anti-Black imaginings of God,” Thomas writes.
The Day God Saw Me as Black is for Black people, especially Black women, who have loved a church that hasn’t always loved us back. It’s for those of us who have been given a theology that doesn’t reflect our identities and lived experiences. It’s for those of us who are ready to live into the liberation and freedom that is found in a God who sees, affirms, and loves our Blackness, our womanness, and the parts of our identity that are integral to who we are.
Deirdre Jonese Austin is a minister, writer, scholar, and womanist whose work focuses on religion, race, gender, and sexuality.
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