Sermon Geographies: Black People As Spiritual Cartographers in South Carolina

During a YouTube interview, scholar of African American preaching, Dr. Frank Thomas, lamented, “too much genius is in the grave.” In that interview, he issued an urgent plea for more scholars of black sacred rhetoric and preaching. Against the backdrop of slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, and dehumanization – within such calamitous atmospheres – religion became a vehicle by which “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2002) and theological ideals, such as life amidst death, took flight and planted roots in a people despised as “the wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1961). Propelled by a “revolutionary love ethic,” (hooks, 1993) which insists upon universal ontological dignity, black preachers and congregations co-create new worlds. Infamously, Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied this phenomenon while preaching “I Have a Dream,” lifting key phrases from Rev. Prathia Hall, a black woman, resulting in a speech-sermon that ignited a nation to imagine and enact what I consider a theo-geographic reconceptualization of American space. Analogous to the axioms for interpreting a physical landscape, (Mitchell 2008) increasingly geographers are analyzing embodied and emotional landscapes and moving beyond ocular supremacy towards the ephemeral and ineffable (Wilford 2015). Sermons quite literally construct new worlds and more emancipatory, expansive, and equitable futures. The sermon is therefore a unique and unexplored micro-geography warranting an ethnographic investigation.