Dis/parity: Blackness and the (Im)possibility of a Pentecostal (Political) Theology

Abstract

American pentecostal political theology is not marked by a fivefold gospel, as key theologians contend, but is best understood as the justification of the color line. That term, popularized by W.E.B. Du Bois, is a theological-political term, and was invoked at Azusa Street. The color line is a spatial and racial order that is both politically and theologically inaugurated and upheld. Political theology, as such, is anti-Black. But at Azusa Street, a Black-led and interracial revival, the color line is washed away. Persons and practices excluded by the color line, and racialized as Black, reject the terms of order and generate the order’s undoing. If this undoing becomes the central interpretive grid for “pentecostal,” then the terms “pentecostal” and “Black” are read synonymously and over against political theology as terms of order. By turning to this generating mode of the Blackness of pentecostal origins, the impossibility of doing a pentecostal political theology emerges.