Throughout the tragic and dreadful onslaught of Western colonialism causing the Atlantic slave trade, the Black Church has been—as Henry Louis Gates Jr. chronicles in both the book and the PBS series The Black Church (2021)—a primary source of strength and solace. But this option is not the only viable life-choice, as humanists like to say. D. K. Evans’ Emancipation of a Black Atheist, Christopher Cameron’s Black Freethinkers, Sikivu Hutchinson’s Humanists in the Hood, and Daniel Swann’s A Qualitative Study of Black Atheists offer compelling counternarratives of segments in the Black community negotiating (post)coloniality, religion, and race through the prism of secularity.
A major contribution of the research by Evans, Cameron, Hutchinson, and Swann is their enrichment of a burgeoning academic identity subfield in religion: Black secular humanism. Black secular humanism consists of a growing body of epistemologies, discourses, ethics, and literature grounded in an African diaspora...
University of California Press