by Anthony Pinn<\/p>\n
What is African American Religion? <\/p>\n
My early years were spent within the context of the Black Church, particularly the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And like other black denominations, many of its local congregations found homes in buildings once used white congregations. As part of the migration to suburban locations, they left behind these buildings \u2013 complete with aesthetically rich stained glass windows. If memory serves, in my home church these windows were my first visual encounter with the image of Jesus the Christ. I sat there many Sundays looking at this pale, blond hair, blue-eye Jesus \u2013 with the pain of the world etched on his face. It\u2019s obvious this image of a white Jesus meant cultural dissonance \u2013 celebration of a God-figure that in no physical way resembled me. And what I saw, was re-enforced by the lyrics of more than one popular hymn, through which negative color symbolism partnered with visual images to create a spiritual world in which blackness was absent as a possible existential and ontological marker of being. <\/p>\n