Religious Naturalism, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity – Interview with Professor Carol Wayne White

We are pleased to share our latest interview with ISSRNC scholar Carol Wayne White. Interview by ISSRNC’s member chris crews.

I caught up recently with ISSRNC scholar Carol Wayne White to talk about her work on religious naturalism and her latest book Black Lives and Sacred Humanity (Fordham University Press, 2016). I’m excited to share the following edited interview based on our conversation.

Religious Naturalism, Black Lives, and Sacred Humanity

ISSRNC: Hi Carol. Thanks for joining me today. For our readers who might be less familiar with religious studies concepts, can you give us a brief summary of what makes religious naturalism unique or different from other religious orientations that have come to focus on religion and nature in recent decades–or what scholars have come to call the “greening of religion”?

CW: Hello, Chris. It is a pleasure being here and I appreciate this invitation to share more about religious naturalism, which is a passion of mine.  

I view religious naturalism as a synthesis of naturalistic ideas that often depart from traditional forms of religious thinking. Accordingly, one unique feature of religious naturalism as a contemporary religious orientation is its creative integration of diverse theoretical perspectives; it shows the very best of interdisciplinary studies,  including insights from traditional fields of inquiry (philosophy, theology, history, metaphysics, physics, biology, history) as well as newer ones emerging from ecology, animal studies, and literary/cultural criticism.

In The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism, Donald Crosby and Jerome Stone articulate an important theme I also think is important when describing the work of many contemporary religious naturalists: “thinking deeply about nature and our place as human beings in nature is an urgent and salutary activity for each of us and for the institutions of our societies, no matter what our personal religious or secular outlooks may be in this time of rampant species endangerment, global climate change, and looming ecological crisis” (Crosby & Stone, 2008, 2). Building on this observation, I often conceptualize religious naturalism as a capacious, ecological religious worldview grounded in the observational conviction that nature is ultimate. When I have presented my work to those who are not religious studies scholars, I am often asked: What makes religious naturalism “religious”?” The qualifier “religious” in religious naturalism affirms the natural world as the center of humans’ most significant experiences and understandings. In other words, religious naturalism does not posit any ontologically distinct and superior realm (God, soul, heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world. Rather, attention is focused on the amazing events and processes of this world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this life.

Finally, for many of its adherents, religious naturalism is a religious worldview that is scientifically credible and emotionally satisfying.

Fordham University Press, 2016.

ISSRNC: You’ve drawn on a number of authors in your latest work, but three you are especially drawn to are James Baldwin, Anna J. Cooper, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Can you say a bit more about what drew you to these particular authors, and how you see their writings about Black religious and political experiences informing your ideas of contemporary religious naturalism?

CW: Yes, and thank you for the opportunity to share more about my interest in Cooper, Du Bois, and Baldwin. As a youngster, I devoured all of Baldwin’s fiction and read Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, experiencing an affinity with them and absorbing their articulations of the beauty of blackness. Later, as a graduate student, I also discovered Cooper’s writings and felt the same level of existential excitement when reading her ideas. My book on religious naturalism offered me the opportunity to draw more attention to these iconic American figures, whose ideas are not often theorized in philosophy of religion or even mentioned in religious naturalism. Cooper, Du Bois, and Baldwin are important to my study because they dared to embrace alternative value systems and theoretical perspectives outside of traditional religious thought as they challenged the present state of affairs affecting their contemporaries. They contribute to an intellectual-activist trajectory in African American critical thought, where one finds systematic cognitive and ethical reflections of an expanded model of humanity beyond the operative ones dominating the racial discourses of their days. Select texts, essays, public lectures, speeches, and works of nonfiction by these figures provide both historical awareness and critical assessment of the lived experiences of African Americans encountering varied, complex levels of subjugation, discrimination, and injustice. These writings provide rich theoretical material for identifying and assessing a distinctive feature of African-American religiosity, namely, the ongoing task of “humanizing the African” and endorsing a rhetoric of liberation accompanied by constant visions of transformation.

In the book, I discuss how these visionary intellectuals imagined (conceived) what humans could be, beyond what was currently experienced or envisioned at the beginning and throughout the mid-twentieth century. While historically, they cannot be read as religious naturalists per se, they certainly foreshadow key ideas I advance as a contemporary religious naturalist. The link between their historic insurrections and the ideas I explore in Black Lives and Sacred Humanity constitute the enduring legacy of those who dare to dream of a better America. As indicated in the latter chapters, I suggest this linkage provides the emergence of a new religious naturalism within African-American culture.

ISSRNC: In your 2017 article, Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, and the Racialization of Nature, or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today you discuss some of the history of dehumanizing racial discourses in the US which fused particular notions about nature, race, and animality (especially primates), leading to what you described as “a lethal combination of intimately conjoined white supremacy and species supremacy.” Can you talk a bit more about how you see these twin dynamics being related, and why you think African American religious naturalism can help us challenge such associations?

CW: Much of my focus in that article was on retrieving and examining a trajectory of modernist racial discourse that I identify with select European scientists and ethnographers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their  publications contributed to the development of what we now identify as Enlightenment racism. As these figures came into contact with new human societies, as well as species of plant and animal life, they sought systematic rules to describe and explain the differences they encountered. Building on earlier accounts that were often more anecdotal than empirically verifiable, these thinkers used various methods and forms of analysis, including the use of evolutionary theory by a few, to promote views of black animality. These perspectives contributed to a Euro-American construction of whiteness as a normative category for establishing a group’s humanity.

While challenging notions of black degradation and inferiority through the systematic use of the animal other, I also analyze the speciesism that is evident in these early scientific studies. Specifically, I argue that the equation of blacks with co-primates is embedded in European colonialism and its wide-ranging violence against animals in general. Furthermore, with the tenets of religious naturalism, I offer a naturalistic view of humans that becomes the focal point for challenging exclusionary and outdated conceptions of humanity embedded in the logic of white supremacy. I present humans as highly complex organisms, owing the lives we have to the emergence of myriad natural systems. In effect, religious naturalism helps blur the arbitrary ontological lines that human animals have erected between us and other species and natural processes. Please note that in the article, I do not identify this critical intervention as African American religious naturalism, but more generally as religious naturalism!

I see religious naturalism as one contemporary critical intervention, among others, that considers fully the colonization of more-than-human animals in addressing issues of justice for myriad nature. One step toward decolonizing nature, I believe, of making it less vulnerable, perhaps, is in honoring nature’s sentience, which is an essential part of being alive, experiencing others, being affected by others, and experiencing well-being.

In reframing humans as material processes in relationship with other forms of material nature, religious naturalism supports an ethical vision that encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more-than-human worlds that constitute our existence. I see religious naturalism as one contemporary critical intervention, among others, that considers fully the colonization of more-than-human animals in addressing issues of justice for myriad nature. One step toward decolonizing nature, I believe, of making it less vulnerable, perhaps, is in honoring nature’s sentience, which is an essential part of being alive, experiencing others, being affected by others, and experiencing well-being. I am currently exploring these issues in a current book manuscript, developing a more nuanced, complex argument.

ISSRNC: In that same 2017 article, you ended by suggesting that religious naturalism’s sense of the “irrefutable interconnectedness of all life” can help inform environmental justice activism, and that idea resonated with my own EJ research. You argued that “religious naturalism and environmental justice advocates share a general maxim: harm done to any one sector of natural processes, inclusive of human organisms, is harm done to all.” This got me thinking about ideas like the legal rights granted to Pachamama in Ecuador, which drew on notions of the Earth as interconnected, but also as sacred. Could you say a bit more about how the sacred is understood in the context of religious naturalism, compared to other Earth-honoring spiritual practices?

Carol Wayne White, Bucknell University Presidential Professor of Philosophy of Religion.

CW: I cannot speak for all religious naturalists in identifying the sacred, as it is a complex term that is used in different ways by various thinkers, and some religious naturalists do not use the term at all. However, I will try to articulate what I meant by my usage of the term in the 2016 book, as I do not evoke it in the article or in my current work.   

In Black Lives and Sacred Humanity, I share Ursula Goodenough’s sentiment that reveling in a sense of connectedness with other living beings can be described as sacred. On the molecular level, there is evidence to support the loftier (or religious) idea that in the very nature of life itself there is some essential joining force. This orientation toward joining with others in establishing our common humanity is what I imagine when using the phrase sacred humanity. Humans are, by our very constitution, relational, and our wholeness occurs within a matrix of complex interconnectedness—or put slightly differently, ways of conjoining with others that transform us. Granted, this is not your typical approach to the sacred, which, admittedly, is a complex word that has been used for a wide range of phenomena: places, times, persons, events, and deities. Traditionally, when people designate something as sacred, they view the thing in question as “other than ordinary.” Thus, in the broadest sense of the term, the sacred has been used by scholars, especially those sympathetic to the work of Mircea Eliade, to convey the “extraordinary.” 

Utilizing the tenets of religious naturalism in conjunction with values discourse, I consider humans’ awareness and appreciation of our connection to “all that is,” as an expression of sacrality, or what we perceive and value as ultimately important and valuable. Value in this sense refers to an organism’s facility to sense whether events in its environment are more or less desirable. Minimally, this facility evokes the notion of adaptive value, or even survival value, which is the basic matrix of Darwinian theory. Within a larger ecological framework, this truth takes on a fuller meaning. As Rolston Holmes suggests, “an organism is the loci of values defended; life is otherwise unthinkable. Such organismic values are individually defended; but, ecologists insists, organisms occupy niches and are networked into biotic communities” (Holmes 2006: 911).  

ISSRNC: You talk in your book Black Lives and Sacred Humanity about the importance of Black religiosity in US history as a response to forced enslavement and white supremacy, both as a form of political resistance and as a way to affirm ones’ basic humanity in the face of inhuman conditions. What role do you see Black religiosity playing today, particularly some of the more critical strains you discuss, such as Black liberation theology or womanist theory, in shaping contemporary political discourse in movements like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo?

CW: I hesitate to speak for Black religiosity in general, but can articulate my understanding of, and preference, for African American religious naturalism as one model of Black religiosity. African American religious naturalism advances “intersectional” analyses, so it can play a vital role in such movements. In other words, African-American religious naturalism features a relational ontology that encourages its adherents to be resistant to isolationist rhetoric and politics (Black lives vs. all lives, racialized bodies vs. gendered bodies, secular vs. religious, queer vs. heterosexual, humans vs. more-than-human, etc.) – this is one of its most astute insights. 

Let me explain these points a bit more. With its materialist epistemology, religious naturalism re-frames humans as material processes in relationship with other forms of materiality; it also supports an ethical vision that encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more-than-human worlds that constitute our existence. In embracing these theoretical claims, African-American religious naturalism addresses the culture-nature binary in modernist discourses that has functioned in historical contexts to demarcate certain spheres of life as superior and others as inferior, justifying the exploitative practices of the former.

During this time of rampant species endangerment, global climate change, and looming ecological crisis, African American religious naturalism evokes a moral imagination that emphasizes our willing participation in movements of scientific inquiry, movements of cultural expression, movements for global distributive justice, movements to eliminate needless suffering, and movements to preserve the ecology of our home planet.

Beginning with the historical particularities of past convictions, African American religious naturalism targets a legacy of white supremacy built upon this culture-nature binary, where processes of racialization have helped shape an exclusionary category of the human, designating who is properly so and who is not. African American religious naturalism also critiques traditional humanistic discourses inflected by this binary differentiation that have overestimated the autonomy of human beings, positioning us outside of nature and rendering invisible our inextricable connection to other life forms and material processes. Confronting both of these impulses—white supremacy and human exceptionalism—and their violent and harmful consequences, African American religious naturalism accentuates human animals’ deep, inextricable homology with each other and with other natural processes. In doing so, it offers an expansive view of our humanity as an emergent phenomenon, not an achievement. It emphasizes all humans as distinct movements of value-laden nature itself, where deep relationality and interconnectedness become key metaphors for honoring all life forms. In this context, African American religious discourse emphasizes human organisms as intimate participants in ecological relations, belonging to a wider biotic community. During this time of rampant species endangerment, global climate change, and looming ecological crisis, African American religious naturalism evokes a moral imagination that emphasizes our willing participation in movements of scientific inquiry, movements of cultural expression, movements for global distributive justice, movements to eliminate needless suffering, and movements to preserve the ecology of our home planet.

This model of African American religiosity shares with the #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter movement an uncompromising demand that all lives be viewed and treated as intrinsically valuable life forms. For example, it resists the lure of a generic, universal construction of “man” that has justified the devalued status of fleshy, material women and other embodied subjects relegated to minority status. Rather than assume that gender, race, class, abled-bodiedness, and other socially derived markers provide the basis of our humanity, we should recognize them as highly complex categories constructed in contested discourses and other social practices. When these constructions are used to support racism, speciesism, sexism, and other forms of cultural superiority, they become forced impositions on the wholeness of natural interrelatedness and deep genetic homology that evolution has wrought.

In the final analysis, while African American religious naturalism focuses worthy attention on the violations against Black lives, its resistance to the forces of anti-Blackness becomes an important point of departure for comprehending and championing the value of all materiality.

ISSRNC: Building on that last question about sacred humanity, I wondered why you chose to call it sacred humanity, rather than sacred cosmology or something that didn’t appear to refer us back to the human as the locus of meaning, particularly given your critiques of the problematic politics of anthropocentrism and the nature/culture divide. You noted in your book that you are not arguing for an exclusive humanism in the Charles Taylor vein, but can we still reconcile your notion of sacred humanity with an ecocentric or biocentric philosophical stance? Or are you really interested in a different issue, which is to critically rethink what it means to be human, by “envisioning a neo-Nietzschean move that valorizes the human as a site for understanding religious valuing”?

CW: The “sacred humanity” concept in the book must be read within a particular context: Black cultural, intellectual, and historical exigencies that warranted the need to confront a legacy of modern humanism that has neglected to honor Blacks as valuable life forms. Without acknowledging this important historical specificity, the term loses it fuller meaning. Furthermore, with the book, I am opening a distinct intellectual space created by the neglect of naturalism within analyses of African American religion, as well as a neglect of African American religion within analyses of religious naturalism. At the intersection of my interest in religious naturalism and my analyses of the Black tradition—at the core of the book—lies the concept of sacred humanity.  

My definition of sacred humanity is connected to “the notion of humans as interconnected, social, value-laden organisms in constant search of meaning (cognition), enamored of value (beauty, goodness, love), and instilled with a sense of purpose (telos)” (3). Animating the notion of sacred humanity is a key question: “how should we understand the complex human being who is affirmed in African American religious discourse?” (19). In the book, the concept of sacred humanity entails that humans are achievements of value, yet also that we are fundamentally unfinished beings who are ever in the process of becoming. I also link sacred humanity to a distinct moral imagination, one with implications for social action: “The sacredness of human beings becomes one precondition for conceiving particular notions of communal moral reasoning, for it is only through an acceptance of one’s material, concrete embodiment and perceived relatedness that one begins envisioning (or is even challenged to think of) what might lie beyond one’s self-perceptions and thoughts” (122).

In ongoing work in religious naturalism, I continue to identify human animals as emergent life forms; yet, I adamantly warn against a particular reading of this claim that concludes human beings are the triumphant summit of natural development. Rather, my position is best described by recent insights in ecological studies: organisms of various types, including human beings, are inextricably bound together in a web of mutual interdependence for their continual flourishing and survival as they make common if varied use of the energy of the sun. Within each web, each species of animal has a niche for which it is more or less adapted, and has attributes that others lack. This ecological bent challenges those who would use evolutionary history as the basis for deciding who is better than whom. Equally important, these ecological perspectives lead some of us to interpret evolution in a much more expansive sense, shorn of the distortions of conventional anthropocentric orientations. Rather than construct evolution as the meta-narrative of an increasing capacity of human nature to manipulate other forms of nature, we now emphasize the successive emergence of new forms of opportunity, or the continual diversification of new modes of being. Within an ecological context, evolution is associated with new patterns of harmonious coexistence among bountiful nature rather than the progressive development of increased specialization. All members of an ecosystem are equally important, comprising it as a functional whole.

Bearing in mind these insights, I share Loyal Rue’s contention that humans are ultimately the manifestations of many interlocking systems—atomic, molecular, biochemical, anatomical, ecological—apart from which human existence is incomprehensible. As by-products of other natural processes and intimate participants with them, humans are material beings through and through. Consider, for example, Michael W. Fox’s compelling account that “[o]ur bodies contain the mineral elements of primordial rocks; our very cells share the same historically evolved components as those of grasses and trees; our brains contain the basic neural core of reptile, bird, and fellow mammal.” We are also structured by relationality. In The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough also offers a lucid account of humans as relational natural organisms, providing sound scientific data that supports our fundamental interconnectedness with other living beings. Human organisms are intimate participants in ecological relations and belong to a wider biotic community.

ISSRNC: In your article Polyamorous Bastards: James Baldwin’s Opening to a Queer African-American Religious Naturalism in the edited volume Meaningful Flesh: Reflections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet, you had one particular line that really jumped out at me that I wanted to ask you about. You wrote: “My goal is to draw the contours of a queer African-American religious topography where polyamorous bastards roam ecstatically in nomadic desiring.” As a writer I really loved how evocative and rich this sentence was, and there is so much to unpack here. Can you say a bit more about what inspired that line, and how we might put these ideas into practice? 

CW: Yes! That line summarizes the main argument in the essay, which is to explore the rich conceptual space opened by Baldwin’s use of the bastard metaphor and his ensuing concept of love. Inspired by Baldwin’s creative reach, I specify bastard as a trope to mark the emergence of an African-American religious naturalism that resists normative (and, in my rendering, impoverished) views of our humanity. Specifically, in negating pauperized views of Blacks’ humanity perpetuated by white supremacy, this African American religious naturalism invites contemporary readers to reconsider who and what we humans are: value-laden natural processes that become human in specific orientations. It presupposes human animals’ deep, inextricable homology with each other, drawing our attention to an expansive view of our humanity as an emergent phenomenon, not an achievement.

As queer enactment, this African-American religiosity calls us to be attentive to our structural relationality in which our experiences of love overcome arbitrary boundaries held in place by normalizing cultural markers. It seeks a modality of existence based in transformation; in such a vision, our expanded humanity as sentient beings is porous—we suffuse each other with care and a sense of belonging together.

Building on Baldwin’s notion of love, this view of religiosity celebrates nomadic, polyamorous relations. With its naturalistic grounding, this model of religiosity resists the “isms” based on binary constructions that uphold asymmetrical relationships and polarize our desire for connection with all that is. In so doing, this African-American religious naturalism adopts a queer positionality – or what Michael Warner has described as resistance “to regimes of the normal.” (In order to distinguish this religious perspective as queer, I also incorporate insights from Claudia Schippert’s strategy of queering the religious discipline.)

As queer enactment, this African-American religiosity calls us to be attentive to our structural relationality in which our experiences of love overcome arbitrary boundaries held in place by normalizing cultural markers. It seeks a modality of existence based in transformation; in such a vision, our expanded humanity as sentient beings is porous—we suffuse each other with care and a sense of belonging together. Putting these ideas into practice involves forfeiting our allegiance to isolationist rhetoric, and our devotion to illusory notions that we are autonomous, individualized entities that do not affect and are not affected by each other. The queer intonations invite us to resist and challenge static, status-quo categories as we achieve and become our humanity through enactments of solidarity, compassion, and desire to be with/for otherness. 

ISSRNC: At one point in your discussion of Baldwin and the church you mention his criticism of “the traditional otherworldly eschatological discourse of fear and damnation featured in holiness traditions” and his attempt to replace it “with an emphasis on the concrete dynamics of living here and now.” I’ve been thinking a lot about eschatology lately since I’m teaching a course on the End of the World. Do you think religious naturalism can help push back against the seeming obsession with religious “end times,” given its immanent focus on the natural world?

CW: Absolutely. As I referenced earlier, religious naturalism does not ground its truth claims in other-worldly transcendence. Elsewhere, I have identified religious naturalism as one type of the new materialism, which interprets nature as the whole of things, the all-inclusive context and all-pervasive dynamic of all that is, can and will be. As such, it is also part of what Michael Hogue describes as an American immanental tradition, whose primary aim is to think against the grain of the ontological and epistemic exceptionalisms that have set humans over and against other forms of animal life and human culture, society, and economy over and against the ecological systems upon which they depend (American Immanence, 2018). In Hogue’s rendering, this tradition approaches moral values as emergent, provisional and negotiated rather than antecedent, absolute and imposed. My conception of religious naturalism embraces this immanental tradition’s persistence in affirming the wonder and sublimity of the diverse expressions of creativity and agency in the universe; it lures us toward more vital and more resonant ways of being in the world, more existentially and spiritually enlivening modes of life.

Closely related to this point, and another way of addressing your question, is my discussion in another article of one particular notion of hope ushering from religious naturalism as we confront climate change. I identify hope as a distinctive human capacity to act in specific settings that present challenges to us; we respond by acting in ways that increase transformation, enact-self aspiration, and envision or imagine alternative forms of reality that inspire us onward in life. This emerging view of hope provides insight into the unique contributions religious reflection can bring to such overwhelming issues as climate change, for example. The focus is on active human imagination and justice work vis-à-vis climate change, discerning possible opportunities for humans to reflect and change their behaviors in expectation of ushering in an alternative future. Hope is associated with the cognitive, emotional, and aspirational processes operating in human beings immersed in the dynamism of life. In short, I ground the concept of hope in a pragmatic, non-metaphysical philosophical anthropology.

In other words, the hope that emerges here is not reducible to anticipating what might be good for human agents only, and, to certain types of human agents living in certain geographic locales. Rather, human agents enact hope when we recognize and expect better results than have occurred before as we continue to engage in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, motivations, and desires for myriad nature. Empathy and affect are primary motivations in the human organism as we engage in forms of eco-justice. Coalitions of compassionate, hopeful humans are willing to stay with the trouble, or to persist amid our uncertainty. Conspicuously absent from this framework of hope is a guaranteed triumphalism, often associated with certain eschatological visions. We acknowledge that certain possibilities may occur when human organisms begin to align our actions with the deeper mystery that we are not at the center of all that is, but are rather a constitutive part of an interacting, evolving, and genetically related community of beings bound together inseparably in space and time.

ISSRNC: Finally, for anyone interested in learning more about these issues, do you have 2-3 resources you would recommend that people could use as entry points to learn more, in addition to your own books and articles?

CW: Yes, I have made references to several already in answering your wonderful questions. I would recommend the following works by other religious naturalists, all of whom have influenced my thinking and are representative of the variety of approaches to religious naturalism:

• Ursula Goodenough (2000). The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Loyal Rue (2005). Religion is Not About God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When Thy Fail. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Donald Crosby (2013). The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life. Albany: State University of New York.
• Donald Crosby and Jerome Stone, Eds. (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism, New York: Routledge.
• Michael Hogue (2018). American Immanence. New York: Columbia University Press.

ISSRNC: Is there anything else you want to add on the topic of African American religious naturalism or other subject we discussed?

CW: I think I have said more than enough! Thank you for this opportunity to share more about religious naturalism, and my devotion to it as one viable and promising religious orientation  in the contemporary era. 

ISSRNC: I want to thank you again for taking the time to talk to me today!

About the Author

Carol Wayne White is Presidential Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Bucknell University. Her books include Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions (Humanity Books, 2002); The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631-70): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism (SUNY Press, 2009); and Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (Fordham University Press, 2016), which won a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Titles. White has published essays on the creative intersections of critical theory and religion, process philosophy, and religious naturalism. Her work has also appeared in Zygon: The Journal of Religion and Science, The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, and Philosophia Africana. White has received international awards and national fellowships, including an Oxford University Fellowship in Religion and Science, a Science and Religion Grant from The John Templeton Foundation, and a NEH Fellowship.