“Naming and Non-Naming: Faith and Identity in a Black Women’s Born-Again Movement”

This paper analyzes the work of Pinky Promise, a nationwide parachurch organization that boasts a membership of approximately sixty thousand women, the majority of whom are Black. Though founder Heather Lindsay describes the organization as broadly “Christian” and “non-denominational,” I observe that Pinky Promise promotes cultural and theological understandings that scholars commonly associate with the term “evangelical.” Furthermore, I posit that we must take seriously the lived religious experiences of communities who affiliate, believe, and behave according to scholarly definitions of “evangelical,” even when those communities do not claim the mantle of “evangelicalism” for themselves. In the case of Pinky Promise, doing so allows for both a fuller understanding of the organization and a critical assessment of American evangelicalism broadly. Situating Pinky Promise within the evangelical imaginary demonstrates how Black women, in particular, produce and participate in a Christian public that often brackets their participation as marginal.