While there has been much ink spilled attempting to account for the sociology of Black religion, namely Christianity, there has been scant attention paid toward the impact of the sermon beyond its function as a language event in African American religious culture. Little to no academic research regards the fugitive witness present in Black sermons as an object of inquiry. Instead, the vast body of North American homiletics regards the sermon as a language/word event; something to be carefully crafted according to the rules of Western rhetoric and communication. African American homiletics as an academic discipline mostly followed suit as well. Black homiletician Henry Mitchell articulates a homiletic theory that sermon outlines are necessary “road maps to help the preacher arrive at the destination, with all the flock aboard.”[1] Mitchell’s approach views the sermon as a textual artifact that becomes a language event in accordance with dominant homiletical theory.
This widespread approach, unsurprisingly, does not offer many avenues toward exploring the Black sermon as fugitive witness. This paper has as a goal to make the case that the sermon, formerly regarded as a language event, is better understood as a sound event. Especially sermons preached within the African American preaching tradition. Critical theory from the Black aesthetic tradition serves as a stark reminder to the weaknesses of homiletics. To understand why fugitivity figures in thinking about the significance of this problem, Andrew Navins Brooks, who relies on Fred Moten’s insistence that the “spirit of escape” is endemic to fugitivity,[2] states that it “is both anti- and ante-, both an opposition to anti-Blackness and a force that exists before the emergence of anti-Blackness.”[3] Even literary critic and Black feminist Hortense Spillers makes a warranted observation describing the sermon as “a gesture of intervention that the physical and psychic violence of the North American Slave Trade neither anticipated, nor could ward off.”[4]
Understanding the sermon as not just a sound event, but a fugitive sound event, provides the overture that leans toward this paper’s central claim. The sounds uttered by the gathered congregation, I argue, is not antiphony—the idea of a voice “opposite” that of the preacher; that cycles neatly between one and another. Homiletician Evans Crawford details the polyphony of call and response within many Black churches noting that “it was the entire church that shared in preaching” producing sounds simultaneously. Rather, this paper is suggesting that the soundscape of the sanctuary, orchestrated by the sound of the sermon, in Black churches functions fugitively and thus endophonically. Etymologically, “endo-” is a prefix from Greek, meaning “within” or “inside”; “-phony” is also Greek from the Greek phōnē, meaning “sound” or voice, which suggests a translation of “inner sound.”
What does the counterwitness sound like? This paper will suggest that in churches where the preacher’s voice, the resounding “Amens” and “Hallelujahs” of the congregation, and the Hammond organ, a fugitive sound emerges during the sermon. While arguably, gestures of fugitivity exist in each of these objects individually, the ad-mixture of these three sound objects necessitate further investigation over and above traditional explanations of call-and-response. In terming this phenomenon as an endophonic counterwitness, it is an account of the sermon as a fugitive sound beyond words found on a manuscript, or even words transcribed from an audio recording. Rather, it is a faithful attempt to examine the sound of the sermon heard by those in attendance; a sound that is attuned best for the ‘within-space’ of the built environment that sanctuaries provide as marronage for Black churchgoers that attend on any given Sunday.
Through a singular case study of Reginald Sharpe’s sermon “Reassurance After Any Results,” I wil demonstrate how the viva voce—live voice—within the African American preaching tradition shapes the soundscape of the sanctuaries in which they are preached. The preacher’s viva voce is the object of my utmost interest as it leans toward better ascertaining the work that sermons do. Cultural theorist Mladen Dolar recognizes the weight that the viva voce has when it is linked to religious and ritual practices.[5] Likewise, the critical theory of Black fugitivity from Fred Moten, Andrew Navins Brooks and Hortense Spillers support the governing logic of the endophonic counterwitness. The concept of counterwitness is reliant on theologian Emilie Townes’ understanding of countermemory as an unsettling of “notions of identity as property, uninterrogated coloredness, reparations and empire, religious values in public policymaking, and solidarity” with the aim to disrupt and irrupt the futures of what she identifies as the fantastic hegemonic imagination.[6]
While this paper is not sufficient for deeply theorizing the endophonic counterwitness as an embedded phenomenon of the African American preaching tradition, refiguring the sermon as a sound event necessitates a generalized logic to begin to understand the sermon as a fugitive sound event.
[1] Henry H. Mitchell, Celebration and Experience in Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 60.
[2] Brooks figures Black life as “life from below” and in possession of qualities that erupt and irrupt at times.
[3] Andrew Navin Brooks, “Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons,” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (November 1, 2020): 35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420911962.
[4] Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line,” American Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1988): 84, https://doi.org/10.2307/2713143.
[5] Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More., Short Circuits Ser. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 107.
[6] Emilie Maureen Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, Black Religion, Womanist Thought, Social Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27.
This paper will argue that a fuller understanding of Black fugitivity is achieved when regarding its sonic properties. That sound, I contend, can be located at the site of the Black sermon. I therefore intend to theorize the phenomenon of call-and-response that participates in the Black fugitive sounds heard on any given Sunday in Black churches across the United States. The sounds that inhabit the sanctuary during the sermon form what I name as the endophonic counterwitness that designates Black churches’ sanctuaries as a ‘within-space’ where the gathered congregation maroons themselves weekly. My argument attends to the ways that the sound objects—the preacher’s voice, the Hammond organ, and the gathered congregation—fuse together in the sanctuaries in Black churches forming a fugitive sound.