The Flesh the Witnesses Could Not Hold: Prince, The Rainbow Children, and the Black Religious Archive

When Prince converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2001 and released The Rainbow Children, he did not retreat from the radical erotic vision that defined his earlier career — he deepened it. I argue that The Rainbow Children is a sustained act of spiritual self-authorship in which religious devotion and sexual possibility are not in tension but are mutually constitutive. Drawing on J. Kameron Carter's theorization of the archē of colonial modernity, Ashon T. Crawley's concepts of the choreosonic and enfleshment, and Jayna Brown's framework of Black speculative vision, I center the track "Mellow" to demonstrate how Prince's erotic lyricism and sonic practice perform what I call a "religioerotics of the crossroads": a mode of Black sacred life that refuses the separation of the carnal from the holy, centers Black feminine pleasure as spiritual ground, and reaches toward an Afro-futurist elsewhere beyond the terms of the present world. Prince's conversion was not the end of his radicalism. It was its most profound expression.