This panel examines how religious practice, theological imagination, and spiritual epistemologies shape movements contesting state violence, racial domination, and carceral power in the United States. Bringing together ethnographic, historical, and theological approaches, the papers challenge assumptions that contemporary left political movements are secular, instead showing how ritual, cosmology, and moral vision function as central modes of resistance and world-making.
The panel spans key sites of struggle, including anti-lynching campaigns in the Jim Crow South, movements to abolish militarized policing infrastructures such as Atlanta’s proposed “Cop City,” and debates over race, migration, and human dignity amid intensified immigration enforcement. Across these contexts, the state emerges as both a political and moral order, contested through competing theological claims.
By foregrounding abolition as a political and spiritual project, the panel highlights how diverse religious traditions—from Black Protestant critique to Africana and Vodou cosmologies—reconfigure dominant narratives of criminality, sovereignty, and belonging.
"Cop City Will Never Be Built" examines the spiritual and religious practices that animated the movement to prevent the construction of a militarized police training facility in Atlanta’s South River Forest. Contrary to popular depictions of contemporary leftist movements as inherently irreligious, militant “Stop Cop City” activists consistently deployed religious ritual and practice as modalities of political organizing and future-oriented world-making. Through analysis of the political impact of the movement’s spiritual ceremonies, rituals, and direct actions, interviews with movement activists, engagement with a multimedia movement archive, and comparison with resonant movements, this paper reveals spiritual practice as a cornerstone of the Stop Cop City movement, as well as other anti-colonial land defense movements across the Global South.
This paper argues that anti-lynching campaigns should be understood within the historical tradition of abolitionist movements in the United States and as a resource for our contemporary abolitionist future. Spectacle lynchings in the South relied on myths of Black southerners’ inherent criminality and were enabled by sheriffs and the broader penal apparatus. By challenging the racial tethering of criminality to Blackness and critiquing the state’s role in mob violence, anti-lynching activists engaged in abolitionist practice. Examining anti-lynching activism as abolition, however, complicates the contemporary abolitionist demand for nonreformist reforms. To grapple with this tension, this paper compares the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). It further interprets lynching as a religious practice and anti-lynching activism as a competing theology that challenged the moral order sustaining racial violence.
Keeping in mind the 2026 American Academy of Religion presidential theme, “Future/s,” this paper argues that theological discourse on race must move beyond the traditional Du Bois–Cone paradigm in order to address the evolving realities of race, immigration, and human dignity in the United States. While W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the color line and James H. Cone’s theological critique of white supremacy remain foundational for Black liberation theology, the racial politics of the present moment increasingly operate through what may be described as the “border line,” where immigration status, nationality, and state power shape experiences of marginalization.
Engaging Haitian Vodou as an Africana religious lens, the paper develops a pneumatocentric ethic of human dignity rooted in Vodou ritual practice, particularly spirit possession as a form of ontological affirmation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of "heterotopia", Vodou ritual space is interpreted as a site where marginalized communities cultivate dignity and resilience in the face of racialized immigration regimes. Africana religious epistemologies and pneumatologies thus offer critical resources for reimagining the future of theological discourse on race.