Captive Body Sanctified: Protest, Enclosure, and the Possibility of Otherwise

Black pentecostals may be conservative or progressive politically and theologically. For those Black pentecostals who identify with conservative political and/or theological ideals, the doctrine of sanctification is the central logic by which a wide range of practices are deemed worldly, secular, or sinful. By way of contrast to the worldly and the secular, many black pentecostals embrace the sanctified life—a life set apart for holiness. This embrace of sanctification is so thoroughgoing, that the identifier “The Sanctified Church” is basically synonymous with black U.S. pentecostalism; black pentecostals understand themselves as saints, as members of a sanctified church, and as leaders of a sanctified movement of more or less global proportions.

In this paper, I seek to illuminate the relationship between the doctrine of sanctification and the community of the sanctified, giving particular attention to the role of the Black woman within scholarship on the sanctified church. On the one hand, at least since Zora Neale Hurston, scholars of Black pentecostalism have understood the sanctified church as an identity-in-protest to one or more of the colonial modern forces inimical to Black life—whether patriarchy, antiblackness, capitalism, or homophobia. On the other hand, given the biblical-historical-theological contours of the doctrine of sanctification, as well as the socio-political reality of Black women as “a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements,”1 I argue that the doctrine/identity of “sanctification/sanctified” forms a grammatical enclosure within which the flesh/body must abide. Thus, to claim the identity of the sanctified church is to claim, at once, an identity-in-protest and an identity-as-enclosure. In light of the stronger associations of Black pentecostalism with conservatism (relative to progressivism), I question whether the grammar of sanctification forecloses the black pentecostal church’s ability to escape the enclosures of colonial modernity.

This paper unfolds in two parts. In part one, I raise the question of the doctrine of sanctification’s object(ive) through a critical examination of Stanley Hauerwas’s essay titled “The Sanctified Body: Why Perfection Does Not Require a Self” by means of Hortense Spillers’ watershed intervention, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Attention to Spillers illuminates Hauerwas’s paternalistic objectification of the Black woman in his treatment of the doctrine of sanctification, despite his attempts to the contrary. At this point, I draw on Catherine Bell’s theory of ritualization, the ritualized body, and the ritualized body environment to show how Hauerwas’ treatment assumes a hierarchical opposition between his own ritualized body and the flesh of the nameless, unhoused, Black woman he names as his teacher. However, this critique of Hauerwas is problematized insofar as his narrative placement of the Black woman as his hierarchical opposite is surprisingly resonant with the critical claim of the black feminist Combahee River Collective that “if black women were free, it would have to mean that everyone else would have to be free.”

To make fuller, if not better, sense of this unlikely resonance, the paper turns in part two to a more direct exploration of the community of the sanctified church and the theoretical notion of the captive body. First, I examine representative treatments of the sanctified church as an identity-in-protest from Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Anthea Butler, Keri Day, and Ashon Crawley. Where Black women are central to Gilkes, Butler and Day’s treatments of the sanctified church as an

identity-in-protest, Crawley’s treatment theorizes sanctified church aesthetics as intimating “otherwise possibilities.” In other words, for Crawley, somewhere latent in Blackpentecostal identity is a fundamental gesture of escape from enclosure. However, turning to the work of critical theorists Hortense Spillers (again) and Joy James, I theorize “sanctified” identity-as-enclosure through a dual logic of the captive body: theological grammar as doctrinal enclosure and Black woman within such enclosures as “captive maternals.”

To conclude, I apply the critical reflection in part two of the paper to Ashon Crawley’s theorization of “otherwise possibility,” questioning the range of possibilities for “otherwise” intimated by sanctified aesthetics given the socio-political realities of enclosure.