Draft:We Testify With Our Lives

We Testify With Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought From Black Power to Black Lives Matter (Columbia University Press, 2022) is a major work by Terrence L. Johnson, a religious studies scholar and political theorist. It explores how religion has informed Black political thought, from the Black Power movement to Black Lives Matter.

Central Argument

Johnson contends that the politics of Black Power took a distinct, yet overlooked, “ethical turn” that shifted the movement into a broader, humanistic understanding of justice, policy, and organizing. We Testify With Our Lives probes this ethical turn and traces its religious underpinnings. Johnson first draws on Toni Cade Bambara’s Salt Eaters to carve out a politics of healing that informed and anticipated this ethical turn. The book then takes readers on a journey through the Black political thought and organizing by examining eminent figures, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and key debates around gender and international affairs. Johnson sheds light on how the questions these leaders grappled with remain highly contested in our current discourse.

In this vein, Johnson concludes by attending to the spiritual roots of Black Lives Matter. This research complicates the narrative that religion has disappeared from Black political organizing and reveals how the role of religion has evolved in conversation with Black political thought and Western liberalism. Johnson pulls from sermons, letters, archival work, and literature to construct a nuanced understanding of how religion has shaped ethics, power, and radical politics in the late twentieth century.  

Contributions to Religious Studies and Political Theory

Johnson coins the term “ethical turn” do describe SNCC'S humanistic nationalism. Johnson deploys the category of the "ethical turn" to interrogate how this seismic shift in the Civil Rights Movement drew on religious notions of justice, solidarity, freedom and an evolving epistemology that found wisdom in the "places discarded as inferior, primitive, or irrational." This book marks a major contribution to Religious Studies and Political Theory by uncovering how deeply held religious beliefs and commitments are central to debates on race, citizenship, and American Democracy.

We Testify with Our Lives has been widely cited in articles that appear in Cultural Sociology, Sociological Theory, and the Journal of Religious Ethics, and is a seminal work of the twenty-first century that bridges Religious Studies and Political Theory in original and generative ways.

Johnson has been invited to lecture on this work at Union Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Wake Forest University, among others.

Critical Reception

Diane M. Stewart sees We Testify With Our Lives as “a magnificent scholarly intervention—none other than a love letter to Black ancestors, artists, freedom dreamers, activists, homileticians, healers and ritual experts that constructs from their testimonies and creative works a compelling theory of 'sacred subjectivity.'”

Anthony Pinn argues that “We Testify with Our Lives makes a compelling case for reexamining dynamics of Black religious life and thought, and from that exploration gathering creative and transformative approaches to well-being in all its sociopolitical manifestations.”