A Womanist Way Out: Reimagining God and Sexuality in Black Women’s Fiction

This article uses Alice Walkers The Color Purple and Deesha Philyaws short stories Eula and How to Make Love to a Physicist to illustrate the harm of evangelical Christianitys divinized patriarchy and heteronormative sexual ethics for Black women. In this article, the author asks: how does evangelical Christianity function in Black womens fiction? She argues that evangelical Protestant Christianity represents an obstacle to Black womens coming of age or being grown in Walker's and Philyaws fictional accounts. Their protagonists choose either to leave or stay within evangelicalisms confining frameworks, but staying has a steep cost. Walker and Philyaw both suggest practices and orientations that support Black women leaving evangelicalisms harmful frameworks for more life-sustaining belief systems. This argument is indebted to Black feminist and womanist theologians and ethicists Kelly Brown Douglas, Katie Cannon, Tamura Lomax, and Monique Moultrie. Leaving evangelicalism is, the author proposes, difficult but necessary womanist work.

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Stable URL: https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.00048

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