Post-White Excursuses: Distracting from Westerly Desires and Destinations in Critical Religious Literacy

Religious literacy has been described in various ways (Hannam et al., 2020; Wolfart, 2022). For example, Wright (1993) stated that this literacy involves “the ability … to reflect, communicate and act in an informed, intelligent and sensitive manner towards the phenomenon of religion” (p. 47). This was vital to what Wright regarded as critical religious education about various religious truth claims (e.g., confessional, transcendent, or metaphysical claims). Thus, critical religious education would result in religious literacy. However, Prothero (2007) contended that this literacy means “the ability to understand and use the basic building blocks of religious traditions [such as] their terms, symbols, doctrines, practices, sayings, characters, metaphors, and narratives” (p. 15). Prothero's approach is drawn from Hirsch's (1987) arguments and advocacy for “cultural literacy,” with religious literacy, ritual literacy, confessional literacy, and denominational literacy as subsets and subdivisions of cultural literacy. At the same time, Moore (2010) defined religious literacy as “the ability to discern and analyse the fundamental intersections of religion and social, political, cultural life through multiple lenses” (p. 1). This expanded the focus of religious literacy from American culture (e.g., Prothero, 2007) to cultural studies and world religions (e.g., Moore, 2010).

With a different framing of religious literacy, Dinham and Francis (2015) defined this literacy as “both generalizable and context-specific,” which involves “exploring how it plays out in a variety of public practice and settings in the real contemporary world” (p. 3). In other words, “religious literacy resides … in an improved quality of conversation about the category of religion and religious belief itself, which first of all irons out all the muddled binaries and assumptions” (Dinham & Francis, 2015, p. 14). As described, this framing of religious literacy is sociological. Hannam et al. (2020) reported: “Religion and belief are key parts of the lives of a majority of people around the world, and as such, there is a shared need to be able to speak with others in a way which appreciates and recognizes this [fact]” (p. 220).

Hannam et al. (2020) went on to point out the (unconvincing) secularization thesis, the distortions of religion through European education (e.g., in the United Kingdom), and then raised an educational point about literacy—defined as the ability to navigate domains—that is directly relevant to the post-White excursuses below: “It is one thing to be able to navigate a particular terrain or domain effectively, but it is an entirely different question whether it is desirable to navigate such a domain” (p. 222). This is another way of questioning Westerly notions of religion in the twenty-first century, in this case using the word “domain” to name the terrain that the Westerly defines as “religion,” along with the implied Westerly norms that police this terrain, as so defined (see Long, 2018). Relatedly, Wolfart (2022) highlighted the other side of this conceptual coin—Westerly notions of literacy—including how the literacy domain is defined and policed according to the norms and myths of Euro-American paradigms (e.g., by arguing that the literacy myth has been transposed as the religious literacy myth).

Importantly, Hannam et al. (2020) have determined that “whilst religious literacy is an important idea, it would not be commendable to see it as the way forward for RE [the curriculum subject of religious education]” (p. 215). But why? Because it turns out that religious literacy—using Westernized literacy domain terms—can focus on both functional religious literacy as well as critical religious literacy. This means that Hannam et al. (2020) did not recommend religious literacy as the way forward in religious education because religious literacy, as functional religious literacy, should not exclusively be carried out in religious education but, rather, across multiple disciplines. Further, they argued that religious literacy, again as functional religious literacy, “should not take over the ‘agenda’ for RE” (Hannam et al., 2020, p. 223). In other words, just as some of my colleagues in the field of literacy research have argued against making literacy education all about functional literacy, Hannam and colleagues argued against making religious education all about functional religious literacy.

Those considerations point to the importance of critical religious literacy. Just as functional religious literacy should not exclusively be carried out in religious education, Hannam et al. (2020) argued that the same is true for critical religious literacy: It should also be carried out across multiple disciplines. Therefore, religious literacy is both functional and critical, and neither of these should be too narrowly construed as matters of religious education only.

With this more complete account of religious literacy (both functional and critical religious literacy), Hannam et al. (2020) concluded: “Religious literacy then becomes a way forward for the whole of education, and would leave more curriculum space allocated to the educational exploration of religion in RE” (p. 224).

However, it is unclear what “religion” means in this less cramped curriculum wherein “educational exploration of religion” would occur. It is reasonable to assume, though, that religion—even within a less cramped disciplinary curriculum—would still be a domain that is defined and policed according to Westerly notions (see Long, 2018). I mention Hannam et al.'s (2020) conclusion at length because they questioned “whether education needs to go beyond simply navigating domains [their definition of “literacy”] and work with students to raise critical questions about how domains are actually defined and policed” (p. 215). All these findings add warrant for excursuses beyond Westerly notions of religion, including religious education, functional religious literacy, and critical religious literacy. In short, there are multiple, competing views of “religious literacy” (Wolfart, 2022) and “critical religious literacy” (Reid, 2024).

Whosoever Will: Come on in This House

Now, expanding on the debates above, the central thesis of this article is that critical religious literacy can either trap literacy researchers or transform us. As a trap, this would invite literacy researchers to feel more at home with the “religious” without critically wrestling with spirituality, history, race, living or dying, and written (e.g., scriptural) or unwritten (e.g., experiential) meaning. As a transformation, this would invite literacy researchers to rethink all of these—from spirituality to meaning.

To demonstrate rethinking and being transformed by critical religious literacy, I return to my fragmental formation through Black Holiness Pentecostal Christian (BHPC) experiences and textual practices, and I ask: What sequencing of words might point readers toward a transformation, rather than a trap, where critical religious literacy is concerned? What follows is my answer to this inquiry. While focusing on the BHPC tradition—a particular Black spiritual community within what is often monolithically called “the Black church,” an oversimplification that may also eclipse Black spiritual traditions that are not Christian—and mindful of Abrahamic religions more broadly (that is, Judaism [e.g., Bloome in this issue], Christianity, and Islam [e.g., Muhammad in this issue]), the method of this genre of writing (i.e., post-White excursus) involves remembering, historicizing, interrogating, comparing, patterning, and interrelating texts and experiences with the aim of facilitating post-White shifts that could result in transforming human beings in the twenty-first century. Such post-White shifts result in further debunking the false notion of racially White preeminence in every way, and these shifts do not align with anti-White(ness) (Compton-Lilly et al., 2023). This genre approach uses form and fact to create a meaningful, journey-beyond experience for readers, even if some may feel that the form and facts are difficulties rather than pivoting points toward differing destinations for living and learning in the twenty-first century.

In this textual journey, first I state the beginning and the end of this article, setting up a nonlinear form for this text (e.g., cycling, circling, reiterating, returning). As is also true of our professional and personal lives, the end embeds the beginning of this text, and the beginning embeds the end. Also, ending is not the same as concluding. This means that while this article must end, it does not conclude all the issues involved with “critical religious literacy” (see the section “On ‘Selah’”). Accordingly, I invite readers to “Pin Up & Return” to this ending article, rather than falling into the trap of concluding at the ending (Croom, 2021). This nonlinear form also conveys that we cannot disentangle ourselves from situated, intersubjective histories and meanings as we approach critical religious literacy, and yet we are not determined by our human conditions (Harari, 2014).

Next, I describe what we might be distracted from and why such distractedness is desirable for literacy researchers in the twenty-first century. Then, I share recalled flashes from my story that turned my attention toward the post-White reframing of critical religious literacy. Also, I interrogate, compare, and discuss patterns by analyzing each term in the concept of “critical religious literacy.”

Finally, I interrelate texts and experiences throughout—from remembered songs to repressed scholarship—to reintroduce the African “fragment” work/love-work that has been preserved across times and places with The Archive. Parenthetically defining, “The Archive” is a term that recognizes and references the multicritical tradition of knowing and recording—with and within human bodies, through language, psychological tools, physical tools, and digital tools—before and after human racialization (Croom et al., 2021). The Archive has persisted and expanded through memory, word, cultural transmission, the sciences, the arts, media, narratives, records, and deeds. Certainly, The Archive is evidenced in documents or artifacts, but it is not confined to such records. Rather, The Archive is conceptually and corporeally (re)composed in moments and over time. This article draws from, reintroduces, and contributes to The Archive by appraising and rethinking critical religious literacy.

By the end of this article, critical religious literacy is interrogated and “home” is both recounted (i.e., my early formation in the BHPC tradition) and interrogated (i.e., in Toni Morrison's novel Home) to invite literacy researchers to be born again professionally and personally from uncritical Westerly orientations to post-White reorientations where critical religious literacy is concerned. Throughout, this article is a remembering (see Dillard, 2012) that also historicizes, interrogates, compares, patterns, and interrelates texts and experiences to advance transforming—instead of trapping—literacy researchers around the world.

“Let the Circle Be Unbroken”: Beginning and Ending

The BHPC tradition is a focal point through which I illustrate(ed) multiple excursuses beyond Westerly notions of religion. While different points are elaborated, all of these excursuses flow out of one insight: We are in this world, but not of this world. I start(ed) by introducing distraction as reorienting opportunities (perhaps root-level rebirths? or even radically, reiteratively born again?). Then, I depict(ed) the focal point through which the excursuses occur(ed) by remembering flashes of my fragmental formation through the complexities of the BHPC tradition in North Carolina—my “home.” Out of this Black, critical, prodigious, birthing space, I turn(ed) to connected post-White excursuses on “critical,” “religious,” and “literacy.”

On “Distracting”

To what degree have literacy researchers accounted for the Westernizing practices and processes that shape ourselves and our orientation to all else? For example, if we carefully consider the term “critical religious literacy,” it becomes clear that all three words are ways of enfolding human beings deeper, deeper, deeper within Westerly norms (e.g., Hannam et al., 2020; Mac Sweeney, 2023; Vial, 2016; Wolfart, 2022). The following post-White-oriented excursuses will briefly distract us from ubiquitous, seriously taken, Westerly norms of obvious, uncritical practices and processes. After depicting the focal point from which this critical essay (see the section “On ‘Critical’”) flashes and distracts us, what follows is a post-White critical excursus of each word in the term “critical religious literacy” unmasked with literature that would help the willing to unfold, unfold, unfold ourselves beyond Westerly norms. This essay is intended to create moments of distraction that may result in shifting our desires, decisions, directions, and destinations as human beings in the twenty-first century.

On “Just as I Am, Without One Plea”

I have never been capable of blind faith. Naive faith? Sure. But blind faith? Never. Even if I don’t say what I see, I do see it, and I know that I am seeing whatever I am noticing. For example, as far as I know my church participation has always involved bracketing aspects of myself, as well as aspects of accumulated human knowledge, away from our Sunday morning worship services or our midweek Bible studies (Thursday nights as a child of New First Corinthian United Holy Church caused me to miss many episodes of The Cosby Show, and then in college my Thursday nights would be spent at Evangel Fellowship Church of God in Christ, both Black—and far from monolithic—churches in North Carolina). This sense of bracketing was simultaneously relieved and unresolved while I was in divinity school (at an historically Black college or university, or an HBCU). And my bracketing tensions/dissonances have continued since I completed my master of divinity degree. Looking back, my childhood and adulthood have repeatedly grappled with noticing both the compatibilities and incompatibilities between my Black church world and my other worlds, such as home, K–12 school, college, professional communities, distant pasts (ancient Africa or Palestine), distant places (Ghana or Germany), and big ideas (God-talk or theology).

As a dad, I remember having to grapple at home with my daughter's big idea for a school science project. When she was in fourth grade, my daughter decided to do a school science project that asked, “How was the world made?” Facing once again—this time as a dad—the bracketing tensions/dissonances among my Black church and Western science worlds, while seeing clearly both the compatibilities and incompatibilities of her incisive inquiry across my worlds, I helped her answer her research question by interrelating both the various creation stories (Hamilton, 1988) and scientific stories (Big History Project, n.d.) that have explained how the world was made, while also pointing out the limitations of both approaches to explaining our planetary world.

At this point in my journey, particularly since my fragmental formation through an HBCU divinity school, I have identified and clarified a great deal of my own Black church formation. While I have not always been able to name what I was experiencing and seeing within my Black church world, nonetheless my awareness of and sensitivity to the kinds of bracketing tensions/dissonances I had—as I lived and learned across overlapping worlds (Croom, n.d.)—feels like an eternal constant of my life. From hermeneutically prescribed Bible stories, to sermonic dictums, to respectable or “holy” social and sexual practices, to axiomatically prescribed disciplines, to post-structuralist criticism, I’ve always had unblind questions about all my worlds (relatedly, when I was an undergraduate pledging for an HBCU band fraternity my given line name and skit phrase was “Da Riddla … cause I baffle everybody with questions!”).

While finding the “sequencing of words” for this text, I wondered: What from my own story ties this article together? A song from my Black holiness church experience was rekindled from a forgotten smolder to a familiar flame: “Just as I Am, Without One Plea” (Elliott, 1836). This song from my Black church experience reminded me that I am free to be as I am without self-justification, and more critically, without Westernized justification. Then later, during article revisions, I listened on repeat to “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith (1969) as I found my way “home” to the BHPC experiences and textual practices that have partly formed me and the unblind framework of the post-White excursuses provided below.

I come to these post-White excursuses through the BHPC traditions of the United Holy Church of America (UHCA). This church denomination is a Black institution of the United States of America (USA) that resulted from Black Southern Americans transforming Wesleyan-Arminian, Methodist, Protestant, and Western Christianity in 1886 in the village of Method, North Carolina (Jones, 1987, pp. 37, 125, 129; Mead et al., 2005, p. 299). After being “pushed out of organized churches,” the founding Black men of the UHCA—most of whom were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church—are recorded as creating an organized church accordingly:

The United Holy Church is an outgrowth of the great revival that began with the early outpouring of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost, when the 120 were filled with the Holy Ghost. The church is built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ, Himself, being the chief cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20).

Throughout my life, the family history I have received suggests the likelihood that I have previously enslaved relatives (maternal), never-enslaved relatives (paternal), and Indigenous relatives (paternal) in my family tree as well as a variety of faiths, from Abrahamic traditions to agnostic to atheist. Today, I am no longer active in the UHCA due to multiple (amicable) reasons, including relocation from North Carolina to other U.S. states. Still, I cherish the fragmental formation that I experienced through the UHCA, especially at New First Corinthian UHC in Dudley, North Carolina (childhood), and Fisher Memorial UHC in Durham, North Carolina (adulthood). This formation is still very much with me. In fact, my church memories provided this section subheading by bringing back to me a song we routinely sung at the close of worship, during the weekly altar call, or during our quarterly Holy Communion.

As I remember Quarterly Meeting—pronounced “Kwort-ly Meetin’”—these were times when we sacredly shared and ate bible bookstore wafers or store-bought bread (the body of Jesus) and bible bookstore or Welch's grape juice (the blood of Jesus) as a communal ritual of remembering and celebrating the sin-atoning sacrifice of Jesus along with the fellowship of literally washing one another's feet (women foot-washing together on one side of the sanctuary and men foot-washing together on the other). Our literal foot-washing ritual symbolized mutual humility, love, and service as fellow disciples of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (who we believed was born of a virgin woman, lived a sin-free human life, was obediently crucified according to the divine will of God, and was raised from the dead with all power in His hands to free us from the powers of sin, shame, and death as God's only begotten son; this was the center of our joy, our Gospel, our Good News, our tidings of great joy in Southeastern USA). Our Holy Communion service was followed by lining up to fill our disposable plates and forks full of homemade, Southern-Black entrees, seasoned-to-taste sides, and finger-licking desserts in the Fellowship Hall at the back of our brick-built church edifice, a building project that was conceived and completed (edifice celebrated and dedicated October 11–17, 1982) by my grandmother and pastor, Elder Katherine Langston Bryant Wells (my grandma was sent by our denomination to pastor our church in September 1977 after the founding pastor, Elder Ella Langston Mitchell, died in February of that same year). On any given Sunday, not just our quarterly meetings, whether there were three gathered together in the worship service (Pastor Wells, and her daughter Rosalind Croom, and her grandson, me) or more, my grandmother, Pastor Wells, lifted up the invitation to salvation in the power of the Holy Ghost that was in our midst: “Will there be one?”

Some complexities of my Black church tradition are demonstrated by the fact that, after a 23-year split that began in 1977, the Original United Holy Church organization was reunited with the 1886-founded United Holy Church of America organization in May 2000. Our Holiness church reunification occurred at the UHCA headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina (Bowens, 2003). In short, the history of the UHCA and my own lifetime in the United States of America indicates the need for a critical account of Western norms, religion, race, and human experience in the twenty-first century.

As anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston (1981), author and activist James Baldwin (Field, 2008), Riverside Church (n.d.) senior minister emeritus Reverend Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr. (1975, 2010), and many others attest (e.g., Jones, 1987; Van Dusen, 1958), the BHPC tradition has made a prodigious contribution to humanity, especially among those experiencing the United States of America as racially Black Christians. Further, my BHPC tradition is related to—and in un-monolithic tension with—other Black institutions, such as the Church of God in Christ, the Baptist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal church, as well as Black evangelical denominations (e.g., T.D. Jakes Ministries; see also Mellowes, n.d.).

On “Critical”

I begin my discussion of “critical” with a reorienting understanding through the complexities of the BHPC tradition of the UHCA: We are in this world, but not of this world. In these 10 words, there is a clear critical orientation toward “we” and “world” that is both discursive and practical. If this BHPC orientation is applied to the “critical” of “critical religious literacy,” it draws our attention to some assumptions. Who is the “we” implied in this apparently “critical” project of “critical religious literacy”? Also, what “world” is implied by “critical religious literacy”? These questions distract us from our Westerly norms and redirect us toward a Westerly-critical excursus.

To say what usually goes without saying, the “critical” is widely understood as synonymous with Western European critical theory or at least entirely derived from this. As such, the “critical” is the project of Europeans or those descended from Europeans. Since the Western European Enlightenment, these “critical” people have been regarded as racially White and falsely ranked as the standard for all human beings. This means that arguably the project of critical religious literacy is narrowly on mere Westerly terms, and I say merely because accumulated human knowledge has already shown that the Western European Enlightenment and Western European criticality have been falsely projected as universal and world historical, and thus neither is as advertised. Caveat emptor (buyer beware). The failures of this particular Enlightenment and of Eurocentric critical theory could distract us to notice broader criticality—before, contemporary with, and beyond both of these—rather than luring us to give further full attention to only these Westerly fictions (Croom, 2024; Mac Sweeney, 2023). These are both fictions because they are uncritical, Westerly, pretend-universal projections that have unhealthily produced the WEIRDest people in the world (Henrich, 2020 defined “WEIRDest” as “Western. Educated. Industrialized. Rich. Democratic…-est”). Such distractedness in racially Black worlds—distracted by attending instead to the Black realities of (re)birthing, living, learning, laboring, leisuring, suffering, faithing, and dying—attunes us to a different spirit as we live the ongoing conditions in which we find ourselves: We are in this world, but not of this world. In other words, we are critical of what is projected as “critical” because we know of glitches in our so-called WEIRD, lived matrix.

Preeminent theologian Howard Thurman illuminated how Africans invented “mutual edification and comfort” despite the slave society of the United States of America (Berlin, 1998)—and parenthetically, the USA remains deformed today by the Westerly slave society processes and practices of enslaving, and attempting to justify enslaving, full human beings on stolen land. Thurman (1945/1969) meticulously identified this breakthrough: “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst” (p. 36). This Black tradition of redeeming religion will be demonstrated in the next section of this essay, but here the point I make is that Black folks’ criticality is not derivative of Western European Enlightenment or Eurocentric critical theory; rather, racially Black criticality critiqued both, as well as those Westerly norms derived from both (Croom, 2024).

On “Religious”

The section above has begun to point to the word “religion” from a post-White critical understanding that I develop further now. Amid Westerly, profane, absurd circumstances, such as slave society USA and all that persists now as a result of those bankrupt norms: What is redeemable where religion is concerned?

Charles H. Long (2000), a history of religions expert, has carried forward Thurman's scholarship by asking, “What can one say about the nature of African American religion?” (p. 369). In Long's (2000) scholarship, we learn that

the lands across the Atlantic [from Europe and Africa] contained three groups of people: the several aboriginal inhabitants of these lands (later called Indians); the European immigrants; and the Africans imported and enslaved by the Europeans. These three groups define different religious situations [in later-called slave society USA]. (p. 368)

In connection with Thurman's (1945/1969) work, the section on “Religious Experience: Conjuring, Deciphering, and Discernment” points out three structuring factors: (a) the “involuntary presence” of Africans in the United States of America; (b) “Africa as historical empirical reality and as religious image,” with the clarification that “the word Africa is a Western term that … [the] enslaved were unfamiliar with … [and therefore the enslaved] knew themselves to be Yorubas, Ibos, Ibibios, Ashantis, Dogon, Bambaras,” and more; and (c) “the meaning of God for African Americans,” which was derived mostly from “their experience rather than from abstract doctrines of theology” (Long, 2000, pp. 378–379). Expanding on Thurman's work, Long (2000) showed that

whether the enslaved Africans used religious language derivative from the tradition of the slaveowners, deciphered from the nature [around them], or remembered from Africa, their notions of God were existentially related to their existence and yet defined the locus of otherness and transcendence—a structure of value that was not created by the slaveowners and could not be determined by them. (p. 379)

We might relate this epoch-making, counter-Westerly, love-work to the “fragment” work that is portrayed in Willie Jennings's (2020) book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Jennings, a Baptist minister and theologian, wrote his book through a Western, Protestant, confessional, Christianity-centered, Africana lens (see also Vega, 2021). Having shown above the antecedent work of (enslaved, but also among them free) Africans in slave society USA, I now highlight Jennings's particular Christianity-framed concept of “fragment” because it belongs to the wider tradition of these early African “fragment” workers in the United States of America. Therefore, I point out that these early Africans—both within and beyond Christianity—did the “fragment” work/love-work necessitated by (a) human faithing, (b) colonial-racial fragmenting, and (c) reduction-commodity falsifying amid Westerly circumstances. In other words, Black folks kept their faiths in futile conditions, generated masterpieces with fragments, and expertly falsified anti-Black hypotheses time and time again with love. Thereby, these early Africans (across sociopolitical statuses in slave society USA) carried out “fragment” work/love-work with Westerly religion and made multiple ways out of the planned dead end that was designed and determined for us as Africans in slave society USA (see also Croom, 2020a).

Notably, within this history of “fragment” work/love-work, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois has critiqued Westerly religion in slave society deformed USA with related but differing concepts, namely “the religion of whiteness” as one element and “the White church” as another element (Mayrl, 2024). As Du Bois (1931) observed, the American template that fragmented religion and Christianity was perforated at the color line. This is important because Du Bois’s (1903) often repressed scholarship established identifying and appraising “the Negro church” in human history in relationship to the anti-Black racial logics and practices of White(ness) in the United States of America, whether in spiritual or economic guises (see Jipguep-Akhtar & Khan, 2024 for highlighting both the contributions and critiques of Du Bois). Du Bois (see 1916 and 1920 respectively) distinguished “the White church” from “the religion of whiteness,” but still these concepts “are connected since the religion of whiteness—at the heart of [the false notion of] White supremacy—finds important institutional support in the White church” (Mayrl, 2024, p. 2). For example, Du Bois showed how these two race practices are combined to carry out depraved forms of legitimation, revisionism, inaction, religious segregation, missionary work, and charitable giving (see Mayrl, 2024).

Also, within James Baldwin's critical account in The Fire Next Time (1963/1993) of his own Black Holiness Pentecostal conversion experience in slave society deformed USA (i.e., the Northeastern United States in Harlem, New York City), he also demystified his own experience while deciphering the meaning of the “religious” in his USA Christian nation with words that seem fragmental, both compatible and incompatible, and even conjuring:

For many years, I could not ask myself why human relief [from all of Baldwin's 1938, fourteen-year-old guilty torment] had to be achieved in a fashion at once so pagan and so desperate—in a fashion at once so unspeakably old and so unutterably new. And by the time I was able to ask myself this question, I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up did not differ from the principles governing the rites and customs of other churches, white. The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world. (p. 31)

Indeed, as a great cloud of witnesses testify of redemption from Westerly notions of the “religious” and of reorienting, root-nourishing love … we will tell the story, how we overcome. And we'll understand it better by and by (Hawn, 2014; Tindley, 1905).

On “Literacy”

Whereas the words “critical” or “religious” may, for some, seem like misplaced terms in the world of literacy research, obviously “literacy” is a word that makes literacy researchers feel right at home. However, before we begin to take comfort in the word “literacy” as literacy researchers, I want to turn our attention to the work of unforgettable author Toni Morrison, who distracts us to unsettle the idea of “home” in ways that may make these post-White excursuses more meaningful.

In the novel Home, Morrison (2012) created moments for readers, especially American readers, to rethink “the land of the free and the home of the brave” (Key, n.d.). Morrison (2012) disrupted nostalgic recollections of 1950s USA as a warm, cozy, simple homeland that was filled with the best of days gone by (see also various critiques of Putnam, 1995, 2000 because of how his work on social capital in America might inspire misguided 1950s nostalgia). At the same time, Home tells the story of Frank Money, who leaves and returns home to Lotus, Georgia, in the Southeastern United States of America. Within this main narrative, there is also the history of how Frank's family was driven out of their Texas home, which required them to reestablish home together in Georgia instead. There are many moments throughout the book where readers might think about and question their own notions of “home.” In this sense, I invite literacy researchers to consider “literacy” as our “home” while beginning to reorient ourselves to a wider world-sense of “literacy”/“home” within the terms of critical religious literacy (Croom, 2020a, 2020b; Croom, 2024; Oyèwùmí, 1997; Willis, 2023).

To illustrate a convergence between “critical,” “religious,” and “literacy” in Home, I point to the moment when Ycidra, or Cee, Frank Money's younger sister, comes to terms with herself and her life in 1950s USA with critical brilliance that should be recognized and to which we should all aspire. Morrison (2012) wrote,

“Your womb can’t never bear fruit.”

For instance, distracting our attention further from Westerly norms, we could turn to questions like these: For whom is literacy a home? For whom is literacy a house, but not a home? What responsibilities are upon those for whom literacy is a home? What secrets does this home contain and to what effect? What memories and stories constitute this home and how so? If literacy is home, how often do we leave and return to it, and why, and what results from such journeying? Does anyone remember a welcome mat at the door of this home? Do we recall whether this home is within community or self-standing? These questions I raise, but do not answer here, because the purpose of this post-White critical essay is to create moments of distraction from Westerly norms whereby our desires, decisions, directions, and destinations may be shifted as human beings in the twenty-first century. Whatever we, literacy researchers, take our next steps to be where critical religious literacy is concerned, I hope that we advance ourselves toward the post-White orientation to “critical,” “religious,” and “literacy.”

We can give “home,” particularly in the United States of America, further scrutiny. As we approach another repetition of the USA ritual cycle—those roughly hundred-year “cycles [that] represent dramatic rituals of the archetypes of American history and religion” (Long, 1986, p. 165)—will we enter the 2060s and 2070s with multiple literacies that include post-White-oriented racial literacies and post-White-oriented critical religious literacies? If we do, we will not evade and abort the healthy transformations that would change USA society and this ongoing USA ritual. If we do not, Long (1986) has already told us what is likely to happen:

At each of these mythical cycles the opportunity is presented for a change of the ritual, for a break in the repetition of this kind of eternal return. It was present in 1776, and then again in the bloody Civil War, and then again in the 1960s with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X; but at each of these junctures the American revolution is aborted and clever priests of our national language and apparatus, skillful in the ways of ritual purity and manipulation, come upon the scene to ensure the repetition of the American ritual. (p. 165)

Summarizing, all the glitches of the Westerly matrix help with distracting us to critically ponder the multiple mythic effects of “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” to question “literacy” as “home,” to learn from Cee's example in Home, and to decipher the silences and rituals that usually function unstated and unexamined to the detriment of those who are regarded as racially White and obviously with disproportionate and undeserved harm to those who are not regarded as racially White. To illustrate these points concretely, would you regard the following as demonstrating literacy or at least as an example of critical religious literacy?

The religion of the American people centers around the telling and retelling of the mighty deeds of white conquerors. This story hides the true experience of Americans from their very eyes. The invisibility of Indians and blacks is matched by a void or a deeper invisibility within the consciousness of white Americans. The inordinate fear they have of minorities is an expression of the fear they have when they contemplate the possibility of seeing themselves as they really are. (Long, 1986, p. 163)

On “Selah”

As stated at the beginning, the ending of this article is not the same as concluding about critical religious literacy. Rather, readers are invited to “selah”—that is, to pause with, listen to, or pin up and return to, all the above. Carefully (re)consider critical religious literacies in the tradition of the African “fragment” work/love-work that occurred in the United States of America as preserved across times and places with The Archive: We are in this world, but not of this world.

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