TL;DR
Black women have long relied on faith as a source of strength, survival and liberation. Some of the same religious teachings have also been used to sanctify our suffering, silence and self-abandonment. I call this sacred oppression: harmful expectations made difficult to challenge because they have been wrapped in Scripture, tradition and the threat of spiritual consequence. This essay asks what we have accepted as holy, who benefits from those interpretations and what might change if we examined the systems built in God’s name with greater curiosity.
I almost didn’t write this.
Even now, something in me tightens as I consider what I am about to say. I can hear the warnings before anybody actually speaks them:
Be careful.
Don’t play with God.
The Bible says lean not unto your own understanding.
Some things you just don’t question.
If you grew up Black, Southern and churched, or even churched-adjacent, you probably know the feeling. We can interrogate politics, education, racism, capitalism and almost every other system shaping our lives.
God? The Bible?
BAEBEA, you better tread lightly.
That fear interests me.
I have not stopped believing in God. I do not believe the Bible contains no wisdom. I certainly do not want to dismiss the faith that helped Black people survive circumstances designed to destroy us.
I am interested because I spend a lot of time thinking about systems: how they shape what we believe, how they organize our relationships, and how they remain in place long after we have forgotten who built them.
I am especially interested in what happens to Black women inside those systems.
Black women have been taught to survive so much that should have been questioned.
We have been told that endurance is strength. That suffering builds character. That forgiveness is required, even when accountability is absent. That keeping the family together is our responsibility. That service is our calling. That submission is godly. That silence is respect. That exhaustion is simply what happens when you are the one everybody depends on.
When those expectations are tied to God, refusing them does not merely feel selfish.
It can feel sinful.
That is what I mean by sacred oppression: domination that has been given divine authority. Harmful expectations become difficult to challenge when they have been wrapped in Scripture, tradition, and the threat of spiritual consequence.
A system becomes hardest to question when it has been made sacred.
Black women are the backbone, but what has that cost us?
Black women have long been called the backbone of the Black church. The numbers support what many of us have witnessed all our lives. Women constitute nearly two-thirds of adults affiliated with historically Black Protestant churches.
We fill the pews.
We teach Sunday school, lead ministries, organize the repast, raise the building-fund money, prepare the children for Easter speeches, visit the sick, tend to grieving families and remember what everybody needs.
We carry the church.
Then we carry its teachings home.
Being the backbone is not the same as having authority.
Black women have often supplied much of the church’s labor while men retained a disproportionate share of its formal power. That includes the authority to interpret Scripture, define proper womanhood and decide what God requires of us.
That contradiction deserves more attention.
What does it mean for women to constitute most of the body, perform much of the work and transmit much of the culture while having less power to determine the theology governing their own lives?
What does it mean when the people benefiting from women’s service also have the authority to declare that service sacred?
We have been praised for carrying crosses nobody ever intended to help us put down.
Then we called that praise honor.
What have we normalized because it sounded holy?
Religion does not remain inside the sanctuary. It travels.
It comes home in our ideas about marriage, motherhood, discipline, sexuality, leadership, sacrifice and forgiveness. It shapes who may speak, who must obey, who is expected to endure and whose comfort is protected at everyone else’s expense.
Eventually, theology becomes culture. Culture becomes common sense. Common sense becomes “just the way we were raised.”
We stop noticing where the rules came from.
A Black woman remains in a relationship that is destroying her because God hates divorce.
A mother gives until she is physically and emotionally depleted because a good woman sacrifices for her family.
A girl is taught to dress differently rather than expect men and boys to govern their own behavior.
A woman forgives harm before she has had time to name what happened because holding anger might block her blessing.
A congregation protects a powerful man because touching God’s anointed is considered more dangerous than questioning what he did.
A queer child learns that being honest about who they are could cost them family, community and God.
A Black woman interprets her exhaustion as a personal failure because she has been taught that God will not give her more than she can bear.
We rarely call these things oppression when they arrive through people who love us.
We call them values.
We call them tradition.
We call them biblical.
Sometimes we call them protection.
Protection that requires one person to become smaller so another person does not have to become accountable is not protection. It is power.
Power does not become less oppressive because someone invokes God while exercising it.
The Bible did not enter our lives outside of power
The Bible did not arrive in Black American life on neutral ground.
European enslavers used biblical interpretation to justify bondage, demand obedience and describe a violent racial order as the will of God. An edition now commonly known as the “Slave Bible” was created for the religious instruction of enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. Large portions of Scripture, including much of Exodus, were removed. Passages that could be used to encourage obedience were preserved.
That was not simply religion.
That was systems design.
Someone understood that controlling the story could help control the people. Someone knew that what people believe about God can shape what they accept from human authority.
Black people refused to find only bondage in the Bible.
We heard liberation in the same text enslavers used to preach submission. We found ourselves in Moses demanding that Pharaoh let his people go. We met beyond the supervision of enslavers in hush harbors, where God sounded different when the person interpreting the Word was not the person holding the whip.
The Black church became sanctuary, school, political headquarters, mutual-aid network and organizing infrastructure. It helped us survive slavery, resist Jim Crow and imagine freedom before America was willing to recognize our humanity.
Black women were central to building and sustaining those institutions, even when history failed to name them and the institutions failed to share power with them.
That liberatory history is real.
The other history is real, too.
The Bible has helped Black people imagine ourselves free. It has also been interpreted in ways that taught Black women which forms of bondage we were expected to accept.
Both things can be true.
When survival gets mistaken for divine assignment
Black women’s ability to survive has always been one of our greatest resources.
It has also been exploited.
America has depended on Black women’s labor while denying us adequate protection. Workplaces depend on our competence while resisting our authority. Families depend on our caregiving while treating our needs as negotiable. Churches depend on our service while sometimes excluding us from meaningful power.
When we survive all of it, people point to our survival as evidence that the arrangement works.
This is one of the most dangerous things we have normalized: the belief that because Black women can carry something, we should.
Our endurance has become justification for giving us more to endure.
Religion can make that exploitation feel purposeful.
Your suffering is producing something.
God is preparing you.
The pain is part of your testimony.
There is a blessing on the other side.
Everything happens for a reason.
Sometimes those beliefs help people endure what cannot immediately be changed. I would never dismiss the faith that has allowed a Black woman to find meaning in the middle of circumstances she did not choose.
Meaning should not become a substitute for change.
A theology that helps a woman survive oppression can be life-giving. A theology that convinces her the oppression itself is God’s will is something else entirely.
We must be able to tell the difference.
Black women have also carried these teachings
Centering Black women does not mean pretending we have only been acted upon.
We have also transmitted these beliefs.
Black women taught Sunday school. Black women corrected little girls’ clothes. Black women warned us not to question the preacher. Black women instructed daughters to keep families together. Black women sometimes taught children that obedience mattered more than bodily autonomy, that forgiveness meant renewed access and that suffering quietly was evidence of good character.
We did not invent the systems we were helping to preserve.
Often, we were passing down the rules that had helped us remain safe, respectable, connected and spiritually certain in a world offering Black women very little protection.
That does not make the harm unreal.
It does make the story more complicated.
Sometimes what looks like consent is adaptation. Sometimes what sounds like conviction began as a survival strategy. Sometimes the women enforcing the rule were also constrained by it.
Our responsibility is not to shame them or ourselves.
Our responsibility is to become conscious enough to decide what should continue through us and what should end with us.
What if curiosity is not disobedience?
Many of us were taught that God, the Bible and the interpretation handed to us were essentially the same thing.
Questioning the teaching meant questioning the text. Questioning the text meant questioning God. Questioning God could mean risking punishment in this life and the next.
That does not leave much room for curiosity.
Perhaps curiosity is not a rejection of faith.
Perhaps it is how we separate the divine from the systems humans have built in the divine’s name.
What might happen if Black women interrogated biblical interpretations with the same rigor we bring to every other system?
What if we asked:
Who taught me what this passage means?
Who benefits when I accept that interpretation?
What does it require Black women to sacrifice?
Whose authority does it protect?
Whose voice does it silence?
What happens when this belief becomes a household rule, a church practice or a cultural expectation?
Does it produce dignity, accountability and freedom, or fear, domination and silence?
Would I still call it holy if it were not familiar?
We do not have to reject everything that makes us uncomfortable. Growth is not always comfortable. Liberation does not mean never being accountable to anything beyond ourselves.
Discomfort is not proof of righteousness.
Neither are suffering, silence, submission or sacrifice.
We have to examine the fruit.
If an interpretation consistently protects powerful people while requiring vulnerable people to absorb more harm, we should question it.
If it demands forgiveness from the wounded without accountability from the person who caused the wound, we should question it.
If it depends on Black women’s unpaid labor while denying us equal authority, we should question it.
If it teaches children to distrust what they feel in their own bodies, we should question it.
If it requires Black women to abandon ourselves to prove our devotion to God, we should be curious about whose purposes that devotion serves.
What are we using it to build now?
I do not know that I would say the Bible is inherently a tool of oppression.
I know it has been used as one.
I also know it has been a source of survival, resistance, imagination and liberation. Black people have taken a religion used to justify our bondage and found freedom inside it. Black women have found language for hope, purpose and possibility in its pages.
The question is not only what the Bible has been.
The question is what we are using it to build now.
Are we building families where Black women can have needs without being called selfish?
Churches where our labor is not valued more than our leadership?
Relationships where forgiveness does not require continued access?
Homes where children can speak and still be loved?
Communities where queer people do not have to choose between God and themselves?
A faith where Black women do not have to suffer to prove we are worthy?
Are we creating systems that honor our humanity, or baptizing the systems we already know?
I am not asking Black women to abandon the Bible.
I am asking us to think seriously about what we have normalized and accepted because somebody told us it was sacred.
I am asking whether the God who helped our ancestors imagine freedom would truly require us to preserve systems that depend on our silence, exhaustion, and diminishment.
I am asking what might become possible if we decided that everything passed down to us does not have to keep passing through us.
Maybe questioning what we were taught is not a betrayal of faith.
Maybe it is how we stop mistaking oppression for holiness.
Maybe it is how Black women finally put down the crosses we were never meant to carry.
What’s in the Pot
This reflection is personal, but the patterns beneath it are documented:
Women make up 64% of adults in historically Black Protestant churches.
Black women have historically sustained churches through religious education, fundraising, caregiving, missionary work, organizing and informal leadership while often facing barriers to formal authority.
Research shows that religious teachings about submission, marriage, divorce and forgiveness can shape how women understand and respond to intimate-partner violence.
The Superwoman Schema documents the pressure Black women feel to project strength, suppress vulnerability and prioritize everyone else’s care. Researchers have associated these patterns with stress, reduced help-seeking and poorer health.
Womanist theologians have long challenged interpretations of Christianity that glorify Black women’s suffering or treat it as redemptive.
Scripture has been deliberately edited and interpreted to encourage obedience among oppressed people. Black communities have also reclaimed the Bible as a source of liberation, organizing and collective survival.
Research Simmering Beneath This Essay
Black women’s presence, labor and leadership in the Black church
Pew Research Center’s “Age, Race, Education and Other Demographic Traits of U.S. Religious Groups” reports that women constitute 64% of adults affiliated with historically Black Protestant churches.
PBS’s “Black Women Were Vital to the Black Church” documents Black women’s historical contributions to religious education, missionary work, organizing and institution-building.
Fuller Seminary’s “Women’s Leadership in the African American Church” discusses Black women’s congregational leadership and summarizes Sandra Barnes’s research involving 1,863 African American churches across seven denominations. That study found significant barriers to accepting women as clergy.
Nelms Smarr and colleagues’ “Gender and Race in Ministry Leadership: Experiences of Black Clergywomen” documents gender discrimination, resistance to women’s authority and obstacles experienced by Black clergywomen.
Womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant’s “Black Theology and the Black Woman” examines the marginalization of Black women’s experiences within Black theology and church leadership.
Religion, marriage, submission and intimate-partner violence
“A Scoping Review on the Role of Religion in the Experience of Intimate Partner Violence and Faith-Based Responses in Community and Counseling Settings” examines how beliefs about Christian gender roles, marriage, divorce and forgiveness may discourage some women from changing abusive circumstances. It also recognizes faith as a potential source of resilience and support.
Oliver Williams and Esther Jenkins’s “A Survey of Black Churches’ Responses to Domestic Violence” examines how Black pastors and lay leaders understood and responded to domestic violence, including institutional responses that could increase danger.
“We Are Our Sister’s Keeper: The Experience of Black Women and Religion in Intimate-Partner-Violence Recovery” explores religion as both a complicated influence and a source of support in Black women’s recovery from intimate-partner violence.
Compulsory strength and the burden of care
Cheryl Woods-Giscombé’s “Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health” identifies expectations to project strength, suppress emotion, resist vulnerability, succeed with limited resources and prioritize caring for others.
Abrams, Maxwell and colleagues’ “Underneath the Mask of the Strong Black Woman Schema” examines the relationship between the Strong Black Woman Schema and Black women’s mental health.
Erving and colleagues’ “Superwoman Schema and Self-Rated Health in Black Women” explores relationships between dimensions of the Superwoman Schema and Black women’s health.
Womanist theology and the glorification of suffering
Yale’s Life Worth Living Project, “Delores Williams on the Danger of Glorified Suffering”, summarizes Williams’s warning against treating imposed suffering, particularly Black women’s suffering, as sacred or redemptive.
Jacquelyn Grant’s “Black Theology and the Black Woman” centers Black women’s lived experiences as necessary sources for evaluating theology.
The Bible as an instrument of domination and liberation
NPR’s “‘Slave Bible’ From the 1800s Omitted Key Passages That Could Incite Rebellion” documents the 1807 edition of the Bible prepared for enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. Approximately 90% of the Old Testament and half of the New Testament were omitted, including passages that could inspire liberation or equality.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s “Consecrated Ground: Churches and the Founding of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities” documents Black churches’ roles in education and institution-building.
Pew Research Center’s “Faith Among Black Americans” provides broader context about Black religious life, belief, church participation and the continuing place of faith within Black communities.
Pew Research Center’s analysis of Black Americans’ views of the Bible provides additional context about biblical authority and Bible reading among Black Americans.
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