American Memory: Everybody’s Slavin’ & Prayin’

“Everybody enslaved somebody” is the kind of sentence that is true enough to end a conversation and false enough to prevent understanding. You can read the text of this episode on UnfitChristian.com In this selection from the American Memory Collection, Passuh Dany examines what gets lost when the racialized hereditary chattel slavery of the Atlantic world is flattened into a generic human history of captivity. Moving through plantation nostalgia, labor and capital, the pseudoscience of Drapetomania, racial memory, Christian formation, and the ongoing struggle over how America remembers itself, she asks what happens when the descendants of the enslaved are expected to “get over” a history the nation has never fully told the truth about. But this is not only an essay about what slavery did. It is also about what survived it: Black memory, theological imagination, spiritual agency, and a Christianity that enslaved people refused to leave entirely in the hands of enslavers. What if the more interesting question is not simply “Where was God during slavery?” but “How did enslaved Black people rescue Christianity from slavery?” History. Theology. Politics. Memory. Come be in good company while you reconsider.