Let's Talk About: Cursed Objects

A Christian builder in Texas prays over every house he puts up and stamps John 3:16 into the driveway. A family member rebukes your depression in the name of Jesus. A Congolese aunt tells you not to buy that carving: it's demonic and it can hurt you. Ethnic cleansing in medieval Spain. Ngofeen and I originally sat down to walk from the Black Plague to the eve of the Reformation, and instead we spent an hour on this: what makes an object, a word, a country, or a body tainted, and who gets to decide? This is the fourth conversation in our series on when white people stopped dancing. Something critical clicked for me this time around. Contamination logic is the hinge. It runs from Pentecostal missionaries in Ghana turning old gods into demons, to Ferdinand and Isabella telling Spanish Muslims and Jews to convert or leave, to a ballet teacher saying keep your hips square, to a man who has to do an elaborate handshake before he's allowed to hug his friend. In this episode: -Why we open in 2020, and what the pandemic can and can't tell us about the plague -Pentecostalism as both the most spiritually aggressive and the most anti-traditional Christianity at once, and Birgit Meyer's Translating the Devil -Scripture citation as spell-casting, and what apologetics has in common with a curse -Ngofeen redecorating his bedroom door with raffia and nails, and what his aunties would say -Paul on meat sacrificed to idols, and whether intention permanently taints an object -The Reconquista, 1492, and why Spain arrived in the Caribbean already unable to see what was in front of them -Columbus is the '90s: Luther in 1517 and Columbus in 1492 are the same twenty five years, not two separate histories -The body as a history book, and reading white evangelical worship gestures as appropriated Black movement -Ngofeen on the exhaustion of proving you are not a tainted object -Why congregational singing might be the cry of a person who can't be touched Mentioned Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (1999) If you missed registration for my class "The Body of Christ Keeps the Score" and want to be kept in the loop for the next time it's offered, head to https://bradleymelle.com/course and join the waitlist! New here? Freestyle Theology reads the history of Christianity through trauma and the body. Not just what people believed, but what happened to them, and what it did to how they move.