Better Stories for Ourselves
An Interview with Danté Stewart
Emerging as one the most influential voices in contemporary faith discussions, Danté Stewart is the author of Shoutin' In The Fire: An American Epistle. As a theologian, essayist, and cultural critic, Stewart has appeared on CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, The Undefeated, Sojourners, and more. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Stewart in early 2022.
Ajanae Dawkins: In Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle, through a hybrid of letter and memoir, you walk us through a kind of awakening and transformation in your relationship with the Black Church and God. In some ways, Shoutin’ in the Fire is a wake-up call to the American church and in others, it feels like a communal lament and love letter to the Black church. How did your concept and capacity for love transform as your relationship with God and the Black church transformed?
Danté Stewart: This is so true. I love that you use the language “wake up call”. My mind immediately goes to a picture of James Baldwin standing behind a pulpit, in a suit, his face as serious as the words his hands have written. In front of him, the sign draped over the pulpit reads: “God is Love”. I resonate with this image because of the ways Baldwin shapes my own self-understanding and what I want to embody as a black Christian writer. Baldwin said that if “love cannot swing wide open the gates, no other power can or will.” Just a few years ago, I would say that I had learned not to love myself or respect myself and that in turn made me the type of person who failed to love and listen to others. As I chronicle this messy journey in my book, I realize that I learned this in many of the spaces that were to be known for love–church, home, school, etc. Some say every loss contains a lesson. I don’t know if that is true in everyone’s story or situation but when I found my way out of the terrible ways I learned to love, which could better be called exploitation, I found my way into loving responsibly. This came by way of my wife and others showing me the ways in which, sadly, I had become anti-black. Changing is messy. It hurts. It is disorienting. But when I look back over the years and all of the passages I’ve read that reminded me of my dignity and power, and all of the moments of therapy, I realize that my circle of love got bigger and wider, not smaller and more controlling. This meant standing as Baldwin stood: behind the pulpit. This can be a metaphor for the page. Though, for him, and for me in some sense, the physical space is different. The purpose remains the same: where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
AD: Something I appreciated about your book is that you did not shy away from implicating yourself as someone who has caused harm for the sake of waxing theological/poetic. A person’s ability to be redeemed and reconciled to their community and God is a cornerstone of the faith. Can you share how the love of your people impacted what holding yourself accountable looked like?
“But when I look back… I realize that my circle of love got bigger and wider, not smaller and more controlling.”
DS: That’s such a perceptive reading of the text. When I was writing, it was so important for me not to make myself the hero of the text. One of the things about Christian writing, if we’re thinking in the narrow frame of what is considered the genre, I would say that so much of the writing is dishonest. I don’t mean that the writers lie in the sense that they are telling the untruth. But when I read some of these texts, they over-spiritualize what it means to just live and exist in a complicated place. So much seems to need to “get to Jesus” that we don’t deal with the trouble of ourselves. Faith becomes an easy way to avoid ourselves or the terrible things we become and do in the name of Jesus. I wouldn’t have any of that–and really, my wife or those who were close to me wouldn’t either. When I think about their love, I think about how they refused to let me continue to lie to myself. What’s interesting about the book is that this is as much a story of them loving me into being better as much as it is about me loving myself into being free. I think we as people can miss the power of friends who actually care deeply about us to give us space to actually grow. This is a hard thing to really talk about because our failures harm so many people and cause so many wounds. So when we speak of changing, that change has to legitimately change how we think. My wife, Jasamine, and others did just that. They literally changed how I thought about and showed up in the world.
AD: What did you have to unlearn about love in order to become the version of yourself that you are now?
DS: Wow. There are so many things. I think some of the biggest things I had to unlearn was my toxic theology. For me, theology became a way to evade my humanity and the humanity of others. It also became a weapon to use to win arguments and people to my “side”. I had to unlearn that. I also had to unlearn toxic masculinity and homophobia. I think anti-blackness, white supremacy, and rigid and oppressive ideas about the body and sexuality go hand-in-hand. So much of what we learn is rooted in certain ways of seeing the world that turn constructs into objective truths and standards. Lastly, I think I had to unlearn control, either of myself or my story. When I saw Philando and Alton, what it did to me put me on a journey that I did not expect. When I started to read differently and think differently, this also put me on a journey. When I was criticized and told that I was harming others and that I needed to change, this put me on a journey. And life consists of small journeys that hopefully bring us to a better destination.
AD: If you had to name three people who are most responsible for developing your love ethic, who would they be and how did they develop it?
DS: Easy. My wife, James Baldwin, and my parents. Each of them has shown me that I am not the worst thing I have ever done nor am I the hero who cannot fail but that I am human. And to be human is to be deeply concerned with how love moves in and around our lives. It’s easy to say we love something or someone and not allow ourselves to be seen through those things or persons. When I think about each of them, they clarified what it meant to be loving and how love may not heal the hurts but it can turn wounds into worlds.
AD: What advice would you give to writers who are trying to approach their own writing with a better love ethic?
DS: I would tell writers to never deny themselves the ability to show up for themselves each day. Writing is hard. Loving yourself is harder. Loving yourself enough to keep on writing and keep on loving is the hardest. I have found that I struggle with self-love and love of others when I forget how much I and others are worth. In these moments, I fall back to comparison and competition. Just the other day I did this. And when I do, it brings out my insecurities and fears. When I am grounded in who I am and what I’m worth and what I know is true of my work, then I am free to love and love in ways that makes us all seen, inspired, and whole. Comparison and competition is a thief of creativity. There is a difference between comparison and imitation. I remember Kiese Laymon saying that. Imitation is a good thing. It reminds us that we are part of a tradition and that tradition has something to give us when we think about the work we do today. Imitation is love. Comparison is self-hate (though Kie didn’t say that haha). I want writers to be themselves and to probe their own stories and imaginations–what Jason Reynolds calls praying at the altar of creativity–because at the end of it all, there is something there.
AD: You frequently invoke Black writers and their texts as sacred alongside scripture. How has scripture in tandem with the work of Black writers pushed you toward the kind of tenderness and vulnerability that we see in Shoutin’ In The Fire?
DS: I want to do the work of a theologian that takes seriously reading Black texts as sacred texts and Black life as sacred history. In the Bible, these books — this anthology, this collection of books — have people’s names, and we receive those names as divine revelation to teach us something about life, to teach us something about God, to teach us something about the world we live in, to teach us something about the stories that give us meaning: Nehemiah, Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea.
I want to receive Black names: the book of Baldwin, the book of Toni, the book of Alice Walker, the book of Gayl Jones, the book of Toni Cade Bambara and Rita Dove and Nikki Giovanni and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. What does it mean to read these peoples' writing as something sacred, that can teach us about how to be Black in this world and how to love God and our neighbor to the best of our being?
And so doing the theological work means that I have to take seriously and read critically, as I do with the Bible, these stories, in the same way that I read critically the story of Nehemiah, the story of Isaiah.
I want to expand the canon, in a sense. I believe that God wants us to as well. Reading Black literature, looking at Black life honestly, expanded my theological imagination but also my ability to write a narrative that introduced and opened up and embraced and explored the Black world, which I believe God has something to say about.
If we’re trying to be honest biblical interpreters, [we must admit] there is a lot of mess within the Bible, but just because something is messy or problematic, doesn’t mean that it cannot be sacred. And so, as I think about the high human endeavor of trying to imagine better stories for ourselves — particularly when you’re talking about Black writers and imagining better Black stories for our Black humanity — then I would say that many of them are doing the same.
[Black writers] are theologians in the truest sense of the word; they’re trying to make divine realities intelligible and coherent for Black people, and telling stories in ways that are as, Alice Walker notes, made beautiful in life.
When I think about what Black writers have done and are doing, it is the same type of idea and ideals of what many biblical writers were trying to accomplish: telling a better story and embracing humanity.