The Jawbone of an Ass: Resisting Coercion and Reclaiming Christ in Christian Higher Education

Christian higher education uniquely marries neoplantation academia with the practice of religious jawboning, using persuasion rather than the exertion of vehement enforcement, to engage Black faculty of faith in upholding white supremacy ideology. These institutions can and do use faith as a tool of oppression through their policies and practice, reinforcing the domination of whites and the subordination of people of Color as the divine order of God. This was the reality and experience of two Black women faculty during their time at one of these institutions. Using Black Liberation Theology as a framework, duoethnographies detail how a racialized hierarchy was embedded into the fabric of a faith-based university and describe the institutional expectation for Black faculty to subscribe to a system that supported their own physical and mental demise in exchange for spiritual redemption. More than just a cautionary tale of religious academic spaces, implications include the need for faith-based institutions to come to terms with and reconceptualize their commitment to racial diversity and the authors' ability to reclaim their faith as an act of resistance, despite the attempted lure to participate in their own spiritual murder.