A Womanist Way Out: Reimagining God and Sexuality in Black Women’s Fiction

This article uses Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Deesha Philyaw’s short stories “Eula” and “How to Make Love to a Physicist” to illustrate the harm of evangelical Christianity’s divinized patriarchy and heteronormative sexual ethics for Black women. In this article, the author asks: how does evangelical Christianity function in Black women’s fiction? She argues that evangelical Protestant Christianity represents an obstacle to Black women’s coming of age or “being grown” in Walker’s and Philyaw’s fictional accounts. Their protagonists choose either to leave or stay within evangelicalism’s confining frameworks, but staying has a steep cost. Walker and Philyaw both suggest practices and orientations that support Black women leaving evangelicalism’s harmful frameworks for more life-sustaining belief systems. This argument is indebted to Black feminist and womanist theologians and ethicists Kelly Brown Douglas, Katie Cannon, Tamura Lomax, and Monique Moultrie. Leaving evangelicalism is, the author proposes, difficult but necessary “womanist work.”