'Lovecraft Country' finale's imagery fails to account for Christianity being misused in US' proslavery history
In the rushed finale, it almost seems like a loophole when Leti suddenly springs back to life after she was thrown off the tower. We saw the Mark of Cain blooming on her skin as she rose from the dead... again, giving the Bible's Lazarus some serious competition.
But a few minutes later, we see how Ruby cast the invulnerability spell for her sister before she is put in a coma by Christina. Why she couldn't do the same for herself or Tic so he would come back to life after being sacrificed is an actual loophole but we'll imagine Christina put her in a coma before she could get to it.
There are several such small loopholes in the finale -- for instance what is the effect on Ji-ah after she is "one with Darkness" or why, when they found a way to undo the curse on Dee, couldn't they also figure out the invulnerability spell with the help of the ancestors?
There is also the pettiness of Leti's "it's ours now" line, but we'll just take it as rage expressed through art for the real murders of Black men and women in 2020 and Black cultural 'magic' being repeatedly appropriated.
But surprisingly, for a series that unapologetically claims Black empowerment, there is a lot of talk about faith and God, specifically the Christian conception of God, in the finale. Leti asks Tic to have a baptism before he is sacrificed and Leti says God will keep her and her baby safe. Plus, there is the Christ imagery of Tic being bled on a cross-like altar.
But before that, way back in Episode 2, we had Samuel Braithwaite compare himself to Adam returning to Eden and his aim to restore the God-ordained 'hierarchy' of the 'natural order'. It is the order of the orthodox, patriarchal, heterosexist interpretation of the Christian religion, which particularly in the US still has reservations about people who are gay, abortion, birth control, and even women preachers.
And yet we see Leti get Tic to embrace this same traditional interpretation and order of Christianity through his baptism ritual before he is sacrificed. At no point does the show acknowledge that the relationship that African-Americans have with Christianity cannot be divorced from the fact that it was their oppressor's religion before it became theirs.
Black people were first allowed to attend church services because their white slave owners wanted them to hear sermons on the injunctions in Ephesians and Colossians about slaves obeying their "earthly master,” hoping it would make them docile and obedient.
When Africans were enslaved and brought to America, they came from different African spiritual traditions. Some were also Muslim. At the time, slaveholders misused the Bible and Christianity to justify slavery as a way to civilize the 'heathens' and bring them into the Christian fold; something that proselytizing missions to Africa before had failed to do except in small pockets.
They were also fond of quoting passages about the “The Curse of Ham". Africans, categorized as cursed descendants of Ham, were supposed to be enslaved according to their 'Christian' masters. They justified their actions by quoting these Bible passages about the 'races' of Man (from each of Noah's three sons) and how they were following the 'natural order' of things.
The 'slave Bible' removed portions of Scripture including the Exodus story that could inspire rebellious thinking. So before anything else, the Bible and Christianity were tools misused by slaveowners to keep Black people subservient and justify their cruelty.
Of course, in time, Black slaves refashioned this tool for their own purposes like keeping the faith in trying times, using Bible verses to appeal to their masters' conscience and even composing spiritual songs with codes to help slaves plan their escapes.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass made a sharp distinction between White Christianity and the Christianity of Christ. And then, in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. denounced church as “the most segregated hour in America.” Even today, this is still true.
In 'Lovecraft Country', we had Hippolyta explore the concept of the Vedic "I Am" in her explorations of the multiverse, and Yahima, the two-spirited Arawak character, represented powerful Native spiritualism. So the show could have presented a more over-arching, inclusive, and evolved conception of God and still had Leti's tryst with faith.
To have 'Lovecraft Country's Black heroes embrace traditional Christianity without paying any heed to the history of Christianity in America and indeed how Christianity was emblematic of Western imperialism with its chant of 'Gold, God, and Glory!' is a critical misstep.