We Should All Be Talking About Religion*: Religion, Black Studies, and the Epistemic Grounds of Media Study
2026-07-14
This essay interrogates the nature of critical religious study in the field of media and communication. Religion is understudied as a critical quality of the human experience in our field, from journals to academic positions in communication departments to specialized grant funding to conferences and more. Recently, White Christian nationalism has swept the academy and blown a small tailwind of interest in “religion” as a demographical marker or political identity. While these are helpful in some instances, these depictions are often reductive, unjustly universalized, and Western-centric. Instead, I detail the epistemological contributions of Black studies of religion and Black media studies to argue that we need to be studying religion more rigorously. After briefly reviewing the contributions of J. Kameron Carter’s Anarchy of Black Religion and Armond Towns’ On Black Media Philosophy , I explain how religious study is vital to any analysis of power and human flourishing. What we need now more than ever are studies of religion that seriously engage what we mean by “religion” and “media” in ways that demand liberatory action.