The black church is best modeled as dialogic heteroglossia, not dialectical polarity.

Evidence

I characterize the church as a dialogic model rather than dialectical, recognizing “dynamic tension” in a multiplicity of protean and concurrent meanings and intentions more so than in a series of discrete polarities. Multiple discourses—sometimes conflicting, sometimes unifying—are articulated between men and women, and within each of these two groups as well. The black church constitutes a complex body of shifting cultural, ideological, and political significations. It represents a “heteroglot” conception in the Bakhtinian sense of a multiplicity of meanings and intentions that interact and condition each other. Such multiplicity transcends polarity—thus tending to blur the spiritual and secular, the eschatological and political, and the private and public. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 101

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the author’s ‘dialogic’ versus ‘dialectical’ model of the black church, borrowing Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.
• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s interest in mechanism: this analytic frame explains why accommodation/resistance binaries fail for church women’s activism. — connects to: Black Baptist church leaders were Gramscian organic intellectuals rooted among the masses — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 242; Black Christianity functioned as philosophic adaptation, not mere domination. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1401

Broader Connections

• Black Christianity functioned as philosophic adaptation, not mere domination. #corroborates (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1401