Ahmad Greene-Hayes on the past, present, and future of African American religious studies
Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies, credits his personal connections to pluralism as the catalyst for his interest in the study of religion. “My parents’ friends were Muslims, my stepfather is a Muslim who grew up in the Nation of Islam, and I went to a Catholic elementary school where nuns from Nigeria taught me math and science,” he shares. “That kind of pluralistic worldview really shaped me from early on—in fact, I think it incited intellectual curiosity.”
While his interest in religion was sparked at a young age, it wasn’t until his undergraduate days that Greene-Hayes realized he could explore the field as an academic. “Before I went to college, I didn’t realize that one could actually study religion from a critical standpoint—less as a practitioner and more as a scholar—so that was my foray into this academic field of study.”
Greene-Hayes went to Williams College, where he studied history and Africana studies as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. “The program is designed to diversify the professoriate,” he explains. “My faculty mentor was Dr. Rhon Manigault-Bryant, who is a scholar of Africana religions and the author of Talking to the Dead. She was the one who set me on the path towards the critical study of Black religion.”
Greene-Hayes completed his MA and PhD in religion and African American studies at Princeton, where he also focused on gender and sexuality. His first faculty appointment was at Northwestern in the Department of African American Studies and Religious Studies. He joined the HDS faculty in 2022.
A Strong Intergenerational Foundation
When talking about his work, the respect Greene-Hayes has for those who helped establish the field of African American and Africana religious studies becomes immediately clear. He fervently cites luminaries from the past—such as Charles H. Long, Albert J. Raboteau, and Alice Walker—as well as current colleagues—including HDS Professor Tracey E. Hucks and incoming dean Marla Frederick—who have been foundational to both the field and his areas of study. Reflecting on his own academic “family tree,” he says: “My advisor at Princeton, Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, was the student of Albert J. Raboteau, who wrote Slave Religion. This canonical book came out in 1978 and, in many ways, formally helped institutionalize African American religious history as a field.”
Sharing another example of intellectual connection and genealogy, he continues: “Professor Tracey Hucks also studied with Albert J. Raboteau while visiting Princeton and was both a student and friend of Charles Long—another scholar who has been immensely influential in my thinking about Black religion. His phrasing of the ‘extra church’ from his book Significations has been one of the most profound theoretical tools that I’ve used in my current book project.”
The connection to Long’s legacy within the field was especially germane this past year. Professors Joi and Raymond Carr joined HDS in 2023 as visiting scholars. Their work at the School included exploring the story, content, spirit, and influence of Long’s intellectual work through his papers, which culminated in a symposium, “The (Re)Imagination of Matter: Introducing the Codex Charles H. Long Papers Project,” held in April 2023.
Greene-Hayes also cites connecting with professors Connie and Preston Williams as a highlight of his first year at HDS. Recalling time spent with them and the Carrs after the Charles Long event, he shares: “I have a deep appreciation for the ancestral synergy that made this moment possible. One of my next projects is thinking about the intellectual history of Black religious studies, and Preston Williams helped establish the unit on African American religious history within the American Academy of Religion in the early 1970s. This is a beautiful moment to have these intergenerational interactions happening at the Divinity School.”
One point of emphasis Greene-Hayes makes about his work is his regard for understanding Black religious expression as a continuum and thinking about Black religions that exceed the bounds of the pew and the pulpit. “In order to decenter the Black church as a kind of monolithic category to bring us towards a more expansive comprehension of Black religion, we need to think about how different Black religious actors come to understand their own identities in relation to each other,” he observes.
The concept of the “extra church” also invokes another passion for Greene-Hayes: the arts. Here, he connects the work of writers and musicians, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Little Richard, to a more capacious understanding of how religion and culture intersect. “To think about Africana esoteric systems that are inside the four walls of the church but are also outside of the church in these other spaces and places that we often don’t think about is vital to understanding religion,” he explains. A prolific writer, Greene-Hayes is also working on a book about how Little Richard explored spirituality, sexuality, and musicality in deeply intersectional ways—including blending the secular and the sacred by writing mainstream rock-and-roll songs inspired by more traditional Gospel.
Honoring a Deep Responsibility
Greene-Hayes feels a deep responsibility to teach—both to honor the history of the field and to support the next generation of religious studies scholars. When asked about his teaching style, he shares a spring 2023 course as an example. In “African American Religious History,” which is a traditional survey course, he chose to forgo the typical chronological approach. Instead, he used a thematic approach to delve more deeply into scholarly work across different time periods.
Greene-Hayes also developed a new course for HDS, “Theories and Methods in the Study of Black Religions.” He notes that some students initially thought of this class as “the Black version of the theories and methods,” though that was not quite his intent. “I created the course precisely because we often don’t think about Black people who think and write about religion as theorists, and we don’t often contend with the methodologies that they offer us for making sense of religion as a category,” he explains. “As such, that was the spirit of the new course—to actually trace a genealogy of Black theorists and Black methodologies in religious studies.”
Connecting his appreciation for academic genealogy and his passion for teaching, Greene-Hayes emphasizes the importance of being at a place like Harvard Divinity School, where the past, present, and future can be better understood in a community that values respect for pluralism. “At HDS, we have experts across the spectrum of religious beliefs and practices. I think those different perspectives speak to the myriad ways that religion manifests in everyday life and society,” says Greene-Hayes. “The fact that we can connect and converse about interrelated ideas like climate justice, the legacy of slavery, and religious literacy illustrates the benefit of teaching and learning at a multireligious divinity school.”
“At HDS, I have been able to build on the foundation scholars have created to both deepen and expand our understanding of African American religious studies—and I hope to strengthen this foundation for future scholars in the field to build upon with their intellectual explorations.”
A social historian and critical theorist, Professor Greene-Hayes’s research interests include critical Black studies, Black Atlantic religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. When asked about his approach, Greene-Hayes notes: “I am an interdisciplinary historian and critical theorist, and my work is shaped by Black feminist and queer studies. My scholarly interests largely center on how Black people articulate our own conceptions of the divine and sacred—often in defiance of overarching dominant discourses about race, sexuality, nation-making, and citizenship.”
He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, which is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press in the “Class 200: New Studies in Religion” series. The book examines the Black Atlantic religious cultures and sexual politics that emerged in New Orleans—a vibrant, American port city—amid Jim Crow policing and the migration of African Americans, West Indians, and Central Americans to the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
—by Amie Montemurro