Losing My Religion: How Organized Religion Continues to Control and Shape Black Women’s Identity

With a contemporary statistical decline in church attendance, in both the USA and the UK, religious institution’s power over people’s lives still remains strong. The (white) Christian church is undoing rights for minoritized groups and women’s bodily autonomy. A 2023 documentary, Shiny Happy People, speaks to the patriarchal control that the religious organization, The Institute of Basic Life Principles (IPBL), exercised over girls and women’s bodies, minds and autonomy. Though there were a small number of Black people that were a part of that church, none of them were interviewed for the documentary. The impact of organized religious institutions and the patriarchy used to shape and control our identities was missing from the documentary and largely missing in the public discourse. Let’s change that by talking about the good, the bad and the ugly or religion’s impact on the shaping of Black women’s identities.

The discussion will draw from Dr. Pow's recently published book, Stories of Black Female Identity in the Making: Queering the Love in Blackness , which is an exploration of how Black identity is constantly formed and reformed, along with intersections of gender and sexuality.