The Womanist Preacher: Proclaiming Womanist Rhetoric from the Pulpit (Rhetoric, Race, and Religion)

"The Womanist Preacher" provides an illuminating treatment of the understudied rhetoric of African American women or womanists. Building on the work of Katie Cannon, Donna Allen, and Elaine Flake, Dr. Kimberly Johnson, a professor of communication at Tennessee State University, offers a textual analysis of sermons by five African American Protestant female preachers who self-identify as womanists: Elaine Flake, Gina Stewart, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Melva Sampson, and Claudette Copeland. Ultimately, Johnson seeks to demonstrate how womanist preaching transforms and adapts the tenets of womanist thought in congregational contexts.The book’s chapters are organized according to Stacey Floyd-Thomas’ four tenets of womanism based on Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist: radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self-love, and critical engagement. Each chapter contains a rhetorical analysis of at least one sermon through the lens of a select tenet of womanism. Drawing on her close reading of the sermons, Johnson delineates four rhetorical models of womanist preaching. These are presented in helpful tables, and the appendix of the book includes all five sermon manuscripts.Johnson’s pioneering work offers one of the most extensive explorations of the rhetorical attributes of womanist preaching that I am aware of. Though Drs. Teresa Fry Brown, Donna Allen, Lisa Thompson, and others have offered insightful studies of womanist preaching, Johnson provides a distinctly rhetorical analysis of how womanist tenets manifest in the sermons of five self-proclaimed womanist preachers. Scholars and students of preaching, communication, and theology will find this an intriguing work on the strategies of persuasion that at least some African American women use to promote justice and equitable rights.Note: A slightly longer version of this review appeared in Religious Studies Review, 46:4 (Dec 2020): 533-534.

I am a student of Dr. Melva Sampson, one of the womanist preachers included in Kimberly P. Johnson's book. As a white woman, and a Unitarian Universalist, I have learned so much from studying the black womanist lens. These sermons are powerful, the explanations of them are full and clear, and womanist theology is broken down in a way that is informative and digestible. As a minister of mine said about her own study of womanist theology, "I would have been impoverished without it." Womanism is the medicine for our time. We all have much to gain from studying it and applying the principles to our theologies and our lives.