This is a brave book that reframes discussion of both natural law and the analysis of race in a theological key. My response begins by discussing how Lloyd situates Black natural law in relation to other traditions of natural law, as this is a central focus of the book. It then locates Black natural law as an approach to race in relation to other political traditions, notably, black nationalism. And I end by trying to understand what kind of book this is so as to understand how the book performs an argument as much as it makes an argument.

Let me begin by laying out what I take to be Lloyd’s central thesis. For Lloyd, the Black natural law tradition (BNL) is a “style of ethical and political engagement” (viii) as much as it is a set of conceptual judgments about the nature and form of human flourishing. As a style of ethical and political engagement it emerges from reflection on human nature as experienced within conditions of systemic oppression and the work of organizing done to end this oppression. The argument is that the oppressed, of which African Americans are a paradigmatic instance, have an epistemic privilege in determinations of human nature (ix). Failure to grant this epistemic privilege leads to mystified and false constructions of human nature that reinscribe unjust systems and oppressive forms of life. As a mode of natural law thinking BNL has a normative conception of what it means to be human, one grounded in theistic conceptions of all humans as made in the image of God, which can be appealed to as part of challenging idolatrous, hegemonic constructions of what it means to be human that privilege some and exclude others. White supremacy, and its manifestation in such systems as the criminal justice system, is one such idolatrous construction of human nature that BNL critiques, capitalism is another. This argument is set out through discussions of four “canonical” figures who embody in their lives Lloyd’s thesis. These figures are: Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. The book closes with a declension narrative focused on how the BNL tradition fragmented and dissolved subsequent to the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Lloyd oscillates between envisaging Black natural law (BNL) as a unique tradition incommensurable with other natural law traditions and envisaging it as a paradigmatic exemplar of natural law thinking that has distinct characteristics against which all other traditions of natural law thinking must be judged (e.g., ix, xiii). A case could be made either way. If it is the former some account is needed of how BNL is part of wider developments in Africana philosophy and whether it should be understood as emerging out of older traditions of what Henry Odera Oruka calls “African sage philosophy.” Such an account would fit with Lloyd’s MacIntyrian argument about how BNL is incommensurable with other natural law traditions (154–55). However, the argument that BNL is incommensurable seems to be contradicted by the evidence of all the figures Lloyd himself discusses, each of whom draws on and makes use of European philosophy and theology in creative and explicit ways. To insist on incommensurability would entail disregarding the testimony of those whom Lloyd puts forward as canonical figures within BNL.

If, however, BNL is taken to be a paradigmatic form of natural law against which all other traditions of natural law thinking should be judged, it becomes a singular and very powerful form of immanent critique. Connections can also then be made to parallel projects of immanent critique, most notably Eugene Rogers’s recent work on natural law.1 What Lloyd plots are the epistemic conditions for natural law to take account of idolatrous systems and oppressive cultures in the formulation of what is taken to be human nature. The BNL tradition exemplifies these conditions (e.g., 23, 68, 72).

Working with such conditions, and using BNL as a paradigm, let me suggest some connections and parallels that can be made to developments in what Lloyd calls the “European, Christian natural law” tradition. For this purpose I will focus on Catholic social teaching as a primary articulation of natural law reasoning in Europe. Arguably, Catholic social teaching is initiated by wrestling with the experience of impoverished and oppressed industrialized workers across Europe in the nineteenth century. Attention to this experience generates Rerum Novarum in 1893, spawns the ressourcement of Thomist conceptions of natural law, the rejection of “throne and altar” political theologies, and the adoption of democracy as a primary marker of good political order.2 However, failures to further extend this epistemic privilege leads to breakdowns in the rationality of Catholic social teaching and calls for its renewal. The Vatican’s response to Latin American Liberation Theology from the 1970s onwards can be seen as a fight over who is granted epistemic privilege and is settled by the recognition of the Vatican that a “preferential option for the poor” is central to any determination of what constitutes human flourishing. An engagement between Catholic social teaching and BNL points both to parallels but also the need for Catholic social teaching to be instructed by BNL, particularly in relation to white supremacy and the symbiosis between the development of phronesis and what Lloyd calls in places social movement organizing.

The book, however, begs the question as to whether natural law can be saved by the salve Lloyd proposes: namely, attention to the epistemic privileging of the oppressed, involvement in social movements and anchoring it metaphysically in an abstract theism. James Cone stands in an ambiguous relation to Lloyd’s argument in this regard. Lloyd praises Cone for his early work and the way it was paradoxical. He criticizes Cone for his subsequent embrace of “contextual” theology and a move towards a “theology of multiculturalism that ultimately also embraces secularism” (160). Yet Cone is most paradoxical when he is most christological. Cone’s statement that racism is a demonic force and Black Power a form of exorcism points to a christological analysis of what needs to happen for liberation from oppression.3 Cone makes an analogy between Jesus’s acts of exorcism and the significance of Black Power. On Cone’s account, as well as a means of survival, Black nationalist and Black Power efforts to form a nation within a nation can be understood as theo-political gestures of exorcism within the wider body politic.4 The confession of Jesus Christ as savior and how this confession presents a crisis to all other ways of knowing the world is not addressed in Lloyd’s book. Yet all the figures discussed are shaped in one way or another not just by involvement in social movements or experiences of oppression but also by Christian confession, either their own or of those around them. So is natural law and a vague theism enough? Or is there a need for a more determinant sense of the revelation of God given in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in Lloyd’s conception of natural law? The book invites this question even while its focus is elsewhere.

The mention of Cone and Black Power raises the question of how to understand Lloyd’s claim that BNL is the majority and mainstream tradition of black political thought in North America. Even within the terms the book sets for itself, this is a claim that needs much further substantiation. An absent presence in the text is what most black political theorists judge to be the primary discursive tradition of US black political thought: black nationalism. To define what I am referring to let me draw on Michael Dawson’s distinction between three overlapping ways of conceptualizing what it means to be the black nation:

The first is built on state power and land. The second defines African-Americans as more than “just another American ethnic group” but as a separate, oppressed people, a nation-within-a-nation, with the right to self-determination. A third, usually less political, conception of “the” black nation defines it as a community with a defined and unique spiritual and cultural identity. All three definitions of the black nation presume that people of African descent within the borders of the United States have at least some common interests based on their race or their common history of racial subjugation.5

Even though the form black nationalism took varied, the basic goal was the same: to form a demos/people capable of, in the first instance, surviving; in the second instance, resisting; and finally, thriving within an oppressive system that refuses to see, hear, or talk about the dehumanizing impact it is having on others and on its white beneficiaries. As Dawson notes, black nationalism is a way to challenge the insider-outsider status of being the racialized other in North America that generates what Du Bois called “double consciousness.” This challenge operates on two fronts simultaneously: first, by claiming to be a nation, entry to and recognition within white channels of public discourse (whether mainstream, such as universities, or subaltern, such as the labor and women’s movement) is demanded; and second, by developing an alternative counter-public, space for critical reflection and self-cultivation (a form of life within which to live and move more freely) is provided.6 The claim to be a nation, even a nation within a nation, is a claim to be all that being a nation invokes as a “social imaginary”: belonging, sense of place, a history, a future, self-determination, citizenship, and a distinctive culture. It is a claim to possess a way of being in the world that lives an alternative to and refuses racialized constructions of blackness as a form of non-being and an anti-type of the good citizen.

Within Lloyd’s book key figures within black nationalism pop up—notably Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey, as well as Stokely Carmichael, who is briefly critiqued (120–21)—but black nationalism is not named, let alone discussed. It would be helpful to hear how Lloyd situates BNL in relation to one or another of the forms of black nationalism Dawson identifies. As it stands, Lloyd seems to position BNL as achieving the same things as being a nation.

Further attention to the intersection between black nationalism and BNL problematizes Lloyd’s identification of Black Power as the forbear of multiculturalism and secularism and the progenitor of the emergence of a middle-class, black intellectual elite who represent the fragmentation and decline of the BNL tradition. His account does not reckon with how the Black Power movement mixed sacred and profane, public and private, the vernacular and the formal, theory and practice, and refused modern European attempts to separate pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. “Black is beautiful” is a simultaneously political, economic, ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic statement that was performed in rap and ballet, hairstyles and poetry, political polemics and preaching. Rather than a form of secularist multicultural discourse, Black Power can be seen as a form of “post-secular” politics avant la lettre. This is exemplified in a figure like Albert Cleage who is central to the emergence of Black Power as a social movement. Cleage’s critique of white supremacy is explicitly theological, does make normative claims about human flourishing, and is tied to specific forms of community organizing and electoral politics. He thereby contests Lloyd’s declension narrative.7

Let me shift focus from specific points of contention to a consideration of what kind of book this is. If the book is read as a monograph, setting out a detailed analysis with carefully substantiated claims based on evidence to warrant those claims and situated within a wider set of scholarly disputes, then problems abound. For example, it is not clear why Lloyd’s framing of W. E. B. Du Bois as a proponent of the black natural law tradition is better than either Cedric Robinson’s reading of Du Bois as mediating the engagement between what Robinson calls “the Black radical tradition” and Marxism, or Cornel West’s situating of Du Bois within American pragmatism, or Gary Dorrien’s identification of Du Bois with the Social Gospel. None of these or other accounts of Du Bois are engaged and the evidence given for Du Bois as drawing on natural law is at times tenuous. And at no point is a justification given for why Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. should be considered “canonical” (159). Moreover, the lack of definition of the term “community organizing” and its deployment to describe radically different kinds of political engagement was frustrating. And I have no doubt that scholars of natural law will be driven to apoplectic distraction by the sweeping characterization given of the “European, Christian natural law tradition” (4). But Lloyd explicitly eschews detailed intellectual and social history because he wants to keep in view a clear line of argument. At the same time, he recognizes the need for it to substantiate various points he is making (e.g., 119, 127).

To understand the nature of this book it is important to attend to how Lloyd is constantly directing the reader’s attention to how genre, style, and rhetoric are vital to discerning the arguments being developed by the figures he discusses. And we cannot understand why genre and rhetoric are so important unless the figures are themselves situated within the forms of political engagement that informed and embodied their understanding of natural law. As Lloyd puts it, to understand the account of natural law someone like Frederick Douglass develops “requires careful attention to both form and content, to rhetoric and argument, to principle and strategy—and to how all of these are entwined” (3).

Lloyd, then, seems to want to invite the reader to engage his book as a richly suggestive essay rather than as an academic monograph. To treat it as a monograph is to miss entirely the performative dimension and rhetorical function of the book which Lloyd himself makes clear is crucial to understanding the BNL tradition (e.g., 90). The book echoes and performs the BNL tradition, which is not mediated by detailed philosophical analysis carried out by professors in ivory towers. It emerges from speeches, stories, letters, poems, and essays, written in the midst of and as a response to urgent political work to end injustice. Like this book, these writings were written to be read as part of enabling shared action.

Attention to the role of genre, style and rhetoric enable a notable feature of Lloyd’s book to come into view; that is, the absence of technical, jargon-heavy and often idiosyncratic terms beloved of critical race and other social theorists. Lloyd writes with a pellucid prose that is a pleasure to read. The style of the writing thereby performs not only his account of BNL but also his critique of other theological and philosophical accounts of white supremacy, for example, Afro-pessimism. For Lloyd, the prolix and obscurantist nature of such accounts reflect how they are disembedded from and often antithetical to black religious traditions and black-led constructive forms of social movement organizing. Therein they fail the essential purpose of writing that, as Lloyd notes in relation to Du Bois, “is to persuade” (59). In contrast to BNL, they emerge from “black intellectual elites whose political and cultural views are closely aligned with the liberalism or radicalism of white intellectual elites” (119).

There is much more that could be said and I very much look forward to reading other responses to this bold and creative book, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to argue with and think alongside it. My hope is that at least some of what I have said might be a constructive catalyst for further reflection.

Introduction & Overview

In Black Natural Law, Vincent Lloyd recovers a black natural law tradition (BNLT) that he argues has collapsed in the wake of the ’60s Civil Rights movement. Lloyd believes this BNLT offers a distinctive view of human nature that surpasses other conceptions of humanity found in comparable natural law traditions; this tradition both “appreciates the mix of reason, emotion, and imagination that make up our humanity” and asserts that human nature is “ultimately unrepresentable” (ix; xi). According to Lloyd, this BNLT also enacts a type of strategic wisdom that targets ideology critique and engages in social movement organizing (xii; xiii). Finally, for Lloyd, the unfolding of this BNLT can be seen in the life, work, and reflections of four iconic figures, whom he shows as performing natural law: Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King (xii).

There are many layers to Lloyd’s provocative study; however, in this brief essay, I focus on Lloyd’s depiction of the “concept of the human” in BNLT, which he states is the basis for this tradition’s normativity. I remain curious about the explicit a priori theistic commitments in configuring the human that Lloyd associates with all of the figures he investigates. I also raise questions about the “normative” claims that Lloyd makes about this tradition’s normative claims, namely, that “black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone. . . . It is the approach that ought to be taken” (ix). I then conclude with a few general observations, asking if the BNLT is capacious enough to justify the normative claims that Lloyd makes for it.

Lloyd’s Theological Basis for Constructing Our Common Humanity

Lloyd’s general aim in this study is laudable. He retrieves and indicates the persuasive power of a BNLT amid a national crisis, poignantly and aptly described as “two million imprisoned Americans whose human nature is systematically denied” (162). The importance of his work is magnified even more when one considers the enduring legacy of white supremacy in a Euro-American lineage of thought that has helped shape an exclusionary category of the human, designating who is properly so and who is not. Even up to the present day, modernist processes of racialization repeatedly characterize people of African descent as deficient when measured against the construction of the normative Western human of Enlightenment thought (Eze 1996; Mills 1997; Stefancic and Delgado 2013).

As Lloyd develops and justifies the BNLT’s conception of humanity, he references a metaphysical component that is beyond human comprehension: “The black natural law tradition is committed to the view that no worldly description of the human suffices. Just as God exceeds all worldly description, the image of God in humanity exceeds all worldly description” (xi). When presenting the four iconic figures’ perspectives on the God concept, Lloyd does not fully theoretically demonstrate whether each figure’s view is consistent with the others. Given their diverse allegiances, historical eras, and modes of reflecting, as well as their varying cosmological and philosophical frameworks, some form of synthesizing may be warranted. My primary interest, however, is not Lloyd’s lack of systematic theorizing in presenting the “God” concept; rather, it is his contention that a theologically based view of human nature is shared by all figures, allowing Lloyd to recover a seamless BNLT.

Lloyd begins his examination with the figure of Frederick Douglass, using Douglass’s natural law theory as paradigmatic of the BNLT (2). Accordingly, Lloyd suggests that Douglass’s “complex” view of human nature, admittedly drawn from many inconsistent descriptions, is striking in its focus on “the expansive, one might even say spiritual, life of all human beings” (7). For Lloyd, Douglass’s view suggests that we are not reducible to our animal nature. Continuing his discussion of Douglass’s views of human nature, Lloyd adds to the “typical” admixture of reason and emotion, a catalogue of other important qualities and capacities. For example, among other qualities, humans can resist, believe, and also doubt; unlike animals, they are able to make progress, to remember, and to reason; humans also possess self-awareness of temporality, and they have the knowledge to distinguish between the human and the non-human (7, 8). Lloyd does not stop there. He also identifies a definitive theological (theistic) component to Douglass’s perspectives, which he presents as Douglass’s sense of the “irreducible” mystery that separates humans from animals and allows humans to identify with God (6, 8). Douglass’s God appears to be the biblically based anthropomorphic deity of traditional Judaism and Christianity. Consequently, the various human qualities “mark the ways in which humans reflect the image of God” (8).

Lloyd follows this schema when discussing each figure. In his section on Cooper, for example, he presents Cooper’s interpretation of human nature as a fusion of reason and emotion, blended in a complex “dynamic mix” (33). He then contends that Cooper’s perspectives on human nature are complemented with her views on God (35, 36, 43, 44); in some cases, as with Douglass, Lloyd even suggests that Cooper’s views are not necessarily exercises in rhetoric (42). The same general pattern, with varying points of emphasis, differences, and clarifications that allow for the specificities of the individual, is found in Lloyd’s treatments of Du Bois (66, 70, 74, 75) and King (103, 104, 105, 110).

As interpreted by Lloyd, the performance of natural law theory by all figures exemplifies the BNLT’s conception of humanity that is understood only within the context of a set of metaphysical affirmations based on a dualistic view of reality. With these portrayals, Lloyd justifies his notion that “black natural law calls us to honor the higher law that acknowledges our humanity by actively challenging the wisdom of the world” (x). Lloyd’s use of religious language is perplexing to me, as it seems to revitalize the Eliadian worldview of the profane and the sacred (Eliade 1987). This dualistic cosmology seems central to Lloyd’s discussion of the advent of secularism in the final pages (150). On p. xiv, Lloyd asserts, “The black natural law tradition certainly uses religious language, but it is legible—and persuasive—without any commitment to any specific theological beliefs or participation in any religious practices.” In reading Lloyd’s assertions, however, I sense a theological rather than religious task in this study. For example, Lloyd consistently employs traditional Christian theological anthropology in characterizing the BNLT (xiv, 6, 10, 38, 40). The result for me as a reader is that the complexity of religious symbolic language utilized by the various figures are collapsed into a formulaic God symbol.

Fissures in BNLT: Other Possible Perspectives

Conspicuously absent in Lloyd’s study are Anna Julia Cooper’s naturalized and humanistic views of human nature and W. E. B. Du Bois’s anti-metaphysical leanings, both of which fissure the seamless theological portrait Lloyd presents. When introducing the young Cooper, Lloyd states that “religion offered her a way of embracing the connections among all human beings” (34); he also infers that this pious Christian temperament remained in Cooper as she aged and informed her conception of human nature (35). In the collection of essays, A Voice from the South, however, Cooper writes not merely as a pious Christian, but also as a humanist. Throughout the volume, she presents a nuanced view of humanity that is supported by her understanding of the prescripts of nature, in which she saw egalitarian principles at work (Cooper 1988, 71, 177–78). She also employs naturalistic metaphors alongside religious ones, characterizing humans as evolving, perfecting, and maturing processes with inner-determination (Cooper 1988, 244, 258, 297). Cooper expresses US blacks’ desires for fulfillment as universal aspirations that supersede cultural and even religious differences among people (Cooper 1988, 113; 108).

In “The Gain from a Belief,” Cooper argues for a view of humanity as a material, dynamic entity capable of transformation under the proper conditions necessary for its cultivation (Cooper 1988, 244). Cooper adamantly targeted a crass materialism that she ultimately rejected with her brand of religious humanism: “Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion (ought to be if it isn’t) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true, and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never” (Cooper 1988, 299).

Lloyd often makes his case for Du Bois’s theological anthropology by drawing on Du Bois’s earlier writings, such as Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Darkwater (1920). These two works, for Lloyd, combine Du Bois’s empirical studies and literary sensibilities. Rather than demonstrate that Du Bois himself argues as a natural law theorist, Lloyd suggests it is sufficient to show that normative judgments flow from Du Bois’s reflections on human nature. Lloyd then contends that Du Bois portrays blacks as having privileged access both to “the ways that God’s image is present in human nature” and “to God” (59). Furthermore, Lloyd notes that Du Bois sees blacks using their insights to change the world for the better, and that Du Bois implicitly argues this can be done by their attempts to “implement natural law” (59).

I share Lloyd’s sense of Du Bois’s appreciation of the rich semiotic significance of religious symbolism in black religion. However, I think he ignores important writings of Du Bois that are replete with anti-theistic articulations and anti-metaphysical leanings when describing blacks’ rights to fullness of life vis-à-vis their accountability of their own humanity (Du Bois 1968, 285; Du Bois 1970, 111; Du Bois 1978; Du Bois 1995, 134). Lloyd and I also interpret Du Bois’s perspectives in Souls differently. In my reading, Du Bois’s interpretations are in line with his empirically based humanism (White 2016, 88ff.), whereas Lloyd often cast Du Bois’s words in a theological idiom that supports Lloyd’s theistic agenda (78). Other examples include Lloyd featuring Du Bois’s purported eschatological views (73) as expressions found only in works of fiction (Lloyd 2018, 74–75), while often minimizing Du Bois’s conceptions of a self-determined black humanity governed by a sense of purposive living. In public speeches and personal correspondence, Du Bois’s anti-metaphysical views and socialist sensibilities have him emphasizing human ingenuity within the context of raced living in the United States. In a 1956 letter to Herbert Aptheker, he writes:

I assumed that human beings could alter and re-direct the course of events as to better human conditions. I knew that this power was limited by environment, inheritance and natural law, and that from the point of view of science these occurrences must be a matter of Chance and not of Law. I did not rule out the possibility of some God also influencing and directing human action and natural law. However I saw no evidence of such divine guidance. I did see evidence of the decisive action of human beings. (Du Bois 1978, 395–96)

Theological Anthropology, Normative Claims, and Questions of Justice

The fissures I read within Lloyd’s portrayal of human nature in the BNLT lead me to consider his normative claims. According to Lloyd, the normative implications of this BNLT’s conception of human nature are so compelling that all ethical and political theory ought to start with the insights of blacks (xiii). Furthermore, recalling the BNLT points to “a powerful resource to revitalize and orient normative inquiry in black studies” (xiii). The boldness of these claims has me wondering if Lloyd’s sense of the BNLT is capacious enough to address the complex and diverse forms of injustice in America today. Can this theologically formulaic approach encompass the varied, emerging conceptions and enactments of black humanity as some of us experience today? For example, can Lloyd’s BNLT creatively address the excluded humanity that queer, transgendered, and other marginalized sexualized beings experience in our unjust world? Granted, Lloyd implicitly acknowledges some of these important issues in his discussions of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (122–29). However, I am not fully persuaded by his accounts of their views, which I think are much more complex when set within queer theory. I also object to his final critique that their perspectives are insufficient because “both offer inadequate accounts of politics” (129). I think Lloyd fails to incorporate the wider communal, sociopolitical, and ethical implications of (black) humanity that Lorde and Baldwin enacted by daring to “queer” normative views of humanity, thereby challenging problematic, monolithic views of sexuality, erotic-affective desires, femininity, and masculinity in the United States.

While deeply appreciating Lloyd’s movement from the restrictive account of natural law he often associates with European rationalist traditions, I also detect a residual androcentricism in his account of this BNLT. This androcentricism seems anachronistic when considering current ecological appraisals of the essential interconnectedness of life (Ralston 2006, 911). Additionally, current developments and empirical studies in animal studies may undermine Lloyd’s sense that reasoning, feeling and imagining are characteristically human capacities (Bekoff 2008; Waal 2016; Safina 2016). As a religious naturalist, I see Lloyd’s BNLT reinscribing a cultural fantasy of human exceptionalism, which assumes that the human is not a spatial, temporal web of interspecies dependencies (Haraway 2008, 3–4). The concept of the autonomous human has lent theoretical support to popular myths of the self-made individual in the United States, which is antithetical to the social, communal view that Lloyd champions. Given Lloyd’s critique of the rationalist bent in other Euro-American models, Lloyd’s implicit speciesism is an ironic dimension of this particular rendering of the BNLT.

Finally, given that we find ourselves in the anthropocene facing forms of ecological destruction, I have doubts about Lloyd’s BNLT’s capacity to function as a normative tool within black studies. I remain skeptical that its current theological-based configuration of human nature can help us identify and politically resist the ill effects of white supremacy on all of life. Lloyd is silent, for example, about the important political organizing done by black (and other racialized) communities in the environmental justice movement. Often without any explicit theological anthropology, this movement appeals to a view of humanity that is inseparable from other natural processes. It has also produced generations of activists of color engaged in struggles to advance natural resource conservation, environmental protection, civil rights, and social equity (Glave 2010; Finney 2014; Cole & Foster 2001). These important ecological values, along with other ones that Lloyd associates with Douglass, Cooper, Du Bois, and King, are necessary, I believe, to promote a view of black humanity that is interconnected with all of life.

Vincent Lloyd’s latest volume can be situated within an economy of recent works which call into question what was often assumed about natural law, both by its proponents (the “new natural law” theorists, John Finnis et al.) and by its critics (usually Barthians of some stripe or another). This assumption was that natural law is an attempt to “read” moral data off of creation, that, while this attempt cannot come up with all the data that Christian revelation provides, it can provide some clear, “common sense” answers to moral questions, and that these answers can be held in common by all right thinking people, whatever their particular tradition (Christian or non-Christian) or social location.

The problems with this position have long since been made clear, both by the postliberal insistence that there is no such thing as a tradition-neutral stance on moral questions and that moral reasoning always (literally) comes to terms with the world in a specific language cultivated by a particular community, and in the liberationist insight, derived from a robust engagement by theology with subaltern studies and postcolonial theory, that what is named as “natural” and “obvious” within a particular order of knowing is often, if not always, that which has been rendered “natural” and “obvious” by a particular order of power. It has been made to appear “natural,” in various times and places, that there are innate differences between the races, that the biological differences between men and women make men, and only men, fit for full citizenship, and that the exclusive purpose of sexual intercourse is procreation within lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriages. Natural law, then, has often been seen as a way of obfuscating the machinations of social power, sanctioning the “common sense” of Empire by divine fiat, and rendering the desires of working class and oppressed people for emancipation, or even for bare existence, “contrary to nature.”

While it would take an essay in itself to flesh out this line of criticism in its entirety, it seems safe to posit, for the purposes of reading Lloyd’s text, that this critique does, in fact, hold, for much natural law theory. This begs the question: is natural law to be abandoned? The answer, among both postliberals and liberationists, has, generally, been “yes” for a very long time. Political theology and Christian ethics in both of these schools of thought has tended to emphasize the apocalyptic, revelatory character of moral discourse, and to devalue “nature” as a locus for moral reflection with goods proper to it. Whether this means devaluing “creation,” too, is a separate issue, which cannot be covered here.

Now, as Lloyd points out, this tendency has extended even the category of the human. Thanks, in large part, to the engagement between Christian theology and Afro-pessimism, the claim “that Western metaphysics or theology has rooted deep within it a commitment to the dehumanization of black bodies” and that the “very concept of the human has been defined in such a way as to exclude blacks” has gained significant traction (145), bringing the rejection of natural law to completion in a rejection of humanity itself. For Lloyd, this rejection of nature in general and human nature in particular is deeply problematic, resulting in “a solipsistic retreat into the supposedly foreclosed self” (146). If the real world, peopled with beings that are really human, is not a site for moral reflection and action, then there is no possibility for concrete interventions by practically wise human agency to transform, to convert the world as it is into something more like the world as it should be. It may be true, as Marx puts it, that philosophers need to move from merely describing the world to changing it, but if there is no world that can be meaningfully described, then change is manifestly impossible, and the result is a theology and politics of hopelessness.

Black Natural Law, then, is one of a number of recently published works that are beginning to fill a crucial need: for reflection on nature—human nature and the broader nature in which humans live, move, and have their being—as a site of moral action and analysis which is not reducible to hegemonic forms of “common sense.” It is not the first, nor will it be the last, project to make this attempt. For example, Eugene Rogers’s Aquinas and the Supreme Court: Race, Gender, and the Failure of Natural Law in Thomas’s Biblical Commentaries (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) argues that “Aquinas believes there is such a thing as natural law, but he is also completely comfortable admitting that we don’t, in fact, know what it is” (26). In other words, like Lloyd, Rogers, wants to affirm that the “natural” and “apocalyptic” dimensions of theology and ethics are not at odds with one another, that affirming that human nature and nature as a whole has moral content to it does not mean saying that that content is equally obvious to everyone, much less that it can be reducible to any sort of “common sense.” Rogers, Lloyd, and others in this emerging school of “dissenting natural law” or “subaltern natural law” want to affirm that natural law can, in fact, be subversive, that it can, in Lloyd’s words, condemn “worldly laws that flow from a faulty account of human nature” (20).

Yet Lloyd’s work also stands out from this emerging school of thought for two related reasons. First, Lloyd stands in continuity with classical liberation theology insofar as he wants to strongly affirm the epistemic priority of the oppressed. For W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, “experiencing oneself as a different sort of creature than how one is treated, experiencing oneself as a human rather than as a thing, offers insight into what it means to be human” (70). This epistemic privilege is intrinsic to a key aspect of Lloyd’s formulation of natural law, which could be termed “apophatic humanism.” Put in classical Christian terms, because human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, because movement into the life of the Trinity is the very principle of their being, and because the triune God whom Christians worship in Jesus Christ is infinite, without limit, there are no fixed definitions that can fully capture what it means to be human. For Anna Julia Cooper, for example, “what is most essentially human . . . is infinite possibility” (53). In fact, definitions that seek to capture human being tend to be the cultural productions of, and technologies for reproducing, regimes of social and political power that capture human beings—slavery, and, together with it and on the basis of it, colonialism and capitalism, cissexism and heteropatriarchy. Insofar as this is the case, people who live on the underside of those regimes will stand the best chance of grasping that simplistic definitions like “human beings are creatures that possess reason” or “human beings are intelligent animals who control their environment through technology” are just that—simplistic, and, in religious terms, idolatrous.

This epistemic privilege of the oppressed raises the second major way that Lloyd’s work stands out from other recent attempts at a dissident formulation of natural law. Unlike someone like Rogers, who is explicitly engaged in a critical ressourcement of a major figure in the eurowestern Christian tradition, Thomas Aquinas, Lloyd’s work directs the attention of those who would have a subaltern approach to natural law and human nature to actually existing subaltern communities, and the dissident intellectuals by whom those communities are served, and through whom their understanding of the good is “made more unitary and coherent” (Gramsci, 1971, 634). Instead of reading Thomas Aquinas or even Gregory of Nyssa, Lloyd has written a book on natural law that takes Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. for its primary subjects. This alone is a radical (and highly generative) move. But Lloyd goes further. He also “suggests that the black natural law tradition gets things right. To put the claim strongly, black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everybody” (ix). There are (at least) two possible ways of reading this claim. On one hand, it could be read reductively, as saying that Black Natural Law should replace the eurowestern Christian tradition as a way of thinking about political ethics. Unfortunately, there will almost certainly be some who take Lloyd in this way, and, on this basis, refuse to take his argument on its own terms. On the other hand, one can read Lloyd as saying that Black Natural Law gets at something real, something that the eurowestern Christian tradition has sometimes tried to evoke but has often failed to articulate. Black Natural Law, on this reading, sounds an echo in the best part of the eurowestern Christian soul, that part which is not fully possessed by the powers of Empire, and hails a new and ancient promise for the redemption of creation by the power of divine love and justice.

What I am calling Lloyd’s “apophatic humanism” is just one example of how this can work—though it is far from the only one. Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, affirmed that, as the image of God, humans are “an incomprehensible image of the incomprehensible,” that is, he had an “apophatic anthropology” as “the consequence of an apophatic theology” (Tanner, 2009, 118). This understanding of the freedom intrinsic to the human as the image of God has radical consequences—Gregory’s opposition to slavery, for example: as J. Kameron Carter puts it, “the notion of the image is what orients Gregory’s posture as an abolitionist intellectual” (Carter, 2008, 242).

Yet this powerful theological resource for organized resistance to slavery and other forms of domination has been largely ignored by a Christian tradition that has sought to place a firm definition on the human as a rational autonomous chooser, that is, as free, propertied, and male. This is the process that Sylvia Wynter has forcefully called the “overdetermination” of the human as Western Man, and it has led Afro-pessimists, including Carter, to seek to do without the category of the human altogether, a move that Lloyd condemns. By showing how apophatic humanism works in the thought of four of the most powerful organic intellectuals in US history, and how it has played a concrete role in their articulation of the black freedom movement’s efforts to challenge racism and white supremacy in American laws and social norms, Lloyd pulls political theology and social ethics back from the brink of this nihilistic, anti-humanist abyss, and gives an account that is faithful to what the Christian tradition, pace Gregory, has tried, at its best, to evoke, and, frankly, that is more faithful to Wynter than many of her theological appropriators are, since she, arguably, wants to speak out against the “overdetermination” of the human, not against the human full stop.

Lloyd, then, is right when he claims that Black Natural Law, while constituted within a particular tradition of resistance in the United States, is a way of thinking about nature in general and human nature in particular that is open to everybody. Those who are interested in doing Christian theology and ethics in a liberative key should be particularly interested in the book, not only because it assigns epistemic privilege to the oppressed in theory, but performs that priority in its very written pages, pointing to a way of describing and changing the world that still has much to teach us as we confront the evils of police power, the carceral state, and other powers of Empire which seek to vitiate and destroy black life in America, and so to cheapen and denigrate the lives of working-class and oppressed people everywhere. We stand in need of a new generation of Black Natural Law theorists and practitioners, and hopefully Lloyd’s volume can help to name that need, and call a new generation to fill it.

Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. serve as the exemplars of Vincent Lloyd’s black natural law tradition in his newest book, Black Natural Law. Through these figures, Lloyd traces what he believes to be the distinctive threads of the tradition. At its heart, he argues, the black natural law tradition is a “doing of theory” through the performance of ideology critique and the organizing of social movements. Its critique and action aim to recover the concept of the human, which suffers distortion as a result of the oppressive powers of the world. Black natural law’s intervention is a recovery of right perception, a process of conscientization that is inspired through the performance of black natural law by leaders/organizers. These performances function as part of a process in which key human capacities, including reason, feeling and imagination, are modeled, evoking the exercising of the same capacities within their audiences. Lloyd suggests these aspects of human nature have remained dormant, stunted by the diminishment of humanity by corrosive ideologies and oppressive practices. Exercising the capacities of reason, emotion and imagination allow individuals to reflect on and discern their own human nature, which makes clearer the truth of natural law. In this process, reflection upon human nature, which is understood to reflect the image of God, occurs communally, informing one’s responsibility to just relationality, and inspiring the community to apply what they have discovered as they struggle together in pursuit of justice.

As is clear from the use of language like the image of God, Lloyd contends, the black natural law tradition cannot be divorced from the black religious tradition, a tradition that permeates all of black culture. However, Lloyd curiously offers a myopic vision of black religion through Christian leaders, or at the very least, leaders who employ Christian language and Christian concepts, begging the question: Is it possible to identify a viable articulation of black natural law that does not grow out of Western religious conceptions of humanity? Lloyd’s disqualification of the truly effective measures of movements like Garveyism and the Nation of Islam, movements that both critiqued erroneous ideologies and galvanized black people across the nation to organize and act for justice, offer the clearest insight into Lloyd’s criteria. If the communal practices of ideology critique and organizing principles of the tradition of black natural law that Lloyd espouses are present in these movements, the exclusion of their philosophies from the catalogue of the black natural law tradition suggests a belief in the universality and kinship of humanity, philosophies from which these movements diverge, prove more important than their theological inspirations or their aims.

As Lloyd articulates in his treatment of Frederick Douglass, his tradition of black natural law is more concerned with the process for discernment than the destination. That process as mentioned earlier asserts a template for discerning natural law, through an understanding of human nature, by way of a concept of the image of God. None of these elements, he argues, can be apprehended, but all are predicated on a theological anthropology. Lloyd’s account is dependent on the concept of the imago dei, a notably biblical concept, which grounds a common concept of humanity and justice in a common divine source, whose nature we reflect when we are pursuing our best selves. Lloyd’s use of these exemplars inadvertently establishes black natural law as an orthopraxy, suggesting we participate in the imago dei when we struggle together towards justice, so that the image of God is not simply reflected in the being of humans, but their practices in the struggle for justice.

While aspects of this struggle and participation in God include Christian practices of love, servant leadership and sacrifice, virtues enthusiastically espoused by Douglass, Cooper, King and even Du Bois, these concepts have been historically debated within black communities as naive, and unrealistic. An aversion to sacrificing one’s power for the sake of preserving and recovering humanity, as well as an unwillingness to commit to black interpretations of Christian religious doctrine, and a lack of confidence in “other-worldly-strategies,” which privilege love above anger, represent the most acute perennial conflicts in the praxis of black political engagement. These are evident in the historic philosophies of the Nation of Islam, the Black Power Movement and are present contemporarily in much of black religious scholarship and secular justice movements like Black Lives Matter.

In addition to different responses to religious tradition, black communities’ perceptions of humanity and the order of the world are diverse. For example, Lloyd argues, mainstream black leaders and communities operated under the assumption that goodness and justice were inevitable, that the long arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice.” However, he does not account for the strong sentiment in black communities that such hope is inappropriate. The suffering and injustice experienced by black communities in this world has eroded this confidence. One of the most celebrated writers of this generation, Ta-Nehisi Coates, recently revisited the old adage, used by Martin Luther King Jr. In his much-lauded book Between Me and the World, Coates argues, “The arc of the universe bends toward chaos, then concludes in a box.” In fact, the conflicts that arose in the black communities regarding a way forward were often rooted in a healthy skepticism that justice was not an outcome that could be assumed, but had to be apprehended through human effort. While, Lloyd contends, black leaders and intellectuals operated out of a confidence in the notion that people were generally good, he does not consider how the privileging of power over integrity in the world compels many to believe otherwise.

Such a posture, Coates admits, is a product of fear that plagues many black children, women and men. This fear is cultivated by unchecked state-sanctioned violence against black people, and rampant inequity in education, healthcare and income, which compromises black communities’ willingness to engage in hope. To those whose perspective has been influenced by fear, hope is a dream that hinders the ability to be vigilant in a world that preys upon them. Still, it must be acknowledged that these deviations from what Lloyd considers the tradition, result in a collective exploration of an intuitive higher law that contests the injustice of the world, engages in critique of the ideologies that animate oppression and collective struggle toward justice, sans divine inspiration. The question becomes, is the idea of the divine animating the work of struggle necessary to maintain an impulse for pursuing justice?

Lloyd’s argument suggests it is. In fact, he contends that one of the reasons for what he perceives to be the current dilapidated state of the tradition is secularization’s watering down and disorientation of religious language among black leaders and organizers. This, he argues, makes it increasingly difficult to articulate a means by which natural law can be discerned. However, communities through creativity have always explored their intuitive yearnings for more. This creativity operates as a form of reflective reasoning, emoting and imagining through the tradition of communal critique and revision, which include assertions of perspectives soberly bereft of hope, or those that affirm self-care before sacrifice and retaliation before forgiveness. This critique and revision are not abandonment or distortion of the tradition but signal something other than the typical Christian articulations of black natural law at work.

Part of the beauty of the diversity of black political engagement is the way in which its various strands constantly critique the others. The dissonance in black philosophies and strategies impels communities to be in constant discernment about the appropriateness of our process. This includes questioning what directs us in our search for justice, and whether principles informing mainstream black thought and morality are contributing to an oppression of their own. As we reflect on Lloyd’s argument, attention to the diversity of thought, methods and actions of black communities is vital. Lloyd’s commitment to the representation of a “black mainstream” tradition presents obstacles, as it is unclear by what criteria this “mainstream” is constructed. However, his exemplars suggest that while this “black mainstream” may have a variety of beliefs, they do not stray too far from Christian perspectives on human nature. This limits what can be perceived as good, considered an appropriate strategy or celebrated as a worthwhile aim, even when they are theologically driven. More importantly, the disqualification of other theological streams stifles critique.

It is our responsibility to struggle together with our incongruent visions, discerning what aspects of these concepts are essential and those that need to be retired, amended, or recast to include the neglected. The discernment of a natural or higher law must include all of the community, acknowledging the traditions that have been effective in our progress until this point, while considering the aspects of practices that may have done more harm than good. For example, in light of the violence Christian doctrine has inflicted upon non-white people, or the fact that society disproportionately expects and feels entitled to the labor and suffering of black people and women, new interpretations of sacrifice may be necessary.

Moreover, we need to open our eyes to the plurality of performances of black natural law traditions, rather than simply one black natural law tradition. While Lloyd suggests the tradition has been misappropriated, I would argue that an intelligible black natural law tradition persists. No, it is not happening in neat, linear ways, however; black communities are always attempting to discern a way forward with the resources at their disposal. These strategies operate in a manner more reminiscent of a kaleidoscope than fixed locations of implementation. In other words, rather than one leader/organizer being the source of ideology critique and a catalyst for the social organizing, aspects of natural law were and continue to be performed and synthesized communally, through a myriad of sources, inspiring black communities to engage in ideology critique and action. Literary and musical artists offer performances that model human nature through their creativities, highlighting the importance of emotion and disputing Western science’s attempt to deny its role in humanity. Politicians and intellectuals exemplify black rational capacity, dispelling the myth of black cognitive inferiority. Non-Christian religious movements offer alternative ways of imagining the good, human nature and possible ways forward. In other words, the black ethical political engagement emerges from unlikely spaces and sources, and builds off of multiple ongoing efforts. Consequently, it is an endeavor strengthened by inclusivity and an expansive approach to method.

However, in the midst of our attention to diverse dispositions and strategies for political engagement, we must take seriously our ethical responsibility to the preservation of our own humanity. This requires deep reflection on an appropriate response to a world that seeks our demise, as well as attention to the damage that has been done to our own perspectives as a result of the injustices visited on our communities and its impact on our abilities to imagine new possibilities. Are particular dispositions more affective in reaching the goal of justice, and preserving our humanity in the process? Lloyd speaks of the black natural law tradition being a tradition that seeks to bring about conversion; conversion from the posture of oppressor, to the practice of advocating for those whose humanity is being diminished. In my estimation, this includes those who rely on the degrading of black humanity to maintain a sense of self-worth. This is not for the faint of heart. Justice and equality are not the same, just as the struggle toward progress is not about a specific telos where black people are no longer oppressed, but that all are operating in the fullness of their humanity. Still, we must be critical of the versions of authority we erect as representative of a black vision of humanity to ensure that we do not stifle the expansive possibilities of the very humanity we seek to liberate.

There is always a bit of the subject’s desire already in the law and always a bit of the law already in the subject’s desire.

—Maria Aristodemou, Law, Psychoanalysis, Society

The point of departure for the most recent book in Vincent Lloyd’s rapidly expanding corpus is his contention that at its best, African American ethical and political engagement reflects the style of a distinctive yet dying tradition of natural law to which black people have “privileged access” (xiii). Lloyd prioritizes the importance of notions like “‘God’s law,” “universal law” or “higher law” (he uses these terms interchangeably) for the black intellectual heritage and its associated freedom struggles. This book is an important contribution to the fields of black political thought, theology and legal studies as it thoughtfully directs our attention to the vital role that African Americans have played in publicly articulating a unique human rights discourse that has emphasized “the eternal, universal and indestructible” (20) elements of an ultimately ineffable human nature.

Black Natural Law attempts to skillfully re-situate the wisdom of the Christian-inflected black political tradition as a distinctive line of natural law activism with important normative and performative features. On my reading, two major threads run throughout the text: a descriptive, historical thread that situates four “mainstream” (vii) black ethical and political leaders within a black natural law tradition; and a normative, aspirational strand that contends the black natural law approach is “the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone” (ix).

Descriptively, Lloyd links his thesis to a historical treatment that cuts against the grain of conventional interpretations of four seminal black freedom fighters: Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., whom he reads as participants in a revised tradition of natural law. Each of the four chapters is nicely detailed and powerfully argued. Overall, these fruitful interpretations aim to demonstrate that at its most effective, the black religio-political heritage effectively dramatizes firm theological and metaphysical commitments such as the notions that God exists, that humans are created in God’s image, that freedom is the natural right of all human beings, and that equality is guaranteed by higher law.

Lloyd’s master narrative of a black natural law style of politics—whose core content he determines to be “ideology critique” and “social movement organizing”—highlights the importance of the affective features of black subjects. Instead of cognition and reason, for Lloyd it is our emotive and imaginative faculties that discern the norms of freedom and equality. He is careful, however, to accentuate the limits of human discernment. He notes that humans can never achieve complete knowledge of human nature or fully implement God’s law, and we cannot successfully codify natural law or firmly establish its determinative content.

It is worth emphasizing that for Lloyd, the discoverable content of black natural law is discerned via a process that starts from the stable center of our humanity (a place that is ultimately unknowable), not from our sociopolitical conditions. His worry seems to be that when we allow our political work to be guided by categories that “obscure the soul, such as race, gender, and class” (40) we inhibit both proper self-orientation and spiritual alignment with others. In other words, we cannot fully understand the transcendent aspects of ourselves and others unless our actions are based in a sense of something bigger than us. On Lloyd’s account then, to start from the fixed yet ineffable center of the soul is to inspire proper discernment. This helps us both to avoid political work marked by the relativism and essentialism of multicultural approaches (that work from definitive contemporary conditions), and to resist the secularism and problem-solving language of pragmatic approaches to politics (that appeal to the rhetoric of natural laws but fail to access their true power). It is a robust, critical black natural law tradition, as crafted by these interpretations of Douglass, Cooper, Du Bois and King Jr., that relies on stable and nonnegotiable laws as sources for our most soul-affirming ethical commitments and humanizing political criticisms. The black natural law approach also avoids the paralyzing problems of skepticism and relativism.

Lloyd’s interpretive historical account of these figures invites us to consider new dimensions of the rich style of black political rhetoric. Yet, the definitive readings of Douglass, Cooper, Du Bois and King as stylists of natural law renders them unidimensional and, to my mind, actually weakens the argument for Lloyd’s black natural law interpretation. To over-determine their efforts in this way is to conceal the creative breadth of their efforts and to overstate their location inside of this tradition. A more nuanced interpretation would argue that these four figures strategically used natural law rhetoric within the larger goals of their work.1 This might more compellingly establish the style of black natural law as a strand within the broader traditions of black religious activism.

Further, on a separate but related criticism, Lloyd does not provide an explicit argument for the rationale behind the specific choice of his four exemplars. At times, other religiously inspired political workers, for example Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Al Sharpton, and Ella Baker, use rhetoric that resembles the normative claims of the black natural law tradition that Lloyd aims to construct (they center the Judeo-Christian God and eternal laws). Vesey, Walker, Sharpton and Baker are generally not, however, considered mainstream thinkers. Does Lloyd’s tradition of black natural law only apply to the mainstream of black political and ethical thought? If so, what features make a black religio-political worker too radical for inclusion in the black natural law tradition that Lloyd constructs? The question of what exactly is illuminated by the description of the figures he chooses as stylists of black natural law would be resolved if he were to tell us the reasons behind his choices.

It also strikes me that against Lloyd’s numerous criticisms of neo-pragmatism and multiculturalism, a specific pragmatist bent and set of “multicultural” tendencies actually inhabit both the method of discernment and the “blackening” of the natural law tradition that he describes.2To acknowledge the multicultural and pragmatic aspects built into his distinctive natural law interpretation given here would serve to moderate the intense critical stance he takes toward neo-pragmatism and multiculturalism. It would also mitigate the most basic criticisms of neo-pragmatists and multiculturalists regarding natural law: that truth is always contingent therefore the very idea of natural law is hubris, and that racial and ethnic differences are products of distinct histories and require idiosyncratic, not universal, solutions. Since Lloyd takes historical truths to be dynamic and appreciates nuanced responses to human difference, he has little to lose by bringing them into his own method.

Before turning to the aspirational strand of the text, I want raise two related points of confusion regarding the descriptive features of the argument. On one hand, Lloyd contends that “black natural law” does not “derive from any facts about race” (xiii) and that it should not “take as its starting point the circumstances and capacities of a certain community” (158). At the same time, he characterizes black natural law as a “distinctively black tradition” and writes that blacks have “privileged access to” it (xiii). He says he wants “the epistemic privilege of the oppressed,” but the oppression he describes is always—as he very well knows—racialized. I have difficulty, however, holding the idea that natural law can be adjectivized as “black” but that it does not derive from any fact about race.

From where does politico-ethical critique arise if not from “circumstances and capacities of a certain community” (158)? While I agree that any process of discernment that gets to “the stable center of our humanity” is useful, it strikes me that interpreting King, Du Bois, Cooper and Douglass—who understood themselves as fully embodied subjects immersed in distinct sociopolitical circumstances—as not starting from “circumstances and capacities of a certain community” (158) actually obfuscates their achievements. It diminishes their extraordinary efforts to be both deeply present to actual conditions of dehumanization and always looking beyond them for more affirming means of human organizing.

Turning to the second, aspirational thread of the text, Lloyd contends that “black natural law” is the “best way to approach politics” (ix). He believes its theological commitments and metaphysical foundations relieve late-modern political detachment and moral confusion. Black natural law method removes the human subject from having to take full responsibility for separating good and bad laws and eliminates the human errors that occur when (self-interested) humans try to identify just from unjust acts. For example, it follows that Lloyd holds that the black natural law approach would lighten the burden of organizers, say, those working under the banner of Black Lives Matter, from having to craft an argument for racial equality based solely on empirical data and derived strictly from identity-based calls for justice. Lloyd would rather these activists appeal to higher laws inscribed in the nature of the universe in their justice work. In this way, the unchanging, absolute and stable moral tenets of the universe would guide Black Lives Matter organizers, who would then direct their listeners to a better discernment of partially obscured moral Truths. In this way, the universal laws demanded by our shared human condition would govern social movement organizing; Black Lives Matter activists would cease to operate out of the racial conditions in which they are mired.

On the one hand, I think Lloyd is correct: attempts to elevate human consciousness beyond immediate sociopolitical conditions are useful for justice work. On the other hand, this kind of transcendence is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for expanding rights and improving the quality of life in the United States. In fact, the Christian “elevation of consciousness” he prefers has been a feature of black political work throughout American history. African American struggles for equality in the United States feature numerous activists, like those in women’s clubs, school teachers, union organizers, ministers and others, who persistently reminded their supporters that they were more than the events they faced and greater than the conditions that produced them. This distinctive form of engagement with the identity-politics at the core of modernity has been a feature of African American life. In both its most elite political articulations (King, Cooper, Du Bois, Douglass) and its more folksy expressions (Booker T. Washington, Mary McCleod Bethune, Huey P. Newton), transformative African American political work begins with an identity-based call for justice that is deeply other-regarding.

Howard Thurman provides another way to think about this unique African American quest for transcendence. In his tracing of the moral history of Jesus (in Jesus and the Disinherited [1948]), Thurman details the history of the black sojourn in America as best understood when we consider how black subjects were able to generate an ethic of love from the psycho-cultural circumstances of oppression and sociopolitical conditions of being disinherited. For Thurman, as for Lloyd, the symbol “God” calls us to the “better angels of our nature,” directs us to our higher selves, and animates aspects of our personality that are greater than our social conditions. Yet Thurman’s vision of this development, unlike Lloyd’s, requires being fully grounded in social facts and taking them as one’s point of departure.

Due to the dynamic nature of politics and the shifting political needs and strategies of citizens on the margins, it is difficult to thoughtfully consider strong assertions regarding any singular, best overall approach to politics. What may work for one issue at a particular time in light of the needs of a particular community, may not work for another issue at another time for a different set of communal needs. Lloyd’s speculative claim that black natural law is the overall best approach to an ethical politics must, then, be understood as polemical. In chapter 5, “Decline and Detritus,” he describes why the tradition he has outlined has declined but he does not directly engage the best arguments against the natural law tradition itself. This leaves the text vulnerable to a slew of potential criticisms; the two most glaring ones are the practical problems of applying natural law solutions, and the value of moral realism in our late-modern moment, that is, after the insights gleaned from the linguistic turn, existentialism, and post-structuralism.

The problem of the application of black natural law is raised but not addressed in Lloyd’s recounting of Martin Luther King Jr.’s debate with James J. Kilpatrick in 1960 (100). Lloyd notes that in both the televised debate, as well as in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King Jr. argued that the proper discernment of God’s law would lead to a greater understanding of human equality, which supported the demand for full and immediate integration of black people into all aspects of American life. Alternatively, Kilpatrick claimed that correct discernment of God’s law enlightened us to the fundamental differences between black and white people, their comfort in being separated, their quest for racial self-preservation, and thus, the continuation of racial segregation in America. These two positions illuminate a fundamental tension within the method of natural law: its lack of a formal means to adjudicate between competing claims regarding the just discernment of higher law. What is the final court of appeal for the clash between King’s position, that higher law demands racial integration, and Kilpatrick’s position, that higher law demands racial segregation?

Lloyd might respond that black natural law includes ideology critique, which, in this case, demonstrated that unjust laws were laws imposed by a majority on a minority (without their consent) that granted privileges to the majority (that the minority did not receive). This, however, does not settle the question of the morality of segregation, it merely settles the issues of consent and unequal privileges (that is, a minority group could consent to “separate, but equal”). Further, ideology critique and social movement organizing are not robust ways to attend to thorny problems like gay marriage and transgender bathrooms; nor, do they effectively speak to the facts of disproportionate pay for women doing the same job as men or the ban on Syrian refugees.

It is hard to hold black natural law as the best style of ethico-political engagement for our time because it is a form of moral realism, and this approach—as Lloyd notes in chapter 5—has gone out of style. Lloyd, however, is convinced that our best way out of our modern predicament is to turn to objective, real moral laws. He allows that these universal, unchanging moral laws are never discoverable in full and that on the ground, laws are fluid (e.g., who the state will consent to be married). Yet he is committed to the position that higher laws are not fungible (e.g., the true nature of marriage). One problem with this account is that conflicts about higher law are merely conflicts regarding proper discernment. This leaves disagreeable parties with nowhere to turn. Black natural law provides no final arbiter between human subjects to help make progress in the face of absolute claims for higher law. What remains, then, is only a power struggle; one that requires not just ideology critique and social movement organizing but protest and resistance against principalities and powers that have a long history of punishing those who resist them.

While we might romanticize the nonviolent protest of the Civil Rights strategists, we must be very careful here: our epoch is not the era of Martin Luther King Jr. (or Cooper, Douglass or Du Bois, for that matter). African American communities are both more diverse and more fractured than they have ever been. This diversity and its concomitant relativism, pragmatism and multiculturalism seem to trouble Lloyd. This may be because he does not acknowledge the imperial language of Afro-Protestantism, which, in the minds of many black people, resembles a tool of capitalist oppression more than it does one for black liberation. In many ways, God-talk itself seems to have run its course for a black radical politics. Black women have long protested patriarchal conceptions of racial freedom reproduced by Black churches. Additionally, Black LGBTQ folks have been dehumanized by so called “charismatic” black male preachers and the repressive morality of their institutions that are largely trans-phobic and excessive promoters of conservative family values. Add to this the fact that the coercive power of the state is more deadly, the strength of its surveillance more intense, and the power of its repressive apparatus more swift. These factors suggest that one must be careful trumpeting any absolutist claims for God’s law as the basis for justice.

I’m on board with the noble aspirations of a rhetorical style and a method of religio-political engagement that pulls us beyond ourselves in ways that mitigate unjust laws that diminish the quality of life. Whether or not the theological language of the tradition of black natural law as it is described here can mobilize a wide swath of the American public, is another question. This does not mean that we cannot aspire to the better angels of our nature by using narratives that remind us of the best of our spiritual imagination, it just means that the problems of justification built into the natural law framework, the historical disharmony created by the clash of so called “self-evident” truths, and the pain that the black Christian heritage has caused to non cis-gendered black men, make it less than possible that the black natural law framework will play a central role in raising the quality of life, in any significant way, in the United States.

The task for African Americans is not to attempt to discern God’s law more effectively, it is to coordinate their interests better (that is, to work in better solidarity with similarly interested groups) and to reconcile with a more expansive sense of self (that is, to be in closer contact with what Howard Thurman calls “whole feeling”). In this way the radical religious heritage of African descended peoples may be able to support energies that counter the brutal forces of global capitalism, which limit the possibilities of so many human beings by trapping them in cycles of poverty and wage-slavery, conditions that diminish the capacities of the human soul.