Lauren Winner puts her finger on the pulse of the church and tells us something that is not immediately evident: there are deformations in church practices due not just to creaturely fallenness but also due to tensions internal to the practices themselves. I think many theologians have suspected as much, but The Dangers of Christian Practice draws back the curtain to show explicit examples of how God’s infinitely good yet mysterious gifts became damaged. I applaud Winner for her illustrative snapshots of the Eucharist, prayer, and baptismal practices gone bad in different historical contexts. She has an uncanny ability to condemn egregious cultural practices while also gently suggesting that part of the problem can be traced back to Christian beliefs. For example, the medieval perpetrators of host desecration narratives may have been, in part, socialized—by the tensions internal to eucharistic theology itself—to develop cultural biases about Jewish bodies. Winner does not excuse anti-Judaizing in eucharistic practices but pushes us to think about how it’s possible for a sacrament like the Eucharist to have fueled a bias that resulted in violence toward the Jewish Other.

Winner challenges her readers to look out for signs of “Christianity’s characteristic damage” (155). I think we need to test Winner’s argument by looking at some less obviously egregious examples. After all, who today would defend slavery, racism, or slurs against Jews? I want to know more about how Christian beliefs are being used today, with the best of intentions, to combat perceived evils but with the unintended consequence of causing damage. Where might we find contemporary examples of a disordered use of one of God’s gifts? Winner touches briefly upon one such present-day instance in her discussion of how the sacrament of marriage has been used to exclude and denigrate same-sex love. The problem is, on the one hand, internal to how Christianity has defined the sacrament of marriage and, on the other hand, a factor of allowing homophobic biases to infect the sacrament. Winner speaks approvingly of Eugene Rogers’s work to rehabilitate (or repristinate, as she might say) Christian marriage in ways that encompass the mutual loving commitment of gays and lesbians. This discussion would be an example of exposing how the sacrament of marriage, when situated within a homophobic cultural context, has “funded toxicity” (33) by othering believers who fall outside of heteronormativity. How might Winner’s readers react to this analysis? Statistics show that while many Baby Boomer and older evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians still oppose same-sex love, Christian millennials are much more accepting, and in increasing numbers.1 That the cultural tide regarding homophobia is turning makes one hopeful about a more inclusive sacrament of marriage. But what about a contemporary issue that is still highly controversial in Christian circles? What immediately comes to mind for me because of my current research is abortion. The fact that many Christians, with good intentions, are adamantly opposed to abortion rights should not deter us from asking if there are tensions internal to Christian beliefs and practices that are funding toxicity and inculcating bias regarding women who get an abortion. I’d like to test Winner’s approach by indicating how the Eucharist has been mobilized to make the case that terminating an unwanted pregnancy runs contrary to what a believer’s eucharistic identity should be. From my perspective, this type of argument exemplifies a present-day biased and damaging reaction to the “doubts and anxieties, [and] tensions . . . inherent in the very nature of the Eucharist” (45).

Recall Winner’s point that one tension internal to the Eucharist that funded anti-Judaizing in the Middle Ages had its source in the mystery of the Incarnation: God became not just “Man” but a Jewish man. The Jewishness of Jesus did not sit well with most medieval Christians, thereby creating a tension during holy communion, which is “the moment when the church is most intimate with Jewish flesh” (36). The theological mystery of the Incarnation coincided with and fueled medieval Christians’ biases about the bodies of their actual Jewish neighbors. Anxieties about the meaning of the eucharistic body of the Christ were assuaged by being projected or displaced onto Jews down the street.

We see an analogous situation with abortion. Another aspect of the mystery of the Incarnation is that Christ has a divine “Father” but became human in a woman’s body. That the church from its origins has had anxieties about women’s bodies, in general, and women’s reproductive sexuality, in particular, is well documented. If we delve further, might we discover that anxieties about the meaning of body of Christ, born of a woman, have been assuaged by being projected or displaced onto the bodies of women with unwanted pregnancies? There is evidence to this effect in some prolife writings.

I point to one scholar’s attempt to extrapolate a prolife message from the Eucharist as a factor of the mystery at the sacrament’s core. Eugene Schlesinger (who, like Winner, is Episcopalian) wishes to reframe the legally contentious abortion issue by setting it in “the liturgical and sacramental life of the church,” especially the Eucharist.2 It is precisely in the mystery of epiclesis, the moment of consecration of the elements, that Schlesinger finds a prolife message: “The Spirit who overshadows bread and wine . . . to make them Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist is the same Spirit who overshadowed the virgin’s womb and there created the fetal body of Christ. This association between epiclesis and the incarnation in Mary’s womb surely ought to work at cross-purposes with the practice of abortion.”3 The gift of the holy meal becomes a means, Schlesinger hopes, for a spiritual reshaping of “the way women view the hitherto unwanted fetuses they carry,” so that a decision to give birth would be unavoidable yet also free of coercion.4 But is this prolife appeal to the Eucharist really noncoercive? For Schlesinger, having partaken of the bread and wine, a believing woman has no other properly Christian recourse than to give of her own body to nourish and sustain any embryo or fetus in her womb, “even when the cost of that donation is high.”5 Two mysteries about Christ’s body—as really present on the communion table and really divine and human in Mary’s uterus—are brought together as a basis for the moral policing of any communicant’s fecund uterus. I submit that this approach to the Eucharist constitutes a misprision, a deformation (to use Winner’s terms) of the sacrament. It is dangerous to claim to know how the sacramental Body applies to the concrete bodies of girls and women dealing with any unwanted pregnancy they might face in the three to four decades of their reproductive lifespan. This use of the Eucharist is a deformation of a very troubling kind, because girls and women who have an abortion (or even consider having one) are seen as Other to the meaning of sacrament itself.

If we follow Winner’s advice about attentiveness to evidence of damage in Christian practices, some of those signposts are very clear. Few today would dispute that the church has historically acted badly toward the Other in communities marginalized by race, religion, class, disability, undocumented status, sexuality, and so on. Is the church willing today to peel back the curtain of another long and disturbing history—namely, the history of the church’s hubris in claiming to know definitively God’s will for every conceptus? Is the church willing to recognize that compelling or even encouraging countless girls and women to gestate and bear children they do not feel they can safely birth, not to mention adequately raise, is profound misogyny masked as pronatalism? Statistics show that very few unwanted pregnancies that are carried to term result in the woman giving up the baby for adoption, so let’s dispense with the myth that compelling a putatively mere nine months of gestation will thereby make a wanted baby available to some loving, eager, adoptive Christian couple. No, the result of forced or coerced gestation and birthing is, more often than not, hardship and sacrifice for the mother and child. Did I mention that maternal and infant morbidity and mortality rates have risen in states with restrictive abortion laws?6

I don’t know if Winner has thought about the connection between the misuse of church sacraments in relation to pregnant women’s bodies. It took a long time, and probably the twentieth-century cataclysm of the Holocaust, for the church to come to terms with the long and sordid history of anti-Judaizing in its sacraments, liturgies, and theologies. America is still coming to terms with the racist legacy of the sexual and reproductive exploitation of enslaved black women’s bodies and the ongoing assaults on the procreative and mothering self-determination of women of color even today. Perhaps one place for the church to begin to come to terms with its blinders about forced or coerced procreation, birthing, and mothering is to dispense with a romanticized view of Jesus’ own mother. I detect a hint of romanticism in Winner’s own reference to Mary’s “Fiat mihi” (148). While I understand Winner’s wish to recognize Mary’s faith and chutzpah before the angel Gabriel, I interpret the Annunciation scene in Luke’s gospel very differently. I see a deeply ambiguous divine-human event. A young woman, who had little reproductive knowledge (she was not a Leah or Rachel who knew what to do with mandrakes), is abruptly told, “You will conceive in your womb” (Luke 1:31 NRSV). Since Mary was apparently without prior experience of intercourse, she must have been terrified. Betrothed but not yet married, she was vulnerable to societal censure and perhaps even severe punishment. As a poor young woman with a first pregnancy, she and her baby might die in difficult childbirth. It probably took the encouragement her older, pregnant cousin to help give her the courage to embrace fully her initial consent. Only after visiting Elizabeth does Mary praise God in the song we know as the Magnificat.

Women today with unplanned pregnancies might well turn to Mary, or the Eucharist, or prayer, or other church practices to help them accept a crisis pregnancy and bring a new life into the world. Moreover, it is good for society to prepare for welcoming and nurturing all natals, to use Hannah Arendt’s concept. But let us not harbor any allusions that using eucharistic theology to induce girls and women to gestate, give birth, and mother against their better judgment is an appropriate extension of that sacrament. In my opinion, using any sacrament in this way damages the moral conscience of the pregnant person and thereby damages the very fabric of the church. I would hope that anyone who reads Winner’s book will “learn to notice and fitly respond to the damage” (17).

Lauren Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice has been a great help in my research on the religious culture of the FBI during the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. I have been asked, numerous times, a variant of the question: “How could Hoover’s FBI have a legitimate religious culture in light of the unscrupulous capers that have come to light?” While others have opted for the more conclusive, “There is no way religion in the FBI was sincere, it was all a ruse and a cover!” However, when Lauren raises questions such as “How does the Eucharist form practitioners?” “What judgements does it enable them to make?” and “What politics does it make possible?” It assists me in responding to the often-repeated doubts about religion in the FBI. Positing the Eucharist as a “damaged gift” helps to frame how the Bureau’s Eucharistic practices at their annual spiritual retreat aided and abetted how FBI special agents viewed themselves and their labor.

Under Hoover’s watch, FBI special agents took a spiritual retreat every year during a strategically orchestrated Spring weekend around the Easter holiday. In the para-military structure of the Bureau, Hoover strongly “encouraged” his white male special agents to attend the retreats to seek God’s will for their life and career. Black special agents who joined Hoover’s Bureau beginning in 1962 were excluded from these retreats, as were the white female administrative support staff of the Bureau. Each year a high-ranking FBI special agent, often from the Domestic Intelligence Division, served as the “Retreat Captain,” overseeing the year’s religious rally. These chosen men then anointed “section captains” from each of the divisions at FBI Headquarters. Special agents in the Identification, Training and Inspection, Administrative, Records, Investigating and Accounting, Domestic Intelligence, and the Technical Lab divisions each had a captain responsible for planning the retreat and steering their respective colleagues to attend. The special agents who embraced this were rewarded with continued employment, commendations, and promotions. However, those who bucked this uniformity found themselves on the fast track to a stifled career or termination. In Hoover’s regimented FBI, the best way for a man—whether Catholic, Protestant, Jew, nominal believer, or anything in between—to distinguish himself as a standout, was to simply fall in line.

The ecumenical brigade of special agents signed up for the retreat with their respective section captains and were assigned transportation. Some G-Men carpooled, while most boarded the Bureau’s appointed buses. The FBI connected with the Greyhound Bus Company to provide “special buses” at a discounted rate to take special agents from FBI headquarters to their spiritual retreat. The buses, commandeered using taxpayer dollars, made stops at the Washington, DC, and Baltimore field offices to pick up the faithful. Once the apportioned buses were full of federal spiritual seekers, the caravan made the approximate one-hour drive to the retreat house of Reverend Robert S. Lloyd, SJ.

The presence of the Bureau was almost omnipresent at the retreat house. Copies of Director Hoover’s autographed books were featured in the library, while Father Lloyd always kept on hand two awards he received for his pastoral service to the FBI: the “FBI’s Distinguished Service Cross” and a “beautiful plaque, setting forth the seal and the motto of the Bureau.” The prized gift, however, was an FBI engraved chalice. “From his own hands,” the FBI director presented Reverend Lloyd with “The Chalice of Salvation.” It was engraved with the Bureau’s insignia. After it was consecrated, Father Lloyd pledged that it would “be lifted . . . daily at the altar, for Director Hoover and all the wonderful men and women of the FBI.” “The FBI,” he continued “will be blessed daily in heaven and on earth. That is a true spiritual fact.” The anointed chalice was used at daily mass, a ritual Lloyd thoroughly enjoyed. “Every day as I hold it on high to God, I shall see the inscription from the FBI.” When the G-men received the Eucharist, they received it from the cup of the FBI.

The routine at the retreat was straightforward. In the morning, special agents of the FBI had Mass and Holy Communion, drinking from the FBI’s Chalice of Salvation. A priest led worship, but G-Men served as acolytes, participated in every aspect of the service. Special agents took care of the sacristy. Other agents infused the air of the chapel with incense by swinging the censer, while retreat captains led the gathering of soldier saints in the rosary and the Litany of the Sacred Heart and the Litany of St. Joseph. Highly regarded special agents were torchbearers for the stations of the Cross, while the most respected agents and captains literally bore the cross.

Such Eucharistic practices helped to affirm the Bureau’s self-understanding as the moral custodian of America’s white supremacist democracy. It helped to ritualize their labor as sacred, no matter how hideous the labor. Celebrity preacher Bishop Fulton Sheen made this clear during one Bureau retreat. After the men received the Eucharist from the FBI Chalice, the two-time Emmy Award–winning televangelist told the faithful agents that the “contemporary problems of our society such as the decline of morality, the lack of discipline generally, and protest for the sake of protest” were caused by “the general breakdown of society” caused by Christians who had neglected “the basic teachings of Christ.” If America was to be fixed, Christians had to confess their sins and return to law and order They had to recommit themselves to the very foundations upon which American society rested: the teachings of Christ. Special agent Churchill F. Downing, chief of the Cryptanalysis-Translation Section in the Laboratory Division, praised the retreat for emphasizing the role Christians should play in returning society back to God. SA Downing believed he played a vital role in this regard. He was in charge of translating and transcribing data obtained from one of the Bureau’s covert surveillance operations. Code-named “June Mail,” the program obtained information through “sources illegal in nature” such as illegal bugs, wiretaps, break-ins, and mail intercepts. Such intel was sent to FBI headquarters under the marker “June Mail.” It was routed away from the Bureau’s central record systems, placed in a “confidential file” in the Bureau’s Special File Room, where it was maintained “under lock and key” for authorized personnel only; for men like Special Agent Downing. Special Agent Downing, who was involved in countless June Mail operations including the bugging of the home of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed, found Bishop Sheen’s diagnosis of society empowering. The weekend retreat served as a reminder that by monitoring and harassing black religious organizations, the FBI was working with and for God to save American society. “Those in attendance,” one agent from the laboratory division relayed, “advise that without a doubt his mediations were superb.” Special Agent Downing agreed, calling Bishop Sheen’s weekend of spiritual guidance unparalleled “in content and in presentation, and particularly meaningful.” “His discussions,” he concluded were “stimulating and will not be soon forgotten.” Indeed, following the retreat, Sheen was invited to headquarters to minister to special agents and their families. Receiving the real presence of Christ from the FBI’s chalice coupled with Bishop Sheen’s homily and direction assured special agents they were serving God in mind, will, and body; it also empowered them to enforce and defend existing societal arrangements in the name of the Lord.

The FBI Eucharist helped special agents to see themselves and their labor as sacred. It assisted them in adjudicating what was godly on the one hand, and what was bad religion on the other. It enabled them to judge who was patriotic and committed to God and country over and against those they believed were communist subversives and unpatriotic. It helped make possible the FBI’s politics of white supremacy and skullduggery all in the name of God and country.

It’s one thing to be reminded that your weaknesses make you vulnerable to doing wrong. It’s another to be instructed that you need to be on guard against your strengths. That’s the bad news Lauren Winner has for the Christian church in this book. She makes a persuasive case that three focal Christian practices—Eucharist, prayer, and baptism—make the church dangerously liable to sin in particular ways. As she notes, the book can be read as a critique of the recent theological fashion for emphasizing practice over belief, inspired by George Lindbeck’s reception of Wittgenstein and by Stanley Hauerwas, but also evident in the work of Eugene Rogers, Marcia Mount Sloop, Elizabeth Gandolfo, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, and Sarah Coakley. The book’s appendix surveys the repristination of practice these authors represent collectively and positions the book as an attempt to depristinate them. But it’s right that this is an appendix. The book is much more than a response to a theological trend. It’s a timely word for the church to reflect on how it goes wrong even—or especially—when it thinks it’s most obviously about God’s work.

Winner presents real horrors to her readers. She shows how the proximity of Jewish and Christian flesh in the Eucharist is plausibly connected to the maniacal concern of the medieval church with host desecration: false claims about Jews destroying Eucharistic hosts leading to riots and killing of Jews, often by burning, with numerous reported incidents from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries in which thousands of Jews were put to death, and stories about the miraculous indestructibility of hosts leading to the building of churches on the sites of massacre. She takes us close to the practice of personal prayer by white slaveholding women in America, complaining of the cross they bear in trying to be patient with lazy and unruly black slaves, strengthened by their prayers in their complacent sense of their own superior virtue, making prayer a key part of the apparatus necessary for the maintenance of the slave economy. And she shows how baptism is co-opted in American fin de siècle domestic family rituals so as to reinforce the family to the virtual exclusion of the ecclesial. Winner convincingly demonstrates in each case that the disastrous results of the practice are not merely accidental but “characteristic deformations” of the practices. Once we have recognized the particular ways in which the practices may go wrong, we are better placed to be alert to their risks, and able to respond with gratitude, repentance, and lament.

As a result of reading Winner’s book, I am resolved to think differently about my participation in the particular practices Winner discusses. I will reflect on how my intercessions may be deforming of me, how the way my church celebrates Holy Communion functions as anti-Jewish, and how our celebration of baptism fails to maintain the tension between church and family. I’m also convinced there are additional potential characteristic deformations in relation to these three practices that need further exploration: the way in which Eucharist and baptism dismember the body of Christ through multiple exclusions; the capacity for intercessory prayer to substitute for moral responsibility. Winner’s work in relation to these three practices highlights the need for similar analysis of other practices. Practices of Christian welcome and inclusivity frequently reinstate logics of ownership of space and resistance to change. Appealing to the universality of God’s love in white and straight contexts is often a convenient way to avoid confronting racial and sexual difference. Charitable work is obviously frequently infected with condescension. More attention to these and other practices would uncover other instructive characteristic deformities.

I’m also struck by the application of the concept of characteristic deformities to academic specialisms. I’ve always included early in my teaching of Christian ethics attention to the ethics of doing Christian ethics. The need for this now looks to me to arise from a characteristic deformation of ethics: attention to the sins of others as a convenient distraction from one’s own moral failings. I propose the management strategy for this spiritual risk as taking logs before specks, which means being prepared to attend to the ethics relating to the logs in one’s own eye before addressing the ethical issues relating to the specks in the eyes of others. A preoccupation with issues that will inevitably impact the practice of others before oneself—such as a male ethicist focusing exclusively on abortion, or a wealthy ethicist on benefit fraud—would be a prima facie reason for concern on this count. There is characteristic deformation to this management strategy as well, of course. It could be used as an excuse for failing to confront systemic injustices that result from the action of powerful others. But once this is acknowledged and resisted the discipline of attending to one’s own moral responsibility must be part of doing Christian ethics ethically. There are other characteristic deformations of Christian ethics to resist: the disproportionate numbers of white men like me in most of the academic contexts in which I find myself suggests there’s something structural in the discipline that functions in discriminatory ways. I wonder whether the lure of being in the powerful position of setting the rules for others to follow is part of this, and leads to the setting of disciplinary norms to ensure those admitted to this space are sufficiently similar to reduce the risk of disruptive interventions.

It seems possible that there are particular characteristic deformations of other theological subdisciplines. The attractive potential of systematic theology to function as a powerful policing of orthodoxy may be part of the explanation that it too is dominated by white men. Perhaps it has a second characteristic deformation of pursuing esoteric abstractions in preference to the kind of risky theological thinking that would enable the church to resist the immediate evils that confront it. It would probably be unfair and unhealthy for me to speculate on the characteristic deformations of other subdisciplines with which I have less to do, but I’m convinced academic colleagues within each would benefit from parallel introspections.

Every Christmas since childhood, I have compiled a list of the things I want to be gifted. From the handwritten list of the ’80s and ’90s to the emailed list of the early aughts, to the current vehicle of Pinterest, every year I petition my parents for exactly what I want each Christmas. Then on Christmas Day I participate in the practice of opening these gifts as if I never asked for them in the first place—because one must feign surprise as is expected in the dramatic liturgy of Christmas gift unwrapping. For thirty-eight years I’ve participated in the practice of making lists and opening gifts I’ve requested without question and uncritically so, never imagining for a moment that I am participating in anything other than a time-honored tradition. Lest anyone think I am a spoiled brat; I am not alone in this. This odd practice of requesting and receiving gifts extends to bridal and baby showers where people request only the things that they want as opposed to trusting the gift-giving capacity of the family and friends invited to celebrate the marriage or forthcoming new bundle of joy.

While list-making during Christmas and people scanning copious products onto a registry is not an explicitly Christian practice, it points to how the concept of the gift undergirds The Dangers of Christian Practice and how many of us have deformed the practice of gift-giving through the way we receive gifts. Lauren Winner explores three Christian practices, the divine gifts of Eucharist, prayer, and baptism that experience, what she calls, a “characteristic deformation” by way of the agents of each of the practices. As agents we consistently participate in the extrinsic damage of Christian practice, gifts that we were given by God for the purpose of binding us to Christian community. Given this, Winner posits that a gift has at least three characteristics: first it understands the triad of giver, recipient, and object given and received; second the object must be transmitted between giver and recipient in a particular way; and third there can be no recompense required or even possible. Failure in any one of those areas renders a damage in the gift, but there’s a fourth way that gifts can be damaged, and that is when “a recipient like this cannot help but damage a gift like that.”

This is the lot of us in the twenty-first century, those whose ancestors were, allegedly, responsible for desecrating the Eucharist or keeping it pure. We are those ancestors of the enslaved or the slave driver who prayed that we would remain obedient to our oppressor. We are those who are baptized into the body of Christ but celebrate our entry into the body with an exclusive list of family and friends gathered around a buffet of fine china and crustless finger sandwiches. The Dangers of Christian Practice hangs on the idea that there is a fine line between the gift and recipient, particularly that we, the recipients, are responsible for the characteristic damages of at least three divine gifts that God has given us, the Eucharist, prayer, and baptism. Winner asks, “What kind of God gives us a gift we can’t use well?” And she responds that it is not that we cannot use the gifts well, but that God gives us felix’d gifts—gifts that are a result of the Fall but not without the possibility of redemption. We may get damaged gifts not because that is what God gives, but because we are recipients like this that cannot help but damage a gift like that. Our receipt of the gift is what damages it.

I read this book as someone who still believes in and is committed to the efficacy of the particular Christian practices covered in this book as well as Christian practice broadly construed. I also read this as an African American woman who noticed that the brief history of the dangers of Christian practice that Winner highlighted all hinge on an othering by a dominant culture toward (what might be perceived as) a subculture. Through these historical examples we discover that Christian possessiveness of the Eucharist enabled violence against Jews via the host desecration narratives; prayer was muddied by slave-owning white women who petitioned God for their slave’s obedience; and early modernity’s baptismal celebrations enabled exclusion. These examples illustrate what I believe might be the truest damage of Christian practice, and that is the way in which they reveal Christianity’s role in the intersecting oppression of race, class, and gender. I say this with trepidation but also in recognition of a question that haunted the pages of this book for me, “Is it possible that the dangers of Christian practice exist because of colonization of Christian practice? Can we really talk about the damages of Christian practice before we talk about whose Christianity damaged those practices?” That is, if we are talking about Christianity historically and contemporarily construed, we are largely talking about a tradition that has undergone countless iterations. A Christianity whose adherents have resisted its divine impulses because of the demands of culture and the overwhelming power of dominance.

Could it be that the Eucharist, prayer, and baptism have suffered blows because of colonization, they are touched by it and that is precisely why the danger and damage exist in the first place. Winner does not make this explicit, possibly because she thinks it’s obvious, or possibly because a book like this given to people like myself will render it obvious. But the persistent claim for me is that Christian practice and Christian faith can easily become tools for oppression because people presume the tradition’s virtue eclipses its vice. At once Keziah Brevard can call Negroes “trying creatures” and ask God’s forgiveness as if the latter wipes away the former, as if the onus was not on her to wipe the stain of hatred and racism from her heart. The Christian practices alone cannot grant us virtue if we refuse to act in virtuous ways when we get off our knees. I’ve homed in on an issue about this book that is rather particular to my identity as an African American woman, but in general it feels like the inescapable reality of Christian practice in the hands of those with more privilege then and now. That is why it is possible to write a book about the damages of Christian practices without close attention to the identity of those who have damaged the practices and, truthfully, those who continue to damage the practices to this day. If we are going to talk about how the Christian practices hurt people, as Winner largely does in this book, we must think critically about the identity of those who are hurting people in the first place.

As I read through the Dangers of Christian Practice I tried to resist the impulse to racialize it, but I could not get over the fact that every account of the deformity of Christian practice rests in the hands of those for whom privilege and freedom have been unquestionable. The foundation of the Christian practices for Winner are rooted in scripture, but the history of the utilization of those practices and the damages therein are rooted in a colonization particular to the subjects of privilege. The colonization refers not just to racial colonization but a religious one in which Christianity and its practices were overtaken by individuals who had their own ideas about the utilization of the practices. It refers to the maintenance of boundaries between people that sometimes pervades Christianity—cue the cliché but true “Sundays are the most segregated day on the calendar.” I return to the scene of Keziah Brevard praying for the obedience of women enslaved under her management. Brevard petitions God to give her good feelings toward Negroes who are “deceitful and lying as any people can well be” (Winner, 58), but her prayer cannot be removed from the fact that she comes from a line of men and women who twisted Christianity toward their own ends. Brevard’s heritage is that of people who misconstrued scripture to hold people in captivity, thus the attending practices would have to follow the same. How do we understand Christian practice in light of this? Winner thinks through this by analyzing the prayers of some of our most celebrated spiritual figures, and in pitting Augustine and Merton against Brevard we discover that our prayers are not always in tune with Christian virtue and may actually foreclose that virtue altogether. Yet we must continually ask, how do we understand Christian virtue and what does it take to obtain virtue?

How does the pursuit of Christian virtue become hindered by a religious tradition flawed by its adherents, adherent who always, in some way, depend on a level of exclusion? We carry this matter of exclusion into early baptismal celebration where baptism goes wrong in its failure to properly express the extraction of the baptized from the local into the ecclesial and vice versa. Again, what deforms these practices is the desire of the individual to remain particular to their local culture and within the reach of the privileges they have always benefited from. Here Winner locates these practices in what she calls a “failure to hold that affirmation of the local in judicious tension” (98). Though she is speaking of the tension that ought to be held when grafting someone into the body of Christ from their locality, I think that Winner directs us toward the fact that we must hold all things with judicious tension, especially the Christian practices. And maybe the reality is that in the twenty-first century, when the demands of culture impinge upon our ability to participate in Christian practices well, we have no choice but to loosen the grip on our beloved Christian practices, especially as we come to grips with the divisive nature of those practices. And in loosening our grip on Christian practices as we know them, we might be able to participate in a decolonialization of the practices that makes us able to accept gifts exactly as they were intended to be received, without spot or blemish and without trying to make them what we want them to be.

I appreciate the invitation to engage Dr. Lauren F. Winner’s important work, The Dangers of Christian Practice. This work offers a necessary and welcome critique of contemporary scholarship on Christian practice(s)-scholarship that has often presented accounts of Christian practices that have failed to seriously reckon with the history of violence associated with such practices. Winner’s work is intended to intervene in this scholarship by offering a sobering account of the harmfulness of presumably good practices that have been “deformed” and “damaged” by human agents corrupted by “sin.” For Winner, however, such deformation is not simply external, but rather there is something intrinsic to each of the practices she examines that make them susceptible to certain “characteristic damage.”

Winner’s work aims to help Christians better understand the propensity of their religious practices to be deformed, anticipate such deformations, and work to avoid further damage. With reference to sacramental practice in general, and the Eucharist in particular, Winner argues “a constitutive part of practicing Eucharist—and of an account of that practice—is the tension between acknowledging that, on the one hand, the Eucharist has gone, and inevitably sometimes will go, wrong, and, on the other hand, articulating the reason to go on doing it” (46). It is this tension, which we might name as holding together a mode of confessional critique and critical apologetics, that runs through this important work.

In my view, Dr. Winner has done a remarkable job in demonstrating the ways Christian practices have and will “go wrong.” Furthermore, if her work is taken seriously, I suspect The Dangers of Christian Practice will, indeed, aid Christian communities in avoiding the perpetuation of further violence. We might even hold out hope that a serious reckoning with the implications of Winner’s work might even lead to more radical Christian practices of repentance through redressing—or making reparations—for prior damage. For these reasons alone, Winner’s work is of inestimable value. With the value of this work firmly in mind, however, The Dangers of Christian Practice leaves me with unresolved questions concerning Winner’s more daunting task of articulating compelling reasons to “go on doing” Christian practices that have been so demonstrably harmful and violent. Before turning to those questions, however, I want to reiterate and call attention to the significance Winner’s impressive historical, theological, and critical account of Christian practices.

While the entire monograph is a fascinating read, as a scholar trained at the intersections of homiletics and liturgics and black religion and cultural studies, as a fellow in a program in Theology and Practice, I am particularly interested in the chapters on “Prayer” and “Damaged Gifts.” Winner’s account of prayer is intriguing in that it analyzes the written prayers of Southern, white, slaveholding women in the antebellum period, with an eye toward their interactions with enslaved Africans (and primarily enslaved African women). To be sure, these prayers, recorded in the personal diaries of plantation mistresses, were not lifted as intercessory prayers petitioning their god for the well-being of black women. Neither were these prayers generally imprecatory prayers inviting the wrath of the Southern slave-sanctioning god upon African “savages.” Rather, these prayers read as something simultaneously more innocuous and more insidious. On Winner’s account, these prayers were petitions for both increased power over, and patience with; domination over, and docility of; restraint towards, and respect from; prayers of accusations against and affections towards the enslaved. Winner argues these power-laden prayers constitute a mode of “household management” that were directed towards a deity imagined as “a God who ordered a hierarchical world and who would inspire and demand of any slaves who knew and loved him obedience both to him and to their earthly master” (66).

Winner captures the horrifically mundane nature of these morning prayers. Such prayers were routinely written as the daily diary entries of white women slavers, sometimes after episodes of intense brutality and violence against enslaved black women, men, and children. Indeed, Winner argues that for “pious slave-owning women” such violence “became inseparable from prayer” (72). For example, she explains, “After whipping, after poking an enslaved woman’s eyes with a fork, mistresses were moved to pray—for a more obedient workforce or for patience or for protection from what they perceived to be the corrupting influence of slavery” (72). While it can certainly be argued that such prayers evince the moral depravity or “sinfulness” of the individual women articulating the prayers, Winner shows how these individual prayers are deformed by both internal and institutional logics that render them simultaneously damaged and damaging “Christian” practices.

Among Winner’s principle claims throughout the text is that Christian practices are not merely damaged because of external pressures exerted upon them by sinful human agents. Rather, she claims that inherent to the practices themselves are internal logics that render them vulnerable to deformation. In the case of prayer, and prayers of petition in particular, the danger of the practice lies in the notion of praying according to the particularity of one’s personal desires—desires that are shot through with “sin” (defined, in large part, by Winner, as “misdirected desire”). Of course, “individual desires” are shaped, at least in part, by external and/or “institutional logics.” In terms of the institutional logics that pressured and deformed the individual desires articulated in white slave-owning women’s prayers of petition, Winner points to the ways that such prayers were always already, consciously or unconsciously, prayed as a means of legitimating and reinforcing the political economy of the slave regime (76). Here, we see that the “desire” motivating the Christian practice of petitionary prayer made by the individual subjects of Winner’s study is deeply shaped by the institution of chattel slavery and the exploitative labor demanded by a Southern plantation economy.

More specifically, the desire is for obedient “slaves” that would work to maximize the profits of capitalists in a slave economy, while also reinscribing the superiority, power, and authority of whites in a white supremacist social order (and, ironically, also men in a patriarchal order). Here we observe the ways that the seeming piety of “Christian” practices of daily devotion through petitionary prayer are shot through with the violent desires of hetero-patriarchal-white-supremacist capitalism. To be sure, such Christian practices not only caused untold suffering for enslaved Africans throughout the history of the antebellum South, but also legitimated sociopolitical and economic systems that continue to perpetuate such suffering into the present.

With this argument in mind, I see in Winner’s work possibilities for reframing, in theological terms, more contemporary social-political-economic issues, such as the recent reparations debate. While those on the political right have cast all such discussions as evidence of godless, radical, leftist socialists, Winner reminds us that notions of “repair” are always already bound up with Christian theological notions of repentance, which is demanded by acknowledgment of sins that have deformed Christian practice. As Winner puts it, “Repentance also involves trying to redress the harm you caused.” Further, she insists, “Although there is never a one-to-one correlation between repentance, on the one hand, and redress and repair on the other, redress and repair often index the sincerity and depth of repentance, and some effort at redress is usually a sign of repentance to one’s larger community” (155). Thus, with reference to the dangerous Christian practice of prayer, for instance, where prayer has been used as an instrument for establishing the legitimacy of a socioeconomic hierarchy, where blacks are by divine necessity on the bottom, and where prayer has been used as a practice to sanction a political economy where white-American wealth is built on the exploitation of labor from enslaved Africans, there are significant theological grounds for taking up discussions of reparations as an explicitly Christian response to the recognition and repentance of a practice deformed by sin and damaging to those who were (and continue to be) the objects of such Christian prayers. Thus, I appreciate Winner’s work, in part, because of its usefulness as a critical tool for an explicitly theological reframing of debates on contemporary socio-political-economic issues linked to the damages wrought throughout the history of Christian practice.

So far, I have discussed the significance of Winner’s account of Christian practices as inherently dangerous and attempted to extend the implications of her work for contemporary discussions, such as reparations. In closing, I would like to wrestle with lingering questions that remain unresolved after reading her important work. Here, I want to think about the latter part of her initial assertion concerning the task of the book. Specifically, I want to consider Winner’s aim of holding “the tension between acknowledging that, on the one hand, [Christian practice] has gone, and inevitably sometimes will go, wrong, and, on the other hand, articulating the reason to go on doing it” (46, emphasis mine). While Winner has nailed the task of carefully articulating the dangers of Christian practices, when it comes to articulating reasons for continuing to participate in Christian practices that have demonstrably “gone wrong” and done considerable violence to others, especially marginalized communities, I am left wondering whether Winner offers a compelling case for going on with these practices. If I have read Winner correctly, her argument can be put succinctly, as follows: Christian practices, such as Eucharist, prayer, and baptism have gone wrong, and violently so. So, why keep doing these practices? “Because they are the only things we have, and because they are gifts from the Lord” (137).

I do not necessarily wish to quibble with the latter theological claim of whether these practices are “gifts from the Lord.” Besides, Dr. Winner gives ample attention to unpacking her understanding of the giving and reception of gifts. Rather, I am interested in the former assertion, which is asserted, but left unpacked. I am unsure what Winner means when she says these practices “are the only things we have.” Because space is limited, I am interested in thinking through the implications of this statement with reference, not only to those enslaved African women and men on the receiving end of those deformed practices of prayer, but also to contemporary descendants of the enslaved. To be sure, many enslaved Africans appropriated and continued the Christian practice of prayer in spite of the deformation and damage of the practice in the hands of their enslavers. Yet, if pressed with the question “Why go on doing it?” I wonder whether Winner’s conclusions would have been satisfactory. They may well have agreed that prayer was a “gift from the Lord,” but certainly this and other Christian practices would not have been “all they had.” To the point, enslaved African communities had access to the memories of African-derived religious practices that often supplemented and augmented “Christian” practices in ways that were sustaining to enslaved communities. Practices of divination, conjuration, amulet making, herbalism, and the like offered protection to the enslaved that was often deemed equally, if not more, potent than the practice of praying in the Christian tradition. Indeed, “prayers” to West African deities and ancestors were often held together simultaneously with Christian prayer. This is not to mention any number of ostensibly nonreligious practices, from work slowdowns to violent revolt (which, of course, for some, were conceived as alternative Christian practices!). The point being, of course that Christian practices, such as prayer, were not “all they had” in their quests for survival, freedom, thriving, and religious meaning making.

Of course, the deformation and damage of Christian practices, such as prayer, in the hands or on the lips of white supremacists is not relegated to the antebellum past. Each continued petition for God to bless America, whereby “America” becomes a signifier of a dangerous ideology and practice of white Christian nationalism, is yet another instance of the invocation of divine sanction upon an anti-black sociopolitical hierarchy. Indeed, the emergence of the contemporary movement for black lives has provoked the renewal of a perennial question in black America concerning commitments to Christian belief and practice. For many young, black, millennial activists, and everyday folks concerned with black lives, especially those who wrestle with existentially and politically fraught identifications with Christianity, Winner’s query, “Why keep doing these practices?” takes on particular urgency. Unfortunately, I am not sure that Winner’s response, as articulated in The Dangers of Christian Practice, adequately addresses the urgency or angst of the question for such individuals.

It is here, then, that I look forward to continued conversation with Dr. Winner. Beyond claims that seem to presume ongoing and/or unquestioned identifications with Christian tradition, what theo-ethical, pragmatic, and/or political significance might be claimed for “going on” with Christian practices? Are there reasons why these particular practices, and not others, do certain kinds of work that might be compelling to communities who continue to grapple with the ongoing violence bound up with the history of Christian practices? Might these practices be able to effectively intervene in the seemingly intractable injustice, violence, and suffering that damaged and deformed Christian practices have wrought and continue to perpetuate? Can theologians put forward alternative constructions of these practices that might lead to convictions concerning the efficacy of these practices in bringing about a world in which we can all thrive? These questions seem especially relevant for those communities that have historically been marginalized by Christian practices and on the receiving end of the violence of these practices. However, these questions require wrestling among all Christians who have inherited the legacy of such violent practices, especially those who seek to be “allies” in ongoing struggles for justice.