My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.

Will the new generation of Nigerian politicians deliver the change in attitudes that many had hoped for?

Updated at 11:11 a.m. ET on November 3, 2024

I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to pantomime the act of giving fellatio.

I could have put it differently. I might have said that “a cognitively impaired man, who has long been showing signs of serious emotional instability and has a history of sexism and racism, engaged in crude behavior in front of a large audience.” But that wouldn’t capture an important reality:

This deeply impaired man is tied in the race to become the next president and could be holding the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal in less than three months.

I don’t know if this bizarre display will move votes away from Donald Trump. Nothing seems to dent the loyalty of his base. Trump voters are resolute in their determination to minimize his ghastly antics, or even to scrub them from their minds. (As one commenter said on social media today, Trump’s new mantra might be: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blow somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”)

Besides, it’s always difficult to single out one terrible moment at a Trump rally when there are so many from which to choose. Last night, for example, he insisted that he won Wisconsin twice. (He didn’t.) He also took a veiled racist shot at the Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is Black. “Your team is very good,” Trump told the crowd. “I would say the Greek is a seriously good player. Do you agree? And tell me, who has more Greek in him, the Greek or me? I think we have about the same, right?” Antetokounmpo is a Greek citizen born in Athens of Nigerian immigrant parents. I am a half-Greek myself (my mother was Irish-American) and we all get the joke: A Black Greek! Get it? He’s Greek …and Black!

Trump is white, and we know this, by the way, because he told us so. During a stop in Michigan before he got to Wisconsin, Trump explained that he could have been living an easier life on the golf course had he chosen not to run for president:

That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned, beautiful.

This was not the first time Trump had made comments about his skin. But I digress, because I’d rather be talking about Trump’s clumsy racism than his hummer on a mic holder.

Look, my Greek father lived to be 94 years old. He might have found the idea of a Black Greek basketball player kind of amusing, and he might have laughed about it among his poker buddies. My dad was a working-class, shot-and-beer guy who told more than his share of sexist and racist jokes.

But if my father in his late 70s had simulated a blow job in mixed company—never mind in front of an audience that included children—I’d have brought him in for a complete neurological workup. Despite an ability to swear that rivaled the Old Man in the movie A Christmas Story, he deeply disapproved of men who swore or were crude in front of women and kids. When I would go out drinking with him, I occasionally saw him go over and caution other men whose language was getting out of hand. (He was a former cop and worked as a bouncer for a time.) Dad was not exactly Emily Post, but there were limits.

Trump, by most reports, has always been a vulgar and ignorant man. This creepy moment in Milwaukee will add to our national and international humiliation if he is returned to office. But more important, manifesting this kind of disinhibited behavior in public more and more often is a warning sign that he is simply not stable enough to sit in the Oval Office.

I do not know if Trump’s erratic behavior, his apparent physical decline, his bizarre rambles and their mental cul-de-sacs are part of a larger illness. Trump’s critics claim that he has dementia and other afflictions. I am not a doctor, and I cannot reach that conclusion. But I know this much: If Donald Trump were your father, your husband, your brother, your uncle, or merely your friend, you would insist that he see a doctor, and you would likely shield him from large gatherings where he could become an object of ridicule. You might even suggest that family or friends look in on him more often.

Whatever small mercies and considerations you might offer to a man acting like Trump, you would certainly not place him in positions of pressure or responsibility, or inflict situations on him in which he would be called upon to make speedy and important decisions. You definitely would not make him the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and place the safety of billions of innocent human beings in his hands.

The rally crowd, ever faithful and willing to do its part, laughed as Trump pretended to pleasure a piece of equipment. But for the rest of us, the laughter has to stop, and the horror of what might happen in a few days must take its place.

This article originally misstated Giannis Antetokounmpo's ethnic heritage.

Donald Trump’s history of racism is breathtaking. His track record of prejudice is so prodigious that keeping all of the incidents straight is difficult: There’s the Central Park Five, the “Muslim ban,” his response to Charlottesville. “Shithole” countries and lamenting that Nigerian immigrants won’t “go back to their huts.” The fabrications about Haitians eating pets. There’s Sunday’s horrifying Madison Square Garden rally, where Trump surrogates made racist comments about Harris and Puerto Rico. The list goes on. And grows. You would be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly racist major American politician on this side of the Civil Rights Act.

Future historians will therefore marvel at the fact that Trump has increased his support among African Americans since he was elected to the presidency in 2016. No serious person expects Trump to win anything close to a majority of Black voters in this year’s election. But months upon months of polls—from a welter of different pollsters—predict Trump substantially growing his share of those voters, particularly young Black men. In a recent poll of Black voters, 58 percent of Black men said they’d support Vice President Kamala Harris if the election were held today, and 26 percent said they’d vote for Trump—a percentage that would represent record-setting support for a Republican candidate.

Other forms of evidence—shoe-leather reporting, first-person testimony, 16 years of declining Black male support for Democratic presidential candidates, the presence of the Black manosphere—suggest that we are in the midst of a substantial racial realignment. If Democratic candidates have long benefited from Black magic—the near-universal support of African Americans—the spell has been broken for a growing share of Black men. Now Democrats, including the Harris campaign, are trying to figure out how to cast a new one. But the chances of stopping the realignment appear slim, because Black voters are both more culturally conservative and more economically liberal than the current version of the Democratic Party.

[Read: Why do Black people vote for Democrats?]

Lauren Harper Pope, a political and communications strategist, told me politicians need to start thinking of Black men—in contrast to more reliably Democratic Black women—as politically independent. “I’ve been telling people for months: Black men, Hispanic men, minority men are independent voters,” she said. “People need to look past the concept that if you’re a Black man with a college degree, you’re going to vote for a Democrat. No. Absolutely not. I’ve got plenty of Black friends who have college degrees who are from the South, not from the South, whatever, who are genuinely concerned about things the Democratic Party is doing.”

Sharon Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida, also believes that some level of realignment is happening. “I do think we have to take the polls seriously, because they are showing that Donald Trump is getting more support among Black men,” she told me. “I don’t know if the numbers are going to be as high as the polls indicate. I do think there are going to be some African Americans who are going to vote for Trump because they find him to be a better candidate.” Austin noted that the strength of the economy under Trump, as well as some Black men’s discomfort with Democratic positions on cultural issues such as abortion, trans rights, and immigration, are likely driving some of this defection.

Other political scientists who specialize in Black politics contest the idea that Black voting habits are meaningfully changing. Justin Zimmerman, a political-science professor at the University of Albany, said that the kind of frustration Black men are exhibiting isn’t new. “It’s not so much that there’s no Black political disenchantment with the Democratic Party,” Zimmerman told me. “That’s always been there.” He said that most rankled African Americans will likely hold their nose and vote for a candidate they may not be enthusiastic about, something Black voters have had to do throughout American history.

Christopher Towler, who directs the Black Voter Project and is a partner at Black Insights Research, also dismissed the notion that African Americans are undergoing a meaningful transition away from the Democratic Party. He argues that polls frequently rely on small sample sizes of Black voters, which makes getting a representative cross-section of the Black community impossible.

“You have a sample that has [18 to19] percent support for Trump, but it has a nine-point margin of error,” Towler told me. “That means it could be as low as 10 or as high as 27 percent. That tells us absolutely nothing.”

Although this point about sample size is reasonable and was echoed by other political scientists I interviewed, it fails to explain why those sample-size errors would lead to polling consistently skewed in one direction. And, more important, it discounts historical trends: Democrats have been bleeding male Black voters for nearly two decades.

Some degree of realignment was probably inevitable, given the widening mismatch between the worldview of many Black men and that of the Democratic Party. Many Black voters are quite conservative, especially culturally, and they may hold views on issues like abortion and gender that are more at home in the Republican Party. In June, the Pew Research Center released what is perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey of American opinions about fraught cultural issues. Conducted when Joe Biden was still the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Pew’s polling illustrates notable contrasts between the views of Black and white supporters of the Democratic candidate. On an array of cultural questions, Black Biden supporters were not simply more conservative than their white peers; they were more conservative than any other demographic group in the Democratic coalition.

Pew found that Black Biden supporters were the least likely to answer questions about immigrants favorably, trailing white supporters by double digits. Similarly, Black Biden voters were about twice as likely to say that “an emphasis on marriage and family makes society better off” compared with their white counterparts. And whereas only 32 percent of white Biden supporters agreed that “gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth,” 64 percent of Black Biden voters said they agreed. Black Biden voters were also much less likely than any other group of Biden voters to say they were comfortable with they/them pronouns. When the questions turned to religion, the differences were even more stark: 35 percent of Black Biden voters said “government should support religious values” and more than half—a higher percentage than among Trump supporters —said “belief in God is needed for morality.” Only 7 and 8 percent of white Biden supporters, respectively, said the same. A different Pew survey from the same period also found that majorities of Black men and Black women agreed that “the government [promotes] birth control and abortion to keep the Black population small.” Again, these polls were not conducted when Harris was the candidate, but there is little reason to believe that cultural attitudes among Black Democrats suddenly changed when she became the nominee.

Since Trump’s rise, Democrats have seemed to assume that if they yell about his racism, misogyny, and authoritarian tendencies enough, African Americans will be scared or shamed into voting for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and now Harris. Eight years ago, the Clinton campaign dropped an ad tying Trump to Ku Klux Klan members; after she lost the election, she warned that Trump supporters wanted to take away the rights of Black Americans. For this year’s presidential race, the Harris campaign has commissioned former President Barack Obama to scold Black men for allegedly being too sexist to vote for the first Black woman president. Harris is hammering messages about fascism, racism, and democracy in the campaign’s final week even though polls have shown that these talking points are among the least popular with voters of all kinds—to say nothing of the fact that Black voters have been moving toward Trump despite nearly a decade of those messages being shouted from a bullhorn.

Democrats seem unwilling to believe that a small but significant portion of Black voters might be willing to overlook Trump’s racism, and are even drawn to aspects of his nationalism, xenophobia, and traditionalism. When Biden won in 2020, many liberal talking heads cheered that “Black voters saved democracy” and heaped praise on Black “superhero women”  as part of an outpouring of awkward gratitude that several Black pundits noted was a little fetishistic and traded in “magical negro tropes.” Some progressives seem to imagine minority voters as mythical beings, electoral angels who radiate light and virtue. In their minds, the Democratic Party is a Marvel movie coalition of Nice Whites and Saintly Blacks and Browns who team up every four years to try to save the country from the Bad Whites: the hodgepodge of unsavory working-class whites and car-dealership-owning whites and Christian-nationalist whites who make up Trump’s coalition. But people of color are people, not saints or saintly monoliths, and the cost of this idealization has been a certain blindness in Democratic circles to the actual, rather than imagined, political landscape within minority communities. And it’s not just African Americans: Other male minority voters are also generally less liberal than white Democrats. Recent polls found that 44 percent of young Latino men back Trump and more than half of Hispanic men support deportations of undocumented immigrants (51 percent) and building the border wall (52 percent). These men are more than twice as likely to say Trump, compared with Biden, helped them personally.

The question, then, is what to do about these growing tensions between the cultural views of Black Americans and other minority voters and those of the Democratic Party. Despite their competing views on realignment, the experts I spoke with largely agreed that Democrats tend to take Black voters for granted, and that the Harris campaign should have started doing targeted outreach to Black voters much sooner. “What Black folks want is an identifiable, explicit agenda,” the political scientist Sekou Franklin told me, one that appeals to their unique needs and interests. He added, “That’s what they’re seeing with LGBTQ+ persons … That’s what they’re seeing with women, so they want the same thing.” Others said that some in the Black community think too much money is going to help foreign countries overseas, while Black Americans—especially Black men—struggle at home. Black Americans are among the least supportive of sending military aid to Ukraine and Israel.

[Daniel K. Williams: Democrats can’t rely on the Black Church anymore]

What Harris has offered to combat these perceptions has been less than inspiring. Trying to court young Black men with policy proposals on crypto, weed legalization, and mentorship programs—the focus of a recent policy rollout—is both confusing and condescending. One ambitious proposal, handing out loans to Black Americans on the basis of race, is very possibly illegal, and thus likely an empty promise. And although Harris has moved to the right explicitly and implicitly on a number of cultural and economic issues, there is approximately zero chance that she can outflank Donald Trump on problems such as immigration, no matter how much she wants to expand the border wall. Anyone whose primary concern is the southern border is almost certainly going to vote for the former president. So if shifting right on cultural and social issues is unlikely to move the needle, what will?

The answer is staring Democrats in the face. If Black voters are perhaps the most culturally conservative wing of the Democratic coalition, they also tend to be among the most progressive on economic issues. A survey this summer found that Black voters are almost twice as likely as other racial demographics to say that “the government should provide more assistance to people in need” and also more likely than any other group to say that Social Security benefits should be expanded. And roughly two-thirds of African Americans say that the government should have a more active hand in solving problems. Another survey found that a majority of African Americans have critical views of the country’s prison system (74 percent), courts (70 percent), policing (68 percent), big businesses (67 percent), economic system (65 percent), and health-care system (51 percent). These are issues that the Democratic Party can credibly claim to be better at addressing than Republicans.

Black voters’ realignment seems less like a sea change than something akin to coastal erosion: a grinding process that can be stopped with concerted collective effort. Democrats cannot out-Republican the Republicans on cultural issues, and it would be a fool’s errand to try. What they can do is spend the final days of the campaign playing to their strengths: loudly championing the kind of bold populist vision that is actually popular with voters, including African Americans.