Hope With Receipts

A Womanist's Search for God in Times of Crisis

I've spent more hours than I care to count hunched over ancient texts, parsing Hebrew verbs and squinting at Greek participles, trying to make sense of stories in the Bible that—let's be honest—sometimes leave me caught between reverence and exasperation, wondering if this is a sacred calling or just learned compulsion.

Let’s be honest: the Bible is a violent text. Blood-soaked, if we're being real. Slavery, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, deportations, gender-based violence, crucifixion: these aren't just theological puzzles to solve with a seminary degree and good intentions. These are texts of terror—scriptures that have blessed the unspeakable and sanctified the savage.

I am a Black woman who writes and talks about religious texts for a living. I'm an ordained minister, a Sunday School teacher, a church girl (yes, I said it, and I'm not ashamed). For me, scholarship and faith are never neutral—they're always in service of a moral vision that refuses to leave anyone behind.

But here's the thing that keeps me up at night: We're all struggling right now. All of us. Watching deportations ramp up, voting rights erode, federal agencies gutted, DEI programs dismantled, universities under attack. We're all looking for signs of resistance, for hope, for some indication that this nightmare has an expiration date.

Even those of us who not only study religion but do religion—people of faith across traditions—are asking the same desperate question that echoes throughout scripture: Where is God?

It's the question on the lips of biblical people in their darkest hours. Job sitting in ashes. The psalmist crying out from the depths. Even Jesus on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I struggle with this question daily. And yet I believe—stubbornly, persistently—that drawing on faith traditions is critical to mapping a new future. Not just for religious folks, but for liberation scholarship as a whole, and womanist scholarship in particular.

This is where womanism offers something distinct from other approaches to resistance. I'm deeply indebted to black feminism for teaching me to name and resist patriarchy, to see how gender shapes power, and to refuse to settle for crumbs when we deserve the whole feast.

But what makes me a womanist (a term Alice Walker proposed as far back as 1983 as an alternative to feminist) and what keeps me a church girl, a minister, a stubborn believer in the possibility of transformation—is the way womanism insists we can be whole. Spiritual and radical. Faithful and fierce. Churched and critical.

While my black feminist sisters often approach religion with necessary suspicion, womanism approaches it with what I call "invested interrogation." We are committed to the study, drawn to the history of how Black women torchbearers drew on the Bible and their faith, and determined to make it empowering and healing for the large swaths of Black women who continue to seek solace from it.

Just look around: The same book that has been weaponized to justify the worst kinds of evil has also fueled the most powerful resistance movements in history. The same text used to bless slave ships also inspired abolitionists. The same scriptures that have silenced women have been the wellspring for women's prophetic voices.

It's messy, it's maddening, and—like it or not—it's part of our heritage. The Bible is a paradox wrapped in ancient leather and modern controversy, and we need every tool we can get right now.

So where do I draw strength in these terrifying times? Do I have special tea leaves or mystical entrails that I study?

Prayer is the answer I expected to give, and I do—I do, I do believe in prayer. But I also believe in giving shout-outs (and financial support) to those with boots on the ground doing the actual work of resistance.

I listen to podcasts like Stacey Abrams' "Assembly Required" and Kimberly Atkins Stohr's "Just by Design" and Rachel Maddow's "Ultra" and Jemar Tisby's "Footnotes"—voices that focus on how change actually happens, not just how bad things are.

I read posts by folks like Heather Cox Richardson and Brian McLaren and Obery Hendricks here on Substack—people who write about where resistance is taking place, the flood of counter-lawsuits being filed, how nations have overthrown regimes like this in the past, voices emerging in protest.

Jesus' admonishment that we are to "watch and pray" is a call to both alertness and seeking God's guidance, particularly in times of difficulty. The watching part means I'm reading and listening across disciplines and points of view, keeping up with those with expertise in areas other than mine.

The endless parade of executive orders designed to harm and divide fill the news everyday, but those who write about where hope is stirring, how resistance is building, what victory might actually look like have to be sought out.

This is where womanism offers something that other approaches sometimes miss: the insistence that another world is not just possible but inevitable, because transformation is written into the DNA of the universe itself.

The radical left excels at deconstructing power, naming oppression, and demanding equality. But some of us have to commit to tinkering with hope in dark places, what AnneMarie Mingo refers to as “theo/moral imagination.” Envisioning not just the absence of oppression but the presence of wholeness. Not just equal access to broken systems but transformed systems that serve everyone.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the conversation got stuck in tired talking points. But we need a deeper imagination that asks: What if God's justice looks like every woman having not just the right to choose, but the resources to raise children safely? What if the sacred is found in honoring women's agency rather than controlling their bodies?

This isn't just theory—it's rooted in black women's lived experience of fighting against coerced reproduction, forced sterilization, and medical racism. That's why the reproductive justice framework emerged from black women's organizing: the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to parent in safe communities.

Womanism's gift is not just critique of what's wrong, but preferably boldly reimagining what justice looks like. While Black feminism approaches these questions about justice and resistance with what Brittney Cooper aptly calls "eloquent rage," womanism approaches them with what Mitzi Smith describes as a bold, unapologetic clarity—rooted in lived experience, sacred memory, and a refusal to be silenced.

There's a song Lizz Wright sings that stops me in my tracks—her smooth jazz voice wrapping around the words: "God Specializes." The lyrics are simple:

God specializes in things thought impossible
And He can do what no other power can do

When I hear those words, I think about all the times this ancient text has surprised me with possibilities I couldn't see. Hagar finding water in the wilderness. Hebrew midwives defying Pharaoh. Mary declaring that God scatters the proud and lifts the lowly.

I think about Sister Thea Bowman, who brought her whole self—Black, Catholic, and unapologetically joyful—to her ministry, never stopping her work of transformation even while battling cancer. I think about JoAnn Robinson, the real force behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott, whose organizing was driven by her faith as a member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, mobilizing thousands while the male leadership got the credit. I think about all the unnamed women who kept communities alive during slavery, Jim Crow, and every other attempt to crush our spirits.

Women walked to work during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Don Cravens/Getty Images

That's what I hold onto in these dark times: what I call hope with receipts—a grounded, eyes-wide-open kind of hope. It's sustained by the thinkers, podcasters, and truth-tellers I follow, whose sharp analysis and moral clarity remind me that resistance is alive and well. Their voices help me believe that change isn't just possible—it's already stirring.

The future isn't about choosing between faith and politics, tradition and transformation. It's about what happens when we refuse to fragment ourselves, bringing our whole selves—sacred and radical, faithful and fierce—to the work of liberation.

Where is God in times like these? God is in the resistance. God is in the truth-telling. God is in the refusal to let darkness have the last word. God is in the networks of people working for justice, in the voices decrying fascism, in the stubborn insistence that another world is possible.

That's what womanism offers: not easy answers or spiritual bypassing, but conviction that God specializes in the impossible. And in times like these, we're working on some serious impossibilities.

The changes we are praying for won't happen overnight or through grand gestures alone. They'll emerge gradually through countless small acts of resistance—often unnoticed, sometimes unsung, but always necessary. With help from above. That's how transformation has always worked, and that's how it will work now.

So I keep reading, keep listening, keep praying, keep preaching and teaching, keep supporting those doing the work. Because if people of faith in the Bible and in modern times have taught me anything, it's that the question "Where is God?" usually gets answered not with a voice from heaven, but with ordinary people doing extraordinary things in impossible times.