all the way down and manifests itself But if you’re Black, no matter how

deeply and thoroughly in religious life. A
parallel book could be written—and
many have been—about the conserva-
tive activists of various faiths engaged
with every major moral-political issue of
our time in wholehearted opposition to
the vision of the religious left. In red and
blue America, we live in parallel moral-
religious universes. One side’s holy cause
is the other’s abomination. It is intense to
live in such times, and Jenkins’s lively
prose captures this intensity. One won-
ders when the fever will break.
Second, the Democratic Party has a
problem with religion because its own
soul is divided into what Jenkins sug-
gests are three groups. Hard secularists
The Vanishing Half: A Novel
By Brit Bennett
Riverhead, 352 pp., $27.00
light your skin, you’ll always still be con-
sidered Black. That is, unless you desire
to walk on the side of life where privilege
prevails—and you’re able to “pass.”
Passing as White means you don’t get
followed around just because of your
presumed race. It means your work
choices are not limited to cooking and
cleaning for White people—one step
removed from slavery.
So one of the twins does just that.
When Stella moves to a new town and
her fair skin is mistaken for white, she
realizes she can get a job in an office
instead of cleaning or doing laundry. So
she decides to pass. She develops a new
life as a White woman, marries, and has a

don’t want their party investing in reli-
gious outreach or religious people,
whom they believe to be destructive.
Interfaith advocates believe Democrats
should be the party of loving, construc-
tive, liberal religious faith—which means
it must represent the vast diversity of
religious beliefs that America now
embodies. More traditional Christian
believers (like black Baptists and
Methodists, Rust Belt Catholics such as
Joe Biden, and some churchgoing main-
line suburbanites who vote Democratic)
do not want Christianity entirely ban-
ished from the Democratic repertoire.
The stark differences in vision between
these three factions of the party are very
hard to reconcile.
Finally, the religious left seems more
comfortable in the streets than in the
halls of power. The legacy of the civil
rights movement looms large. Certainly,
the Trump years have given us many rea-
sons for street protest. But if the
Democrats do win in November and the
religious left gets a place at the table in
Washington, it will need people who
know how to work the levers of power,
get laws passed, and change public policy.
It will need analysts, lobbyists, and legis-
lators as well as street protesters. Jenkins
tells us about a few religious left leaders
like this, but the energy of the book and
of the religious left seems mainly in the
streets.
I, for one, hope that January 2021 will
give our nation the chance to find out
whether the religious left can be as effec-
tive in Washington as in the streets.
D
uring a recent vacation, I picked daughter.
up The Vanishing Half and start- But she does so at a great cost. She
ed reading. I couldn’t put the relinquishes all ties to her family, includ-
book down. When I told my family what ing Desiree and their mother. She tries to
was happening inside the literary world forget the trauma of the racially motivat-
Brit Bennett creates, my ten-year-old ed tragedy that killed her father when
daughter decided that she wanted to she was young—a death that continues
read it, too. There are many reasons this to haunt the family.
novel isn’t for children. But I promised
I’d save it for her to read when she gets
older—and I will. It’s that riveting. THE UPPER ROOM
Bennett paints a realistic picture of
some of the harrowing circumstances
African Americans have had to over-
Disciplines
come. Stella and Desiree are identical A BOOK OF
DAILY DEVOTIONS
twins who grow up in an all-Black town
in Louisiana in the mid-20th century. 2021
Louisiana, my native state, has long been
known for producing a large number of
light-skinned Black people—those
who’ve inherited the melanin levels of
their White slaveholding ancestors.
In the town of Mallard, where Desiree
and Stella live, all of the residents are
light-skinned Black people. After being
freed from slavery and inheriting his
White father’s land, the town’s founder
(who was the twins’ great-great-great-
Let Your
grandfather) had “married a mulatto
even lighter than himself. She was preg-
nant then with their first child, and he
Life
Be Shaped By
imagined his children’s children’s chil-
dren, lighter still, like a cup of coffee
steadily diluted with cream. A more per-
fect Negro. Each generation lighter than
the
Word
the one before.” UpperRoomBooks.com/Disciplines
Reviewed by CENTURY community engagement edi-
tor Katara Patton.

39 Christian Century October 7, 2020