black theology, Vol. 12 No.

3, November, 2014, 230250

Nat Turners Rebellion as a Process of

Conversion: Towards a Deeper
Understanding of the Christian
Conversion Process
JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS
Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium

This article considers Nat Turners 1831 slave rebellion as the culmination of a
process of conversion. In adopting this stance, this article argues that Turner is
right in his understanding that the praxis of his rebellion was a participation in
Gods grace, even when the nature of that praxis fell outside the ethical norms of
mainstream theology. This work places Turners Christian faith within the
context of the Christianity lived out by slaves, and then engages Kellers
theological reflections on apocalypse and an implicit theology of conversion in
Marcella Althaus-Reids work to show that the concurrence of a process of
conversion and rebellion has important theological implications. Seeing
Turners rebellion as a praxis of conversion can prompt a move towards a
theological understanding of conversion that understands a commitment to
God made within a community of faith to be more fundamental than the
assimilation of ones praxis to conventional ethical norms.

keywords Nat Turner, rebellion, slave religion, conversion, apocalypticism

Nat Turner spent all thirty-one years of his life (180031) as a slave in
Southampton, Virginia. While not ordained or an enrolled church member in the
official sense, it is clear Turner held religious authority within his slave community
and had deep ties to the religiosity of his fellow slaves. Nat Turner is still known in
the historical record because he led one of the largest slave revolts in US American
history. However, he is largely forgotten in the theological record. For the most
part,1 he is not seen as contributing to our understanding of God or theological

1
It is important to mention the recent publication of a dissertation on Nat Turner within theology, which considers the
rebellion in light of the prophetic violence found in scripture. See Karl Lampley, A Theological Account of Nat
Turner: Christianity, Violence, and Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1476994814Z.00000000037

 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 231

concepts. While the theological record largely forgets that non-dominant

subjects can also be theologizing subjects, the omission of Turner from the
theological record is striking because he very clearly and intensely describes his
rebellion in theological terms. We find Turners motivation for his rebellion in a
pamphlet published by Turners local attorney, Thomas R. Gray. This pamphlet, a
product of Grays discussions with Turner before Turner was executed, was
published as The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1831.2
From the Confessions, we learn that Turner ran away for thirty days, but
returned when, he says, the Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes
directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of Heaven.3 In 1828,
three years prior to the rebellion, Turner had what he described as a vision that
would motivate a particular commitment:
I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the
Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of
men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast
approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.4

In connecting this vision to the motivation for his rebellion, Turner makes it clear
that he sees himself as participating in the confrontation between Gods Kingdom
and the anti-Kingdom that characterized his social-historical context.
Following this vision, Turner planned for a rebellion and notified some of his
fellow slaves. On the night on which it commenced, Turner recounts the exchange
between himself and Will, one of the slaves in whom he had confided. As Will
arrived to the group, Turner asked him how he came there. Wills exchange with
Turner indicates that freedom or liberation was connected to the religious
motivation: he answered, his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty
as dear to him. I asked him if he thought to obtain it? He said he would, or lose his
life. This was enough to put him in full confidence.5 With his small group of
companions, Turner decided, We should commence at home on that night, and
until we had armed and equipped ourselves, and gathered sufficient force, neither
age nor sex was to be spared.6
In course of the forty-hour revolt, Turner gained recruits along the way, and his
group which eventually amounted to between sixty and eighty slaves, killed
between fifty-five and sixty-five slave holders. The historian Herbert Aptheker

2
Nat Turner and Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in
Southampton, VA (Baltimore, MD: Lucas & Deaver, 1831). Historians have debated the authenticity of the
Confessions, and it is important that one does not assume Turners voice in the Confessions uncritically. Gray certainly
had motives for publishing the Confessions, including a financial motivation and a need to assuage the fear of the
White community and show that Turners rebellion was impractical, confined to a small area, and that Turner was a
fanatic and not representative of the general slave population. It would, however, have been difficult for Gray to have
correlated Turners various visions with the historical events of his life so that they would line up as closely as they did
in the Confessions, and it thus seems that the core of the document most likely did come from Turner. See David F.
Almendinger Jr., The Construction of The Confessions of Nat Turner, in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History
and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2442.
3
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 910.
4
Ibid., 11.
5
Ibid., 12.
6
Ibid.
232 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

describes a situation after the rebellion of terror and mayhem, including

vigilante mobs that gruesomely killed slaves and free Blacks.7 While impossible to
determine how many slaves and free Blacks were killed following the rebellion,
conservative estimates are that it was at least a hundred, and possibly several times
more.8 In the weeks and months after the rebellion, the White population asserted
its control through legislation and propaganda in an attempt to hold onto the
political economy that allowed for their continued hegemony.9
Following the rebellion, Turner described his motivation as a turn towards God.
Despite his description of his revolt as a response to his commitment to God,
White-controlled newspapers portrayed Turner as a sub-human fanatic, and
distanced his motivation from any accepted religious experience. One article
likened those who fought slavery with Turner to a parcel of blood-thirsty wolves
rushing down from the Alps and called Turner a fanatic preacher, one who
pretends to be a Baptist preacher, who rebelled without any cause or
provocation.10 Another article, also pointing to Turners lack of purpose, claims
he was stimulated exclusively by fanatical revenge, and perhaps misled by some
hallucination of his imagined spirit of prophecy.11
Looking deeper than the portrayals of Turner as a fanatic, I argue that Turners
rebellion can be understood as the culmination of a process of conversion in which
one participates in Gods grace through praxis. In addition, I will argue that this
continues to be the case even when such praxis falls outside the ethical norms of
mainstream theology. In Turners case, I will show that the violence of a rebellion
particularly falls outside ethical norms, yet remains a mode of praxis that
participates in Gods grace. Seeing Turners rebellion as a praxis of conversion can
give us a deeper theological understanding of Christian conversion in so far as it
forces the development of a theology of conversion that does not cohere with
current standards of doctrinal and ethical norms.
I indicate this theology of conversion by considering Turners rebellion in light
of Catherine Kellers theological reflection on apocalypse, and particularly, the
connections between apocalypticism and rebellion. This thinking is then
supplemented by Marcella Althaus-Reids theological understanding of relation-
ships with God that are concretized in commitments made within the social-
relational fabric of indecent communities.12 In the first instance, Keller is an
important dialogue partner because she offers a critique of violent rebellions that
draw on the apocalyptic in order to justify the historical act of conquest or
rebellion. To demonstrate the theological contribution Turners narration of his

7
Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turners Slave Rebellion (New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 5771. Randolph Ferguson
Scully also provides a detailed account of the aftermath of the rebellion in Religion and the Making of Nat Turners
Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 192232.
8
Thomas C. Parramore, Covenant in Jerusalem, in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed.
Kenneth S. Greenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 70; and Aptheker, Turners Slave Rebellion, 62.
9
Aptheker, Turners Slave Rebellion, 74.
10
Richmond Enquirer, August 30, 1831. Reprinted in The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of
Source Material, comp. Henry Irving Tragle (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 4445.
11
The Constitutional Whig, August 29, 1831. Reprinted in Tragle, Southampton, 53.
12
Marcella Althaus-Reid describes the indecent as that which falls outside normative expectations, and describes
the process of indecenting within theology as doing a materialist, concrete theology which has departed from
idealist grounds of understanding in a scandalous way (The Queer God [London: Routledge, 2003], 35).
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 233

rebellion makes, it will be important to show how Turners rebellion differs from
the violent rebellions Keller has in mind, and to show what Keller misses by
ignoring the theological insights within Turners rebellion and his subsequent
narration of it. I then turn to Althaus-Reid in order to develop a theological
understanding of conversion catalyzed by Turners rebellion. I draw out a theology
of conversion that is largely implicit in her theology in order to indicate the
connection between Turners human activity and Gods activity. This will also
indicate a more general connection between praxes that are excluded, primiti-
vized, or fanaticized by the discursively powerful, on the one hand, and what is
often constituted as salvation history, on the other.
My argument will proceed according to four related steps. First, I will argue for
Turners connection to the Christian faith as it was lived out by slaves in early
nineteenth century Virginia. In placing Turner within this religious context, I will,
second, interpret his rebellion as part of the process of his deepened commitment
to his religious community and his turn towards God. Third, I will consider
Turners rebellion in light of Kellers critical reading of apocalyptic rebellions.
Fourth and finally, in conversation with Althaus-Reids theology, I will indicate the
starting points of a theology of conversion from the perspective of Turners
rebellion.

Nat Turners Faith as an Embodiment of Slave Religion

At least two religious traditions alive within Turners historical context inform his
Christianity: White evangelical Baptist Christianity that pervaded south-eastern
Virginia and the Invisible Institution of slave religion. While the influence of
White evangelical Christianity on Turner needs to be accounted for,13 I interpret
Turners religiosity to clearly emerge from the religious world of the slave
community. Indications of much stronger connections with the religious life
among slaves in Turners Confessions motivates this choice.
There are two key elements in the Confessions that connect with the wider
milieu of slave religion: (1) the complexity of the relationship between the sacred
and the secular realms, and (2) the connection between religion and rebellion.
Developing these two points of connection indicates that the tradition from which
Turner emerged has more affinities with the Christianity of the slaves, rather than
that of the slave masters, even if these two cannot be separated in any absolute
sense. Establishing this tradition that Turner situates himself within will help to
illustrate a connection between his slave revolt and a conversion experience.
Albert Raboteau argues for a tight connection between liberation and salvation
in slave religion, with salvation often taking on a double meaning, as it also

13
Randolph Ferguson Scully argues that Turners religious paradigm emerged to a significant degree out of the
evangelical Christian culture that dominated southeastern Virginia in the nineteenth century (see Scully, Religion and
the Making of Nat Turners Virginia, 218). Scullys work is helpful in so far as it situates Turner within the religious
milieu of Protestantism in the South in the nineteenth century, and shows how Turners rebellion impacted this
religious milieu.
234 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

implied earthly liberation. As a means of communicating religious faith, the

spirituals allowed for the complexity of this relationship because of their use of
images with various levels of meaning, an aspect common to West African oral
culture.14 Raboteau argues that the spirituals did not simply express a worldly
liberation couched in Christian language of salvation; rather they expressed a faith
in which the sacred and secular were thoroughly intertwined, in which following
African and biblical tradition divine action constantly took place within the
lives of men, in the past, present and future.15 Thus, Raboteau depicts an
understanding of Gods transcendence that enters into the material world, through
which the community participates. This gives rise to a way of understanding
scripture by which the community reads itself into Israels history.
This relationship between salvation and liberation has strong implications for
the understanding of the end-times in slave religion. In the spirituals, this was
often expressed within an apocalyptic worldview.16 Like the spirituals, the
Confessions is not apocalyptic literature in the technical sense of the term,17 but it
is evident that Turners Christianity operated within an apocalyptic worldview.
Turners rebellion functioned within such a view in his claim to have received
revelation mediated by the spirit that disclosed a certain knowledge about when
the eschaton would arrive, how it would arrive (the Parousia), and what it would
entail (judgment). Turners communication of this was in highly symbolic terms,
which can be seen particularly in his dualistic understanding of the cosmos and the
desire to take sides within this duality. One of Turners descriptions of a vision
gives an example of this:
I saw White spirits and Black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkenedthe
thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streamsand I heard a voice
saying, Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth,
you must surely bare it.18

As his description of this vision makes clear, Turner understands himself as

participating in the story of Gods relation with the world. This notion of
transcendence is not separated the world in the sense that it polarizes human and
divine activity, rather it involves the world.

14
See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 249.
15
Ibid., 250.
16
James Preston Byrd argues that there are significant connections between first century Christian apocalyptic
literature and slave spirituals. First, both use symbolic imagery to orally and collectively communicate their faith.
Second, like apocalyptic literature, the spirituals often refer to a dualism in which the entire cosmos is involved, and in
which hearers are to take part on the side of Jesus Christ. And third, both apocalyptic literature and the spirituals
contain an eschatological emphasis that pushes beyond time (see James Preston Byrd Jr., The Slave Spiritual as
Apocalyptic Discourse, Perspectives in Religious Studies 19 [1992]: 199216).
17
In a widely cited definition, John J. Collins defines an apocalypse as a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative
framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent
reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves
another, supernatural world (The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd
ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998], 5). While Turners vision has certain aspects of this, the combination is not
present in the Confessions. For example, in the Confessions he does not articulate a clear sense of a transcendent
reality envisaging another supernatural world.
18
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 10.
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 235

The turn towards an apocalyptic worldview makes sense within Turners

context. On a historical level, this is the worldview in which Turner was situated.
More fundamentally, however, this thinking within an apocalyptic worldview also
makes rational sense. Apocalyptic worldviews rely on divine revelation over a
received tradition or dominant rationality.19 In Turners context, the received
tradition and human reasoning was embedded within the cultural and
epistemological matrix that legitimized slavery, and thus, it is reasonable for
Turner to search for Gods transcendence in history and appeal to it as a higher
authority than a doctrine that legitimized violent oppression.
The second point of connection between slave religion and the worldview within
which Turner described the motivation for his rebellion, is the rebelliousness that
Christianity provokes. Raboteau is clear that the subversiveness that Christianity
sometimes provoked cannot be limited to explicit acts like revolt or escape. Any
form of religiosity was often in itself an act of rebellion on the slave compound.20
When the Christianity of slaves involved seeing themselves as existentially
participating in the struggle for the Reign of God proclaimed by Jesus,
religiosity itself became rebellious. This rebelliousness was expressed, for example,
when slaves often refused to see the moral norms preached to them as essential to
Christianity, and explicitly rejected them.21 Prayer was also a means of rebellion. It
provided an inner world in which slaves could be in contact with the divine,
outside the parameters of how the divine was constructed for them: In this inner,
religious world the primary value and fixed point was the will of God. And in
opposition to the slaveholders belief, the slave believed that slavery was surely
contrary to the will of God.22 We see this clearly with Turner, whose relationship
with the divine is based on the will of God that certainly, as witnessed in his
rebellion, transcends the doctrine of God preached to him by the slave master.
One of the most explicit ways in which slaves were involved in the Christian life
was manifested in their involvement, on an existential level, in biblical stories. This
practice is consistent with the first point of connection I mentioned, namely the
theological view that material or lived reality is never outside the divine reality.
Raboteau shows how reading biblical stories as part of slaves own histories could
lead to rebelliousness:
Slaves prayed for the future day of deliverance to come, and they kept hope alive by
incorporating as part of their mythic past the Old Testament exodus of Israel out of
slavery In identifying with the Exodus story, they created meaning and purpose out
of the chaotic and senseless experience of slavery.23

19
See John J. Collins, From Prophecy to Apocalypticism: The Expectation of the End, in The Encyclopedia of
Apocalypticism, Volume 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. John. J. Collins (New
York: Continuum, 1998), 157.
20
See Raboteau, Slave Religion, 305.
21
Ibid., 295301.
22
Ibid., 309.
23
Raboteau, Slave Religion, 311. This practice of reading oneself and ones community into scripture continues into
Black and womanist theology. Delores S. Williams, for example, reads the community of African American women
into the story of Hagar. See Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 1533.
236 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

Involving oneself and ones community in salvation history is a revolutionary act

in so far as it concretely manifests Gods option for the oppressed. This is precisely
what we find in Turners rebellion.
In the Confessions, it is clear Turner participated in this practice of reading
himself into scripture, and that the affirmation of the divine presence within
material reality became a form of resistance. We see Turners understanding of his
rebellion as involved in Gods story of salvation when Gray asks him if he felt he
was mistaken about the divine inspiration of his rebellion. Turner responded,
Was not Christ crucified.24 I read this as a theological claim that indicates the
subversive potential of involving ones community in salvation history. In the same
way that Ignacio Ellacura talks about the crucified people of El Salvador as the
historical continuation of Christ,25 or James Cone talks about the lynched Black
body as necessarily inflecting our understanding of the cross,26 Turner referred to
Black slaves, including himself, as the historical continuation of Christ.
By investing himself in the Christian religion as it was lived out among his fellow
slaves, which involved living out a much more complex Christianity than slave
masters imagined they were proselytizing, Turner was already engaged in an act of
subversion. The manifestation of this subversion in a revolt is one way of
consistently carrying forward the theological paradigm of Christianity as it was
lived out by slaves.

Nat Turners Rebellion as an Actualization of a Commitment to God

The interpretation of Turners narration of his rebellion as indicating an
investment in the faith that was lived out on the slave compound is crucial for
the argument that the narrative drive of his rebellion can be read as a conversion
process. The counter-violence involved in Turners response to the violence of
slavery poses the primary problem with interpreting Turners action within the
Christian tradition of the slaves. One can try to legitimate Turners counter-
violence on rational grounds as self-defense or by trying to make use of something
like the Just-War theory, but this is not how Turner presented his action. Turner
described his rebellion as theologically motivated: the violence within his rebellion
was a result of his turn towards God. Presumably, this was not a turn towards the
God preached by the slave master. This leaves at least two further options: (1)
Turners violence was a turn towards an idea of God that he concocted himself,
autonomously, or (2) he turned towards a tradition of understanding God within
the way slaves practiced and understood their Christian faith.
There are currents that interpret Turners rebellion within both of these views.
The newspaper articles referenced at the beginning of this article represent the
earliest iterations of the first view, namely that Turner responded to an
autonomously developed idea of God and as such he was a fanatic and

24
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 11.
25
See Ignacio Ellacura, The Crucified People, in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation
Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacura and Jon Sobrino, trans. Phillip Berryman and Robert Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1993), 580603.
26
See James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011).
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 237

pretend preacher. There are also contemporary, more nuanced positions that
take on this view.27 In contrast, other scholars see Turner as reflecting the larger
tradition of slave religion and Black protest movements in the Americas.28 By
looking at the Confessions against the background of what is known about slave
religion, one can make a number of telling connections. The connections, of which
I speak, are related to Turners faith and that of slave religion, more broadly. In the
previous section, I interpreted the counter-violence in Turners rebellion as
connected to the Christianity of the slaves. I see this as a much more plausible
interpretation. Demonstrating this connection will open up Turners rebellion as
an actualization of his turn towards the religious tradition of his community and
the God who emerges there. In doing this, the historical import of Turners praxis
of liberation becomes inseparable from the theological import of understanding
such praxis as participation in the relationship between the divine and the world.
As a representative of the first trajectory, Patrick Breen argues that Turner was a
marginal figure within the Black community. Making this claim opens up the
possibility of describing Turner as a religious fanatic. Breen contrasts Turners
religious motivation with the ideals of freedom and equality, which he argues
motivated the others who joined the rebellion. Breen pays particular attention to
an exchange in the Confessions between Turner and Will, which I alluded to in the
introduction. In the Confessions, as Will arrives at the meeting point, he tells
Turner that he came because his life was worth no more than others, and his
liberty as dear to him.29 Breen uses this exchange to argue that the promise of
libertynot salvationled Will to join the rebellion. In not becoming a disciple of
Turner, Will likely represented the majority of recruits.30 It is crucial that the
desire for liberation motivated some or many to join the rebellion. But it is odd,
especially in light of what we know of slave religion, that Breen draws a sharp
distinction between liberty, understood as a secular concept, and salvation,
understood as a religious, spiritual, or theological concept.
Turners response to this exchange points to the complexity of the sacred/secular
relationship in slave religion. Referring to this exchange, Turner says: This was
enough to put him in full confidence.31 Turner by no means rejected Wills
motivation. The issue here is not about discipleship, as Breen frames it, but rather
about fighting as a response to a shared condition of bearing the burden of a
historical reality contrary to Gods will. The ultimate meaning Will gives to
liberation, namely his life, connects to Turners call to rebel. Breens claim about
the myriad reasons slaves joined the rebellion should stand, but it reduces the
complexity of slave religion, and in light of Raboteaus study, misunderstands

27
See Patrick H. Breen, A Prophet in His Own Land: Support for Nat Turner and His Rebellion within
Southamptons Black Community, in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S.
Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10318.
28
See, for example, Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious
History of Afro-American People, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983); Vincent Harding, There Is a River:
The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981); and Douglas R. Egerton,
Nat Turner in a Hemispheric Context, in Greenberg, Nat Turner, 13447.
29
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 12.
30
Breen, A Prophet, 118; my emphases.
31
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 12.
238 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

slave religion, to make the following claim that these reasons were in opposition to
one another.
A much more plausible way of thinking about Turners rebellion is that his
narration of it signals that it was the culmination of a turn towards his community
and their religious tradition and the God who emerged from that space. Gayraud
S. Wilmore represents this view when he connects Turner to other slave preachers,
as well as the biblical Christian tradition more broadly:
The most important thing to know about Turner is that he was a representative of an
important group of slave preachers who discovered something White Christians had
attempted to conceal from the slaves for more than two hundred years. Nat Turner,
like others whose names are buried under the debris of the citadel of American slavery,
discovered that the God of the Bible demanded justice, and to know him and his Son
Jesus Christ was to be set free from every power that dehumanizes and oppresses.32

The attempts, starting with the media reports after the rebellion, to depict Turner
as a fanatic, excluded from the Black community, prompt Wilmore to focus on
Turners continuity with the broader religious tradition among slaves. And going
deeper, Wilmore indicates that Turner attached himself to a divine reality that
exceeded the limits of the Christian God proselytized to him. Reading the
Confessions as a theological text justifies this view, as we see that the entire
motivation is framed as a commitment to God.
As Turner describes his motivation to Gray, it is clear that his religious commitment
comes out of a calling by his community. Turner begins his confession by
connecting his rebellion to his upbringing within the community: Sir,You asked
me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late
insurrection, as you call itTo do so I must go back to the days of my infancy, and
even before I was born.33 The process of Turners calling, which occurred
throughout his infancy, childhood, and adolescence, was then confirmed to Turner
and perfected in a process of conversion during the years leading up to his rebellion.
Turner saw himself as set apart at a young age by older religious people, both
Black and White, for certain powers he had,34 and by his peers for his intelligence
and leadership ability.35 Against this backdrop of having both religious and
practical knowledge, Turner describes his superior judgment as later being
perfected by Divine inspiration in the opinion of his community.36 It is only

32
Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 64.
33
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 7.
34
After describing how people who saw him recount events at a young age that happened before his birth remarked
that he surely would be a prophet, Turner says that others strengthened this belief. And my father and mother
strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they
had always thought from certain marks on my head and breast My grandmother, who was very religious, and to
whom I was much attachedmy master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the
house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon
intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any service to any
one as a slave (Turner and Gray, Confessions, 7).
35
Turner remarks, such was the confidence of the negroes in the neighborhood, even at this early period of my life, in
my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they were going on any roguery, to plan for
them (Turner and Gray, Confessions, 8).
36
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 8; my emphasis.
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 239

after being held in confidence by his community that Turner says he therefore
studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery.37 Turners
self-imposed isolation from the slave community is thus a product of the calling
from his community to encounter the divine reality more fully. A dynamic
develops here in Turners religious worldview of separating himself from his
community in order to pray and encounter God, but at the same time receiving
religious visions that apply much more to his function within his community than
to him personally.
Ten to fifteen years before the rebellion, Turner said that when he was praying at
his plough, the spirit spoke to me, saying, Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all
things shall be added unto you.38 This religious experience confirmed for Turner
what his community had already called him to do.39 After this initial revelation,
Turner received further revelations and visions, which he eventually began to
communicate to some in his community and, he claims, they believed and said my
wisdom came from God.40 While Turner receives revelation in private, these
manifestations tie him into his community and they affirm the (religious) truth he
shares.
In the various revelations he receives, it becomes apparent to Turner that there
will be a great day of judgment, and he begins to watch for signs of Christs
return. Still over three years before the eventual rebellion, Turner says he:
heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the
Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of
men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast
approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.41

After this vision, the nature of Turners faithful anticipation of Christs return is
made clear to him.
Turner sums up his motivation for the rebellion by clarifying that it came from
his orientation towards the Kingdom of God. He emphasizes that his master,
Joseph Travis, was to me a kind master I had no cause to complain of his
treatment to me.42 Turners ambiguous escape from and return to the slave
plantation also points to this orientation. Turner references his thirty-day escape in
the Confessions, and says:
the reason for my return was, that the Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes
directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of Heaven, and that I
should return to the service of my earthly masterFor he who knoweth his Masters
will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes, and thus have I chastened
you.43

37
Ibid., 9; my emphasis.
38
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 9; cf. Luke 12:31.
39
It fully confirmed me in the impression that I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty
(Turner and Gray, Confessions, 9).
40
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 9; my emphasis.
41
Ibid., 11.
42
Ibid., 1112.
43
Ibid., 10.
240 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

There is some ambiguity regarding which master Turner refers to here. However,
in light of his subsequent rebellion, it seems to be clear that Turner is not referring
to Joseph Travis when he says his Masters will. Wilmore interprets this to be
Christs will. In light of Turners escape, Wilmore argues:
[Turner] had, in other words, been disobedient to his calling. Instead of remaining on
the plantation and waiting for the Day of the Lord, about which he had been secretly
preaching, he had yielded to impatience, to the temptation to escape alone. He had
evaded the terrible work God had called him to do and had thought selfishly only of
his own freedom and the material success that awaited him in the North.44

The nature of Turners patient waiting for the Day of the Lord contrasts sharply
with normative understandings of patiently waiting, precisely because of the
violence that is embedded within Turners waiting. I will discuss, further, this
aspect of his apocalyptic worldview in the next section, with a view towards
indicating how Turner pushes the theologian into a broader understanding of the
idea of patiently waiting.
Turners insistence that the rebellion exceeded an individual desire for liberation
becomes increasingly clear when Gray asks him whether the spirit of rebellion was
widespread, likely in an attempt to alleviate White fears. Turners response is
revealing. He denies knowledge of other planned rebellions, but then adds, I see
sir, you doubt my word; but can you not think the same ideas, and strange
appearances about this time in the heavens might prompt others, as well as myself,
to this undertaking.45 Turner understood his rebellion to be a part of a deeper,
even universal or transcendental, Christian experience. There was a spirit of
liberation, concealed by the institution of slavery and also obscured by the
religious norms of his context, which Turner oriented himself towards.
Taking the broader phenomenon of slave religion and the Confessions as a basis
indicates that Turners rebellion was a continuation and radicalization of his
communitys religious tradition. While Turner does not place himself in the
tradition of slave rebellions in terms of having direct knowledge of them, he
affirms a universal element of Christianity that prompts resistance against slavery.
This interpretation of Turners rebellion as a radicalization of the Christian faith,
on a broad level, and how it was lived out in slave religion more particularly,
opens up the possibility to describe the rebellion as a result of a fidelity to a
particular encounter with God. At the same time, however, it necessitates a
clarification of the relationship between violent rebellions that take place within
history and apocalyptic expectation.

Turners Apocalyptic Imagination within his Conversion Process

In the historical actualization of Turners process of conversion, the apocalpytic
worldview that generates his conversion is de-eschatologized. Rather than the new

44
Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 66.
45
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 18; see also Scullys discussion of this exchange, Religion and the Making of Nat
Turners Virginia, 4.
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 241

creation existing as a gift from God that has to be waited upon, Turner sees it as
his call, from God, to actualize the new creation. At first, this seems to contradict
the faithful waiting that the biblical hypomene calls for.46 But rather than
attempt to determine the legitimacy of Turners adherence to the Christian faith,
interpreting Turners hypomene, while taking into account his historical context,
allows us to see how his process of conversion challenges and re-defines normative
understandings of hypomene. It is, indeed, important to remember that the
Christianity of the slaves typically did not accommodate itself to the Bible; slaves
used the Bible and biblical stories to interpret their lived reality.47
In the book of Revelation, John creates a symbolic universe to imagine a new
reality or re-present the social reality he is confronted with,48 which has the
potential to persuade others to participate in that alternate or re-signified reality.
Turner does something similar out of his own apocalypticism. He imagines reality
in a different way than it is presented within the slave institution, and then sees
himself as participating, in a concrete way, in this trans-historical or re-signified
reality.
In an attempt to be faithful to the biblical tradition, as well as her own leanings
towards process and feminist theology, Catherine Keller develops the idea of
counter-apocalypse in her exegesis of Revelation. This development construc-
tively challenges my interpretation of Turner. Although not with reference to
Turner, Keller demonstrates the ambiguity of historical figures and movements
that draw on apocalypticism. Focusing on the cultural appropriation of the
apocalypse script in the West, Keller describes several levels on which apocalypse
has been imagined. She uses retroapocalypse to describe the conservative,
literalist use of Revelation.49 Cryptoapocalypse refers to the unconscious
fascination with apocalypse that we all take part in, which involves an
apocalypse habit of adopting a dualist mentality embedded within an explosive
futurism.50 Liberation and feminist theologians, notably Elisabeth Schussler
Fiorenza, have appropriated what Keller calls a neo-apocalypse paradigm.51
While this option for engaging the apocalypse script is oriented towards liberation
in that it sees apocalypse as a prophetic resource to address progressive concerns,
for Keller, it fails to be critical enough of Revelation and how it has been used.52 If

46
For example, in Revelation 3:10, Jesus says, Because you have kept my word of patient endurance (hypomene), I
will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. Revelation
1:9 also references the idea of hypomene: I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the
kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the world of God and the testimony of
Jesus.
47
See Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 4.
48
Whether the imagination of such a universe is a trans-historical reality, as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza argues (see
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, The Followers of the Lamb: Visionary Rhetoric and Social-Political Situation, Semeia
36 [1986]: 12346), or a re-presentation of his current context in light of the Jewish-Christian tradition, as Leonard
Thompson argues (see Leonard Thompson, A Sociological Analysis of Tribulation in the Apocalypse of John,
Semeia 36 [1986]: 14774), is inconsequential for my analysis here.
49
See Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2005), 7.
50
Ibid., 811.
51
See Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis, MD: Augsburg Press, 2005), 60.
52
See Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 1618.
242 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

Keller were to have engaged Turner, I believe she would put him within those who
use a neo-apocalpyse script.
Against retroapocalypse, cryptoapocalypse, and neo-apocalypse, Keller opts
for what she calls counter-apocalypse. Counter-apocalypse starts from the
recognition that Christians, and especially the broader western culture, are
situated within an apocalyptic habit. Our apocalyptic paradigm has colored our
historical lens, but has also created a historical situation.53 Being situated within
the apocalypse script, Keller wants to keep the potentials of apocalypse open, but
at the same time disclose the violence of the Christian truth claims that apocalypse
represents.54
Kellers attention to the violence that apocalypse can represent is important to
consider in light of Turners apocalypticism. An important question to ask is
whether the certainty with which (neo-)apocalyptic revolutions are undertaken
brings about a new messianic imperialism. Keller points to two examples of this
type of imperialism. First, when George W. Bush was asked whether he consulted
his father, a former president, before ordering the invasion of Iraq, he responded:
he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father
that I appeal to.55 In a second example, Keller makes reference to Christopher
Columbus. Keller contrasts her focus on the new creation coming down out of
heaven from God (Rev 21:2) with the modern conception of space. Unlike the
vision of its premodern fathers, which radiated upward along the vertical axis,
Keller argues that the masculinity of the idealized Columbus looks forward,
penetrating its future, piercing horizons. Its eschatology will render the planet
endlessly available to cartography, to conquest, to commodification.56
Citing his journals, Keller suggests Columbus reads the object of apocalyptic
hope, the New Creation, by God the Creator already createdand therefore
available to discovery A new approach to space became possible: the
symbolism of the new heaven and earth now reduces to geographic literalism.57
In this sense, a theological consideration of Columbus would indicate that he is
guilty of Pelagianism: Columbuss practical human action produces the hope of the
new creation, negating that it is a gift from God.
An important question Kellers reflections on apocalypse raises is how Turners
rebellion differs from the imperial conquests of Bush and Columbus. There is
certainly a difference in the goals of their rebellions and conquests/wars:
Columbuss conquest and Bushs War on Terror are the result of their desire
for the expansion of capitalist markets and neoliberal agendas, while Turners
rebellion is at the service of a community-wide liberation from the capitalist-
influenced institution of slavery. While this difference in the agendas of Columbus
and Bush, on the one hand, and Turner, on the other, is important, there is also a

53
Ibid., 1213.
54
Ibid., 19: Counter-apocalypse dis/closes: it would avoid the closure of the world signified by a straightforward
apocalypse, and it would avoid the closure of the text signified by an anti-apocalypse [T]he slash through the
mystagogic terms of the canonical history of disclosure is drawn in penance for, in interruption of, the history of anti-
Jewish, anti-flesh, anti-pagan, anti-female Christian truth claims.
55
Keller, God and Power, 135.
56
Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 153.
57
Ibid., 159.
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 243

difference in the location out of which their agendas are framed. This points to a
theological difference grounded in my interpretation of Turners rebellion as a
process of conversion. Turners rebellion is a response to his encounter with the
divine, and a product of his communitys affirmation that he exists within Gods
grace. Turners love for his community and for God, his desire that grounds his
apocalypticism, comes out of his encounter with the divine. His process of
conversion is not an assimilation of this love into the type of hypomene that slave
masters demanded from their slaves; it is a deepening of his love into a praxis that
participates in Gods grace. If hypomene is grounded in love for and fidelity to God
and community, Turners rebellion brings forth an alternative option for
conversion. His rebellion brings forth the instability and potential of the tension
between already participating in eschatological salvation and being within the
power of Gods judgment and a future that is far off. The instability results in a
patient endurance, or what Schussler Fiorenza translates as consistent
resistance or staying power.58 This is a dynamic that individual desires cannot
supersede. Turners return after running away makes this clear. This dynamic also
reveals, however, a form of resistance that can no longer be nonviolent.
Turner points to the radical possibility of this tension most clearly in the
Confessions when Gray asks him if he is mistaken in his mission, and what I am
calling his conversion, now that he awaits his execution. Turners response, Was
not Christ crucified, reveals his consciousness of his emerging wholeness in God,
despite his impending execution. His rebellion was a response to the negation of
this emerging wholeness. It responded to the fact that capital and White supremacy
had taken hold over the apocalyptic tension.
Turners process of conversion indicates a theological understanding of
conversion that is broader and more universal than the historical manifestation
of his rebellion. The rebellion indicates that conversion can be seen as a turn
towards the force of liberation, towards love, which is in fact a turn towards God.
While I have shown how Kellers idea of counter-apocalypse and love can be
critical of Turners rebellion, and is a much-needed dialogue partner for his
actions, his rebellion also brings to the fore the love that irrupts from the borders
of the Christian tradition and societal norms. Turner shows that the love, the
desire for justice, that exists outside of, or opposed to, the processes of western
modernity, can be a desire sheds light on the Queer God that Marcella Althaus-
Reid envisions.

Turners Rebellion and a Theology of Conversion

In this article, I have established that Turners rebellion can be understood as a
radicalization of the commitment to the religiosity within the slave community. I
have also demonstrated how his apocalyptic worldview challenges standard
interpretations of apocalypticism. I will now present an understanding of the
praxis of the rebellion as the culmination of a conversion process. Turners process
of conversion remains on the borders of Christianity in so far as his fidelity to God

58
See Schussler Fiorenza, The Followers of the Lamb, 134.
244 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

remains tied to the God who emerges outside the parameters of mainstream
Christianity. This makes it necessary to specify the theological understandings of
conversion I employ in assessing Turners conversion. Catalyzed by my reading of
Turners Confessions, I draw out three aspects of what I see as an underlying
theology of conversion in Althaus-Reids work that deepen an understanding of
Turners rebellion as a conversion experience.
First, Althaus-Reid demands a shift in the spaces where we encounter revelation.
Rather than using doctrine as a starting point, she affirms that we encounter the
divine within our encounter with material reality, and particularly, peripheral
realities. Second, conversion entails fidelity to the understandings of God that
emerge from relationships not sanctioned by the neoliberal ethos, and often
necessitates disloyalty to ethical and theological norms. Third, conversion
culminates in seeing this fidelity, manifested in ethical betrayals, as a mode of
holiness, and thereby refuses the need to legitimize this fidelity through
mainstream theology. I bring in Althaus-Reids theology because she pays
particular attention to relationships that have been made indecent, relationships
emerging in spaces that have been pushed outside of accepted traditions, as places
where God self-reveals. Althaus-Reid focuses on the indecency of deviant sexual
relationships, although her theology has implications for indecent relationships,
with others and with the divine, beyond sexuality.
1. Althaus-Reid opens up new theological loci in her turn from theological/
ideological norms to the lived reality of excluded and suffering peoples. The loving
relationships that take place within these excluded sites are privileged sites of
encounter with the divine. Althaus-Reids theological project is largely about
forcing theological loci that are hidden within orthodox theologies. An encounter
that reveals something of who God is, despite being outside the parameters of
understanding within dominant theologies, implies a need to shift the geography
of reason, as decolonial theorists have described it.59 This, as a corollary, means a
shift within a theological context, necessitating the geographical shift of
revelation. Christian theological knowledge starts from sites within the periphery
because of who God is: God is incarnated at the gates, in the relationships of
people who have been denied a ground on which to stand.
The revelation that Turner found to be crucial was not the same as that which
was preached to him by his master; Turner interacted with Gods revelation in
light of his communitys concern for how they fit into Gods story of liberation. As
I already indicated, Turners Christianity was marked by aspects that Raboteau
finds to be consistent with slave religion, including the idea that slaves were
actively involved in Gods history of salvation. When Turner explains the reason
for his rebellion to Gray, this involvement of the community is crucial:
Knowing the influence I had obtained over the minds of my fellow servants by the
communion of the Spirit whose revelations I often communicated to them, and they
believed and said my wisdom came from God. I now began to prepare them for my

59
This is the motto for the Caribbean Philosophical Association. See http://www.caribbeanphilosophicalassociation.
org.
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 245

purpose, by telling them something was about to happen that would terminate in
fulfilling the great promise that had been made to me.60

Turner found the legitimacy of his claims for slaves inclusion in Gods story in his
communitys affirmation of his knowledge that came out of his communion with
God. Gods wisdom is something that implicates the slave community and
demands action, and its implications are worked out within Turners relationship
with his community.
2. Althaus-Reid recognizes that loyalty to the God revealed on the borders
requires an indecent fidelity. She calls this a loyalty to the Queer God, who is
manifested in people whose lifestyle and values are not easily assimilated by
capitalist spirituality.61 In line with how God discloses Godself biblically,
Althaus-Reid affirms that God emerges as a stranger at the gates of Hegemonic
theology, amongst loving expressions of relationships at the margins of the defined
and decent and proper in Christianity.62 It is this way that God emerges in history
to which conversion, through Althaus-Reids theological lens, pertains. Because
she sees the divine to emerge in relationships outside the normative parameters of
understanding and outside the canonical tradition, conversion for Althaus-Reid
entails ethical betrayals:
Feminist Theologies represent an authentic Christian conversion, a turning away from
the structures of patriarchal sin and a reading of the Scriptures which throws the texts
into crisis. And there is no turning back. Conversion, it goes without saying, is about
ethical betrayals. It means turning our backs on a whole ideological symbolic order
that is sinful. Conversion takes us into the holiness of betrayals, the unveiling of
ideologies of death.63

Conversion obliges us to betray ethical and theological norms when confronted by

those who suffer as a result of these norms. This turn is based on a theo-logical
presupposition: In Queer Theology the grounding of the theological reflection lies
in human relationships for it is in the scenes of intimacy and the epistemology
provided by those excluded from the political heterosexual project in theology that
unveilings of God may occur.64 The turn that for Althaus-Reid grounds the
conversion experience is a turn towards denied parts of reality and human
intimacy. Who God is, and how Althaus-Reid understands God to emerge,
motivates this turn.
Turners rebellion amounted to a colossal ethical betrayal. It is for this reason
that it was necessary that he be so roundly rejected after the rebellion as a fanatic
and discredited as a preacher. Gray still cannot believe the lack of ethics of the
rebellion as he introduces the Confessions: No cry for mercy penetrated their
flinty bosoms. No acts of remembered kindness made the least impression upon

60
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 9; my emphasis.
61
Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 158.
62
Ibid., 171.
63
Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity and God
(London: SCM Press, 2004), 3.
64
Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 114.
246 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

these remorseless murderers.65 We find a need to reaffirm the legitimacy of

the ethics of slavery in the newspaper articles and Grays comments in the
Confessions. But this is never a concern of Turners. As we see in the Confessions,
Turner continues to see his ethical betrayal as a commitment to God.
3. This leads to a further implication for a theology of conversion within
Althaus-Reids theology: the need to resist incorporating the ethical betrayals that
accompany fidelity to God into the mainstream, what she calls a process of
straightening, and instead imagine the possibility of a Queer holiness. In this
sense, Queer theology does not just provide a starting point that is eventually
brought into traditional theological norms; rather, Queer theology maintains its
border position. Althaus-Reids interpretation of Rahabs conversion in Joshua 2,
in which she helped the Israelites to capture her own city of Jericho, indicates the
violence of the process of straightening and opens up the alternative of
converting into a Queer holiness.66
For Althaus-Reid, the way the Deuteronomist presents the story of Rahabs
conversion implies a contrast between, on the one hand, loving God, and on the
other, loving oneself and ones community and culture. Even if some exegetes read
the story of Rahab as God making an option for the poor,67 Althaus-Reid argues
that the imposition of a God who demands a turn from ones community towards
a more orthodox option is a violent process of theological straightening. For
Althaus-Reid, Rahab become[s] straight by choosing orthodoxy, mono-
loving, mono-fidelity, and her own security, over a commitment that emerges
out of the concerns of her community.68 For Althaus-Reid:
There is a lesson here for the Queer theologian. She should remain faithful to the theo/
logics of the potlatch by declaring her site at the margins as a non-negotiable site of
Grace and freedom. Rahab is an example of a woman saving herself and her closed
community (her family) without being herself a salvific presence. Instead she
excommunicates her nation. For one thing leads to another and one betrayal leads
to the entombment of nations and the destruction of the walls which circumscribe the
loving communities of the Other and their neighbourhoods.69

When Rahab turns from the divine emerging in her community and towards a
doctrine given to her, she becomes a destructive rather than salvific presence.
When Gods presence in the denied parts of reality is concealed, Gods grace is
limited to those who straighten themselves. When this happens, the mediation of
Gods revelation is confined to a narrow epistemic tradition. This limits conversion
to a turn towards a God mediated within particular western frameworks.
Turner never straightened himself, even after he was captured. He maintained
his understanding of his praxis as participating in Gods grace, in a Queer
holiness. He describes the impetus for the rebellion to be based on a holiness

65
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 4.
66
See Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 8285.
67
See, for example, Edesio Sanchez Cetina, Joshua, in The International Bible Commentary, ed. William R. Farmer
(Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 2004), 584.
68
Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 105.
69
Ibid., 107.
 NAT TURNERS REBELLION AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION 247

found outside the ethics of White institutional religion: I sought more than ever to
obtain true holiness before the great day of judgment should appear, and then I
began to receive the true knowledge of faith. And from the first steps of
righteousness until the last, I was made perfect; and the Holy Ghost was with
me.70 Turner maintained his Queer theological position. This is seen in his
response to Grays question of whether he finds himself mistaken. Turner counters
with the question, Was not Christ crucified. It is also seen in Grays comment
about Turner introducing the Confessions: He makes no attempt (as all the other
insurgents who were examined did,) to exculpate himself, but frankly acknowl-
edges his full participation in all the guilt of the transaction. He was not only the
contriver of the conspiracy, but gave the first blow towards its execution.71
More fundamentally, Turners resoluteness in his position is seen in a comment
that Gray makes about Turner at the end of the Confessions:
The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions,
the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains
of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered with
chains; yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above
the attributes of man; I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.72

Despite calling Turner a fanatic and belittling his religion, and also despite Turner
being chained in a prison awaiting his execution, Gray is frightened of Turner. This
fear, as I read it, stems from Turners steadfastness in his conversion and his refusal
to straighten himself to conform to the way the White population defined its
religiosity.
These three elements of an implicit theology of conversion within Althaus-Reids
work are highly suggestive. In summary, they include, shifting the geography of
revelation, fidelity to the God who emerges on the margins of society and
institutional religion, and embracing Queer holiness. These elements prompt me to
see Turners rebellion as opening up a new way of understanding conversion from
a theological standpoint. They also indicate a theological understanding of
conversion that is made evident in a mode of praxis that transcends the ethical
norms of mainstream theology.
Turning towards the God presented in the institutional church and being a
salvific presence in his community were mutually exclusive options for Turner. He
thus fully invested himself in the God he encountered within the slave compound
and refused to straighten this encounter. Althaus-Reids theology opens up a
theological space for this refusal. She imagines the possibility of Gods grace in the
relationships that emerge out of Queer historical sites.73 Through her rejection of
an understanding of conversion that limits itself to the manifestation of praxes

70
Turner and Gray, Confessions, 10; my emphasis.
71
Ibid., 4.
72
Ibid., 19.
73
When entering into Queer holiness, the rebellious subject refuses to form a new (imposed) identity. She does not
convert but remains stubbornly firm in what she is or has become, independently of any theological colonial claim
upon her soul Conversion has been a colonial and neo-colonial enterprise in which globalization still partakes.
Religious conversion when imposing an absolute does not give space for options (Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 167).
248 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

sanctioned by mainstream theology, Althaus-Reids theology opens up options for

an understanding of conversion that maintains fidelity to material relationships
within a marginal community. The rebellion Turner led, which he envisioned as a
radical turn towards the God who emerges on the margins, and also a radical
commitment to his calling by that God, indicates the need to engage such an
understanding of conversion.

Conclusion
Even though nonviolent resistance has been emphasized in (White and revisionist)
historical accounts of Black religiosity,74 I have shown that Turners rebellion is
not a product of a solitary religiosity separate from the Christian faith of the slave
community. It was, as I have argued, a radicalization of the Christianity lived out
by enslaved Africans. Turners response to institutional slavery by leading a
rebellion was certainly not the only possible culmination of a conversion to the
Christian faith that was lived out by the slaves, but it is one such culminating
point. The concurrence of a process of conversion and a rebellion has important
implications in the contemporary context. It indicates how concrete action can
indicate loyalty to an encounter with the divine within a community, even when
the historical action takes forms that are not sanctioned within the discursively
dominant articulation of theological and ethical norms.
While Catherine Kellers theological understanding of apocalypticism, in
conversation with scholars of slave Christianity such as Albert Raboteau, helps
to clarify Turners apocalyptic worldview, Marcella Althaus-Reids theology helps
to ground a theological understanding of conversion from the narrative Turner
presents in the Confessions. Althaus-Reids focus on excluded and indecent
realities to uncover as yet undisclosed layers of theological understanding provides
a framework in which we can better understand the theological implications of the
Confessions. Her theology, when read in light of Turners rebellion, can help to
move towards a theological understanding of conversion that understands a
commitment to God made within a community of faith to be more fundamental
than the assimilation of historical praxis to conventional and mainstream ethical
norms.

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Notes on contributor
Joseph Drexler-Dreis is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Theology and
Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium, and one of the coordinators of the Centre
250 JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS

for Liberation Theologies there. His research focuses on questions regarding how a
theology of liberation can respond to the contemporary context of coloniality.
Specifically, he is working on developing a decolonial theology using Frantz
Fanons praxis and theorization of love as a basis. Recent publications include:
The Irruption of Love, the Irruption of the Beloved: Reciprocity in the
Preferential Option for the Poor Voices, EATWOTs Theological Journal 1
(2013): 89102; and Decoloniality as Reconciliation, Concilium: International
Journal of Theology 1 (2013): 11522.
Correspondence to: Joseph Drexler-Dreis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, Charles Deberiostraat 26 bus 101,
3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email: Joseph.drexler-dreis@theo.kuleuven.be
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