Part 2: 2021-2025
2021
Artifact I: Who Gets to Define the Sacred? Religious Classification, Power & Black Religious Thought
Permalink Cluster:
Lil Nas X, “Not God” exposition — April 13–20: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.Ifá + Bible, Christian Moralizing & Other Inherited Stories Part 1, Part 2.
Text: Across several months in 2021, I repeatedly returned to questions of religious classification: what Christians identify as divine or demonic, which practices are authorized as legitimate ways of knowing God, and how those classifications intersect with race, sexuality, colonialism and institutional power. These artifacts also document my increasing engagement with comparative Black religious thought and my use of Unfit Christian as both a site of public theological argument and communal religious inquiry.
Artifact II: The Rule Is Not the Same Thing as Justice
Permalink: Sha’Carri RUns On
The Richardson controversy became an aperture into a broader question I had already been asking across other domains: whether the existence of an authoritative rule is sufficient evidence of its legitimacy. I moved from the technical mechanics of drug testing to the racial history of American cannabis policy and the unequal consequences produced by ostensibly neutral regulation. The cultural event was the entry point; the object of inquiry became policy, punishment and institutional authority.
2022
Artifact I: Christianity Under Interrogation
Permalink Cluster: Love the Sinner Hate the Sin is BS, but Here’s Why, Can We Ever Decolonize Christianity, What Do I mean when I say decolonize your faith?, Good Friday, Holy Week.
This cluster documents Instagram functioning not simply as a site for distributing finished ideas, but as a serialized container for sustained public theological inquiry. Across multiple platform-native carousels organized around the liturgical calendar, Thomas develops an argument incrementally—defining terms, posing questions, rereading scripture, interrogating inherited theology, and moving from structural critique toward theological reconstruction.
What would it actually mean to decolonize Christianity if colonial power has shaped not only its institutions, but its doctrines, images of Christ, definitions of legitimate religious practice, and interpretations of liberation? Can Christianity be decolonized without allowing some of what Christianity has constructed to die? Intellectual movement of this series navigates colonization → dogma → power → domination → death → grief → memory → transformation → reconstruction → liberation.
What Persisted: My recurring concern with the relationship between religion and domination; power and freedom; inherited systems and their presumed legitimacy; and the possibility of dismantling structures without surrendering what may remain liberatory within the tradition itself. The series also demonstrates my increasingly constructive movement in public theology where critique does not end with identifying what must be dismantled, but asks what practices, institutions, and ways of understanding God might be built in their place.
Artifact II: Political Theological Synthesis
Permalink: https://www.unfitchristian.com/post-roe-protest/
Text: The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the immediate wave of protest following the decision serves as the aperture of this analysis. What makes political resistance materially consequential rather than temporarily expressive? If protest alone does not threaten the institutions exercising power, what kinds of collective sacrifice, economic disruption, civic infrastructure, and sustained participation would actually be required to make resistance costly enough to matter? The essay moves from the immediate political outrage surrounding the end of Roe into an examination of the material conditions that constrain collective action. Rather than treating insufficient resistance as simply a failure of individual courage or political will, Thomas considers how economic precarity, commuting and employment structures, individualism, and weak civic infrastructure make sustained boycotts and other forms of collective disruption difficult to maintain. The question therefore shifts from why aren’t people protesting enough? to what social and economic conditions would make durable collective resistance possible?
2023
Artifact I: Guardians of A Supremacist Galaxy
Permalink Cluster: Tyre Nichols & Institutional Policing: Part 1, Part 2. Palestine vs. Empire, Black Zionism, Our God Stories.
Text: After the visibility of Palestine’s decades long struggle for freedom reach incomparable global visibility thanks to the ability to livestream death into the palm of our hands, I widen the same inquiry of the supremacist state that began the year across national borders and into empire, land, theology, propaganda, and settler colonialism.
Artifact II: Lateral Domination & the Systems That Socialize Us
How does supremacy reproduce itself through ordinary people—including people whom its hierarchies also subordinate—through identity, gender, religion, culture, economic aspiration, moral judgment, media, and social participation?
Permalink Cluster: 1: 8/27/23 media literacy → 10/2/23 theological illiteracy → 8/7/23 intersectional supremacy→ 12/22/23 pay equity and gender disparity
Cluster 2: 7/24/23 cis women womanhood→ 7/24/23 Carrying water for patriarchy→ 8/1/23 Transmisia & Shae Sibley→ 8/2/23 Politics & Optics of Queer Femme Bodies
Text: I spent this year repeatedly interrogating the gap between what social systems appear to be doing and the material, ideological, institutional, and economic mechanisms through which they actually operate. Across media, theology, racial discourse, and cultural labor, the posts challenge forms of public “literacy” that mistake visibility for security, credentials for liberation, content for information, and individual identity for structural position. I also learned to watch how domination becomes difficult to recognize when people misread the systems through which it operates. Cluster 2 asks how domination becomes self-reproducing when subordinated people adopt and enforce its categories against one another.
2024
Artifact I: TikToks, No, Public Lectures in the Instagram Hall
Permalink Cluster: Public Lecture: The Montgomery Bus Boycotts & the 2024 Election, Public Lecture: Who Will Survive in America?, Public Lecture: We Are Not Your Colonizers: A Brief History of Black Political Activism for Palestine
Text: As Andre 3000 told John Legend, “Sometimes you gotta step from behind that piano! And let ’em know what’s going on!” This year I came from behind the keyboard and put a face to the vice my years of writing had already forged. This cluster documents the increasing role of oral public pedagogy within my intellectual practice. Delivered through long-form and extemporaneous digital video, the lectures move between historical memory, contemporary political events, Black political thought, empire, colonialism, electoral strategy, and collective survival. Unlike the written artifacts elsewhere in the archive, these lectures also document Thomas’s capacity to formulate and sustain interdisciplinary arguments orally, drawing upon accumulated knowledge and returning disparate examples to a governing structural inquiry.
Artifact II:Freedom, Violence, & Legitimation
Who possesses the power to define the conditions under which human beings may live, suffer, resist, survive, and call themselves free?
Permalink Cluster: D. Danyelle Thomas for Ebony Magazine, What is Freedom? Liberation in a Time of Genocide. From the Unfit Christian Instagram Periodical, It’s Mother’s Day in America, Domestic Terrorism, An American Pastime.
Text: I spent 2024 asking who gon check me boo—both of my own intellectual sovereignty and that of our global powers. Wars, genocides, snd rumors of wars left my writing to interrogate what institutional mechanism possesses sufficient jurisdiction to constrain sovereign authority? How does power determine what counts as freedom, legitimate violence, necessary suffering, and permissible resistance in the first place?
2025
Artifact I: The Gospel According to Power — The Unfit Christian Instagram Periodical
What becomes visible when claims about holiness, scripture, salvation, belonging, morality, and Christian witness are interrogated by asking whom they protect, whom they discipline, and what relations of power they preserve?
PermalinkCluster: Rev. Budde & the Black Coalmine Canaries. From the periodical— White Supremacy Isn’t Just Loud It’s Calculated, The greatest trick whiteness ever pulled? Convincing us white women were innocent, WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIONALISM IS NOT THE SHADOW OF AMERICA-IT’S THE BLUEPRINT, If the gospel you heard came with debt-start over, TRANSPHOBIA ISN’T DEFENDING HOLINESS.
YOU’RE DEFENDING HIERARCHY, You can’t heal what you’re still trying to join, Already Holy 🏳️🌈, The Violence of Bad Theology, When Gospel Protects Power
Text: The2024 publication of my trade nonfiction work The Day God Saw Me as Black was not the terminus of my public wrestling with the interventions of power, theology, or systemic thinking. In 2025, I returned to Christian language as a site of interrogation, asking what becomes visible when theological claims are examined through the relations of power they authorize and preserve. Across whiteness, Christian nationalism, capitalism, gender, sexuality, belonging, scripture, and institutional violence, this periodical repeatedly tests religious claims against their material consequences: Who is protected? Who is disciplined? Whose suffering becomes sanctified? Whose power becomes mistaken for divine order? Rather than treating harmful theology as merely a problem of incorrect interpretation or individual prejudice, these artifacts examine the institutional and ideological work theology performs—how religious language can naturalize hierarchy, convert domination into holiness, and teach people to experience submission as faithfulness. At the same time, the series asks what remains of Christian witness when liberation, rather than control, becomes the measure of its fruit. The recurring inquiry is therefore not simply whether a theology is doctrinally defensible, but what kind of world its gospel makes possible—and for whom.
Artifact II: The Cost of Liberation: Power, Survival & the Problem of Moral Performance
What does liberation require when moral conviction must operate inside systems that distribute power, vulnerability, survival, and consequence unequally?
Permalink Cluster: American Prison Labor & The Palisades Fires, 2024 Election Post Mortem, Antiblackness, the Soul Sickness of a Nation, Lenten Season Reflection, Never Grow Old, Palm Sunday & Environmental Racism
Text: In 2025, my inquiry increasingly turned from identifying domination toward the material problem of liberation itself. Across prison labor, electoral politics, historical responsibility, religious ritual, environmental injustice, political resistance, and revolutionary memory, I repeatedly asked what freedom requires when people must act from within systems that have already constrained their available choices. I became especially interested in the distance between moral performance and material transformation: the difference between appearing righteous and building the conditions through which people can actually survive refusal. By the end of the year, liberation had become not merely a question of what must be dismantled, but what risks, infrastructures, forms of accountability, and collective capacities must exist to make freedom materially possible.
Across a decade of public intellectual work, I’ve repeatedly approached different cultural, religious, political, and social problems through an increasingly recognizable structural question: what would dismantling domination require? While the domain changes, the inquiry persistently moves beyond individual actors and isolated events toward the systems, beliefs, institutions, and arrangements of power that make domination reproducible.
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