“Sinners have soul, too.” So goes the famous line spoken by blues singer Shug Avery in the 1985 film The Color Purple. At the time, my young mind didn’t quite understand what it meant.
But after becoming a Christian as an adult, after reading plenty of Zora Neale Hurston and listening to a deluge of John Mayer and Kanye West, after reintroducing myself to the Harlem Renaissance literature that was forced upon me as a child, I learned that non-Christian art can have soul—and it can also be redemptive. I came to understand the apologetic that’s happening between Shug and her minister father when she and her chorus of “sinners” disrupt his church service, bursting through the doors and joining in song.
Decades of film have taken as their subject the tension between the church and secular music in particular: The Color Purple and Footloose, Cabin in the Sky and Sister Act 2. You know the terse tropes: The church is rigid and judgmental. Secular music is the Devil’s playground.
Now we have Sinners—a thrilling, genre-bending new offering from writer and director Ryan Coogler—entering the age-old debate about what belongs to God and what belongs to Satan. The movie insists that while story and song can heal the soul, bringing love and fellowship, they can also be appropriated for evil.
The film essentially has two plots. First, it’s 1932, and the Moore brothers, Elijah and Elias, return to the Mississippi Delta for what is promised to be the most unforgettable night of blues and booze for the hardworking plantation folks of Clarksdale, Mississippi. The second plot: vampires.
That’s the plot, but it’s not the full story. Sinners thoughtfully explores the intricate commercial dynamics between Asian and Black communities, interrogates Jim Crow policies and the damaging tradition of sharecropping, and addresses the fraught realities of racial passing and colonialism with haste but narrative acuity.
I would be remiss not to mention the blood and the sex. This movie is rated R for a reason.
Its rating (and its themes) means some Christians will respond to Sinners with unnecessary panic. Others will respond with rash adulation.
I’ll advocate for a serpent-and-dove disposition. Viewers should pause at what darkens the soul—but also praise what gestures at grace, even in unexpected places. Even if you’re typically averse to horror films, you might want to watch this one for its social commentary and cinematic wizardry. Just be aware that the N-word flies just as much as the blood and bullets, and the bawdy themes will tutor you in practices that would make your marriage counselor blush.
But yes, pause, just as Paul advises his listeners in Romans 14:20–23. Hold to your convictions if a movie like Sinners will cause you to stumble. Don’t be like the Gentiles who’ve secretly watched the entirety of Game of Thrones but masquerade as if they haven’t.
I’m writing as one of the Christians who did see Sinners—and I enjoyed it. It wrestles honestly with whether we can keep “dancing with the Devil” without him “follow[ing] us home.” One of Michael B. Jordan’s characters, an ex-military bootlegger, encourages his younger cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to stick to gospel music and avoid the “juke-joint life.” But singing, guitar-playing Sammie feels restricted by the same fetters that bound Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Sam Cooke, luminaries who had their start in the church but found fame outside it.
Can people who love God also love the blues? The two affections aren’t unrelated. In The Spirituals and the Blues, theologian James Cone argues that “the blues are ‘secular spirituals’ … in the sense that they confine their attention solely to the immediate. … They are spirituals because they are impelled by the same search for the truth of black experience.”
Yet for some, the “Devil’s music” is only to be avoided. Sammie’s father, a pastor, has his son read 1 Corinthians 10:13 and argues that “you will be tempted, but you will also be provided a way out.” Sammie, like Jesus to the man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–15), might ask himself, “Do you want to be healed?”
Generations of Black Christians have experienced the church’s sluggishness when it comes to new music. Thomas Dorsey, who’s said to have coined the musical term gospel, was demonized for blending the sound of the blues with hymns and spirituals. Even today, it’s a quotidian truth that Christian hip-hop is more likely to be patronized by white and multicultural congregations than by traditional Black churches. I’ve experienced this in my own career.
Of course, just as the bouncer Cornbread guards the door in Sinners, pastors and religious leaders are wise to be cautious about who they invite into their folds. It’s the shepherds’ duty to protect and feed their sheep. At their best, our leaders teach us when to resist the Devil head-on and when to flee temptation entirely.
But this kind of leadership can easily become repressive. Church leaders get afraid of new sounds and techniques, nervous about letting too much of “the world” through the church’s doors. Let us pray for discernment in this matter, the same kind of discernment required to decide whether to watch a movie like Sinners in the first place. We often operate as Protestant Essenes, isolationists afraid of the vampires in the night. But Christ prayed for protection, not isolation. Discernment, not distance, might be the mark of maturity.
Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “all art is propaganda and ever must be. … I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” As a Christian, I tend to agree with him, at least insofar as stories are not agnostic.
Therefore, I’m pausing over some aspects of Sinners—over what could be observed as the heroic work of voodoo and the damning critique of Christianity (one character laments that the faith was forced upon Black folk). Movies are for entertainment, but their ideas have influence. That’s all the more true of Black films, which, because of cultural pride and scarcity of opportunity, more readily evolve into sociology, psychology, and theology. Although Sinners may be making not an intentional moral statement but rather a historical one about religion, viewers have the tendency to form doctrine based on what they see onscreen.
Sinners does speak frankly about the bloodsucking perversion of religion in the United States. But its critique of plantation faith is asymmetrical. Movies like Dogma, Us, Footloose,and The Golden Compass show only the devilish corruption of a Christianity pining for power and dominion—but we know of a gospel that fueled abolitionists and liberated enslaved peoples. The same plantation folks who suffered hypocrisy knew of a healer who gave joy and life abundantly in perilous times. That joy spawned spirituals, which gave birth to blues. We know of a gospel prevalent in Africa long before colonizers; some of the oldest Christian representation is found in the legacy of Rock-Hewn Churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia.
Scripture acknowledges that false gospels will always exist alongside what’s true. The Bible describes people casting lots, pouring libations (Gen. 35:14), and interacting with the dead, and witches speaking with authority (Acts 16:16–21). Don’t panic at practices that have a form of godliness but no power to “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). The body of Christ has the proper armor for the fight and light that shines in the darkness.
That said, we can’t always tell the two apart. In art and in life, we are prone to assign virtues where there are none; we are prone to withhold dignity where it is due. We struggle to see that the sinners aren’t solely the fall-down drunkards, the soul-snatching monsters, and the land-thieving colonialists but also are us, we who refuse to let go of the vices that prevent true liberation.
Don’t just beware of monsters and adult themes. Beware of the powers and principalities that present themselves as fellowship and love. Imperialists, appropriators, and musicians alike, we are all in danger of being intoxicated by the American dream. The question isn’t whether sinners have souls—but who has the power to judge us.
Sho Baraka is editorial director of Big Tent for Christianity Today.
