![]() “It’s hard to get them to want to come back to church.”Īlthough in-person numbers dropped, some Black Protestant churches have grown if one counts a rise in virtual attendance. “They’ve really gotten to the place that they can turn over in bed and flip on the television or their phone and watch the services, press a button, send their offerings and go back to sleep,” he said. Still, he lamented that many congregants have not returned in person. Sawyers said his church benefited from a rise in virtual attendance and online donations, which have financed a building renovation. “The people are just really, really afraid to come back.” Attendance at the church dropped from about 150 people before COVID to about 80 now. Hewitt Clifton Sawyers at West Harpeth Primitive Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee. “It has impacted our community pretty substantially,” said the Rev. “They didn’t want to carry the patriarchal kind of Black masculinity leadership model,” Lomax said.ĭuring the pandemic, Black pastors used their influence to encourage vaccinations from the pulpit, while hosting testing clinics and vaccination events in church buildings. Its members, she said, embraced some of the African spirituality and religious practices that were taken from their ancestors during enslavement and rejected the Christ-centered movement that had been pivotal to the civil rights struggle. “It still functions in the same way: It’s a source of hope for people who cannot hold on to political promises, they can’t necessarily go to the law and get the things that we need and give them the safety that we need,” said Tamura Lomax, professor of religious studies at Michigan State University who specializes in the Black church.īut attendance had been dwindling - even before the pandemic and the 2020 protests over racial justice - because the way people connected to the church had changed, Lomax said.Ī pivotal moment came when the Black Lives Matter movement was founded. “For a people systematically brutalized and debased by the inhumane system of slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow racism, the church provided a refuge: a place of racial and individual self-affirmation, of teaching and learning, of psychological and spiritual sustenance, of prophetic faith,” he wrote.Īlthough there’s broad respect for the historical role of Black churches, including their crucial role fighting for racial equality, polls show that there’s also a perception among Black Americans that they have lost influence in recent decades. wrote in ‘The Black Church,’ his companion volume to the PBS series. “No pillar of the African American community has been more central to its history, identity, and social justice vision than the ‘Black Church,’” Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. “The Black church is kind of grappling with and struggling with this idea of religious progressivism.”ĭespite the attendance drop, academics, pastors and parishioners agree that churches remain fundamental to Black communities, providing refuge and hope, especially during times of challenge. Starting in mid-October 2022, the trend achieved viral popularity on Twitter.Although his congregation has been welcoming to the LGBTQ community, Driskell said that historically that has not been the case for the Black church. On October 12th, Twitter user posted screenshots of and tweets, as well as another similar tweet, writing, "WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING" (tweet shown below). The tweet received over 43,700 retweets and 375,000 likes in 10 days (shown below, right). On October 10th, artist further explored possibilities of utilizing Among Us crewmates in art by using it to shade a character's hair. The tweet received 129,400 likes and 13,300 retweets in one month (shown below, left). On September 24th, 2022, tweeted "just use amongus for everything" and an attached illustration of a woman lying on her front side and her posterior overlaid with a decapitated crewmate. ![]() The post (shown below) gained over 3,000 retweets and 15,600 likes in one month. On September 23rd, 2022, artist tweeted the earliest discovered fan art, an illustration of Angela from Lobotomy Corporation, that utilized the "Among Us technique" for drawing another body part rather than eyes. The trend also developed in another direction as artists explored ways to utilize Among Us crewmates to draw other body parts and other objects. ![]() The post was followed by more art in which artists humorously utilized Among Uscrewmates to draw a character's eyes in what is known as the Among Us Eyes trend. On September 21st, 2022, artist tweeted a viral post in which they tried out the technique, with the tweet gaining over 73,400 retweets and 438,500 likes in one month (shown below). ![]() On June 20th, 2022, artist posted a drawing of the Touhou Project character Junko on their secondary Twitter account drawing the iris and pupil of the character as a crewmate from the 2018 video game Among Us.
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