“Sinners” and White Christianity

Recently, “Sinners,” the Southern Gothic horror film from director Ryan Coogler of “Black Panther” fame, began streaming, following its theatrical release over Easter weekend. 

This story, set amid Jim Crow Clarksdale, Mississippi, is fraught with religious symbolism, from its opening in a rural Black church with the congregation singing “This Little Light of Mine” to the biblical names of the main characters: Elijah, Elias, Mary, Sammie, Jedidiah and Annie. The film also punctuates deeper theological issues worth exploring by anyone interested in church, society, and race, both historically and today. 

Coogler, who was raised in the Black Baptist Church and attended Catholic school, acknowledges that the film expresses his complex relationship with his Christian faith. He has said that living with these “two very different types of Christianity” made him sensitive to ideas of identity, expressed in the film as a tension between the Blues and Christian faith. This tension is manifest early in the film, as the character Delta Slim, a renowned Blues singer, explains to another that while Christianity was forced upon Black people, the Blues is “from home.”

The film centers on Black twins, Elijah and Elias (nicknamed Smoke and Stack), who return to Mississippi with a load of stolen mob money and a plan to open a juke joint. They purchase a warehouse and recruit Sammie, a young Blues musician and son of a preacher, whose guitar playing has the ability to rupture the veil between the living, the dead, and the future. 

However, as he plays on the joint’s opening (and, fatefully, only) night, his gifts don’t just conjure the musical ancestors and descendants of Jim Crow Blues culture in a spiritual dance that transcends time and space. He also invokes evil in the form of Remmick, a vampire of Irish descent, himself a musician, who appears on the scene with two Klan members he has recently turned. 

White Christianity as Vampire

Much commentary on the film focuses, as it should, on the prominent themes of Black spirituality and survival—specifically, the fleeting experience of Black freedom or Black music and culture as a form of resistance. But, as a white Christian concerned with the ways my own faith tradition has conjured the evil of white supremacy, I am interested in the film’s portrayal of white Christianity— specifically its depiction of white Christianity as vampire. 

Warning: While this is not a movie review, there are spoilers ahead.

Vampires are typically portrayed in popular culture as the enemy of Christianity. Yet, despite his own disavowal of Christianity, Remmick represents the colonial and racist impulses of historic white Christianity. 

As Remmick attempts to gain entrance to the juke joint, he confesses that Christians stole his family land and forced their faith upon him as well. As an Irish immigrant, he identifies with the Black people he now terrorizes. But in his coping, he is unable to find a free and authentic community as the revelers do in the juke joint. 

Black theologian James Cone writes in “The Spirituals and the Blues” that only by accepting “the real as disclosed in concrete human affairs can a community attain authentic existence.” This is what the Blues does: create authentic communion by acknowledging the real, with all of its pain and struggle. 

And this is exactly what the vampire cannot do. So, he forces their communion with him. This suggests the conscriptive power of white supremacy and white Christianity. 

Appropriation and Assimilation

The Irish, once a marginalized racial minority, represent the ability to assimilate over time, and even became white in the national conscience. Remmick represents the reality of those groups who are able to assimilate quicker, gain privilege, and then do what they must to hold onto it, even if it means imposing the oppression they experienced on other groups.

Unable to achieve an invitation to the joint based on this shared history of oppression, now fractured, he turns to a more personal strategy. He tells Mary, the white-passing love interest of Stack, who is grieving the recent death of her mother, that he is able to “save” her. 

In fact, all those (sinners?) in the juke joint that night needed “saving,” he says. The Klan has plans for a morning massacre. 

He proclaims to the group of Black people fortified in the juke joint, “I am your way.” This claim is not only an allusion to Christian salvation, a parody of Christ’s claim to be “the way, truth and life,” but an invocation of colonial logic— I, the white man, alone can save you (in this case, from other white men). Salvation through forced conversion—a dark reality that haunts Christian history. 

Stack tells his brother, Smoke, that as Black people in the U.S., they were never going to be free. There might be fleeting moments that feel like liberation—like one night in the juke joint—but true freedom remains elusive. 

To this, Remmick responds, “But this is the way, forever,” claiming that only by joining in his colonial white camaraderie would they ever experience real freedom, eternal freedom, eternal life. His promise is an afterlife of “fellowship and love,” across race—literally a homogenized “heaven on Earth” of the undead—reflecting the shallow promises of racial reconciliation from white evangelicals who wish to let bygones be bygones for the sake of spiritual unity. 

But this is not authentic fellowship, because, as the group in the juke joint soon discovers, once bitten, Remmick controls their mind and body. This is a vision of vampiric white Christianity with false promises of communion and freedom. 

Christianity as control is the version of the faith also adopted by Sammie’s preacher father, whose insistence that Sammie choose between the Blues of his culture and the beliefs of his faith is implicitly a belief that Sammie must become white in order to be saved from his sin.

Remmick fixates on Sammie, as the one who conjured the spirits and now wants Sammie’s memories, songs and abilities. Again, this represents the desire of white supremacy to colonize other people as well as their culture. 

The first time the other characters ever see Remmick, he’s already appropriating Black culture for his own means. When he first arrives at the warehouse, he performs “Pick Poor Robin Clean” as an Irish folk gig, demonstrating his musical chops in order to gain entry. Yet, it was originally a Blues song, now inverted into an appropriated means of gaining control.

But soon Remmick’s aims become clear. He not only wants to steal Sammie’s gifts, but also to transform the Black people at the juke joint into himself, to make them like him. 

“I want your stories, I want your songs,” he tells Sammie. “And you’re going to have mine.” 

As those trapped inside the juke joint hear the sounds of the multiracial collection of vampires singing and playing “Rocky Road to Dublin,” the film cuts to a jarring exterior scene of Black sharecroppers, who previously danced along to Sammie’s Blues, now Riverdancing to this Irish folk song. This is the point of vampirism—the bite coercively transforms every individual, with all their particularities and cultures, into a white-washed homogeneity—as well as cross-cultural Christian missions.

Remmick’s attack on Sammie ends with baptism. As he tries to escape, Sammie is repeatedly immersed in a pond by Remmick. 

Sammie begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer, thinking this Christian practice might ward off the vampires. But they join in, reciting scripture in unison as Sammie is submerged, conjuring the forced baptisms of enslaved Africans by white colonizers. 

This reflects Delta Slim’s words to Sammie that Christianity was forced upon Black people, while the Blues is their own. Sammie refuses to be baptized into this vampiric white Christianity, ultimately resisting until Remmick is killed. 

Christianity or The Blues

At the end of the film and after the vampires are defeated, Sammie, the sole survivor, is back in his father’s church, faced with a decision between Christianity, “giving his voice, his soul to the Lord,“ and the Blues.

A review of the film in “Christianity Today” warned its evangelical readers not to watch the movie if the adult themes might make them stumble in their faith, but also criticized the film for its “critique of Christianity.” Christians, however, cannot shy away from critiques of our faith or the faithful, and we ought not give in to the apologetic temptation to “defend the faith” at every turn. Doing so only replicates the false choice his father presents to Sammie between faith and the Blues. 

According to Cone, the Blues is transcendent because through the communal sharing of trouble and suffering, it reveals the deepest truths about human existence, with all its pain and struggle. Films like “Sinners” reveal profound truths that ought to give white Christians pause and direct us toward reflection. 

Just as so-called “secular” music like the Blues offered Black people liberation from daily troubles and a deep resource for their spirituality, so too can films like “Sinners” offer white Christians a mirror to our own faith and spirituality and the ways it has offered false promises and choices. 

Coogler presents this history of white Christianity, with all its pain and harm, in ways we must not forget. Perhaps reflection on so-called “secular” forms of art like this film might also offer us liberation as well.