I must admit, I have recently become a political and theological realist. Like many Americans, I feel exhausted by the effects of the pandemic, the specter of another Trump presidency, the ongoing state violence against innocent civilians. I feel like I am wandering in the wild, waiting for God to answer injustice. Quite frankly, I no longer know how to respond to God’s promise of presence in these times.
In my wandering, one text I come back to time and time again is Sisters in the Wilderness. There, the womanist theologian Delores Williams describes this wilderness experience by inviting us to pay attention to Genesis 21 and its story of the Egyptian slave Hagar. Unable to remain living under the tyrannical abuse of Sarah and Abraham, Hagar and her son Ishmael are forced into the wilderness. Williams suggests that Hagar’s wilderness story is often overlooked or dismissed as part of a larger narrative that merely demonstrates the poor decision-making and disobedience of Abraham and Sarah. That is not so. Hagar is not just a prop used to teach us about the moral or spiritual improvement of Abraham and Sarah. Hagar’s story teaches us about the realities of wilderness and the trauma it creates for people like Hagar who are rendered invisible from the religious or national story. For example, Williams links this to the historical experiences of Black women in the United States, showing us that the wilderness is a place that marginalized and vulnerable Black women often find themselves, not because of their actions but because of systemic powers.[1]
Considering Williams’s account makes me wonder how we might think differently about our political moment if we were to center the Hagars of our current world. At the very least, I hope it will allow us to acknowledge that we are living in the age of wilderness. This is an age marked by the intractability of structural racism and antiblackness, heteropatriarchal capitalism and its exploitation of laborers, and an absence of adequate health care, childcare, and living wages—the very things necessary to survive. This age of wilderness is a desert of rabid individualism in which the sharp winds of competition and narcissism make shared life nearly impossible. There is a moral dryness such that values of love and care are no longer seen as possible. This age of wilderness forces us to confront our own despair and disappointment in who we have collectively become.
Wilderness aptly describes the instability and uncertainty of our current political, cultural, and economic institutions. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I wept. I cried not only because the decision follows the direction of conservative legislators and religious groups by compromising the ability of women to have control over their own bodies and lives but also because I felt deep anxiety with respect to the undue burden it will place on poor women of color who often do not have the economic resources to seek termination. I cried because Black and Brown women will find themselves in precarious and dangerous positions if they need to seek abortion services outside their states—in states that have legislated total bans, women can be criminalized, convicted, and imprisoned if they simply seek abortion services. I cried because a doctor or neighbor can go to prison simply by attempting to help a woman seeking reproductive services in this way. I cried because we are living through a nightmare. We are in the age of wilderness.
As part of this wilderness terror, I find myself holding my breath whenever I hear former president and now president-elect Donald Trump speak. For example, he recently expressed his vision to arbitrarily round up millions of “alien immigrants” and deport them. This is a plan to send them to other countries without any thought for the families they have formed here in the United States.[2] Imagine that you are an immigrant and a contributing member of your community, that you have lived here for years, that you have struggled to navigate the steps toward achieving citizenship, and that, in the blink of an eye, you are arrested and headed to federal offices for deportation.
This nightmare has also included the repealing of LGBTQIA rights. In the name of religious freedom, Christian conservative groups are advocating for governments to deny marriage, adoption services, and other basic rights to LGBTQIA[RK2] families. The American Civil Liberties Union[RK3] is currently tracking 527 anti-LGBTQIA bills in our nation that include health-care discrimination, school bans with respect to transgender youth, curriculum censorship related to LGBTQIA justice, and more.[3] Project 2025, which was drafted by former Trump officials, proposes that the Department of Justice defend the first amendment rights of groups who would discriminate against LGBTQIA communities. The future feels uncertain for these communities.
During our recent election season, I was daily reminded of the rise of white nationalism, in both secular and Christian forms. Forms of white Christian nationalism are underwritten by “big money” or wealthy donors that intend on “taking back” our country.[4] Project 2025 is an example of how wealthy capitalist actions are married to white conservative Christian practices of faith, which creates a nightmare for those seen as threats (e.g., people of color, members of the LGBTQIA community, immigrants, and the differently abled). Project 2025 promises to give tax breaks to corporations, raise taxes on middle-class Americans, allow employers to eliminate overtime pay, ban Medicare from prescription drug prices, and fire government employees who are not loyal to the president. This fascist agenda strikes at the heart of what it means to care for and respect one’s neighbor.
Exposing and deconstructing this current wilderness reality must take priority. And Williams shows how Black women have echoed the voice of Hagar throughout history, exposing and deconstructing the violence of this country. Indeed, Black women’s theological and religious voices are tremendously important in helping us expose and deconstruct ongoing violence and trauma. Such voices allow us to see that all hope is not lost. Possibilities remain.
Thus, although we might feel that exploitation, degradation, and death are the only realities in the wilderness, Williams reminds us that the wilderness is also a place of survival and possibility, a place where God hears the cries of the suffering and offers quality of life amid travail. She reminds us that just as God provided a spring of water and resources for Hagar and her child to survive, so too we are invited to think about divine promise in the valley of death. But beyond survival, what I have always loved about this story is that Hagar and Ishmael do not only drink the water and survive; Hagar is also able to name God. In fact, she is the only person in the Hebrew Bible to have such an encounter. Hagar names God El Roi, the God who sees.[5] Hagar proclaims a God who refuses to forget her despair amid the exploitation and violence committed against her and her son. She speaks to a God who sees and offers possibility in the face of death and despair.
The Hagar narrative reminds me that divine promise is not an abstract transcendental guarantee or some impersonal teleological certainty. Rather, divine promise is rooted in our actions as we come alongside God’s vision for care and love; divine promise is rooted in our willingness to see the pain of the vulnerable and respond. God’s promise is an invitation for us to join the movement Jesus proclaimed and inaugurated, an invitation to tend to the poor, imprisoned, and rejected. Perhaps, like Hagar, we will not be able to set the captives free, but we can nevertheless remind them that they are seen and loved. Through our partnership with God in the world, the divine promise becomes visible and possible.
Next year, 2025, will be the seventieth anniversary of the death of Emmitt Till, a death that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement in the United States. That year, the world saw how grown white men in Mississippi abducted, lynched, and mutilated the fourteen-year-old Black body of Emmitt. The world saw because of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, a woman whose pleas for justice for her son remind me of Hagar. I imagine that as she opened his casket to let the world see what a white supremacist system did to her son, she too understood the power of wilderness and the power of divine promise. Mamie often remarked that she didn’t want her boy’s death to be in vain. She wanted his life to be redemptive, a turning point in the hearts of Black communities to not despair over such atrocities. God was on their side and would strengthen them to defy systems of white violence by speaking the truth of Black trauma.
For Mamie, reaching for the future meant not letting white structural violence and hatred have the last say, not letting such systems remake us into their violent image. It meant possibility and an ongoing story, an ongoing story that was contingent on something of this world yet beyond it. Divine promise allowed Mamie to feel a strange, unpredictable resolve in knowing her son did not die in vain.
Hagar, Mamie, Williams—these are marginalized women who have fought and provided profound insight on how to navigate times of wilderness and war. They are exemplars of defiance to the status quo, women who believe that evil should not have the final say and that we must never be consumed by hatred and violence. If we look around, we will see that Black women are showing us that we are not alone, that God is with us and that we can partner with God in challenging the violence of this world and in experiencing love, care, and joy in, under, and despite our wilderness context. In other words, we are in this wilderness reality, but we need not be defined by this reality.
Hagar and the generations of Black and Brown women who have followed her are calling us to believe that we are more than the nightmare we are living through. What we do and say matters to us and to future generations. They are calling us to take hold of this divine promise in our present age of wilderness.
[1] Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Orbis Books, 1993), 15–21.
[2] Julia Ingram, “Trump’s Plan to Deport Millions of Immigrants Would Cost Hundreds of Billions, CBS News Analysis Shows,” CBS News Politics, October 17, 2024, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-plan-deport-immigrants-cost/.
[3] American Civil Liberties Union, “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in US State Legislatures in 2024,” 2024, https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024.
[4] Sian Norris, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global (Verso Books, 2023), 149–178. Also, see Barbara Plett Usher, “Christian Nationalists—Wanting to Put God into US Government,” BBC News Tennessee, December 17, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63902626.
[5] Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 19–21.