Judith Weisenfeld, an esteemed professor of Religion and a prominent voice in African American Studies, delves into the unsettling relationship between race, religion, and psychiatry in the aftermath of slavery. She uncovers how white psychiatrists pathologized Black religious practices, viewing them as insanity. With compelling historical insights, Weisenfeld discusses the misuse of mental health diagnoses to undermine Black self-determination, showcasing powerful narratives of resistance among Black patients against oppressive psychiatric systems.
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Race and Religion in Psychiatry
Early American psychiatry racialized African American religion as a marker of mental instability.
These ideas shaped diagnoses and limited Black freedom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Father Divine Case Prompted Research
Father Divine's followers were sent for psychiatric evaluations for their religious beliefs in the 1930s.
Psychiatric studies labeled their faith expressions as psychoses, sparking Dr. Weisenfeld's deeper archival research.
insights INSIGHT
Meaning Behind Book Title
The title reflects how post-slavery racist ideas shaped psychiatry's framing of Black religion.
"In Slavery's Wake" signals enduring legacies affecting Black self-determination through psychiatric theories.
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In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect. As Judith Weisenfeld argues inBlack Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025), psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom. Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.
Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com
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