Questions at the Crossroads with Dr. Ralph H. Craig III

A conversation about Dr. Craig’s book, Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans, 2023).
Posted June 13, 2023

Questions at the Crossroads with Dr. Ralph H. Craig III

A Conversation with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld

[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen the recording of the full conversation below.]

 

Dr. Ralph H. Craig III received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University, where he specialized in Buddhist Studies and in American Religions.  His dissertation explored medieval representations of Buddhist preachers across South Asian Buddhist literature. He is also the author of Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, which will be released in November 2023 by Eerdmans Press in the Library of Religious Biography Series. For the 2023-2024 academic year, he will be visiting faculty in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, teaching courses in Buddhist Studies and African American religion.

 

What’s most important for readers to know about Dancing in My Dreams?

I think the first most important thing for readers to know is that we should look in the subtitle at the word “spiritual.” Originally it was “religious,” but publishers do what they do. But in putting that before “biography,” the reader should understand that what I'm centering in Tina Turner's life is the trajectory of her religious life and her intellectual labors towards that end. So, I'm not as much concerned with giving a backstory of every major Tina Turner album or tour, or even delving so deeply into the minutiae of her private life, for example, as of course she has done in her own memoirs and books written about her. I am concerned with the place of religion in that story, and I am concerned in the book to show how religion is actually the frame for almost every major personal and professional development in Turner's life. So the reader should understand that in this biography, religion is the central story. And I argue, at least in regards to Tina Turner's life and now legacy, that religion is one of the central pillars of that legacy.

What are you arguing in Dancing in My Dreams?

My argument about Turner is that, more than a figure of popular culture, and then in that context a “secular” artist, Turner has been a significant catalyst for changes in American religion, in a sense bringing a greater awareness and acceptance of Buddhism to the mainstream through her commercial projects and media profiles that have centered her religious beliefs. So what then emerges through a study of Tina Turner's life is that Buddhism is a vital dimension of African American religious life and that Turner herself has contributed immensely to this vitality. And that when we then think about scholarship on the history of Buddhism in the West and in the United States in particular, it has often been noted by scholars how the voices, presence and significance of African Americans have been neglected in those histories.

And Tina Turner then represents an important intervention into the study of Buddhism in America. But then in the study of African American religious history and Black religion, Turner again represents an intervention because she sees herself in her output of the last ten to fifteen years of her life, where she saw herself as shifting to become a Buddhist teacher. She saw herself as shifting from a primarily, as I would say, again, “secular” performing artist to using that platform to share a religious message. So she, in so doing, joins this growing list of Black Buddhist teachers.

And in that context, then, we have to move from seeing African American religions as being primarily or in the main, concerned with Afro-Protestant Christianity or forms of Afro Protestant Christianity, and I think that that is a movement that many scholars in the field of African American religions and Black religions are noticing, participating in expanding -- your own work Professor Weisenfeld, of course, participates in that and the work of others, Vaughn Booker and many of the scholars who presented at the Sonic Souls of Black Folks – are participating in this very movement. So, Tina Turner, then, is a site for studying this this phenomenon. So Tina Turner's life as a Black Buddhist teacher and her role as a Black Buddhist teacher represents an intervention in the field of religious studies, specifically Buddhist studies and African American religions or Black religion.

Dancing in My Dreams Cover

 

What is at stake in this project? Why does this work matter?

So at stake in the project at large, in the book Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, and my work, is fundamentally taking seriously the intellectual and religious labors of Black artists, specifically Black women like Turner. And this matters because not taking seriously those labors means that we then neglect an important site of religious enculturation and formation, that there are many of those who have consumed Turner's output, be that attending her concerts, hearing her interviews or just understanding her as an iconic figure in popular culture and in an American popular culture and, of course, global kind of transport of that across the globe. For those who consume Turner, they're consuming Black Buddhism, fundamentally. So, to not take seriously her labors and the labors of women like her – so I’m thinking in particular of a figure like Alice Coltrane who was rooted in Hindu traditions and took on a Hindu name and had an ashram and released Kirtan (spiritual devotional Sanskrit singing) – to not take seriously those labors is then to not take seriously the religious formation of those who have consumed these women's output and then gone on to act based on that consumption. And I think that this is on a maybe popular level when you look at YouTube comments, which I did for my article and for the book, just to see the kinds of things people say about her albums or her videos and inevitably, a substantial portion of the comments talk about how Tina Turner has inspired them towards an exploration of either religion in the form of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, or other Buddhist traditions or spirituality, more broadly in the sense of taking their own interiority seriously and taking seriously what practices might help them move in the world, and might help them do in the world. And so that's what's at stake in the larger project.

But then we have to think about Turner, I argue in the book, we have to think about Turner, then, as a religious teacher. There is some theoretical work that then comes out of that what Buddhist teachers look and what Black religious authority looks like, what traditions Black religious authority is rooted in that has to, by definition, expand when we consider someone like Tina Turner, someone like Alice Coltrane, as I mentioned, or in Vaughn Booker's work, someone like Mary Lou Williams. All of these figures each of these figures expand black religious authority beyond church Afro-Protestant traditions. Rather, at the same time, Turner does in a sense remain broadly rooted in the traditions that she was raised in. So, she was raised in a Black Baptist church and at times attended with her family, a Pentecostal church near Knoxville, Tennessee.

Being rooted in that, I think we can see in Tina Turner's output, that stayed with her and that informed her, of course, her singing and her performing, but also, I think, informs the language that she uses even to talk about Buddhism. So, Tina Turner is a Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist, and that is a form of Buddhism that has been very successful with African Americans. A substantial portion of the membership body of Soka Gakkai International USA, the United States branch of that religious organization, that Buddhist organization, a substantial portion of the membership is African American. And many scholars have noted this. Richard Hughes Seager and others like Jan Nattier have noted this phenomenon.

But if you listen to Tina Turner and you listen to her talk about her beliefs and so her Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist beliefs that she is then teaching, where Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists would say Buddha nature, the potential inside of all people to become awakened and overcome suffering, Turner calls that the “coin of God within” and she then relates that to her understanding of a Buddhist concept the ten worlds, which are ten epistemological and ontological ways of understanding reality, from experiences of suffering up to the transcendence of suffering, those are the ten worlds. She relates that in her mind to the Ten Commandments and back to her Baptist training that she received in West Tennessee.

If you read the Ten Commandments, there's no obvious relationship between these two lists, except that they're both lists of ten. But for Turner she sees a deep relationship between these two and has written about and spoken about that. So, we cannot entirely displace the importance of Afro-Protestant traditions in the life of a figure like Tina Turner, even as her religious repertoire expands. And I draw in part this kind of argument from the work of Rima Veseley-Flad in her book Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, where she highlights that for many of the Black Buddhist teachers that she studies in her work, many of them continue to incorporate the religious traditions of their upbringing, and for many of them that is broadly Afro-Protestant tradition.

How does Dancing in My Dreams fit within the broader field of Black and/or African American religions?

I think Dancing in My Dreams with the book, I take the story of Turner's religious development in the post-World War II United States and track that development to the release of her mature reflections on religion in the 21st century into the 21st century. And I show how the roots of that story, anchored in Black Southern religious culture, develops through the discourses and intellectual history of what might be more broadly called American metaphysical religion and its eventual transformation in SGI Nichiren Buddhism. And, as we've discussed, a form of Buddhism that has been particularly successful with Black practitioners. And in so doing, I highlight the place of both metaphysical religion and Buddhism in African American religious history or Black religious history, and thereby open a window onto, as I said before, other figures like Tina Turner.

I think that the field of Black Buddhism is in many ways in its infancy. So I am working with a colleague, Adeana McNicholl, to compile a documentary reader of Black Buddhism, and this is an acknowledgment of the fact that the last really forty years has seen a critical mass of Black Buddhist writing, meaning writings by Black Buddhists, whether that's in the form of short essays or kind of popular pieces, crossover pieces, memoirs, and so on and so forth. And now the time has come to compile that and begin to critically analyze that.

And I think that this is something that begins in the work of Jan Willis, a brilliant and insightful scholar who has really laid a lot of the groundwork for studying African American Buddhism or Black Buddhism, and she continues to produce scholarship. At the same time this is expanding with the work of scholars like Adeana McNichol, Ayo Yetunde, the kind of more crossover writings of Charles Ward, the scholarship of Rima Veseley-Flad, and so on. So, I think the last twenty years is beginning to see a critical appraisal of Black Buddhism and Black Buddhist thinkers. Whereas before that I think we saw in the field, kind of the almost sociological, noting that there are Black Buddhist practitioners and their experiences in what sometimes predominantly white Buddhist communities, distinctions between binaries, between convert Buddhist and traditional Buddhists, and so on and so forth. Now I think the field is moving beyond that to begin to look at figures like my work on Tina Turner, even Father Divine and how they were drawing figures like that, drawing on Asian religious traditions and the language of Asian religious traditions and then beyond figures to trends.

 

Where do you see your work and the fields of Black and African American religions heading next?

So I plan to, and I think that the field needs to go direction, in addition to the documentary reader, I also am planning to do a book on Soka Gakkai International USA, and this book would be the first to do two things. It would be the first to specifically center SGI USA in the context of American religious history. Most treatments of Soka Gakkai either focus on the organization in Japan or the idea of the global organization, with a few case studies. My work will center the organization and its development in the context of post-World War II American religious history and then center the experiences of Black practitioners in the organization. So, my work will be the first to not just note their presence, but to center their presence and ask us then to think through Black Soka Gakka practitioners as thinkers in American religious history. Which then leads to the work that I would like to see more of in the study of Black Buddhism and in American religious history more broadly is studying the intellectual labors of these traditions. So what Rima Veseley-Flad does in her book is centers Black Buddhist interiority as a space from which Black Buddhist teachers then offer a challenge and an intervention for systems of social injustice.

More of that. We need more of that kind of work, which looks at the again, the intellectual moves that are made, how Black Buddhists expand upon, transform, and enter into dialogue with Buddhist traditions, for example, and how that inevitably means an encounter between Black Christianity, for example, and Black Buddhism. And these encounters are happening, sometimes in the very person of figures like Tina Turner. So, we need to study that, and we need to see what's going on. And I think that we'll find, and this is certainly the conviction of my own work, I think we'll find when we do that, new dimensions for what it means, for what the Black religious means, what Black religiosity means, and thereby we will find new dimensions of what American religiosity means.

Posted June 13, 2023

Questions at the Crossroads
Ralph Craig III
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