Questions at the Crossroads with Ralph Craig III
A Conversation with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld

June 12, 2023

Judith Weisenfeld: 
This is Questions at the Crossroads. I am Judith Weisenfeld, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where I direct The Crossroads Project, which is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Princeton University, with the aim of creating deeper understanding of Black religious histories, communities and cultures past and present. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Ralph Craig, III who 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. And he's 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 24 academic year. He will be visiting faculty in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, teaching courses in Buddhist studies and African-American religion. Thank you for joining me for Questions at the Crossroads, Dr. Craig. Thank you for joining me for questions at the Crossroads. Dr. Craig


Ralph Craig III:
Thank you for having me.

Judith Weisenfeld:
I wanted to start by asking how you came to write this spiritual biography of Tina Turner, how you got interested in her, how it connects to the work you've done as a scholar and hope to do in the future.

Ralph Craig III:
I have been interested in Tina Turner much of my life, and I mean that quite seriously. But I always noticed, as I would have listened to her interviews, on television, in the her performances and her movie What's Love Got to Do With It? And all of these things, and then read her memoir, her first one, I, Tina I just started to realize that there were kind of two Tina Turners emerging. There was the one that was promoting whatever she was promoting in the context of an interview or something like that. So promoting the movie. What's Love Got to do with it? When it was coming out, or her memoirs or her records or her tours. But in every interview, in every piece of media that she would put out there, there would be something about her religious practice and her religious beliefs.

And often questions that would start out about the project that she was promoting would inevitably turn into a kind of discourse on Buddhist them. But then anyone who knows anything about Buddhism. Whether that Be has written books about it or its history would start to notice that in her discussion of Buddhism was also contained discussions of kind of Afro-Protestant religiosity was also discussions of ideas that are broadly related to metaphysical religion. So as I was picking up all of these, I would then see the distillation of whatever she was promoting. So the kind of interview, if she had given an interview, I would see a report or an article on that interview, or I would see another interview that would summarize that interview and it would inevitably either leave out the religious dimension or collapse what she had said into something either bite sizeable or into something that flattened what she was saying.

And so I thought someone, I would often say to myself, someone has to write about this, someone has to do something about that. And I never ever thought that someone would be me, even as my colleagues would say maybe you, maybe you. And I would always say no, that's not really what I'm thinking through and that's not really what I'm doing. Until inevitably it became what I was thinking through and what I was doing.

Judith Weisenfeld:
Well, you really are uniquely positioned to have written this work, to have done this. And so I'm really grateful for it, having read it. So what's the most important thing for readers to know about the book you did write: the spiritual biography of Tina Turner in the form of Dancing in My Dreams? What's the most important thing for readers to know about this book? 

Ralph Craig III:
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. Right. So I'm not as much concerned with the 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 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. Right. 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. 

Judith Weisenfeld:
That leads well into my next question about what you're arguing in Dancing My Dreams. And I want to ask that in particular in relation to your argument about really how to conceive of religion in Tina Turner's world. So what is your argument about religion and about how it matters and what we get by framing her story through that lens? 

Ralph Craig III:
My argument about Turner, right, is that more than essentially, as I say in the book, more than a figure of popular culture and then in that context, a quote unquote secular artist, Turner has been a significant catalyst for changes in American religion, in a sense bringing a greater acceptance and a greater awareness and acceptance of Buddhism to the mainstream. Through her commercial projects and media profiles that have centered her religious beliefs, Right.

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 the kind of output of the last ten to fifteen years of her life. Its where she saw herself as shifting to become a Buddhist teacher. She saw herself as shifting from a primarily, as I would say, again, quote unquote, 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 it 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 presented at the Sonic Souls of Black Folks are participating in this very movement. So Tina Turner, then, is a site for studying 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.

Judith Weisenfeld:
That's really helpful, and I want to follow up in a couple of ways. So the big frame for the next question is what's at stake in the project? Why does it matter? But it has sub-questions. And however you want to answer the big question, I'd be interested in hearing more about what kind of Buddhism and what's at stake in the particular form of Buddhism she chose to embrace and teach. So, to move below the kind of generic label, is there something at stake there? And then another question is, even as she helps us move beyond the central focus on Afro-Protestantism, it's a question about perhaps the influence of Afro-Protestantism on her spiritual identity, experience, practice. Yeah, those are two for right now. 

Ralph Craig III:
So at stake in a project at large, right. In the book. Dancing in My Dreams. The spiritual. 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. As I said at the Sonic Souls of Black Folk, they're consuming black Buddhism fundamentally. So to not take seriously her labors and the labors of women like her, something 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, right, 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. Right. 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. So I think that that's what that

Judith Weisenfeld:
Sorry to interrupt. I was saying that's fascinating that archive is there of how people have been influenced by her as a religious teacher. Yes. Oh.

Ralph Craig III:
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, et cetera, all of these figures each of these figures expand black religious authority beyond church Afro-Protestant traditions. Rather, at the same time as you identify, 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 stayed with, 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, right. Richard Hughes Seager and others have noted 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 has been teaching where Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists would say Buddha nature, the potential inside of all people to become awakened and overcome suffering, you Turner calls that the coin of God within as she then relates that to her understanding of a Buddhist concept the Ten Worlds, which are ten kind of 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 Ten. Black Baptist training that she received in West Tennessee.

If you read the Ten Commandments, they have nothing, 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.

Judith Weisenfeld:
Do you think that that fact the significant presence of African Americans in Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism in the United States and that willingness to incorporate and not reject or discard do you think that has had an impact on the culture of Soka Gakkai in the United States or might ask you to predict in the future? Is there a similar openness from the other side? Maybe not to make them sides, but

Ralph Craig III:
That is an interesting question. I think many of the changes that I've observed happening in the literature that Soka Gakkai puts out has to do with the way the organization sees itself. And this is true even in the charter of the organization which is publicly available, sees itself. As fitting into whatever country and cultural context that it interests. So as a religious body, it's in 192 countries, has a presence in 192 countries and the organization and its members, of course look different and think differently in those different contexts. So one shift that I have observed in the literature of Soka Gakkai since probably since 1970 and definitely by 1981 or 82 was the shift away from an important concept in the organization is the mentor disciple relationship where in which the president of the organization is called Sensei, which means teacher or mentor. But in the older translations of the organization so in the early seventies the language said master and disciple and many African American members of the organization took,

and rightfully so, took umbrage with that language and pushed for a change. That's one example. 

And that of course doesn't relate so much to the kind of religious side. But then I've observed this change in Soka Gakkai’s meetings over the years as I've kind of attended and taken notes and put those and kind of triangulate these meetings with things that members have said, the output, the kind of literature of the organization. And I noticed that the meetings have the organization's meetings and especially their major monthly meetings have come to incorporate West African dance forms more broadly, a kind of way of talking about doctrines and practices that seem more indebted to African American religion and black so for example, the switch to the language of ancestors. I observed this first at a memorial service that I attended for an African American practitioner who was an actor. This was years ago, this might have been around 2015 or 2016 and it just struck me that four of the people who got up to speak said they've joined the realm of the ancestors and now we will put their names on our altar as an testers. And I had never heard that language used before now. A scholar like Chin Shing Han who's written about raising the voices of Asian American Buddhists.

Han speaks about the practice of ancestors worship and the importance of that for Asian American Buddhist and of course, Asian religious traditions more broadly. But the specific uses of that language in Soka Gakkai, that's new. And I think we can say that that is the influence of black religion in the organization and the way in which African American members of the organization this is a bit more ethnographic, but the way that members talk about their practice. I think Tina Turner maybe crystallizes that with her writings and her discussions of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism. But it is representative of a pretty common way of taking the language of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist teachings and just kind of just infusing it with language that might be more at home in Afro-Protestant traditions. For example, saying, the spirit came over me in a Buddhist what spirit? Question mark. So I think that all of these ways are I think that we can see represented in the literature this dialogical relationship between Black religion and Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism.

Judith Weisenfeld:
I'm so glad I asked that question because I had never heard this kind of rich, in-depth answer to that. And it's a good segue to the next question, which you've touched on in different ways. In many ways, Tina Turner turner is singular. She was simply the best, and no one else could be that. And her practice, having read your book, was in many ways a very personal practice, although she did see herself as a teacher broadly. But I wonder what your work offers to the broader field of the study of African American religion or black religions beyond a really fascinating account of this individual spiritual life and contributions from her perspective. The question is sort of what's the state of the field of the study of this thing you've been talking about out is black Buddhism? And where does the story of Tina Turner as a black Buddhist fit into that?

Ralph Craig III:
I think dancing in My Dreams with the book, I take the story of Turner's religious development in the kind of 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, anchor 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.

Maybe I think that the field of Black Buddhism is in many ways in its infancy, Black Buddhist writing. So I am working with a colleague, Adeana McNicholl, to compile a documentary reader of Black Buddhism. 

Judith Weisenfeld:
Wow. That's fantastic. 

Ralph Craig III:
Yes. And this is an acknowledgment of the fact that the last really 40 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 and continues,

Judith Weisenfeld:
Jan Willis, who wrote the forward to Dancing My Dreams 

Ralph Craig III:
Jan Willis she wrote the foreword to Dancing My Dreams and that she is a brilliant and insightful scholar who has really laid a lot of the groundwork for studying African American Buddhism or Black Buddhism. And that continues, 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 agreement vessel flawed and so on. So I think the last 20 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 they're Black Buddhist practitioners and their experiences in what sometimes predominantly white Buddhist communities, distinctions between kind of 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. So I think Black Buddhism now, I think the pedal is being put to the metal.

Judith Weisenfeld:
And that really does you've addressed some of the last question, but maybe if you have some other thoughts in terms of where you think this scholarship might go? What kinds of trends what kinds of themes you would like to see people take up in the future? Or you plan to yourself?

Ralph Craig III:
So I plan to and I think that the field needs to go direction. In addition to the documentary reading, 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 again 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 Gakkai 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, as I started by saying, 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 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.

Judith Weisenfeld:
Beautiful.

Ralph Craig III:
I think one thing that I would add is that Tina Turner and the study of Black Buddhism
requires us to expand into that by us, any scholars require scholars to expand into that global context dimension. Because even as I argue in the book and in the epilogue of the book, I argue that in many ways, though, at the time of Turner's passing, she's a Swiss citizen who had lived in Europe since 1980, really? Since 1986.

Still, her story is in many ways, her religious story is quintessentially American. Right. That's the argument of the book. And she remains an African American figure and all that that implies.

At the same time, her life existed in a global context. She was consumed in a global context. Right. Her album sales were depending on the album you talk about and the tour you discuss. Right. The sales were even greater abroad. And that then means the beyond albums where she kind of begins her turn to being a black Buddhist teacher.

Those albums saw some of their greatest sales in Europe, in Switzerland, in Germany, in France. So that means black Buddhism is being consumed in Switzerland, in Germany, in France, just as an example, in Japan, because the form of Buddhism Turner practices and also the late Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and others, that form of Buddhism is from Japan.

In Japan, when you walk into many religious bookstores or the religious section of bookstores,
the prominent Buddhists you'll see are not figures from Japanese religious culture. It's Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tina Turner. So to study the figures like them -- Alice Cotrane right, and her relationship to India, these are just examples, again, that I keep reference, that referencing. To study them means we have to then study the global context, Black Buddhism and African American religion. Black religion exists in a global context that must be taken seriously 

Judith Weisenfeld:
And it's a different geographic spread than one normally imagines when talking about African American religion in global context. Right? 

Ralph Craig III:
Indeed. 

Judith Weisenfeld:
Afro Caribbean Africa. That's really helpful. 

Ralph Craig III:
Can just say one thing on that. This is my last thing and then I'll let it go. But I find a story like this very fascinating and indicative. A story that begins in West Tennessee, makes its way across the United States and to California, picking up the language into England, picking up the language of metaphysical religion, and then the beliefs and discourse of metaphysical religion along the way. And then through California and England rooting itself in a tradition from Japan.

And that story then becomes one of the most prominent stories in that Japanese religious traditions arsenal. It becomes one of the most prominent stories held up as conversion and the excellence of the tradition and the practice bar none. Tina Turner such that when she passed away, the SGI USA ran a headline on their website and in their publications tina Turner simply the best. She was simply the best and an example on a larger stage of Nichiren Buddhist practice.

That story, though, is Black religion. And it is as if they put on this website Black religion is the most prominent story in our arsenal, in our collection of stories that I find very fascinating. And I think we're only at the beginning, scholars are only at the beginning of understanding what that means. That's the work I'm doing with my book, Dancing in My Dreams.

That's the work that I intend to do in the documentary reader and that's the work that I intend to do with the SGI. And that's the work that scholars like Rima Veseley-Flad doing. And then more broadly outside of Buddhism, I think that is the work that even scholars like Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Vaughn Booker, that's the work that I think and obviously your own Professor Weisenfeld, I think that's the work that's being done to move black religion to the center of American religious history and religious studies.
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