by Nikita Beloborodov
On Friday, February 20, 2026, the Department of Religious Studies hosted a colloquium delivered by Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Discussion centered on his recent book, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025). The primary audience was faculty and graduate students in the Religion in the Americas (RAM) and Religion and Society (RSOC) areas of concentration.
In Greene-Hayes’s own words, he decided to write Underworld Work “with the intention of taking readers on an enlightening journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expressions from the post-Emancipation era to the tumultuous period of Jim Crow segregation.” In his study of the diverse religious practices of Black people in an epoch marked by racial and sexual terror, he centers non-Christian practices and traditions. As a field, religious studies has mainly focused on the so-called “Black churches” in studying religious experiences of Black people. Greene-Hayes’s perspective restores voices to those who have gone unheard for many decades, recovering the stories forgotten in the canon of U.S. religious history, including the canon of U.S. Black religious history. As he and other participants noted, Underworld Work is also a project that specifically foregrounds queer voices and stories, making it―in this way, too―a contribution that remains rare in the study of Black and Africana religions.
An important part of the colloquium touched on terms and concepts. Greene-Hayes voiced critical reservations about terms such as “polycultural bricolage,” “syncretism,” or “magical religions,” which have historically been applied to the religious traditions and ritual practices of Black people in the U.S. One of the reasons for these reservations is that many of those early-twentieth-century practitioners he studied were largely uninterested in being legible within Christianity or regarded by Christian institutions as “properly Christian,” whereas “syncretism” and other such labels tend to center normative Christianity as the main modus operandi, since “syncretism” mainly implies an original Christian core that is diluted or contaminated by external elements. The concept of “Black Atlantic religion-making” became for Greene-Hayes an alternative to these categories, aimed at providing a more careful and detailed framework for studying how Black practitioners drew on a multitude of ritual technologies and spiritual and esoteric traditions in order to survive while navigating a world of state-sanctioned terror and religious policing. Central to this framework are processes of differentiation: in the competitive religious environment of Jim Crow New Orleans, where new house churches and spiritual centers constantly emerged, practitioners actively articulated what made their beliefs and practices distinct from those of their neighbors. In this way, the idea of “Black Atlantic religion-making” offers a perspective that seeks to avoid reducing the diverse religious expressions to categories such as Voudou, Hoodoo, or Conjure, and prevent them from being reified, instead foregrounding more specific details and self-descriptions of individual practitioners and communities.
Other processes and conditions Greene-Hayes attends to closely in his study include non-Christian and quasi-Christian institution-building and the co-existence of these non- or quasi-Christian Black practitioners and Black Protestants, who were in constant conversation with each other, living in the same neighborhoods and often—though at different hours—sharing the same spaces for their services. While there is a tendency in religious studies to prioritize the agency of Black Protestants in these histories, Greene-Hayes shifts the narrative, drawing inspiration from historian of religions Charles H. Long’s notion of “extra-church,” a term meant to capture the spiritual life of Black communities expressed through aesthetic and cultural practices outside formal church institutions.
New Orleans has served Greene-Hayes as a uniquely generative field for his case study. This U.S. city is itself a dense entanglement of traditions, shaped by centuries of creolization and Americanization among Spanish, French, Portuguese, Asian, Mediterranean, Native American, West African, and Caribbean peoples—processes that were often violent, intertwined with the slave trade and successive waves of forced migration. Greene-Hayes stressed that the study of religion in the U.S. has traditionally focused on the Northeast and New England in particular, starting with the Pilgrims and Puritans. The South still appears relatively understudied, and New Orleans even more so—a city that stands apart from the predominantly Evangelical South. Besides being historically Catholic, this international port has long functioned as both a destination and a point of departure for migrants across the Atlantic world, making it home to a rare cultural mosaic. In the Jim Crow era, the city was simultaneously an arena of extraordinary Black religious creativity and of pervasive racial violence.
In his journey into Jim Crow New Orleans, Greene-Hayes follows the footsteps of Zora Neale Hurston, the writer, filmmaker, and ethnographer who immersed herself in the city’s religious communities in the late 1920s and early 1930s. While acknowledging that Hurston is a very complicated figure whom he did not seek to romanticize, and that many of her assumptions have been proven wrong, he expressed deep appreciation for the ethnographic sensibility that distinguished her from so many of her contemporaries. As Greene-Hayes put it, “it is because she is so complicated that we are able to get to people who are complicated.” Hurston was willing to go to the deepest depths of the Black slums and commune with the folk living there, paying attention to the people no one else wanted to pay attention to at the time—and this is precisely why this rich archive is now available. In a sense, Greene-Hayes returns to Hurston what the field has owed her for a hundred years: academia prioritized many other figures over Hurston, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Melville Herskovits, Benjamin Mays, and others. In Underworld Work, Greene-Hayes honors Zora Neale Hurston through what he calls “Visitations”—brief ethnographic interludes drawn from her own writings, meant to introduce her seminal work into the discussion without necessarily making readers agree with her assessments but still allowing those excerpts to serve as guides and provide valuable observations that read as insightful even today, almost a century later.
The talk―as well as the book itself―sparked a productive discussion among the participants. Dr. Greene-Hayes responded to questions and comments, elaborating on his notions of Black Atlantic religion-making and underworld work, as well as on his own theoretical stances and his view of how secularism studies approaches religion-making. He explained that “underworld work”—a phrase documented by Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Anglican minister and self-taught folklorist—was, as Hyatt himself acknowledged, how practitioners had already been calling their own practices for decades. Greene-Hayes recovered the term from the archive precisely because it came from the sources themselves, reflecting how Black religious practitioners made sense of their place in—and against—the world as they knew it. He further emphasized the importance of attention to detail and practitioners’ perspectives. As a scholar of such diverse and complicated material, Greene-Hayes sees the conjunction of history and ethnography as a key methodological commitment in his work.
The Spring 2026 area colloquium highlighted many key problems in those parts of contemporary religious studies dealing with histories of religious contact, racialization, violence, surveillance, and transformation in the Americas. Although Greene-Hayes’s research focuses on the U.S. South, it engages in discussions highly relevant to the study of religion in the Caribbean as well as Central and South America.
Nikita Beloborodov is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at UT Austin. His research focuses on Classic Maya religion and writing.