Ashon Crawley struggled much of his life to reconcile the teachings of his Pentecostal upbringing with his lived experience.
Crawley, who describes himself as “agnosticostal,” is a scholar, artist, musician and writer. He has spent his career expressing the powerful joy of his upbringing in the Church of God in Christ while trying to reconcile it with the injustice and hypocrisy he experienced, particularly as a gay man.
In his visual arts work, he “shouts,” a Pentecostal practice of physical worship involving music, dance, clapping and other forms of ecstatic praise — to create pieces with paint, pigment powder and other media.
“When I started doing these performative painting pieces, I really began to feel things that were resonant with the feelings that I would experience in church,” he said.
Crawley is a professor of religious studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of “Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility” and “The Lonely Letters.” He was the Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill during the 2024-2025 academic year.
His work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, among other venues.
Crawley spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about his path from being a musician in his parents’ church to an artist and scholar. The following is an edited transcript.
Faith & Leadership: How did you come to do what you’re doing?
Ashon Crawley: I don’t know. I grew up in New Jersey. My parents are both clergy. We grew up Church of God in Christ, and our church wasn’t large. The same people did a lot of things. So I was a choir director and I was a musician for the church. I started learning how to play just to be good enough for a church service, essentially.
I enjoyed it. At that time, I was imagining myself in the future as a pastor of a church with a wife and kids. I was gay, but that was the trajectory that I thought I would be on and that I was preparing for. I didn’t know how it was going to work but I assumed that that’s what was going to happen.
I moved for undergraduate studies at University of Pennsylvania, started The New Spirit of Penn, which is a gospel choir, and was doing this choir work on campus and going to church. I was a musician at one of the churches outside of Philadelphia and was directing this choir.
I was very committed to the spiritual life of my Pentecostal upbringing. I was in the engineering school and wasn’t doing well at all. It was not clicking. Part of it was being away from home. Part of it was the existential crisis of, “Who am I going to be? I know that I’ve been preparing all my life to do these things, but I also don’t feel like I want to do these things.” I had no one to really talk to, no real outlets.
I got kicked out of the engineering school and had to make some decisions. I decided — well, they encouraged me/they forced me — to be a student in the College of Arts and Sciences. I was taking education, architecture courses and photography courses, which I loved.
I was an artist when I was a kid. I would paint a lot, but painting is expensive. It’s not a hobby I could keep up with. I was engaging in all of these practices that I would not have called artistic, especially the musicianship and the choir directing. Now I recognize all of it is actually different forms of art practice, performative art practices.
I was using this artistic imagination in these architecture courses and in my photography courses. I was able to sit and think critically in the education courses. I was really enjoying learning and writing and thinking about the relationship between race, class, gender, sex, sexuality.
I was using Yahoo to search for things like, “What does 1 Corinthians 6 and 9 say? What does it say in Hebrew or in the Greek? What does it say in Leviticus?” I was finding folks at Yale and at other universities who were writing about Greek and Hebrew. I was having a different kind of existential crisis: It seems like there are things that I have learned from my youth that are not squaring with the things I’m learning now.
I decided to leave the choir. I told people, “I’m just tired.” But it was really because I was no longer convinced doctrinally and theologically. I gave up music for a long time.
I went to Emory University [for seminary.] I thought at that time that I would be clergy in a progressive kind of Christian space. I was a student chaplain at the Metro State Prison for women outside of Atlanta. I was very unsettled. We were primarily responsible for leading church services, [but] I wanted to ask questions about institutional practices of racism and sexism and classism.
I was having another existential crisis because at this point it’s like, well, I feel like I’m amongst people that are progressively oriented Christians, but it doesn’t seem like this is the kind of work I can commit to. Because it felt deeply unethical to every Sunday go into a prison, lead a church service and then leave.
I applied to doctoral programs the second year, thinking about a doctorate in theology or biblical studies or American religion. I got rejected from every program I applied to — every single program. At that time I was very sad. Today I’m very, very, very thankful.
I had to move back home with my parents, [who hold] very classical Pentecostal beliefs like speaking in tongues and the movement of spirit, the third work of grace in terms of the Holy Spirit and the ideas of sanctification and living a clean life. And being queer doesn’t square with that. It was not a fun year.
F&L: Being queer is a big part of your story. Were you struggling with this all along?
AC: At a very young age, 7 or 8, I had age-appropriate attractions to boys. It kind of felt like, “Oh, this is the devil trying to tempt me. This is an obstacle that I have to overcome.” I struggled, through junior high school and high school, absolutely, because there was no one at all that I could talk to about anything; just an experience of loneliness.
I knew that what the Bible said, according to our church, is that it’s sinful. But it was a certain kind of sinfulness that you didn’t want to be named publicly because people would also talk badly about you and people would target you for sermon bashing.
F&L: It sounds like you were trying to integrate what you felt, what you experienced, what you were learning and what you’d grown up with.
AC: I was trying to integrate it. So much of the way I was socialized to understand the problems of queerness was through attacking men for being feminine: You’re giving up your place as a man, you’re giving up your place as a Black man, you’re giving up your place to a woman. There was so much language that degraded women.
A lot of the musicians — and this is the book that I’m writing now — who were working in the Pentecostal churches that we would go to, that we would fellowship with, were geniuses with music [and] also dying from AIDS complications. And no one was talking about it.
So on the one hand, there was all of this castigating of gay men for exchanging God’s desire for them to try to be like women. And they’re dying. But also, before they die, they are providing the music, the exuberance, the joy that catches hold in the congregation so that everyone ends up praising.
At a very young age it was confusing. Not just to notice it, but to feel a deep affinity for the men who are dying, and to not be able to articulate that, was another real struggle. I was called pejorative terms at a young age, the same terms that people who were preaching or sermonizing would call the men who were dying.
It felt very much like, I haven’t done anything for me to be like this, so why am I like them? Experiencing deep despair in the same space where you experience deep joy was a conundrum that I couldn’t figure out.
The older I got, the more I was beginning to realize. The more that I read and the more that I learned, the further I began to push against some of the doctrines. I finally said, Well, actually, I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t know what I believe, but I know I don’t believe this anymore.
I finally ended up at Duke in the English department. At Duke, I really figured out that the thing that I was most interested in thinking about was what we call performance theory.
Performance is about behavior, it’s about practice, it’s about repetition and habituation. And performance theory can give you a way to think through concepts of gender. Is gender a thing that is biological or is it a thing that we accept and become used to and perform and repeat over and over again?
I love performance theory because it gave me a clear way to think about the things that I enjoyed about my Pentecostal upbringing: the joy, the exuberance, the sound, which are all things that you have to practice and be intentional about. They don’t just happen. They have to be cultivated.
F&L: One thing that’s striking is the lack of anger or bitterness in your words and in your visual works. How did you emerge from this struggle to lean into joy and beauty?
AC: I think it’s because I allow myself to be angry. I don’t pretend that I’m not angry. I feel like despair should not have the final say in terms of our emotional register.
I’m interested in ending harm. I’m an abolitionist. I’m not interested in the reproduction of harm. I would rather be angry at the repetition of the system as opposed to individuals trying to find their way through it.
It doesn’t mean that I’m not angry with people. I just feel like the anger ends up being misplaced if you leave it there. Because I allow myself to feel anger, I can experience joy deeply. I recognize that joy is not something that anger short circuits.
I eventually tried to do a lot of the things that I had been thinking about and theorizing, which compelled me to return to artistic practices. I started painting seriously in 2017 when I moved to Virginia. I had all this time and I had paint, and I said, “Let’s see what happens.”
F&L: What is your relationship with the church now?
AC: I don’t go to church anymore. I’m good on that. I am agnostic. The performance [at Duke] was titled Agnosticostal, which is putting together the words “agnostic” and “Pentecostal.”
I have a strong sense for justice and a desire to do good and for myself to thrive amongst the thriving world. I don’t think that God concepts are necessary for me for that pursuit. I’m also not dismissive of people that are oriented toward God. A lot of my friends are believers within various traditions.
I’m agnosticostal and agnostic but I’m very spiritual. There’s something about the music and the sound of Pentecostalism that still resonates with me, that I still love. I write about it extensively. I obsess over it in my thinking and my writing and in my artistic practice.
But the churches of my youth are like, “Yeah, no, whatever that is, we don’t do it.” I think there’s a lot of curiosity with regards to what I do, how I think, what I write about. But there’s also a lot of tension as well. I am very committed to queer thriving, and I am very explicit about it. I think that for some that is a huge, huge problem.
In 2021 there was a series in the Washington Post about the future of the Black church, and for some reason they asked me to write a piece. There were big-name church leaders and then me. I wrote that the future of the Black church depends on how it reckons with the past and what it allowed to happen with regard to the AIDS crisis, the refusal to practice care. I wrote about the Church of God in Christ specifically, the organization that I was a part of, that my parents are still a part of. And I know that people knew about it, and no one talked to me about it.
F&L: Even your parents?
AC: No, they did not. I sent it to them, but they didn’t.
I was at a funeral a couple of weeks ago for a dear friend’s parent who passed away. There was someone there at the funeral, he knew me from [when I was] a child. I was close with his son; we were very, very good friends. And [the father] saw me after everyone was standing in the parking lot. He saw me and he turned and walked the other way. Wouldn’t even allow it to be an opportunity to say, “Hi, it’s been 30 years since I’ve seen you.”
There’s a kind of sharp dismissiveness. Because people believe what they believe.
Because I allow myself to feel anger, I can experience joy deeply. I recognize that joy is not something that anger short circuits.
