Rev. Will Rose asked one question. One. And then four of the most brilliant theological minds I know — Kelly Brown Douglas, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, and Adam Clark — spent an hour doing what theologians do when you give them a microphone and the right film: they cracked the whole thing open.
The session became one of the most-talked-about moments from Theology Beer Camp 2025. Not because of any prepared remarks or PowerPoint. Because someone handed these four people a genuinely great movie and got out of the way.
The episode is out now. But before you hit play, here is what you’re walking into.
The sin in Sinners isn’t what you think it is.
Will’s question was simple: the movie is called Sinners — so what’s the sin? Adam Clark answered first. White supremacy. Parasitic. Predatory. Embodied in white vampires who can only sustain themselves by consuming black vitality. That’s not metaphor. That’s the actual mechanics of the film and, Adam argued, the actual mechanics of the thing it’s depicting. Vampires don’t produce anything. They require an invitation. And they erase difference through the hive mind — a false universal that can’t tolerate distinct, living human cultures.
That frame didn’t close the conversation. It opened it.
The blues and the Black church aren’t fighting. They never were.
Kelly Brown Douglas put it plainly: the blues and the church have always been in dialectical relationship. Both traditions are speaking to the same community — poor Black people just trying to make it. The juke joint and the church house aren’t opposites any more than the spirituals and the work songs are opposites. They’re answering the same question. They’re responding to the same wound.
Kelly made the comparison that stopped the room: the juke joint functions as the invisible institution to the Black church the way the invisible institution — the hush harbor — functioned to the white church during slavery. It kept something alive that the official structure wasn’t keeping alive. It went to the raw underside. The blues people. The ones the respectable church wanted to leave at the door.
Ryan Coogler made a film that honors that complexity, and Kelly named who made it possible: Dr. Yvonne Chireau, whose work on Black conjure and American religion ran through the whole thing. “This movie isn’t possible in its richness,” Kelly said, “if it wasn’t for the Black women.”
Sammy isn’t just a musician. He’s a gateway.
Juan took the conjure thread further. That scene — the one where Sammy plays and time collapses and centuries of Black culture pour through a single juke joint in 1932 Mississippi, Crip walkers and Parliament Funkadelic and praise dancers and DJ turntables all converging — Juan called it conjure. Sammy is Robert Johnson at the crossroads. He’s Papa Legba, the Haitian lwa that Western Christianity mistranslated as demonic but who is actually a portal, a messenger between the human and the divine. When Sammy picks up that guitar, he isn’t performing. He’s opening something.
And that’s why the vampire comes for Sammy specifically. You don’t just want to consume a musician. You want to consume the gateway.
The ancestors give life. That’s not how vampires work.
Here’s the theological move the film makes that most horror movies don’t: the Black dead aren’t the threat. They give life. Kelly and Juan distinguished it clearly. In the African religious sensibility that runs beneath this film — the West African cosmology where there is no hard line between the sacred and secular, no break between the living and the dead — the ancestors are always present, always impacting the living. The film honors that. The Black dead come back to give, not to take. It’s the white dead who drain.
The film is deeply theological, but it requires categories that traditional Western Christianity simply doesn’t have. Which is exactly the point.
Stacey named what the women paid.
This was the hardest turn in the conversation. All the women in the film — Annie, Mary, the Asian shopkeeper’s daughter — are the most valuable figures in the story. They’re also the most sacrificed. Stacey didn’t let that pass. The women carry the root work, the relational knowledge, the spiritual weight. And they get the shortest end of the stick because Smoke and Stack are stacking and smoking, and a patriarchal structure — even a Black one, even a sacred one — asks women to put their gifts on the altar first.
Stacey connected it back to the blues women: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Suge Avery in The Color Purple. Men could hold the blues and the church together. Women were usually asked to choose. That’s not the film’s failure. That’s what the film is naming.
Theology Beer Camp is a hush harbor.
Stacey said it out loud and the room felt it: “Beer camp is a hush harbor.” We are an invisible institution. People drinking beer and eating popcorn and arguing about theology and Legba and syncretism and Beyoncé, assembled together outside the official structures, risking a little privilege and protection to think freely. That’s what the juke joint was. That’s what the brush arbor was. That’s what this community is.
She closed with a letter she wrote to her daughter — a future screenwriter sitting in the front row on her spring break — about what Sinners means. About keeping the God birthed in you. About disordered loves (Augustine, who was North African, not the white European we made him). About not letting stacking wealth or the smoke of ambition compromise the depth of your faith and the affirmation of your health and your holy human experience.
I’m not going to summarize it further. You need to hear it.
If this conversation is the kind of thing you want to be in the room for — not just listening through headphones but actually present, asking the question, being part of the hush harbor — Theology Beer Camp is coming to Kansas City this October.
This is what it is. People who take faith seriously, take culture seriously, and take each other seriously, gathered around tables to think out loud about things that actually matter. Will Rose asked one question. Look what happened.
Come join us.
Join Us at Theology Beer Camp 2026!
Look—most church conferences can be, let’s be honest, painful. Bad coffee, weird carpet, breakout sessions that make you question your life choices. We do things differently. Theology Beer Camp is three days of incredible speakers, honest conversations, craft beer, and a community of people who actually want to wrestle with the big questions. We laugh, we learn, we argue, we pray—and yeah, (and some of us) drink delicious beer while we do it. This October—the 8th through the 10th—we’re gathering in Kansas City, and I want you there. If you’ve ever wanted to join us—or if you’re ready to come back—this is the time to grab your ticket. Head to TheologyBeerCamp.com and lock in your spot: beer, theology, and some of the best conversations you’ll have all year.
Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class - Theology for Troublemakers!
The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?
For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.
This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?
Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.
WHAT IS INCLUDED?
6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology.
6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics.
Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair.
Online Community: Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.
ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.
COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).
Panelists Include…
Kelly Brown Douglas is Visiting Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral. She is the author of Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God and Sexuality and the Black Church, and one of the foremost voices in womanist theology and the Black church tradition.
Juan Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches Black religion, race, religion, and film. He is a leading scholar of Black religious history and the moral philosophy of Black popular culture.
Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society and Chair of African American Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. A pioneering womanist ethicist, she is the author of Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics and co-author of Liberation Theologies in the United States.
Adam Clark is Professor of Theology and Director of Civic Engagement at Xavier University. A veteran of Theology Beer Camp and a passionate advocate for making progressive theological frameworks available outside the academy, he brings Black theology and ethics into direct conversation with culture, community, and justice.
Will Rose is the co-host of Systematic Geekology, a podcast exploring theology and pop culture for people who geek out on the deeper things. He hosted the Pop Gods Stage at Theology Beer Camp 2025.
