Faith is Bigger Than God: 'Sinners,' Religion, and Community
In a time of intense division and a drive toward individualism, 'Sinners' pushes a people-based faith that encourages us to lean on our neighbor, to become something greater together.
Faith is at the heart of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The first character we see is Sammie (Miles Caton) stumbling to a church, a house of faith, after an ordeal that left his clothes tattered and his face bloody. Sammie, also called Preacher Boy due to his father being the local pastor, comes seeking sanctuary. Upon seeing his son, Jedidiah Moore (Saul Williams) does not lean into care. Instead, he attempts to force Sammie into giving testimony that the blues lifestyle is one of sin and all the church attendees ought to give themselves up to God. Coogler intercuts this scene with gory, ecstatic images of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), the vampire that terrorized the juke joint created by Sammie’s cousins, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan). Remmick wants to use Sammie’s musical gift to reconnect with his Irish ancestors, just as Jedidiah seeks to use Sammie as a tool for furthering his brand of Christianity. As much as Sinners is a story about vampires, it is also a story about Sammie, and his battle for dominion over his soul.
In the film’s opening, we hear Annie’s (Wunmi Mosaku) voice speak of people with a gift to “pierce the veil between life and death” and conjure “spirits from the past and the future.” Sammie resides in this lineage of community storytellers that Black folks can trace back to the West African griots. Coogler invites us to bear witness to Sammie’s ability as Caton masterfully performs “I Lied to You” in the juke joint. Even before the scene leans into a surreal blend of time and space, we see what Sammie’s music can do, what the blues can do. His guitar and voice and Delta Slim’s (Delroy Lindo) piano blend into that magic we take for granted; these artists can enter our bodies and make us groove. No one in the building has heard the song before, but they are moved to dance by the power in his song.
Sammie’s voice reverbs as he sings, “Somebody take me in your arms tonight,” and we flashback to a moment where Slim talks to Sammie. He says, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. Nah, sir. We brought this with us from home. It’s magic what we do. It’s sacred and big.” And then we get to see just how “sacred and big” it is. Sammie’s voice collapses time and space to bring the African diaspora of the past, present, and future together. We see ballerinas and DJs and guitarists and so many more dancing together and creating music with their bodies. Coogler describes this scene as a “feedback loop,” and that’s exactly what it is. Sammie creates music, which moves the bodies in the juke joint, and then the bodies create a music of their own—as seen by the beat switch ups when we focus on different characters. Sammie’s music sets the roof on fire and burns down the walls. He facilitates a connection that has no boundary through song.
Unfortunately, his gift catches the attention of Remmick, who seeks to use it for his own purposes. The other large dance scene in the film demonstrates Remmick’s vampiric power. He leads his freshly-turned coven of vampires in a river dancing extravaganza to “Rocky Road to Dublin.” Remmick preaches “fellowship and love,” as he tries to seduce all the juke joint survivors to join him in vampirism. However, contrasting this scene with the juke joint scene betrays the truth that lies beneath his words. He does not desire true “fellowship,” instead followers whom he can extract from and get to do his bidding. He uses this forced, non-consensual connection to create a community without doing the hard work of building one. He is the center of the dance number, unwilling or unable to let others engage in the “feedback loop” of the juke joint. Therefore, he cannot do what Sammie can; he cannot “pierce the veil” and connect with his people. He can only create illusory proximity. Even the two white people he first turns, Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke), often echo Remmick’s words like automatons. He must strip people of their individuality to commune with them.
Therefore, when returning to the beginning of the film, the question becomes why does Coogler flash between Jedidiah and Remmick. To answer that, we must look at Black Americans’ religious history.
Enslavement left an indelible mark on Black American culture. Prior to being enslaved, Black folks mostly followed traditional West African religions, with Christianity following Islam in terms of prevalence. White enslavers often used Biblical passages to justify their domination over Black people. However, they also worried that converting Black enslaved people would prove impractical in the task of continuing the slave trade. They recognized that Christianity held the possibility of inspiring the enslaved to rise above their forced station in life. Nevertheless, white Americans forcibly converted the enslaved to Christianity in a civilization attempt right out of “The White Man’s Burden.” In the course of conversion and “civilization,” the traditional West African religions did not just disappear: they often merged with the Protestant Christianity to create idiosyncratically Black American modes of faith. Furthermore, the crucible of the “New World” also gave rise to Conjure, also known as Hoodoo or root-working.
In her book, “Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition”, writer and Professor of Religion Yvonne P. Chireau, who also served as Sinners’ Hoodoo consultant, defines Conjure as “a magical tradition in which spiritual power is invoked for various purposes, such as healing, protection, and self defense.” Throughout the book, she emphasizes the blurred boundaries between religion and spiritualism among Black Americans. Conjure has historically been most demonized when viewed through a strict and white good/evil binary and when Black folks attempt upward mobility through respectability politics. Black Christians may use religion as a tool to prove their humanity to the white majority.
This prostration to white standards would lead to the ostracization of Conjure women like Annie. Annie offers a counterpoint to Christianity as the only method of engaging with the divine. Even the establishing shot of her home calls to mind the little church house in which we meet Sammie’s father. She, too, feeds the spiritual needs of the community. When two young children come to her home looking for some of her goods, she knows them and their mother. She even accepts their plantation money as payment because she is aware of the economic reality of Black Southerners and wants to stay enmeshed in her community. She refuses Smoke’s offer of exchanging the plantation money for US dollars because she “ain’t goin’ nowhere else.” Moreover, Annie is the one to recognize the vampires for what they are, and Sammie never would have survived without her knowledge.
Less open-minded Christians may want to keep people like Annie completely separate from Black religion, but that is historically dishonest. As Chireau says, “Conjure practitioners did not eschew Christianity but often accommodated Christianity within their own complex of supernatural beliefs.” Sinners explicitly references this when Annie lists holy water as one of the weapons one can use against vampires. Despite the interplay of Christian faith and Conjure, people like Christian rapper Lecrae have called the film “anti-Christian propaganda,” saying that the film portrays Christianity as “irrelevant or oppressive” and that “Hoodoo, not the Holy Spirit, is the weapon of choice.”
Conversely, Ajanaé Dawkins, “poet, conceptual artist[,] and theologian,” wrote a thread on X sharing her thoughts on the blend of Christianity and Conjure in the film. She argues that “Preacher boy is protected by his dad’s faith + prayer . . . Preacher boy literally turns to the Lord’s Prayer when he has no other options & it saves his life.” There is no evidence in the film that Sammie’s father prayed for him when he went to the juke, and there is definitely no evidence that these unseen/unheard prayers had any effect on Sammie’s fate. Additionally, the scene Dawkins refers to with the Lord’s Prayer shows that Christianity alone in fact cannot save lives. Remmick repeats the Lord’s Prayer at Sammie and speaks on how it was forced on his people, yet “the words still bring [him] comfort.” In this way, we see the divergent ways that Christianity can be incorporated into the colonized’s lives. Remmick uses the words to soothe, but he also learns the wrong lesson from British rule of Ireland. He becomes a cultural and literal vampire like the British. Sammie, on the other hand, transmutes Christianity into a chimera of itself with Black cultural traditions. He uses his religion to inform how he creates culture instead of extracting it from others like Remmick. It is not until Sammie uses his guitar, a symbol of the blues and his power, to hit Remmick in the head that Smoke is able to save him. The guitar and his cousin save Sammie’s life, not a prayer.
Yet, this is not to say that Christianity is solely a negative force in the film. In an interview with Megan Goodwin of Religion Dispatches, Dr. Yvonne P. Chireau says, “The film shows that Hoodoo is part of the Christian heritage, part of Black religion’s heritage.” Hoodoo and Christianity are so blended together that you can’t really keep them apart. Annie and Jedidiah are not diametrically opposed, but rather two spiritual practitioners working to save their people in the only ways they know how.
So why does Sammie think of Remmick as he sees his father in the bookended church scenes of the film? Because both characters seek to use his gift for their purposes. The former to connect with his Irish homeland and the latter to proselytize about Christianity. They see Sammie not as a full person but as a tool. Therefore, Jedidiah does not condemn the blues out of hatred but rather fear. The blues divert Sammie’s attention from his father’s mission, and it is a genre so deeply Black that it can only attract the violence of white oppressors and their God. There is a care in Jedidiah’s constant commands to “Put [the guitar] down in the name of God!” However, this care would strip Sammie of his individuality just like Remmick’s bite.
Sammie needs the blue to live. Chireau describes the blues as “the first commercially produced music to explicitly embrace the culture from which conjuring traditions emerged.” She continues, “The blues articulated blacks’ experiences of alienation, victimization, and loss and, as such, like Conjure, became existential appeals for control in an uncontrollable universe. Blues lyrics gave voice to suffering by describing both personal and collective afflictions.” The blues, within the world of the film and outside if it, are a kind of magic. It alchemizes the pain of a race into something beautiful, something soothing. It creates a sacred space through rhythm and melody. And yet, like Annie and other Conjure people, Sammie does not throw away Christianity in favor of blues and Conjure. Instead, in his song that “pierces the veil,” he sings, “See, I'm full of the blues, holy water too.” He holds the capacity to engage in Christianity and blues. He can be a person and follow the faith of his community while still being a conduit for an abstract divine.
Despite Christianity’s dominance over the conversation surrounding Sinners, the true faith at the center of the film is the faith that the characters have in each other. Community is Sinners’ religion. From the collapse of time and space in the juke joint to the rainbow coalition of vampires, community is the most powerful force in the film. Even sixty years after the most horrific night of his life, Sammie says, “But before the sun went down, I think that was the best day of my life.” And vampire Stack says, “And just for a few hours, we was free.” That pleasure and freedom would have been impossible without the people around them. Without Bo, Grace, Annie, Delta Slim, Cornbread, Pearline, Smoke, Stack, and Sammie, there would have been nothing to fight for. No joy to protect. Sammie was able to call upon the ancestors because Smoke and Stake gave him their daddy’s guitar and invited him to sing. Delta Slim’s piano playing adds to the magic of Sammie’s song. That is the lesson at the film’s center. In a time of intense division and a drive toward individualism, Sinners pushes a people-based faith that encourages us to lean on our neighbor, to become something greater together.