Womanist Ethics and the Semiotics of Religious National Power: White Authority and the Politics of Unknowing

Abstract

This article theorizes a womanist semiotics of advocacy by reading the unnamed Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4—renamed Polet (defender)—alongside Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching crusade. A womanist semiotics decodes how Black women’s bodies and voices signify within systems of White patriarchal power that simultaneously demand their advocacy while denying them protection. Through close readings of biblical narrative and historical archive, the article identifies five components that structure Black women’s resistance: communal grounding, strategic alliance-building, trauma witness, prophetic truth-telling, and sacred self-preservation. Both women embodied kenotic love—a paradoxical self-emptying that becomes fierce self-assertion—confronting prophetic and political authority to demand accountability for life against death. This framework exposes how contemporary democratic systems exploit Black women as “democracy’s backbone” while marginalizing their policy priorities, and offers theological authorization for strategic withdrawal from exploitative contexts. By centering Black women’s epistemological standpoint, this womanist ethic reframes rest and disengagement not as abandonment but as revolutionary self-love essential for sustainable justice work.

Repository attribution: CL Nash. Womanist Ethics and the Semiotics of Religious National Power: White Authority and the Politics of Unknowing. Religions, 17(6), issue year 2026; article page publication date 2026-06-03. Original: source article. DOI: 10.3390/rel17060670. Original PDF reproduced without changes under CC BY 4.0. No endorsement is implied. Copyright 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/