“That Part of Us That Is Mystical”: The Paradoxical Pieties of Huey P. Newton

Abstract

Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his death in 1989. Focusing on 1960s’ U.S. Black Nationalism as materialist, Maoist, and Marxist in its appeals to objectivity, rationality, and positivist science, some scholars have presented Black Nationalist contempt for religion as pacifying and counter-revolutionary. Conversely, others have focused on the religious-like nature of formally secular 1960s’ Black Nationalism, even framing it as a “form of piety” and a “politics of transcendence”. Between these bookends, the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton have simultaneously been characterized as both “anti-religious” and as possessing an “innate spirituality”. I attempt to reconcile these divergent interpretations through an analysis of Newton’s worldviews (culled from his graduate school papers, published articles and books, and speeches and interviews). Newton frequently described aspects of the human condition as partially spiritual and in so doing, regularly married dialectical materialist variants of anti-capitalism, Black Nationalism, and ethno-racial self-determinism with “mystical” and theological aesthetics, concepts, stories, and styles from a variety of religious and philosophic traditions. These “paradoxical pieties” included, but were not limited to, the embrace and critique of spiritual existentialism and transcendentalism; deism and theosis; Christian hermeneutics; Zen Buddhism; and Vedic and Pranic Hinduism.

1. Introduction

Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party [hereafter BPP] in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his untimely death in 1989. Focusing on 1960s’ U.S. Black Nationalism as cultural, ideological, and political, with specific appeals to objectivity, rationality, and science, some scholars have presented Black Nationalist leaders’ contempt for religion as pacifying and counter-revolutionary (e.g., Camfield 2016; Comstock 1976). Conversely, others have focused on the religious-like nature of formally secular Black Nationalism (Cone 1975), even framing it as a “form of piety” (Glaude 2002) and a “politics of transcendence” (Smith 1998). Between these bookends, the BPP and Huey P. Newton have been characterized as both “anti-religious” (Dillard 2018) and as possessed by an “innate spirituality” (Abu-Jamal 2004).

I attempt to reconcile these divergent interpretations through an analysis of Newton’s worldviews (culled from his graduate school papers, published articles and books, speeches, and interviews). Newton regularly understood aspects of the human condition as partially “mystical” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 218). I argue that Newton regularly endeavored to marry dialectical materialist variants of anti-capitalism, Black Nationalism, and ethno-racial self-determinism—or what he called “revolutionary intercommunalism”—with “mystical” aesthetics, concepts, stories, and styles from a variety of religious and philosophic traditions. These “paradoxical pieties” included the embrace and critique of spiritual existentialism and transcendentalism; deism and theosis; Christian hermeneutics; Zen Buddhism; and Vedic and Pranic Hinduism.

2. Background

What is the religious story of Huey P. Newton? Sparse attention has been paid to his merger of spirituality and science. Many, instead, have concentrated on Newton’s provocative iconography, from the “Free Huey” campaign that lasted through his time in jail (Bae 2017; Street 2019, p. 1), to the famous poster of him beclad in a beret and leather jacket, holding a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other (Jeffries 2002; Hughey 2005, 2007). A hyper-radical spectacle, Newton oscillates between sinner and saint.

In the former role, he admitted to studying law in order to become a better burglar, was thrice tried for manslaughter1, and regularly engaged in violence and intimidation (e.g., Crouch 1989; Malnic and Stein 1989; Pearson 1994; Street 2015; Wolcott 2013). The negative appraisals of Newton have not lessened: Avril (2012, p. 16) contended that Newton’s philosophies aligned with “literal and physical” violence, while Oden (2007) compared Newton to no less than Osama Bin Laden. In stark distinction, others have approached such indictments as ad hominem attacks that fail to address the seriousness and validity of Newton’s intellectual production. But while some have concentrated too heavily on Newton’s faults, this other body of work has often tended toward hagiography. Even as the influence of the BPP and Newton was waning in the early 1970s, varied publications emphasized Newton’s latent genius, such as Keating’s Free Huey (Keating 1970), Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time (Seale [1970] 1991), and Anthony’s Picking Up the Gun (Anthony 1971). Following his death in 1989, Newton experienced sporadic popular culture reincarnation. The 1995 film Panther directed by Mario Van Peebles, Spike Lee’s 2001 one-man film A Huey P. Newton Story starring Roger Guenveur Smith, and the 2011 The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (directed by Göran Olsson), labored to recast Newton as an unsung hero. The rise of Panthermania exacerbated the mythic distortions of Newton. Varied books by former Panthers, activists, and scholars told tales of Newton as a misunderstood savant (e.g., Churchill and Wall 1990; Brown 1992; McCartney 1992; Jones 1998; Jennings 1999; Austin 2006; Cleaver and Katsiaficas 2001; Hilliard 2008; Hilliard and Cole 1993; Jeffries 2002; Forbes 2007). Since the early 2000s, positive scholarship on the BPP and Newton has exploded, intersected by topics like art, health, education, masculinity, media, sexuality, and more (e.g., Bassett 2016; Doss 1998; Freer 2012; Harris 2001; Hughey 2005; McLaughlin 2022; Poston 2012).

Only a few scholars have addressed Newton’s relationship with religion (e.g., Anderson 2012; Narayan 2020). Many have asserted that he was more of an apostle of Marx, Mao, and materialism than anything else (e.g., Ren 2009; Anderson 2012; Hardt and Negri 2009). For instance, in quoting Newton, Narayan (2019, p. 67) argued that he was solidly opposed to religion:

Newton’s multitude … included all members of the communities exploited under reactionary intercommunalism, and sought to break the Eurocentric, racist, patriarchal and heteronormative constitutions of the working class … This would provide the foundations, as Hardt and Negri also advocate, for the eventual emergence of a universal identity that could leave behind ‘racial, cultural and religious chauvinism’ and ‘realize that we are all Homo sapiens and have more in common than not.’

And put explicitly, in his 2016 commentary on Anthony Neal’s Common Ground, Felipe Hinojosa remarked, “To be clear, Newton’s position was not rooted in a religious and liberative consciousness” (in Neal 2016).

Such positions, I argue, ignore or dismiss Newton’s many different and contradictory syntheses of varied philosophical, religious, and spiritual traditions. This is puzzling given the acknowledgement of religious sentiment within dialectics and Marxism (cf. Garaudy 1976; Collier 2001), as well as Newton’s use of both in his theorizing (cf. Hughey 2005; Newton and Erikson 1973; Newton and Huggins 1975)).2 In this vein, some scholarship has acknowledged Newton’s uneasy and contradictory intersections with religion, from Newton’s reliance on Black churches and his working relationships with clergy members (cf. Burns 1995; Habtamu 2023), to his use of Christan theology and hermeneutics in his analyses, such as Detre’s (1973) and Sowers’ (2017) views of Newton’s ideology as deeply informed by his father’s Protestant preaching and faith in Christian soteriology and millennialism. Newton was also far from an atheist, but exhibited a critical and pan-religious deism, as emphasized by Lloyd’s (2015, p. 154) argument that Newton embraced God as “the unknown, the unknowable”, and as a common sentiment uniting “all religions”. Relatedly, some have concentrated on the religious or messianic character of Newton’s words and personality, such as Morgan’s (2014, p. 129) emphasis on “the political and religious aspects” of the famous photograph of Newton as an “authoritative portrayal of deities and rules—Christ in majesty”, which was echoed by Hooper’s (2015) assessment that Newton has been frequently rendered in Black theological aesthetics. While such works have begun to explore the religious and theoretical connotations of Newton’s activism, there has yet to appear a study of Newton’s variable usages of disparate religious and spiritual traditions in the interests of Black people.

3. Newton’s Paradoxical Pieties

Newton’s religious proclivities were many and messy. Far from clean-cut exegeses or specific hermeneutics, Newton deployed a snarl of theological traditions. In an attempt to disentangle these, I first explore his use of spiritual existentialism and transcendentalism (marked by his engagement with Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Schelling, and Tillich) that functioned to merge humanism with Black political theology. I then explore Newton’s deism and theosis, which were rooted in his father’s Baptist church. Newton cross-fertilized a Protestant understanding of the divine as a metaphysical force of unity and love with varied non-Christian Black social movements that theorized divinity as Black (or as residing within Black people). I next turn to Newton’s explicit and critical visitations with varied Christian hermeneutic strategies and concepts, ranging from Christomorphic pneumatology and Calvinist predestination to original sin and millennialist soteriology. Finally, I turn toward the apparent influence of both Buddhist and Hindu traditions on Newton’s theorizing and practices. In particular, I demonstrate that Newton’s uses of munen musō (no-thought and no-image) and uji (being-time) came from the Zen school of Mahayana Buddhism and his understanding of advaita vedānta (non-duality tradition) and chakras from both Vedic and Pranic Hinduism. I conclude by re-conceptualizing Newton’s “paradoxical pieties” as “liturgies for liberation”—public sermons that reiterated how we must draw upon the “part of us that is mystical” in order to attain freedom, equality, and justice.

3.1. Call Me Ishmael: Spiritual Existentialism and Transcendentalism

Growing up in the predominantly Black communities of both Monroe, Louisiana, and Oakland, California, Newton found the parable of the cave in Plato’s Republic a potent tool for understanding oppression (cf. Sowers 2017). “The allegory seemed very appropriate to our own situation in society”, Newton wrote in his autobiography (Newton 1973c, p. 75). “It was a seminal experience in my life … it had started me thinking and reading and trying to find a way to liberate Black people” (Newton 1973c, p. 230). While initially attracted to Platonic idealism, or the existence of otherworldy “Forms” as the unchangeable essences of all things, Newton began to identify with existentialism—a philosophical movement emphasizing free will and centering on experience and meaning-making (cf. Gritz 2023). By the time he entered graduate school in the 1970s, Newton had both deepened his study of existentialism, and increased his critical dissections of Platonic idealism and others’ reverence for it. In one unpublished graduate school paper, Newton wrote that “Plato’s life work” was “a cluster of infantile ideas about the divine personification of the stars, and the advocacy of the death penalty for atheists and poets” (Newton 1973b, p. 7).

By the mid-1970s, as Newton deepened his studies in pursuit of his doctorate in the “History of Consciousness” at U.C. Santa Cruz, he demonstrated a matured understanding of existentialism in relation to theological concerns, influenced by sundry perspectives. He took courses and independent studies under psychologist Arthur Pearl, political scientist J. Peter Euben, anthropologist Triloki Pandey, literary critic Eugenio Donato, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and more. For instance, during 1978–1979, Newton was tutored by the historian Hayden White. Newton submitted a paper to White entitled “Common Denominators of Existential Philosophy”, in which he distilled a cacophonous body of scholarship into a coherent refrain:

… By the opening of the first World War the chorus of existential criticism was univocal, despite the different quarters from which the voices were raised. Each of the important thinkers demanded that existence be defined out of immediate, concrete, personal experience of the experiencer, rather than as an abstraction without time or place. For Schelling the approach to existence is through the immediate intimate experience of Christianity. For Kierkegaard it is the immediate personal experience of the separate individual in the face of eternity. Feuerbach perceived Man through his sense. Marx sense Being through socio-economic determination and intervention. For Nietzsche there is a biological definition of the Will to Power. Bergson’s vocabulary consists of dynamic vitality, duration, and creativity. Jaspers thinks in terms of the inner activity of the Self, of “Self-Transcendence”. Heidegger attempts to describe the very structure of Being, and of Man’s “concern” with Being.

(Newton 1978–1979, pp. 7–8)

In this paper, Newton wrote adamantly of his move away from classical Greek philosophy. Newton highlighted how such a “closed system”, with a reliance on an “unchangeable essence”, had created a bifurcated understanding of humanity as “animal” with a “soul”. He advocated instead for a reorientation toward “the flesh and blood of Being” as the basis of human existence as articulated by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche:

We live today in the midst of this tremendous reaction against the closed system universe of Aristotle, Newton, Euclid, or rather the powers their illustrious names came to represent. According to the anti-Hegelians, the Aristotelian faith in unchangeable essence and the confusion of where ideas come from leads us to pathologically reversed order of reality. In Aristotle’s system as applied, the spirit becomes complete and institutionalized, with jails for the “animal” and churches for the “soul”. … Kierkegaard saw that Schelling was unable to escape the Aristotelian cage that he had been schooled in … Then in the 1880’s, the prophet Nietzsche made his dramatic entrance. Nietzsche’s rhapsodic song of rebellion and his immense wit carried him toward the great announcement of the death of God … Because we humans are along with the shield of God or History or Law, therefore no one may violate the flesh and blood of Being. This new categorical imperative of Nietzsche’s will be reflected in all later existential ethics.

(Newton 1978–1979, p. 1)

But Newton did not simply critique absolutism in the form of religious expression. Rather, Newton understood existentialism’s nemesis as contextual, as both religious ideologies and abstracted scientific materialism when used to rationalize and justify the inequality ubiquitous to modern political economy. At the time, Newton, contemplating enrolling at the Graduate Theological Union (he later decided against it), and ordained as a minister of the Universal Life Church in 1980, was interrogating the place of religious ideas in relation to liberty and justice. Thus, existentialism’s opposition to these institutions and modes of thought was not only an academic exercise, but was instead a liberatory praxis.

The common enemy of existential thought is the “rational” and “religious” systems of thought that have come to serve as the apology and the ideology of the modern nation or late industrial state. The basic common goals, of this dramatic criticism of Western industrial society, has been to foment rebellion and revolution in the name of a human freedom that is both personal and social.

(Newton 1978–1979, p. 1)

In other prior graduate school papers, Newton articulated the threat to existentialism from both the assimilation of abstracted reason and rationality into Christian theology and the secular sanctification of Aristotle. In the fall of 1977, Newton took a course under J. Peter Euben, a leading figure of the “Berkeley school of political theory”, which advocated for activism as the end of theory. In that class, Newton wrote a paper entitled “The Rise of a Non-Aristotelian System”, which reads as follows:

Reason, Aristotle tells us, is the highest part of our personality; that which the human person truly is … Even the Christianity of the Middle Ages, when it assimilated Aristotle, did not displace this Aristotelian principle: it simply made an uneasy alliance between faith as the supernature center of the personality and reason as its natural center; the natural man remained an Aristotelian man, a being whose real self was his rational self. This logos will become the Holy Ghost and Aristotle the academic saint of the Age of Faith.

(Newton 1977, p. 8)

With existentialism understood as a paradigm for centering the human experience of inequality and suffering, but also coupled with the attainment of just and ethical principles, Newton wrestled with how to best conceptualize humanity’s material experience without negating morality or his understanding of intangible spirituality. He did just that in another unpublished paper on the Christian existentialist Paul Tillich’s understandings of the idealist–transcendentalist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In it, Newton revealed his own definition of existentialism:

By existentialism, I understand the philosophy which is oriented towards the existence of things insofar as they stand in opposition to their essence. Toward things in their falling away from themselves. Existential elements in this sense you can find as in Plato, also in most essential philosophies. They break up in a revolutionary way in the 19th century in the battle of the precursors of the current existentialism, Kierkegaard’s and the early Marx, Nietzsche, Burkhardt, against Hegel and they determined as an existential style the great art, literature, and philosophy of the 20th century.

(Newton 1975, p. 2)

Newton argued that a two-fold understanding of human nature was essential to existential philosophy. However, he did not retreat to Cartesian dualism (which I will discuss shortly). Rather, he articulated the spiritual or the ethical aspects of humanity similarly to Schelling—that the “Spirit is never without nature” (Newton 1975, pp. 5–6). That is, the spirit is a part of the unconscious nature of human experience. Newton continued, “There is hardly a stronger counter-instance against the essentialism of the ethical than the philosophy and psychology of the unconscious and it was, though not discovered, yet seen in a new way in Schelling’s philosophy of nature” (Newton 1975, pp. 5–6).

But Newton aligned more with Tillich’s theological appropriation and critique of Schelling. He thus concluded his paper with an appeal to a transcendental and liberatory “revelation”, given his assumption of the “impossibility to derive existential answers from existential analysis” (Newton 1975, p. 11):

Schelling tries it and he created a philosophical theology which was neither theology nor true philosophy. It is the task of the theologist to answer the questions of human existence and their conflicts … But he can do this only on the basis of revelation—revelation of the power of being which overcomes the conflict of essence and existence and which we can only meet in history. Schelling knew this but he was too much an heir of the idealistic tradition to draw the consequences. He forgot the encounter nature of revelation which he himself had asked for.

(Newton 1975, p. 11)

Newton thus mapped his understanding of the spirit and “revelation” onto Tillich’s. God’s communication or “revelation” to humanity must, in its form, relate or correlate to the conditions of human experience and being. Existence became the question to which revelation was the answer. While not necessitating a formal theism, Newton opened wide the door for how the divine manifests in human experience:

… being itself manifests itself as God—in the way in which it rules consciousness and expresses itself in symbolic form through consciousness. This happens in myth and revelation. They mirror the way in which the being itself controls being. The absolute is not God, but it becomes God and reveals itself as God in the immense processes and earthquakes of mythical experience.

(Newton 1975, p. 9)

Throughout his graduate school papers, Newton repeatedly merged Tillich’s socialist theology and existentialism with his primary quest to achieve racial, if not human, liberation. Newton was thus often sympathetic to, and even in agreement with, what he called the “Christian-Marxist-Existential dialogue” (Newton 1978–1979, p. 7), in which the “Religious Socialists bring to bear the immanent or pregnant historical moment in conjunction with God” (Newton 1978–1979, p. 8).

Importantly, Newton’s understanding of God also departed from Tillich’s. While Tillich kept faith in an absolute deity that manifested in the relativist experiences of being, Newton was highly critical of any version of divinity that might rob humanity of its self-determination. In the spring quarter of 1973, Newton wrote a graduate paper entitled “Politics and Myth”, wherein he articulated a primary concern about the deleterious Platonic reversal of the relationship between human agency and the fight for liberation with divine authority and tyranny:

The idea of the good is finally identified with God; the old gods are dead forever. … The final advice of Plato’s evil and senile genius is that man should be ‘the plaything of God’. … With tragic irony, in the end, the rebel Prometheus became identified with the cruel tyrant Zeus. And Zeus, the fallible god, became the infallible God [underline in original].

(Newton 1973b, pp. 9–10)

Newton was a staunch critic of dogmatic and orthodox renderings of the divine absolute and God’s relationship to humanity as subservient to, and accepting of, inequality and suffering. Importantly, Newton did not negate the importance of faith and transcendental departures from sensuous experience. Drawing explicitly from both Tillich’s Systemic Theology and Camus’ The Rebel, Newton emphasized the necessity of marshalling “self-transcendence” toward the interests of liberation and freedom, of theorizing what is alongside imagining what could be:

… Paul Tillich, the leading theological existentialist, provides a characteristically balanced summary of thought about freedom in its broad outline. Man is so far as he sets and pursues purposes, is free. He transcends the given situation, leaving the real for the sake of the possible. He is bound to the situation in which he finds himself, and it is just his self-transcendence that is the first and basic quality of freedom. … At the conclusion of his work The Rebel, Camus tells us that “the bow is bent, the wood complains”, and that at the moment of supreme tension an arrow will be released, “a shaft that is inflexible and free”. There is that kind of poetic drive to existential philosophy. The arrow, the leap, the wager, the glance of good faith, the quantitative leap, the Downgoing: we could inventory the phrases of the existential thinkers—the list adds up to “Freedom”.

(Newton n.d., pp. 10–12)

Newton’s dialectic framing of transcendentalism and existentialism was rather explicit. He advocated a purpose-driven idealist departure from the material precisely because he understood the desire to transcend as borne out of, and driven by, material conditions.

A theory of immanence, in which the divine is encompassed within the material world, underpinned Newton’s reverence toward other revolutionary activists. Newton frequently opined that he was inspired by a lineage of revolutionary thinkers (e.g., Malcolm X, Franz Fanon, and Ché Guevara) and that he and the BPP were their rightful heirs. Embracing the language of a “progressive revelatory”3 prophet and borrowing the sacralized succession of hereditary religious leadership, Newton often described himself and the BPP as a part of a continuous spiritual force that had returned to replenish people’s faith in their eventual liberation. Moreover, Newton neither parroted prior revolutionary ideologies nor did he claim he was simply inspired—that is, mentally stimulated—by the ideas of revolutionaries before him. Instead, in romantic and transcendental language, often toward the early formative years of the BPP, Newton frequently argued that both his own and the BPP worldview were guided by the revolutionary ethos or “spirit” of those who came before him. For instance, of his and the BPP’s relationship to Malcolm X (whom he never met in person), Newton wrote the following:

We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm. Often it is difficult to say exactly how an action or a program has been determined or influenced in a spiritual way. Such intangibles are hard to describe, although they can be more significant than any precise influence. Therefore, the words on this page cannot convey the effect Malcolm has had on the Black Panther Party, although, as far as I am concerned, the Party is living testament to his life work.

(Newton 1973c, p. 113)

Some scholars have acknowledged how the political and ideological genealogy of the BPP was indebted to prior movements and organizations, such as Marcus Garvey’s “African Legion,” the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) “Fruit of Islam,” Malcolm X’s “Organization for Afro American Unity” (OAAU), and the Deacons for Defense (cf. Henderson 1997). Yet, many have strategically ignored Newton’s mention of “spiritual” influences and the transcendental “intangibles” with which he labored to imbue the BPP and himself with metaphysical import. Consider that Newton found the church a material refuge that gave “a feeling of importance unequaled anywhere else”, while it also provoked “strange feelings” (cf. Lloyd 2018):

Even though I did not want to spend my life there, I enjoyed a good sermon and shouting session. I even experienced sensations of holiness, of security, and of deliverance. They were strange feelings, hard to describe, but involving a tremendous emotional release. … Once you experience this feeling, it never leaves you.

(Newton 1973c, p. 37)

In this context, what did Newton mean when he claimed that “Malcom’s spirit is within us” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 52), or when he eulogized his comrade George Jackson by stating that “he bequeathed us his spirit and his love” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 243)?

We can be relatively sure that Newton resisted both the reduction of “spirit” to passion or temperament, as well as any conflation of “spirit” with “mind”. For Newton, “spirit” was both attached to and determined by the body [he once articulated “what others call our spirit or our mind would not exist, if we were not material organisms” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 192)]. Yet, as discussed prior, he was also critical of the Cartesian duality of body and mind; he spoke highly of the philosopher Gibert Ryle’s “demystification of the mind as the Age of Enlightenment conceived it: the ‘mind as spirit’” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 317). Instead, Newton meant something more “intangible” and deeply value-laden. Newton’s intangible spirituality was a resource that enabled people to transcend physical existence. Newton suggested an existential synthesis of ontology and axiology—humanity’s capacity and purpose for a just and moral existence. Newton made this understanding explicit when he wrote that the “dignity and beauty of man rests in the human spirit, which makes him more than simply a physical being. This spirit must never be suppressed for exploitation by others” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 156).

Such an orientation aligns with two related traditions. Newton was, first, a humanist (cf. Finley and Alexander 2009; Pinn 2001, pp. 301–2). Humanism is a systematic belief system based in the inherent value and goodness of humanity, which places community rather than God at the center of existential questions. Second, Newton used Black political theology. As Lloyd (2018, pp. 188, 191–92) wrote,

Newton’s life and image intensely intertwine the purportedly secular and the theological, and Newton’s political practice exemplifies political theology at its best—as black theology. … this is an indication of a rich theological imagination closely tied with engagement in real politics, politics that critiques ideology (as idolatry) while exalting the skill of political judgment.

Newton’s Black humanist/Black political theology can be witnessed in his critiques of the idiolatry of a romanticized “cultural nationalism” and a fetishized “African ideology”, and through the mid-1970s establishment of the Oakland-based and BPP-sponsored “Son of Man Temple” that hosted lectures, artistic events, and other programming (often on Sundays) that was formed as a site to “come together to express our humanity”, rather than a place to “honor one God or one reverend. … We want our belief in the beauty of life to spread to freedom-loving people everywhere” (in Hilliard 2008, pp. 14–15).

Newton repeatedly relied on and promoted a transcendental conception of existentialism as an integral part of the human condition. In so doing, Newton claimed both inclusion within a distinct ethno-racial legacy and exclusion from full civil, social, and human rights and justice in the context of the American democratic project. Newton cast himself in the mold of the prophet Ishmael—a scion of a covenanted line but also an outcast possessive of a unique view of his native land.

3.2. The Son of a Preacher Man: Deism and Theosis

Toward the beginning of his doctoral studies, Newton once wrote rather decisively and dismissively of the concept of “God” as a human invention: “My opinion is that the term ‘God’ belongs to the realm of concepts, that it is dependent upon man for its existence. If God does not exist unless man exists, then man must be here to produce God” (Newton 1973c, p. 168). This evaluation of the divine might seem straightforward, but it can be interpreted in widely different ways. On the one hand, Newton might have meant a radical atheism in which “God” was made up whole cloth by human imagination and thus had no corresponding metaphysical existence. Yet, on the other hand, Newton could have been gesturing toward how divinity exists but is fundamentally unknowable, and how humanity thus places anthropomorphic renderings and language upon the divine in order to accommodate human limitations of understanding. This position aligns with attempts to know the “unknowable” divine by negation (one attempts to speak of what God is not rather than what God is). After all, Newton wrote, “I’m a very religious person. I have my own definition of what religion is about, and what I think of God” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 280). For Newton, we might understand this approach toward the divine as a knowledge of unknowing. But where do we situate Newton’s understanding of the divine between the rock of agnosticism and the hard place of agnoiology?

Newton was far from an atheist, and he likewise frequently departed from agnosticism. Newton possessed a critical deism that oscillated between an apophatic (“God is not”) and cataphatic (“God is”) theology. Second, Newton’s understanding of the divine was marked by theosis—a Protestant Christian understanding of a process of becoming like, or uniting with, God (what we might call deification or divinization).

Newton’s critical deism was often apophatic. Far from a departure from theology, the attempt to “know the unknowable” is a critical feature of many Abrahamic and world religious faiths (cf. Burrell 1992). At times, the “God” of Newton’s imagination was a synonym for what science has not yet understood. He stated, “As far as I am concerned, when all of the questions are not answered, when the extraordinary is not explained, when the unknown is not known, then there is room for God because the unexplained and the unknown is God” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 205). He also articulated this attempt to know, or even overthrow, the divine in Enlightenment-era and Oedipal language in a spring 1974 graduate paper entitled “Utopia: Universal Life Energy”:

God is ignorance! And as we become more aware and as we come into control of all those things that ‘belong’ to him, suddenly it is not god’s anymore; as the son comes into control of what his father had and it is not his father’s but it is himself, so that is a gradual kind of maturity.

(Newton 1974c, p. 7)

In this rendering, “God” was a progressively diminishing force akin to the human Oedipal desire to overthrow a father’s authority. Newton occasionally returned to this theological hermeneutic, such as in an interview in which Newton was asked about his religious beliefs, and he responded that across the major world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God is “the unknown, the unknowable” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 281).

“But this God of Newton’s is not hidden”, remarked Lloyd (2018, p. 196), before continuing, “God’s erasure is what animates the political-theological vision of Newton and the Panthers. Their commitment is to achieve the unknown, to struggle against those who would name it—who would name God, or who would name revolution”. Accordingly, Newton’s theology was also cataphatic. Newton appeared keen to resist the specific framing of the unknowable and knowable, and by proxy, the authority of those who would claim to know God and sharpen that authoritative epistemology into a weapon against Black interests. Newton penned, in his autobiography, that “The Black Panthers have never intended to turn Black people away from religion. We want to encourage them to change their consciousness of themselves and to be less accepting of the white man’s version of God—the God of the downtrodden, the weak, and the undeserving” (Newton 1973c, p. 179).

The struggle to know the unknowable was not paradoxical for Newton, but rather a two-fold process of decoupling White supremacy from divinity and of sacralizing the struggle against oppression as the search for, and commitment to, a God of love. This point was particularly emphasized in a 1973 interview that Newton gave to The Christian Century:

When he [Newton] told me that his father, whom he idolizes, is a Baptist preacher-and that as a boy he went to church several times a week—a new perspective on him and his work began to emerge. I was genuinely surprised that he professed to be deeply religious; he quoted liberally from Ecclesiastes, his favorite book of the Bible. While he expressed the prophet’s scorn for the religious establishment … he praised the church’s ideals.

(C. Rogers 1973, p. 795)

Here was not a Marxist-spouting Newton or a Newton for whom divinity was a Durkheimian elementary form borne from the need to explain observable phenomena. Rather, this “religious” Newton praised Christian ideals and drew from a Biblical book that explored the meaning of life, the limits of knowing, and the importance of joy. Moreover, in that same 1973 interview, Newton revealed his commitment to theosis via pseudobiblicism: “Although not a traditional theist, he believes fervently that ‘wherever two or three are gathered together to serve the people, there is God’” (C. Rogers 1973, p. 795).4 Relatedly, in a 1972 interview that Newton gave to Rolling Stone, the interviewer repeatedly remarked that Newton’s emphasis on revolution and attaining ultimate freedom was informed by his father, a Baptist preacher.

Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, one of seven children of a struggling sharecropper and part-time Baptist-preacher. … “I’ll contribute to humanity and to my children after me, but I won’t suffer a slow death here and now where conditions are so intolerable”. He is, in fact, not talking about death at all, but about dedication, and almost in the tongue of his father, about faith”. … that is a glance at the core of the 30-year-old Black Panther Supreme Servant of the People whose first impressions go back to attendance as often as three times a week at his father’s church. … “You got me preachin’ my old man’s sermons” he said, laughing.

(Findley 1972, pp. 31, 33, 35)

Found sporadically across Newton’s vast discursive productions rests the marriage of a Protestant notion of God as a metaphysical force of love to racial activist, non-Christian understandings of divinity as were practiced by the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Peace Mission of Father Divine (cf. Weisenfeld 2017). Such theologically underpinned ethno-racial movements simultaneously placed divinity outside of, and within, Blackness. Newton thus offered a race-conscious theosis in which, in the act of coming together to work for racial justice, God was invited into a beloved community.

3.3. You Gotta Have Faith: Christian Hermeneutics

In a graduate class in the fall quarter of 1973, Newton wrote a paper entitled “The Son of Man”, in which he began with a dialectical reading of religion and politics through the hermeneutic lens of suspicion:

Mytho-religious and socio-political value systems are historical functions of each other … Underneath the seemingly conflicting vocabularies of sacred and secular movements is a unity of unities … of tradition and prediction. These assertations are thrown out in order to define as sharply and as soon as possible the distinction between a dialectical approach to eschatology as against variations on the classical method of exegesis.

(Newton 1973d, pp. 1–2)

Newton attempted to destabilize two dominant understandings of Christ and the Gospels: first, as either a tale of a sovereign savior who spoke with prophetic import to “move God and humankind into a new relationship of grace” (Newton 1973d, p. 2); or second, as a narrative that encapsulates the “long arc of human agony”, in which Christ was an exemplar of the “biology of the soul” (Newton 1973d, p. 2). Rather, Newton understood Jesus as employing a “messianic strategy” that welled up “out of the popular conscious [underline in original]” (Newton 1973d, p. 2). Finding a parallel between Jesus’ last three years and that of “John Brown acting in the name of God” (Newton 1973d, p. 2), Newton foregrounded Jesus’ relationship to his community or “caste” of oppressed peoples as specific to the political economy of Nazareth:

… a vicinity of such low repute that the phrase “nothing good can come out of Nazareth” was coined to describe this most oppressed of an oppressed nation. Jesus’ accent, clothes, manners must have been “substandard” in every way when measured against the cosmopolitan capitol of Jerusalem, despite his obvious genius for communication with both the casts of the Sadducees and Pharisees.

(Newton 1973d, p. 3)

Citing chapter and verse throughout his paper, Newton opposed the hermeneutic deification of Jesus as the “Son of God”, and instead emphasized His status as “the Son of Man”, who spoke in sacred terminology only because it was the lingua franca of the Roman empire:

By calling for unity against the oppressors he is speaking as Man, for Man, to Man. And one should not be mystified by the deistic vocabulary of a culture that was, after all, a colonized theocracy. Both the benedictions and the curses must be seen as the “Good News” brought the miserable masses of the Middle East.

(Newton 1973d, pp. 4–5)

Newton also wrote a paper in which he reinterpreted Second Isaiah and criticized those who would misplace abstract hope for salvation on a messianic leader who would capitulate to state violence:

This fatal nostalgia for a redeemer who is both powerless and yet god’s only Servant contains within its [sic] imagining all the powerful contradictions of the Christian era. … Thus Jesus was constrained to preach to the whole world and to reject the elect ambitions of Judah, to render unto Caeser openly what Isaiah had been forced, against his will, to surrender unto Cyrus.

(Newton 1974b, p. 28)

For Newton, religion’s place in the struggle for liberation and equality was double-edged:

Thus Jesus was constrained to preach to the whole world and to reject the elect ambitions of Judah, to render until Caesar openly what Isaiah had been force, against his will, to surrender until Cyrus. … God had to be killed before revolutionary could be born. … the killing of god slaughtered, for a time, the irreplaceable idea of the sacred and so revolution.

(Newton 1974b, p. 28)

Given Newton’s roots in his father’s Bethel Baptist Church of Monroe, Louisiana, where he was raised, his particular brand of theosis was tethered to the influences of Christomorphic pneumatology (a view of Jesus Christ as an example for people’s relationship to God or divine-like virtues, such as justice, equality, and honesty). That is, Newton often approached the Christian faith not through a Pauline emphasis on grace, but as a movement that invited people to become Christ-like through a community’s good works and faith in attaining perfection.

But the de-sanctification of Christ in Newton’s theorizing had its limits. A hermeneutics of faith occasionally replaced suspicious exegeses. Other members of the BPP, outside observers, and even Newton himself, conflated or overlapped Christ’s divinity with Newton’s life and legacy. For instance, the model of Christ-as-Man (and Man-as-potential Christ) served as a template for Newton’s autobiography and iconography. Lloyd (2018, pp. 193–94) thus contended that

The Christomorphic form that Newton’s autobiography sometimes takes echoes the sanctification, and sometimes deification, of Newton as part of an orchestrated campaign to both have Newton freed from jail and to use the struggle for Newton’s freedom as an organization-building opportunity. … the enterprise of writing a Huey P. Newton biography, according to [Bobby] Seale, was prompted by the explicitly Christomorphic remark by Eldridge Cleaver …: “Eldridge said that Huey P. Newton followed Malcolm X like Jesus Christ followed John the Baptist’”.

Newton’s autobiography was entitled Revolutionary Suicide—the explicit decision to resist oppression, acknowledging that such resistance will result in one’s death. Newton juxtaposed this concept against “reactionary suicide”—a tacit acceptance of oppression until one’s death. While drawn from Durkheimian sociology, “revolutionary suicide” was also blatantly Christological in its appeal to sacrificial martyrdom. Relatedly, Street (2019, p. 8) maintained that

Seale compared Newton to Jesus, echoing the BPP newspaper’s insistence that, like the Son of God, Newton ‘laid his life on the line so that twenty million black people can find out just where they are at.’ Here, the BPP began Newton’s martyrdom, calling on Christian iconography to establish his innocence and saintliness. … It also slyly indicted the American government, suggesting that Newton’s life, like Jesus’s, hung on the whims of a capricious legal system that could sentence him to death despite being innocent of any capital crime.

While Newton (and others) would compare himself to Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Lenin, and other “philosopher-kings” (cf. Detre 1973; Hulherin 1970; Sowers 2017), he was explicitly sacralized by BPP propaganda (Street 2019, p. 3). Such priming was effective. For example, journalist Tim Findley (1972, p. 32) called Newton the BPP’s “theoretician, master-mind, philosopher—its high priest”. During a rally for Newton on 17 February 1968, a journalist remarked that “… it was almost as though Huey P. Newton were already dead … We usually require of those among us who would be immortal that they first cease to breathe and be buried before claiming the exalted status. But even as Huey Newton continued to be mortal, the throne was his” (Moore 1971, p. 113). As former BPP member Donald Cox (2001, p. 121) wrote,

For some of us, Huey represented the equivalent of the Messiah. Since we didn’t want to see any more of our leaders eliminated, we launched a massive campaign to assure that Huey would not be condemned to the death penalty. A cult of his personality was created. Huey was elevated to the status of the gods, and his every word became gospel.

Furthermore, Detre (1973, p. 120) wrote that Bobby Seale had an “almost religious veneration of Newton”, and Stew Albert, a white civil rights and peace activist who worked with the BPP, admitted, “we were all in awe of Huey. It’s like meeting a Wizard of Oz who is for real” (Albert 2001, p. 190).

But such hagiographies were double-edged. Lloyd (2018, p. 193) argued that Newton demonstrated a remarkable “self-awareness of his political-theological status as simultaneously earthly body and divine”. Newton was keenly aware of the power and peril of his Christomorphic caricature. He wrote that the placing of leaders on pedestals functions to divide revolutionary organizations, foster the alienated egotism of the leader, and foreclose service to others:

One of the primary characteristics of the revolutionary cultist is that he despises everyone who has not reached his level of consciousness or the level … he thinks he has reached, instead of acting to bring the people to that level … (thus) he becomes divided from the people. Instead of serving the people as a vanguard, he becomes a hero.

(Newton 1999, p. 102)

Moreover, in presaging the perspectives that Newton would later encounter in Eugenio Donato’s spring 1978 class at U.C. Santa Cruz, such as Paul De Man’s critiques of Nietzsche’s rhetoric, persuasion, and the “superman” trope, Newton decried messianic leadership:

The image that they constructed, especially if it doesn’t fit into their super-ego needs, never works. First, the leader is meant to be everything they are not, but everything they would like to be, so he’s not a real person, generally speaking, and at any point where this leader fails in his performance, this fantasy they constructed falls. It becomes a matter of contempt. So leadership is dangerous in itself—the whole concept—and it’s not something we’ll have in the future. … They would be very critical because of the reason we went through about the fantasy and their superman idea and, of course, this leaves themselves free of any charge or obligation and puts it safely on the back of the fantasy. If that fantasy can come in the form of a person, then that person’s in trouble, you see?

(in Findley 1972, p. 33)

Relatedly, reflecting in a 2023 article in Smithsonian Magazine about Newton’s struggles with his own iconography, his widow Fredricka Newton stated, “He went into prison and there were, what, 40-something members of the party. … And he comes out and it’s this international movement. They made him into a symbol. It separated him from the community that he loved” (in Gritz 2023). Accordingly, Newton once sadly recounted after his release from prison, “People expect me to work miracles” (in Albert 2001, p. 193).

Newton did not walk on water, but he did buoy people’s faith. “One of the most long-lasting influences on my life was religion”, Newton wrote in his autobiography (Newton 1973c, p. 35).

A life-long student of the Bible and Christian theology, Newton presented many a critical eisegesis on Christian scripture and doctrine, becoming a sort of public theologian on matters of racial and economic inequality. For example, Newton evidenced his displeasure with, and departure from, the unfulfilled promises of the Protestant work ethic (cf. Sowers 2017). As Weber famously made clear, the growth of modern secular capitalism relied upon the “spirit” of Calvinist predestination, whereby hard work and financial success became interpretated as signs that one was of God’s elect (cf. McKinnon 2010). “Why could my father never get out of debt? If hard work brought success, why did we not see more success in the community? The people were certainly working hard. It seemed we were predestined to endless toil” (Newton 1973c, p. 57). A student of sociology at Merrit College, Newton was well aware of this Weberian critique, and he used it in his opposition to both Protestantism and capitalism (and their merger when used as theodicy for rationalizing “endless toil”).

Elsewhere, Newton showcased his theological fatalism regarding the counter-truths of both divine omniscience/predestination and human free will, and then, thirdly, in people’s inability or unwillingness to confront that seeming paradox. Newton recounted the conversations he would have with his “street friends”:

I would ask them, “Do you have free will?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes.”

“Is he omniscient?”

“Yes.”

Therefore, I told them, their all-powerful God knew everything before it happened. If so, I would ask, “How can you say that you have free will when he knows what you are going to do before you do it? You are predestined to do what you do. If not, then your God has lied or he has made a mistake, and you have already said that your God cannot lie or make a mistake”. These dilemmas led to arguments that lasted all day, over a fifth of wine; they cleared my thinking, even though I sometimes went to school drunk.

(Newton 1973c, pp. 76–77)

Raised a Baptist, with a conception of humanity as born into a state of sin (“original sin”), Newton later revolted against the concept, finding that the Book of Genesis was often used to justify violence and patriarchy as both divinely and biologically natural and innate to the human condition. About the former, in a 1974 graduate school paper, entitled “Eve, The Mother of All Living”, Newton wrote the following:

Some of the exponents of original sin are subtle and impressive (Koestler, Lorenz), some are vulgar and impertinent (Ardrey, Morris) but all of them find an irreversible and lethal measure of aggression in human instinct complex. … There is simply no evidence in many or any of his closest relatives of the spontaneous upwelling of aggression admittedly seen in the lower animals. … Like homicide, the sparing of human life is a learned behavior.

(Newton 1974a, p. 1)

Newton argued, about the latter, that

The surprising fairy tale of Genesis is taken lightly at our peril. The first principle of nature itself, seems to be female. Genesis is a startling testament to the man’s realization of that basic identity. In Genesis we see the ancient Mother Nature co-opted by a patriarchal super-masculine beard of a god. The trauma of female primacy is further denied by making the woman, Eve, a mere extension of the man, Adam, and the issue of his [underline in original] body!

(Newton 1974a, p. 2)

Newton even penned a graduate paper entitled “Genesis According to Science” (Newton 1974b). Composed in pseudobiblical language, Newton wed the Book of Genesis to evolutionary science: “In the beginning ‘Mother Nature’ created the seed” (Newton 1974b, p. 1).

Newton was particularly adept at reinterpreting Christian soteriology and eschatological millennialism. While expectations of the alleviation of human suffering were oriented toward the passing of a thousand-year period in which radical change would be ushered in, and the old and evil elements of the world destroyed, Newton seized upon this concept to redeploy the “end times” in the present. While conventional millenarian notions characterized power as transcendental and extraneous to the human condition (cf. Detre 1973), Newton made human activity responsible for apocalypse now. He was rather adept at wielding these interpretations, for as early as 1971, in a speech entitled “On the Relevance of the Church”, Newton remarked, “As man becomes free he knows more about the universe he tends to control more and he therefore gains more control over himself. That is what freedom is all about” (Newton 1999, p. 61).

Elsewhere, Newton employed Christian millennialism and the fulfillment of prophecy, frequently peppering his analyses of class and race with biblical allusions to the “Day of Jubilee”. The “Jubliee” is the 50th year that follows the passage of seven “weeks of years” (seven cycles of sabbatical years, or 49 total years) in which, according to the Book of Leviticus, certain servants and slaves would be released from servitude, debts would be forgiven, and people could regain their property or land that was once taken from them. Only three years removed from the BPP founding, in 1969, Newton published an essay in The Black Panther newspaper entitled “A Functional Definition of Politics”, wherein he wrote the following:

Because we lack political power, Black people are not free. Black reconstruction failed because Black people did not have political and military power. The masses of Black people at the time were very clear on the definition of political power. It is evident in the songs of Black people at that time. In the songs it was stated that on the Day of Jubilee we’d have forty acres and two mules. This was promised Black people by the Freedoman’s [sic] Bureau. This was freedom as far as the Black masses were concerned.

(Newton 1969, p. 2; see also Newton 1973a)

Here and elsewhere, Newton merged two millennialist reconfigurations of the racial balance of power and made a synthetic third. On the one hand, he took the historical anointments and blessings that were unfulfilled and greeted, on the other hand, the promises of future salvation. He collapsed the past and future onto themselves to create a present, Promised Day. Coupled with the authority of his own prophetic voice, such a public theology committed the labor of calling the faithful to their appointed tasks to struggle against injustice.

3.4. I Had Forgot Myself: Buddhism and Hinduism

Newton’s paradoxical pieties were limited neither to analytic philosophies nor Abrahamic traditions, but also extended to Eastern religious practices, like Buddhism and Hinduism. These were particularly well pronounced when Newton reflected upon his imprisonment for involuntary manslaughter from approximately September 1968 to August 1970. For instance, Newton remarked in a 1973 interview with Esquire that he had begun to engage in the Zen Mayahana Buddhist contemplative practices of munen musō (no-thought and no-image), in which one seeks freedom from worldly thoughts and desires—which is itself the quest for Boga no Kyo, or a state of forgetting not simply the world, but one’s own self: “I am a student of Buddhism now … Zen Buddhism—of course I would embrace the rebel school. I’ve studied for the last three months, academically at least” (M. Rogers 1973). Pureland Buddhism has been particularly appealing to those from marginalized demographics across cultures. And Newton’s affinity with Zen Buddhism dovetailed with the embrace of “Pureland Buddhism” by African Americans in 1970s’ California (cf. Hughey 2025; McNicholl 2021; Selzer 2011), thus reflecting what some have called an “engaged ethnic Buddhism” (Izumi 2010). Newton’s formal study of the religion, which extended to studying under a Buddhist “priest” who insisted that “Newton has been a Zen Buddhist in posture and life all along” (in M. Rogers 1973), grew out of his need to endure long stretches of solitary confinement while in prison.

I was turned on through prison. … I got into one of the last stages of practice, which is how to suspend thought. If I hadn’t developed a correct discipline, they would have destroyed me … Imagine this … The strip cell, which is now illegal, was called the soul-breaker. A four and a half by six and a half box, and you’re nude, like a dog, living in your own waste. … So I learned to do like Gandhi and eat just one bean. … Finally l reached a desperate breaking point … I wanted to scream so badly that I finally threw up. But I wouldn’t accept throwing up swallowed it all back. Finally I was exhausted, and I lay down on the floor … Much later, through reading, I learned that in the Orient that is a variation of a Buddhist posture. And suddenly—that’s when it was over. I had freedom. … But what I said is the truth: once I had discovered the secret of detachment, putting me in solitary was like putting a rabbit into the briar patch.

(M. Rogers 1973)

Newton also acknowledged the origins of his Buddhist practice in a separate interview the year prior for West Magazine, there acknowledging his understandings of the metaphysical idea of uji (being-time) found in Sōtō Zen Buddhism. A sort of ascesis, in which one attempts detachment from the material world, uji emphasizes the existential moment in which time and being are not durational or linear, but instead one enters into a state of complete impermanence; a oneness of being and time wherein one could meet the Buddha in this transcendent realm or state.5 Newton stated that

…the human organism needs to be bombarded by outside stimuli, and when it isn’t, everything starts to whirl. To stop this, I would think about the happier experiences outside. It takes a certain art to slow my thoughts down. I finally mastered the concepts of speed. I started suspending myself in time as they do in Buddhist rituals.

(Diehl 1972, p. 30)

Newton later described this feeling of temporal and spatial detachment by stating, “Sometimes … sometimes I feel like I’m suspended in a kind of void … those feelings come” (Findley 1972, p. 30).

Even before practicing munen musō and uji to cope with solitary confinement in prison, such an “engaged ethnic Buddhism” was apparent in Newton’s application of these concepts to revolution, the quest for racial utopia, and concepts of collectivity and diasporic unity. While jailed at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland in 1968, he gave an interview to the Marxist periodical Fifth Estate in which he was asked, “When you’re alone and wondering about things, what’s your most fervent wish?” Newton replied, “Complete destruction of this decadent system”. The reporter pressed, “But what do you wish for yourself?”, to which Newton replied the following:

Well, that will be for myself … You see, in the first place, this feeling of individuality is strictly a Western thing. It’s one of the most corrupt things on the face of the earth, where one person has no identification with another. It’s inhumane. This is one of the causes of a whole people being enslaved and treated like cattle and brutalized to the utmost. I think that with the revolutionary movement, we’re wiping out this feeling of individuality; the feeling that what is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine. We feel that we have to share with any person who is born on the face of the earth.

(Wald 1968)

Unlike with Buddhism, there is little evidence that Newton formally studied Hinduism. However, some of his paradoxical pieties directly gestured toward Hindu cosmology and advaita vedānta. One of the six scholarly traditions within orthodox (āstika) Hindu exegesis (primarily associated today with the teachings of the philosopher Shankaracharya), this school emphasizes sadhana (the means of accomplishing), or the spiritual discipline and experience of which one unifies with the ultimate reality. Advaita vedānta is sometimes translated as “non-secondness” or “non-duality” in order to deemphasize the individual soul (Atman) becoming one with the ultimate reality (Brahman). Thus, one’s true self is a unified, singular consciousness that is divinized. This tradition first emphasizes the meekness of the self as engaged in a processual unification with the ultimate reality, and, in so doing, develops a resistance to binaries and claims to definitive knowledge. Advaita vedānta is thus a hesitant theology. Second, this school of Hinduism emphasizes a departure from egotism and instead preaches a state of utter detachment from one’s fate. And third, one comes into an ultimate unification and sacralization of the self with divinity.

The initial prong of anti-dualism, or a processual understanding of reality not as a static relationship between the self and nature, but as an always, ongoing re-unification of the self with the cosmos, can be witnessed in a 1972 interview Newton gave to Rolling Stone. Newton was described as “not the hard-bitten revolutionary people expect” and that he offered “no ultimate answer” (Findley 1972, p. 34). Instead, Newton told the interviewer, in language strategically departing from Christian theology, that he could not even offer “… an ultimate question, because I wouldn’t know how to ask that question” (Findley 1972, p. 34) Newton continued as follows:

I don’t understand Alpha or Omega6, I only understand events in between, and that’s all part of a process that will deliver the answer someday what the meaning of the beginning and the end and the absolute and the finality means. Now we just have some sort of vague notion that there’s something we don’t know about. There’s an answer we don’t have. It’s only hypocrisy to say you do have the answer, because that stops your move, that will make you fight anyone who contradicts you. The party has gone through many changes with many ideologies. We’ve been transformed and partially the reason is that we understand that the social forces are constantly in motion and we’ll be left behind as many other groups—as SNCC was—if we don’t take these things into consideration…. There is no prize to be gotten, there’s only the process and that is the process of life.

(Findley 1972, pp. 34–35)

How Newton was influenced by the second aspect of advaita vedānta (detachment) was also illumined in that interview. That is, Newton explained the aforementioned difference between “Reactionary Suicide” and “Revolutionary Suicide”, the latter being a state of ultimate detachment and the title of his autobiography that he would publish the following year in 1973:

To the revolutionist, death is a reality, and victory is a dream … what makes the guerilla in the people’s army so invincible or so strong is that morale’s so high. It’s because they don’t measure their success or failure on a pay scale. The regular army, when they come after the people’s army, is paid. They measure their success against the probability of collecting their paychecks. And as the possibilities or probabilities of collecting a paycheck drops, their morale drops. They’re mercenaries. The guerilla is not. He’s there because he’s got no choice, really. He’ll suffer reactionary suicide—that’s death while he’s just standing there not attempting to defend himself—or he’ll put up obstacles and guard himself against his own death. For the revolutionist, the war machine against him is so strong that there’s little chance he will eat the fruits of the revolution in his lifetime. People say ‘Revolution in our lifetime.’ I say, ‘Yes, it’s going on all the time, but I think it means something different.’ It doesn’t mean we’ll eat the fruits of revolution in our lifetime ….

(Findley 1972, p. 35)

Elsewhere in the interview, Newton also stated that “I don’t think the correct way is so much to go out and find the people’s needs and be aware of the conditions as much as it is revolutionizing yourself and freeing yourself, because you are interconnected to the whole thing” (Findley 1972, p. 33). This seemingly Hindu-inspired theological position of detachment, and of seeking unity with an ultimate reality, can also be witnessed in a poem that Newton wrote, which was later used as the epigraph for his autobiography:

By having no family,

I have inherited the family of humanity,

By having no possessions,

I have possessed all.

By rejecting the love of one,

I have received the love of all.

By surrendering my life to the revolution,

I found eternal life—Revolutionary Suicide.

(Newton 1973c)

That poem was given to the Rolling Stone journalist, which he later shared with a friend who “noted its close similarity to the writings of Hindu swami Vivekanada, An Indian militant turned religionist who died in 1902 after travelling the world promoting a universal religion based on the Hindu Vendanta” (Findley 1972, p. 35).

The third prong of advaita vedānta establishes the ongoing unification with the divine, or an emphasis on the non-duality of the self. While Newton was a student of prior movements that blended Black uplift strategies with varied theologies, and (as discussed prior) saw himself as an “heir” to the work of Malcolm X and others, his varied pieties seemed to indicate a suturing together of his Baptist upbringing and Hinduism. In a speech given to the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California, Newton stated the following:

I went to church for years. My father is a minister and I spent 15 years in the church; this was my life as a child. When I was going to church I used to hear that God is within us and is, therefore, some part of us: that part of us that is mystical … if we had ministers who would deal with the social realities that cause misery so that we can change them, man will become larger and larger. At that time the God within will come out, and we can merge with Him. Then we will be one with the universe.

(in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 2018)

For Newton, divinity existed simultaneously inside of people (“the God within will come out”) and outside of people (“and we can merge with Him”). This is precisely the advaita vedānta sacralization of the human condition, which Newton seemingly applied to a Black diaspora subjected to renderings of their theological and biological inferiority relative to White people.

Such an understanding is again seen in Newton’s autobiography: “In the metaphysical sense, we based the expression ‘All Power to the People’ on the idea of man as God. I have no other God but man, and I firmly believe that man is the highest or chief good” (Newton 1973c, p. 167). While one could interpret this line as indicative of atheist humanism, such an interpretation is strained by Newton’s aforementioned uses of varied religious exegetics, among which Hindu hermeneutics circulated. Instead, his statement is better understood as another instance in which he advanced a hypostatic union of Black selfhood and the divinity, possible only when people come together in a detached fight to “deal with the social realities that cause misery”. Newton thus divinely supercharged a unified people’s pursuit of a “highest or chief good”—the achievement of ethical, just, and equitable social conditions that were part and parcel of an ongoing process of becoming one with the ultimate reality (Brahman).

Elsewhere, Newton emphasized the unity of the selfhood and the disintegration of the illusory concept of body/mind dualism. “Black people are regaining their minds”, wrote Newton, “They’re saying we want freedom to determine the destiny of our people, thereby uniting the mind with the body … It’s almost a spiritual thing, this unity, this harmony. This unity of the mind and of the body, this unity of man within himself” (in Foner 1995, p. 59). Importantly, we can now understand Newton’s reference to a “unity of man within himself” as the unification of humanity with a Hindu cosmology of simultaneous internal and external divinity.

But Newton was far from consistent. At times, he rendered such unity in secular and materialist terms. For example, in describing the “Down to the Countryside Movement” (the 1950s–1970s rural–urban work exchange under Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Leap Forward”), Newton stated that “Their minds and bodies are united and they control their country. I think this is a very good example of this unity and it is my idea of the perfect man” (in Foner 1995, p. 60). But Newton’s “perfect man” could also be understood in a spiritual sense; the “perfect man” is not an atomistic individual but a collective in pursuit of divine ideals toward the unification of man and divinity. This is again an example of Newton’s merger of Baptist theology and Hindu cosmology: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there”.7

While informed by Baptist hermeneutics and even elements of Marxist-inspired liberation theology, Newton repeatedly used Hindu cosmology to emphasize the process of attaining a true consciousness of self and one’s conditions, a detachment from the attainment of one’s goals, and unification with the divine. Here, Newton seemingly blended advaita vedānta with Vedic and Pranic Hinduism. Vedic and Pranic Hinduism teach the divinity of the self as located in varied gathering points throughout the body called chakras. Chakras are gathering points of prana (life force), one of most important of those being on the forehead in the form of an eye (which is an allusion to Shiva, who opens that eye to enact destruction upon both those whom have angered Him and a decadent world). Newton stated the following:

… there’s definitely a relationship between the rich and the poor and much of the very wealthiest people’s emptiness and absurdity in their existence is based upon the system that they’re caught up in. Many times they want to change this because they find that not only does it make their lives very empty, but it’s also causing suffering by the people generally—the people who are oppressed by their ways of behaving. So it’s really not an altruistic thing that brings you to try to harness the forces so the process will go in the way you would like it—it’s saving yourself. Only then, you become larger, because you see that you’re bigger than your limited definition—your name. You become the Big Eye. The Big Eye encompasses all the things that you touch and those things that touch you. When you expand like that, then you have to find an organization that systematically can question the oppressing system and the status quo of the reactionary ruling circle. … Then we’ll have the army so we can topple the ship—the authority of God himself. God is only everything we don’t know and don’t understand, yet he affects and controls us, the unknown parts of nature, or ourselves, you see, because we’re also nature.

(Findley 1972, pp. 34–35)

Newton’s paradoxical pieties are perhaps best witnessed in this meandering and gymnastic soliloquy. His earlier mention of existentialism and transcendentalism is apparent, alongside his deism and theosis, which remain connected to a reference to Shiva’s eye of protection, and the cycle of destruction and rebirth in which one can eventually reach enlightenment and a saintly, if not a Bodhisattva, status.

4. Conclusions: Liturgies of Liberation

In this article, I have attempted to cover and reconcile, to the extent possible, the varied religious understandings of Newton that bear on his understanding of the world, people, and revolution as, at least in part, a metaphysical process. While it is difficult to draw a direct correlation between Newton’s life events and his swerving and even haphazard uses of distinct religious and spiritual traditions, one can still glean four distinct influences.

First, Newton’s life story is one of contradictions: raised functionally illiterate, he would exhibit extreme intellectual curiosity and earn his doctorate; he would descend into drug abuse, violence, and crime, but was an advocate of extreme self-discipline and moral codes of conduct; and he both decried and praised the place of religion in revolutionary movements. A simultaneous insider and outsider, Newton repeatedly drew upon the social gospel tradition to advance prophetic interpretations of racial and capitalist exploitation. For Newton, Black people specifically, if not oppressed people more generally, were a loved and protected people that would one day become free. Casting himself in the image of the prophet Ishmael, he labored to portray his leadership of people as both belonging to that covenanted genealogy, but also as an outcast who wielded a special, second sight of the world. Second, raised the child of a preacher who grew up in a southern, Black, Baptist church tradition that carved out space within a calcified Jim Crowism, Newton occasionally marshalled a critical theosis built from the merger of Black power and divine adoration. As a result, laboring to love Black people and to secure freedom for all people was an action that both invited God into one’s activist work as well as invoked an inherent divinity that already lurked within Blackness. Third, ever the student of Protestant Christianity, Newton was highly skilled in using sermons about faith, grace, works, mercy, and power to supercharge the struggle for civil and human rights as a larger-than-life metaphysical contest between good and evil, in which people were destined to triumph so long as they continued to keep the faith in mind and work against injustice with their bodies. Fourth, a prisoner who suffered abuse and inhumane solitary confinement, Newton turned to Buddhism and Hinduism to cope with those harsh material conditions, to reconcile the psychological effects of such trauma, and to make meaning of the simultaneous importance and non-existence of the self in the struggle for liberation. A cursory view of Newton’s biography reveals that these were not stages unfolding in a linear progression. Rather, these paradoxical pieties became deep reservoirs from which Newton, ever thirsty for answers, occasionally drank throughout this life.

Newton’s disparate uses of and allusions to such varied spiritual sensibilities served as robust liturgies for liberation. I understand a liturgy to be a public and communal form of worship and invocation of the divine and its attendant unexplainable mysteries to assist people and give metaphysical meanings to the world. Newton labored, using religious language that was sometimes abstract, at other times rife with spiritual folk wisdom, and at other times replete with direct recitations of scriptural passages, to amplify secular and militant strategies that together declared with thundering passion, the sanctified and moral realities of people, so as to change their material conditions and spiritual selfhoods. Through appealing to an unfalsifiable deism internal to the self; from waxing poetically about revolution and utopia with millennialist and prophetic zeal; to reinterpreting religious traditions that better fit—and called for upheaval against—the social, economic, and political conditions of his brethren; and calling for deeper understandings of the relationship between one’s spiritual self qua soul, time, and pain, so as to persevere, Newton constantly reiterated a message that there was “part of us that is mystical” (in Hilliard and Weise 2002, p. 218).

Across bewildering abstract speeches, confusing interviews, and niche and esoteric graduate school papers, Newton consistently reiterated his liturgies. But Newton trafficked neither in blind spiritual faith nor naïve sociological optimism. His broad liturgies were existential apologetics, reminders that by virtue of materially informed and spiritually supercharged participation in the liberation struggle, people might fulfil both a tangible and sacred purpose. Newton’s call for “revolutionary suicide” was such a plea for courageous and righteous martyrdom in the fight against inequality. This entreaty gestured toward Newton’s use of varied pieties to bolster the confidence, pride, and audacity necessary to challenge White supremacy. Knowing well that the dehumanization of Blackness found rationalization in both pseudo-science and in theological exegetics, Newton’s pieties reframed racial hierarchy as neither divinely preordained nor a consequence of natural evolution, but as the globally interconnected, protean product of human agency, changeable in the face of sacrificial labor.