Growing up in a Missionary Baptist church in rural southwestern Virginia, the version of Mary that Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones was taught was “flattened and conflated into this impossible thing—a virgin and a mother—that none of us can be,” she says. “An impossible icon.” And this image of Mary had blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin.

That’s wildly different from how Adkins-Jones, 41, views Mary today, as an ordained Baptist minister, an assistant professor of theology and Africana studies at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, and author of Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology. She says the premise of the book is that Mary is Black, a dark-skinned woman from the ancient Near East, and calls Immaculate Misconceptions “a rally against the loss of sacred Blackness.”

Hers is the rare Mariology—a theological study of Mary—written by a Protestant scholar. According to Oxford University Press, which published the book in June, Adkins-Jones is the first to center the Black Madonna as a theological subject. Thomas Perridge, senior acquisitions editor at Oxford, calls Immaculate Misconceptions a groundbreaking book with “significant implications for Christian thinking about matters such as purity, female agency, motherhood, and liberation, as well as issues like colonialism and racial justice.”

The inspiration for the book came to Adkins-Jones when she traveled extensively doing humanitarian and missionary work in her youth. “I didn’t get on a plane until I was 19,” she says, “and my family jokes that after that I never got off.” Her travels eventually led to an academic career. “When I couldn’t find answers connecting theology to global realities of gender- and race-based violence, a mentor asked me to consider that I was the one called to research and write the answers.” She went on to become the first Black woman to receive a PhD from Duke University’s program in Christian theological studies.

On her travels, Adkins-Jones was particularly struck, as a Black feminist and womanist scholar, by encounters with Black Madonnas—statues of Mary that depict her with black skin and that are venerated and associated with miracles in locations around the world. Believers revered Black Madonnas while opposing societal ills like racism, misogyny, slavery, and sex trafficking.

Adkins-Jones says she began to wonder, “What has happened that Black women’s bodies are not seen as sacred, are not assumed first to be holy?” It was while researching the history of the Black Madonna that Immaculate Misconceptions came into being.

Christian depictions of Mary and Jesus as white and European in appearance began with a rejection of Mary’s Jewish identity, Adkins-Jones argues. Early Christians, she says, “wanted to exsanguinate her from her Jewish blood, wanting the blood of Christ to be something new and different.”

Adkins-Jones, herself a mother of four children ages five to 16, argues that understanding Mary as a Black mother could inspire social change. “If we pay attention to the conditions of Black mothers, that will be a warning sign about where we are as a society,” she says, highlighting issues of Black maternal health, justice, education, and the continuing Black Lives Matter movement. Reflecting on Mary’s presence at Jesus’s crucifixion, she asks, “What does it mean that so many Black mothers have witnessed their children unjustly killed by the state?”

The Black Madonna, Adkins-Jones says, “gives us resources to resist and to refuse anything in any system that would oppose justice for all and helps us to think differently about who and what we name and see as being holy, and what is required of us in order to rectify that lapse in our faith.”

Adkins-Jones will participate in a panel review of Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology, Saturday, 9–11 a.m., HCC 207 (second level).

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