Seite - 145 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 03/01

Bulletproof Love: Luke Cage (2016) and Religion | 145www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 123–155 levitates against the gravity of state-sanctioned violence. even in the face of the monstrosity of police brutality, Luke shields the one police officer from the bullets of the other. he demonstrates a central claim in the thought of Baldwin and Black theology – the liberation of the oppressed is tied to the liberation of the oppressor. “NO ONe CAN CAGe A MAN if he trULy WANts tO Be free!” In his brief yet influential introduction to the subject, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. argues that if “African American religion” is to have any analytical purchase, it must mean more than simply the religious life of people who happen to be Black. he insists, instead, that we understand it as a religious formation that “emerges in the encounter between faith, in all its complexity, and white supremacy”.57 Afri- can American religion responds to the political and social context of the United states in three ways. it represents a “sign of difference”, insofar as it “explicitly rejects, as best as possible, the idolatry of white supremacy”. African Ameri- can religion operates as a “practice of freedom”, wherein the “black religious imagination is used in the service of opening up spaces closed down by white supremacy”. And it “insists on its open-ended orientation”, meaning “African American religion offers resources for African Americans to imagine themselves beyond the constraints of now”.58 We have already seen the ways in which Luke Cage, our “dishwasher La- zarus”, stands as a sign of difference with regard to the traditional superhero story. if we take the archetypal comic book superhero who doles out violence in his (or occasionally her) quest to redeem the masses as an embodiment of the white savior – the figure who takes up the white wo/man’s burden to save those who cannot save themselves – then we can read Luke Cage’s reluctance to do harm and commitment to protecting the vulnerable as a rejection of one logic of white supremacy. To this sign of difference we can add that the show opens up spaces closed down by white supremacy by reclaiming the image of the Black man in a hood- ie which figures so prominently in the racist fantasies of the collective Ameri- can subconscious in recent memory. Cheo hodari Coker, the show’s creator, brought to life a bulletproof Black man who shields other Black and Brown bod- ies from harm at a time when for viewers of color their bodies are as vulnerable as they have ever been. Nothing is more indicative of the show’s birth in the Black Lives Matter moment than Coker’s choice to dress Luke Cage in an array 57 Glaude 2014, 6. 58 Glaude 2014, 11–12 (emphases in the original).