Between the Cross and the Juke Joint: Reading the film Sinners with James Cone

James Cone's The Spirituals and the Blues is a seminal text that explores the deep interconnection between Black religious music and the lived experiences of African Americans. Cone argues that both the spirituals and the blues emerged as vital, embodied expressions of Black suffering, resilience, and theological imagination. While the spirituals were largely collective, centered on the hope of divine liberation, and grounded in the community's relationship with God, the blues represented a more individual and existential articulation of Black life. The blues singer, for Cone, is a theologian of the everyday, drawing attention to the here-and-now struggles of existence rather than the promised afterlife.

Cone emphasizes that spirituals were often misinterpreted as purely otherworldly or escapist, when in reality they were steeped in subversive hope and coded language about freedom and deliverance. Likewise, blues—often regarded by the church as secular or even sinful—were rooted in a theology of survival, an insistence on one's dignity in the face of systemic dehumanization. Cone insists that the blues reflect a deeply theological impulse, one that affirms life in the midst of suffering and joy in defiance of despair. For the blues artist, self-expression is a kind of sacrament. The music names the realities of abandonment, betrayal, and longing—not to glorify them, but to confront them honestly and, in doing so, reclaim agency.

The tension between sacred and secular in Black music, Cone suggests, is a false binary that fails to account for the full scope of Black spiritual expression. This division is largely a product of colonial and Western theological frameworks that compartmentalize the body and spirit, the profane and the holy. Cone argues that in the Black tradition, these realms often overlap, with the so-called "secular" blues bearing witness to the same divine truths as the spirituals—only through different modes of articulation. For enslaved and oppressed peoples, the sacred could be found in a moan, a melody, or a defiant lyric just as surely as in a sermon or hymn. By reclaiming the blues as a valid site of theological reflection, Cone expands the boundaries of what counts as religious experience and centers the lived reality of Black people as the ground of God's revelation.

The Spirituals and the Blues is highly relevant to the film Sinners because it gives theological grounding to the significance of the spirituality inherent in the blues. Rather than interpreting the blues as demonic or merely secular and worldly, Cone’s framework invites us to see the articulation of the blues as a sacred presence—an embodiment of grief, resilience, and divine lament. Cone helps viewers and participants understand the conflict in Sinners between the film’s protagonist's spiritual calling and artistic integrity, particularly in how institutions (like the church or music industry) can suppress the rawness and honesty that the blues—and true spirituality—demand. Cone thus helps us recognize the blues tradition as a theology of the margins—preaching from the underside of history in a language often unacknowledged by institutional religious spaces.