What Happens When Your Boaz Is the Danger

Indhira Udofia
Apr 16
6 min read

Mapping the Tapestry | April 2026

Last week, Glendon “Teddy” Campbell filed for divorce from Tina Campbell — gospel singer, half of Mary Mary, and for the better part of a decade, one of the Black Church's most visible testimonies about the miracle of marriage restoration. In 2013, Teddy had an affair with a woman who had been like a godmother to their children. Tina publicly forgave him. She made an album about it. She said: “I know God kept the three Hebrew boys from getting burned; He also kept Tina and Teddy from a broken marriage.” She renewed her vows. She told Black Church women everywhere: stay, forgive, trust God with your marriage. The testimony became a ministry. The ministry became a movement.

And now Teddy filed.

I am not writing to celebrate a divorce. I am not writing to condemn either of them. Marriage is a private geography, and grief is not a spectacle. But I am writing because Tina Campbell's story did not happen in a private geography — it happened in a pulpit, on television, in conference rooms full of women who were told that her miracle was available to them too, if they would just do the work, if they would just forgive, if they would just make room.

And I have been watching the news. And I have been counting.

The Archive

From a research proposal, WGS 490, February 2012:

In looking at feminist discourse regarding intimate partner violence and other violence against women, there is a push for the secularization of violence prevention. I am interested in looking at the implications of faith when it comes to feminist views of violence against women, especially intimate partner violence within the African American culture. Questions for consideration: In what ways do traditional notions of feminism neglect faith's role in the African American experience? What hegemonic structures are involved with the framing of intimate partner violence as a public health issue? What groups are marginalized in their attempt to develop preventative measures?

I was twenty-four years old when I wrote that. I was in a Women's and Gender Studies capstone course, trying to articulate something I could feel but couldn't name — the way the Black Church and the secular feminist movement were both, in different ways, failing Black women. The secularists wanted to remove faith from the conversation entirely, as if the Black Church was not the organizing center of Black community life. The church wanted to keep violence prevention within the walls of covenant — pray harder, forgive faster, stay longer.

Neither could say the thing that needed to be said: that the institution people were being told to trust for safety was sometimes the very source of the harm.

That question has followed me for fourteen years. It is still not answered.

The Tapestry

In 2016, I wrote a paper called “Release Your Wiggle: Deconstructing and Reimagining Black Women's Performance in Black Church Spaces.” I used Big Freedia's bounce performances as a framework for thinking about what containment costs Black women in the church. I wrote:

For too long, the construction of what it means to be a good Christian woman in Black Church spaces have been predicated upon rules of decency and containment. The pressure to keep their bodies 'pure' and 'holy' have led for women to be feared as 'dangerous' under the male gaze.

The argument was this: within the traditional Black Church framework, a Black woman's body is a problem to be managed. Single women are dangerous — they might tempt men. Married women are the solution. Their dangerous bodies are resolved, contained, sanctified by the covenant. The Juanita Bynum formula, in No More Sheets, promises exactly this: empty yourself out, and God will send your Boaz. Submit yourself, and you will be made whole. Your danger will be redeemed by his arrival.

But I asked the question then that I want to ask again now: What happens when your helpmeet is dangerous just like you?

The Count

Black women are murdered by intimate partners at nearly triple the rate of white women. More than half of all Black women killed in 2020 died at the hands of a current or former romantic partner. Five Black women die each day. The weapon is most often a gun. The killer is most often someone they loved.

In February 2025, Alexis Walls — twenty-three years old — was shot fifteen times by her common-law husband in their home in Bryan, Texas. He accused her of cheating. He got a rifle. She did not survive. Nearly one year later, he was sentenced to fifty years.

These women are not dying in the absence of faith. Many of them are dying inside it. They are dying in homes decorated with scriptures. They are dying after years of being told that staying is holy and leaving is faithless. They are dying inside the covenant they were told would save them.

The Trace

Tina Campbell did everything the testimony promised. She forgave a husband who cheated with her close friend and family confidant. She made it public and called it ministry. She told women who were hurting that God could do it — that the Red Sea could part inside a marriage. She was generous with her grief, and I do not doubt that the faith was real.

What I doubt is the framework.

The framework that located her holiness in her willingness to absorb the harm. The framework that purity culture builds from the ground up — the Church Girl who remains, who forgives, who holds the covenant even when the covenant is being held against her. When Tina said, in the midst of her pain, that she had “emasculated her husband” — that her “sin” was being disrespectful — the framework was already speaking through her. The logic was already intact: his infidelity was his sin, but her shortcoming made the soil for it. This is what purity culture teaches Black women to do with their own suffering. Find the root in yourself. Make room for his redemption. Call the staying a miracle.

Purity culture does not protect Black women. It teaches them that their bodies are problems to be solved by submission — first to God, then to marriage, then to the man the marriage creates. It tells them their safety lives inside the covenant. And then it counts on their silence to keep the covenant legible.

The Echo

From a portfolio synthesis, WGS 490, February 2012:

I found myself gravitating towards courses that were able to understand my position as an African American woman... I cannot help but really reflect on how my feminism and academic focus has shifted.

What shifted: I stopped believing the problem was information deficit. Black women do not lack the information that their lives are at risk. They are not unaware that the people who harm them are often the people they love. What they lack — what we have been systematically denied — is a theological framework that tells us our lives are worth more than the preservation of the covenant.

The Black Church has not consistently offered that. It has offered testimony instead. And testimony, as powerful as it is, can become a trap — a story that teaches women to see endurance as evidence of faith, staying as proof of love, survival as the miracle rather than the baseline.

The Web

The web has been weaving for a long time.

In 2012, I asked: what hegemonic structures are involved with the framing of intimate partner violence as a public health issue? What role does faith play?

In 2016, I asked: what happens when your Boaz is dangerous just like you?

In 2025, I wrote about the rise of a new generation of Black Christian influencers — Mike

Todd, Jackie Hill Perry, the whole sanctified digital economy — selling the same old arrangement to young people more removed from the hermeneutical suspicion of their grandmothers. A new retooling of the Religious Right, dressed in high-top fades and stadium lighting, telling Black women to wait well, submit fully, and trust that the covenant will keep them.

And in April 2026, Teddy Campbell filed for divorce. And Alexis Walls's husband was sentenced to fifty years. And five Black women died today. And five will die tomorrow.

Anancy doesn't untangle the web. She maps it. She shows you where the threads connect. She asks: do you see the pattern now?

The question I have carried since I was in my twenties is not whether the Black Church loves Black women. I believe it does — in the way that a system can love the people it also constrains. The question is whether a love that requires containment is the kind of love that keeps us alive.

I am still working on the answer. I have been working on it for fourteen years. I suspect I will be working on it for fourteen more.

But I am not willing to keep working on it quietly while the numbers keep climbing.

— Church Gworl Maroon