Time & Perspective Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Religion arrives here not as thunderclap revelation but as a schoolyard sorting mechanism: you either "had" it or you didn’t. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s phrasing is deceptively plain, almost childlike, and that’s the point. She’s capturing the first social fact of religion, the way it functions less like an interior theology than like a possession people can inventory, display, and use to decide who belongs. The line turns faith into an object in your pocket, a credential you can be asked to produce.

Coming from Reagon - a musician, organizer, and foundational voice in the freedom song tradition - the subtext is cultural and political. In Black Southern life, religion often traveled alongside community infrastructure: choirs, call-and-response, mutual aid, the moral language of the movement. But her recollection highlights how early the category gets weaponized as identity. The question isn’t "What do you believe?" It’s "Are you one of us?" That’s a distinction with consequences: it marks who is trusted, who is suspect, who is presumed disciplined or dangerous, whose grief and joy are legible.

Reagon’s repetition ("had religion... didn’t have religion") mimics the blunt binary itself, letting the listener feel its constraint. It also hints at her later work: translating lived experience into song that carries complexity without losing accessibility. She’s naming religion as an inherited social label before it becomes a chosen practice - a reminder that for many people, faith begins as a community grammar, not a private epiphany.