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Pop Religion | Two Nations in One Womb: Professor Abimbola Adelakun on Is God Is, Destiny, Sin, and the Religious Imagination of Black Rage
By Leo Walker | June 12, 2026
Photo credit: Patti Perret © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC.
It would be easy to read Aleshea Harris's Is God Is as a revenge thriller: twin sisters set out to kill the father who burned them as children. But the film, Harris’s feature directorial debut, plays more like a parable, folding inherited trauma and Black rage into the language of destiny, sin, and sacrifice.
“That itself started to tell me that these are not two people,” said Abimbola Adelakun, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and the Tandean Rustandy Scholar, of the sisters' near-telepathic bond. “This is one person. The story breaks them into two.”
Adelakun’s work spans global Christianity, Pentecostalism, and the performance of religion. Criteria spoke with her about twins in myth, sin as a collective burden, and why righteous anger occupies such a central place in the film's political and theological imagination.
This is an edited Q&A that contains spoilers for the film Is God Is.
The film repeatedly returns to questions of inheritance, destiny, and obligation. How do the twins' relationship and their mission illuminate the film's understanding of trauma, family, and social order?
At first, Racine and Anaia seem inseparable, bound by love, protection, and a near-telepathic sense of each other’s thoughts. That closeness is why I began to see them as one person split into two. There are so many Greek and Yoruba myths attached to twins.
In Greek mythology, where one twin can be human and the other divine, they are used to represent duality, opposition, or even balance. In the Bible, too, there is a passage where God tells Rebekah that two nations are in her womb, Jacob and Esau, and they emerge in constant tension. The film plays with that duality. Racine is willful, forceful, and calculating; Anaia is more uncertain and emotional.
Once their mother shows them her scarred body and tells them what happened, the daughters cannot walk away. They must make the suffering they have endured mean something, and so they become people on a moral mission. In many African stories, that is the logic of destiny: you have been called to do this, and to refuse would foreclose a whole world of possibilities. They reach a threshold where they either discover their destiny or they betray it. In their case, they keep asking: Why should we do this? What will we become if we do? That is the anxiety that precedes such a life-changing mission.
Through social practices of religion, we see how these twins are committed to a web of relationships and obligations that overlay the morality of their mission. It is not only their relationship with each other or with their mother. They are quite entangled in family ties and obligations.
If you look at the pair as two people going through psychological duality, they are trying to define evil from the perspective of people who have suffered so much. They are wrestling with what is good and what is bad. One sister says, "We will be killers." The other says their father was a killer, their mother became a killer, and these are the people from whom they come. What else are we but a people marked by the fated circumstances of our birth?
The film is saturated with religious imagery, particularly through its treatment of God, the devil, sin, and sacrifice. How do you understand these theological themes, especially through the figures of Mother and Father?
I struggled with the ending for two days. Early on, one sister wants to push the father off a building, and Racine asks, "What if he pulls us along with him?" By the end, it is not just the physical pull that happens. It is also the evil in him that drags Racine down. In the last scene, the father pulling her into the fire reads to me like the devil rising from Hades to drag her down into hell with him. That scene was quite striking in its allusion to Christian imagery. The devil is sin, and sin will drag you down to hell if you are in dalliance with it.
The mother in the story is God; the film tells us so. She is the creator because she gives birth. The father is the devil, and the two are in contention, with their human children left to set the world right. That is the story of creation according to Christianity. Except that the “man,” the creation of God that the devil has always sought to destroy, are two children, not one. Both of them represent two halves of a whole. Racine carries destructive energy, the kind that gets things done but cannot build. Anaia, on the other hand, carries creative energy. If one has to die so the other can go on creating, then the survivor becomes more intimate with God.
That is also where sacrificial logic comes into this story. According to Rene Girard, societies project their aggression around a consensual victim, a scapegoat, who must be sacrificed. Something or someone has to be cut off so balance can be restored. In trying to destroy the devil, you take on some of his essence, so renewal becomes necessary. For Anaia, the renewal can only come if her sister and her tendency to escalate are no longer there.
The film also asks a provocative question. If women create life, why has God not been a woman? It flips the familiar Christian image: instead of woman as temptation or evil, the woman becomes God and the man becomes the devil.
The film also complicates conventional ideas of sin by presenting violence, trauma, and revenge as interconnected. What does Is God Is suggest about sin, accountability, and collective responsibility?
This story changes much of what we think we know about good and bad, with sin at the center. Sin here is not only what someone has done as a personal moral failure, but also what was done to others who bear the consequences on their bodies. The film makes the effect of sin tangible. The twins’ scars and the mother’s failing body are living records of sin, still felt, still demanding to be recompensed.
The original sin in this story is the father's attempt to destroy his family. He tried to murder his wife and children and walked away, protected by a frail, human legal system. In Christian terms, the mother's desire for revenge is sin, asking her daughters to carry it out is a sin, and their violence is a sin. But each emerges in response to a first sin that was never paid for.
In premodern societies, sin is rarely individual. When one person does wrong, it stains the entire community, and repair has to be collective. Modern life, shaped by Christianity, makes us individually accountable instead. The film asks what happens when one person’s wrongdoing touches everyone and there is no mechanism for collective repair. The father's sin spreads through the entire family network, and by the end nearly everyone is dead. Unrecompensed sin destroys all. Anaia, carrying a child, is the only one left standing, the one who can begin a cycle of renewal.
Critics, creators, and actors have described Is God Is as a specifically Black story. How do Black rage, religion, and historical trauma intersect within the film?
The story itself is a powerful notation on Black history and culture, especially through Racine. Her anger is never anger for its own sake. It begins as protection for her sister and deepens when she confronts her mother's suffering. The film gives a Black woman space to be angry in a way that departs from how Black women's anger is usually shown, as hysterical or meaningless. This is someone with a reason for her rage, and that rage drives the plot. It is destructive but also creative, with intuition, initiative, and clarity.
Set against Black history in America, the film reminds us that people are not enraged for no reason. There is historical trauma carried on the body, written on the burn scars of both mother and daughters and passed down. The film balances that rage: one sister pushes toward action while the other asks questions, together holding the tension between destruction and preservation.
The religious framework intensifies all of this. Religion is a language many people already understand, and it lets the film turn vengeance into a moral mission and suffering into a theological question. Harris draws on Christianity as well as on indigenous traditions through twins, creation, destiny, and divine power, so the story works on several levels at once: Black family history, trauma, religion, and justice. It allows a Black woman to express righteous rage and asks what happens when that rage becomes morally meaningful. That, for me, is what makes it a major political project.