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The
Black Church Won't Reform
By
Irene Monroe
With the "No Hope Baptist Church of God
and Christ" and the "Apostolic Church of Hell"
standing front and center in our black communities, and with two
decades of trauma and death in part due to many churches'
inattention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaging our communities,
should the Black Church continue to have such a central role in
the life of black communities in 2006?
As the progenies of the African diaspora,
many of us pause in the month of February to pay homage to our
ancestors who survived the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade. We pay homage to our ancestors by remembering the Yoruba
proverb that states, "If we stand tall, it is because we
stand on the backs of those who came before us."
When it comes to the Black Church, however,
this is a present-day horror. Many of us lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender children of the African diaspora would say our
ancestors left us neither any teachings nor any road maps on how
to survive the Black Church, let alone be a part of its
virulently homophobic climate.
For centuries, the paradigm of leadership in
the African-American community has been the Black Church with
its homophobic yet charismatic preacher.
So the question must be asked: Is the utility
of the Black Church in its present-day accommodationist phase—that
is, selling out its social gospel message of justice in order to
whore itself for George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives—the
locus of liberation of African-American LGBTQ people?
Those attending the National Black Justice
Coalition's (NBJC) Black Church Summit on Gay Rights over the
weekend of Jan. 20-21 at the First Iconium Baptist Church in
Atlanta certainly think so. The Summit's goal is to build a
Black Church Social Justice Community Action Network, which
would be a national coalition of affirming black churches and
clergy to provide leadership to NBJC's ongoing campaign to end
religious-based discrimination.
The Black Church Social Justice Community
Action Network will host community trainings, develop a speakers
network, reach out to NBJC's allies in the media, seminary
students and others with its message of inclusiveness of LGBTQ
families.
More than 100 African-American LGBTQ clergy,
religious activists and our allies came to hear sermons and
speeches on how to develop specific strategies to challenge the
systemic homophobia in black churches, from its pulpits to its
pews. Most notably, the Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the event's
keynote address.
"Martin Luther King said there are two
types of leadership. There are those who are thermometers, who
measure the temperature in the room, and those who are
thermostats, who change the temperature. I come to tell you to
be thermostats. Turn up the heat in the Black Church. Make these
people sweat," said Sharpton, a former Democratic
presidential candidate.
And the heat was turned up even more in
Sharpton's homily as he pointed out how the Black Church fell
prey to the divisive tactics of both the Christian Right and the
Republican National Committee to garner votes by any means
necessary.
"The Christian Right were not concerned
about same-sex marriage; they were concerned about the same
president being elected. They use gays and lesbians as
scapegoats. They knew they couldn't talk to the Black Church
about the war, health care, about education. They took the cheap
way out; they used gays and lesbians. . . . The Republican
National Committee stopped being involved in the marriage issue
after the election. It was hard for them to sell morality after
[Hurricane] Katrina."
Sharpton plans to take his message on the
road. However, many African-American LGBTQ people are asking why
Sharpton is speaking up now when we needed to hear his voice
crying out for queer justice in the homophobic wilderness of
black ministers two decades ago.
For Sharpton, it is both personal and
political.
Why the personal stake in the issue?
Sharpton's sister is a lesbian. In the October 2005 issue of The
Advocate, Sharpton stated, "I understood the pain of
having to lead a double life in the system [since] we grew up in
the church." And at the Summit, he made reference to his
sister: "Black, gay, and female. Imagine the social
schizophrenia."
And why the political stake in the issue?
Sharpton says it's in memory of working with Bayard Rustin, the
chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington who was kept
largely behind the scenes because he was gay. Rustin gave
Sharpton the funds in the early 1970s to start the National
Youth Movement.
However, with no church of his own, many
African-American LGBTQ people are not buying Sharpton's
rhetoric. Why? Because in a competitive homophobic pool of black
religious leaders vying constantly with each other for
attention, Sharpton is repackaging himself. With airtime spent
so much on black ministers' homophobic vitriol of one-upmanship,
a new voice is welcomed.
By employing a rhetoric of inclusion,
Sharpton may be exploiting African-American LGBTQ people
knocking at the door of the Black Church while putting himself
on a national stage as the new leader for all black people.
Also, not all ministers are buying Sharpton's
rhetoric.
Immediately following the closing of the
Summit, the Rev. Wayne Cooper of Atlanta sent the NBJC this
message:
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I am literally sick
and tired of the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson
trying to force people to accept gay marriage! In fact,
most Americans are. I am black and I believe that
marriage was ordained by Almighty God to be between one
man and one woman. It is clear from the distinct
physical anatomies of men and women. It is a sad day for
men who supposedly represent God to believe that God
would ordain for a man to put his penis in the rectum of
another man! The rectum was/is not made for 'entry' but
for 'exit' of toxic human waste. I'd love to
publicly debate either man on this subject and I have no
doubt that I will eat them alive! |
So I ask the question again: In constructing
an inclusive paradigm of leadership, is the Black Church
paradigm with its homophobic charismatic preacher the answer?
I am immediately reminded of my ancestors'
use of the Bible as a central text of their teachings and I turn
to Mark 2:22 to get my answer: "No one puts new wine into
old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and
then wine and skins are both lost. New wine goes into fresh
skins."
Rev. Monroe
is an adjunct professor of religion and the director
of Multicultural and Spiritual Programming at Pine Manor
College in MA. She writes a biweekly column, “The Religion
Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender newspaper in New England states, and an online
column, “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive
Episcopalian journal.
posted 7 February 2006
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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