Black Woman... and Evangelicalism?

Part One

Every fall I make my way to annual gathering of the evangelical bible nerds. ETS serves me in 3 ways: a nerdy little vacation, a chance to reunite with seminary friends for a few days, and a chance to hear people’s research and ongoing/upcoming projects. I first started going to ETS when I was a student at Dallas Theological Seminary studying for my ThM (Master of Theology and more on this later). Let me be clear, I love attending ETS and learning. But ETS has not always loved me. And honestly, it sill doesn’t. Let me explain.

Being in white evangelical spaces as a black woman has inexplicably been the root of some of my deepest pain and loneliness amongst fellow Christians. But in the queerest of manners I find my very presence to be a multi-varied protest to spaces upheld by a system designed to exclude people who look like me. To say the relationship between American evangelicalism and race and gender is complex is a gross understatement.

On being black…

“On the shores of Africa, the horror of the scene commences; here, the merciless tyrant, divested of every thing human, except the form begins the action. The laws of God and the tears of the oppressed are alike disregarded; and with more than savage barbarity, husbands and wives, parents and children, are parted to meet no more: and, if not doomed to an untimely death, while on the passage, yet are they for life consigned to a captivity still more terrible; a captivity, at the very thought of which, every heart, not already biassed with unhallowed prejudices, or callous to every tender impression, pauses and revolts; exposed to the caprice of those whose tender mercies are cruel; unprotected by the laws of the land, and doomed to drag out miserable existence, without the remotest shadow of a hope of deliverance, until the king of terror shall have executed his office, and consigned them to the kinder slumbers of death. But its pernicious tendency may be traced still farther: not only are its effects of the most disastrous character, in relation to the slave, but it extends its influence to the slave holder; and in many instances it is hard to say which is most wretched, the salve or the master.”

- An excerpt from Nathaniel Paul’s “Address Delivered on the Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in New York” (1827)

I find it odd that white people will casually remind us and each other about having Scottish, Irish, or “insert whatever European country or ethnic group here” heritage but squirm when black people bring up that we are the descendants of slaves. It’s not me attempting to conjure up some sort of racially motivated guilt- it’s just a fact. Your ancestors arrived via colonization, via free will attempt at escaping religious persecution, or indentured servitude- which is not the same as race-based, for life, inherited, slavery. My ancestors arrived via slave ships.

Slavery, America’s original and institutionalized sin, was so incredibly interwoven with America’s social and economic survival via capitalistic industry that it necessitated divine defense from Christians. From Baptists to Methodists to Presbyterians and everyone in between; theologians, preachers, and politicians like Richard Forman, James Thornwell, George Whitfield, Basil Mansly, Thorntown Stringfellow gathered fellow Christians together to defend, commend, and actively pursue race-based American slavery from the Bible.

To believe that there are no present and long-term consequences regarding collective epistemology and social structures and systems that spill over into individual conscience and interpersonal relationships is to live in a post-post-modern fallacious reality. Human beings don’t pop up with autonomous independence divorced of tradition, history, and context. We are formed and born into real bodies, in real spaces, in real time entirely enmeshed within socio-anthropological realities that cannot be divorced from tradition, history, and context.

Divorce may not be possible but divine disturbance is. Arguably not just possible but a necessary occurrence that is always taking place.

Last fall I taught a semester long study through Judges at my church. One of the things that I say often and that I kept saying week after week during the semester was “Injustice always follows idolatry.” And it does, we see that in Scripture over and over again. God’s people would reject God and turn to other gods, subsequently leading to the neglect, mistreatment, and rapid injustice of the very people they were called to protect, love, and be a blessing to- their neighbors, the marginalized, etc. Judges is one of the most in-face examples of this. The idolatry of God’s covenant people leads to rampant instability and horrid violence- culminating in the brutal rape and murder of an unnamed woman, a national civil war, and the abduction, forced marriage, and rape of young girls by the end of Judges. Injustice always follow idolatry.

As we examine our tradition, history, and context; as we examine the genocide of indigenous peoples, race-based American slavery, the widespread campaign of rape against non-white women, the era of domestic terror which was lynching and destruction of prosperous black communities, the “ugly laws” that penalized disability, the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, Japanese internment camps, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, the destruction of immigrant human dignity, etc, and the theological treatises we developed to defend this injustice and evil; the question becomes “What are the idols of American evangelicalism?”

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Lyrics to “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”- a black spiritual of lament

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home, a long way from home

Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done
Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done
Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done
And a long, long way from home, a long way from home

True believer
True believer
A long, long way from home
A long, long way from home