[Oe List ...] 7/29/2021: Rev. Irene Monroe: Progressing Spirit:The topic the Black Church dares not speak of honestly; Spong revisited

Thu Jul 29 05:35:30 PDT 2021

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The topic the Black Church dares not speak of honestly
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|  Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe
July 29, 2021I was recently asked:  "What should be the mandate for today's Black Churches? " I believe one of the mandates for today's Black Churches is to address its ongoing struggle with the spectrum of human sexuality.

In 2021, I am still asking these three questions: Why can't we as an African American community tell the truth about our sexuality? What price do we pay in telling the truth? And what role does the church play in perpetuating not only unsafe sexual behavior but also demonizing its members of the LGBTQ community?

The Black Church purported to preach and practice a prophetic social gospel. However, in truth,  it preaches and practices a heteronormative conservative gospel tethered to a model no longer relevant to a younger generation that embraces LGBTQ+ social justice issues. 

The Black Church played a part in the death of African Americans with AIDS. While its silence on the issue was appalling and unconscionable, so too, was its various forms of heterosexualized rituals and homophobic pronouncements that denigrate both LGBTQ+ people and women.

Sexuality has never been a comfortable topic of discussion in the African American community. This is due primarily to slavery,  and what we appropriated from the dominant culture about sexual behavior to deem ourselves human beings in our oppressors' eyes. First bred as cattle during slavery, and later either touted as sex sirens or taunted as sex predators, black sexuality has never had a chance to evolve in a milieu free of abuse, violence, and stereotypes. The raping of black women and the lynching of black men in this country by white men have always kept the control of black bodies away from us. In carving out a racial identity, African Americans have done it at the expense of leaving our bodies and sexualities behind. However, with the embrace of fundamentalist Christianity embedded in its tenets and an asexual theology, African American bodies, and sexualities that were once systematically usurped by white slave masters are now ritualistically harnessed by the black church with a "politic of silence." Sadly, this was viewed as a revolutionary act against the oppressive white gaze. But what happens in churches, communities, and families where people lose touch with their bodies and sexualities? 

One answer is that the Black Church continues to stay on the "down low." The most significant factor that keeps the Black Church on the down-low are closeted, homophobic ministers. Pastor Donnie McClurkin - a three-time Gospel Grammy winner and the former poster boy for African American ex-gay ministries - is one example.  

In an April  episode of TV One's "Uncensored," McClurkin talked about his sexual past. 

"I didn't know really what a woman wanted," he said. "I've messed up more than I've had good. My past relationships were a sprinkling of everything–men and women."

McClurkin admitted he still has sexual urges to be with men but won't act on them. He compares his gay desires to diabetes: "I don't eat sugar, but it doesn't mean that I don't want sugar."

McClurkin's sexuality has been an open secret, but now, at 61 years old, McClurkin is lamenting about growing old and being alone. While the Black LGBTQ+ community would applaud someone of McClurkin's status telling the truth about his sexual past, many of us can't care because of decades of damning and damaging messages he hurled at us.

McClurkin attributed his homosexuality to being raped twice as a child – first at age eight by his uncle and again at age thirteen by his cousin (his uncle's son).

"You can't call me a homophobic if I've been a homosexual… My thing was from [being] raped. And this started a pathology," McClurkin stated on "The Tom Joyner Morning Show "in 2013.

Confusing same-gender sexual violence with homosexuality, McClurkin misinterpreted the molestation as the reason for his sexual orientation. McClurkin "testi-lies" that he was cured by deliverance from God, and his manhood was restored by becoming the biological father of a child. Of course, McClurkin refers to heterosexual marriage because he was an opponent of the marriage equality movement.

However, there might be some light at the end of this tunnel. This month, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black denomination church,  dating back to 1787, will convene a committee to study LGBTQ+ issues by examining Scripture and doctrine hearing testimonies of LGBTQ+ individuals. Some of us in the LGBTQ+ community feel the effort is more than "a day late and a dollar short" because a younger generation has left. However, I am hopeful.

Our bodies are our temples, and as our temples, they house the most sacred and scariest truth about us: our sexuality. Sexuality is an essential part of being human. It is an expression of who we are; it is a language, and a means to communicate our spiritual need for intimate communion—human and divine. However, our silence, shame, and stigma around issues of sexual identity, gender expressions, and sexual practices have allowed for behaviors of denial, neglect, and abuse.  Also,  the lack of pastoral care contributes to high-risk sexual behaviors and the transmission of HIV/AIDS in the African American community. 

Right now, Black Churches are in a crisis. The AME Church is now the first to admit openly.  The church has contributed to the culture of the "politic of silence" because it not only lacks the language to talk about sex, but it also sees sex as a private and personal matter and not part of the business of the black Christian community as a way of loving God and ourselves. 

However, the black church is also uniquely positioned to significantly affect knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors within congregations and, by extension, the entire African American community. The black church can help its congregants live their sexual lives by devising an African American faith-based sex education curriculum where churches embrace the concept that sexuality is God-given, an integral part of being human, and at the core of how we interact with one another. 

Research has shown that sexuality education programs in black churches would delay the onset of sexual activity among teens, reduced the number of partners among teens and adults, significantly decrease the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned pregnancies, and gay-bashing.~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read online here

About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By John

For me, Bishop Spong's words resonate with truth when he illustrates the nexus between God and evolution, in a way that I believe Pierre Teilhard de Chardin always did. My questions are "Are we going somewhere? Is there purpose driving evolution?" In other words, it would seem that a theology of God and evolution demands human responsibility to see that plan through to fruition. This changes the status quo somewhat, from patiently waiting to purposeful action.

A: By Rev. Jim Burklo
 Amen, John!  to the Christian imperative to purposefully act for social and environmental justice and progress.  We can’t passively pray catastrophic climate change away: we must put our faith into action now.

As to your deep question of whether or not such faithful activism represents movement toward Teilhard de Chardin’s “omega point” of the cosmic evolution of consciousness – I wish I could offer a definitive answer. 

Years ago I read the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.   He described the evolutionary explosion of life forms in the Cambrian era, over 500 million years ago.  Many of its breathtakingly bizarre creatures disappeared from the fossil record after a series of mass extinctions at the end of the era.  Gould argued for the “punctuated equilibrium” theory of evolution: the process is not smooth, and its “progress” is anything but assured.  If we extrapolate his findings from the earth to the universe, we get a counterpoint to Teilhard’s glorious vision of a universe inexorably evolving toward higher life-forms with ever-more divine consciousness.

I’ve engaged in vigorous dialogue about your question with Michael Murphy over wine on a deck overlooking the Big Sur coast.  Murphy, co-founder of Esalen Institute, is a proponent of what he calls “evolutionary panentheism”.  He is a major figure in the genesis of the human potential movement, which literally embodies an optimistic anthropology.  As a Stanford student of Frederic Spiegelberg, the legendary professor of comparative religion, Murphy was introduced to the mystics of the world’s faiths.  He was much influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, as well.  It was hard not to be persuaded by Michael’s emphatic, enchanting expression of his cosmic vision.  I answered that I would very much prefer to agree with him, and believe in the inexorable progress of the universe, and humanity with it, toward higher and higher complexity and consciousness.  But the dead-ends in the fossil record suggest that this progress is not inevitable.  Humanity is doing a rotten job right now of securing its future in geologically meaningful time.  And if we don’t punctuate our own equilibrium, it’s easy to imagine that someday, something else – like an asteroid strike – will finish the job.

As sunset over the roiling Pacific faded into starlight, and the wine drained from the bottle, we concluded our conclave on the future of the universe.  My parting words were something to this effect:  “Maybe the best we can do is to strive ever onward in advancing humanity and the cosmos toward the omega point – whether or not we ever get there!” ~ Rev. Jim Burklo

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California.  An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021).  His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership.  He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org.   |

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That's my starting point every time I sit down to write one of these notes. You, the folks I'm writing to, have worked hard for your money and have so many worthwhile organizations you could choose to support – so, why support ProgressiveChristianity.org?

It's an important question and I'm going to cut straight to my two part answer.

1) In the frequently fundamentalist religious and political climate of modern times, access to rational and caring understandings of spirituality and the Christian texts are more important than ever. Essential, even.

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ProgressiveChristianity.org
Progressing Spirit

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Biblical Ignorance in Public Life

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 19, 2011One of the things I look for in my elected representatives in government is that they understand the issues on which they speak with some level of competence. When people in authority take stands on public issues, I believe, they do have a responsibility to be informed.  Two events occurring recently in our political landscape have indicated that that quality is not always present.  No political party has a monopoly on incompetence and one of these publicly embarrassing moments featured a governor who is a Democrat, while the other featured a senator who is a Republican.  Ignorance, it appears, is non-partisan and so apparently is an elected official’s willingness to play to the lowest common denominator of the people’s fears and prejudices in order to be re-elected.  I examine these two episodes today with the recognition that they are part of a disheartening and discouraging current political reality.

The Democrat is the sitting governor of Kentucky, Steven Beshear.  The Republican is the senior Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss.  In recent public appearances they both offered vivid illustrations of how uninformed they are and, by their rhetoric, both of these gentlemen indicated that their commitment to be informed is not essential to them, nor is truth important if it is inconvenient to their political agenda.  To make it even more distressing both claimed the Bible as a supporter of their ignorance.  These are their two stories.

Governor Beshear of Kentucky recently announced his support for a plan that will provide three hundred and twenty five million dollars in tax abatement to a private group in Kentucky to enable them to build a theme park based on the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. The purpose of this theme park is to combat those who might suggest that the biblical story of Noah and his ark is not literal history. This bias becomes obvious when one learns that a major partner in this plan is a “private group” that previously created another theme park, 40 miles away, but still in Kentucky, dedicated to countering evolution in the name of “Creation Science.”  That organization called “Answers in Genesis” is headed by a man named Ken Ham.  Both theme parks are part of this man’s agenda, which is to demonstrate the literal accuracy of the book of Genesis.  That is a point of view that no recognized biblical scholar in the world would support.  That seems not to matter to these self-styled “defenders of the literal truth of the Bible.”

The assertion of the creationists is that the earth was created in 4004 BCE and is thus little more than 6,000 years old.  The assertion of the Noah’s ark literalists is that, since Noah saved two of each of the world’s species, there had to have been a time when human beings and dinosaurs lived together on planet earth, since the fossil evidence for the existence of dinosaurs is indisputable. When those planning the Noah’s Ark theme park were asked at a recent press conference whether or not dinosaurs had been on that original ark, they answered yes without embarrassment.  They regretted that they would not be able to have any real dinosaurs, but in all other details they would make this project literally authentic. At least they seemed to know that dinosaurs are extinct.  In this Noah’s Ark Park they also plan to have a replica of the Tower of Babel, described in the Book of Genesis as a human project designed to be so tall that they could talk face to face with God.  That, of course, assumes that God lives above the sky of a three tiered universe, an idea that departed this world with the work of Galileo in the 17th century.  Ken Ham, Governor Beshear’s resident biblical expert, described the story of Noah’s Ark as one of “the best known historical events” in the Bible. I suppose the Tower of Babel would, in his mind, be right up there in at least the Top Ten “historical” events related in the Bible.  When people who have studied these issues raise questions about the historicity of his “facts,” they are dismissed on the Ken Ham blog as “secular scientists” or “secular historians,” who are not true believers and therefore whose points of view have no validity.  Truth to be truth, it seems, must support Mr. Ham’s convictions. I listened to this press conference with amazement.

While I am neither a “secular scientist” nor a “secular historian,” I am a practicing Christian who has been educated in reputable centers of Christian learning and  I find these theories offered by Mr. Ham and endorsed by the Governor of Kentucky to be profoundly ignorant, and more importantly, to be insulting to the Christian faith itself.  The kind of biblical literalism that this organization espouses has been relegated to the dustbins of history for the last two hundred years.  I am not opposed to an individual’s private ignorance nor would I deny anyone’s right to interpret their religion in any way they wished, but when they seek public funds to peddle their biblical ignorance to the world in a money making scheme I do object.  Even more, I resent their ignorance that reduces the Christian faith that I deeply believe to a caricature of itself and subjects it to the constant ridicule of the late night comedians who know a good source of comedy when they see it. While Mr. Ham and his organization assert that the “literal Bible cannot be wrong” those who study the Bible know that it is wrong in thousands of places. Epilepsy and mental illness are not the result of demon possession, as the Bible states.  Slavery is not a legitimate social institution.  Women are not created inferior to men and cannot be regarded as male property.  Since homosexuals do not chooses their sexual orientation they should not be put to death for “their sin.”  Yet in a literal Bible I can validate each of those assumptions. The literal Bible is demonstrably wrong in thousands of places in its understanding of reality.  As Elizabeth Barrett Browning once said in another context, “Let me count the ways.”

Look for just a moment at the flood story in the Bible. If a flood covered the entire earth at the time of Noah, there would have had to be enough water to cover every mountain chain in the world from the Himalayas to the Rockies and the Alps.  That is more water than there is in all the oceans of the world, which are only about five miles deep at the deepest point.  I wonder where all that water went.  It could not have simply evaporated because the evaporation of that much water would simply have been recycled as abnormal amounts of rainfall.  Perhaps the only alternative was that it fell off the edges of the flat earth!

At the time of Noah no one knew about dinosaurs for they had been extinct for 65 million years.  From fossil remains that we have discovered, we know they were enormous creatures weighing many tons.  The dimensions of Noah’s Ark are described in the book of Genesis and the developers of this Ark project in Kentucky, seeking to replicate those dimensions, plan an ark that is 500 feet long and 75 feet high.  They, thus, do not seem to realize that a pair of dinosaurs would have taken up enormous space, made navigation all but impossible and, in the 150 days that Noah was supposedly on that boat, would have by themselves required more food than the ark could have carried.  These developers did seem to sense that they had a problem with space because they suggested that Noah must have taken on board only baby giraffes that did not require the height adult giraffes would need.  When the story of Noah and his ark was written no one knew about kangaroos or koala bears because the existence of Australia was unknown to any, but its aboriginal people.  Neither were polar bears nor penguins known to have existed.  There are also billions of species of insects, some microscopic in size.  How were they contained in the literal ark and what would have happened if Noah had heard a buzzing about his ear one night and swatted one of the two mosquitoes?

Hominids, who were our human ancestors, can be dated no earlier than four million years ago.   We human beings thus missed the dinosaurs by only about sixty-one million years!  Most of these facts we can now document with DNA evidence.  This is not “secular” science, Mr. Ham and Governor Beshear, this is documentable truth.

We have also today traveled deep into space and we have not yet discovered the God who lives above the sky for whom the tower of Babel would give us access.  The Christian Church thought Galileo was wrong in the 17th century, but in December of 1991, even the Vatican finally issued a statement that announced they now believed Galileo was correct!
Of course, there will be people who will come to these biblical theme parks. P. T. Barnum reminded us of how often such people are born. Does the State of Kentucky and Governor Beshear, however, want to announce to the world the lack of knowledge that must reside in that state to cause it to offer tax incentives that encourage this degree of religious ignorance? Does the governor’s argument that this project will create jobs make it worthwhile?

Senator Saxby Chambliss, prior to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” wanted to put the constitutional rights of homosexuals to a vote of the people in the armed services!  His argument was that if serving with gays and lesbians in the military makes one feel uncomfortable, the soldiers’ comfort level must take precedence over justice!  This wisdom comes from the man who won his senate seat by attacking as non-patriotic a quadriplegic, incumbent senator, who had lost his limbs in military service to his country!  “This is not the right time for this change,” he argued.  It will never be the right time for homophobic people any more than it would ever have been the right time to end segregation, if this nation had waited until white southerners were comfortable with the idea.  We as a nation have walked this road and heard these arguments before.  When Senator Chambliss, trying to mask his deep-seated prejudice, asserted that “some of my best friends are homosexuals,” I broke into laughter.  Ignorance is no less ignorant when it is perfumed by biblical quotations or is spoken from the mouth of a United States Senator.  This nation deserves better leadership than these embarrassing demonstrations reveal to be present.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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Do Christianity and Buddhism have Shamanic Roots?

A Virtual Teach-In with Isa Gucciardi and Matthew Fox
In this Teach-In, Matthew Fox and Isa Gucciardi discuss the roots of shamanic practice in Christian and Buddhist thought through the lens of the visionary experiences that are essential to shamanic practice. Saturday morning will be highly experiential. Students will have the opportunity to engage in the shamanic journey, an ancient practice used to establish contact with the unseen forces of nature, and will also participate in a practice that brings the Cosmic Christ alive in one’s Self.  READ ON...  |

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