by Curtis Bunn
In the end, Harris continued attending therapy to process her feelings and manage her anxieties, and Harris came out as queer.
“I started dating, and got a better understanding of who and where I was. It was somewhat of a safe place to come out. Duke Divinity School most certainly wasn’t a safe space, but Durham surprisingly has a strong Black, queer community,” she explained. “And I ended up working with this great nutritionist who was way more body positive.”
Even after navigating all of that and graduating from seminary, Harris was still not certain the ministry was for her. The seeds planted by her childhood experiences, brought up in a conservative church, were deeply rooted.
“Again, my dad is a pastor and my dad is someone, current day, I don’t have a good relationship with. I don’t talk to him. He’s not affirming. He didn’t come to my graduation. It’s not a good relationship. Especially now that we’re in the same field and I don’t have that experience with him, there’s a lot of hurt and sadness around that. In many respects it will always be sad, based on the decisions my dad is making not to be part of my life, although the door is open, of course.”
Harris pressed on and finally began having the conversation with McBride about where she might begin her ministry. Long story short, together they concluded that she was going to be a pastor, and it then became a matter of where. Since her siblings all lived in Los Angeles and it had been difficult for her to be away from them, when the chance came to return, she jumped at it. She moved to Los Angeles in July 2019 and got ordained as a pastor that month at the Lake Christian Center and also started her own private practice as a mental health therapist. The transition was hectic and not without challenges. For the first six months she had to adjust to the cost of living.
“It’s super expensive! But things kinda turned around at the top of [2020] and I was able to come out of the fog of…leaving seminary,” she said. “Someone in my church community offered to help me find affordable therapy and I was able to get back on track and feel better about things. In March, we were getting ready for Easter. We were planning a sunrise service at the top of a mountain. And then, COVID happened.”
The Pandemic and the Church
The pandemic exposed the long-standing racial inequities in the United States that permeate all strata of society and throughout every index, including labor, economic, educational, and especially health. At its onset some church leadership, Black and white, balked at restrictive measures and protocols that would keep houses of worship shut to help prevent the spread of the virus. Some openly defied the edicts, and others went to court to have them overturned. Many services and choir practices became super-spreader events and led to infection and death. The toll on African American communities was so apparent that houses of worship had little choice but to restrict in-person worship. As the pandemic dragged on, many churches, which are after all businesses, pivoted to online services and discovered PayPal and Venmo to keep tithes coming.
According to a study published by the British medical journal The Lancet, Black people were twice as likely to become infected with COVID-19 as white people, and people of Asian descent are one and a half times as likely.
The pandemic also revealed just who was an “essential” worker, and therefore more apt to be exposed to the virus, and who could afford to remain relatively safe working from home, facilitated by technology, Zoom, and Google Hangouts. Remote learning became a necessity at all levels of education, but it was made easier in school districts where students had easy access to Internet connections, high-speed broadband, and hardware.
Those in elder care and medical fields—health care workers in nursing homes, nurses, orderlies, nurses’ aides—were disproportionately people of color, as were civil servants, such as bus drivers and rail employees. Not to mention those who work in the retail and service industry: mom and pop stores, bodegas, kitchen and back-of-the-house restaurant support staff. They were the ones who bore the brunt of the pandemic, specifically when it was pummeling New York City in March, April, and May of 2020. In the rollout of vaccines to stem the rising tide of infections and deaths, structural racism, the silent, working arm of white supremacy, is afoot as African Americans and people of color are getting vaccinated at rates two to three times lower than whites.
But COVID-19 also had another effect: It was instrumental in the swell of global demonstrations as people decided to brave getting infected and began protesting police use of deadly force. This is what George Floyd’s daughter meant when she said: “Daddy changed the world.” Floyd, by all accounts, was a person of faith, especially in his original hometown of Houston. “He was like the OG of the neighborhood and made sure we were welcomed in,” Pastor Patrick “PT” Ngwolo of the church Resurrection Houston, told Religion Unplugged. “In the Bible we call it a person of peace.”
One pandemic exposed and highlighted another. People sat in their homes and in a three-month period learned about the white vigilante killing of a Georgia man, Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, and a Louisville, Kentucky, EMT, Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police officers as they forced entry into her home. And then there was Floyd’s killing.
The comedian Dave Chappelle joked, “Thank God for COVID,” because of the paucity of mass shootings, school or otherwise, since the onset of the virus. But the epidemic of Black people being shot by police seemed to continue unabated. In the United States, according to the Brookings Institution, one Black person is killed by police about every forty hours. Black teenagers are twenty-one times more likely than white teenagers to be shot by police. And one out of every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police. It’s against this backdrop that the video, literally a snuff film, of Floyd went viral.
“Yeah, of course, I watched it,” Reverend Lewis said. She sighed heavily. “I will never get the picture of the officer’s knee on his neck out of my mind. Those hands in his pocket…if you really pay attention you could see that he is squirming his knee against cartilage and bone. All of those people kneeling on him…that I will never forget. And I’m of a certain age, I’m sixty-one, so I can vividly remember the picture of Emmett Till on the cover of Jet magazine and how his mother let us see that, so we would not forget. So, what came to mind was that it was a lynching.”
The Reverend Lewis, who recalls as a child how she hid below her bed as “bullets flew” in her Chicago neighborhood in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, is the senior minister for public theology and transformation at Middle Church in Manhattan, New York. She also connects what was done to Floyd to the most sickening images from the 1960s civil rights era.
“If we really watch again, the [Edmund] Pettus Bridge beatings, the hoses being sprayed strong enough on our children to send them flying down a street, you know, streams of water that are strong enough to strip bark off trees, the violence against Black people, the violence against brown people in cages, this is horrific blight, blessed by the church: blessed by the white church. So, when I watch it, I’m motivated. I am outraged. And I know just because we saw it on camera, there’s so many more that we haven’t seen on camera.”
White Christian Nationalism
There can be no discussion of the Black church without an examination of the white church. In many ways the Black church was and is set up in opposition to the white church, since for most of the nation’s history, and like the rest of society, worship was not integrated.
“It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning,” Dr. King said in 1963.
While that has changed some, the Pew Research Center has found that at least eight out of ten parishioners still attend service where the congregation is exclusively of one race. But even separated, much of what the Black and Latinx churches have absorbed around religion and theology is an aping of the white church.
Dana Milbank, a columnist at the Washington Post, delved into how important white evangelical Christians were to President Trump�
�s failed 2020 reelection efforts.
“White evangelicals are only 15 percent of the population, but their share of the electorate was 28 percent, according to Edison Research exit polling, and 23 percent, according to the Associated Press version,” Milbank wrote. “Though exit polls are imprecise, it seems clear that white evangelicals maintained the roughly 26 percent proportion of the electorate they’ve occupied since 2008, even though their proportion of the population has steadily shrunk from 21 percent in 2008.
“The white evangelicals’ overperformance also shows, unfortunately, why the racist appeal Trump made in this campaign was effective,” Milbank wrote. “White evangelicals were fired up like no other group by Trump’s encouragement of white supremacy.”
The use of the word “unfortunately” in Milbank’s prose betrays the can’t-believe-this-is-true attitude that much of the corporate media and social and political commentators adopt when the topic rears its ugly head. “This can’t really be us” is the clutch-your-pearls posture some assume. They would like that to be true, but it isn’t. This is them! Most everything in American society benefits white comfort and discounts and/or dismisses Black pain.
Robert P. Jones, who runs the Public Religion Research Institute, told Milbank, “Trump inspired white Christians, ‘not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy,’ attracting them not because of economics or morality, ‘but rather that he evoked powerful fears about the loss of white Christian dominance.’”
The Reverend Miguel A. De La Torre, professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, said, “A lot of it probably has to do with these churches who were oppressed, copying the theology of the white churches. So, when white churches sent missionaries to Puerto Rico and Latin America, they were mostly fundamentalist churches back in the early 1900s.
“Black churches that found their own spaces many times copied the theology of the masters and of the overseers, and Paulo Freire (most notably in his groundbreaking 1968 text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed) talks about this: ‘What happens when the oppressed copy the structures of the oppressors?’ And I think that legacy continues to be manifested today.”
Author of more than two dozen books, De La Torre is an unflagging and relentless critic of the white church and its minions, which he said is “killing Christianity.” In one of his most incendiary books, Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity, De La Torre mercilessly flogs the white church:
The gospel is slowly dying in the hands of so-called Christians, with evangelicals supplying the morphine drip. Christ’s message of love, peace, and liberation, has been distorted and disfigured by Trumpish flim flammers who made a Faustian bargain for the sake of expediency, whose licentious desire for ultra conservative Supreme Court justices trumped God’s call to judge justly. These Euro-American Christians have made a preferential option for the golden calf over and against the Golden Rule as they revel in an unadulterated power grab, deeming white privilege to be more attractive than waiting for the inheritance promised to the meek. White Christianity has more than a simple PR problem; it is inherently problematic.
De La Torre references President Trump and the unwavering support he had, and continued to receive, from white evangelicals, who in the 2016 presidential election voted 81 percent for Trump. Other denominations also went for Trump in 2016 in great numbers: 58 percent of Protestants; 60 percent of white Catholics; and 61 percent of Mormons. In his lost 2020 reelection bid, according to the AP VoteCast survey, 81 percent of white evangelicals again voted for Trump, though there were slight shifts in some crucial states. In 2016, 92 percent of white evangelicals in Georgia voted for Trump. But in 2020 that number dipped to 85 percent. Former vice president Biden won the state by less than 14,000 votes. And in Georgia, Biden, a practicing Catholic, out-balloted Trump among Catholics by a competitive 52 percent to 47 percent.
“These individuals—Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and evangelicals—share more than an ethnic identity,” De La Torre wrote. “They share a cultural identity: white Christian. They voted for a person who promised them power and standing even though his entire life repudiates everything Christ modeled and taught. What kind of religion tolerates separating crying children from nursing mothers?”
De La Torre is not a singular voice on this subject.
Jemar Tisby, a church historian and the author of The Color of Compromise, said, “What Black Lives Matter did was highlight the racism and white supremacy that still has a stranglehold on much of white Christianity. You have this phrase and this movement that is forcing people, essentially, to take sides.”
The dean of Black religious scholarship and Black liberation theology, James H. Cone, who died in 2018, once wrote: “Black theologians and preachers have rejected the white church’s attempt to separate love from justice and religion from politics because we are proud descendants of a Black religious tradition that has always interpreted its confession of faith according to the people’s commitment to the struggle for earthly freedom.”
In the essay, Cone explained that the Black church was faced with a choice: “The cry of Black Power by Willie Ricks (a field secretary alongside John Lewis in SNCC who later changed his name to Mukasa Dada), its political and intellectual development by Stokely Carmichael (later, Kwame Ture) and others challenged the Black church to move beyond the models of love defined in the context of white religion and theology. The Black church was thus faced with a theological dilemma: either reject Black Power as a contradiction of Christian love (and thereby join the white church in its condemnation of Black Power advocates as un-American and unchristian), or accept Black Power as a socio-political expression of the truth of the gospel. These two possibilities were the only genuine alternatives before us, and we had to decide on whose side we would take our stand.”
That struggle endures. It’s not that the Black church ignores the racism that is part of the DNA of the white church, but it’s a devil it knows. The BLM movement is one they haven’t gotten a handle on as yet. On one side you have Black Christians, some of whom are wrestling with what they have been taught, what they have lived, and what they think the BLM movement represents.
“BLM grew initially out of the death of Trayvon Martin,” John Edmerson, senior minister of Church of Christ at the Vineyard in Phoenix, Arizona, told the Christian Chronicle, “but has now expanded to include Black people represented in any societal setting with special emphasis supporting the LGBTQ plus platform and the doing away with male-orientated leadership in the family.”
Many white Christians who express contempt for the BLM movement don’t mince words.
“Their own writing shows that they are on the opposite side of the spectrum from those of us who try to follow Christ’s teachings,” Merijo Alter, a member of the High Ridge Church of Christ in Missouri and whose husband is a former Republican state senator, said to the Christian Chronicle. “We should be at the forefront of being politically incorrect by affirming that ‘All Lives Matter,’ yet this is construed as a racist remark. I was taught as a child (to sing), ‘Red and yellow, Black and white, we are precious in his sight.’ We have been hijacked by this disgusting organization.”
Ruby Sales is adamant that the reasons—destroying the traditional family and subverting a tacit, religious-based racial harmony—white evangelicals and others proffer for their disdain of the BLM movement are smoke screens. “They think the Black Lives Matter movement is a movement to destroy them,” Sales said. “Because, somehow, they believe that Black people have savage anxieties, that we pose a threat to their security and that we are savages. And I’m saying savages are mostly those who cannot be civilized and who must be destroyed. It is not about the ‘family.’ That’s a bunch of crap, because you can’t say you care for the family and then turn around and not pass gun control legislation when your children are being shot up in schools.”
In demonizing and seeking to diminish the BLM movement, congregants of
all stripes resist facing the patriarchy or homophobia that exists in the church. For white believers, the mention of white supremacy is ofttimes a bridge too far. The Reverend Dr. Paul Ramsey, the senior minister at the progressive Mayflower Congregational Church in Denver, Colorado, explained that for many the church is one of the last bastions in society that harkens to a fading reality.
“One of the parts of the church that happens in the white church and in the Black church, especially in the male-dominated piece of what I would consider kind of mainline Black church and evangelical white church, is that the patriarchy that has the power, their power is only in the church. They have very little power outside of that, unless they are in a small evangelical community, unless they have some sort of a traditional place where they’re the head of the rotary.
“But because of that, they try to channel everything back into the church so that there’s more say. So, the outside world to them, or in that kind of construct, is scary and represents a wilderness or a wildness that they can’t contain and that they no longer have control of.”
Ramsey’s measured sermons admonish his small flock to step outside their comfort zone and have the difficult conversations around racism, sexism, and homophobia with their relatives and those within their communities. Because, he said, we are in a changing world, where the norms that gave white Christians a sense of power and even dominion have been radically altered, most recently by the BLM movement. He notes that too many white Christians, in an effort to retain and maintain what they see as their ordained place atop the caste system that is the United States, ignore or lash out and cling even more to their interpretations of scripture.
“It’s really just the Bible translated as their idea of a kind of idyllic America, you know, the Andy Griffith Show kind of America, and they have no way to navigate a world where there’s equity,” added the Reverend Ramsey. “So, they don’t; they don’t say much at all because they’re painting this completely dysmorphic picture of what the world is supposed to be like.