Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church Coalition
240
Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church Coalition
240Paperback(New Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226537207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2018 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 1,156,164 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"I've Been 'Buked": The Double Consciousness of Being LGBT and Black
"George Howard" grew up in a Pentecostal church in the Deep South in the 1970s. He had been aware of his homosexuality since his childhood. Arriving in Chicago, he found a far more open and accepting world, a place with Gay Pride celebrations, lots of gay bars, and an energetic drag scene. He still wanted to be part of a church family, but for a long time he had no success finding a suitable congregation in Chicago. He explains his struggle to find a church home:
I didn't go to any churches here because they were either too large or they were gay bashing from the pulpit and had a huge choir full of homosexuals and a congregation with even more and then you know you hear all this agreement from the masses and I just could not see myself being a hypocrite. Not in that way, not in the sanctuary, I was not going to stand up and say, "Amen, Pastor, that's right!" and I don't believe it. My belief is that God knows all of us, better than we know ourselves, and that he made all of us just as we are. I came to the conclusion for myself that if I keep asking God to change me, then you know I'm telling him that he messed up, that he did wrong. So that's what made me say to myself, accept it and be done with it. I used to fast and pray early in life, especially before I turned twelve because turning twelve was that age where there was a heaven or hell for you. Before twelve, you know God would probably forgive you and you could go to heaven. But at twelve, youcould make your own decisions and there's a heaven or a hell for you. I used to fast and pray, you know, "Please take this away from me."
Despite the greater acceptance LGBT people have experienced across American society since the 1970s, African American communities have been described as particularly inhospitable to homosexuality and to be especially antagonistic toward people with non-heteronormative gender or sexual identities in religious settings (Anderson 1998; Bates 2005; Douglas 1999; Griffin 2006; Johnson 2008). Like other black Americans, many LGBT black people hunger for a religious home and a spiritual center, historically located in the black church. In this chapter, I will detail the history of the black church and outline the particular challenges faced by LGBT people who yearn for acceptance in what they often describe as a "church home."
The Black Church in America
To understand the stories of Fellowship members that will be told in these pages, we must begin with the almost immeasurable importance of the black church and religious belief for most African Americans (Frazier 1974 [1964]; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). Speaking broadly of the many denominations that constitute the black church, scholars have described its significance as going back to the days of slavery, when Africans who had been transported to North America struggled to survive not only the physical hardships of captivity but the threats that servitude presented to their sense of the order of the material and supernatural world. Slavery generally entailed close interaction among people of disparate African origins, who often spoke unrelated languages and came from diverse religious backgrounds. While disputes about whether slaves were able to preserve elements of their African cultural heritage or were utterly cast adrift and forced to invent new creeds have preoccupied scholars for generations (Frazier 1974 [1964]; Herskovits 1990 [1941]), most were exposed to Christianity from their early days in North America — whether intentionally or obliquely (Raboteau 1978). Even as this occurred, there was vigorous debate in the antebellum period over whether Christianity might be used to make slaves more compliant or whether it would arouse rebellious feelings among them grounded in a sense of equality with slaveholders as children of God (Genovese 1972). In any case, some rejected the new religion, but many others either found elements of Christian doctrine compatible with their earlier beliefs or discovered specific features of Protestant practice that were appealing (Mintz and Price 1992 [1976]; Raboteau 1978). In particular, scholars have argued that the emphasis on direct experience of the Holy Spirit that characterized Baptist and Methodist evangelism in the antebellum period was attractive to slaves as it offered a compelling translation of African beliefs in the dynamic world of spirits and the ability of individuals to have transformative contact with them (Battle 2006).
Some research indicates that elements of African religions figured prominently in the spiritual activities of slaves, sometimes providing the foundation for resistance to the degradations of captivity (Young 2007). Biblical stories offered compelling examples of how embattled Hebrews survived assaults on their spiritual practices and managed to sustain themselves as a people, and many of these offered slaves images of redemption that, if not close at hand, could at least be imagined. As historian of religion Albert Raboteau explains, the accounts of God's interventions on behalf of biblical Israel helped "slaves to assert and maintain a sense of personal value — even of ultimate worth" (Raboteau 1978: 318). Even during slavery, Christianity sometimes presented slaves with opportunities to preach or lead worship, that is, to achieve positions of leadership or esteem in their communities. But in many cases, worship was carried out in secret, constituting an act of rebellion against the constraints of slavery. Taking a different approach to this discussion, folklorist John W. Roberts urges his readers to pay close attention to the African foundations of African American culture, resisting the impulse to label discrete elements as "Africanisms." He proposes, instead, what he calls an "Afrocentric perspective," one that would see African and American traditions in a "dynamic relationship" (Roberts 1989: 9). Following this approach, Roberts traces such folk hero figures as the trickster and the conjurer to African precedents, and also argues for strong African influences in the form and content of spirituals.
While slaves were often baptized or otherwise "Christianized" soon after they arrived in America, it is of lasting significance that Christianity made a major impact on slaves during the First Great Awakening around 1740 (Raboteau 1978) and later during the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. During both of these periods of intense religious fervor, white evangelists for the Baptist and Methodist denominations were especially active in the South, converting both slaves and masters. These denominations worshipped in a manner that was notably expressive and emotional (at least in comparison with other religious practices brought to America from England) and engaged directly with Scripture and evangelism. Raboteau (1978) suggests that slaves probably found the practices of the Catholics, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians, which may have been the denominations of their masters, less appealing because of their more restrained style of worship. He also points out that the Baptists and Methodists welcomed clergy regardless of education, thus clearing the path for slaves and later free blacks with little if any formal education to make their way into the clergy. He explains:
A converted heart and a gifted tongue were more important than the amount of theological training received. If a converted slave showed talent for exhorting, he exhorted, and not only to black audiences. The tendency of evangelical religion to level the souls of all men before God became manifest when awakened blacks preached to unconverted whites. (Raboteau 1978: 133–34)
Theologian Horace Griffin argues that the affiliations of black people with what have now coalesced as conservative Protestant denominations have important implications for present-day religious thinking. White members of these churches are theologically orthodox as well as firmly conservative on social issues such as the family and homosexuality, but since a more substantial proportion of black people are members of these and other traditionalist denominations, such views are even more prevalent among them (Griffin 2006). One of the ironies of this history is that these (white) churches often used biblical authority to defend slavery in a manner that Griffin argues is echoed today in their approach to homosexuality. Griffin explains that black Christians tended to support a markedly sex-negative version of Christian tradition, probably responding to racist demonization of black sexuality as excessive. Their efforts to achieve respectability after emancipation generated a strikingly puritanical approach to sexuality and the body, one that E. Franklin Frazier also remarked on in Black Bourgeoisie (1957). According to Frazier, creating and maintaining an image of the black body as chaste was one cultural strategy that blacks used to try to attain a respectability based on control of their "savage instincts" (Griffin 2006: 59).
As black feminist theorists have observed, sex negativity in black culture can be traced to the toxic sexual myths that are foundational to racism, circumstances that rose to the surface in a particularly dramatic manner during the 1991 confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court. Anita Hill, a law professor who was a former employee of Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testified to his having sexually harassed her, even specifying the vulgar language he used on these occasions. These allegations laid bare persistent sexual stereotypes of both black women and black men, and led many African Americans to repudiate Hill's decision to make her experience public as an unfortunate instance of "airing dirty laundry" (Morrison 1992). That African Americans are typically viewed as hypersexual, with appetites that exceed the "normal" sexuality of white people, penetrates every aspect of black political and social experience, as Patricia Hill Collins has persuasively argued (Collins 1991, 2004). Given the pervasive reach of these malicious stereotypes, the defensive strategies intended to disarm them permeate black religious observance, which in turn serves to stigmatize behaviors or identities deemed to be problematic as black people struggle for respectability.
Besides its significance as the site of religious observance, in which worship enabled slaves and later emancipated African Americans to express their yearnings for freedom and dignity, the church has long provided key resources that have furthered the ability of besieged communities to survive. As early as 1849, abolitionist Martin Delany stated that "among our people generally, the church is the Alpha and Omega of all things. It is their only source of information — their only acknowledged public body — their state legislature" (quoted in Glaude 2003: 338). With the end of slavery, the "invisible institution," established under slavery and the institutional churches built by free blacks, grew and morphed along diverse denominational lines and "provided an organization and structuring of Negro life which has persisted until the present time" (Frazier 1974 [1964]: 37). As Frazier explains, the church regulated marital and family relationships, fostered economic cooperation, provided education, and served as the crux of political life. Even more important, the church offered refuge to blacks struggling to survive in an unremittingly hostile world. Religious scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. enumerates other activities that were housed in black churches: mutual aid societies, athletic clubs, libraries, insurance companies, and many different kinds of social events, as churches usually provided the only large public spaces to which black people had access both before and after emancipation (Glaude 2003). Indeed, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham makes clear that churches were the primary means through which African Americans interacted with the state and other racially constituted institutions. She calls this "the public dimension of the black church, not the religious dimension of the public realm" (1993: 9).
Churches offered spaces where blacks could criticize racism and white society and could gain access to status and esteem away from sites where they were belittled and humiliated. Long ago, W. E. B. Du Bois noted the centrality of the church not only to the black community in a physical sense, but as "peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere" (Du Bois 1994 [1903]).
For African Americans, long excluded from political institutions and denied presence, even relevance, in the dominant society's myths about its heritage and national community, the church itself became the domain for the expression, celebration, and pursuit of a black collective will and identity. (Higginbotham 1993: 9)
Expanding these multivalent social and cultural roles, the church has also often served as the source of political mobilization — most notably in the mid-twentieth century as the cradle of the civil rights movement (Baer and Singer 1992; Harris 1999).
But beyond the many instrumental roles the church has taken in the lives of American blacks, religious participation and particularly access to the expressive worship style of the various denominations that constitute the black church mean something more than religious observance alone: they stand for blackness perhaps more strongly than any other symbol of cultural affiliation (Battle 2006).
The centrality of the church continued after emancipation. Free African Americans established themselves in the South and were able to maintain the religious associations they had during slavery; as many moved north and west during the Great Migration, beginning around 1916, they established churches on the model of those they had left behind (Wilkerson 2010). As Isabel Wilkerson and others who have documented the pathways of the Great Migration have shown, denominations and styles of worship that were central to African American life in the South made their way north and west with the migrants, as did food, music, and other ethnic markers (see also Best 2005; Lemann 1991).
Sharing cultural traditions and preserving the history of African American culture loom large for many American blacks today. Anthropologist Faye Harrison recounts the "grounding for the sense of cultural tradition" that is enacted in down-home family reunions in the South, whose participants include both those who remained in the South and those who migrated away from their ancestral roots. These events, which usually include both sacred and secular ritual components, constitute "an ancestor-focused pilgrimage" that accentuates the continuing meaning of "old-time" customs and stories (Harrison 1995: 35). Accounts such as Harrison's highlight the importance of continuity and tradition in the ongoing vigor of the black church, as well as enduring nostalgia for the various southern locales to which African Americans outside the South trace their origins.
These ties to religious heritage are strong among African Americans, even those who have moved outside the South and prospered economically. The Pew Forum reports that regardless of education and other class markers, the vast majority of black Americans continue to be members of historically black churches such as those affiliated with the National Baptist Convention or the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), with a smaller percentage affiliated with other (mostly evangelical) Protestant churches (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009; Sanders 1996). As one might expect from these statistics, belief in God and both faith and observance figure prominently in African American life. Even considering the high levels of religiosity that typify Americans in general, as compared with Europeans (Caplow 1985; McLeod 2007), black people's involvement with religion, especially with Protestant Christian observance, is far more central to ordinary life than it is for other racial/ethnic groups (Taylor, Chatters, and Levin 2004). Indeed, an article from 2011 in the New York Times reported that black people who were both gay and didn't believe in God found it easier to "come out" to parents about their gayness than about their atheism (Brennan 2011; see Pinn 2014 for an extended personal statement on atheism by a prominent black religious studies scholar). Black people attend church at higher rates than the general population; report more intense belief in the afterlife, miracles, and other divine phenomena; and are more likely to engage in regular, even daily prayer. They are also somewhat more likely than people in the general population to hold negative views of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, though their views on a variety of political issues are far from uniform and are evolving as the national discourse on these topics shifts in the wake of judicial support for marriage equality (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Invocation: The Anthropology Ministry 1 “I’ve Been ’Buked”: The Double Consciousness of Being LGBT and Black 2 “Lead Me, Guide Me”: The Charisma of Bishop Flunder 3 “Just as I Am”: Revealing Authentic Selves 4 “Old-Time Religion”: Invoking Memory 5 “What a Fellowship”: Radically Inclusive Futures Benediction: Continuities and DeparturesNotes References Cited Index