“Not All Churches” is Not Enough.

Jasper Williams: A Clash of Generations

Last week’s homegoing service for Aretha Franklin served as a celebration of Black church culture. It also reopened old wounds and laid bare the worst of that tradition.

For many of us who grew up in the Black charismatic church, we were reminded of a culture that’s been both our bedrock and disappointment. The ministers who took the pulpit at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple lifted us with familiar high praises and fellowship only to later starkly remind us of familiar pain through their preaching.

Charged with eulogizing the life of the Queen of Soul as he’d done for her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, Rev. Jasper Williams of Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta instead delivered an echoing death knell for the relevance of the Black Church. Faced with backlash from the tone deaf sermon, the Franklin family responded that it found the pastor’s eulogy to be offensive and distasteful. With a sermon that weaponized the bible against single mothers of sons and LGBTQIA+ identity while devaluing Black lives, Williams singlehandedly showed the remarkable stubborn, out-of-touch approach from Black Church elders that has emptied our pews in waves.

Black Millennial Faith in Flux

A 2015 Pew Research Center report showed that the percentage of the U.S. population attending church is projected to be nearly half of what it was in 1990, and only 27 percent of millennials attended religious services on a regular basis. As the founder of Unfit Christian, a digital medium expressing the voice of millennial faith, and a consultant on research projects examining Black millennial church attendance, I’ve heard the testimonies of young Black men and women as they’ve shared their pain about church communities that seem more interested in leveling judgment instead of offering services, ministries and sermons that resonate with their spiritual needs and a desire for community (Read: Exodus: Why Black Millennials are Leaving Church).

While 87 percent of Black Americans described themselves as people of faith in a Pew study, millennials are increasingly finding that the traditional black church is out of touch with their progressive faith that embraces their intersectional identities of race, class and sexuality. According to the Williams Institute, more than 1 million (3.7 percent) of African American adults identify as LGBTQIA+ in the US. While Black LGBTQIA+ people identify with various faiths, Christianity remains dominant among these practices and religious intolerance remains a barrier for LGBTQIA+ Americans. By 2014, Black Protestant support of same-sex marriage only increased 15 percentage points since 2003, moving from 23 percent to 38 percent. The display at Aretha Franklin’s funeral provided full display of the reasons why Black millennials are making a modern-day exodus from church.

“Touch Not Mine Anointed” & the Absent Accountability of Religious Leaders

Still, faithful leaders and attendees overwhelmingly responded to the outrage with the oft-cited “not all churches” defense. The defense usually implores critics to remember that one bad experience is not representative of the whole, sometimes even going a step further of accusing critics of demonic influence due to their accusations.

Only if we are honest with ourselves can we admit that it is indeed all churches and likely our church too.

When we let voices in toxic theology like Williams have the loudest voices for years, affirming their authority to speak for us even when we disagree, it is all churches. When anti-black lectures of “pull your pants up, start acting right, and maybe white folks will respect you” has been normalized as speaking the gospel, it is all churches.

Black Women are the Backbone of the Black Church

We have accepted dogma rooted in maintaining and navigating white supremacy as the undisputed God-breathed word. Calling it our church culture, we have witnessed unchecked violence against the very groups of people who fill our pews: single women/mothers and LGBTQIA+ people. Single women comprise the majority many Black congregations in America – large or small – and are our greatest resource of time, talent, and tithes. In its religious portrait of African Americans in the US, Pew Research Forum notes that 84 percent of Black women say religion is important to them while about six-in-ten (59 percent) attend religious services at least weekly. There is no comparably high group of men or women from any other racial or ethnic background.

Yet, despite being essential to sustaining the existence of Black churches, women have not escaped harmful pulpit rhetoric. As with Williams’ sermon, we’ve asked women to accept our projected shame by blaming them for their single motherhood. We’ve upheld modest dress codes as holiness to protect the unchecked misogyny of hypersexual men rather than hold men accountable. Reverend Brandee Jasmine Mimitzraiem, a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, agrees. “The talk of need for women’s modesty in church – of appropriate attire – is rooted in the need to control women and excuse men,” says Mimitzraiem. “I pastor a church where every member – except for my 2 kids – is a woman. We excuse preaching predators who victimize women and hold their victims accountable based on their attire,” Mimitzraiem continued. Some have called the harmful rhetoric a cultural norm of the Black church that should be nuanced rather than called out. “It’s not church culture. Jesus never said anything like it. It’s rape culture in sacred spaces. Saying the abuse of [Ariana Grande’s] body is what we can expect in the Black Church is an indictment of the Church,” says Mimitzraiem.

Come as You Are. Restrictions May Apply.

To see Williams’ weaponized sermonic form as a normal and fully acceptable part of our culture is the problem itself. We have been willing to die on the hill of our dysfunction masked as cultural rites. We’ve yet to unpack why we expected Ariana Grande’s dress to be “appropriate” but willingly overlooked the lecherous stares of men who should have respected and protected her. We must unpack why we’re still holding on to the ways of our elders who merely developed behavioral responses to survive oppression.

In my experience, our Black church culture has loosened the restrictions of Leviticus as it applies to shellfish and mixed fabrics but continues to uphold its text as a boot on the neck of Black LGBTQ+ Christians. We’ve asked LGBTQ+ Christians to silence their sexuality while condemning them to hell – but not before asking them to dress and direct our music ministries, first ladies and pastors. Shane B. Johnson, 43, a Health Policy Director and a Black, gay Christian man, shares the complexity of Black LGBTQIA+ religious identity. “My relationship with the Black church will always be complicated because of its embrace of [biblical Apostle] Paul’s inherently discriminatory theology. One can be gay, the Black church can know about it, pimp the LGBT members for their gifts, and then disrespect and completely deny their right to exist,” says Johnson. “No matter how the Black church tries to divorce itself from prejudice, hatred and bigotry are justified by the Apostle Paul’s messed up views. That’s why I left over 20 years ago. I’m free and glad about it,” Johnson continued.

“Not All” is not Exceptional.

It’s not enough to say “not all churches” as the first response to people’s pain. There’s a required level of intimacy and emotional investment in forging both a relationship with God and with churches, making church hurt and abuse unlike the kind of hurt and abuse one might experience from a job or business. It’s not enough to simply say “try another church,” when the experience of many has been experiences with theology akin to Jasper Williams’ in their churches from childhood to adulthood.

While many of us have chosen to walk away from church, we haven’t walked away from God. But a love of God is not enough to keep us filing into the sanctuaries of churches that hate us — and hate what matters to us — rather than heal us. Even when we experience the warmth of nostalgia in the presence of hand-clapping and foot stomping, it will never be enough to overcome verbal violence disguised as salvation from the pulpit.

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