Since November, one of the more painful fractures in American culture became apparent in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 8 in California. A repeated worry of queer folk is the support of many African-American churches for restricting our rights. Yet, focusing on this worry has led to some hardening of preconceptions on that front, and even leading to scapegoating the African-American community as especially responsible for Proposition 8's passage. As a way of addressing this issue, and hopefully advancing productive dialogue, I'm offering a review of Kelly Brown Douglas's Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. I believe this book should be on a list of required reading for all Kossacks, but anyone who is interested in sexual politics, race relations, or religion will benefit especially from it. A review, and Nina Simone, after the jump.
I should state at the outset that my direct experience of the Black Church is extremely limited. I have attended an African Methodist Episcopal church in California and a predominantly African-American Baptist church in Virginia. In seminary, I worked with an African-American classmate on a class project; over the course of the semester, as we exchanged views on queer and African-American experiences, we came to see profound commonalities, especially in a kind of split way of being in relation to dominant culture or our respective marginalized cultures. I offer this review aware that one text will never express the range of experience in the Black Church. Nevertheless, Douglas has dialogued with many of the theologians most important to me, and I seek to give her voice a wider audience. Writing this diary has been a valuable experience in finding out where many of my own, previously unnoticed, limitations are.
The subtitle of Douglas's book signals that it is an example of womanist theology, which may be new to many readers here. Womanist theology, theological reflection from the perspective of African-American women, arose in the 1980s as both an outgrowth of and corrective to feminist theology. A very early formulation was Dolores S. Williams's explication in a 1987 Christianity and Crisis article, Womanist Theology: Black Women's Voices. As a work of womanist thelogy, what Sexuality and the Black Church offers is not a sociological description of attitudes to sexuality in Black Churches - she clearly makes theological and ethical prescriptions for reform from a distinctively African-American voice. For more on the relationship of Black Theology to African-American churches, see James Cone's For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church.
Douglas opens her study with an examination of the impact of White culture on Black cultures within a general framework of power dependent on the philosopher Michel Foucault. Douglas does not explicitly engage the many debates surrounding the meaning of Whiteness as a social analytic category. But it is clear that in Douglas's work, White culture does not simply refer to what predominantly caucasian communities do. Rather, Whiteness is a cultural sign of privilege that has expanded over time to include groups, such as the Irish, Mormons, and Jews, whose status as "white" is generally taken for granted in American society today. Douglas, however, is clear that she holds individuals responsible for creating new ways of relating.
What is particularly significant for Douglas is the way African-Americans internalize the messages of White culture. She discusses various sexual stereotypes that emerged in Southern Plantation culture, and demonstrates their staying power through discussions of the Moynihan Report, the Anita Hill hearings and the O.J. Simpson trial. In the latter cases, her concern is less with the ultimate verdict than with the cultural narratives surrounding the cases, seen most blatantly in Time's darkening of Simpson's mugshot. I know of no more powerful rendition of some of these effects of the stereotypes than Nina Simone's song, "Four Women":
I have had experiences that both confirm and disconfirm Douglas's sense that African-American Churches are reticent to deal with sexuality openly. On the one hand, a former African-American student of mine whom I interviewed for a class project in grad school firmly deflected "sexuality" as a frame for issues that to me were clearly issues of sexual politics. On the other hand, I've heard preachers in the African-American churches give advice about "who you're going to lie down with," a more explicit statement about sexual activity than I would ever have expected to hear in a church.
But Douglas does not present the legacy of racism as an excuse for homophobia or misogyny in the churches. Douglas clearly offers the analysis of the negative impact of White culture on Black sexuality as a prod for transformation - a challenge she poses to everyone. For African-Americans, she presents the impact of this legacy as an opportunity to reflect more explicitly on sexuality in church settings. White people need to become cognizant of this legacy and take responsibility for transforming patterns of privilege.
Drawing both on her experience working with African-American congregations and some analyses in the excellent volume, Stony the Road We Trod: African-American Biblical Interpretation, Douglas locates a center of religious reflection in a specific understanding of Scripture that takes not the text, but the oral transmission of the text as normative.
For many post-Enlightenment liberals, the authority of an orally-mediated understanding of Scripture runs counter to standards of rational discourse, in which fact is established through experiment, not testimony. But Douglas insists that holding too tightly to this view will cause one to miss the role the authority of Scripture plays in African-American communities: "Black people's allegiance to this particular biblical tradition does not reflect a recalcitrant refusal to learn new things; rather it is a testament to a faith and stories of faith that have served Black people well in their struggle for freedom"(94). As a professional theologian, Douglas represents a different perspective within African-American religious reflection than the oral tradition she understands as predominant. She recognizes real tensions - and calls for the churches to draw more on the resources of scholars - but also steps into dialogue with a deep sense of respect for the discursive practices of her interlocutors. Douglas asserts that any effective resistance to homophobia within Black churches must come out of extension of this oral tradition.
Douglas is also the author of The Black Christ and What's Faith Got to Do With It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls.
Further Resources
John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mayima, The Black Church in the African-American Experience
Anthony Pinn and Dwight Hopkins, eds. Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic
Gary David Comstock, A Whosoever Church: Welcoming Lesbians and Gay Men into African-American Congregations
Horace Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not: African-American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches