Today, I write these words, not for others but for myself. As those close to me know, I am an external processor. A yapper, if you will. And if any do read this, some may see these words as a large overreaction to yesterday’s election results. However, it is in fact a longwinded summary of all the honest thoughts that have only ever been allowed into the crevices of my mind except for the times in which honesty is all that I have energy for.
For context, I grew up in the church in the south. I went to a private Christian school in Alabama for my preschool years. After I became a believer in middle school, I embarked on the increasingly winding journey of studying the Bible with the same overzealous personality in which I have always lived my life. In middle and high school, I would sit in closet with the light on and the door closed so my little brother could sleep as I read the word and my devotionals, praying for those who had nothing to eat or a place to sleep at night. A nod of thanks for the blessings I had. But as high school went on and I fought so hard against my flesh in the pursuit of holiness, I increasingly noticed that maybe not everyone at church was doing the same. It also became harder and harder to stomach that I could be left to sit alone for a year, the one black kid in a room full of a hundred white high school kids, while the youth pastor talked about community and the goodness of God. The outcast, I hoped, more for the fact that I went to a different high school rather than because of the color of my skin. By the end of high school, I began to wonder whether Christianity was all it was made out to be. But as church vernacular would have it, God kept me near and I joined Young Life in college.
Young Life was, as a whole, quite a negative experience looking back. It took moving to Los Angeles and a lot of therapy to undo the hell that is being called the token black kid repeatedly as if I wasn’t quite aware while also possibly being the first black YoungLife leader in the city. Yet in the midst of that, there I got to experience Acts 2 community. There were times that I got to see just how big and real the Gospel could really be. How a bunch of college kids could sell their stuff to buy a friend a car. How we sacrificed college Friday nights and a lot of gas money we didn’t have to watch terribly bad high school football games for the sake of kids feeling valued and cared for.
And it is from there that I read the Word and cling to it dearly. In an again overzealous manner, I looked up how to study the Bible at a seminary level. In medical school, I, through much suffering and misery, realized how much capacity my brain truly had and spent some of my free time studying the Bible as if I wanted to be a pastor. Not to be a pastor, but to have the words close enough to my heart and tongue that it would guide me and help me help others. I memorized all 111 verses of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 3-5) down to the ESV punctuation along with many verses throughout the Bible, again with the hopes that God’s word and love and teachings would guide my heart when I wanted to guide it myself. And it has come in handy so many times when I needed the guidance. And I say this not to brag, for I have long lost the care for the approval or acceptance of any religious caucus. Rather I highlight from where the following words spring.
For so today I think of these verses that feel like they lost last night. Verses that feel pushed aside in many Christian spheres but are the true beauty of what I have known or naively believed Christianity to be.
Matthew 22:36-39
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets
For if loving our neighbor is much like loving God and so significant, how can we make sense of leaving your neighbors to die in the name of saving the idea and possibility of a neighbor? How can we make any interpretation of Scripture that contradicts that second commandment and see it as influenced by the bible rather than politics if on these two commandments depend the word of God? For what sense does that make?
Matthew 25:31-46 which talks again about caring for the poor, the immigrant, the sick, and the imprisoned for in loving them, we love God. For while one half of the church fights for them, the other half, at best, are willing witnesses to vilification of those we are called to protect.
Matthew 6:24
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
For it feels many have chosen decreased taxes and trickle down economics over loving those spoken of in James 1, which I believe not be coincidence overlaps the people mentioned in Matthew.
James 1:22-24 and 1:26-27
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.”
“If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit the orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
For again, I find it odd how James, himself, says religion is worthless if we do not fight against influence from and of the world rather than loving the again mentioned disenfranchised, especially as many of the “unborn” will become these very people.
1 Corinthians 10:31-33
“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all things to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.
For it feels hard to think of how one can rejoice in this election if one was to care about the many of different ethnic backgrounds and beliefs over one’s own advantage. For how does one look a black man or women in the eye, a gay teenager in the eye, any woman bleeding out from a failed pregnancy and say I have sought your safety over my own advantage?
Matthew 5:43-47
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”
Today, I think of the many white Christians I have called friends with Matthew 5 in mind.
I think of how much those friendships cost me. How much of my being I had to leave to the side. How much I had to suppress my blackness. The very defined blackness that is more a separating construct of their great grandfathers than it has ever felt should have to be my own. I think of how much I thought about how they could not and would not ever see me and love me as a black man in totality, but only in theory. For one cannot love someone and hug them while stabbing them in the back. One cannot love someone and not fight against their oppression. For I no longer accept the idea that I am a fool to not accept words that have always been hollow. Words that have always lacked substance. Words that have always had increasing limits as they are dropped at the smallest of costs.
Because despite decades of knowing that they would never choose me, I loved them anyways. For that is what Matthew 5 said. Because that is what I believed the Gospel was. To love others as yourself. To not only hope others thrive but to be as much of a participant in their thriving as I, an admittedly flawed individual, could. And yet my feet yearn to move farther away. For I have yet to find a way to justify how Christians willingly set the world on fire and then pray for God to send rain and the strength to care for the burned while standing motionless with the match and the fire extinguisher both in hand.
For I have heard too many sermons on the ills of the world and modern day society. How we are divided by race and sexuality and many other attributes as many make those characteristics their whole being and identity rather than as humans or image bearers of God. Yet it is painfully forgotten that it is in many ways because the religious have no urgency to reform the ability for cops to kill me unjustly that I become very much defined by being black. It is because of the vile indignity with which those who do not fit into heterosexual norms are ostracized, demonized, and beaten that they become very much defined by being queer. It is because of the utter indecency with which hard working, tax paying immigrants are dehumanized that they become very much defined by being immigrants. For what many white people will never experience and many refuse to acknowledge is that what leads to your oppression defines you. For how many white-passing Jews became increasingly defined by their Judaism during the Holocaust or during the last year? For one becomes increasingly aware of the characteristics that might get him killed.
And so that American Christian Nationalism spends a lot of time, money, and effort making sure so many people feel less than human while preaching imago dei pains me. For Christianity in America more and more seems to me as geo- and sociopolitics cosplaying as a war for souls in the battle of good and evil. And as cynical as it sounds, hear I lay.
Because honestly, I’ve tried really hard to find a reason not to believe. To think that maybe I hold these things as truth because I grew up in the south. And if anyone even reads this, some might read the following and think of me as mad or crazy. However, it’s undebatable fact that Jesus existed, that he was killed on a cross, and that his body was not found in the tomb a few days later. There are so many ideas on how that last part came to be. However, I’ve never been able to make sense of it other than the Resurrection, again to which many might find quite insane. Why would a bunch of people who created and founded the hoax, then spend the rest of their lives canvassing around the Middle East in sandals in the face of persecution? In almost every religion created that I have read about, and I do want to note my limited and vastly incomplete knowledge, the founders stood a lot to gain from their isolated “enlightenment”. As religion has and always will be the easiest way to manipulate the masses for your gain. But in my understanding of sociology and psychiatry, I’ve never understood why a handful of people, scattered across their region of the world with only communication via letter, would suffer so much when they could have easily quit and gone back to normal life when it would have been easier. Most specifically because that’s literally what they did after Jesus died.
And so today I think, as I sit here a comically, begrudging Christian, trying to reconcile so many lenses of the world. For some may read this and weep in sorrow that my heart has been hardened by the enemy to which I starkly roll my eyes. That I bring more divisiveness in a time we need togetherness. But I contend from long personal experience, where external peace lies, an internal war rages and brings destruction. I increasingly combat the idea that I, and my fellow comrades, must wage that war alone in the name of holy peace by those who refuse to do the same. For if those of fairer complexion did as much as they have many a times asked of us, there would be no need for such lengthy words.
I once sat in a bible study of almost 40-50 mostly white people. A mini church if you will. It is very silly and brave yet completely naive looking back on it, but I asked that they would come alongside me. I believed as we waxed eloquently about the beauty and power of Jesus, that this same power may be siphoned to a small step in the restoration of society as the Bible calls. For at the time, I believed that the church, if anyone, had the power and a really good reason to expend the energy for black people and white people and really all to be family as it is written it shall be in Heaven. And as I have seen so many times, I was met with silence and indifference. Could not even get buy-in from 2 percent aka one person. And it would have taken an absurd amount of mental gymnastics to not conclude, that if one could not find the time to read a single book about “racial reconciliation” in a schedule that includes Netflix and brunches, one would later be a good ally.
And so today I think about how I’ve sat in so many Bible studies and have increasingly concluded that many of them would have been at the lynching picnics. While standing there in a sea of white, they would not have thought “man, this is pure evil and hatred,” and instead would have been more likely to think “man, Margaret made some really good peach cobbler and lemonade this time.” I’ve shamefully spent so many Christmas’s and Thanksgivings trying to convince my black Southern family that my white Christian friends are good people who love the Lord and if they could be made aware of the evils of the world, they would come to their “brothers” and “sisters” aide. The older I grow and the more I remove the veil from my eyes, the more I realize it was myself I was trying to convince.
Trying to convince myself the people I’ve laughed with, read the Bible with, prayed for in tough times, who I’ve stood as a groomsmen in their weddings wouldn’t have sold me for a nickel 200 years ago. Wouldn’t have thought anything of me being hung from a tree for looking a white girl the wrong way. Wouldn’t and will never see me as equally human enough to defend my humanity in a whole sense. And yet there is no thought that they are bad people but simply no better than their forefathers of whose history and shame they seek to erase. I always go back to the jaw-dropping quote my Jim Crow-surviving grandmother said in the midst of my convincing attempts. She said in the immediate silence that came from opening her mouth, “We never asked white people to be friends with them or their neighbors. We simply asked that they stopped burning our shit down and let us be.”
And so today I think also of all those that I love. My family, my soon-to-be nephew, the little kids that walk into my psychiatry office after so much of the world has failed and forgotten them. I think of some of the best people and best friends that I have, many of them white women. For many would say God is a man and Ariana Grande says she is a woman, but nevertheless, I have seen the love of God in them. For I think the capacity for true love and friendship is not determined by your skin color, gender, sexuality, or religion, but by your ability to see others as equal value to yourself and thus be willing to put yourself in their proverbial shoes.
I have overthought for the last few months about the high possibility of today and what that may mean for this country for the next four years and beyond. I have thought about how to exist in the current times and what could become much worse. As an occasional history hobbyist, I have thought of those in London during the bombings of WWII who went about their days and went to work and cooked and had dinner with the family at the dinner table while death and danger stood them in the face. I have thought of those in East Germany who had crushes and went on dates and fell in love and got married and started families in the midst of Soviet oppression outside their doors. I think of the true founders of our country who sang and danced in their black skin within the shackles of slavery. I think of the patients I have known, who have overcome so many odds and traumas no man or woman should have to endure, smiling and finding joy in the small, simple moments of life. I think of how so many make lemonade from the lemons of war, cancer, and all the ills of life. For as I age, I grow the increasing awareness that our days are numbered and for how many days, no one is to know. And thus, as much as humanly possible, I must live like those above. I must live to the fullest, laugh to the fullest, sing to the fullest, and love to the fullest capacity of my being as if today could be my last.
For that, I think, is the power of God in the weary soul. And no amount of hatred and oppression can nor will ever take that from me. And thus, I resist! For what other option do we have.