The Unholy Life of Literacy Normativity and the Creation of Black Queer Spiritualities
Faith is taking the first step, even when you can’t see the whole staircase.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
When Phylicia Craig wrote a letter to her parents “coming out” as a lesbian, they sent her letter back—along with six pages of biblical scripture, each one condemning homosexuality as an abomination in the eyes of God and enumerating the love relationships that Christianity did and did not sanction. For Craig, this was “heartbreaking.” She wrote back to her parents, enclosing pamphlets about the coming-out process from Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), a national organization that provides support services for individuals who are allies of LGBTQ communities, particularly close friends and family members. She also included several biblical passages that affirmed her identity as a Black lesbian Christian, challenging her parents’ reaction by quoting scripture that called for them to love and support her like “good” Christians. Craig’s referencing of the Bible, the same text her parents used to condemn her, is one example of how individuals enact restorative literacies to survive uses of text that wound or harm. Authorizing herself to question their actions and name them as hurtful, Craig fashions understandings of Christian doctrine to empower all of her identities, Black, lesbian, and Christian.
Through restorative literacies Craig reimagines and remakes herself and her community, transforming the use of texts from one that wounds into one that affirms, supports, and loves. Doing so, for Craig, transforms the Bible into a source that affirms a relationship to a religion often used by others to harm her and others. It involves a response that resists literacy normativity, affirms and empowers the self, and sometimes renders legible literacies in religious and spiritual spaces that are otherwise rendered illegible. Craig’s dilemma is one that many LGBTQ people experience: How does one respond to the use of religious texts to inflict “spiritual violence”? How does one make an identity as a queer person of faith? How does one create an affirming relationship to religion and spirituality in the face of powerfully anti-LGBTQ interpretive traditions and accepted ideology?
Like Craig, countless research participants discuss incidents where they experience spiritual violence. In my analysis of Black LGBTQ people and matters of religion and spirituality, I use both spiritual violence and literacy normativity interchangeably to reference the same incidents. That is, my analysis theorizes spiritual violence as another iteration of literacy normativity, while my analysis also examines specific tactics of restorative literacies that research participants employ for various forms of spiritual activism and self-empowerment. I borrow the phrase “spiritual violence” from United Methodist minister and spiritual activist Reverend Jimmy Creech. In an editorial for the organization SoulForce, Creech says that “spiritual violence” is any “assault upon the integrity and dignity of a person when that person is told that, because of who she or he is, she or he is not loved and accepted by God, and is in fact rejected and condemned by God.”1 But, given the diversity of religious and spiritual identities of my research participants, I would expand Creech’s definition to reference spiritual violence as experienced by people whose religious and spiritual lives encompass many other expressions of the divine and God(s), not just the Christian understanding of God. I would also add that what is described here as spiritual violence harms not just those who have an avowed religious or spiritual identity but also those individuals who are atheists.
The incidents of spiritual violence examined here include hostile interpretations of religious and spiritual texts; physical and emotional abuse justified through the use of religious and spiritual beliefs; demanding silence about identities through threats of dismissal or banishment and loss of employment and economic support based on religious-based disavowals of one’s gender or sexual identities. Literacy normativity, manifested again as spiritual violence, speaks Black queers out of existence in religion, faith traditions, and spiritualities. It literally says that the Black queers cannot exist. What research participants learn about literacy through such experiences is that, like the creation narratives provided in the sacred texts of various religions and spiritualities, literacy possesses the power of creation—a power that, in spiritual violence, is levied toward a creativity that can both be painful and lack empathy. But the power of creation can also be levied toward ends that are more loving, more just, more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more positively applicable to the lives of those who hold it in their hands and others who those individuals support. For some research participants, literacy is the tool through which they recreate themselves in the context of religious and spiritual spaces in ways that have a transformative effect on that space. For others, literacy is the means by which they make their divine relationship and own faith identity; and some, including research participants who are agnostic, create their own spirituality altogether. In any case, this all occurs despite the fact that the power of creation is given to a divinity that various faith traditions say does not love Black queer people and never created them.
Given this, the labor of restorative literacies is to enact self- and communal love by creating one’s self and community as divine, despite messages in public life that draw upon literacy on and off the page to debase Black LGBTQ people by suggesting they are not worthy of love and care, and especially not in religious and spiritual spaces. Restorative literacies thus recreate one’s faith in literacy when “the word” has been used against you, while also demonstrating and affirming one’s faith in faith itself. Taken together, my aims here in examining spiritual violence and the various tactics of restorative literacies in Black LGBTQ people’s religious and spiritual lives are threefold: First, to show how focusing on the rhetorical stances of Black queers of organized religions (e.g., Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Religious Scientists) and spiritualities force us to reexamine the role that religion and spirituality play in historiographies of African American and LGBTQ literacy, composition, and rhetoric. I do so through an analysis that connects Black LGBTQ uses of literacy in their religious and spiritual practices to the longer scholarly discourse of African American literacy and religion. I also examine the diversity of religions and spiritualities practiced by Black queers of faith and the role of literacy in those practices specifically, which is key to dealing seriously with the role of religion and spirituality within LGBTQ literacies, life, and culture. Second, to provide an analysis that treats people’s life stories, and the centrality of literacy to those stories, as epistemologically valuable to understanding the links between religion, spirituality, and Black LGBTQ life, culture, and politics. As such, my research participants’ stories fill a critical gap in scholarship linking African American literacy with religion and spirituality,2 while deepening the rare conversations about religion, spirituality, and Black queer genders and sexualities. Third, to identify and analyze how research participants challenge harmful interpretations of religious texts in order to fashion their religious and spiritual identity and build an affirming relationship to religious communities as Black queers of faith, despite various and recurring incidents of anti-LGBTQ spiritual violence. I categorize these actions according to three major trends in which fashioning faith identities and ideologies were applied, and my analysis of spiritual violence and restorative literacies are organized around these three trends: (1) queering Christian identity, (2) forging new faith identities in organized religions, and (3) creating new spiritualities.
Within each of these three trends, my analysis of restorative literacies focuses on one or more interrelated practices of creation I categorize as a guerilla praxis of literacy that Black LGBTQ people employ to navigate the literacy normativity made manifest as spiritual violence, including counterliteracy, co-constructing knowledge, co-constructing texts, deauthorizing the written word, identifying spiritual violence as a lack of literacy, strategic authorization of the written word, and creating vernacular divinities. Through this multifaceted, dynamic guerilla praxis of literacy, research participants enact a literal or figurative appropriation of religious or spiritual space, texts, or traditions in the interest of tangible change in the energy, policies, or activities of individuals or institutions that are decidedly anti-LGBTQ. With counterliteracy, deauthorizing the written word, and reauthorizing the written word, for example, research participants discuss ways they contest spiritual violence through the appropriation of literacy to construct a theological position that seeks to end marginalizing interpretations of the Bible and Christian theology, as well as interpretations of other organized religions and faiths used by others to harm them. For example, many research participants describe incidents where they have to reinterpret the same text used against them in order to affirm their identities as Black LGBTQ people of faith; therefore, they do not disavow the religion itself nor the authority of the religious texts, but instead resist from the inside out. Co-constructing knowledge and co-constructing texts occur when research participants approach organized religions and faith communities that are different than the ones they were born into and describe the process of joining that religion as one where they are co-constructing what the religion means for them and not passively accepting what already exists even as a newcomer to that religion. For some research participants this consists of creating and applying literacy practices for spiritual self-empowerment that enable them to join that religion. Creating vernacular divinities consists of creating an altogether new spirituality or faith of one’s own, including the making of empowering space, spiritual ideology, and conferring divine status onto one’s self and one’s community. Examining a diversity of everyday Black queers’ experiences with spiritual violence can be useful to drawing out insights about the role of literacy in religious and spiritual life that are overlooked when we rely exclusively on cultural production (novels, narrative films, visual art, and performances) for examples of rhetorical and literate resistance to spiritual violence.
Literacy normativity and restorative literacies map onto longer discourses of African American literacy and religion, including those rendered in Black queer cultural production; they enable us to read these discourses across temporal lines while focusing on everyday Black queer subjects to destabilize and extend our conversations. For example, Janet Duitsman Cornelius showed that, at the same time that slave owners and supporters used scriptures to argue for the inferiority of people of African descent to justify slavery, enslaved Black people used the Bible to acquire literacy, empower them, and resist the horrors of enslavement. Cornelius says it was clear that “slaves who learned to read and write could use literacy to gain advantages for themselves and mediate their fellow slaves. . . . [S]laves used ingenuity and patience and risked discovery, death, and dismemberment to learn to read and write.” This empowerment emerged within what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called “the invisible institution,” the hidden religious and spiritual practices of Christianity that occurred among enslaved Black people out of the sight of slave masters and overseers. This created a space for enslaved Black people to practice Christianity outside the confines of the master’s church where they could read and interpret the Bible and Christianity according to their own understanding.3
There are many other instances throughout history where African Americans felt mandated to fashion their relationships to Christianity in the midst of harsh circumstances. In many instances African Americans, like their enslaved African ancestors, drew on literacy to make those interventions. David Walker’s Appeal (1829), the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner,4 and, in the mid-twentieth century, the boycotts and rallies of the civil rights movement and the use of religious rhetoric by civil rights leaders Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., and others are some of the other notable examples of this resistance through appropriations of religion and spirituality. In each of these examples Black people drew on Christian writings, songs, and other texts to make claim that their humanity and autonomy was implicitly supported by Christian teachings.
How might the life stories of everyday Black LGBTQ people help forge new conceptual frames for documenting and analyzing Black and queer discursive traditions within religious and spiritual communities? In terms of African American literacies and religion, my intervention disrupts the normative narratives by connecting historical and contemporary Black queer literacies in their religious and spiritual practices to scholarly discourses about the role of religion in African American literacy and rhetorical traditions. The key to this intervention is naming and resisting the heteronormativity of this narrative much in the way womanist theology forged interventions into Black liberation theology many years ago. When we acknowledge the truth that Black queer subjects are and always have been present in African-American religious and spiritual communities, we are confronted by the mandate to question and challenge the investments in the linear and neat narrative we currently work from. Doing so allows us to see the complex ways religion and spirituality are present or absent in all African American lives. In terms of LGBTQ literacy and religion, relatively few studies link queer sexuality and gender to religion or spirituality at all, and those that do tend to emphasize gay marriage over other topics. I do not mean to disparage the significance of marriage rights here; I must, however, say that the prevalence of this discourse comes at the expense of understanding the diversity of religions and spiritualities practiced by queers of faith more broadly and the role of literacy and rhetoric in those practices specifically. Furthermore, I join numerous scholar-activists in queer, feminist, and LGBTQ studies who questioned the overemphasis on marriage rights at the expense of issues such as comprehensive immigration reform, voting rights, homelessness, poor health care, hate crimes, and many other issues that LGBTQ people face every day and who continue now to turn the attention of the LGBTQ movement toward the issues that achieving marriage equality could not and did not resolve. To get at these “othered narratives” requires a disruption of a neoliberal queer politics that elevates some narratives of queerness over others.
First, I examine how research participants identify literacy normativity in the form of the use of religion to condemn LGBTQ people. Interestingly, the concept of “literacy normativity” first occurred to me as I wrote follow-up notes after my interview with Phylicia Craig, who described her parents’ use of the Bible to hurt her as wrong and un-Christian, explaining it as an instance when, she said, “literacy was powerfully misused.” Craig’s experience confirms another dimension to literacy normativity mentioned in previous chapters, which is that these literate acts are not confined to written or visual texts or exclusively built on interpretations of written texts. Unwritten ideologies in this literacy of Black gender and sexuality prove equally constraining. Note that “unwritten ideologies” circulate both in and through literacy normativity, which is another reason why being attentive to literacy as occurring off the page is important. For example, Craig recalled that when she was eight years old she told her parents that she wanted to be a pastor of a church when she grew up. Her parents crushed her dream by telling her that only men were called by God to lead a church. Unlike when she came out to them as a lesbian, Phylicia’s parents did not invoke scripture to justify their assertion that women could not be pastors (though they may have had some in mind). However, their belief that women should not minister is grounded in a “reading” of Black gender and sexuality that is decidedly sexist, misogynistic, and heteronormative. In the face of literacy normativity, both written and unwritten, Craig and other research participants draw on literacy to identify these terrors and form a more affirming counterliteracy of Black gender and sexuality in religious and spiritual spaces.
Here restorative literacies represent a literal or figurative appropriation of religious or spiritual space or ideological mediums in the interest of change. Participants’ restorative literacies result in an identity “making” that disrupts spiritual violence by creating and affirming an identity to which many others in their faith groups are averse. The making includes the ways research participants describe their use of literacy to specifically subvert authoritative, oppressive, and repressive figures and ideologies that police “acceptable” uses of literacy and to make their own identity and ideology as a Black queer person of faith. They take a politicized position that is unsanctioned, even transgressive, in the eyes of hegemony. Thus, applying restorative literacies as a conceptual frame in the analysis of Black LGBTQ people’s religious and spiritual lives, we see the centrality of literacy to Phylicia Craig and other research participants’ religious and spiritual practices as it helps them find the power to identify spiritual violence, and not be silenced by others’ notions of acceptable or reputable identity. In Craig’s case, her formation of a Black lesbian Christian identity demonstrates the appropriation of literacy toward this religious and spiritually centered portion of Black LGBTQ restorative literacies.
For my other research participants, this dynamic among literacy, religion, spirituality, and Black queer identities led to different currents and outcomes associated with particular literacy practices. Some challenge spiritual violence by choosing to remain within their religion. In these instances restorative literacies resulted in their being an out Black LGBTQ Christian and finding biblical scripture to contradict others’ Bible-based condemnations. Some chose to leave Christianity and join other organized religions, whereas others ceased identifying with organized religion at all, instead fashioning an ideology and practice unique to their needs.
Despite any differences in their current religious, spiritual identities, faith affiliations or nonaffiliations, all the research participants discussed in this chapter, and all but five of my research participants overall, were either born and raised in a Christian household or discussed the impact of Christianity, and specifically Black churches, on their religious and spiritual experiences. I am aware of, although I do not support, the potential misreading of my work as an argument that Black people or Christians are more homophobic and transphobic than other racial-ethnic groups or faith communities. Nor do I wish for my following critique of racist and gender-normative ideologies in LGBTQ churches to suggest that they are more problematic than other groups. Rather, I aim to increase awareness of the specific experiences of Black LGBTQ people in order to help us better address the spiritual violence that perpetually constrains human rights and makes building community across difference less possible.
Black Queers, Christianity, and Literacy: Historical, Contemporary, and Cultural Perspectives
My theoretical approach to race, sexuality, and gender in the religious and spiritual lives of Black LGBTQ people emerges from womanist and queer theology. Womanist theology is an outgrowth of Black feminisms and a response to early Black liberation theology.5 In 1975, James Cone’s God of the Oppressed introduced a critical lens that showed how African Americans and other marginalized communities could use scriptural references to Jesus’s suffering as a metaphor to empower oppressed groups of all kinds. Cone’s pioneering work, while well-received, was criticized by Black women theologians such as Jacquelyn Grant who called attention to Cone’s narrow definition of the experience of Black Christians, not looking at the specificity of Blackness as gendered and therefore overlooking Black women. Womanist theology, by linking to Black feminisms, develops a critical lens that centers the experiences of Black women in religious and spiritual practices. Broadly defined, womanist theology constructs a lens for liberation theology that acknowledges not just race but also gender and sex as central to examining the religious and spiritual practices of people of African descent and the impact of patriarchy on those experiences.6 More recently, queer theology has emerged along this same current of liberation theology. Queer theology works at the intersections of queer theory and theology, operating as a critical lens to examine and resist the oppressive practices of some religious and spiritual communities. It seeks to link LGBTQ people, religion, and spirituality in ways that are empowering and affirming. It is the organizing philosophy in many LGBTQ churches such as the Metropolitan Community Church, the oldest LGBTQ Christian denomination, founded in 1968 in Huntington, California. A number of theologians and religious studies scholars have formed what I see as Black queer-feminist critiques of Black and LGBTQ churches. Reverend Irene Monroe, for example, has noted the absence of a more explicit critique of heterosexism among liberation and womanist theologians, as well as the absence of a consideration of the ways queer theology excludes attention to race.7 Kelly Brown Douglas focuses more specifically on the Black church’s silence around sexuality in general, including queer sexuality, through a womanist lens.8
Theologian Horace L. Griffin notes that historically “Black church leaders and congregants have been resistant and even closed in treating [LGBTQ] congregants equally or, in many cases, offering simple compassion to the suffering of [LGBTQ] people.” Thus “the Black heterosexual majority is presently engaged in a biblical indictment that identifies [LGBTQ] people as immoral.”9 I understand “biblical indictment” to include the repression and silence surrounding sexuality; pervasive heteropatriarchal ideologies; the persecution and ridicule of women, as well as Black LGBTQ, and other sexual and gender nonconforming people; the refusal to recognize and affirm the love relationships of LGBTQ people; and numerous other inequalities and invisibilities that people attempt to justify through interpretations of the Bible. E. Patrick Johnson writes that the “pathologizing of gayness as ‘unnatural’ and ‘ungodly’ creates a hostile, oppressive, and homophobic environment for gays and lesbians—an environment that is, according to Christian doctrine, supposed to foster community and acceptance through Christ.”10 And whether one publicly identifies as LGBTQ or remains silent, all are subject to the anti-LGBTQ sentiments and heteronormativity that pervade American society as a whole and many Christian churches in particular.
Griffin explains the continuum of responses that Black LGBTQ people in Black churches must adopt as a means of “passing” to survive what he calls the “heterosupremacy” of Black churches: guilty passing, angry passing, silent passing, and opportunistic passing.11 These types of passing categorize the silences and consequential “closetedness of lesbians and gays in churches.”12 The deeply rooted silence surrounding LGBTQ people in churches puts those who identify as gay or are identified as gay by other congregants in the paradoxical position of invisibility and hypervisibility that accompanies Black queerness in Black churches. By invisible and hypervisible I am also referring to what Marlon Ross calls the “open secret” of the existence of LGBTQ people in Black communities, and by extension, Black churches. Ross says that “when the question of telling loved ones what they already know does become an issue, it can be judged a superfluous or perhaps even a distracting act, one subsidiary to the more important identifications of family, community, and race within which one’s sexual attractions are already interwoven and understood.”13 “Open secrets” refers to the passive acknowledgement and assumption of the presence of Black LGBTQ people in Black communities: everyone knows, but no one speaks about it. In Black churches the open secret of LGBTQ people in the congregation is more than simply known, it is embedded in the cultural landscape. E. Patrick Johnson writes,
What is most insidious about the Church’s denouncement of homosexuality . . . is its exploitation of its gay members. . . . The church exploits the musical talents, financial savvy and leadership abilities of gays. At the same time that it denies homosexuality as a valid form of black Christian sexuality as well as denies the homosexual his/her rightful place among the “saints,” it uses the black gay body to bring others to Christ.14
Despite open secrets, tacit assumptions, and passive “acknowledgments” of LGBTQ congregants through humor and verbal horseplay—whether it be explicitly homophobic, ironic, or satirical—the major sentiment in some Christian churches is that homosexuality is not godly and that there is to be no affirmation of gay people in church regardless of how people identify outside of the church. Consequently, what persists are “teachings of deliverance from homosexuality, Christian change therapy, and exorcism [that] create more denial and inner conflict for lesbians and gays,” says Griffin, all “creating an undue burden on lesbian and gay lives and causing Black suffering.”15
For many Black LGBTQ people, attending LGBTQ churches can also be a marginalizing experience. To escape the unwelcoming atmosphere of some Christian churches, many Black LGBTQ Christians have joined LGBTQ churches, which tend to have predominately White LGBTQ members and liturgical leaders. These churches are in most cases the only Christian home where LGBTQ Christians feel completely affirmed and welcomed. However, some members of LGBTQ churches, especially people of color, express that their worship experience in these churches does not represent the diversity of experiences among LGBTQ Christians. Reverend Irene Monroe states that often in LGBTQ churches White LGBTQ people’s “control and dominance of the lexicon erodes our power and deletes our spiritual expression.” This “not only renders us invisible, but also renders us speechless.” For Black LGBTQ Christians, says Monroe, “housing our spirituality in both religious cultures—White queer, and Black—has been one of tenuous residency, that of spiritual wanderers and resident aliens.” By “spiritual wanderers” Monroe refers to experiences of being Black in the White LGBTQ churches, whereby “we navigate through the dominant queer spiritual lexicon for words to speak truth to our reality.” As “resident aliens in Black religious culture,” Monroe says Black LGBTQ people are only invited to “speak of a God we know about through heterosexist theological language.”16
The Spiritual Violence of Literacy: The Unholy Life of Literacy Normativity
Numerous research participants recalled episodes where family, friends, and other church members confronted them with a Bible-based condemnation of their gender and sexual identity. These instances often relied on interpretations of written texts. Additionally, many other participants recalled incidents where unwritten discourses and ideologies around gender and sexual politics helped perpetrate spiritual violence.
Michael Adkins described the pain of witnessing spiritual violence as a youth. Adkins, born in 1983, is a Black gay man who was raised in a very small southern suburb and currently lives in the Midwest. Adkins was “raised in the Baptist Church,” but in high school he “started attending nondenominational service.” Despite his Christian upbringing, Michael said that he “doesn’t really strongly identify with that community anymore.” He attributes his estrangement from his family’s church to the Bible-based condemnation church members used against LGBTQ people. Adkins said, “It’s kind of hard to listen to someone when they’ve also been like, ‘Oh you’re a bad person.’ Everything—like, your being gay is bad.” Adkins said he has read the Bible multiple times, and thinks anti-LGBTQ sentiments are discriminatory acts.
Cicely Davis is a Black bisexual woman born in 1977 in a small southern city. Davis enjoyed a very fulfilling life as a Christian. She had strong relations with her family until she came out to them as bisexual. After she did, several family members told her that her “lifestyle” was not godly and that she needed to change immediately.
For Steven Morgan, the spiritual violence directed at LGBTQ people was most palpable during his adolescence. Morgan was born in 1985 and raised in a suburban city in the Midwest. Although he now identifies as a Black transgender man, Morgan recalled the challenges of coming out as a lesbian as a teenager when he began recognizing his sexual attraction to women. Morgan said he used to pray every day as a teen “that I would change” because “when I would go to church events . . . they [church members] would be like ‘You know, you can pray away these evil feelings that you have.’” This was one of the many instances where Morgan says he witnessed how “people use the Bible to disenfranchise and to discriminate against others and put them in a box.” Although in later years his mother became more supportive, at the time, Morgan said, “there was really no comfort, at least not from my parents.”
Kevin Coleman is a Black bisexual man born in 1980 in a large city on the East Coast. Coleman was raised in a Christian household and now identifies himself as a nondenominational Christian. He said that church congregants identify themselves as welcoming of LGBTQ communities, but despite this, Coleman believed that the church as a whole was not welcoming or affirming for LGBTQ people. He recalled an incident where “the minister said something ‘off’ [anti-LGBTQ]” and the congregants came to him and “apologized afterward for the minister.”
Descriptions of the literacy normativity of spiritual violence in Christian churches were not confined solely to majority heterosexual churches. The cisnormativity of churches and religious texts—including some LGBTQ churches that declare they are welcoming and affirming of all sexualities and genders—was palpable. Ella Mosley describes encounters with spiritual violence perpetuated by gay, lesbian, and bisexual members of an LGBTQ church. Mosley is a Black transgender woman, introduced in chapter 2. Mosley said in her day-to-day life there is “almost total disregard and ignorance of the LGB persons that I encounter” when it comes to issues that affect transgender and gender- nonconforming people. Mosley said “I have never understood why there too often is an automatic animosity from those people, on a number of occasions . . . because by and large we are all struggling against the same injustices.” These sentiments often made their way into Mosley’s church where lesbian, gay, and bisexual people members have used spiritual violence against her and other transgender people. On more than one occasion lesbian, gay, and bisexual church members told Mosley that transgender people were going against God’s nature because God created men’s and women’s bodies as they were and that sexual reassignment surgeries and changes in gender expression were against God’s will.
The spiritual violence Mosley experiences is consistent with the dearth of scholarship addressing transgender and gender nonconforming people’s religious and spiritual lives in general. Transgender people of faith receive little attention in discussions of queer Christians. Horace Griffin calls for more research on transgender experiences in churches. The documentary The Believers chronicles the work of a predominantly Black transgender gospel choir in San Francisco. Outside of this film and some case analyses and biographical sketches in a few other scholarly works including my own,17 little of the research on the antiqueer sentiments of churches speaks to the specific experiences of transgender people worshipping in various religious and spiritual spaces. My analysis of experiences of the role of literacy in the religious and spiritual lives of Mosley, Morgan, and other transgender and gender nonconforming people offers crucial insight on the matter.
Challenging Spiritual Violence, Fashioning Faith Identities
When challenging spiritual violence, participants resist literacy normativity and refashion their relationship to religion or spirituality. Such practices entail constructing an identity as Black queers of faith on their own terms. Examining these practices shows that appropriations of literacy are critical to the range of activities that participants in Black queer restorative literacies describe. It features the different meanings, values, and processes of literacy deployed for social and institutional change in religious and spiritual institutions. The following analyses add another layer of understanding to this complex interplay between literacy and religious/spiritual identity among some Black LGBTQ people. Again, I examine these details from in-depth interviews according to three major trends in which fashioning faith identities and ideologies were applied: (1) queering Christian identity, (2) forging new faith identities in organized religions, and (3) creating new spiritualities.
Queering Christian Identity
Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Heather Andrea Williams, and other scholars document the role of literacy in the religious lives of enslaved people of African descent.18 Literacy scholar Beverly Moss further explicated this tradition when she argued that preachers’ sermons are texts constructed by and engendering particular “literacy events”19 in Black churches.20 My analysis of research participants’ life stories queers this important work on religion’s role in African American literacy learning. By centering Black LGBTQ people of faith, I confirm some elements of the relation between religion and African American literacy learning, disrupt others, and posit new ways to view this historical and contemporary practice through a lens that recognizes the gender and sexual plurality of Black life and culture.
Overwhelmingly, research participants cited church worship services and other faith practices as a conduit for learning a number of traditional literacy skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Church was also where they learned a number of nontraditional literacy skills like call and response, signifying, and other Black literacy rhetorical practices. Many of the ideologies around racial-ethnic, gender, and sexual identity included ways of reading identities—social scripts that were encoded in the literacies that research participants learned as children and adolescents often occurred in churches. This perspective adds another layer of complexity to historiographies of Christianity in African-American literacy learning and use through multiple ironies. One is that these skills were taught and learned with the intention of orienting them to the religious, cultural, and other ideological teachings of the church and improving the quality of their lives more generally; unbeknownst to the church and the research participants who were then children, these individuals would use the literacy skills they learned in their youth to make faith identities and religious and spiritual ideologies that some church members would unequivocally reject. These “sponsors of literacy,”21 unknowingly set the stage for Black queers of faith to form literacies later in life that would allow them to read, critically question, and respond to religious texts that others interpreted in marginalizing and incorrect ways. This centrality of religion to learning to read and write spanned life stories.
Alicia Jefferson, a Black gay woman introduced in chapter 1, was clear about the effect that church had on her literacy learning. Jefferson said that as a child she “went to church all the time. There were Easter programs and we had to learn a speech.” Similarly, Stephanie Flowers, a Black lesbian also introduced in chapter 2, said, “I was four when I first learned to read . . . we were in church and I read the church program, and he [my brother] told my mother ‘Oh, look, she read the church program.’”
In some cases, the presence of religion and reading and writing in the lives of the parents strongly affected the literacy learning of the research participants. Franklin Smith, a Black gay man also introduced in chapter 1, said his mother’s reading of the Bible was perhaps the earliest encounter with reading and writing he could remember.
There are various instances where research participants employ their restorative literacies to remake Christian identities in their own image. Examining episodes where participants confront spiritual violence, we witness the making and demonstrations of new religious and spiritual literacies. Through restorative literacies, many research participants’ use literacy to facilitate a construction and articulation of an identity and ideology as a Black LGBTQ Christian. Thus, we also witness the application of these literacies in acts of Black LGBTQ Christian identity fashioning and affirmation.
Many research participants recall moments where they name and engage literacy normativity by considering issues surrounding the authority of the Bible itself. This authority includes the written and unwritten religious and spiritual ideologies some persons develop and on which they base their readings of the Bible. Reconsiderations of the unquestioned authority of the Bible and these ideologies were also apparent to me in an experience I had at the Unity Fellowship Church in Baltimore, Maryland, as an invited guest of Leon Whitlock, one of my research participants.
Whitlock is a Black gay man born in 1944 in a large southeastern city. In June 2007 I attended church services with a group of twenty-one students and four other instructors from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. We brought the students enrolled in an experiential learning course titled “The LGBT Civil Rights Movement, 1950–1980: Exploring History and Current Consequences” to the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area to meet with local LGBTQ activists. In addition to meeting with organizers and activists of the LGBTQ movement, students would receive in the course a survey of key moments in the history of LGBTQ rights through engagement in the actual scenes of the movement. Given the centrality of religion and spirituality as a theme within the LGBTQ movement, we visited a queer worship space for one unit of the course. I had already interviewed Whitlock, who invited me to attend his church, part of the larger Unity Fellowship Church Movement (UFCM), while I was in town. I mentioned the course and Whitlock kindly invited the entire group of students and instructors to come along too.
The bus turned the corner and descended a residential street in Baltimore. There was very little about the scene we had come upon that announced itself, with one small exception: hanging in the window of the storefront church was a moderately sized purple and gold banner with the official insignia of the UFCM. At the bottom of the banner was the UFCM denominational motto: “God Is Love, and Love Is for Everyone,” a motto that has been with the UFCM since its inception.
A rarity on the landscape of Black and LGBTQ faith communities, the existence of the UFCM is one way to explore how Black queers have attempted to negotiate the challenges of Black and queer religious spaces. The founder, liturgical staff, and activists involved in the formation of UFCM established it as a safer space for Black LGBTQ people to worship God and experience spiritual fellowship across faiths. They were particularly interested in forming an environment that affirmed Black LGBTQ identities and cultural traditions. I argue that the establishment of the UFCM points to a critical historical moment where we again see the relations of literacy normativity and the formation of the UFCM as acts of restorative literacies. Those moments usefully connect the life stories of my research participants to a tradition of Black queer challenges to spiritual violence.
In 1982, the UFCM began as the Unity Fellowship Church Los Angeles, a weekly Bible study and prayer meeting for Black lesbians and gays that Carl Bean and others held at a private residence.22 When UFCM began it did so just as a number of Black activists and allies were publishing newsmagazines and holding events discussing the antigay interpretations of religious and world history,23 questioning how important African American religion was to the gay civil rights movement,24 and debating the usefulness of a Black LGBTQ church. In 1984, the group underwent a reorganization that formally established it as a church, complete with nonprofit status, in 1985.25 Some of the Black gay and lesbian activists of that era became ministers and liturgical leaders in Unity and in other LGBTQ churches. Reverend Renee McCoy, one of the founding members of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG), the first national organization for Black gay and lesbian rights, was a UFCM minister. The UFCM follows the teachings of liberation theology.26 The incorporation of liberation theology into the UFCM is most evident in UFCM’s foundational commitment to the use of religion and spirituality toward the liberation of those who are oppressed on any basis. Another tenet of liberation theology that UFCM employs is that theology must speak to the cultural experiences of people of color and cultures all around the world and not subordinate those views through an explicit or tacit assumption of European or Western views as the only or the correct view.
The UFCM’s numerous national ministries and programs demonstrate resistance to literacy normativity affecting Black LGBTQ people. These ministries also reflect restorative literacies in that they promote and support congregation members’ steps toward identity formation by forming new literacies centered on being a Black queer of faith. For example, in the 1980s, when the government and larger American public, including Christian churches, turned their backs as HIV/AIDS was killing gay men, the UFCM was very active in raising awareness about the epidemic. They offered support services for those with the virus, and shortly after the first HIV testing mechanism was developed the UFCM made HIV/AIDS testing services a primary part of its work.27 Early in its life, the UFCM offered counseling to LGBTQ couples, seminars and workshops on liberation theology, and many other services aimed at improving the spiritual experience and quality of life of its congregants. The UFCM and its local congregations have several ministries. Some congregations, such as the UFC of Baltimore, have a ministry specifically for transgender congregants.28 The UFCM church performed weddings, referred to as a “Holy Union,” long before the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriages, for church members who choose to mark the occasion of the day they entered into loving relationships with their partners. At UFC Baltimore, Whitlock’s congregation, the church space serves as a drop-in center for youth and other persons who are estranged from their families or for other reasons have no other place to go. As of 2015, Unity has fifteen branch churches in cities all over the country, including Brooklyn, Detroit, Newark, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and the Baltimore branch my students and I attended. In all of their churches, the UFCM challenges spiritual violence. In doing this, the UFCM offers new literacies of religion and spirituality, drawing on religious doctrine to do work and offer a message in opposition to the homophobia of mainstream churches.
As we exited the bus, Reverend Dr. Jamie Washington, who was then the Baltimore UFCM’s Minister of Music, met our group at the church’s door, invited us in, and gave us a twenty-five minute discussion about the history of the church and its ministries, followed by a Q&A. Reverend Washington gave each member of our group a handout entitled “Bible Affirmations,” which he had authored. He indicated that the affirmations were a centerpiece of most UFC of Baltimore sermons and that the handout would be of use in the service itself.
Just as the preacher for the day stood to offer the sermon, the entire congregation, including visitors, was asked to stand and hold a Bible in the air as we read aloud in unison from the handout:
This is my bible. It contains basic instructions before leaving earth. It is a primary resource in the development of my relationship with God. While I believe it’s inspired by God, it is not God. It is not to be used as a weapon but as an instrument of liberation and life. I will pray over it, as I study it, and I will interpret it through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit within. I have the right to question it, as I apply its teachings to my life. My heart is open, my mind is alert, I am ready to receive a word from the Lord.
The “Bible Affirmations” the church recites is useful for exploring restorative literacies because it contains a touchstone for a number of tactics research participants employ to survive spiritual violence. For example, “Bible Affirmations” resonates with how research participants deauthorize the written word of religious texts as employed by others. Deauthorizing the written “Word” is a restorative literacies that preemptively forms to interrupt spiritual violence. By deauthorizing the written word, research participants rearticulate the authority of the text itself, an act that repositions them as empowered in their relationship to the Bible and its authority. Both actions invite, encourage, and model acts of and possibilities for challenging the literacy normativity of spiritual violence of specific uses of these texts.
Deauthorizing the written word is first demonstrated when the affirmation statement refers to the Bible being inspired by God, but not being God. This demonstrates a commitment to the possibility of having a relationship with God that does not depend on the Bible exclusively but does not dismiss the Bible’s significance. The affirmation statement implies and supports a belief that structuring an ethics of living one’s life according to the Bible is not equal to living one’s life for a relationship with God that is not based solely on interpretation of the text. It also quietly resists the actions of people who may reference the Bible to support their anti-LGBTQ ideologies as if their statement were God actually speaking. This intent is clearest when they state that the Bible is not to be used as a weapon, reacting against Bible-based condemnation of people, their lives, and their beliefs.
Second, note the affirmation statement’s discussion of praying over and questioning the Bible. This is a crucial intervention. When speaking of questioning, the affirmation statement gives deference to how the text will be interpreted to “the Holy Spirit.” Loosely speaking, the “Holy Spirit” refers not to God, but to the spirit of God. It is one of the foundational beliefs of Christianity and one to which many Christians would readily agree. Emphasizing the Holy Spirit is strategically powerful and imperative in the rhetorical effectiveness of the affirmation statement. Focusing on the Holy Spirit situates the call and requirement to continuously question and interpret the Bible, and the outcome of those questions, as potentially actions inspired by God through the prayers of those who seek the counsel of the Holy Spirit. A number of transgressive acts emerge through this action: it positions Black queers as God-fearing, a point that anti-LGBT religious rhetoric denies. This is evidenced in seeking the counsel of the Holy Spirit, an act that is inconsistent with the narratives of anti-LGBTQ spiritual violence that states that LGBTQ people and others have no concern for the Holy Spirit, God, or anything “righteous.”
Third, the statement suggests that Black queers can even be under the influence of the Holy Spirit and God, which some Christians would deny because of their nonnormative gender and sexual identities. This is imperative because it makes the point that people should be concerned with wrestling with God over how to understand the Bible, not arguing with people. In this respect, Black LGBTQ people can embody greater autonomy in relationship to biblical scripture and authority to claim their Christian identity, as the affirmation statement constructs such relationships as a one-to-one connection to God and to understanding Christian teachings. This position effectively emphasizes individual people as already divinely guided while deemphasizing the assumed authority of others who attempt to use “the Word” to do harm. This belief is central to many of the ways research participants situate themselves in resistance to the literacy normativity of spiritual violence. It cuts other people’s beliefs out of one’s relationship with God, a notion that engenders the possibilities for identifying as a Christian on one’s own terms.
A fourth point is that the affirmation statement ends with comments about deciphering the meanings of the Bible within the context of one’s own life. I read this call as not literally rewriting the Bible, given the clear deference to its significance. Rather, there is a mandate to consider how much to historically contextualize a collection of documents that are thousands of years old within the experiences of people living today and working through questions of how to relate such an old text to modern life. This belief is manifested in one of the official slogans of the United Church of Christ (not to be confused with UFCM): “Never place a period where God places a comma. God is still speaking.” This is a crucial rhetorical stance because it characterizes many of the fundamental differences in the arguments between pro- and anti-LGBTQ uses of Christian theology in the United States. For my research participants, this question of the Bible and context is crucial to further showing the role of literacy broadly defined. Deciphering the meaning of biblical scriptures for people today is also a demonstration of literacy, another example of literacies occurring off the page. This is seen in the ways people read both “the word and the world” when they approach God’s word today.29 An example that comes to mind is how LGBTQ Christians and allies have argued for government approval of same-sex marriage under the banner of marriage equality. The Bible, as many have said, argues against homosexuality and defines marriage between one man and one woman. However, those who have argued for marriage equality have read the Bible and said that what is being emphasized in the scriptures is not a literal interpretation of who can and cannot be married, but an emphasis on the affirmation of love and family formed under God in general. From this, they say that the reading of that scripture and the way it is applied to the world should include what love and family looks like contemporarily. In this case, people are employing literacy in the ways they merge reading the text and reading the world toward a vision of love and family that is not just inclusive but, as we saw with the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision, can also be transformative in some respects as well. Overall, rearticulating the accepted authority of the Bible, research participants are positioned to begin the process of challenging the ways some churches, clergy, and church members interpret the Bible on issues of identity, particularly in relationship to LGBTQ people.
As with the production and recitation of the “Bible Affirmation” at Unity Fellowship Church of Baltimore, research participants like Leon Whitlock appropriate literacy to challenge spiritual violence, to make an identity as a Black LGBTQ person of faith, or to create their own unique religious and spiritual spaces that are welcoming and affirming. As such, the reappropriation of their literacy to form a relationship to religion mirrors the ways that enslaved African ancestors who had acquired literacy, which they used for liberation, also used it to form their own religious and spiritual understandings and spaces.30 In these spaces, enslaved Africans interpreted the Bible not to sanction enslavement, as many slave masters had dictated, but to mandate their liberation physically, spiritually, and culturally.31 Many participants challenge the literacy normativity within spiritual violence as a step toward asserting their own right to physical, spiritual, and cultural liberation, including their right to identify as Christians despite the condemnation of others. The most frequent and illuminating of these actions were the appropriations of literacy when fashioning the textual interpretations of others.
Previously, we read of Steven Morgan’s recollections from his youth, when he experienced spiritual violence from fellow church members. Morgan credited a queer minister he met with helping him to imagine a different perspective on LGBTQ identity and Christianity than he had previously encountered. The minister told him that “there really wasn’t a word for homosexual in the Bible” and showed Morgan how antihomosexual ideas people said were in the text are actually their interpretations and have no bearing on his individual relationship with God. Morgan said the insights of this minister and other people in “the queer community who are ministers, preachers, community outreachers” all “really helped me to say, ‘You know what? Just be a good person.’ It’s all about being a good person.” Here Morgan challenges the spiritual violence he experienced as an adolescent by asserting “goodness” as a clear qualification for being a Christian, an assertion that questions whether the comments of the church members from his youth qualify as good or “Christ-like.” Morgan’s reference to being good to others as true Christian value mirrors the story that began this chapter, in which Phylicia Craig rebuked her parents for not being good Christians because they used Christianity to speak against her lesbian identity. Moreover, Morgan positions himself as one who can also determine the real meanings and values of Christian practice instead of being subject to the meanings and values that others impose. This too is an intervention into spiritual violence manifested through literacy normativity.
To form and affirm his identity as a Christian, Steven Morgan said he first read a lot of religious and spiritual writings, including the Bible. He said, “You do have to read religion on your own. You have to read the books, Bible—you have to read scripture on your own because if you’re letting people tell you what to think or what it means, then you haven’t done your research either.” Morgan says this research was important to him because he found that non-Christian LGBTQ people would give him a hard time about still identifying as a Christian because of their own negative experiences with churches. These issues resulted in an emergence of a theme within his writings of navigating anti-LGBTQ and non-Christian LGBTQ people’s questioning of why he remained a Christian.
A poet and spoken-word performer, Morgan performed one of his poems on religion and spirituality for me during the interview. In the poem he describes his journey from suffering spiritual violence when he first came out as a lesbian in his teenage years to a kind of spiritual and religious awakening in the years since, whereby he identifies as a Black transgender man who is Christian. The poem comments on the struggles he has with being a Christian given the contentious relations between transgender people and Christianity. Morgan said,
At the time I wrote the poem I was struggling with just my spirituality in terms of what religion was for me, how I’d get closer to God. Do I need to? Am I blind? . . . How did I get back to Jesus basically? How do I find my salvation in this crazy world that I’m living in?
Ultimately, Morgan said through reading and writing that he “tried to not let the anger and what other people were saying have anything to do with how I felt about it [religion].” Morgan’s recollections demonstrate Black queer restorative literacies. From the challenge to spiritual violence and its related creations of new literacies of welcoming and affirming Christianity, Morgan is able to fashion an identity as a Black transgender Christian. Such a moment operates as one moment in a lifetime of actions where Morgan and Black queers get their life.32
Previously I discussed Ella Mosley who described being marginalized in a predominantly LGBTQ church by lesbian, gay, and bisexual congregants who ridiculed her because she is a transgender woman. Mosley says she looks to the Bible for ways to combat “those people who are supposed to be Christian and they can’t see further than the covers of their Bible.” Though inflected with humor, Mosley’s comments challenge the basis for people’s anti-transgender sentiments. By pointing out what she calls the ignorance of cisgender lesbian, gay, and bisexual people about the lives of transgender persons, Mosley signals that the treatment she received from other church members is representative of transphobia writ large. Thus, Mosley points out how literacy normativity in an LGBTQ church can mirror the literacy normativity of spiritual violence in non-LGBTQ spaces.
In restorative literacies, one interpretation of the Bible Mosley heard from a minister and says she has facetiously applied in response to church members condemning transgender people was that “when it comes to transgender people, if God is supposed to be everything, man and woman, we [transgender] might be coming as close to God as you can get. Because we’re both [laugh].” Another interpretation Mosley has used is that “since God is Love . . . then a real Christian must by and large love everybody and that he doesn’t feel that God would have placed his son in jeopardy to die just for a certain segment of a world population. So, that he had to have been sent to Calvary for all of us.” Here Mosley’s thoughts represent her own definition of what true Christians believe and challenge any interpretations of religious texts that exclude and condemn others. This definition is an example of Mosley’s making a Black transgender Christian identity on her own terms.
Where Morgan and Mosley fashion their Christian identities through challenging the harmful use of texts and ideologies, Kevin Coleman adopts a surprising and somewhat controversial strategy that is a departure from these other research participants and many LGBTQ people and allies who challenge spiritual violence. Recall that Coleman experienced a minister saying something offensive against LGBTQ people. Coleman continued to attend that church after the incident. He said he has developed his own understanding of things despite the minister’s anti-LGBTQ sentiments. Kevin said,
So in the Bible it says that being bisexual and gay is wrong. It says that and I think that I am knowingly doing it [being bisexual]. So, maybe—it’s not something I feel as though I have to reconcile. And I think I might have reconciled with it already, but I see how people use it, but I think my religious beliefs are, well everyone has some sort of thing to do—there are a lot of sins people do, but the Bible says that no one sin is worse than the other, so being gay is just as bad as being a murderer and lying. So, some people lie, some people are gay and some people are murderers and that’s how I have kind of reconciled it. It’s like, well if God is gonna forgive you for lying than he’s gonna forgive me anyway.
Coleman’s comments show that he identifies with the hegemony of anti-LGBTQ beliefs regarding sin. The sentiments he expresses about sin are prevalent in many churches throughout the United States. While this notion of sin is so central to spiritual violence, by identifying with the hegemony Coleman is paradoxically positioned to challenge this anti-LGBTQ sentiment. He does so by stretching this Bible-based condemnation to illuminate an interpretation that characterizes God as understanding and forgiving, which for Coleman undermines the spiritual violence of others’ interpretations. Coleman thus claims that all human beings are fallible and therefore subject to God’s judgment and in need of God’s forgiveness. Coleman’s strategy is reminiscent of Muñoz’s disidentification, where, again, queers of color seemingly identify neither with nor against the hegemony as a strategy to do their own works of intervention.33 Coleman’s apparently passive response to the condemnation of LGBTQ people is not so passive after all. He essentially repudiates others’ interpretations of the Bible and implies that infallible judgment and full understanding of the Bible will be left up to God, thus lessening the significance of the interpretation of humans; this includes his own interpretations, but it is a position that provides the distances from the spiritual violence lodged at him by others, affording some sense of self-affirmation, care, and thus self-love in that moment. This action creates a space to fashion his identity as a Black bisexual person of faith and to continue to worship despite anti-LGBTQ sentiments. His choice does not completely circumvent spiritual violence, and some might argue that Coleman is subjecting himself and other people to the violence of such an interpretation. However, for Coleman, his response confronts the spiritual violence of the anti-LGBTQ comments he experienced in a way that feels right for him and works toward his survival. Coleman’s response, however controversial for some, is important for us to acknowledge and engage with because of what it can tell us complexly about how Black LGBTQ people use literacy in the face of spiritual violence to construct religious and spiritual identities that are reflective of a response to spiritual violence that others might offer as well.
Morgan, Mosley, and Coleman use literacy to fashion ideologies and identities that allow them to remain Christians on their own terms. On the other hand, a number of participants turned away from Christianity after encountering spiritual violence in church or through Bible-based condemnation. The following section will explore the decisions some of these individuals made in the wake of spiritual violence, showing the role of literacy in fashioning one’s life as a Black LGBTQ person of faith.
Forging New Faith Identities in Organized Religions
A number of research participants named anti-LGBTQ spiritual violence as a primary reason for their decision to cease practicing Christianity or identifying as Christian. Many joined other religions, and still others questioned all organized religions, choosing instead to identify with and practice an individual spirituality. In each case, these former Christians appropriate literacy to fashion new religious and spiritual selves as part of their orientation into new, more welcoming spaces of organized religion or individual spirituality. I do not mean to suggest that Christianity is the default for every Black LGBTQ person, and all others are secondary choices for my research participants defined through their negative experience of Christianity. Rather, I wish to engage sincerely and substantively with the role of literacy in the formation of their new relationship to their new religious and spiritual paths, which are their primary faith identity. Stephanie Flowers is one such example.
After Flowers’s parents denounced her for being a lesbian, saying their religion did not support lesbian sexuality, Flowers responded through challenges to the literacy normativity of spiritual violence. This is most apparent in her identification of her parents’ actions as spiritual violence, when she criticized them for being part of a church community where they could not and would not critically question the church’s teachings, which Flowers felt told her parents to disown their daughter. Interestingly, Flowers’s critique of her parents’ choice to be in a religion that does not allow them to question constructs her parents’ homophobia and Christian identity as being built on a lack of literacy. Their view, in her perspective, is not particularly informed and emerges from uncritical acceptance of other people’s theology. Flowers said that her parents’ negative response to her lesbian identity was “really hard for me because central to their . . . particular belief system is that I am going to hell, and that I should not be gay.”
Years after coming out as a lesbian and falling out with her parents, Flowers moved to the Great Plains area to be with her partner who relocated away from the large southern city they lived in because of a job opportunity. Flowers attended a “Buddhism 101” class after noticing an advertisement for it. What Flowers liked most about Buddhism was that it “encourages you to question. Encourages you to challenge like what you read with your own life experience. So, if what, you know, if what somebody tells you that a Buddhist text doesn’t mesh with your own life experience, there’s no expectation from anyone that you’re going to toe the line.” Two other Buddhist research participants, a Black lesbian and a Black queer woman, each echoed Flowers’s comments.
Flowers’s understandings of Buddhism are derived from numerous readings, calling attention to the centrality of reading to her Buddhist practices. And while she identifies Christianity as a text-based religion, she describes her introduction to the Christian religion and its text as containing a predisposition to accepting the text without filters, whereas she says Buddhism emphasizes questioning. Recall that this ability to question is the complete antithesis of what she felt about Christianity and was the major reason why she turned away from being a Christian at an early age. She faulted her parents for the lack of questioning their church’s interpretations through their own research, so the right to healthy skepticism is a key issue for Flowers. Her comments say that for her Buddhism contains a space for one’s individual experience to complicate what the texts appear to prescribe. What interests me here is that Flowers is describing the ability of Buddhist texts to be subject to context and lived experiences of the reader as something that the texts themselves encourage. This is a departure from Michael Adkins, who said that not relating the Bible to current and individualized contexts enables such uses of texts for spiritual violence. Flowers asserts that Buddhist texts are not about prescribing one way to live, and thus many texts are subject to challenges about their applicability to various lived experiences, but that the many ways of being in the world are understood. This means that from the outset, Flowers’s experience as a Black lesbian is centered as a way of being and not on the margins of a heteronormative ideology.
Flowers’s one challenge she had with Buddhism is that she didn’t know many other Black Buddhists. She initially struggled greatly with being in a religion where she didn’t know or see Black people. Though Flowers did not further elaborate on this point, her conversation with me revealed engagements with Black Buddhists that she encountered all the time, albeit through reading. She said, “There’s Angel Kyodo Williams . . . who wrote a book, I believe it’s called, Being Black, that I read. And more recently a book called Meeting Faith, another Black Buddhist woman wrote that book.” It seems, then, that although Flowers likes Buddhism for its ability to create a window through which she can see her experience in the religion, she also likes that there are texts authored by other Black women and Black lesbians. This detail forecasts Flowers’s description of Buddhism as a welcoming and affirming faith community for her particular Black lesbian subjectivity despite the fact that she did not see evidence of this in actually meeting people. In this instance Flowers forms a new literacy of religion and spirituality to fashion a new faith identity, to affirm religious and spiritual ideology within that identity, and to use religion to assist her in meeting her future needs.
While Flowers’s story demonstrates the deauthorization of religious texts as a tactic of restorative literacies, other research participants reauthorize religious texts to do the same. I highlight this juxtaposition in approaches to written text to continue to show the contrary ways research participants enact restorative literacies even in traditional or normalizing literacy systems and tools. Lynette Tyson expressed a desire to practice within a religion that would allow her to engage its relevance to all aspects of her life, not just a faith identity. Tyson is Black, lesbian, and Jewish. She was born in 1969 in a large city in the Midwest and currently resides in a city in the Northeast. Tyson said that she was attracted to Judaism because “it’s all about questioning. You’re expected to question your faith a bit.” Tyson says that both her ability to question and the vast amount of texts and information she is able to draw from support her in fashioning a faith identity as a Black lesbian in the Jewish faith. She notes that it is not uncommon for people of color to be looked at oddly when they say they are Jewish, but this is an action still odd to her given that, as she estimated at the time of our interview, “more than twenty percent of Jews in this country are Jews of color.” And though she has encountered some people who question whether she should be allowed to identify as Jewish because of race alone, many of the virulent challenges have been because she is a lesbian. Tyson says that to intervene into these challenges she has researched and documented a great deal of scholarship on the Jewish faith that she references whenever people attempt to tell her she cannot be a Black lesbian in the Jewish community. Here Tyson is reauthorizing the legitimacy of the written word to push back against arguments from others that would disavow her religious identity. Whereas Black LGBTQ Christian research participants deauthorize religious texts that are used to disavow their identity as Black LGBTQ Christians, Tyson finds that texts are the basis for her arguments that the Jewish faith affirms her religious identity.
For example, once, while attending a Jewish national conference, Tyson said a person made comments that only people from Eastern Europe were “real Jews.” He also made comments that were offensive to gay and lesbian Jews, to an interfaith couple in the group, to a Spanish-speaking Jew, and about Jews residing in parts of Africa. In response to his comments, Tyson referenced a list of writings about Jewish history and practice that spoke against the man’s claims. She said she wanted to “remind people . . . how diverse our community of Jews actually is,” that “it’s much closer to what the population of the United States is like . . . much closer to that than what people actually think.” That Tyson drew from a rich body of scholarship to challenge the man’s spiritual violence and argue for her identity in the faith community demonstrates the place of literacy in fashioning her new religious identity.
Brenda McNeil’s description of joining the Church of Religious Science is replete with literacies where she engages in co-constructing knowledge and co-construction of religious texts to new faith identities and ideologies. McNeil is a Black lesbian born in 1957 in a suburban town in the Northeast. She currently resides in a large city on the West Coast. McNeil said that she began to question Christianity even as a child. She remembered asking her grandmother and mother questions about some of the stories they’d read her from the Bible because they didn’t make sense and seemed “like fairytale” stories to her: “We’d go to church and hear about, oh, he walked on water. And I’d say, well, how did he do that? [Laugh] And you know, my mother and my grandmother would say, ‘You’re not supposed to ask how, you know, you just believe that he did it, you know?’” Even as a child McNeil’s questions demonstrated her impulse to co-construct knowledge, as her inquiries displayed a desire to understand the religion through narratives that made sense to her, not through a passive acceptance of the information being shared by others. Hence, McNeil is refusing what Paulo Freire refers to as the “banking concept”34 of education and knowledge dissemination, wherein she is merely a recipient of information from her mother and grandmother. Instead, as a child, she pursued the position of critical thinking in relation to the formation of a religious identity. As she grew older McNeil says she began to move even further away from the Christian church because family members used religion to demonize her lesbian identity. One of McNeil’s aunts expressed negative opinions toward her being a lesbian and ended her criticism saying, “I’m going to pray for you,” to which Brenda replied, “I hope that you’re praying that I’m gonna come into money because if you’re praying about my lifestyle, don’t bother, because I’m happy.”
Some years after she moved away from the Christian church, McNeil became aware of the Church of Religious Science. In her descriptions about Religious Science, we see the centrality of restorative literacies in the ways co-constructing knowledge, and also co-constructing of texts, figure strongly into McNeil’s refashioning of her identity as a Black lesbian in a newfound religious and spiritual community. For instance, one of the things she did to become familiar with the church was to read books by its founder, Ernest Holmes. She also took courses in the church about how to do “treatments,” which she described as similar to what is thought of as prayer. The course required a fair amount of reading, writing, nonwritten self-reflection, and other literacy activities. As McNeil described reading these texts, her comments portray the same critical thinking by way of questioning and deep introspection around what she was reading with Religious Science texts that she possessed in relationship to Christianity as a child.
The construction of texts is also prevalent when McNeil described the role of writing as part of her work as a member of the Church of Religious Science. For instance, McNeil spoke about a regular church practice called “Insight” in which church members write positive affirmations for themselves that they can meditate on daily. McNeil said she still had one of the affirmations she wrote years before our interview posted “on my refrigerator and I look at it every day.” McNeil’s writing “insight” affirmations are important for another dimension to the making of her faith identity because she does not draw religious and spiritual insight from texts that are given to her by the Church of Religious Science. Rather, there is space within the Church of Religious Science to draw insight from her own reflective writings that provide sustenance for her everyday life, which establishes the text she writes as having as much primacy as the texts written by others in the religion. By writing her own affirmation then, McNeil is co-constructing the knowledge and co-constructing the texts she is encouraged to follow in her religious practices. Through this work she is not only giving meaning to religion and spirituality but her appropriation of literacy also gives meaning to literacy itself, as evidenced in the power it enables her to fashion her faith identity in affirming ways and on her own terms.
Creating New Spiritualities
Twenty-two research participants, all former Christians, identified themselves as being “spiritual, but not religious” or some variation of that same phrase. This statement is the foundation of research participants who embark upon restorative literacies wherein they are, as I have come to think of it, creating vernacular divinities. Through positioning spirituality over organized religion, research participants are laying claim to their faith or spiritual belief system and stating that it does not need to be formed as part of a religion. From this position, research participants embark on spiritual practices that are deeply personal, rewarding, and that gain meaning from and are applicable to all areas of their life. Creating vernacular divinities are those literacy practices of research participants who make, claim, and operationalize a spiritual identity and spiritual life outside of organized religion. The role of literacies in these practices, as you will see, occurs on and off the page: from reading various texts and the aurality of listening to music to embodiment in dancing and in connecting to nature in various ways. In creating their own spiritualities, research participants are asserting they possess an inherent magic as divine beings in that they establish their faith practices and spiritualities from their own lives, for their own purposes, and according to their own definitions of morality. Kendall Ivins’s discussion of religion and spirituality best represents my theorization of how research participants create vernacular divinities as a tactic of restorative literacies.
Unlike other research participants, Ivins said he did not encounter spiritual violence in his immediate family or community, though he was aware of the ways religion was used to harm Black and LGBTQ people in general, historically and contemporarily. Ivins grew up in a family where there were various perspectives on religion and spirituality. His grandmothers, he says, “were very religious and very active in their churches, but my parents were not.” There was even a wide difference in perspective between his father and mother on religion. Ivins said, “My father is actually quite anti–organized religion, but my mother is kind of like church on Easter Sunday kind of religious,” and between these two approaches Ivins said he “never, never grew up with any kind of overt religiosity in our household.” He reasoned that
because religion was not overt in our family is one of the main reasons why—another reason why I didn’t have a hard time coming out because I didn’t internalize a lot of those messages that people get from religion. . . . I thank God that I didn’t grow up in a church. So no, actually, and quite early on—around freshman year in high school—I started to really question religion and what it meant and how I fit into it, both as a gay person and a Black person. So pretty early on I think I decided or figured out that it was not gonna have a very big part in my life.
Ivins’s comments function as counterliteracy because they portray a way of reading the word and the world that comes from a worldview that rejects the dominant discussion of how race and queer sexual identities get formed in relationship to religion. Instead, Ivins centers his own lived experience as the basis for how he narrativizes his identity formation and affirmation, and his views on religion and spirituality; his narrative runs counter to the experience of spiritual violence and navigation of religion and spirituality of many others.
Ivins’s skepticism about religion shifted very little between his adolescence and adulthood; in response to my asking what his religious or spiritual identity is, he states,
Atheist. Actually, I’ve gone back and forth from that to spiritual—just being very spiritual. You know I believe that there’s other things out there that we have nothing, no control over, no information about, but I’ll just kind of leave it at that. I think at this point whatever it is that created all of this, I think I’m comfortable enough calling that God. Whatever created the stars and the universe and the oceans and all this evolutionary stuff, I’m comfortable calling that God. But it’s not the same kind of God that is found in the Bible. So I go back and forth between saying I’m atheist and something else—I don’t know.
Like his assertion that spiritual violence was not a feature of the formative years of his identity development, a prominent feature in the narratives of many people across race, gender, and sexual identities, Ivins’s comments here push past rigid narratives around religion and spirituality in his refusal to be labeled. For instance, while he identifies as atheist, Ivins’s comments then show how he complicates this identity when he describes himself as being between that identity and one he describes as “just being very spiritual.” Doing so, he is challenging misperceptions of atheism, and his nonbelief in God as others conceive of it, as inherently lacking spirituality. Likewise, in asserting a claim to being spiritual, Ivins is also challenging the idea that just because one is described as spiritual does not mean that they must follow organized religion or even believe that God exists. A reductive reading of Ivins’s comments would attempt to disavow his right to claim an atheist identity, or to spirituality, but despite those reductive readings the complexity of Ivins’s own description of religion and spirituality in his life stands as a destabilized and destabilizing—and thus queer—description.
The fluidity and queerness of Ivins’s description of spirituality is the hallmark of creating vernacular divinities, and this is given more meaning when we look at specific ways this description emerges in how he experiences or practices spirituality in his everyday life. In every interview, after research participants discuss how or if they identify themselves in terms of religion or spirituality, I would follow by asking: “What do you do in order to center or observe your personal sense of faith or spirituality?” For Ivins, his observation of his spirituality shifted content and contexts, as he answered:
Music is one. Music and dancing to music is definitely one because it comes from such a deeply spiritual and pure place inside of me. . . . Also just connecting with other people through music and dance in similar ways that other people connect through religion. I think I see the same principles, but it’s not the same doctrine, almost. The beach is another one. Now I’m going into my hippie crunchy granola stuff, but really, being at the ocean and whenever I’m at the ocean and just seeing like what water can do, what the earth has done. I mean all of that shit is just so amazing to me. Just to be humbled by where we are as human beings on this planet. Like I feel definitely connected to something much, much bigger than me, but again, I’m very kind of reluctant to call it a religion or God or something . . . that’s the closest I get to something very spiritual in the same way that I would think that religious people experience it, you know.
In creating a vernacular divinity, Ivins is making a claim to his own divinity and spiritual strength as an everyday person. This is a powerful assertion in a world that denies the value embedded in the word “divine” to Ivins and others on the basis of their nonnormativities with regard to race, gender, sexuality, or other identities. Ivins’s description of music, dancing, and water as tools and sites that hold meaning for him spiritually is, in itself, very provocative and one I think many people might share. What I found most intriguing is how his description of each of these tools and sites operates in a way that is every bit as textual or material as those research participants who describe reading written texts as part of a religious or spiritual practice. For example, one research participant described reading quotes by life coach and spiritual teacher Iyanla Vanzant and meditating on them as her daily spiritual practice. Another explained that she repeated a passage from an Audre Lorde or Alice Walker poem three times each morning before leaving her bed to feel grounded in her day. Music, dance, and water are the texts or materials of Ivins’s observation of his own definition of spirituality. They do not need to be defined as being like the primary texts of organized religions, or even be authored by beings who are seen as clergy, theologians, or priests in order to have value in his life or the lives of others. It has spiritual meaning because Ivins says so; thus, creating vernacular divinities means one’s own perspective is what matters and does not need to be shared or understood by others in order to have value.
Ivins says that ritual is another dimension to his spirituality. Ritual, he says, is doing something with intention regularly. Though, again, he is not religious, Ivins says the literal definition of doing something religiously implies ritual, and thus “that’s what religion is; it’s a ritual of doing something.” For Christianity, he says that “it’s a ritual of doing something, like praying or reading the Bible or listening to a sermon. These are very ritual-based activities.” Ritual is also evident among other research participants, including one who talked of reading Audre Lorde and Alice Walker poetry three times daily before starting her day as one such example. Ivins said ritual is “the same for me when I go dancing. . . . I consciously go dancing to relieve stress, to forget, to let go, to get my life, to twirl. I mean it’s the same thing in a different context.” Ivins said he most feels this when dancing to the musical genre known as house music, and said, “House music definitely is like that’s my church when I’m going out to dance, the house music. But even just [dancing and listening] here at home, just like vocal stuff, typically female vocals—I give a classic, ‘Amen!’” when he gets into it. I find Ivins’s description of the feelings dancing gives him to be of special note because it speaks to an experience of complete liberation, comfort, and indeed joy. That Ivins gives these things to himself through an observation of his own spirituality in the midst of a world that is hostile to Black queer people, and quite frankly, hostile to those who are agnostics or atheists, is a demonstration of love for himself and one that he shares in community with others. Like dancing, he says, the “same thing [goes] for the beach—I know that when I go to the beach that I’m gonna feel more grounded. I’m gonna feel more calm. I’m gonna feel energized. It’s the same thing; it’s the same ritual. It’s just a different context.” The variety of texts and contexts that Ivins describes is echoed by another research participant, Cicely Davis, whose experience also reflects creating vernacular divinities as a tactic of restorative literacies that work against spiritual violence.
“I still believe in a higher power!” declared Cicely Davis. Her words reflect the sentiments of many of my research participants who have decided to no longer affiliate with organized religion but consider themselves “spiritual.” Davis had a hard time reconciling that the very people who had taught her to love everyone no matter what they did or who they were so easily turned their backs on her when she said she was bisexual. She now completely disregards such claims and is more concerned with “teachings of Jesus that have nothing to do with his followers.” She describes Jesus’s teachings as not oppressive, unlike how her parents and their church members represented them. After being all but expelled from her family when she came out to them as bisexual, Davis declared, “[I] strayed far away from that [Christianity]. . . . I feel I’m a very spiritual person, I still believe in a Higher Power, I disagree wholeheartedly with organized religion—in my life anyway—as believing that’s the only way it [religion] can be.”
Davis’s sense of spirituality did not immediately materialize following the showdown with her family and church. Davis described first “trying to make my peace with Christianity” by trying “to kind of censor out” negative uses of the Bible. This entailed a restorative literacies process similar to that of Ella Mosley in which Davis critically questioned the way others were interpreting the Bible and other texts, while simultaneously working to fashion a relationship with Christianity that was more self-affirming than what she was taught. Davis describes this process as reclaiming the Bible from the interpretations of those who used it against her. Where her story differs from Mosley’s and others’ is that this fashioning did not result in her choosing to remain a Christian. Instead, for Davis, it opened up other possibilities for spiritual fulfillment.
Reading written texts was particularly important to Davis in fashioning her spiritual identity. She named the Bible and other Christian theological texts on a long list of readings relevant to her spiritual practice. For example, Davis says the Bible and other Christian theological texts are her way of engaging with “Jesus, himself . . . someone that spread messages about love and about acceptance and about forgiveness and peace.” Alongside the Bible, however, Davis also reads other religious and secular texts that she finds to be spiritually edifying, and says, “I embrace a lot of Buddhist principles.” Davis explains that astrology books, self-help books, and works by mystic Wayne Dyer are on her list of important texts in her spiritual life.35 Davis is also a regular reader of Our Daily Bread, a print and audio-visual devotional that features scriptures, stories, and other information about people’s experiences from a Christian perspective.
Revisiting Christian texts embodies Davis’s shifts from naming spiritual violence to acts of restorative literacies in that she finds power to fashion herself in a place where she had previously only encountered hurt. Restorative literacies are present in her choice of developing her own path to spiritual fulfillment. Davis’s assertion that Christianity is about “love,” “acceptance,” “forgiveness,” and “peace” is important as it represents her ability to assign meaning to the religion when she felt powerless to do so in the past. These descriptions by Davis mirror the tenets of restorative literacies as I have theorized it and its emergence from or outcomes of self- and communal love. Davis’s censoring out those things in the Bible she finds oppressive speaks to the labor involved in restorative literacies, stretching literacy in the process of questioning and reconstructing a new relationship to biblical text. Davis cuts out everything and everyone else and fashions Christianity to be about a relationship between herself and Jesus, not between humans and text or between two individuals. Davis’s discussion of reading the Bible demonstrates how the text, for her, is a dynamic relic of literacy given that in her readings the text is frequently under revision. The primacy of this constant revision makes the Bible a living text, not confined to an antiquated status that it cannot be made anew. For Davis, it can be made anew, and it can be made anew through her and others living today. Thus, the Bible is, in Davis’s spirituality, a co-constructed text that is constantly being collaboratively written. This allows Davis to siphon spirituality from Christianity and other organized religions, use it to challenge organized religion, and then employ it to create her own vernacular spirituality and its literacies.
Writing also figures into her spiritual activity. Davis says,
I do keep a journal. . . . [I write] not so much like journal entries, but just writing down affirmations, things like “I can do this.” “I can get this job,” when I was unemployed. “I can forgive myself.” “I can forgive other people,” and . . . “I’m worthy of all the good things that should happen to me.” “I can be a loving daughter.” “I can be a loving sister.” “I can be a loving partner.” “A loving aunt.” Just to try to remind myself that these good things can come out of me.
Davis’s affirmations serve as a text that she constructs as part of her newfound faith identity and practices, as opposed to being required to accept a text without question. While she resists the authoritative position of the Bible, by constructing her own text she maintains authority in her spiritual practices through her own experience of these affirmations. Constructing her own text is restorative literacies in action. Ultimately, literacy proves to be central to Davis and others when resisting spiritual violence and making the interventions necessary to redefine an affirming relationship to religion and spirituality on their own terms.
Fashioning the Spirit Queer
This chapter has focused on the ways Black LGBTQ people of faith and spirituality experience literacy normativity as spiritual violence and use literacy to fashion spaces in which to achieve affirming faith identity and spirituality. This is true whether participants are contesting spiritual violence or simply acting in the interest of centering religion or spirituality in ways that are acceptable to them. One response to spiritual violence is the appropriation of literacy to construct a theological position that seeks to end marginalizing interpretations of the Bible and Christian theology. In examining spiritually violent texts and acts, some participants reinterpret the same text used against them in order to affirm their identities as LGBTQ people of faith. Their actions show Black queers of faith making necessary interventions with literacy central to their work. The queering of the intersections between African American literacy history and religion is also pertinent, demonstrated most clearly by those research participants who learned to read and write in and through the literacy institution that is the Church (e.g., Sunday schools, vacation Bible school, religious affiliated primary and secondary schools, etc.) that ultimately disavows them and who then use the literacy they learned in those spaces to challenge experiences of spiritual violence coming from those same churches and faith communities who were central to research participants’ literacy learning and development.
Black queer cultural production, though not prominently featured in my theorization of restorative literacies that research participants employed to address spiritual violence, further supports and could benefit from seeing that work through my concepts and analysis of the efforts of my research participants. However, as already stated, there is a tendency when analyzing these cultural productions to focus on the production itself and not on the role of literacy or the usefulness of literacy history and theory to explicate the phenomenon. The many Black queer cultural productions that address spiritual violence, and thus function as restorative literacies, include novels and short stories such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Craig Harris’s “Cut Off from among His People” (1986), Larry Duplechan’s Blackbird (1986), Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me (1987), and, most recently, E. Lynn Harris’s I Say a Little Prayer (2006); films like Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom (2008), Maurice Jamal’s Dirty Laundry (2006), and the 2015 film adaptation of Duplechan’s Blackbird; and television programs, including Noah’s Arc (2005–6). Part of the labor of this work then is to demonstrate the crucial role of literacy history and theory in understanding discussions of religion and spirituality in Black queer cultural production. My concepts manifest in the Black queer cultural productions I have named and others on multiple levels: first, in the experiences of Black queers of faith and spirituality in which the art is created and responded to; and second, in the impact the cultural productions have on everyday Black queers’ resistance to spiritual violence and fashioning faith and spiritual identities. The latter emerged in my interviews when many research participants implicated some of these cultural productions in the details of their challenges to spiritual violence. However, this inspiration flows two ways, as the experiences of everyday Black queer people and the real-life debates surrounding the issue of spiritual violence undoubtedly influence the cultural productions. A more recent example is director Yoruba Richen’s film The New Black (2013), which looks at how a Black community—and in particular Black churches and activists—deals with the struggle for marriage equality, exploring multiple sides of the debate and how the conservative Christian right attempts to use gay marriage debates as a wedge issue to promote policies that are anti-Black and anti-queer. This further demonstrates the importance of centering the voices of everyday people and their literacies as we examine spiritual violence and its response as detailed in cultural production. Overall, documentation and analysis of Black LGBTQ people employing restorative literacies in the face of literacy normativity manifested as spiritual violence is an invitation to further reconsider the vital sociocultural functions of literacy for exploring relations between Black queer people, religion, spirituality, and literacy, not as a source of contention or confusion, but as a source of power, illumination, and creation.