Some black preachers were angry with me for writing this essay and “telling tales out of school.” It only helped a little that I was honest about my own shortcomings as well. But the black church must engage black sexuality on every front: the sometimes hypocritical assaults by the white mainstream that have over the years caused us to deny our sexual beauty; the sometimes repressive sexual practices of black religious communities that deny the sacredness of sexual identity; and the homophobia that feeds the AIDS pandemic, which has torn through black communities with destructive fury. In this chapter, I combat the legacy of white supremacy that brings shame to black embodiment, even as I exhort the black church to develop a theology of eroticism that freely embraces our God-given sexual gifts. Otherwise, the church will be mired in sanctimonious pronouncements that offer little help to struggling believers, and our children will be further alienated from an institution that, were it honest and courageous, might literally save their lives.
______________________
He healed my body, and told me to run on.
—GOSPEL SONG
“CAN’T NOBODY DO ME LIKE JESUS”
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Love . . . gives you a good feeling. Something like sanctified.
—MARVIN GAYE
“LET’S GET IT ON,” 1973
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Sexual healing is good for me.
—MARVIN GAYE
“SEXUAL HEALING,” 1982
THE VISITING PREACHER, A BRAWNY BROWN MAN with smooth skin and teeth made of pearl, was coming to the close of his sermon, a ritual moment of climax in the black church. It is the inevitable point to which the entire service builds. Its existence is the only justification for the less dramatic rites of community—greeting visitors, collecting tithes, praying for the sick, reading scripture, and atoning for sins. These rites are a hallway to the sanctuary of zeal and vision formed by the black sermon. The furious splendor of the preacher’s rhythmic, almost sung, speech drove the congregation to near madness. His relentless rhetoric stood them on their feet. Their bodies lurched in holy oblivion to space or time. Their hands waved as they shrieked their assent to the gospel lesson he passionately proclaimed. His cadence quickened. Each word swiftly piled on top of the next. The preacher’s sweet moan sought to bring to earth the heavenly light of which his words, even at their most brilliant, were but a dim reflection.
“We’ve got to keep o-o-o-o-on keepin’ on,” he tunefully admonished. The preceding wisdom of his oration on Christian sexuality, arguing the link between passion and morality, turned this cliché into a sermonic clincher.
“We can’t give up,” he continued. “Because we’ve got God, oh yes, we’ve got Go-o-o-o-d, um-humh, on our side.”
“Yes,” members of the congregation shouted. The call and response between the pulpit and the pew escalated as each spurred the other on in ever enlarging rounds of emotion.
“We’ve got a friend who will never forsake us.”
“Yes sir, Reverend.”
“We’ve got a God who can make a way outta no way.”
“Yes we do.”
“He’s a heart fixer, and a mind regulator.”
“Oh, yes He is.”
“I’m here tonight to tell you whatever moral crisis you’re facin’, God can fix it for you.”
“Thank you, Jesus.”
“If you’re facin’ trouble on the job, God can make your boss act better.”
“Tell the truth, Reverend.”
“If your kids won’t act right, God can turn them around.”
“Hallelujah!”
“If you’re fornicating, and I know some of y’all been fornicatin’, God can turn lust to love and give you a healthier relationship with Him.”
“Hold your hope! Hold your hope!”
“If you’re committin’ adultery, and I know some of y’all are doing that, too, God can stop your rovin’ eyes and keep you from messin’ up. Won’t He do it, church?”
“Yes! Yes He will!”
“If your marriage is fallin’ apart, and there’s no joy—I said there’s no jo-oy-oy-oy at your address, God can do for you what He did for David. David asked God: ‘Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation.’ I’m a witness tonight, children. God can do that, church. God can restore your joy. Won’t He do it, children?!”
“Yes He will! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”
“I’m closin’ now, but before I go, I just stopped by to let you know that you can’t find salvation in things. You can’t find salvation in clothes. You can’t find salvation in your car. You can’t find salvation in your wife or husband. And you certainly can’t find salvation in sex. Did y’all hear me? You can’t find salvation in sex. You can’t find it in sleepin’ around, tryin’ to fill the empty places of your life with pleasure and loose livin’.”
“Thank you, Jesus!”
“You can only find salvation in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! Do y’all hear me? Jesus, that’s who you need! Jesus, that’s who can save you. Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
“Thank ya! Oh, hallelujah!”
The congregation erupted in waves of shouting and hand clapping as the minister withdrew from the microphone and dramatically spun to his seat. He was thoroughly spent from a forty-five-minute exercise in edification and enlightenment. As soon as he was done, his fellow ministers on the dais, including me, descended on the preacher’s chair to thank him for his thoughtful, thrilling message. Sex, after all, is a difficult subject to treat in the black church, or, for that matter, in any church. This is indeed ironic. After all, the Christian faith is grounded in the Incarnation, the belief that God took on flesh to redeem human beings. That belief is constantly trumped by Christianity’s quarrels with the body. Its needs. Its desires. Its sheer materiality. But especially its sexual identity.
I got a glimpse that night, or, I should say, a reminder, of how deeply ambivalent Christians are about sex. I learned, too, how dishonest we’re sometimes made by the unresolved disputes between our bodies and our beliefs.
After the service was over, after the worshipers had time to greet and thank the preacher, we ministers, five in all, retired to the pastor’s study.
“Doc, you blessed me tonight,” beamed the pastor, a middle-aged preacher of no mean talent himself. (Among black ministers and their circle of intimates, “Doc” or “Doctor” is an affectionate term given to preachers. It began, perhaps, as a way of upgrading the minister to the level of respect his gifts deserved, especially at a time when black ministers were prevented from completing their formal education.)
“Thank you, man,” the preacher gently replied with a kind of “aw shucks” smile.
“Yeah, Doctor, you were awful, just terrible, boy,” a second minister enthused, heaping on the guest the sort of congratulation black preachers often give to one another.
“Revrun, it was judgment in here tonight,” another minister chimed in with yet another line of black preacherly praise. “You killed everythang in here. And if it wasn’t dead, you put it in intensive care.” At that, we all laughed heartily and agreed that the preacher had hit his mark.
As a young minister in my early twenties, I was just glad to be in their number, bonding with ministerial mentors, men standing on the front line of spiritual warfare, or, as the black church memorably refers to it, “standing in the gap”: carrying and crying the judgment of the Almighty, opening opportunity for salvation, proclaiming the soul’s rescue and the requirements of redemption, and edifying believers with the inscrutable, wholly uncompromising, tell-it-like-it-is, to-bepreached-in-season-and-out-of-season gospel of the living God. I was simply enjoying this magical moment of fraternal friendliness. And it was just that. No women were there. No one thought it odd that they weren’t. We never remarked once on their absence, and, indeed, we counted on their absence to say things, manly things, that we couldn’t, didn’t dare say, in mixed company. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what followed.
“Revrun, I need to ask you something,” the visiting preacher begged the pastor. His eyebrows were raised, a knowing look was on his face, and his voice affected, if not quite a mock seriousness, then a naughty whisper that clued us that his curiosity was more carnal than cerebral.
“Who is that woman with those big breasts who was sitting on the third aisle to my left?” he eagerly inquired. “Damn, she kept shouting and jiggling so much I almost lost my concentration.”
“She is a fine woman, now,” the pastor let on.
“Well, Doc, do you think you could fix me up with her?” the visiting preacher asked with shameless lust.
“I’ll see what I can do, Revrun,” the pastor promised.
The married preacher’s naked desire shocked me. To my surprise, it also made me secretly envious. The fact that he could seek an affair less than an hour after he had thundered against it offended my naive, literal sense of the Christian faith. I thought immediately of how angry I’d been in the past when I heard preachers justify their moral failings, especially their sexual faults. Such ministers chided their followers with a bit of theological doggerel dressed up as a maxim: “God can hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.”
But in ways I didn’t yet completely understand, I envied the preacher’s sense of sexual confidence. He was able to zoom in on his desire and, to borrow a favorite neo-Pentecostal catchphrase, “to name it and claim it.” The preacher—and he was surely aware of it, since he didn’t let principle stand in the way of his pleasure—had apparently made his peace, however temporary, with the war between Christian ideals and delights of the flesh. I hadn’t.
Still, I’m glad I didn’t mount a high horse that night to trample the preacher. I’ve developed enough failures in the sometimes bloody management of erotic desire. So have many other black Christians. Especially those seeking, like most people of faith, to close the gap between what they believe and how they behave. That night, I was nearly tortured by questions I couldn’t answer. Was the preacher’s theology off? Did he have a flawed understanding of how a Christian should view the body and its sexual urges? Was his extreme sexual libertarianism just plain out of order? Was he simply a hypocrite? Or was he acting out, however crudely, a confused sense of black Christian sexuality that is, by turns, repressed and excessive? Or all of the above?
The answers to these questions are not as simple as we might believe, despite the rigid certainty of self-anointed arbiters of Christian Truth. And neither are the answers relevant simply for cases, like the one I’ve described, where everyone can agree that something was wrong. It’s much more difficult to figure out how we can have a healthy sense of black Christian sexual identity in a world where being black has been a sin, where black sexuality has been viewed as a pathology, and where the inability to own—and to own up to—our black bodies has led us to devalue our own flesh. We must recover the erotic uses of our bodies from the distortions of white racism and the traps of black exploitation. We must liberate ourselves to embrace the Christian bliss of our black bodies.
At the beginning of the African presence in the New World, black bodies were viewed in largely clinical and capitalist terms. The value of black slave bodies was determined by their use in furthering the reach of Western colonial rule; expanding the market economies of European and American societies; institutionalizing leisure for white cultural elites; deepening the roots of democracy for white property-owning gentry; and providing labor for the material culture that dominates the American landscape. Interestingly, when Christianity poked its nose in, chattel slavery, already a vile and dehumanizing affair, got even uglier.
Christianity insisted there was a need to save the savages from their own cultural deficits. White Christians sought to rescue slaves from perdition by making sure what little soul they had was made suitable for the Kingdom of God. Christianity gave theological legitimacy, and racial justification, to widely held beliefs about black inferiority. It also sanctified the brutal methods deemed necessary to tame the beastly urges of black Africans. White society exploited black labor. White Christianity made it appear that God was behind the whole scheme. Some argued that God used slavery as a tool to bring backward Africans to America. They believed God used white slavers to save black souls by subjugating their bodies. Christian theology shook hands with slavery and sailed off into the sunset of white supremacy.
A key to keeping blacks under white control was the psychological poison pumped into the intellectual diets of slaves. Whites viewed black bodies as ugly, disgusting, and bestial, and blacks were made aware of this. Black bodies were spoken of in the same breath as, say, horses and cows. As if being viewed as an animal wasn’t bad enough, blacks were also considered property. Because of Western beliefs about the connection between moral and aesthetic beauty, the belief in the ugliness of black bodies carried over to attitudes about black souls.
Black sexuality sat at the heart of such judgments. If black bodies were demeaned, black sexuality was demonized. Unless, of course, it was linked to breeding black babies for slavery, or, in the case of black women, satisfying the lust of white men. Thus, a central paradox of black sexuality began. Even as whites detested black bodies for their raw animalism, they projected onto those same black bodies their repressed sexual yearnings. Black bodies provided recreational and therapeutic relief for whites. Although that paradox has certainly lessened, it has not entirely disappeared.
For the most part, black sexuality was cloaked in white fantasy and fear. Black women were thought to be hot and ready to be bothered. Black men were believed to have big sexual desires and even bigger organs to realize their lust. White men became obsessed with containing the sexual threat posed by black men. The competition for white women was mostly mythical. It was largely the projection of white men’s guilt for raping black women. Even after slavery, white men beat, burned, hung, and often castrated black men in response to the perceived threat black men represented. White men also repressed white female sexuality by elevating a chaste white womanhood above the lustful reach of black men. Well before gangsta rap, the crotch was the crux of black masculine sexual controversy.
During slavery and after emancipation, blacks both resisted and drank in sick white beliefs about black sexuality. Some blacks sought to fulfill the myth of unquenchable black lust. The logic isn’t hard to figure out: if white folk think I’m a sexual outlaw, some blacks perhaps thought, I’ll prove it. Other blacks behaved in exactly the opposite fashion. They rigidly disciplined their sexual urges to erase stereotypes of excessive black sexuality. During slavery, many black women resisted sexual domination through abortion, abstinence, and infanticide. They interrupted white pleasure and profit one body at a time.
The rise of the black church, first as an invisible institution and then as the visible womb of black culture, provided a means of both absorbing and rejecting the sexual values of white society. Black religion freed the black body from its imprisonment in crude, racist stereotypes. The black church combated as best it could the self-hatred and the hatred of other blacks that white supremacy encouraged with evil efficiency. It fought racist oppression by becoming the headquarters of militant social and political action in black communities. The black church produced leaders who spoke with eloquence and prophetic vigor about the persistence of white racism. It was the educational center of black communities, supporting colleges that trained blacks who became shock troops in the battle for racial equality. Black churches unleashed the repressed forces of cultural creativity and religious passion. The church also redirected black sexual energies into the sheer passion and emotional explosiveness of its worship services.
I’m certainly not saying, as do those who argue that black religion compensates for racial oppression—we can’t beat up the white man so we cut up in church—that the displacement of black sexual energy by itself shaped black worship. I’m simply suggesting that the textures, styles, and themes of black worship owe a debt to a complicated sexual history. In sharp contrast to the heat of most black worship experiences, there emerged almost immediately in black churches a conservative theology of sexuality. In part, this theology reflected the traditional teachings of white Christianity. Out of moral necessity, however, black Christians exaggerated white Christianity’s version of “PC”—Puritan Correctness. Later, many black Christians adopted white Christianity’s Victorian repression to rebut the myth of black sexuality being out of control.
The contemporary black church still reflects the roots of its unique history. It continues to spawn social action, though not on the same fronts as it once did. The increased secularization of black communities, and the rise of political leadership outside of the black church, has blunted the focus of the church’s prophetic ministry. Some things, however, have changed very little. There remains deeply entrenched in black churches a profoundly conservative theology of sexuality. Like all religious institutions where doctrine is questioned, rejected, perhaps even perverted by members, the black church faces a tense theological situation. Unlike, say, the Catholic or Episcopal Church where an elaborate and more unyielding hierarchy prevails, historically black churches have a real opportunity to bring lasting change more quickly to their religious bodies. Such change is sorely needed in black communities and churches where issues of sexuality have nearly exploded.
Of course, there are problems that are easily identified but are difficult to solve. Earlier and earlier, black boys and girls are becoming sexually active. Teen pregnancy continues to escalate. Besides these problems, there are all sorts of sexual challenges that black Christians face. The sexual exploitation of black female members by male clergy. The guilt and shame that result from unresolved conflicts about the virtues of black sexuality. The continued rule of black churches by a mainly male leadership. The role of eroticism in a healthy black Christian sexuality. The revulsion to and exploitation of homosexuals. The rise of AIDS in black communities. The sexual and physical abuse of black women and children by black male church members. The resistance to myths of super black sexuality. And the split between mind and body that leads to confusion about a black Christian theology of Incarnation. What should be done?
For starters, the black church should build on a celebration of the body in black culture and worship. Ours, quite simply, is a body-centered culture. Sharp criticism by black intellectuals, including me, of essentialism—the idea that there is such a thing as black culture’s essence, and that we get at it by viewing blacks as a monolith, ignoring differences made by region, sexuality, gender, class, and the like—has made many critics reluctant to highlight persistent features of black life. But in many African and black American communities, colorful, creative uses of the body prevail. (Unfortunately, as we have learned with resurgent slavery and genital mutilation of females in Africa, destructive and oppressive uses of the body mark our cultures as well.) Many black folk use vibrant, sometimes flamboyant, styles and colors to adorn their bodies. Johnnie Cochran’s purple suit and Dennis Rodman’s weirdly exotic hairstyles and body tattoos reveal a flare for outrageous, experimental fashion. Plus, the styling of black bodies for creative expression—Michael Jordan’s gravity-rattling acrobatics, singer Anita Baker’s endearing tics, Denzel Washington’s smoothly sensuous gait, and Janet Jackson’s brilliant integration of street and jazz dance—underscores the improvisational uses of black bodies.
The black church, too, is full of beautiful, boisterous, burdened, and brilliant black bodies in various stages of praising, signifying, testifying, shouting, prancing, screaming, musing, praying, meditating, singing, whooping, hollering, prophesying, preaching, dancing, witnessing, crying, faking, marching, forgiving, damning, exorcising, lying, confessing, surrendering, and overcoming. There is a relentless procession, circulation, and movement of black bodies in the black church: the choir gliding in and grooving to the rhythmic sweep of a grinding gospel number; members marching aisle by aisle to plop a portion of their earnings in the collection plate; women sashaying to the podium to deliver the announcements; kids huddling around the teacher for the children’s morning message; the faithful standing at service’s start to tell how good the Lord’s been to them this week; the convicted leaping to their feet to punctuate a preacher’s point in spiritual relief or guilt; the deliberate saunter to the altar of the “whosoever wills” to pray for the sick and bereaved, and for themselves; the white-haired, worldly wise deacon bowing down at his seat to thank God that he was spared from death, that “the walls of my room were not the walls of my grave,” his bed “sheet was not my winding sheet,” and his bed was not “my cooling board”; the church mother shaking with controlled chaos as the Holy Ghost rips straight through her vocal cords down to her abdomen; the soloist’s hands gesturing grandly as she bends each note into a rung on Jacob’s ladder to carry the congregation “higher and higher”; the ushers’ martial precision as they gracefully guide guests to a spot where they might get a glimpse of glory; the choir director calling for pianissimo with a guileless “shhhh” with one hand as the other directs the appointed soprano to bathe the congregation in her honey-sweet “ha-lay-loo-yuh”; and the preacher, the magnificent center of rhetorical and ritualistic gravity, fighting off disinterest with a “you don’t hear me,” begging for verbal response by looking to the ceiling and drolly declaring “amen lights,” twisting his body to reach for “higher ground,” stomping the floor, pounding the pulpit, thumping the Bible, spinning around, jumping pews, walking benches, climbing ladders—yes literally—opening doors, closing windows, discarding robes, throwing bulletins, hoisting chairs, moaning, groaning, sweating, humming, chiding, pricking, and edifying, all to better “tell the story of Jesus and his love.” In the black church, it’s all about the body: the saved and sanctified body, the fruitful and faithful body, working and waiting for the Lord.
The body, too, is at the center of what Christian theologians have long termed the “scandal of particularity”: the very idea that an unlimited, transcendent God would become a human being, time-bound and headed for death, was just too hard for nonbelievers to swallow. That scandal has special relevance for black Christians, who draw courage from a God who would dare sneak into human history as a lowly, suffering servant. From the plantation to the postindustrial city, suffering blacks have readily identified with a God who, they believe, first identified with them.
The black church has helped blacks find a way to overcome pain, to live through it, to get around it, and, finally, to prosper in spite of it. Black religion has often encouraged black folk to triumph over tragedy by believing that undeserved suffering could be turned to good use. That idea sparked the public ministry of Martin Luther King Jr., a towering son of the black church. The radical identification with Jesus’ life and death, which happened, after all, in his body, has permitted black Christians to endure the absurd violence done to their bodies. Through church sacraments, black Christians nurtured and relieved their bodies’ suffering memories. On every first Sunday of the month, or whenever they celebrated the Lord’s Supper, black Christians broke bread and drank wine, knowing that Jesus’ crucified body was their crucified body, and that Jesus’ resurrected body could be theirs as well. Every time the words of Holy Communion were repeated, “this do in remembrance of me,” black Christians remembered those lost warriors who once fought mightily against oppression but who now slept with the ancestors.
Above all, the Incarnation revealed to black folk a God who, when it came to battling impossible odds, had been there and done that. Because black Christians inevitably had to pass through the “valley of the shadow of death,” they could take solace from a God who had faced a host of ills they faced. Divine abandonment. Cruel cursing. Ethnic bigotry. Religious marginalization. Unjust punishment. Spiteful epithets. And most important, vicious death. Just knowing that God had walked this same earth, eaten this same food, tasted this same disappointment, experienced this same rejection, fought this same self-doubt, endured this same betrayal, felt this same isolation, encountered this same opposition, and overcome this same pain often made the difference between black folk living and dying.
It is indeed ironic that, with so much staked on the body, many black Christians continue to punish themselves with the sort of extreme self-denial that has little to do with healthy sexuality. To a large extent, the black church has aimed to rid the black body of lascivious desires and to purge its erotic imagination with “clean” thoughts. All the while, the black worship experience formed the erotic body of black religious belief, with all the rites of religious arousal that accompany sexual union.
Indeed, the story of the visiting minister that begins this chapter portrays the erotic intensity of the black worship experience: the electric call and response between minister and congregation; the fervent temper of the preacher’s words of wisdom and warning; the extraordinary effort by the minister to seduce the audience onto God’s side through verbal solicitation; and the orgasmic eruption of the congregation at the end of the sermon. It requires no large sophistication to tell that something like sexual stimulation was going on.
Perhaps that’s because there is a profound kinship between spirituality and sexuality. Great mystics figured that out a long time ago. More recently, so have black singers Marvin Gaye, the artist formerly known as Prince, and R. Kelly. Black Christians are reluctant to admit the connection because we continue to live in Cartesian captivity: the mind-body split thought up by philosopher Descartes flourishes in black theologies of sexuality. Except it is translated as the split between body and soul. Black Christians have taken sexual refuge in the sort of rigid segregation they sought to escape in the social realm—the body and soul in worship are kept one place, the body and soul in heat are kept somewhere else. That’s ironic because, as critic Michael Ventura has argued, black culture, especially black music, has healed, indeed transcended, the split between mind and body inherited from Descartes and certain forms of Christian theology. Segments of secular black culture have explored the intimate bond of sexuality and spirituality. The black church has given a great deal to black culture, including the style and passion of much of black pop music. It is time the church accepted a gift in return: the union of body and soul.
The sensuality of our bodies must be embraced in worship. That sensuality should be viewed as a metaphor for the passion of our sexual relations as well. And vice versa. The link between sexuality and spirituality was hinted at when the Bible talked of the church as Christ’s bride, and alternately, as the body of Christ. Because Christian belief is rooted in the Incarnation, Anglican theologian William Temple held that Christianity is literally the most material of all religions. The sheer materiality of our faith is not simply a protection against those versions of Christianity that get high on the soul’s salvation and forget about the body’s need to eat. It is also a rebuke to those who believe that God is opposed to our sexual pleasure. To twist literary critic Roland Barthes, we should celebrate the pleasure of the text, especially when the text is, literally, our bodies.
Simply put, the black church needs a theology of eroticism. Admittedly, that is a hard sell in an Age of Epidemic, where panic and paranoia, more than liberty and celebration, set our sexual moods. Of course, black sexuality has always thrived or suffered under a permanent sign of suspicion or revulsion. Still, that’s no reason to be cavalier about sex when its enjoyment can kill us. A theology of eroticism certainly promotes safe sex. Our definition of safety, however, must include protection against the harmful sexual and psychic viruses that drain the life from our desire. Further, a theology of eroticism looks beyond the merely physical to embrace abstinence as a powerful expression of sexuality.
In the main, a theology of eroticism must be developed to free black Christian sexuality from guilty repression or gutless promiscuity. Sermon after sermon counsels black Christians to abstain from loose behavior. To sleep only with our mates. To save sex for permanent love. And to defer sexual gratification until we are married. In black churches, as with most religious institutions, hardly anyone waits for marriage to have sex. People sleep with their neighbor’s spouse. Casual sex is more than casually pursued. And because the needs of their bodies make them liars with bad consciences, some drown their demons in a sea of serial monogamies. Little of this is highly pleasurable, but it’s pleasurable enough to make us unhappy. Ugh!
What’s even more intriguing is that the sermons pretty much stay the same. Black Christians pretty much tell their children and each other that that’s how things ought to be. And consistency is seen as a substitute for tradition. But it certainly isn’t. Vital, living traditions leave space for people to change bad habits because they have a better understanding of what the tradition should mean. As one wise churchman put it: tradition is the living faith of dead people, while the traditional is the dead faith of living people. Too often, the latter has ruled black churches. While we may share our forebears’ faith, we can certainly leave aspects of their theologies behind.
A theology of eroticism is rooted in simple honesty about black sexuality. While we tell our kids not to have sex, more and more of them do. They are making babies, having babies, and dying from AIDS. The black church should lay off the hard line on teen sexuality. Sure, it must preach abstinence first. It should also preach and teach safe sex, combining condoms and common sense. It should tell kids from ages twelve through seventeen that when it’s all said and done, human sexuality is still an enlarging mystery, a metaphor of how life seeks more of itself to sustain itself, of how life, as black theologian Howard Thurman remarked, is itself alive. (Of course, we adults could use a reminder of this as well.) Our sexuality is one way life reminds itself of that lesson. In the hands of groping teens, sex is often little more than bewilderment multiplied by immaturity, despite growing, groaning body parts that seem fit for the job. In an era when music videos, television commercials, daytime soaps, and nighttime cable movies exploit our kids’ urges, it’s no wonder that they, and indeed, all of us, have sex on the brain. If only we could use that organ more in our erotic escapades.
The bottom line, however, is that traditional black church methods of curbing teen sex aren’t working. We must make a choice. Either we counsel our kids about how to have sex as safely as they can, or we prepare to bury them before their lives begin. The cruelty of contemporary sex is that the consequences of our kids’ mistakes, the same mistakes we made, are often swift and permanent. Most black preachers and parents who tell kids they shouldn’t have sex had sex as teens. If not, most of them surely tasted carnal pleasure before they were married. The guilt or embarrassment stirred by their hidden hypocrisy often makes them harsh and unyielding in their views on teen sexuality. The black church’s theology of eroticism should place a premium on healthy, mature relations where lust is not mistaken for affection. It must make allowances for our children, however, to learn the difference, and to safely experiment with their bodies in pursuit of genuine erotic health. The black church should pass out condoms on its offering plates. At the least, it should make them available in restrooms or in the offices of clergypersons or other counselors. The days of let’s-pretend-the-problems-will-goaway, never-fully-here-anyway, are now most certainly gone.
We must find remedies, too, for angst-ridden black preachers. Many of them stir anxiety in their congregations because of their own conflicted theology of sexuality. The visiting minister I spoke of earlier was bewitched by the erotic double bind that traps some ministers. He preached a theology of sexuality that satisfied the demands of black church tradition. But he was also moved by erotic desires that are rarely openly discussed in black churches, or in the seminaries that prepare men and women to pastor. The sexual exploitation of black women by black preachers, and the seduction of preachers by female members, rests on just this sort of confusion. (Of course, it also rests on a gender hierarchy in black churches where women do much of the labor but are largely prevented from the highest leadership role: the pastorate. The ecclesiastical apartheid of the black church, which is more than 70 percent female, continues to reinforce the sexual inequality of black women.) In many cases, both parties are caught in the thralls of unfocused erotic desire. Such desire doesn’t receive reasonable, helpful attention. It is either moralized against or it lands on the wagging tongues of church gossips.
As a very young pastor—I was all of twenty-three years old—I sometimes participated in the sort of sex play that mocks healthy erotic desire. Once, after assuming the pastorate of a small church in the South, I received a call from a desperate female parishioner.
“Reverend Dyson, I need to see you right away,” the soft, teary voice on my phone insisted. “It’s an emergency. I can’t discuss it on the telephone.”
It was seven o’clock at night. Since I lived nearly a hundred miles from the city where my church was located, it would take me at least an hour and a half to reach her home.
“All right, Ms. Bright (not her real name),” I replied. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I told my fiancée Brenda, with whom I was living, that a member needed me to come immediately. I tore up the highway in a frantic race to Ms. Bright’s home. I was a young, relatively inexperienced pastor, new on the job, and eager to please. When I arrived at Ms. Bright’s home, her parents greeted me at the door. Judging by the surprised look on their faces, her parents had no idea of their daughter’s distress, or her urgent request to see me. When she appeared a few minutes later, I didn’t let on that I’d just zoomed to their house to help relieve their daughter of whatever problem she had. To them, I guess it looked like I had come courting on the sly. After all, neither of us were married, and Ms. Bright was only a few years older than me. Although I was in a committed relationship with Brenda, my members didn’t know that we were, as the ’70s R&B hit goes, “living together in sin.” (Already living in the Bible Belt, perhaps on its buckle, I was caught in the cross fire between sex and soul almost before my career as a pastor began.)
Ms. Bright suggested that we go upstairs to her room to talk. We excused ourselves from pleasant chitchat with her amiable parents. We soon found ourselves alone in her stylish, sweetly scented bedroom. I felt awkward. I’d never spent time alone with her before outside of the few occasions we spoke in church. Besides, I didn’t know what signal my presence in her boudoir might send. But I soon found out what was weighing on her heart and mind.
“Reverend Dyson, I think I’m in love with you,” she blurted out.
I was genuinely startled. I had never been a Don Juan. And despite the crude stereotypes of ministers as lotharios out to bed every woman within speaking distance, I certainly hadn’t been promiscuous. I could count the number of girlfriends I’d had on one hand. And I’d never been led to think of myself as irresistibly handsome. I wasn’t a guy, like many I’d known, for whom women seemed to pant and pine. I was just Mike Dyson, the poor kid from Detroit who worked hard, studied long, and mostly lived out his sexual fantasies with a few beautiful women.
“Well, Ms. Bright, I, um, I, well, I’m very flattered,” I barely managed. By now my yellow face was flushed and my eyes were boring holes in the floor. “I don’t know what to say.”
Then it hit me. My pastor, Frederick Sampson, knowing that the advice would one day come in handy, had given me a stern warning.
“Never let a woman down harshly, Mike,” Dr. Sampson said. “Always be gentle and considerate.” Eureka! Here was my out.
“You know, Ms. Bright, what you’ve said makes me feel good,” I uttered with more conviction. “I’m truly honored that a woman like you would even be interested in me. But you know I’m in love with Brenda.”
I saw the disappointment in her eyes. Quickly extending Sampson’s rule, I was determined not to make Ms. Bright feel foolish.
“But if I was available, you’re the kind of woman I would definitely like to be with.”
And I wasn’t just blowing smoke, as they say. Ms. Bright was a very intelligent, inquisitive woman, as our few conversations revealed. She was also a beautiful woman; a tall five feet ten inches, she dwarfed my five-foot-nine-inch frame. She had flawless chocolate skin, an incandescent smile, a sensuous voice, and a voluptuous figure.
“Really?” she replied.
In retrospect, I guess that gave her an opening. And despite denying it then, I probably wanted her to find it. Although each of us had been sitting on chairs in her room, Ms. Bright stood up and, well, descended on me. Standing directly above me, she confessed that she’d spent a great deal of time daydreaming about me.
“I just can’t get you off my mind,” she said. “I really think I’m in love with you, Reverend Dyson. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
As the words rolled off her tongue, which I began to notice more and more, she began to run her fingers through my hair. I was embarrassed, ashamed, almost mortified, and extremely turned on.
“Well, I don’t know either, Ms. Bright,” I muttered. “I guess, well, I don’t know, I guess we’ll just have to . . . ”
Before I could finish, she was kissing me. Before long, we were kissing each other. Our tongues dueled with more energy than we’d been able to devote to resolving her problem. Except now, it was our problem. I wasn’t in love with her, but my lust was certainly piqued. Talk about not letting a woman down roughly; I certainly wasn’t flunking that test. But I felt bad for cheating on Brenda. I yanked myself free from Ms. Bright’s luscious lip lock and came up for air, reaching as well for a little perspective.
“Look, Ms. Bright, I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I said through my heavy breathing. “After all, I’m your pastor, and I should be counseling you, not trying to get down with you.”
She simply smiled. Then, before I could protest, she was out of her blouse. Next her bra fell to the floor! The queenly, regal pose she struck, part Pam Grier and part British royalty, made me feel like a lowly subject. And gawking at the sheer magnificence of her breasts, I was glad to be in her majesty’s service. We groped each other like high school teens stranded in a hormonal storm. After nearly a half hour of this pantomimed intimacy, guilt suddenly overtook me. Better yet, the thought of having sex with her parents able to hear the bed creak and groan quenched my erotic fire. I recovered what little pastoral authority I had left—I think it was mixed up with my jacket and tie on the floor—and insisted that we quit. So we fixed up our clothes. Ms. Bright retouched her makeup, and without saying much—what could we say?—we went back downstairs to make small talk with her parents. After fifteen minutes or so, I bid them farewell and drove home far more slowly than I’d driven to my appointment. I was more disappointed at myself than angry at Ms. Bright. Despite what she said—and even she probably didn’t really believe it—I didn’t think Ms. Bright was in love with me. She simply had a crush, though, admittedly, it was a big one. Plus, she had a healthy dose of sexual desire, a subject we should have been able to talk about, not only in her house but in our church. We should have been able to refer to sex education classes, sermon series, Sunday school discussions, Sunday night forums, and a host of other ways that erotic desire might be addressed in the black church. Some churches are doing this, but they are far, far too few in number.
I was flattered that Ms. Bright wanted me. At the same time, I was ashamed that I’d given in to wanting her. I’d come to pray. I’d ended up the prey—the willing prey, as it turned out. Maybe Ms. Bright had seen the desire in my eyes, which failed to be disguised as pastoral concern. Maybe she was simply the first to act on what she knew we both wanted. Maybe she was just more honest.
On my way home, I couldn’t help thinking of the visiting preacher. I got a lot more humble. Still, I kept thinking about my erotic encounter with Ms. Bright. Despite trying to feel bad about it, I found myself getting aroused all over again. I hadn’t yet figured out that it’s all right to enjoy erotic desire—to own up to the fact that you can be horny and holy—as long as you don’t live at the mercy of your hormones. But if we can’t talk about sex at home, and we can’t talk about it at church, black Christians end up lying to ourselves and to the people to whom we’re sexually attracted. And too often, we end up being much more destructive because of our erotic dishonesty.
Because so many black Christians have taken up the task of being sexual saviors—of crucifying the myths of black hypersexuality and sexual deviance—we abhor out-of-bounds sexuality. This social conservatism expresses itself as a need to be morally upright. Beyond reproach. (Unsurprisingly, gangsta rappers are high on the list of sinners. If its detractors actually ever listened to more than snippets of gangsta rap lyrics, they’d probably have a lot more grist for their critical mills.) Oh, if it was only that simple. If the black church—for God’s sake, if any religious institution—was erotically honest, it would admit that the same sexual desire that courses through rappers’ veins courses through the veins of its members. If many of the black ministers who wail against the sexual improprieties of hip-hop culture would be erotically honest, they’d admit that the same lust they nail rappers for breaks out in their own ranks. And there aren’t too many sermons pointing that out.
The standard religious response has been: “Of course we have the same desires, but we fight them and put them in proper perspective.” That’s partly true. The desire is certainly fought. Why, you can see the strain of erotic repression on unmade-up faces, in long dresses that hide flesh, and in the desexualized carriage of bodies (notice the burden is largely on the women) in the most theologically rigid of orthodox black churches. But that’s just the point: mere repression is not the proper perspective. We’ve got to find a mean between sexual annihilation and erotic excess. Otherwise, the erotic practices of church members will continue to be stuck in silence and confusion.
Neither are there many sermons that assail ministers for exploiting women. To be sure, there are women who think they were put on earth to please the pastor. For them, embracing his flesh is like embracing a little bit of heaven. Pastors should study their books on transference and help spread light on this fallacy. Of course, there are just as many women who simply get in heat over a man who can talk, especially if they’ve dealt with men for whom saying hello in the morning is an effort. So let’s not romanticize the put-upon, helpless female who’s charmed by the wiles of the slick, Elmer Gantry–like, minister-as-omnicompetent-stud-andstand-in-for-God.
Too often, though, there are women who come to the minister seeking a helping hand who get two instead. Plus some lips, legs, arms—well, you get the picture. The black church is simply running over with brilliant, beautiful black women of every age, hue, and station. Pecan publicists. Ebony lawyers. Caramel doctors. Mocha engineers. Beige clerks. Bronze businesswomen. Brown housewives. Redbone realtors. Yellow laborers. Coffee teachers. Blueblack administrators. Copper maids. Ivory tellers. Chocolate judges. Tan students. Often these women are sexually pursued by the church’s spiritual head, so to speak.
This fact makes it especially hard to endure the chiding of black preachers, veiled in prophetic language, launched at the sexual outlaws of black pop culture. In reality, the great Martin Luther King Jr. is the patron saint of the sexual unconscious of many black ministers, but for all the wrong reasons. For most of the time he lived in the glare of international fame, King, as is well known, carried on affairs with many women. He wasn’t proud of it. He confessed his guilt. He said he’d try to do better. But he just couldn’t give it up. Plus, he was away from home for 28 days of most months. Lest too many critics aiming to bring King down a notch or two for his moral failings get any ideas, bear in mind that he spent that kind of time away from his wife and children, under enormous stress and at great peril to his life, leading the war against racial inequality.
Many black ministers have absorbed King’s erotic habits, and those of many white and black ministers before and after him. But they have matched neither his sacrifice nor his achievements. Not that such factors excuse King’s behavior. But they do help us understand the social pressures that shaped King’s erotic choices. One must remember, too, the ecology of erotic expression for civil rights workers. The wife of a famous civil rights leader once told me civil rights workers often went to towns where their presence reviled whites and upset many complacent blacks. She said it was natural that they sexually fed off of each other within their tight circles of sympathy and like-minded perspective. That squares as well with King’s comment that a lot of his philandering was a release from the extraordinary pressures he faced. That’s probably a large part of the story, though it can’t be the complete story. King’s behavior apparently predates his fame. His philandering was a complex matter.
In some senses, King’s erotic indiscretions were the expression of a Casanova complex, pure and simple. That complex is especially present in famous men whose success is a gateway to erotic escapades. Indeed, their fame itself is eroticized. Their success is both the capital and the commodity of sex. It procures sexual intimacy and is the gift procured by (female) sexual surrender. Then, too, for black men there is a tug-of-war occurring on the psychosexual battlefield. Black men occupy a symbolic status as studs. That stereotype is one of the few that black men refuse to resist. They embrace it almost in defiance of its obvious falseness, as an inside joke. (How many times did King tell white audiences that blacks wanted to be their brothers, not their brothers-in-law, even as white women flaunted themselves before him? King was even set to marry a white woman when he was in seminary, but she was sent away, and King was warned by a mentor that he would never be able to be a black leader with a white wife.)
There is also a specific psychology of the ministerial Casanova. He believes he merits sexual pleasure because of his sacrificial leadership of the church community. Ironically, he sees the erotic realm as an arena of fulfillment because it is forbidden, a forbiddance that he makes a living preaching to others. (Yes, the cliché is certainly true that “That which is denied becomes popular.”) But erotic forbiddance is a trap. The very energy exerted against erotic adventure becomes a measure for ministerial integrity. It becomes the very force the minister must resist if he is to be erotically honest. Erotic desire both induces guilt in the minister and is his reward for preaching passionately about the need for the denial of erotic exploitation! Self-delusion and self-centeredness mingle in this arena of sexual desire.
All of this sets up an erotic gamesmanship between minister and the potential—often willing—object of his erotic desire. One of the rules of the game is, “Let’s see if I can get him to fall, to act against what he proclaims as truth.” This is more than simply a case of Jezebel out to seduce the minister. It is a case of erotic desire being expressed in a way that reflects the unequal relation between male leaders and female followers.
Many ministers who travel on the revival circuit—delivering sermons and giving a lift to the sagging spirits of churches across the nation—too often settle into comfortable habits of sexual exploitation. Their regimen of erotic enjoyment gets locked in early in their careers. They travel to churches, preach the gospel, meet a woman or women, have sex, return home, go back the next year and do the same. Even ministers who stay in place can roam their congregations, or the congregations of their peers, in search of erotic adventure. What it comes down to is that the Martin Luther King Jrs., and the Snoop Doggy Doggs of black culture all want the same thing. The Snoops are up front about it. Most of us in the black church aren’t.
The same erotic dishonesty applies to another sexual identity: homosexuality. The notorious homophobia of the black church just doesn’t square with the numerous same-sex unions taking place, from the pulpit to the pew. One of the most painful scenarios of black church life is repeated Sunday after Sunday with little notice or collective outrage. A black minister will preach a sermon railing against sexual ills, especially homosexuality. At the close of the sermon, a soloist, who everybody knows is gay, will rise to perform a moving number, as the preacher extends an invitation to visitors to join the church. The soloist is, in effect, being asked to sing, and to sign, his theological death sentence. His presence at the end of such a sermon symbolizes a silent endorsement of the preacher’s message. Ironically, the presence of his gay Christian body at the highest moment of worship also negates the preacher’s attempt to censure his presence, to erase his body, to deny his legitimacy as a child of God. Too often, the homosexual dimension of eroticism remains cloaked in taboo or blanketed in theological attack. As a result, the black church, an institution that has been at the heart of black emancipation, refuses to unlock the oppressive closet for gays and lesbians.
One of the most vicious effects of the closet is that some of the loudest protesters against gays and lesbians in the black church are secretly homosexual. In fact, many, many preachers who rail against homosexuality are themselves gay. Much like the anti-Semitic Jew, the homophobic gay or lesbian Christian secures his or her legitimacy in the church by denouncing the group of which he or she is a member, in this case an almost universally despised sexual identity. On the surface, such an act of self-hatred is easy. But it comes at a high cost. Homophobic rituals of self-hatred alienate the gay or lesbian believer from his or her body in an ugly version of erotic Cartesianism: splitting the religious mind from the homosexual body as a condition of Christian identity. This erotic Cartesianism is encouraged when Christians mindlessly repeat about gays and lesbians, “we love the sinner but we hate the sin.” A rough translation is “we love you but we hate what you do.” Well, that mantra worked with racists: we could despise what racist whites did while refusing to despise white folk themselves, or whiteness per se. (Of course, there were many blacks who blurred that distinction and hated white folk as well as they pleased.) But with gay and lesbian identity, to hate what they do is to hate who they are. Gays and lesbians are how they have sex. (I’m certainly not reducing gay or lesbian identity to sexual acts. I’m simply suggesting that the sign of homosexual difference, and hence the basis of their social identification, is tied to the role of the sex act in their lives.)
The black church must develop a theology of homoeroticism, a theology of queerness. (Well, if we want to be absolutely campy, we might term it a theology for Afriqueermericans.) After all, if any group understands what it means to be thought of as queer, as strange, as unnatural, as evil, it’s black folk. A theology of queerness uses the raw material of black social alienation to build bridges between gay and lesbian and straight black church members. The deeply entrenched cultural and theological bias against gays and lesbians contradicts the love ethic at the heart of black Christianity. Virulent homophobia mars the ministry of the black church by forcing some of our leading lights into secret and often selfdestructive sexual habits. James Cleveland, considered the greatest gospel artist of the contemporary black church, died several years ago, it is rumored, from AIDS. Aside from embarrassed whispers and unseemly gossip, the black church still hasn’t openly talked about it. Perhaps if gay and lesbian black church members could come out of their closets, they could leave behind as well the destructive erotic habits that threaten their lives.
The black church should affirm the legitimacy of homoerotic desire by sanctioning healthy unions between consenting gay and lesbian adults. After all, promiscuity, not preference, eats away at the fabric of our erotic integrity. Are gays and lesbians who remain faithful to their partners committing a greater sin than married heterosexuals who commit adultery? The ridiculousness of such a proposition calls for a radical rethinking of our black Christian theology of sexuality.
Central to the doctrine of Incarnation in the black church is the belief that God identified with the most despised members of our society by becoming the most despised member of our society. Sunday after Sunday, black ministers invite us to imagine God as, say, a hobo, or a homeless person. Well, imagine God as gay. Imagine God as lesbian. Is the gay or lesbian body of God to be rejected? Better still, isn’t God’s love capable of redeeming a gay or lesbian person? The traditional black theological answer has been yes, if that person is willing to “give up” his or her sin—in this case, being gay or lesbian—and turn to God. But a more faithful interpretation of a black theology of love and liberation asserts that God takes on the very identity that is despised or scorned—being black, say, or being poor, or being a woman—to prove its worthiness as a vehicle for redemption. We don’t have to stop being black to be saved. We don’t have to stop being women to be saved. We don’t have to stop being poor to be saved. And we don’t have to stop being gay or lesbian to be saved. Black Christians, who have been despised and oppressed for much of our existence, should be wary of extending that oppression to our lesbian sisters and gay brothers.
The black church continues to occupy the center of black culture. Although most black folk have never officially joined its ranks, the influence of the black church spreads far beyond its numbers. The black church raised up priests to administer healing to wounded spirits in slavery. It produced prophets to declare the judgment of God against racial injustice. The black church has been at the forefront of every major social, political, and moral movement in black culture. It remains our most precious institution. It has the opportunity to lead again, by focusing the black erotic body in its loving, liberating lens. A daughter of the black community, Jocelyn Elders, attempted to bring the sharp insight and collective wisdom of our tradition to a nation unwilling to ponder its self-destructive sexual habits. Let’s hope that her advice won’t be lost on those closer to home. Like Marvin Gaye, black churches and communities need sexual healing. If we get healed, we might just be able to help spread that health beyond our borders.