Afro-Netizen

Not Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Black Atheists, Urban America

Not Knocking on Heaven’s Door:* Black Atheists, Urban America *

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

Late Saturday afternoon, like clockwork, the street corner preachers on Crenshaw and King Boulevard in South Los Angeles take to the “stage.” Decked out in flowing robes and dreadlocks, they fulminate into their mikes about the universe, God’s will and “unnatural” homosexuals to a motley audience waiting for the next express bus. Members of the Black Israelites, they are part of a long tradition of performative religiosity in urban African American communities. This particular corner of black America is a hotbed of social commerce. Kids who’ve just gotten out of school mingle jubilantly as pedestrians flow past fast food places, mom and pop retailers, street vendors and Jehovah’s Witness’ hawking Watchtower magazines. The Israelites have become a fixture of this street corner’s otherwise shifting tableaux. Exclusively male and virulently sexist and homophobic, they are tolerated in some African American communities in part because of the lingering visceral and misguided appeal of Black nationalism.

While the Israelites’ millennialist “racial uplift” ethos ostensibly fits right in to the bustle of this prominent South L.A. street, other belief systems are not as easily assimilated. Since 2006, the L.A.-based street philosopher Jeffrey “P Funk” Mitchell has been documenting his conversations with everyday folk on questions of atheism and faith. Using the handle “Atheist Walking,” Mitchell also conducts free-ranging inquiries into Christianity’s contradictions with a rolling video camera and a satirically raised eyebrow. Adopting the role of the bemused urban flaneur, ala the commentator- pedestrian immortalized by French poet Charles Baudelaire, he delves into “atheist spirituality,” biblical literalism and the paradoxes of faith.

Mitchell is a member of the L.A.-based Black Skeptics, a group that was formed earlier this year to provide an outlet and platform for secular humanist African Americans. The Skeptics are part of a small but growing segment of African Americans who are searching for humanist alternatives to organized religion. In May, the Washington DC Center for Inquiry’s first annual African Americans for Humanism conference drew over fifty participants. Chat groups and websites like the Black Atheists of America have sprung up to accommodate the longing for community amongst non-theist African Americans who feel marginalized in a sea of black hyper-religiosity. Organizations such as the Institute for Humanist Studies cultivate African American secularist scholarship and advocacy.

With over 85% of African Americans professing religious belief, black religiosity is a formidable influence. Racial segregation, the historical role of the Black Church, and African American social conformity reinforce Christianity’s powerful hold on black communities. Indeed, I was recently told that I’d been deemed an unsuitable culmination speaker for a bourgie philanthropic organization’s young women mentees because of my decidedly unladylike public atheism (Perhaps the Israelite’s Old Testament shout-out to silent prostrate women would be more acceptable).

Proper role models for impressionable black youth are, at the very least, skillful church lady pretenders with ornate hats in tow. Secular organizations that seek to build humanist community with a predominantly African American base and social justice world view are challenged by the association of charitable giving, philanthropy, poverty work and education with faith-based communities. For many, successfully emulating the strong social and cultural networks that have sustained church congregations is an elusive goal.

And then, there is the deep and abiding desire for belief in the supernatural, the ineffable faith-passion that propels some through the trauma of racial indignities and personal crisis. Yet, humanism asks why we should cede enlightenment and the potential for restoration to the supernatural. Humanism challenges the implication that the sublimity of the natural world, and our connection to those that we love, admire and respect, is somehow impoverished without a divine creator.

In one of his bus stop monologues, Mitchell comments, “I want people to look at each other with the same reverence that they look at God and realize that ‘we’ did this, we made this happen.” The “we” represents will, agency, and motive force; qualities that many believers would attribute to God as omniscient architect and overseer. Non-believers are compelled to ask whether individual actions (for good or ill) are determined by God, or whether human beings simply act on their own volition in a universe overseen by God. Since time immemorial, non-believers have questioned whether God exercises control over those who commit evil acts or whether hell is the only “medium” for justice. By refusing to invest supernatural forces with divine authority over human affairs, humanism emphasizes human responsibility for the outcome of our pursuits. Morality is defined by just deeds, fairness, equality and respect for difference; not by how blusteringly one claims to adhere to “Godly” principles.

However, in communities that are plagued with double digit unemployment and a sense of cultural devaluation, notions of self-sufficiency and ultimate human agency may be perceived as demoralizing if not dangerously radical. As a child preacher steeped in the fiery oratory of the Black Church, writer James Baldwin recounted his growing cynicism about spreading “the gospel.” Lamenting the grip of religion on poor blacks, Baldwin said, “When I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to…tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize.”

In Baldwin’s view organized religion’s requirement that believers suspend disbelief and submit to “God’s will” is a liability for working class African Americans. Religious dogma anesthetizes as it bonds, a dangerous combination in an era in which the proliferation of storefront churches in urban black communities is a symptom of economic underdevelopment.

Echoing Baldwin, Chicago-based Education professor and atheist Kamau Rashid argues that “Freethought is an extension and expression of the struggle that African Americans have waged for self-determination. In fact it represents a heightened phase of such a struggle wherein one of the final stages of ‘conceptual incarceration,’ the belief in a God or gods, is discarded for a belief in the human potential, for a belief in ourselves.”

And why, in a heritage steeped in the revolutionary thought of such dirty outlaw skeptics as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, A. Philip Randolph, James Forman and Alice Walker, would this be so viscerally frightening?

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org, a member of the Black Skeptics Group and the author of the forthcoming book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.

*With apologies to Bob Dylan

Easter Season, Capital Punishment, and the “Drum Major for Peace”

By Margaret Summers

Guest Contributor

During Easter season, Christians worldwide celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It occurs in the early spring, a season rife with anticipation and the promise of new beginnings; of the shoots of green plants pushing their way through soil warmed by the sun, thawed after a long and frozen winter; of new leaves opening on trees and bushes; of blossoming flowers upturned to the rays of a welcoming sun.

This year, in a tragic historic coincidence, Easter Sunday fell on the 42nd anniversary of the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil and human rights champion, a self-described “drum major for peace.”   Dr. King was shot dead on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with friends and fellow activists. They were in Memphis to support economic justice for striking sanitation workers, a majority of whom were African American.

Uprisings exploded in several urban U.S. cities in reaction to the murder – expressions of uncontrollable grief, rage, and hopelessness, now that the man who had led millions up figurative mountaintops where all could share in his vision of a promised land where races could live together in equality, respect and love, was so violently and brutally taken from them.

Undoubtedly such anger and anguish back then prompted many to call for the execution of whoever was responsible for killing Dr. King. But neither Dr. King nor his immediate family had ever supported capital punishment. For Dr. King, a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, whose massive nonviolent demonstrations brought down British colonial rule in India – a tactic that Dr. King later used with great success in the sit-ins, pray-ins, and other anti-segregation protests in the Deep South – it was impossible to simultaneously believe in nonviolence as a way of life and also believe in the death penalty.

Dr. King felt the punishment effectively writes off human beings as forever irredeemable and unforgivable. “Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality,” he said. “As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.”

“I do not think God approves the death penalty for any crime - rape and murder included,” Dr. King asserted. “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

Dr. King’s family, suddenly left without a husband and father 42 years ago, nevertheless agreed with his views that the death penalty perpetuates violence.

 “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses,” his widow, Coretta Scott King, once said. “An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.”

Such sentiments have been echoed by two of his children. “Having lost my father and grandmother to gun violence, I will understand the deep hurt and anger felt by the loved ones of those who have been murdered,” Reverend Bernice King, recently named President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was once led by her father, had stated. “Yet I can't accept the judgment that their killers deserve to be executed. This merely perpetuates the tragic, unending cycle of violence that destroys our hope for a decent society.”  His son, Martin Luther King, III, who was named for his father and grandfather, was quoted as saying, “I should be on the front line for those advocating the death penalty, [but] we have always been consistently against the death penalty.”  

The King family’s beliefs are not unusual. They are shared by many murder victims’ families. Among the members of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s Board of Directors, three individuals – New Hampshire State Rep. Robert “Renny” Cushing, Bill Pelke and Bud Welch – lost family members to murder. Rep. Cushing’s father was killed by gunfire through the family home’s screen door. Pelke’s grandmother was killed in the course of a robbery of her home by four teenaged girls.  Welch’s daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing.

The three are active in organizations working to rid the United States and the world of capital punishment – Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and Journey of Hope . . . from Violence to Healing. Victims’ families and the death penalty abolition movement have long worked together to let the public know that the death penalty does not help, but harms such families. The expensive punishment drains needed resources from grief counseling, victims’ families’ compensation, and other services and programs that enable these families to heal. Together, the voices of abolitionists and such murder victims’ families’ organizations and victims’ family members are amplified, united, as they say, “Please – don’t kill in our names.”

It is my hope that this Easter season, as many of us celebrate the resurrection of He who also stood for nonviolence and peace, we remember the words of Dr. King and his family members who rejected a punishment system that in the end dehumanizes us all. “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy,” Dr. King said. “... In fact, violence merely increases hate. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

Margaret Summers is the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s Director of Communications.

What Would Jesus Do? Uganda, White Supremacy and Right-Wing Evangelical Blood Money

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

White evangelicals have taken their corrupt “traditional family values” racket to Africa and hit paydirt. 

Over the past several months, Uganda’s terrorist anti-homosexual bill has been exposed as not just a symbol of African homophobia but a symptom of American evangelical influence-peddling.   While the legal battle over same sex marriage has reached epic proportions in the United States, American evangelicals have been quietly wielding “moral” influence over African public policy, spearheading a rabid call for retribution against gays and lesbians in their missionary pilgrimages. 

During a March 2009 trip to Uganda, evangelical activists Scott Lively and Don Schmierer warned Ugandan leaders of a gay agenda to “take over the world.” Lively and Schmierer have been roundly condemned by human rights and social justice organizations for galvanizing Ugandan politicians to develop the legislation.   

As has been well-documented, the Ugandan legislation would “seek to protect the traditional family by prohibiting any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” It would also bar “the promotion or recognition of such sexual relations in public institutions and other places through or with the support of any Government entity in Uganda or any non-governmental organization inside or outside the country.” 

The Bill envisions a vast homosexual conspiracy of “sexual activists” seeking to convert youth and adopt children.  It would require those knowing of homosexual acts to report them or risk prosecution, and, as a result, seriously jeopardize the country's inroads in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

The United States and other donor countries have denounced the Bill.  Facing the possible loss of international aid, the Ugandan government is considering revising an earlier provision which would have required the execution of known homosexuals.

After a firestorm of criticism, the evangelicals have also tried to distance themselves from the flap.  However, the Ugandan Bill is part of a larger movement of evangelical puppeteering.  The bill exploits anti-gay sentiment and anxieties within African culture about a family structure under siege by “outside” forces, evoking some of the same tensions that African American communities experienced around California's Proposition 8. 

Fittingly, the Bill has been bankrolled by conservative foundations and promoted by the far right Christian activist group the Family, a covert network of influential politicians and power brokers.  The Family hosts this week's National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., an annual gathering for power brokers from the international community.

Stoking anti-gay sentiment through biblical edict and propaganda about potential homosexual corruption of the African family, evangelicals have used Africa as a springboard for a virulently homophobic agenda that has been intensified by the struggle over gay equal rights in the United States.  At the forefront of this movement is President Obama's buddy Rick Warren.  Warren's purpose-driven crew is hugely influential in Africa, funding schools, missions and HIV/AIDS treatment while brokering homophobia.

Warren and his American counterparts have identified Africa as the new frontier and future of evangelicalism.  And as such, Africa is fertile ground for the export of hate and right wing evangelical terrorism.  Indeed, evangelicals’ hold on Africa is merely an extension of white supremacist control over African self-determination. 

The colonial legacy of African exploitation by the West, exemplified by the undue cultural and economic influence of Western missionaries, has played a pernicious role in the African psyche.  To the extent that African nations have been so besieged by Western influence, their embrace of American-bred homophobia, in exchange for American largesse, is simply part of the package of white capitalist patronage.

For this reason, it is inconceivable that African evangelicals would have the same impact on public policy in the West.  In a sweeping expose, the progressive think tank Political Research Associates reports that American evangelicals have long been active in promoting anti-gay public policy through their missionary work in Africa.  Because “the demographic center of Christianity is shifting from the global North to the global South,” Africa’s influence on the global direction of Christianity has increased. 

According to the report, one of the architects of this movement is the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD).  IRD is a neo-conservative think tank which has exploited the widespread belief that homosexuality is a western phenomenon that undermines essential African culture values.  Scratch the surface and IRD is a radical political organization that has actively opposed the social justice campaigns of mainline Protestant churches and pro-democracy movements in Central America and Africa. 

Supported by ultraconservative foundations such as the Scaife and Bradley Foundations, the organization is part of a well-financed network of think tanks and nonprofits, many with tax exempt status granted to religious entities.

The staggering amounts funneled into these organizations dwarfs foundation grants and funding to progressive advocacy organizations.  As a result, conservative organizations are better equipped to position themselves as lobbyists and power brokers in both the global and domestic legislative arena.

The intersection of dire poverty, underdevelopment and social desperation has historically made African countries vulnerable to the moral profiteering of a bankrupt evangelical movement.  Make no mistake, American evangelicals, in their advancement of a terrorist agenda that seeks extermination based on sexuality, will most certainly have blood on their hands. 

Far from being an isolated act of extremism, Uganda's shadow evangelical legislature is yet another potent reminder of the global destruction that the Christian right wreaks in the name of Western enlightenment.  As the anonymous author of the blog Gay Uganda says, “I am immersed in the middle of a battle for my life. My very life, me and my partner’s. And of all Ugandans that are like me.”

  

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org and the author of the forthcoming book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.

Prayer Cult Nation: Faith-healing scams & healthcare reform

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

Recently on a popular Black Entertainment Network talk show R&B singer Monica pitched her new reality show and extolled the virtues of prayer.  Suited up in hip-high boots like an emissary from God’s army, she credited God with guiding her through life and imbuing her with purpose.  His word was her marching order, she proclaimed, as the rapt studio audience nodded in approval, giving credence to surveys that indicate African Americans are more religious, more likely to subscribe to Creationism and more apt to break out the Bible for guidance and counsel than any other group in the U.S. 

Yet not since the Great Awakening of the 18^th Century has “God” spoken through so many American public figures so unequivocally.  The medievalist Sarah Palin has risen to cult status touting her personal speed dial to the Lord.  The Old Testament God has become the kamikaze co-pilot of the Republican Party.  And President Barack Obama frequently invokes both God as an adjudicating figure and prayer as an antidote to tragedy. 

Prayer has become the national bromide for generalized suffering.  If it can’t be sanitized, domesticated and defanged by prayer then it isn’t worth experiencing.  Now, in the midst of the healthcare reform morass, prayer healing “therapy” may become a legitimate form of government subsidized medical treatment.  According to the Los Angeles Times, a “little known” provision in the health care overhaul bill would authorize coverage for Christian Science prayer as a medical expense.  

The provision is sponsored by the ultra-conservative Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and the liberal Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.  This strange bedfellow pairing is part ideology and part political expedience.  Hatch is a notorious Mormon ideologue and Kerry’s state is the Christian Science Church’s base.  Despite several high profile cases in which religious fanatic parents have been convicted for using prayer healing to “treat” their terminally ill children rather than seek medical treatment, the Senate healthcare provision would sanction this practice. 

In a nation in which millions go bankrupt and/or die from not having health care insurance the decision to include prayer healing into the insidiously partisan healthcare deliberations is an outrage.  Increasingly, prayer has wormed its way into the most mundane of American moments.  Moments of prayer or “silence” have become more commonplace during local government meetings, schools, social functions and games.  A recent AOL poll surveying site users about a Southern school’s decision to post a message to God received overwhelming support.  A majority of users agreed that reverence for God is part of “our” nation’s heritage.  

As more and more Americans shrug in apathy at the leaky wall separating church and state, those who abstain from or question these mass spiritual entreaties are viewed as curmudgeon naysayers at best and un-American public enemies at worst.  The explosion of public prayer—exemplified by the near manic drive to enshrine the most simple of pursuits with Godly sanction—seems to bespeak some deep-seated crisis of American selfhood which afflicts all classes and ethnicities.

According to the Christian Science Church, a faith healing internship takes the form of an “'intensive' two-week class instruction in Christian Science healing” after which practitioners “may take patients.”  Treatment “may rely on passages of the Bible…or may simply be a period of silent communion.  There is no formula and ‘treatment’ can be given in absentia by telephone or email.” 

Since Christian Science practitioners can hang up their virtual shingles after a two-week crash course why can’t apostles of Frodo or oracles of Pan be similarly credentialed?  Ethnocentric bias has apparently banished Pentecostal snakes, Santeria chants, Wiccan spells and animist rituals from consideration as insurable faith treatments.  However, the Senate provision would ultimately provide protection for so-called religious and spiritual healthcare, opening the gate to all manner of medically dangerous, clinically unproven treatments.

Few on the Left have raised concerns about the contradiction between conservatives’ draconian attempts to eliminate coverage for abortion (a medically established and lifesaving practice) in the healthcare overhaul and this obscure provision for government subsidized Christian Science hocus pocus.  The House of Representatives’ deliberations on its version of the healthcare bill are being stalled by endless wrangling over toughening restrictions on abortion coverage from private healthcare companies that participate in a government public option insurance “exchange.”  Under the current language these private plans could be purchased by poor subscribers with the aid of government subsidies.  Yet anti-abortion legislators are jockeying to prevent private insurers that offer abortion coverage from even being included in the public option.

Perhaps poor women seeking reproductive healthcare would be advised to submit an email request for God’s intervention to their nearest Christian Science provider, courtesy of the federal government.  In the only democratic nation in the postindustrial world that doesn’t have equitable government healthcare the watchwords will be “let them have prayer.”

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.

Flat Earth Follies: the Religious Right's "egg crusade"

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

Taking its “life begins at conception” charade from State Legislature to State legislature, one of the most dangerous political forces in the U.S. is stepping up its crusade for the “rights” of the unborn. Backed by an organization called Personhood USA, the latest offensive from the Religious Right involves a renewed movement to amend state constitutions to establish human rights and personhood status for fertilized eggs.

Ever immune to morality, reason, church-state separation precedents and an understanding of the basic laws of biology, the most flat earth reactionary segment of the so-called pro-life movement wants to circumvent constitutional protections for abortion by conferring personhood on fertilized eggs. This would eviscerate the premise that women have a sovereign and singular right to control their bodies by designating rights even before implantation and a clinically viable pregnancy has been determined.

For those who have any elementary grasp of the human reproductive process, conception doe s not automatically result in pregnancy and the majority of fertilized eggs never implant in the uterus. Yet if the egg crusade zealots had their way these new edicts would potentially criminalize any woman attempting to use birth control pills or IUDs, and jeopardize in vitro fertilization procedures and stem cell research.

Though the egg crusade has failed to gain the imprimatur of the National Right to Life Committee those who would dismiss such a campaign as too extreme to gain traction do so at their peril. According to the L.A. Times, earlier this year the egg crusaders were able to convince the North Dakota House of Representatives to pass a constitutional amendment on personhood although it was later vetoed by the State Senate. Colorado voters also rejected a similar ballot initiative 73% to 27%. Yet in California the egg crusaders are collecting signatures and whipping up support for an amendment insidiously dubbed the California Human Rights Amendment.

One of the most reprehensible arguments that the egg crusaders make to bolster their cause is a comparison between their movement and the movement to abolish slavery. Their website cites Joshua Giddings, a 19th century American anti-slavery legislator who held that “God” as “author” of all life grants the inalienable right to life to every being. Following this argument it is unclear who is exactly “enslaving” pre-implanted fertilized eggs. Is it potential mothers who arrogantly lay claim to their own bodies? Is it20the state for failing to protect the right of pre-implanted fertilized eggs to20implantation? By cloaking its propaganda in the rhetoric of civil and human rights the egg crusaders avoid delineation of the real life consequences for women, once again reducing them to vessels with no agency, right to privacy or control over their own bodies.

The website does not specify what rights un-implanted eggs would be conferred with other than, presumably, the right to progress to the implantation stage, fetal development and then birth. There are no details about who or what could act on the behalf of the un-implanted egg as person if the host carrier (formerly known as mother) of the egg were to determine that she should receive medical treatment.

There was no information on who would legally be empowered to intervene or act on behalf of the un-implanted egg as person (the state perhaps?) to object to any stance that the mother might take. It stands to reason that if contraception were used to prevent the inalienable right of the egg as “person” to implant then host carriers who did so would be criminalized and prosecuted for murder. As a preventive measure, potentially offending host carriers could perhaps be fitted with special ankle bracelets or encoded with state monitored electronic microchips to preclude violations.

The Catholic and fundamentalist Christian activists at the forefront of the egg crusade are curiously silent on these small details. In true schizoid fashion they push for special faith-based government entitlements and yet scream about government interference, rallying big government to run roughshod over women’s fundamental right to privacy through a new regime of policing. And indeed, their own “family planning” policies have proven an abysmal failure, as evidenced by the exploding teen birth rates in Bible Belt states like Alabama and Mississippi in comparison to lower rates in the relatively godless Northeast and Northwest (abstinence-only sex education programs and fundamentalist Christian propaganda against fornication outside marriage would seem to be a source of cognitive dissonance for Southern teens).

The decidedly anti-human rights egg crusade would take this national obscenity one step further by deepening the region’s poverty and straining its already overburdened, single parent-averse social welfare net. The fervor of this “new” brand of anti-abortion activism only underscores the need for a vigorous secular defense against the continued incursions of the Religious Right. It’s either that or get ready for the ankle bracelets.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org and a commentator for Some of Us Are Brave KPFK 90.7 FM. This is an excerpt from her book Scarlet Letters on race/gender politics, atheism and secular belief in America.

Onward Christian Soldiers: Health care wars & the religious right

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Guest Contributor

On a visceral level the scene couldn’t have been more terrifying: a sea of angry virtually all White protesters wielding an array of anti-government, anti-socialist, Obama-as-marauding-terrorist signs, raining fundamentalist wrath on the Capitol.

“Thank God 4 Fox,” one woman's sign proclaimed, rising like an incendiary beacon from a motley crew of “insurgents” dressed in revolutionary war garb and other assorted costumes.

Despite Republican claims that this weekend’s protest represented a broad cross-section of constituents, the performance on the Capitol was yet another demonstration of the racist provincial fear-mongering that characterized the 2008 presidential campaign. The oft-cited fantasy of the U.S. magically transforming into a post-racial society as a result of Obama’s election has been belied by the precipitous decline of his approval ratings among Whites, casualty of the GOP’s thinly-veiled racialized appeals to the White conservative base of Sarah Palin and far right reactionary special interests.

Inflamed by the Fox News Network and talk radio, the intersection of far right tax revolt protesters, reactionary health insurance industry shills, “birthers,” and fundamentalist Christian foot soldiers has succeeded in infusing every major policy initiative that the decidedly centrist Obama administration pursues with Orwellian overtones.

What is the connection between this climate of 24/7 Fox engorged right wing propaganda and the religious extremism that has so dominated American politics for nearly two decades? Contrary to earlier predictions, the election of Barack Obama has not dimmed the zealotry of the Religious Right, rather it has invigorated it and propelled it to new heights of pious hysteria.

Over the past several months, health care reform has transmogrified into death panels and a government conspiracy to provide federal funding for abortion on demand. Fundamentalist coalitions like the newly-formed Freedom Federation—a group of far right wing organizations like Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council and Gary Bauer’s Campaign for Working Families—claim that health care reform is in their line of fire because of the prospect of further government incursions into so-called Christian charity.

In its response to the Obama administration the Freedom Federation has proposed that the government allow churches and faith-based organizations (Satanist, Wiccans ready your applications) to provide care for the uninsured. Speaking for the Federation on MSNBC Perkins declared a government “takeover” of health care fundamentally anti-God and anti-Christian because “Trying to give it off to the government is an abdication of personal responsibility.” Rather, the government should redirect its misguided efforts to expand health care to the 47 million uninsured and simply ratchet up its multi-million dollar faith-based handouts to mega-churches.

This would enable the faith community to serve all of the Bristol Palin abstinence-only sex-ed graduates seeking abortions and HIV/AIDS afflicted LGBT patients--courting hellfire and damnation due to their promiscuous gay lifestyles. Despite bending over backward to assure religious groups that federal funding would not go to abortion, organizations like the Federation continue to unleash anti-government propaganda to foment uprising. After a discussion with President Obama and other religious conservatives in which Obama quoted Scripture, Perkins denounced Obama’s hoodwink, blustering that using “Scripture like silly putty to wrap around radical ideas is not going to be sold to the Christian community.”

The idea that expanding access to the millions of uninsured constitutes radicalism is one of the more egregious examples of moral corruption within the conservative Christian community. Rather than defend a universe in which even poor Cubans in Havana and Chinese in Communist China have better health care than unemployed middle class people in the U.S., the Religious Right should challenge the amoral corporate hierarchies that restrict access to citizens of the wealthiest nation on the planet. Yet this would not serve the Fox brigade’s Orwellian agenda.

According to RightWingWatch.org the platform of Perkins and company is indistinguishable from a States Rights free market manifesto of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Further privatizing health care to subsidize religious special interests already deep in the back pocket of government threatens the fading prospect of equalitarian care for all regardless of life circumstance or sexual orientation. For example, it would reinforce the Bush era policy (the so-called “conscience clause” which the Obama administration recommended rescinding) of allowing doctors to opt out of medical procedures like abortion or fertility treatments due to their religious beliefs.

The resurgence of the Religious Right—bolstered by Obama’s own continued investment in George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative policy—is fertile ground for a full-blown palace revolt of powder keg conspiracy theorists, anti-government extremists and other disaffected nut jobs that gained sway during the Oklahoma City era. The debate over health care reform may unfortunately be a mild first salvo.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org and the author of the forthcoming book Scarlet Letters: Essays on race/gender politics, atheism and secular belief in America.

Overcoming silence on this anniversary of the Attacks of September 11th

We all mourn on this anniversary.

We mourn in different ways and for different reasons.

Some mourn for the Americans who were killed in the Attacks of September 11th. Many like me mourn the tragic deaths of all who were killed in the attacks in New York City, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA and the related deaths that preceded the Attacks here and abroad.

Others also mourn the soldiers and civilians killed in the military aftermath of the Attacks.

Peace-loving Muslims and other enlightened people of faith around the world mourn the seemingly indelible stain they fear those 19 assassins put on Islam when they weaponized those hijacked planes on September 11th.

Many mourn the theft of civil liberties and the shunning of humanitarianism in pursuit of an instant balm that still scars instead of heals our small, imperiled planet.

Still more mourn the narrowing of what once was a broad-shouldered patriotism that could not be confused with jingoistic rhetoric, obsequious complicity with the war-mongers, and conspicuous ornamentation that for too many in positions of influence has been a derelict proxy for moral courage and humanitarian leadership.

On September 11th, I watched in stunned silence evil strike where Ground Zero now remains.

Silence is how many have chosen to honor the lives -- not lost -- but stolen from this physical world, by what happens when festering rage turns to terror.

Indeed, we mourn in different ways.

But silence is not always reverence. And as we have seen in the aftermath of the Attacks, silence can also be the enemy.

Nationalistic pageantry has little meaning to me either as we memorialize the dead who hailed from more places far beyond American borders -- from more nations than most of us can identify on a map.

No, today, Afro-Netizen will memorialize this infamous day of terror by sharing a song whose lyrics were borne out of a centuries-long tradition of coping with terror called, "We Shall Overcome", a protest song whose simple, but moving melody comes in part from "No More Auction Block For Me also known as "Many Thousands Gone", 19th century spirituals deeply rooted in the scourge of America's domestic terrorism of slavery and Jim Crow.

So, in some ways "We Shall Overcome" is indeed a mourning song, yet one that is anything but mournful.

Its lyrics, gravitas, cultural resonance -- and its history of how, why and where it has been sung all represent the hope, humility and humanity that to me provide the balm so missing from the often cynical marketing of this important anniversary.

We Shall Overcome
(lyrics)

We shall overcome, we shall overcome, We shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome someday.

The Lord will see us through, The Lord will see us through,
The Lord will see us through someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.

We're on to victory, We're on to victory,
We're on to victory someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We're on to victory someday.

We'll walk hand in hand, we'll walk hand in hand,
We'll walk hand in hand someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We'll walk hand in hand someday.

We are not afraid, we are not afraid,
We are not afraid today;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We are not afraid today.

The truth shall make us free, the truth shall make us free,
The truth shall make us free someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
The truth shall make us free someday.

We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace,
We shall live in peace someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall live in peace someday.

This far by faith? Race-traitors, gender apostates & the atheism question

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Guest Contributor

Martin Luther King once dubbed Sunday at 11:00 a.m. as the most segregated hour in America, a microcosm of the titanic divide that specifically separates black and white America.  Yet racial divisions are not the only prominent schism in the Sunday churchgoing ritual that encompasses much of the social and cultural life experience of one of the most God-obsessed nations on the planet. 

Despite all the “liberal” revisions to biblical language and claims to progressivism among some Christian denominations, mainstream Protestantism is still, of course, a Jim Crow throwback and a man’s man’s world.  As Mark Galli, editor of the Evangelical magazine Christianity Today once remarked, “It’s a cliché now to call institutional religion 'oppressive, patriarchal, out of date and out of touch.' So what else is new? I feel sorry for those people who don't think there's anything greater than themselves…It leaves out the communal dimension of faith.” 

From the Deep South to South Los Angeles, this “communal dimension of faith” is one of the most compelling and problematic aspects of women’s investment in organized religion.  When it comes to accounting for the disproportionate male to female ratio for self-identified atheists, there has been much wrongheaded conjecture about the supposed emotionalism of women versus the rationality of men.  Bloggers muse about women’s intuitive sensitivity to the warm and fuzzy “verities” of religious dogma.  Women are portrayed as naturally timorous and thus less inclined to question or suspend belief about the inconsistencies of organized religion. 

For the most part, there has been no serious evaluation of the perceived gendered social benefits of religious observance versus the social costs of espousing such a gender non-conforming “individualist” ideology as atheism, particularly with respect to American born women of color.  Indeed, in many communities of color the very structure of organized religion offers a foundation for the articulation of female gendered identity that has been a source of agency and an antidote to marginalization.  On the other hand, patriarchy entitles men to reject organized religion with few implications for their gender-defined roles as family breadwinners or purveyors of cultural values to children. 

Men simply have greater cultural license to come out as atheists or agnostics because of the gender hierarchies that ascribe rationalism, individualism, intellectualism and secular or scientific inquiry to masculinity.  So women in traditionally religious communities who come out in real time (as opposed to online) risk greater ostracism because women don’t have the cultural and authorial privilege to publicly express their opposition to organized religion as men. 

African American women provide an illustrative case in point.  Imagery such as filmmaker Tyler Perry’s bible thumping malapropism spewing Madea, heavyset black women in brightly colored choir robes belting out gospel music and sweat-drenched revelers cataleptic from getting the holy ghost are some of the most common mainstream representations of black femininity.  These caricatures are buttressed by the unwavering financial and social support of the black church, which is predominantly Christian-based, by African American communities of all income brackets. 

According to BlackDemographics.com, African Americans remain the most solidly religious racial group in the United States, outstripping whites in their churchgoing fervor by a nearly 20% margin. Sunday in and Sunday out, between the hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., a familiar scene emerges in both working and middle class black communities across the nation.  Black women shuttle dutifully to church in their sartorial best, backbone of a dubious institution that still accords them only second class citizen standing. 

The gender dynamics in the breakdown of regular churchgoers reflect an utterly predictable disparity in power and access.  While more black women have been allowed to assume leadership roles in black churches in recent years, they remain a minority among deacons, pastors and senior pastors of most black congregations.  So although black women are far more likely than men to attend church more than once a week, the officialdom of black religious establishments, and certainly the political face of the black church, is steadfastly male. 

What is the relationship between these gendered religious hierarchies and cultural politics in African American communities?  Christian religiosity pervades the slang of misogynist black hip hop artists and sports figures and worms its way into their Jesus touting boilerplate award acceptance speeches.  Christian religiosity engorges multi-million dollar faith-based empires in poor urban black communities where “prime” real estate is often a triad of storefront churches, liquor stores and checking cashing places. 

Sex scandals and financial improprieties fester amongst the leadership of black churches yet sexist and homophobic rhetoric remain a mainstay.  Blind faith speaks through bulging collection plates and special tithes to the latest charity, pastor’s pet cause or capital campaign, “blessing” donors with another chit to heaven and certitude that black apostates are also race traitors.  If mainstream African American notions of black identity are defined by a certain degree of essentialism, then religious identity is certainly a key element.  Alternative belief systems are viewed with suspicion because they are deemed to be inconsistent with authentic black identity.

Given this context it is unsurprising that comedian and self-appointed dating guru Steve Harvey’s recent diatribe against atheism went largely unchallenged by African American cultural critics.  Harvey’s swaggeringly ignorant declaration that atheists have no morals was not only a repudiation of atheism but a thinly veiled warning to black women that they should tow the religious line with their personal choices.  Failure to do so would have serious consequences for racial solidarity and their ability to be good (black) women, compromising their heterosexual marketability and legitimacy as marriage partners and mothers.  It is this brand of essentialism that makes stereotypes associating black identity politics with an anti-secularist stance and religious superstition so irritatingly persistent.

While the greater religiosity of women of color in comparison to men is no mystery, why is it that this peculiarly gendered regime gone relatively unquestioned?  The gravity of the social and economic issues confronting black communities—and the tremendous cultural capital and social authority that organized religion exercises within them— compels further analysis.  

Just as women are socialized to identify with and internalize misogynistic and sexist paradigms, religious paradigms that emphasize domestication and obeisance to men are integral to mainstream American notions of femininity.  For many observant women questioning or rejecting religion outright would be just as counterintuitive as rejecting their connection to their lived experiences.  In this regard religious observance is as much a performance and reproduction of gender identity as it is an exercise of personal “morality.”  Many of the rituals of black churchgoing forge this sense of gendered identity as community. 

Whether it be maintaining ties with peers within the context of a church meeting, ensuring impressionable children have some “moral” mooring by sending them to Sunday School or even invoking sage bits of scripture to chasten malcontents, enlighten casual acquaintances or infuse one’s quotidian doings with purpose—all carefully delineate enactments of kin and community that have been compulsorily drilled into women as the proper fulfillment of a gendered social contract.  And if this gendered social contract were violated en masse patriarchy and heterosexism would have less of a firmament.

What, then, are the lessons for promoting secular humanist, agnostic or atheist belief systems?  First, that there must be more clearly defined alternatives to supernaturalism which speak to the cultural context of diverse populations of women and people of color.  Second, that moral secular values should provide the basis for robust critique of the serious cultural and socioeconomic problems that have been allowed to thrive in communities of color under the regime of organized religion. 

Finally, in an intellectual universe where rock star white men with publishing contracts are the most prominent atheists and atheism is perceived in some quarters as a “white” thing, it is also critical that acceptance and embrace of non-supernatural belief systems be modeled in communities of color “on the ground.”  Only then can secularism defang the seductions of the communal dimension of faith that defines our most segregated hour. 

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org and a presenter at the 2009 Atheist Alliance International Conference in October.

Same Sex Marriage, Religiosity & Black Civil Rights Orthodoxies

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

Last year’s debate over California’s Proposition 8 exposed deep racial fault lines around the issue of same sex marriage in African American communities across the state.  After polls showed an overwhelming number of blacks supported the initiative some liberal whites came out swinging, blaming blacks for the initiative’s defeat in racist diatribes against African American hypocrisy on civil rights.  Black religiosity and social conservatism were deemed to be the “culprits” for the failure of same sex marriage to galvanize mainstream Black support. 

As marriage equality advocates of color gear up for another organizing offensive in the wake of the California Supreme Court’s decision upholding Prop 8, it is abundantly clear that when it comes to gay rights, bucking the black religious establishment on civil rights “orthodoxy” continues to be a third rail issue.  Exhibit A in this quagmire is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (or SCLC, the civil rights organization once headed by Martin Luther King Jr.), which recently threatened to fire Los Angeles chapter head the Reverend Eric Lee for his outspoken advocacy of same-sex marriage.

The SCLC’s rebuke of Lee reflects a recent L.A. Times poll that showed 54% of African Americans remain steadfastly opposed to same-sex marriage. In this regard straight privilege and religious privilege have converged in a decidedly unholy alliance.  The tiresome debate over whether gay and lesbian liberation struggle is a “civil rights” issue hinges on proprietary claims to the civil rights movement legacy that supposedly only straight black folk are entitled to. 

According to this logic, equality for gays and lesbians isn’t a civil right because there were no state sanctioned segregation laws barring gays and lesbians from employment, schools or housing—an argument which is just as absurd as asserting that gender equity is not a civil rights issue because there were no poll taxes, grandfather clauses, or literacy tests for white women at the voting booth before 1920. 

In this reductive universe all women are white and all gays are white, and the notion that systematized oppression, as well as systematized privilege and entitlement, intersect via multiple identities is unheard of.  Yet black gay and lesbian slaves worked in the plantation house and fields alongside straights while having their lives, identities and right to love tacitly if not violently suppressed by a regime that brutally exploited black reproduction. 

Black gay and lesbian youth sit in classrooms where they are ritually called out of their names, dehumanized by harassment that passes for harmless jocularity and rendered invisible by cultural norms that equate attractiveness, social acceptance and authentic masculinity and femininity with being heterosexual.  And black gay and lesbian partners live in segregated neighborhoods, struggle with unequal access to health care and housing while being denied the privilege of marital benefits to give them a leg up in society stratified by race, gender, sexual orientation and class.

Conflating biblical literalism with morality, Christian partisans condemn same-sex marriage as blasphemy while conveniently rejecting the archaic racial hierarchies that the Bible espouses.  Black preachers sanctimoniously opine about the “hijacking” of the civil rights movement legacy while effectively turning a blind eye to the disenfranchisement of their young gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered congregants, who suffer disproportionate rates of suicide and depression simply because of the dominant culture’s denial of their fundamental personhood.

For far too long, the more conservative segments of the Black church have been allowed to function as the unquestioned moral arbiters of marriage, sexuality, child-rearing and cultural mores.  Rather than representing one and only one world view within African American communities, the conservative religious civil rights orthodoxy has been enshrined as the prism for black perspectives.  Admittedly, Eric Lee and his counterparts are in the minority of those within the black Christian community principled enough to go on record against the anti-gay rhetoric of the pro-Prop 8 coalition.  Yet this leadership is crucial to a civil rights movement based on intersectionality, a consciousness of the complexity of African American identity and community in repudiation of the bigoted flat-earth ethos that has made silence around Black homophobia morally and socially acceptable.

Sikivu Hutchinson is editor of BlackFemLens.org and an advisory board member of the Washington D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools curriculum guide on family diversity, gender stereotyping and anti-LGBT bullying.

“God sent the Shooter”: White Christian terrorism and the assassination of Dr. George Tiller

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

“God sent the shooter,” the signs wielded by anti-abortion protestors at the funeral of slain doctor George Tiller proclaimed.  Last week’s assassination of abortion provider and feminist George Tiller in a Kansas church on the so-called holy seventh day was not only a barbaric act of religious cowardice but a terrorist assault on the rights of women.  Tragically similar to the 1998 murder of New York doctor Bernard Slepian, Tiller’s murder was the culmination of years of attempted murders, death threats, bombings and arson attacks waged against abortion providers by white Christian terrorists.

Despite the scope of this orchestrated campaign mainstream media rarely identify these acts or those who commit them as “terrorist.”  Those who invoke Christian fundamentalism as justification for their barbaric incursions against women and their allies are dismissed as aberrations, even though the profiles of the killers are always the same, the suspects—generally disaffected white middle aged males, aligned with a crackpot anti-government militia and/or fundamentalist ethos steeped in the bloody retribution of the Old Testament—virtually plucked from central casting.

These spasms of Christian fundamentalist violence are largely peculiar to the United States.  Anti-abortion activism in Western European countries such as Great Britain, France and Italy doesn’t inspire anywhere near the level of militant resistance seen here.  This virulent strain of fundamentalism was nourished by three theocratic Republican administrations that dismembered the Constitution and effectively sanctioned criminal campaigns against abortion providers.  So while the U.S. condemns Muslim religious fundamentalism and trumpets itself as a beacon for individual and civil liberties unbridled by theocratic intolerance it has become a breeding ground for the most dangerous Christian fundamentalist terrorist movement in the world.

Christian fundamentalism has always objectified women’s bodies as patriarchal property and territory for reproductive control.  It’s no surprise then that white men deem themselves to be Christian soldiers in the war over the wombs of Middle American and Southern white women.  It’s also no surprise that the Bible Belt, fount of hyper-religious public policy that demonizes sex education and contraception, has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. 

Christian fundamentalist dogma is about keeping ‘em barefoot, knocked up and in obeisance to a God that would rather see an impoverished 12 year-old incest victim carry her rapist father’s baby to term and suffer lifelong psychological trauma than undergo a safe legal abortion and have a reasonable expectation for a future.  And it is immoral, radically anti-woman positions like these which make the “pro-life” misnomer appropriated by the anti-abortion movement so infuriating. 

In the militant anti-choice universe the lives of real babies living in poverty and their real mothers and real families are of no consequence next to protection of the religiously decreed “rights” of the unborn.  White male anti-abortion terrorists can’t get similarly exorcised about cuts to women’s health care benefits and pre- and post-natal care to mothers in real time because it would mean ceding control to flesh and blood women.

Tiller’s assassination also dovetails with a dangerous shift in public opinion regarding the future of choice for American women imperiled by unwanted pregnancies.  Influenced by a decade of unrelenting right wing propaganda that equates abortion with murder and abortion providers with Nazi eugenicists, polls indicate that a growing majority of the American public has adopted a “pro-life” stance and is willfully ignorant about the life-giving and life-saving potential of legal abortion.  Dispatching shooters from “God,” the anti-abortion movement must accept responsibility for the murderous religious rhetoric that led to the assassination of George Tiller and the terrorist assault on the rights and lives of American women. 

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7FM.