the young people's professor

Keeping the Faith:
Unfinished Notes from a Black Christian Baptist Leftist Academic
For Marques

As a black leftist academic who works within the field of “queer theory,” I’ve noticed that whenever I disclose my religious beliefs to my students and colleagues, it usually leads to a spectacle. Being the kind of Christian Baptist that routinely prays before he eats, goes to Church on Sunday, and makes casual references to the presence of Jesus Christ,is not always welcome practice among the sophisticated, secular company I often keep. “Frank, are you serious?” “You realize Christianity is a largely ‘oppressive’ regime, don’t you?” “What are you, some kind of black Andrew Sullivan?” “How you can you say that you’re ‘Christian,’ when you’re so dam gay?” These are just a few of the tongue-in-cheek inquiries I’ve had posed to me upon the revealing of my religious affiliations.

Lately, I have become increasingly attuned to the unspoken racial and class politics that often structures these responses, especially when they come from my non-black and/or non-gay colleagues. I can’t help but think that whenever my white queer theory colleagues hear me say I’m “Christian,” they’re thinking to themselves: “This poor black boy. If he had just read a little more Foucault or Freud, maybe he’d ‘get it.’” In other words, there is this alignment of Christian ethics with a sort of naïveté or lack of sophistication. In the queer theory-community’s unspoken hierarchy of belief systems, I would say that atheism ranks high, Buddhism falls somewhere in the middle, and Christianity ranks way down on the low-end of things. Far too often, queer academics who are interested in Christian ethics are characterized as loonies: we’re “colonized,” “silly,” “backwards,” “not post-structuralist or social-constructionist enough, ” “misguided,” “neoliberal,” “apathetic,” or just plain old stupid.

Now before I go any further, let me be clear about a few critical things. First, I am not attempting to paint a portrait of some sad, lost clan of black Christian queers who are supposedly being “silenced” by the academy. Nor am I making an argument for the religious exceptionalism of Christianity. Quite the contrary. I am keenly aware of and deeply disturbed by the continued U.S. imperialist hijacking of ‘Christian ethics’ as a seductive point of departure towards a vicious xenophobia (embodied most recently in our endless “war on terror” and its subsequent demonization of our Muslim brothers and sisters.) Anyone who knows me knows that I am a staunch advocate of radical religious pluralism (from atheism and agnosticism to Santeria and Vodun.) Thus you will never, ever find me attempting to “uphold” Christianity as some kind of superior belief system over these other religious constellations. However, I do find myself wanting to put pressure on the knee-jerk dismissal of Christianity that I often encounter from my fellow queer leftist academics.

For so many poor and working class African Americans (such as myself), Christianity (materialized in the contradictory form of the “black church”) continues to be a fundamental aspect of how we make sense of ourselves, our communities, and our politics. To say that the black church (and Christianity more generally) has historically been a site of tremendous homophobia and sexism does not mean that I am willing to simply jettison or abandon Christianity as my personal belief system. My criticisms of Christianity have always been in the spirit of what Theodor Adorno called “immanent critique”: that mode of critique that comes from within the very system of thought being called into question, as opposed to a one that exists wholly outside of it. In other words, in spite of the histories of trauma, colonization, and violence that have been rightly associated with Christianity, I have never quite been able to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I suppose you can say that I have a “disidentificatory” relationship to Christianity (to borrow the neologism made popular by dissertation advisor).

I find an especially useful kernel of progressivism in much black liberation theology, and as such, continue to embrace black Christian ethics as a foundational structure of who I am ethically, spiritually, affectively, and intellectually. The radical genealogy of black Christian ethics that I embrace begins with a figure like Nat Turner and spans up to someone like Cornel West. I’m also seduced by the spirit of righteous indignation invoked by a figure like Jeremiah Wright. It is in this “B-Side” history of Christian ethics that I would say I locate my everyday politics and my investment in Christian thought and practice.

Is there room in the academy for a young black boy who’s becoming a leftist queer academic, who also wants to “keep the faith”?