Fk* Yo Misogynistic Jesus

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Welcome family to My Irreligious Life podcast with your host Jermaine Thomas, aka The Professor. Deconstructing and deconverting from your faith is a very difficult journey. The process can have psychological, psychosocial, and emotional implications. Join us as we have a heartwarming and engaging dialogue around this and so much more. Let's get it, family

New Jermaine 0:22

hey, family. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of my Irreligious Life podcast. There are a couple of things that led into me doing this podcast episode with such controversial and awe-shocking title, and there's a reason to that. Sometimes we need the conscious to be accosted for us to hear, the deeper meaning or to grasp the concept and the principle behind, what's being said. News media do it all the time. But anyway, along my deconstructing journey, one of the things that I had to confront and unpack for myself, is what patriarchy taught me within the concept of church and my lived experience was the Black church. I had very misogynistic views relative to that and so that took a lot of introspection on this deconstructing journey. And I've said this a lot, deconstructing can have emotional and psychological impact, in unpacking these things. And so one of the things on this journey was unpacking the toxic man box, or I like to call unpacking the toxic Christian man box. And with that, the harm that we perpetuate in a patriarchal framework within our Christian institutions, whether that's, complementarianism, is at the forefront of that you're the head of your household, you're the man of God, and you would hear a pastor say, "You're the head and your wife is the neck." Marriage ministry, all of those things were meant to reinforce patriarchy and disempower women in those constructs. And oftentimes you don't see it that way because you're so indoctrinated and thinking that this is the way of Jesus. No, these are the constructs that we built around Jesus. My last church I attended before I was really on my way out of Americanized or Western views of Christianity and the constructs around God. And I was lured to this church, in a leadership role. I think the pastor seen my hunger and passion for that, so with that I wasn't aware. I think somewhere along the way I started to realize that this church didn't believe in women pastors, which eventually I was ministering one day and I was prophesying, if you will, to the pastor's wife. And so the pastor approached me afterwards, said that his wife was upset because she didn't believe that women could be pastors. And so we had a whole little sidebar conversation after what I considered was a, a awesome time in ministry and going forth in the Lord, quote unquote, right? But anyway so that little spat ins- and a few other instances of things led to us leaving the church and one of the things I shared with the pastor on my way out was, what if there is a call of God on my daughter's life? You wouldn't be able to empower her and or support her in that because you don't believe women could be pastors." And and this was part of like my little exit meeting out of this particular church. And so as I lean into this, I want you to consider, your constructs and the things that you've encountered within the context of the Black church. But think about this. The most faithful demographic in America is the Black woman. They fill our pews, they run our ministries, they cook the dinners at our churches, and they keep the books. They raise the pastors and literally raise them from diapers to doctorates, right? And then Sunday morning comes and the same institution their labor built tells them to sit down, cover up, submit, wait on your husband to be your covering. And then they get to watch a man half qualified take in the pulpit that most often than some that they're called to and for So today I'm gonna say it plainly, and yeah, I chose these words on purpose. Fuck your misogynistic Jesus. Not the Jesus of Nazareth, right? But the one that was manufactured! The Jesus of the actual text I don't think would have never asked a Black woman to shrink. And actually, the whole conversation with the woman at the well shows you how intentional Jesus was in dealing with women. The first evangelistic ministry was women going to tell the men that Jesus was risen, right? And so it's about how you're indoctrinated and shaped, and using the Bible and nothing has been more weaponized than the Bible and scriptures against women, especially the Black woman. So somebody's been forging Jesus' signature for hundreds of years, and today we're gonna pull the receipts and name the forger. And I'm gonna tell you now, the fingerprints of the forgery is nothing more than white supremacy So before somebody auntie clutches her pearls and reports me to the deacon board, let me be precise, because my precision is a part of what we do here. The profanity in this title is not aimed at Jesus of Nazareth, right? It's aimed at the construct, a misogynistic idol wearing his name like a stolen jacket. There's a long tradition of prophets using offensive language to shock people out of their religious autopilot. If you don't believe me, read that Bible Ezekiel chapter 16 and 23 in the original Hebrew. The prophets talk nasty when the situation called for it, and this situation calls for it, family. And here's my thought and my thesis, right? About power. Power, or what I would like to call white power or supremacy in thought and ideology, it didn't disappear, it relocated. When emancipation came, white supremacy didn't pack up and go home, it relocated. It found a new host, new uniforms, and new vocabulary. And one of the places it relocated to, whether we wanna acknowledge it or not, family, is in our pulpits. The patriarchy crushing Black women in the Black church is not indigenous to Black spirituality. We inherited that crap. It didn't come off of slave ships. It came in the framework of slavery Let me just explain some of the patterns and what it looks like in the Black church. You walk into damn near any Black church in America, who's ushering? Women. Who's a part of the nursing guild, right? The one that tends to the pastor. who's In the kitchen? Who's a part of the finance committee? Who's leading the Sunday school? Women. Who tithes the most consistently in our churches? Women. Now look up at the pulpit. Look at the trustee board. Look at who signs the checks the women tithes fill. The church runs on women's labor and men's authority, and we've been taught to call that arrangement holy We gave women a throne with no power. First Lady is a title that says the closest woman can get to leadership in a house is marrying into it. That's what we saying when we use the term First Lady. Then there's body policing. That comes from slavery. Purity culture in the Black church is a surveillance system aimed almost entirely at women and girls. Skirt length s- gets a sermon. Pregnancy out of wedlock gets you stood up in front of the church congregation, but the man involved, he gets prayer and privacy. Meanwhile, the pastor falls, suddenly everybody remembers, "Touch not my anointed." The anointing apparently only covers men. But when a woman fall or a woman I guess you could say, cause trouble in the church, she get the title Jezebel. And then there's a recent video, which is, one of the reasons why I'm touching this topic, too, was a, a young Black girl getting deliverance at a white church from the spirit of Jezebel all because she pledged to a sorority And these are the patterns, right? These are the receipts, if you will, of how Black women are targeted and treated systematically in our Black churches in the Bible, you get a Deborah leading Israel, but somehow the sermon is always about Jezebel. Oh, don't let me stop there. Then let's go with Ephesians 5, wives submit. Preached every wedding season, conveniently detached from the mutually in verse 21, and conveniently detached as we're about to see for who first weaponized the text on our people and why. Now, a lot of brothers hear this list and get defensive because they think I'm calling Black men uniquely sexist, and I'm not. I'm about to argue the opposite. This patriarchal framework was installed through white supremacy. Here's a question nobody asks in Sunday school. Where did the Black church get its Christianity from? Not its soul. The soul is ours! Alba Robato documented how enslaved Africans built the invisible institution Which is things like hush harbors, ring shouts, a stolen away faith that read Exodus as their story and met a God who sides with the enslaved That's the tradition of liberation full stop. But the institutional package, the doctrine, the household order, the picture of God on the wall, the white Jesus, that came through plantation catechism Listen to this. Listen to how missionary preachers used the household codes. Ephesians five and six wasn't broken up the way we preach it now., It was one continuous package, right? Wives submit to your husbands. Children obey parents. Slaves obey your earthly masters. One passage, one machine. The same sermon that sanctified the master's whip sanctified the husband's rule. White supremacy and patriarchy are not two systems that happen to be friends. They are one hierarchy with multiple floors. God at the top, then white men, then white women, then Black men, then Black women at the bottom holding up the whole damn building. So emancipation came, power relocated. Black men locked out of every seat of authority in white America were handed exactly one thing of power in their communities was the pulpit. The one executive office a Black man could hold in 1870 was that of a pastor. And here's the tragedy. Instead of a building, an authority that looked like the hush harbor, too many rebuilt the only model of power they ever been shown, the master's household. Theologian Jacqueline Grant said it in plainest Black women became the oppressed of the oppressed, catching white supremacy from the outside the community and patriarchy from inside it, both wearing a cross. do you need more proof or more imagery and receipts? Listen to this christina Cleveland calls him white malegod, one word, but he functions as one idol. For centuries, the image of God in Western imagination has been a white man Now here's the move I need you to catch, family. The Black church, to its everlasting credit, rejected the white part. We got Black Jesus in the stained glass, Black Madonna, James Cone declaring God is Black. Beautiful, and necessary, right? But we kept the male part. We performed half a liberation. We took the white face off the idol and left the gender on it, and then wondered why our daughters still couldn't see themselves in the divine. Evelyn Brooks Higginbottom documented how the Black church became the stage where our people performed respectability for the white gaze, proving our civility, our discipline, our worthiness of citizenship. And who became the terrain of that performance? Black women bodies. Her hemline, her hair, her sexuality, her silence. That's where the race reputation got litigated. Meaning, even our policing Of Black women was at root a performance for white people. The deacon measuring skirt lengths is doing the overseer's paperwork, doesn't even know it. There's another framework to think about, family, and that's the internalization. Joy DeGruy's framework tell us trauma doesn't just wound, it instructs. Systems of domination reproduce themselves inside the dominated. The overseer's logic doesn't need an overseer forever, it runs like computer hardware. That's what it means when a Black grandmother, who was herself crushed by this system, teaches her granddaughter that the calling to preach is rebellion. That's not her voice. That's the institution talking. And if you want the wide-angle lens, immersion, Embracy argued in the religion of whiteness that whiteness itself operates as a religion in America, with its own rituals, its own moral order, and its own sacraments And a part of that religion of whiteness sacraments, patriarchy is one of them. And you cannot take communion at whiteness table Monday through Saturday and preach liberation on Sunday. So no, this episode is not Black men are the problem. This episode is Black men inherited the master's job description, and it's killing us, too, and that's what I talked about earlier, was talking about how I had to unpack the toxic man box and how it was impacting my marriage and how I treated my wife at that time But inheritance is only an excuse until you know what you're holding, and after that, it's a choice. Now, none of what I said here in my commentary is of my own invention, right? Black women scholars built their entire analysis while the church was listening. They called it Womanist theology done from Black women's experience, and I'm about to give you the syllabus, right? So that you can go and read and study this stuff especially Black men in the church, pastors. So make sure you gift your pastor this episode. Just slide it to him, right? And say, "I think you need to check this out." But listen to this. Jacqueline Grant, White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus, 1989. Grant separates the Christ of the empire from the Jesus of the text, and argues Black women have always known the difference because the Jesus they met in their suffering was a co-sufferer, not an overseer. White women's feminism couldn't speak for them. Black men's liberation theology didn't speak about them. Triple jeopardy of intersectionality, right? Race, gender, and class. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 1993. William reads the Bible through Hagar, the enslaved African woman used as a forced surrogate, cast into the wilderness with her child. Sound familiar? It's the Black woman's story sitting in Genesis the whole time. Catch this. Hagar is the only person in scripture who names God herself, El Roi, the God who sees me. The enslaved Black woman is the Bible's first theologian Williams' framework of surrogacy talks about how Black women were forced to stand in and labor for and absorb the cost of everybody else. Describe your church's volunteer roster today katie Cannon, Black Women's Ethics, 1988. Cannon showed that Black women forged a moral wisdom under conditions where the official ethics written by people who owned them could not apply. The church didn't give Black women their ethics. Black women's ethics survived the church Then there's Kelly Brown Douglas and her work, Sexuality in the Black Church Douglas names the silence, the Black church's refusal to talk honestly about sexuality as itself a wound inherited from white supremacy's obsession with policing and mythologizing Black bodies. The silence isn't holiness. The silence is trauma management Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy a Yoke, 2014. The strong Black woman capital S, capital B, capital W, as a theological trap. The church baptizes Black women's exhaustion and calls it virtue. She carries everything, asks nothing, dies early, and gets a nice funeral where we praise her for it Walker Burns says that's not discipline, that's a yoke, and Jesus said his yoke was easy then there's Womanist Midrash, 2017. Reverend Dr. Gaffney is a Hebrew scholar, an Episcopal priest, and she translate God with feminine pronouns on textual grounds, not vibes, grammar There's Christine Cleveland, God Is a Black Woman 2022. The title is the thesis. Her whole journey is a pilgrimage away from white male God toward the sacred Black feminine. When I say reimagine God, I'm standing on her shoulders Then there's bell hooks. Ain't I a Woman and Beyond, because patriarchy is a system, not a gender. Hooks spent her career showing that the man box maims the men inside it, too. Brothers, that's your entry point, dismantling, deconstructing these constructs. This isn't charity to the Black woman. It's our own liberation. James Cone himself credited womenist theologians for confronting the sexism in his own movement, and he owned it. The father of Black liberation theology took correction from women So if Cone could repent, your pastor can too So let's look at a few things in the Bible too, right? 'Cause I know it's out there. "I suffer not a women to teach." And the context to that is Greco-Roman- literary form Pagan philosophers wrote them for centuries before Paul. Aristotle laid out the same three pairs, master and slave, husband and wife, father and child. So that hierarchy is not Hebrew revelation, it's Imperial Roman household management absorbed into the church as assimilated into empire. So the same synchrism story I've been telling and posting about on my posts about, how these things are passed, and even in the themes of my episodes, right? This is nothing but Greek thought explained through Hebrew text. So the misogyny again is an import, right? Think about this, Luke 8:1-3, Jesus' ministry was bankrolled by women, Joanna, Susanna, Mary of Magdalene. The text says they provided for the movement out of their own resources. The first church budget was women's money. Some things just never change, huh? Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the resurrection, commissioned to go tell the men. The early church called her Apostle to the Apostles. The entire faith rests on a women's testimony that men initially didn't believe. Preach that on Easter, right! Then there's Romans 16:7, Junia. Paul calls her outstanding among the apostles. A woman, an apostle. And here's the receipt of this forgery, right? Of all what we've been talking about There's translations and scribes literally changes her name to a man's name because they couldn't handle a female apostle That's not interpretation, family. That's tampering with evidence! And then there's other women in the Bible, Phoebe Romans 16:1 in the Greek, diaconus, translated deacon or minister when it's a man. She carried the letter to the Romans. The most influential theological document in Western history was hand-delivered and likely first read out loud by a woman And then there's Deborah in Judges 4, prophet, judge, military commander, ran the whole nation, and nobody in the text asked her where her covering was. So when the church quotes two important Roman verses and ignores Deborah, Phoebe, and the others I mentioned, that's not exegesis that's indoctrination Now in closing I just want you to consider this thought when we consider and think about reimagining the Black church and recentralizing and making the Black woman central to our church and our faith space ecosystem. Like I said the Black church took the white face off of God and left the gender on. And so I'm not asking you to leave the Bible to do what I'm saying. I'm asking you to actually read it. Genesis 1:27 says, "God created humanity in God's own image, male and female." Verse one of the whole conversation, if only maleness shows up in your God language, your image of God is incomplete, by the Bible's own math Isaiah 42:14, "God, I will cry out like a woman in labor." God describes God's own self as a birthing mother. Isaiah 49:15, "Can a nursing mother forget her child?" God says, even if she could, I won't." God as the nursing mother who loves and exceeds even as a mother. Isaiah 66:13, "A mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you." Matthew 23:37, Jesus over Jerusalem, "How often I longed to gather your children like a hen gathers her chicks." Jesus self-describes as a mother bird. Then there's the proverbs wisdom is personified as a woman, right? So then you have the Ruach, the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit. The breath of God hovering over the waters in Genesis 1 is grammatically a feminine noun in Hebrew. The spirit y'all catch on Sunday has been she the whole time and this is why Gafni's womanist midrash matters. A credential Hebrew, Hebrew scholar translating God as she because the text permits it and the tradition suppressed it And it's why Cleveland's God is a Black woman isn't provocation, it's restoration. It's a lost truth being restored, family. So here's my invitation. Try it in your own prayer. Just try it for a week. Instead of saying Father God, say Mother God. And for me as a Black man, this is what I did a part of my reprogramming, right? Deconstruction and de- decolonizing your Christian faith doesn't mean it's an attack on God or Jesus itself, per se. But it is a, a dismantling of systems of thought rooted in whiteness, rooted in white supremacy in, in patriarchy that wanted to erase any sense of notion of power that God gave to women. And so saying Mother God has been a healing modality for me So in recalling all of what I said today, family, Hagar, the Black slave who was the first to name God Pay attention to your body when you say it, because Father God feels natural, and Mother God makes you flinch. That flinch is the data, family. It's a data point. That flinch is is 400 years of white male God living in our nervous system And you just located your idol. Now it's time to evict it. And brothers, hear me. A God who can be mother doesn't diminish you. If your manhood requires God to be exclusively male, that's not faith, that's the man box holding your theology hostage To the Black pastors, elders, and deacons, and brothers in the pews Repentance in the text is not a feeling It's a turning away. It's a changing of thought and thinking So think about it. Who preaches in your church? Who governs? Who controls the money? Who gets credit? If the answer is men and the labor is all women, your church is running plantation economics with a gospel soundtrack And then let's stop assigning demons to Black women's autonomy. Let's preach about a Deborah, a Hagar, not just on Woman's Day, not on the fifth Sunday slot. Lets Ordain Women in senior leadership. If your theology says she can raise the pastor but not be one, your theology is white supremacy, plain and simple. Let's expand our thoughts and our thinking about being intentional and using the term Mother God in our sermons. She instead of he or the God who sees. Say it from the pulpit. Let the congregation feel the flinch together, and then teach them where that uncomfortableness comes from. Stop measuring the church's health by Black women's endurance and start measuring it by their flourishing. If the strongest woman in your congregation can finally rest, exhale, and be healed and be soft, that's revival. Because here's the truth and then I'll let you go, family. A church that liberates Black men while Subordinating Black women isn't empowerment. That's white supremacy, family And I wanna leave you with these thoughts. A Jesus who needs Black women silent is a Jesus somebody manufactured. The liberating Jesus looks like Hagar's God, El Roi, the one who sees the woman everybody else used and discarded, meets her in the wilderness and hears her name for the divine The first theologian in your Bible is an enslaved African woman the church has been trying to talk over ever since. To my brothers in the pulpit, the inheritance was not your fault. Keeping it is. Repentance ain't a feeling. It's a changing of thought and thinking, and returning what was taken, and give it back to the Black woman If this episode moved you, share it with your pastor, and I mean that literally. Thank you for tuning in, family. God bless

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Hey family, thank you for tuning in to another episode of My Irreligious Life podcast. Don't forget to take the opportunity to go ahead and click on the alert link so that you can catch up on any and all upcoming episodes. Thank you and God bless