Scorning their own

Horace L. Griffin

Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians & Gays in Black Churches

The Pilgrim Press, 2006. 240 pp. $24

African-American culture is complex, fraught with paradox and contradiction, and no other area is more notable in this regard than the scorn the black church reserves for black gay and lesbian Christians.

For the Rev. Horace L. Griffin, who teaches pastoral theology and is director of field education at The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City, the black church's homophobia is a betrayal of the church's special, historical place in black culture.

"The black church's teaching that homosexuality is immoral has created a crisis for lesbian and gay Christians in black churches," Griffin writes. ".... It is an engagement I characterize as oppressive and duplicitous. For though black church leaders once refused to accept white church leaders' use of the Bible to justify oppressing them during the periods of slavery and segregation, presently many use the Bible in a similar fashion to justify oppressing lesbians and gays."

Griffin, the openly gay rector of youth and family ministry at All Saints Episcopal Church in Glenn Rock, New Jersey, goes far beyond merely complaining. In this clearly written, seminal work. He presents a history and scholarly analysis of the black church and its current failure to serve a minority group in its midst. Most importantly, he offers ways that black churches can embrace liberation theology through close reading of scripture. Many interpretations of scripture are the result of blind acceptance of popular wisdom and an a la carte mode of affirming truth.

He writes that "Jesus' silence on homosexuality in all four Gospels ought to make African American Christians think twice before assuming that homosexuality is the great sin that the majority of black and white churches declare it to be. A reasonable response is that if homosexuality were a great sin or a sin at all, at some point during his ministry, Jesus would certainly have addressed this terrible way of life, as he did other sins." In light of Jesus' silence on the subject, black pastors, like others who reject lesbian and gay believers, select passages they believe support their culturally bound perspective on homosexuality, just as white Christians used scripture to justify their support of slavery and other atrocities against blacks.

Although Griffin believes that the black church sold its soul to Republicans during recent years by supporting issues unrelated to civil rights, human rights and justice, he uses Their Own Receive Them Notas a clarion call for the church to reverse course. The book attempts to build passion and support for lesbian and gay congregants by presenting real-world and scientific evidence that homosexuality is not a disease or sin to be feared but is, instead, anatural state of being.

In the chapter titled "Toward a True Liberation Theology for Pastoral Caregivers," Griffin writes: "The American Psychological Association no longer considers homosexuality an illness. The APA does not support so-called change therapies. It argues that gays must not view their sexual orientation as a problem and should respond to religious and social prejudice as other oppressed groups do. Black pastors who assist parishioners to accepttraditional theories of homosexuality as the result of negative influences--for example, bad parenting or child abuse--have had their theories disproved."

While Their Own Receive Them Not is a searing indictment of the black church's bigotry, it simultaneously is a plea for the church to discover, perhaps for the first time, how to practice its true calling: being the voice of compassion and wisdom in a society that is mired in rejecting, abusing, and, perhaps, obliterating populations it deems to be the sexual other.

"Our acceptance and celebration of lesbians and gays and their relationships with those of heterosexuals will allow us to appreciate the beauty of God's diverse creation," Griffin writes. "In doing this, in affirming the erotic in all of us, we proclaim a true black liberation theology, and in so doing, we will honor God."

Ultimately, Griffin argues, the black church has no business trafficking in hatred and exclusion. After all, it is a direct product of hatred and exclusion. It needs to liberate itself from itself.

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