No Justice, No Pride
By Olivia Sonell
Author’s Note: When discussing “The Church” in the context of the USA, as I do in this article, it is important to note that I am analyzing predominantly white and protestant Churches, as this is where my experience and knowledge lies.
This is an important distinction as Black Churches, as well as Catholic and Orthodox, will have a distinctly different relationship to the problems described.
“Everyone proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD...“ Proverbs 16:5a,
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18,
-KJV
Since 1969, June has been recognised as “Gay Pride” month, a celebration of the historic Stonewall Uprising that launched the Gay Liberation movement, responsible for many civil rights gains for LGBTQ+ people around the world.
As the story goes, on the night of June 28, 1969, during a police raid on The Stonewall Inn in NYC's Greenwich Village, mixed-race lesbian activist Storme DeLarverie was one of many the police were attempting to arrest under the city's anti-gay laws. If she had been charged, it most likely would have been for violating the law against women wearing less than three articles of “feminine” clothing. A second charge may have been "resisting arrest" as Stormie nearly managed to fight off her police assailants three times before her cries for help resulted in either a brick or a high heel hitting a cop in the head. The patrons of The Stonewall Inn, the majority Black and Brown drag queens and trans folk, had had enough. What followed was a six-day uprising against police brutality.
What meaning does a protest from 51 years ago have for us today? Among the many changes to our lives 2020 has brought, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic with its concomitant job loss, housing crises, and its shining a light on the failures of the capitalist healthcare system, the most significant and most relevant development has been the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
On May 26th, after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police, the floodgates opened and people spilled out into the streets in search of justice, echoing the calls for justice that rose from The Stonewall Inn.
And as the protests, rallys, vigils, and memorials have continued, they're coinciding with the annual celebration and recognition of the Stonewall Uprising. Rather than corporate funded "Pride Parades" where the NYPD has their own float, we're seeing marches organized by the affected communities that speak to the spirit of the original Pride march.
Unfortunately the need for Justice isn’t isolated to the streets, it doesn’t stop at the sanctuary door, or when you take a seat in a pew, or when you offer your voice in praise. In the United States, the Christian Church, in its predominately white manifestation, has a horrific history of siding with white supremacy and patriarchy over and against the demands of the Gospel.
Rather than confiscating and redistributing the wealth of the richest among us, many white U.S. Churches use what are ill-gotten gains to maintain fancy buildings, centralised locations, and a bevy of services that fail to reach beyond the sanctuary doors.
Rather than taking Jesus at his word when he said God sent him "to set the oppressed free"(Luke 4:18d), white American churches institutionalised support for U.S. slavery, and it’s sequel Jim Crow apartheid. All across the country Black Americans have been murdered by white folk who line pews every Sunday, even when gathered in their own churches, and today many whites in U.S. churches support the structures and racist assumptions that uphold mass incarceration.
In light of the white church's participation in the U.S.’s white supremacist history, I believe that without a profound reckoning and complete course correction within the white church structures and white faith communities, it is impossible to be proud of them. And without deep and systemic overhaul to the white supremacist nature of U.S. American churches I do not believe that we should have Pride in them either. No Justice? No Pride!
What Does Pride have to do with Christianity?
What better month than Pride month to acknowledge that white Christianity in the West, whether it is Catholic or Protestant, Mormon or Evangelical, in addition to its horrific track record around race, has had a hard time wrapping its head around non-procreative sexuality. If we can truthfully say the Gospel at its core is about liberation, what demands might this put on the church in the face of LGBTQ oppression?
In 1968 Pastor Troy Perry, moved by the Holy Spirit, attempted to meet that demand by founding the Metropolitan Community Church in LA, what is the first and to this day, only LGBTQ Christian church in the U.S. However, it wouldn’t be until the 1980s, more than 200 years after most white U.S. churches were founded, that a more concerted effort towards further inclusion of LGBTQ people would emerge in those denominations.
However, the attempts white mainline churches have made toward equality haven’t been free from backlash. Among many examples, when the Episcopal Church consecrated their first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003, he had to wear a bulletproof vest in response to death threats.
Additionally the misuse of scripture, and ideas presumed to be biblical, to bully people into sexual conformity has a long history in the church, predominately in the white and evangelical manifestations.
"It's Adam & Eve, not Adam and Steve",
"God doesn't make mistakes, and God made you a boy",
"If you choose this lifestyle you're defying God".
These are statements many queer folk in western Christian contexts have no doubt heard. The two verses quoted at the top of this essay provide some examples of what often gets used as "proof texts" by christians who see a condemnation in the similarity of the words “proud” and “Pride”.
The Right to Pride, the Fight for Justice
Despite what some people say, the oppressed being proud of our sexuality, gender, or race is not haughtiness or arrogance. It won’t lead to our fall. We claim Pride, not because we are haughty, but because we are people who've been told we have nothing to be proud of. We've heard we are “misshapen”, “broken”, “bad”, “disgusting”, so when we as queer christians claim Pride, we are saying we are proud to be made in the image of God. We are placing ourselves in a history of struggle against homophobia, transphobia, and patriarchy against racism and white supremacy, we’re following the trail blazed by Queer Women of Color, and the mandate of Jesus the Christ, a brown-skinned man murdered by an occupying police force. (Check out my article on Jesus’ relationship to the oppressed here.)
And just as Jesus was willing to walk into the sacred places of his day and speak truth to power, we must be willing to walk into our churches and our cathedrals and our prayer meetings and denounce the ways in which our holy places have sustained racism and homophobia and transphobia, and the ways that the church has allowed itself to be sustained by the financial workings of the 1%. Those vipers who benefit from the continued oppression of people in the pews and on the streets. The radicality of the Gospel is that it dares to imagine a world where oppression is not normalized, and the radicality of what Jesus has called us to do is to make that imaged world a reality. One of the ways I seek to do that is through celebrating and fighting for Justice.
No Justice, No Pride!
Questions for Reflection:
What are some things your faith community could be doing to make God proud? How might your faith community have disappointed God?
What are ways your faith community can celebrate Pride’s spirit of resistance?
What is your faith community's relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement?
How might your church community challenge the racist history of Christianity in the U.S.?