Our journeys were quite different until about a decade later. I asked her again, and she agreed. We went on to have five children, now adults, who live in our hearts. We spent our youth participating in church life together. Our devotion to God and people was part of what attracted us to each other.
Because of the authoritarian nature of our church leadership, we also found ourselves trying to please. I had lived a worldlier life in my late teens than did Diane and I kept silently questioning things; sometimes, I was not so silent. She was told what not to wear. I was told to get a haircut. She was told not to wear makeup. I was told not to wear my running shoes to church. We were against dancing, drinking, smoking, and listening to non-Christian-themed music. My long process of faith deconstruction was more challenging for Diane, especially since we were both "true believers" when we first wed.
Many Black churches around the country were colonies of the country's South. There was a great need for them to distinguish themselves from the Christianity of their oppressors. Some churches, like ours, even differentiated themselves from other Black denominations. We sank in a rabbit hole of a constrictive culture threatened by the alien world that is Southern California life.
Christianity pinioned Diane and me until we learned to fly. Jesus promises liberty, but we had to learn a hard lesson: Christianity does not always promise the same things that Jesus does. Unfortunately, our kids grew up while we were still learning to spread our wings and have had to recover much in the same way we did.
There are beliefs we held that wonder if we ever truly embraced. Even though we were taught and then taught others about eternal damnation in hellfire, how wrong all other religious systems were, and that the whole world needed our version of the gospel to be saved, it did not make sense intellectually.
We were told that the only legit version of the Bible was the King James Version, or Authorized Version. It never made sense to us that people from Saigon to San Salvador, from Mombasa to Moscow, would need to read a Bible in 17th century English to be saved.
Not until we were away from that regressive religious ecosystem for decades were we able to see the political resistance in the keeping of odd rules. Still, it was too easily a desperate resistance. It was a way of telling a society that left us behind that we were the ones with values that matter. One product, however, of colonizer religion in the Black community is misplaced outrage.
Black Christians are sometimes scandalized by queerness and even abortion while we suffer from unemployment, lack of healthcare access, high-density housing, all caused mainly by historical white supremacy. We’re upset when a child brings a “bad word” home but overlook the fact that the kid’s mind and language are colonized daily. Often, we get worked up over the legalization of cannabis without a thought of the criminality of Big Pharma. It feels like many of us are traumatized and/or charmed by a historically oppressed and excluded way of being that we offer our consent to it in a Stockholm-Syndromic way. Many of us are content to "reconcile" racially without appreciating that even the sincerest of gestures can serve to sanction the evils of the present social order.
Some of our preachers will go so far as to blame our exclusion and impoverishment on things like queerness, abortion, and marijuana legalization. As can happen with adherents to any faith tradition, we love to find people and things to criticize, but we dismiss the roots of our problems. This may be where American Civil Religion is most effective. It neutralizes aspirations of justice because it affirms the status quo.
Now Diane and I live from our hearts. Rather than living vigilantly, consciously observing some code, we are experiencing our experiences. Our meditations are informed by ancient text, not excluding the First Testament, the Second Testament, and the Third Testament, which is how African American academics sometimes refer to our historic songs encoded with both anguish and liberation confidence. Diane and I share a life that is consistent with the dream and expectations of Jesus' message. Jesus did not come to make Christians. He came to help us be human. The glory and divinity of humanity make our species attractive and worthy. We love to love. Our love goes out to all of nature, and we want everyone to recognize that everyone and everything is redeemable.
