TCR Special Dialogue: Further Reflections
On Friday, The Christian Recorder hosted a Special Dialogue on LGBTQ+ acceptance in the AME Church. A timely dialogue it was as Pride Month is underway commemorating LGBTQ+ lives lost to hate crimes and celebrating some advances made in the acceptance and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in society.
The panel was not exclusively American but it was a recognition that the acceptance and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people is a global imperative that affects the Africa continent. Unfortunately, due to load shedding of electricity outages, our reality of the post-Apartheid South Africa, I was disconnected before I could raise this aspect in the Dialogue. I appreciate that The Christian Recorder’s invitation for participation.
The assertion by the Rev. William Lamar, IV, the pastor of the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington DC, a panellist in the Dialogue, nipped it in the bud, “We have allowed our agenda to be hijacked by white evangelicals. We have allowed those who pervade the curse of Ham and a misreading of Sodom and Gomorrah to set our theological agenda.”
This is true about the African context where the colonisers’ laws and biblical interpretations are glorified by our people. We play deaf to the apologies of our former colonisers, imperialists who imposed the laws we now use, to demean, dehumanize, and discriminate against LGBTQ+ Africans in our societies. Similarly, we apply their biblical interpretations to exclude queer Africans from the very unfathomable grace we were freely given through which we were engrafted into the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ, reconciling us with God.
We have, in Africa, become Catholic more than the Pope is, appropriating queerphobia as though we were its originators. Doing so is ahistorical because queerphobia is a foreign imposition to the African heritage. Rather than homosexuality, it is homophobia that is unnatural in Africa and evil for African Christians. Ours, as a people in Africa, is a story littered with queer people who were not abused for being who they are because that runs the grain of ubuntu/botho. It is not a story of cruelty, violence, and exclusion.
The failure to fully accept and include LGBTQ+ people in our Zion is blithe to the mission bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Instead of building up families, queerphobia destructs them and leaves parents and siblings of LGBTQ+ people to unnecessarily choose between the church and their own. We ought to be proud of the Rev. Dr. Toni Belin Ingram for choosing Omar Ingram, her son. Hers is illustrious leadership as parents and siblings of LGBTQ+ people must appropriate, taking advocacy for transforming both society and the church a step further in the quest for inclusion. Don’t disown and reject your children or siblings because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Stand with them and for them, especially when they can’t.
Omar, in a conversation with his mom, hit the head on the nail. He said, “You can’t use folks’ gifts and then tell them they can’t be their whole selves in the space where their gifts are being used.” Inclusion is indivisible and so is justice and love.
The current legislated policy on same-sex marriages or civil unions in the AME Church violates the sanctity of our pastoral vocation. We “start-stop-restart” pastoring to LGBTQ+ members and it is exclusively towards them that we do this. Repealing it sooner will complete our commitment to wholly embracing LGBTQ+ members. It will not be rhetorical.
The Human Rights Campaign’s documentary was riveting and edifying. The panellists were good AMEs. Thanks to Dr. Alfonso David, Esq. for helping the scales from our eyes to fall. Indeed, we don’t have to be at each other’s throats. It is not God’s will for us. Dr. Tiffany Willoghby-Herard reminded us so.
