Changing Hearts and Minds in America's (Black) Church Communities

Last week, we experienced a watershed moment for African-American LGBTs and the black church in America.

It wasn't a million-person rally on the mall in Washington, D.C. It wasn't a sweeping new civil rights law. It was something smaller, but nonetheless profound. It was one sermon, preached by one man, in one church outside Atlanta, Georgia. Granted, Pastor Dewey Smith is a big deal. And the church where he preaches, House of Hope Atlanta, has 11,000 members and holds services in a 7,000-seat neo-Gothic cathedral.

What's profound about this semon is that a ray of light has pierced the darkness. Painful and honest words have been spoken, and the result has not been outrage from his congregation, but rather (from what we can see thus far) celebration.

Thanks to social media, Pastor Smith's message will now spread and reverberate. The conversation about gays in the African-American church will inevitably shift, if only a little.

 Whether or not we are believers, religion and organized religion affect us all. The church's influence on the larger African-American community is profound and cannot be denied.  

Will this sermon on a Sunday in July of 2015 be remembered as "the" tipping point? Probably, no. It's too soon for that. Other pastors will need to take up Pastor Dewey's message and carry it to their own flock. But I will believe we will look back on Pastor Dewey's sermon as seminal, akin to certain key acts of bravery and leadership taken by Dr. Martin Luther King and his peers. 

When I saw the video of the sermon (above) I was dumbstruck. I shook. There were tears in my eyes.  I knew something momentous had occurred. Yet, when I shared it on social media, the response was tepid. Here's an example of an exchange from my Facebook page:

• Paul Baswell i just don't get why its so important for you to change their minds? you live your way and let them 

  live theirs. its not a form of condoning its knowing were your prioritys should be. i just don't think you can change them. many are filled with hate not only for gay people but for almost anything they see as outside. plus there is far to much religious talk out side of ones community. i find much of what is presented in the media to be disingenuous manipulation.

  Like · Reply · 23 hrs
• 

  Ben Patrick Johnson It's important to change hearts and minds because we all affect each other profoundly through our attitudes and actions. Countless young gay people are mistreated in their own homes, abused or dismissed, in the name of God and Bible. By changing hearts and minds (something that is very much possible and doable) we can make life better for millions and diminish the sort of tragedy after tragedy we LBGT activists and care providers see on a daily basis. 
  
  As Evan Wolfson said of gay marriage, "There is no marriage without engagement." We have engaged people on that subject. Public opinion (overall) is now strongly in favor of same-sex marriage. But there are communities, like the African-American and some Latino communities, where the message is slow to resonate. One of the reasons is the stronghold of the anti-gay black (and, with Latinos, Catholic) church, where bigotry and non-acceptance is preached on a weekly basis.
  
  The solution? Work within the black (and white Evangelical) and Catholic church communities to promote tolerance and acceptance of not just gays but, as you note, traditional societal outliers of all stripe. Celebrating the words and actions of a pioneer like Pastor Dewey Smith will help us. As will efforts like the Institute for Welcoming Resources, a Minneapolis-based organization that develops programs church members can take to their clergy to help shift the message coming from the pulpit to one of inclusion vs. exclusion, empathy vs condemnation.

Today, I have been asking black friends, especially musicians, for their reaction and perspective. I'll probably update this post and include some of that in the days ahead. But I want to know what YOU think, how significant you feel the church is in current civil rights challenges for gays, Muslim-Americans and other disenfranchised groups, and how you feel we can best get the message of inclusion into America's church communities.

A brief hiatus that wasn't so brief

I haven't blogged in a long time. Two years almost. I could say "Shame on me," but shame is such a useless thing. I don't wish to invoke it. Instead, I'll simply say, "Here goes." (We can talk more about shame later. And shall. Especially in reference to my relationship. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Maybe I should talk about why I haven't been blogging.

The simplest answer is I've been busy writing other things. Like the novel Splinters, which is about to be published by Dreamspinner Press. I also worked on a screenplay version of my novel If the Rains Don't Cleanse, which then got ditched after Hollywood producers optioned the novel and wanted a real screenplay written by a real Hollywood writer.

In addition, I lost access to this blog and every time I tried to log back in and post something, I hit a dead end and rather than keep trying to figure it out, I got distracted and moved onto something else. Like writing tweets for my Twitter page. Or sending endless Facebook pokes. Or smoking weed and playing with the cat. 

Ironically, there was a period where I was journalling prolifically. This was during a period of depression I went through in late 2013 after breaking up with Marcos. It's been broadly suggested that to be a serious writer, one ought to write 1,000 words a day. There were a number of months in 2013 where I journalled 50,000 words or more. Most of it was dreck. I don't even want to go back and review it now. Those were not quality words. They were long laments. Lists of nothing useful. Meandering, circular repetitive ... you get the idea.

And then, in December of 2013, I met Mariano Tugas, now (spoiler alert) Mariano Johnson, on a trashy hookup website. We ended up dating instead of hooking up, I came out of my depression, we fell in love, and then he went batshit crazy for a little while (maybe I'll let him be the one to blog about that.) Eventually he got un-crazy and we got married. Now we live in a big house with way too many animals and we run around most days in our underwear and sing songs to each other, shouting from room to room,  fighting like angry lobsters. (Do lobsters fight? Do they get angry? I know they're red from asthaxanthin, not anger, but maybe they have tempers. I digress.) We tried healthy food delivery for a while but it was a bust. So now we order in pizza and Chinese food. Every day, I do voice-overs in my studio and write and post things on social media in the bedroom on my laptop. Husband sits around in the family room tending his four aquariums and attempting not to kill seahorses. (He is sometimes successful at not killing seahorses.) We burn incense. We alternately sneer at each other and sing each other's praises. We frequently run out of lube. 

There are people who want to make a reality TV show about my life. About our life. Which is kooky because I spend most of my time sitting here wearing reading glasses and typing on my computer.

.

That is, when I'm not floor-skating down the hallway in my socks with my husband or fighting with him. (Yes, I'm aware this is the second time in this blog entry I've mentioned fighting with my husband. I'm deeply in love with him, but I'm not going to pretend like things are hunky dory all the time. Except, maybe on TV, I will.) I can't see how our life would make for interesting television viewing. But I'm going along with the TV people, at this point. Because I love attention. And a part of me still feels like, all these years after the TV show Extra fired me as host at age 24, I still haven't gotten my fifteen minutes of whatever--Fame? Acknowledgement?

There are a lot of blank spaces to fill in. Underdeveloped parts of me, as a human being, and gaps explaining myself. (In a blog. This blog.) I'm working on both, the Benjamin and the blog. Maybe I'll talk about shame in my next blog entry. Shame is a motherfucker. And it plays more of a role in my life, and in husband's life (and thus in mine, doubly), than I wish it did. 

Sunlight disinfects. Let's drag some of this out into the light and see what happens.