Our Father’s Not in Heaven: The New Black Atheism
Cord Jefferson is the senior editor at GOOD magazine.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Several years ago, I pitched a freelance piece about black atheism to a prominent magazine geared toward African-Americans. The pitch was denied, but not for any real reason. "That one might be a bit, uh, hard," is all my editor said. I'd later come to find out that he was merely sheltering me from his ultra-Christian executive editor, who would never let a piece questioning religion run in the magazine.
Black America's religious problem isn't that it's highly religious—most of America is religious—it's that, in my experience, it's highly religious to the point of exclusion, as if black people living their lives without God don't count. Black atheists or agnostics are often looked at by other blacks as alien or pitiable. A black atheist quoted in the New York Times last year said his mother was bothered more by the admission that he is an atheist than the admission that he is gay. Another in the Huffington Post said that declaring she was an atheist to her black friends was "social suicide."
I can understand where they're coming from. In high school, I went on a day-trip to a convocation of Black Students Unions, where we were all asked to bow our heads and pray before lunch. I was shocked. I tipped my head out of politeness, but rather than pray, I just sat there and wondered if what we were doing was legal. A few years later, during my freshman year in college, a black girl asked me what church I was going to attend as if it were as certain as asking me where I planned on eating or breathing. When I told her I wouldn't be going to any church, she wrenched her face away from me, aghast, like I'd vomited onto her lap. "Oh," she responded, "OK." We literally never spoke again.
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I can't remember exactly when the last line of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" address began to bother me, but I think it was sometime around 6th grade. That was the year my history teacher had the class sit through all 14 hours of Eyes on the Prize, memorizing dates and important heroes and the names "Selma" and "Little Rock." Growing up with a black history-buff father, I'd heard the speech many times before. But I'd never pored over it in conjunction with a deep dissection of the Civil Rights movement as a whole. And when I finally did, I just couldn't get over that last line.
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