My post on a Yahoo! news story "Many blacks shrug off Obama's new view on gays"

[johnlucas]

12. Bible Belt nonsense & just your everyday garden-variety fear & paranoia

In the slave days Blacks—Africans were stripped of their cultural customs & routines & pushed to embrace White Man's Christianity to make sure the African, the Black was easier to control. Better control meant better slaves.

In this holocaust which saw families ripped apart & whole populations permanently embedded in an underclass, Black people needed something to give them hope for a better day. The Bible stories that were forced on them gave them an outlet to hope. The slavemaster allowed Blacks to have ministries so the ministry was an escape from the brutal toil of everyday life. So long as the slave ministers preached messages acceptable to the slaveowners, this was allowed. No Nat Turner rebellion & 'let my people go' kind of stuff, ya know.

No literacy was allowed so these were probably oral recitations which is what ministers were for. To administer the message. To serve out the message. Think about it. Some big man behind a stump talking to a captive audience. Why do you need to listen to him if you knew how to read the book for yourself? People still follow this antiquated tradition to this day. You got a book. Read it. Hahaha.

However, this churchy time also proved USEFUL for those slaves who begin to talk in code using the religious storefront. Code talk done in Negro Spirituals which would be seen as just part of the indocrination campaign by the slavemasters. A few slaves were secretly taught how to read too also undoing the campaign. They COULD transmit that 'let my people go' message to the others.
They could be meeting places that serve as the 'train junctions' for that Underground Railroad, meeting places that serve as 'command centers' for those March on Washington ops.

Basically, the Christian Protestant church which was once forced on them became an unintended source of power & hope. Even after official chattel slavery was ended (wage slavery still going on today), the church was the place where you could gain prestige & status. Stuff that was hard to get in a world which still devalued Black life.
In the outside world you're a sharecropper, a pullman porter, a maid, a housekeeper, a shoe-shine boy but in the church you are a DEACON, a REVEREND, a BISHOP, an ORGANIST, a CHOIR DIRECTOR, an USHER, a TRUSTEE, a PROPHET or PROPHETESS.

The White Man's church was ironically instrumental in Black folks' ability to exact measures of equality. Was ironically instrumental in giving Black folks a better sense of identity than an Untouchable, a Slave, a Ninth-class citizen.
In the church, I am a Child of God Almighty. My life has value because my Creator SAYS it has value. It doesn't matter what the world says. It doesn't matter what the White man says.
That's why you saw the Black Church at the forefront of the Black Equality Movement (Civil Rights Movement) of the 1950s & 1960s.
And it wasn't always the Black Christian Church either. Some came from an alternative Black Islamic Church or Mosque (Hello Ward Muhammad, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan & the Nation of Islam).
Church, Mosque, Synagogue, Temple, same thing.

So this tradition is valuable to many Black people. I'm no longer religious but I come from a strongly religious Black family. Our family reunions have church services included. It's part of the Black community & to turn on the church could be just as severe as turning on the Black community. Just as severe as turning on your own Black family. Without your support network how far can you really go ESPECIALLY in a world that STILL devalues Black life (ask Trayvon)?

It's why I don't make my religious point of view public & obvious to my own family. I don't believe they would disown or disavow me but I don't want to cause tension. I've seen the religion help stabilize one of my family members who was on drugs bad. It has its usefulness. I saw flaws in religion as a pre-teen/teenager & now wish to do good by people outside of the religious yoke. I value certain things WITHIN the religion like the Golden Rule, the stuff about God as 'I AM', certain Proverbs but I only go by these things if they have a universal weight. When they seem beyond humankind's bias & bigotry. When they seem to run under an immutable universal law. I look at religion as another sector of philosophy & judge by its positive merits.

But all Black folks ain't like me. Most people period ain't like me. I'm unusual.
So they will live life by what's written in the Bible & if the minister says homosexuality is 'living in sin' then they will believe that anything gay is 'living in sin' regardless of how badly thought-out that conclusion is. Few are brave enough to challenge this covertly or openly due to the support network factor.

Outside of this realm, it also falls into simple fear & paranoia in general. The simple 'I don't understand it. It looks gross. EWWWW!' kind of thing. They might not even be religious but they fear homosexual people. The unique cross-up of feminine & masculine seen in homosexual people weirds them out. Gay men are masculine in body but feminine in brain. Gay women are feminine in body but masculine in brain. It's all hormonal from the womb but they don't understand that fact.
The Yin-Yang symbol which explains everything: One white swash with a black dot in the middle, one black swash with a white dot in the middle. There's a little man in every woman & a little woman in every man. In gay people this just gets a little more pronounced.
Once this is understood as fact rather than fable, this irrationality will fade out.

Meanwhile, Black people already under siege trying to maintain the Black family (been that way since the slave days) fear that gay people are emblematic of the ultimate destruction of family life. They must be taught that this is just another variation of nature not the apocalypse of your own kind. Besides, ultimately every gay person was born from a straight.
John Lucas