Your Yes Will Kill You
and why reforming the church won't save us
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Traditional Christian Church spaces are antiBlack. Not only that, but they are incapable of harboring “true love” or living up to the ethic of communal responsibility and care — that’s unattached to hidden costs. Whether the Church is non-denominational, “allows” you to wear pants (hooray?), is up to date on the latest technology for online streaming, or has a visual priority to have “the youth” in leadership, no matter how it’s spun, or what the outside looks like all churches, all Christian churches, at least within the United States, necessitate, engage in, and ritualize subtle and blatant forms of antiBlackness under the guise of uniformity in Christ and being Christ-like, to exist.
Perhaps the all too often and widely repeated phrase your yes will cost you everything rings a bell? Whether said as transitional words during a praise set, laced between a lengthy sermon, or affirmed in a small group session, your yes will cost you everything, along with the reminder to follow the call to pick up your cross, deny yourself and follow Jesus are illuminations of the death world in which we already exist. And these deaths expand beyond the physical.
From what I have observed, Churches embody what I call a faith that needs you dead in order to function. More specifically, the “you” within these Church spaces are the congregants, members, and leaders who are baptized into and engage in antiBlackness under the guise of religiosity.
*Definitions of terms I use throughout this piece for better clarity.*
Afropessimism
Is a lens of interpretation, a way of analyzing and understanding social phenomena, much like marxism, feminism, or postcolonial studies. (38)
True afropessimism is not animated by reformist desire to end discriminatory practices in the world; it is animated by an understanding that [the] world itself is unethical and needs to be undone. (39)
Afropessimists argue… all other various categories within the same species, that species being the Human (woman/man, worker/boss, native/settler, queer/straight are, in various paradigms, antagonists, to be sure, but they are also all Human beings), the Black or Slave is not a category of Human. (39)
Key afropessimist tenet: that there is no analogy between the suffering of Black people and those others who find themselves subjugated by unethical paradigms (such as patriarchy and capitalism). (40)
Afropessimists interrogate the historic development of the Human, and what that development has meant for the creation of the Black as non-Human. (41)
Jesus & Christ
Depending on the denomination, Jesus & Christ appears interchangeable or starkly different. In this letter, my use of Jesus includes what would also be perceptions of Christ yet remains aware of the realities of, as Dr. Jacquelyn Grant would title, “White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus.”
I blend the realities of “Christ’s significance is his humanity, not his maleness [and] “when theology uses Jesus as a symbol and sanctioner of male or white or economic supremacy, this imprisons Jesus in an elitist, racist, and sexist symbol system that often results in a notion of servanthood that devalues the humanity of Black women and oppressed others. This understanding of servanthood has been used to reinforce obedience and docility in those who are oppressed socioeconomically, thus allowing the privileged to deny the existence of Jesus’ real servanthood by changing his poor status into a royal one. (166)
God
God/god will be interchangeably used in this letter. As I’m personally working through what’s written in this letter, ‘god’ may appear more fitting than “God.” I’m reflecting on townes’ explanation of God as who “directly speaks to poor Black women through Jesus, and through God’s revelation of themselves in the Bible… This is how God and humanity meet.”
Church
The Church, as in, inclusive of all denominations and understood as within the United States. The Black Church is part of this definition of Church and how it engages the phrases, “your yes will cost you everything.”
Scripture:
Matthew 16:24-26, NRSV
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?
Antiblackness
Antiblackness is an antisocial logic that not only dehumanizes Black people but also renders abject all that is associated with Blackness. (8)
The Human, the modern human, defines itself in opposition to the Black (alleged) nonbeing…Frantz Fanon places this fear and hatred of Black people at the core of what he describes as the modern collective unconscious. The hatred of Black people is the hatred of the nonbeing, of the placeless, of the alleged nonhuman. (5)
A Church That Preys
Quite a bit of preying happens within Church, so I’m concerned with Churches that run with the model of (death) discipleship. As in death to self, death to desire, death to the belief of our inherent goodness, death to trusting self, death to the belief that morality can exist independent from a belief in a higher power or specific higher power, and beyond.
I’m thinking about how often I hear the call to pick up our crosses and follow Jesus and the community policing and the disciplining of bodies into function that happens between church members to enforce this. I’m thinking about how this call to say “yes” to Christ leans heavily on external performance and increased praises of how much someone self-deprecates as a way to show their loyalty to god. But I can’t get my mind off how a culture of demanding your full yes creates an enclosed cycle of ingraining a false belief of our innate unworthiness, sinfulness, and evil and the Church profiting from that lie.
The Church is not only antiBlack but also insidious because it poses itself as a holy and worthy place compelling you to say “yes” while truthfully needing you dead to operate. And death, specifically of Black bodies, includes a social death, in what Orlando Patterson describes as – “the enslaved is ‘a socially dead person’ or, alternatively, ‘a social nonperson.’... to be enslaved is to have no recognized social existence: in and against the social world but not of it.”(3).
One of the ways that this preying happens is through recognizing that enslavement has not ended and capture still exists. Christina Sharpe describes this as, “in the wake, the reappearances of the slave ship in the everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school,” and I would confidently add the Church. (21). The preying that happens is the creation of an external fear of the other, an internalized fear of resembling any marker of Blackness, to feel a false sense of safety within what is actually the danger and to keep you tethered to this location.
If we are in the wake, how are our sensitivities to what kills de-sensitized so that we are exploited? When are we, Black people, ever not in the wake?
This Faith Needs You Dead to Function.
The Church needs Blackness to remain the nonhuman other so that any violence done particularly on Black people isn’t seen as violence because Black people are viewed as things and not humans in this antiBlack world. The death and terrorizing of Black people, their bodies, and their flesh is the currency that builds this Church.
So it’s a lie when Churches say that your yes will cost you everything because there are two camps – those who can afford to lose and those who have nothing to gain. And those who have nothing to gain always pay more of this cost compared to those who can afford to pretend as if they’ve done something (all nonBlack humans).
This reminds me of the experience that James Baldwin wrote about in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” between himself and Norman Mailer “there is a difference between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.”
The reality is that in this world, the “yes” to Christ/Jesus/God is still hierarchical. If Baldwin had nothing to lose because nothing was there to begin with, just as with Blackness as a site of negation, the foil of Norman having something to save - his beingness, shows that we are not equal in this body of Christ. For Norman to be able to engage in the friendship with Baldwin and reap the fruits of that dynamic, there still requires a cost from Baldwin that determines the ability for Norman to have the option of still having something to save.
In other words, when the call is made for Christians to say yes with their life, to deny themselves fully, and to recognize that their yes will cost them everything, it still hinges on the fact that white Christians can still hold onto their beingness as their “something to save.” Their humanity remains in the process of external commitment, so they never really fully give of themselves to the Lord because they do not have to, and they can reap the earthly benefits of this “yes” – social inclusion, financial security, perceived salvation guarantee, etc. Whereas with Blackness, in this antiBlack world, the requirement is their all, without question. There still remains spiritual labor to ensure that all citizens of the Kingdom can have life more abundantly, but not the laborers themselves.
So this can be seen in who is found performing labor within the Church, who serves, who gives of their time, and who is assumed to be a “humble servant.” For white and nonBlack humans, their yes and the perceived benefits of that yes, hinge on those who have been forced to say yes and what they have been forced to give.
It’s not enough to rest in the self-assurance that Churches are becoming “less” racist, sexist, or more welcoming. Cool, but no. What remains and what will is the undergirding of antiBlackness in Churches, and that’s because the world we know is antiBlack, and no space, relation, or interaction is immune from this reality. What are we now doing to end these spaces?
Again, the Church is antiBlack. Please find God elsewhere!
AP theory holds that the Black and the Slave are nonhuman. And according to the plan of salvation, Jesus came to Earth so that humans can have life and so that Jesus can bridge the gap of communication between God and humans. Again, AP theory holds that the “Black” and the “Slave” is nonhuman. In that case, that means that God still does not engage with Blackness and Slave because both are not recognized as human within this plan of salvation. So who was really saved, and who is salvation for?
Gleaning from Christina Sharpe, Black people have still remained to assert our existence in a world that sees us as nonexistent, which, alongside Lauren Olamina’s Earthseed’s tenets of shaping God, we, as Black people in the wake, make, shape and craft God into a being that can potentially save us. But the reality is that in this zone of non-being (from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks), we are the ones who have saved and continue to save ourselves.
With a closer look, in the Church, the reality is that personhood is unseen and rather a body part in the collective body of Christ – until it is time to reprimand you as an individual when your actions are not approved or when efforts made to actualize yourself go against the accepted grain.
For the Black and the Slave, you are no thing until you need to be criminalized, to which citizenship/recognition of a pseudo-humanity is granted so that the criminalization is executed. Sharpe continues that “to be in the wake is to live in those no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship, to live in the longtime of Dred and Harriet Scott, and it is more than that.”
AntiBlackness and enslavement remain and undergird the structure of the Church. It is what keeps the Church alive. If all holds true, then the only freedom is the death of this world, including the Church. We’re past the point of reforming and external revising. Let God be found elsewhere because surely this god, or this world, is not worthy of our yes.
Links:
Special thanks to Taqiyyah Elliott and Ozioma Erondu for reviewing this piece.
This is good!!!
To call church to the fore and acknowledge that its methodology is death dealing and requires a particular death that’s self depreciating and so counterintuitive and productive to a God who holds many names and exists in many ways that I believe sees creation as good is provocative and would like to use for my lecture😊
A few years ago in school I started talking about the racism that exists within the Church, but was disregarded by my religion teacher and didn't fully have the knowledge or ability to articulate what I was trying to say. This piece has reminded me of that encounter. I didn't try to understand what I was trying to say and forgot about it. Thank you for this entry point into a subject I let myself stop caring about.