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The theology of those at the center of society often seeks to characterize people on the edge as enemies of God. This is especially true when individuals or groups unrepentantly refuse to conform to the dominant definition of normativeness. Overcoming internal and external oppressive theology, or a theology that excludes certain people, is primary in creating a Christian community for people visibly on the periphery. Those who promote theologies that exclude certain races, cultures, sexual and gender orientations, and classes in the name of Jesus would do well to remember that Jesus was himself from the edge of society with a ministry to those who were considered least. Jung Young Lee, describing the marginality and the ministry of Jesus, states that

Jesus’ public ministry may best be characterized as a life of marginality. He was a homeless man with a group of homeless people around him. The people Jesus called to be his disciples were marginalized people. None came from the religious establishment; they were not elders, high priests, or Judaic-law teachers. Most were fishermen, except for a tax collector and a clerk, Judas, who betrayed Jesus. His other associations were primarily with the poor, weak, outcast, foreigners, and prostitutes.²

Marginalized people, now as in the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry, respond to a community of openness and inclusivity where other people from the edge gather. Such an atmosphere welcomes people to feel it is safer to be who they are. A liberating theology of acceptance must be embodied in the atmosphere of a liberating Christian community. Contempt for the church and all things religious often stems from exposure to oppressive theology, biblical literalism, and unyielding tradition. A person, church, or society can do extreme harm when that harm is done in the name of God and virtue and with the “support” of Scripture. In The Good Book, Peter Gomes reflects on an old aphorism he heard from a friend: “A surplus of virtue is more dangerous than a surplus of vice, because a surplus of virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience.”³ Many people rejected by the church got their burns from Bible-believing Christian flamethrowers.

In the African American Metho-Bapti-Costal⁴ tradition there is an example of oppression sickness that masquerades as virtue. The ancestors of present-day African Americans were taught to cover up in the daylight and were often sexually and physically abused behind closed doors at night. This brought about shame and guilt regarding the body, but what was worse was what went on behind those doors, under those clothes, in the dark, late at night. Africans came to realize that virtue was a white thing for white people that did not extend to the slave; the rules came in different colors. Sin and evil were black; goodness and virtue were white.

Peter Paris says of the “Christian” slave trader:

Slave traders saw no contradiction between being Christian and being engaged in the sale of human cargo. Although Christians espoused a universal doctrine that God created all humans, their theology did not imply the equality of all humanity. On the contrary, their refusal to acknowledge the full humanity of African peoples implied the absence of any moral issue with respect to slavery. Consequently, slave traders saw no contradiction between being Christian, on the one hand, and the buying and selling of human slaves on the other hand.⁵

The slaveholders were the people who taught Africans who were brought to the Americas about Jesus, a Jesus who loved Africans as long as they were content to be slaves, a Jesus who supported the snatching of babies from their mothers’ breasts and selling them down river. Good religious folks, who could sing “Amazing Grace” on the deck of a slave ship or at a burning, beating, or a lynching, were the examples of good moral Christians. John Kater in his book Christians on the Right is correct in his assertion that all theology serves someone. The question is whom does it serve? Who benefits and at whose expense? When we are finished cooking up and serving our theologies, who reigns and who suffers? Kater describes the state of the slaveholding religious south in this statement, “Both Jesus and the prophets before him knew well that it is possible to practice religion without seeking Justice.”⁶ The slave’s understanding of a God who could allow such atrocities would have to be joined with internalized inferiority. This oppression is rooted deeply in the African American community’s spirit. African Americans demonstrate certain characteristics of African spiritualism such as ecstatic, cathartic behavior in worship with dancing and “shouting”—behavior very similar to and central to the liturgy of West African peoples. Yet we are told what Africans do is demonic and what African Americans do is the Holy Spirit. African Americans have systematically been taught that all indigenous African expressions of faith are heathen, demonic, or ignorant. Some African American churches refuse to sing songs with call and response or long repeating choruses because it has been suggested that only ignorant people sing the same thing over and over, yet the repeating chant is a significant part of our musical history.

In 1706 six colonial legislatures passed acts denying that Christian baptism made slaves equal to whites. Their fear was that the slaves might become “saucy” if they saw themselves equal to whites in the sight of God. Baptism began for many with the following proclamation:

You declare in the presence of God and before the congregation that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience that you owe your master while you live, but merely for the good of Your Soul and to partake of the Graces and Blessings promised to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ.⁷

Preachers allowed to preach to slaves had to constantly reinforce and remind them that they were never going to be equal to their masters . . . not now nor in the hereafter.

A slave, Frank Roberson, paraphrased the kind of preaching slaves were subjected to:

You will go to heaven if you are good, but don’t ever think that you will be close to your mistress and master. No! No! There will be a wall between you; but there will be holes in it that will permit you to look out and see your mistress when she passes by. If you want to sit behind this wall, you must do the language of the text “Obey your masters.”⁸

In order to even preach to the slaves the preacher had to convince the slaveholder that Christianity would produce a more docile, obedient slave.

It is impossible to come into the Christian faith through the slave door and not have a skewed view of relationship with the Creator and a sideways interpretation of virtue. According to M. Shawn Copeland,

Black women’s suffering redefined caricatured Christian virtues. Because of the lives and suffering of Black women held in chattel slavery—the meanings of forbearance, longsuffering, patience, love, hope, and faith can never again be ideologized. Because of the rape, seduction, and concubinage of Black women under chattel slavery, chastity or virginity begs new meaning.⁹

Just as child abuse passes from one generation to the next, so does spiritual/theological abuse, and the resulting contagious oppression sickness can make the oppressed a “virtuous” oppressor. Oppression sickness is internalized oppression that causes the oppressed to be infected by the sickness of the oppressor. The effort to mimic the dominant Christian culture or those “truly favored” by God has greatly infected the African American church tradition with classism, sexism, heteroprivilege, patriarchy, and closed doors. How does an inferior-feeling group of people feel superior? By finding someone else to make inferior. Accordingly, light-colored people feel superior to dark people. Educated people feel superior to undereducated people. Men lord over women. Delores S. Williams in her critique of James Cone’s groundbreaking book, A Black Theology of Liberation, reveals that although the book became “scripture for many black seminarians who had for years been trying to reconcile their own black experience of Jesus in the black Christian community with the Jesus they met in Eurocentric theological education,” it fell woefully short of addressing the “horrible exploitation black women have experienced in both the black and white worlds.”¹⁰

The “haves” continue to lord over the “have nots.” Straight people bash SGL people. Elias Farajaje-Jones, in his essay “Breaking Silence,” says,

Many Black people believe it is acceptable to be openly homophobic/biphobic. The Black Church definitely encourages this through words and actions. Indeed, expressing homophobia/biphobia to reaffirm their heterosexual privilege is often the only situation in which many Black Christians feel that they have any form of privilege at all.¹¹

The pulpit often becomes a place of monarchy, not ministry, particularly when the pulpit is the only place where the minister has value. Whoever is considered the “Gentile” in our midst is often oppressed. Some African Americans who got their opportunity to succeed through affirmative action speak against it, forgetting that colored people were lynched fighting for it. In Shades of Freedom, A. Leon Higginbotham refers to such an elitist attitude among African American professionals in a scathing critique of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He states, “Many white judges share an underlying belief about the rarity of racist occurrences in the courtroom. In contrast, I know of only one African American Federal Judge (Thomas) who minimizes the significance of the fact that societal racism, even unintentional, often affects the adjudicatory and factfinding process of court.”¹² In Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, lawyer and author Stephen Carter comments that there are no black conservatives, only neoconservatives whose only claim to blackness is their skin, and who have forgotten their roots.¹³

The African village concept of community was demonized along with African religion; so much was lost in the crossing of the Atlantic. When a low sense of self-worth is present it often seems necessary to stand tall on someone else’s back. In the world of church, regardless of the ethnicity or culture, those backs often belong to the people who do not fit—the ones who are obviously, visibly “other.” This is a peculiar paradox, as the African American church has a long history of fighting for the rights of those in its pews and community.

For more than four hundered years, the African American church has been the principle source of sanctuary, education, socialization, information, and community for people of African descent in this country. Most of the great African American civil rights leaders, for example, Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Jordan, Rosa Parks, and Jesse Jackson, are products of the black church, yet this black church community that endured so much oppression during its development on the margin has become an oppressor for many.

In Unrepentant, Self–Affirming, Practicing, Gary Comstock reveals the findings of Michael Dickens’s survey of SGL men of African descent in Connecticut. Dickens acknowledges the leading role of the black church in “all progressive changes in civil rights since the days of slavery,” yet he says, “When we realize the important contribution the black church has made, we begin to understand how truly devastating it is for someone to be condemned for their homosexuality by an institution that has long been in the vanguard of the cause of Justice.”¹⁴ In order to create community among people on the margin, it is essential to adopt a theology that seeks to identify and eradicate oppression sickness no matter what the root cause may be.

Oppressive theology, or a theology that welcomes those who fit a normative definition of the dominant culture while excluding those who do not, is a ball and chain on the heart of the body of Christ, and with it we keep each other in bondage. The church of Jesus Christ is in the midst of change, not all of it for the better. Any theology that suggests that God receives some and rejects others is not reflective of the ministry of Jesus Christ. Comstock insists that “the church has simply gone astray from a basis, center, origin in a common carpenter who welcomed, included, and healed the broken, outcast, and needy.”¹⁵ Jesus established the role of ministry that was being ushered in by the phenomenon of God being made flesh when Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah one Sabbath morning. Jesus said the Spirit of the Sovereign God was upon him for this purpose to:

Preach good tidings to the meek

Bind up the broken-hearted

Proclaim liberty to the captives

Open the prison to them that are bound

Proclaim the acceptable year [the year of Jubilee]

Comfort all that mourn

Give beauty for ashes and the oil of joy for mourning

Give a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness

Make us trees of righteousness, plantings of God.

(Isa. 61:1–3; Luke 4:18, 19 adapted from KJV)

These priorities must also be the priorities of an oppression-free Christian community. How can we be the church of Jesus unless we reflect the ministry of Jesus? Is the church a radical incarnation of the ministry of Jesus or a private social club? It is crucial in the formation of community that those who were and are oppressed seek to overcome the theological millstones tied around their necks. It is equally important to eschew pejorative assumptions toward others in community who are different to avoid passing on the sickness of oppressive theology. This inherited oppression leads to stereotyping for the purpose of gaining power or advantage.

Donald Chinula, using Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion of the “beloved community,” asserts that oppression manifested as an unjust use of authority or advantage “seeks its own advantage at the expense of the oppressed and strives to perpetuate itself.”¹⁶ Stereotyping allows the oppressor to stand apart from the oppressed and categorize and pigeonhole a group of people. This oppression is particularly insidious when the Bible is used to defend it. Chinula says, “Women are oppressed because they happen to be women. This is invidious stereotyping. It is the perpetuation of a belief that a person or a group possesses characteristics or qualities that typify that group, and the use of that belief against its members.”¹⁷ This cycle of naming and blaming marginalized people has historically been the biblically based justification of the violence perpetrated against individuals, races, and nations.

The principal message that goes out from the church of Jesus Christ should declare, “Freedom in Christ is freedom in life—all are welcome at the table.”