Afrocentrists, Evangelicals, Hebrew-Israelites and the False Revolution

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Afrocentric, Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authority Figures, Black Action Society, Child Abuse, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Cross of Gold (1896), Dick Oestriecher, Domestic Violence, Estelle Abel, Evangelical Christianity, Frances Cress Welsing, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hoteps, Jack Van Impe, Judah ben Israel, Karl Marx, Kenneth Copeland, Kufi, Marxism, Maurice Eugene Washington, Molefi Asante, Neo-Marxists, Ostracism, Prosperity Gospel, Racism, Rapture, Religion, Wendy Goldman, William Jennings Bryan

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

For nearly all of my life folks with even a kernel of authority have tried to convince me that there was one right way to live, one true path to liberation. Mostly religion has been the means through which others have attempted to box me in, although ideologues around Marxism, Afrocentricity, and Capitalism have all been in my figurative kitchen over the years. And like any well-meaning human being, at times I tried real hard to adapt myself to these right ways of thinking, of living out the one correct way to live. Only to fail, or rather, to recognize that none of these ways are the one right way, unless you are a closet right-winger, a conservative (non-ideological) wearing revolution-esque clothing.

My introduction to this madness began with my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, from April ’81 to April ’84 (although I wore my kufi until September ’84). That any parent could suddenly impose a new religion on their kids without explanation is abusive enough. When combined with vague notions about the Lost Tribes of ancient Israel and the wearing of clothes that set us apart culturally while in the middle of puberty, it was a forced societal ostracism. Even still, I tried to live by these strictures. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Eat kosher food, don’t use Ivory soap, shop only at Black or Hebrew-Israelite stores, avoid “unclean issues of blood.” But the physical abuse and poverty that came with being a Hebrew-Israelite in the Judah ben Israel madhouse of contradictions at 616 made me despise anything involving Hebrew-Israelite pretty much for all time.

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Fast-forward a few years to the early 1990s, to the rise of Afrocentricity and the Afrocentric ethos. After three and a half years of being around Hebrew-Israelites, these kente-cloth wearing fools made me weary more times than not of their exclusionary our-way-or-no-way Blackness. Molefi Asante and the late Frances Cress Welsing were just the tip of a much larger iceberg in search of revolutionary “authentic” Blackness. From the Afrocentric undergrads who hijacked the Black Action Society leadership at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991 to folks who picked arguments with me for “sounding White” while I was in grad school, I saw them the same way I saw my now idiot ex-stepfather and the obnoxious Estelle Abel from my high school days. They were well-meaning but stupid. As far as I was concerned, they thought that their words alone would foster a revolution, that being Black meant turning one’s back on the world while also indirectly embracing an ethnocentric capitalism. Or at least, a Black American collective individualism, otherwise known as an “Afrocentric cool.” I could not, I would not, exchange one form of oppressive uplift in Hebrew-Israelites for the shiny fool’s gold that mostly represented the Afrocentrists.

The neo-Marxists I met in Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s were no better. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, theirs was a world of theoretical activism, of scholarly examples of past oppression. Most of them didn’t know poverty and didn’t comprehend oppression beyond their own limited experience. Most of all, they couldn’t find a connection between American racism and class oppression if I gave them an industrial strength magnet. The fact that most of them hadn’t read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis — but could quote Karl Marx the way Hebrew-Israelites could quote the Torah and Afrocentrists could quote Asante and Welsing — I found troubling. That’s putting it nicely. I found it contemptuous that folks who didn’t know my experience or who would all but refuse to read folks who written about experiences like mine would expect my allegiance to an ideology that was never meant for people who look like me.

The evangelical Christian part of my life was literally the last of the major dogmas to go. It was the hardest for me because I literally had given my life to Jesus in the midst of the whole Hebrew-Israelite crisis, Easter Sunday ’84. With my Mom coming down the same path by the late-1980s, it made it easier to not interrogate my Christianity as thoroughly as I would excoriate Afrocentrists and Marxists in graduate classes and in articles and papers a decade later. But even at nineteen, I realized that the Van Impe’s weekly predictions of the Apocalypse were as ridiculous as Welsing’s exulting of the magical properties of melanin. Or, for that matter, a fake Balkis Makeda cautioning against the use of Ivory Soap among her Hebrew-Israelite flock because of a dream she had.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I went along to get along for years, until the hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity’s Gospel of Prosperity became too much. They took the metaphor of William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold and actually went literal and nuclear with it. Somehow being Christian now meant blind patriotic allegiance to anything US and fully supporting capitalism, and yet an exclusionary separation between “true” evangelical Christians and the rest of the world. Especially on Rapture Day.

The last time I sat comfortably in a pew was in January ’97, although I’ve been to churches of various denominations dozens of times since. I still believe in Jesus, the life and the death and even the resurrection. But I don’t believe in most who claim to represent him, yet turn around and ignore the vulnerable standing right in front of them, making weak claims around individualism and poverty in the process.

In so many ways, evangelicals, Marxists, Afrocentrists, and Hebrew-Israelites are more alike than different. They all insist on a singular path, a quintessential truth. While some aspects of their thinking are appealing, I find accepting their bullshit in entirety poisonous to my spirit, mind, and gastrointestinal tract. There still may well be a revolution or even a rapture, but it won’t be because of any of these groups.

My Christianity at 30

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Action, Activism, Atheism, Atheists, Christianity, Critical Thinking, Easter Sunday, Evangelical Christianity, Evangelicals, Faith, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hypocrisy, Renewal, Revelation, Salvation, Social Control, Social Justice, Spirituality, Wisdom

The full prayer kneel, April 8, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

No, today’s not my thirtieth birthday — I’m still forty-four and twenty months away from entering middle age. But, it has been thirty years since I converted to Christianity, two weeks before Easter Sunday ’84, sometime between 8:55 and 9 am. You could say — and many would — that this marks three full decades since my spiritual rebirth, a milestone as significant as my birthday on the final Saturday of the ’60s at Mount Vernon Hospital.

In many ways, it was a renewal, a reboot, a beginning of sorts. To claim control over my life and my destiny, at least, as much control as I could muster. In the past thirty years, the issues of control and perfection, faith, knowledge and wisdom, and the expectations I have of myself, my God and those who either don’t see God as real or as real to me have remained constants in my life.

Perhaps this has been because of how I became a Christian in the first place, a bit more than three months after an aborted suicide attempt on my fourteenth birthday. With my abusive stepfather Maurice and his insistence that we were Hebrew-Israelites, I couldn’t be open about my conversion or the thought and faith process that led me to Christianity. At least, I didn’t feel strong enough back then to be open about it. I remained a clandestine Christian for five months before I stood up to the idiot after my first day of tenth grade — my first time not wearing my kufi since sixth grade — and dared him to kill me. He didn’t, and it was my first full victory against my stepfather.

As for my classmates, the splits between the denominational Christian, agnostic, atheist and Nation of Islam sets were ones I’d become aware of long before my conversion. And, by tenth grade, it was obvious that many of my immediate Humanities classmates were about as accepting of the spiritual as Bill Maher and the late Christopher Hitchens. Maybe not openly so, but the barrier of intolerance and disdain was there.

Break the chains, April 8, 2014. (http://www.flrministry.com).

Over the years, my walk with Jesus’ life, death and resurrection has grown more complicated, with euphoric highs, quiet lows, and periods of almost evangelical revival along the way. Still, I remain faithful, even as I remain disillusioned, about my life, humanity, the universe and the afterlife. I still pray, and believe that God listens to my prayers, but understand that prayer without action is tantamount to talking to myself. “Faith without works is dead,” is what the good book actually says. Unfortunately, there are way too many alleged Christians in exalted places and in positions of power who practice neither faith nor the works of Jesus. All they do is talk about their Christianity while acting like pagan Roman emperors.

I no longer welcome debate about what and in whom I believe. I find those who smirk and call my walk the equivalent of someone with a mental illness or an imaginary friend about as bigoted as a Christian who believes that all atheists are the sons and daughters of Satan. There’s a certain hubris in claiming the nonexistence of the spiritual because the people whom are representatives of the religious are themselves flawed and full of crap. Then, I guess, there’s a certain hypocrisy in the universe, in evolution, in all life, and I don’t think any of us have enough knowledge to be that cynical and nihilistic.

I no longer regularly attend church. I’ve been to at least a dozen churches in the DC area over the past decade and a half, and combined, I’ve gotten less out of all of those services than in one service I attended at my mother-in-law’s church in Pittsburgh last September. Heck, I’ve found more wisdom and compassion and realness in some of the courses I’ve taught than at most of these churches. Church is a place for fellowship with other Christians, but I have a hard time with my own contradictions, much less those of others.

Bertrand Russell wisdom quote, April 8, 2014. (http://izquotes.com).

For my son Noah’s sake, though, I want to find a place or two where we can feel comfortable exposing him to Christianity. Places where the hypocrisy quotient isn’t so high, and with the understanding that this is a long spiritual walk, not a magical carpet ride of infinite miracles and treasure chests full of gold. I’m tired of the megachurches, the Gospel of Prosperity, the overly emotional, the attempts to strangle human behaviors, and the endless predictions of apocalypse based on homophobia, misogyny, Whiteness, and a terrible understanding of history.

But I do have a one-on-one spiritual walk that’s mine, that no one — atheist or evangelical — can take away from me. It’s a walk that has taken me far from the despair and abuse of my youth, warts and all.

The Whore of Babylon (and other wacko comments)

22 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Amy Grant, Apocalypse, Book of Revelations, Christian Zeal, Christianity, Evangelical Christianity, Frederick K.C. Price, Gov. Rick Perry, Hebrew-Israelites, Jack Van Impe, Jimmy Swaggert, John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, Politics of Fear, Rachel Maddow, Rapture, Televangelism, Televangelists, The Response

Televangelist John Hagee sans glasses compares Texas Gov. Rick Perry to Abraham Lincoln, The Response, Reliant Stadium, Houston, August 6, 2011. (Source/http://www.businessinsider.com).

I used to be one of them. One of those evangelized Christians. Coming off of three years as a Hebrew-Israelite, I became a Christian in the spring of ’84, without a church, and without an immediate family member who had any real experience as part of a Christian family or community.

So naturally, when my mother — who still appeared to be a practicing Hebrew-Israelite — would tune our one working stereo radio to the Christian AM stations in the New York City area in the summer that followed my secret conversion, I’d listen. I’d hear everything from Amy Grant’s “Angels Watching Over Me” to folks like Jimmy Swaggert and Kenneth Copeland on those two stations. Plus, there was the 700 Club, Oral Roberts and Frederick K.C. Price on our TV at 10 am Monday-Friday, and Sunday mornings between 8 and 11 am.

With the exception of Price, a good portion of what these televangelists and radio preachers would talk about was the Book of Revelation of St. John. They’d outline in detail everything from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the gigantic sucking sounds of great death as the Lord opened one seal after another. As a fourteen-year-old and brand-new Christian, it was scary listening to them. So scary that it seemed unlikely that I’d make it to thirty before the entire world was on fire.

The Whore of Babylon, from a 1800s Russian engraving. (Source/Wikipedia). In public domain.

When Swaggert or Roberts or Robertson would get to the part of Revelations that talked about “the whore of Babylon,” they’d lament about how America was the “whore” that John of Patmos had described in his letters to the Christian churches in what is now Turkey — 2,000 years ago. But for Swaggert, Roberts, Robertson, et al., it was because of gay rights, or because of Blacks having kids out-of-wedlock while collecting welfare, or because women were on an assembly line to have abortions, or because of out-of-control government spending that America had become the ultimate harlot.

I put much of what they said aside even then, because my life at 616 and in Mount Vernon was scary enough without thinking about the fate of four or five billion humans. But all of this came up again, especially once my mother revealed herself as an evangelical Christian in ’89, in the last days of her marriage to my idiot (ex-) stepfather. In the years that followed, whenever I visited over the holidays or came home to work for the summer, I’d see more of Kenneth Copeland, Oral and Richard Roberts, Pat Robertson than I’d see of regular television.

In particular, a “new” guy, Jack Van Impe, along with his wife, was on. Every week in the summer of ’90, my

Jack Van Impe, circa 2010, predicting an Apocalypse via Iran. (Source/http://wn.com).

mother would make me sit in front of the TV to hear this guy relate things like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of that year to the Rapture and the Apocalypse. Somehow, the evil spiritual forces intent on world domination and human corruption were unleashed by Iraq and the US response to Iraq that summer. Van Impe was so worried about the rebuilding of the Roman Empire via the expanding European Union that he looked like he was about to collapse from a brain aneurysm.

My mother once said, “You think they crazy, but when the Rapture comes and you’re stuck here, you won’t.” I didn’t think that they were crazy — I knew they were. But more importantly, what I was really thinking was, why is she watching this, and making me watch this stuff, too? It’s not as if anyone, whether an atheist or a Zen Buddhist, didn’t or doesn’t really know that our world faces a multitude of challenges that could lead to a perfect storm of global crises, causing immense destruction and death. That’s true. Still, I couldn’t see how any of us could make sense of what we face as a planet by using the Book of Revelation as a guide.

So, when Rachel Maddow decided to go after Governor Rick Perry and “The Response” party down in Houston earlier this month on her show, I, unlike most Americans uninvolved in mind-bending forms of Christianity, wasn’t surprised. I didn’t feel shock that there was such a thing as the New Apostolic Reformation, because there isn’t anything new about it. I wasn’t even surprised that the likes of John Hagee would consider Oprah Winfrey the “Whore of Babylon” because of her ability to use verbal voodoo on the millions of people who worship everything she does. And I was unsurprised, unfortunately, that a snake-oil salesman like Perry would fall into their camp.

Oprah Winfrey at her 50th birthday party at Hotel Bel Air 2004. (Source/Alan Light/http://www.flickr.com/photos/alan-light/216012860/). In public domain, cc-by-2.0.

Quite frankly, there are only two things that surprise me. One is that there are millions of people like me who could find more holes in the evangelical apocalyptic paradigm in one nanosecond than Maddow could in one day, yet we’re never called on to refute and inform. The other is that it’s taken this long for mainstream media to really pick up on what has been a four-decade long trend in the meshing of the wackiest of “Christian” ideas with politics that exploit America’s imperial fears. That our days as #1 are at an end.

Bittersweet Symphony

03 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, Eclectic, Religion

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Atheism, Bigotry, Bill Maher, Christianity, Creflo Dollar, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hebrew-Israelites, Jimmy Swaggert, Kenneth Copeland, Liberation Theology, Pat Robertson, Televangelism

This weekend marks twenty-six years since I became a Christian. Given how torturous my nearly three and a half years of wearing a kufi and walking in the beliefs of the Hebrew-Israelites (at least nominally) were, I dare say that the turning point for all of my life occurred in April ’84. I’m grateful every day — and I mean, every day — for finding my way to God and Jesus. But, as I’m come to understand myself and Christianity over the years, I’ve also come to regret the religious and anti-religious narcissism that is infused in all of our conversations about Christianity, God, Atheism, evolution and so many other things that require more than scientific knowledge and absolute certainty.

For better and for worse, I have to start with the people who helped me get on the Christian path in the first place. If not for televangelists like Frederick K.C. Price and Kenneth Copeland, my understanding of Christianity would’ve been limited to conversations with my best friend in elementary school and my pedestrian attempts at understanding the New Testament. So I have to thank both for opening my eyes to the endless possibilities that all people have through faith and redemption, salvation and grace.

Still, their work, and the work of others like Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggert, Robert Tilton, Pat Robertson, Oral and Richard Roberts and others has revolved into a form of narcissism. Their gospel — and the gospel of the megachurches that now populate our nation — should be remembered by historians as the Gospel of Prosperity. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking control over your finances, giving to a church to provide community and social services or even using principles of faith (beyond the religious or spiritual) in order to make one’s life better materially. There is something vitally wrong, though, when this is almost all your ministry is about. I must admit, I was inspired by Price when I was a teenager, listening to his story about how he grew up in Alabama, about the poverty he had to overcome in order to become an ordained minister and establish his church in L.A. It was much later that I learned how enriching a Gospel of Prosperity could be for those with the power of the pulpit and the will to wield that power.

Seeing it firsthand at my church outside Pittsburgh (in Wilkinsburg for those of you familiar with Western Pennsylvania) was what made me realize how incredibly shallow this kind of preaching is for a church and its flock. The leadership began a campaign to raise something in the order of $1 million toward building a new church, as this church now boasted over 3,000 members. That was in December of ’96.

Within a couple of months, we had easily exceeded this amount, which was on top of the amount church member normally gave. Within a week, the pastor announced that God had given him a vision that another $3 million would be needed to help with the costs of building a new church and maintaining the current church building. A vision? Really? I think even God realizes that most of us, with help, can decipher a budget sheet to know what’s needed to build a building the size of a 3,000-seat church. What made this particularly dishonest was that the leadership should’ve let us sheep know what was needed from jump street, not a staggered campaign of visions in order to build the congregation’s confidence in giving. Not to mention the tapping into our American obsession with getting rich or becoming well-off.

Around the same time, Price was doing the same thing via his TV program. A whole series on Jesus as a materially rich Jew living in Galilee, and not as the relatively poor son of a carpenter and fisherman as portrayed in the Gospels. “How could he be poor and feed 5,000 people? Why would a poor man need to hire an accountant?,” Price asked at one point in his series in ’97. Although I think you could argue that Jesus’ ministry was doing well enough to keep him and his disciples in food, olive oil and sandals for three years, I’m not sure what this means for the average Christian or average person. The implication of all of this, of course, is that if you end up in debt, or without significant upward changes in income, or somehow become unemployed, that you somehow didn’t display enough faith. Or give your full tithe to your local pastor or church. Or for that matter, give beyond the tithing to pastors like Price, Copeland, and numerous others.

It couldn’t be about education, the kinds of job individuals have, or the wrecked state of the American economy, right? Or that, no matter how much faith we have, it’s our acting on that faith, having the skills necessary to make our dreams real possibilities, and of course, meeting people who are well positioned in our lives to help us (and oddly enough, vice-versa)? No, our lack of faith in The One is to blame. Need I mention that folks like Price have been saying for at least thirty years that we as Christians shouldn’t worry about the world’s oil reserves running out, as there’s more than enough to carry us all the way to the Rapture?

Before those in Bill Maher’s camp laugh in wild glee, I’ve found in my academic and spiritual walk narcissistic intolerance among many atheists as well. As if all Christians — and all people who believe in a higher power in general — are delusional, are absolutely orgasmic about seeing the world go up in flames and think science is something to be discarded. Theirs may well be the Gospel of Scientific Absolutism, as if science and the scientific method alone holds all of the answers in the Cosmos. I’m not arguing against evolution, the Big Bang, or String Theory. What I am standing up against are overly simplistic answers for the “why” questions — questions that come with weird and somewhat unscientific explanations — that can confound many a biologist or astrophysicist. Or, for the purposes of this post, atheists who refuse the acknowledge the myriad examples of intelligence in the supposedly random universe. While I stand in almost all respects on the side on science, complete randomness isn’t something that I choose to believe in.

So where does this leave me after twenty-six Christian years? In a very lonely place, where I’m both a complicated Christian and a less-than-scientific scientist in a broad sense. I stopped watching Price in ’98, and the other televangelists between ’88 and ’01. Christianity is about so much more than prosperity and pontificating pastors, learning about much more than science. Social justice, wealth redistribution, speaking truth to power, fighting for equality in this life and the next. Both religion and science have this possibility and have provided this for many people over the course of human history.

Unfortunately, folks like Price think that this is about speaking power to truth, and people like Maher already believe they know everything they need to know. Both have missed the point that faith, or belief, is important in every endeavor, and serves as a catalyst for great human achievement and for great human atrocities. So, for me, this Easter truly is a bittersweet one, where my salvation is real, and my doubt almost as much.