By Sherline Hawkins
White supremacy and the legacy of slavery are to blame for the “homophobia” that has been so prevalent in African American churches over the decades, a professor from Goucher College said during a speech at Towson University last night.
Photo borrowed from Black, White & Gay website.
Dr. Kelly Brown Douglass, who is also the director of the religion program at the Baltimore private liberal arts college, said enslaved Africans were taught by Europeans to reject bodily pleasure and homosexuality to redeem their soul and remain strong in the Christian faith.
“The black church sees the LGBTQ community as nothing but sexual being and penalizes them,” Douglass said. “Homophobia came from the rejection of hypersexualization from white culture. LGBTQ is oversexualized because if they are not procreative then they are lustful.”
Douglass said that one of Christianity’s core beliefs is that bodily pleasure is bad. It demonizes the body, she said.
Before slavery, she said, some Africans in pre-colonized parts of Africa were homosexual. Douglass said that Europeans were homophobic and encouraged homophobia by introducing slaves to Christianity. This homophobic attitude carried forward in black churches, Douglass said.
“Power over people comes over controlling their sexuality,” Douglass said. “White supremacy culture saw blacks pushed by passion and not rationale that they [blacks] were oversexualized beings to justify slavery, rape, lynching and castration.”
Understanding the link between homophobia and the African American church is important, she said, because of the important role religion plays in the black community.
“From slavery to the Civil Rights Movement to the present, the black church is prominent in our social, political and personal values,” she said. “The church plays a huge role in what is accepted. But why are they [black churches] homophobic?”
She said it is blasphemous to condemn sexuality and the body within the belief and justice that God created everything and saw it as good.
“The black church affirmed homophobia with a famous scripture from The Bible,” she said. “But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”