And May God Bless the Heretics

A polemic by Robert Jones, Jr.

Bishop Carlton Pearson at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 21, 2018. Taylor Jewell / AP

“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”

— James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

The very first thing I learned about God is that He hates my guts.

Whatever the religion, whatever the name He goes by, His profound, fiery, and everlasting hatred is the basis of our understanding of one another. While He cannot make up His mind on other things—like who exactly His chosen people are, whether war in His name is pleasurable or disgusting to Him—He is absolutely convinced that I am a defect that somehow snuck past His quality control, revealing the imperfections in His what-is-supposed-to-be-perfect cosmic system. I am, thus, an embarrassment, a mistake; and, as a result, forever excluded from His favor because of my status as a “Sodomite,” which is holy-text speak for a man who loves and/or is sexually attracted to other men.

Churchy folks couch it this way: “Love the sinner; hate the sin.” But that could only ever be doublespeak and they know it. My sexuality is not whimsical. It is not something separate and apart that I can pick up or put down in accordance with popular opinion. It does not hang away from me deadly like a murderer’s weapon or profane like a rapist’s. It is not some stolen artifact kept brazenly on display in the very thief’s museum, nor is it like blood-took lands stabbed through with flagpole and claimed on behalf of savage nations that see themselves as civilized. My sexuality is, and has always been, an intrinsic, inseparable part of who I am; bound up in my cells and subatomic particles; an energy co-animating my very being. It is something that, as Ancestor James Baldwin once put it, “can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self.” Therefore, to hate my “sin” is to hate me. That is an undeniable fact.

Religious people know that this is the case, too, even if they would never admit it. Pretense is critical to their marketing, recruitment, and evasion schemes. Nevertheless, even if my sexual orientation was not embedded in the very substance of who I am; even if it was not my natural order; even if it was something that I decided on like evening fashion; even if it was something that I chose to practice as the same kind of performance art, compulsory action, or obedience that heterosexuality often is, Ancestor Bessie Smith put it like this and I agree: “‘Tain’t nobody’s bizness if I do.”