About a year ago, my faith in God was tinkering on the edge of agnosticism. For someone who has spent all of my life in the church attending regularly, all of my life praising and thanking God, and spending a year in seminary, it’s difficult to believe that my faith in God/Jesus struggled that much. A few major factors contributed.
One was the betrayal of white American Church aligning with Trump and MAGA starting in 2015. I have spoken in great detail as to why this is the case. The most difficult part has been watching people, predominately white conseravtive Christians I’ve loved and known for many years or even a lifetime, align with Trump who is an overt racist, a morally-bankrupt felon, and sexual predator, and worse, intentionally celebrates unleashing harm and death on innocent minorities. To witness and experience this cruelty over and over again has taken its toll on Christians who do not align with Trump and MAGA who are the majority of Christians in this country. The white conservative Republican church thinks it owns Christianity; it does not!
As a reminder, 95% of Black Christians and 65% of Hispanic Christians/Catholics are Democrats. Only white conservative Christians are predominantly Republican and supported Trump during over the last decade. Even as a former Republican switched Democrat myself in 2019, the betrayal of white Christians supporting Donald Trump unconditionally has been the toughest for me to endure. I’ve also felt a great sense of guilt for not understanding the harmful alliance white Christians have had with the Republican party sooner. The Black Church understood it well-before the Trump era.
Second, during Joe Biden’s presidency, I discovered that only one of our young adult children is heterosexual, and one of them is transgender. This is not a bad thing but a somewhat surprising thing. I love and celebrate my children for the way they are because being a disability provider of children has trained me to love and help support people for the way they are, but I had some serious blind spots as a white Christian. I still had too many hangs ups with abortion, gender, and sexuality which God has now revealed the full truth to me. Years of science and ministry have proven that family support saves lives for LGBTQ+ kids. The bad thing has been discovering how much harm the white and other aligned pro-Trump/MAGA conservative churches have done to not only LGBTQ+ people but other minority groups.
The two greatest treasures in my life are my family and people with a far second, the church. To discover that the church has played the biggest hand in hurting LGBTQ+ people and minority groups has been another deep and painful betrayal to me. And I have also felt a great sense of guilt for not understanding all of this sooner, not being fully-affirming of all people much sooner, and not doing a deep-dive self-examination much sooner.
Now, my faith in God/Jesus is recovering thanks to ministers and other Christians who openly support justice and openly reject Trumpism/MAGA. Trumpism/MAGA ideology is not only supporting the person of Trump but a harmful white Christian Nationalist ideology which is antithetical to the Gospel. This has marginalized the Black community, Black Christians, the Black Church, and the collective of anyone who is not white, straight, conservative, and “Christian” since the beginning. This white Christian Nationalist ideology has hurt not only most of the country but has also contributed to global instability.
Another major factor in my recovery is the Black Church. My family was part of the Anglican Church of Nigeria for a while because I grew up in traditional Anglicanism which is very similar to Catholicism. This is a different kind of spirituality than American Black spirituality and the American Black Church. The American Black Church is a broad spectrum of Christian expressions, from Baptist, to Pentecostal, to Anglicanism, to Catholic. I have discovered that American Black spirituality is rooted in liberation and justice-based theology at its core, and this would even include the American Black Catholic Church under American Black Catholic leadership.
I am slowly but surely reconstructing my faith to align with justice and Black liberation theology because I believe this best-aligns with the Gospel and Jesus’ teachings and any faith which supports the common good. Hyper-fixating on abortion, gender, and sexuality are not what it means to be a Christian or a good person. Loving God means loving our neighbor as ourselves which translates to wanting the good we would want for our own families to be bestowed on others and their families without exception and respecting autonomy of decision-making, even if it’s different than our own. God does not show favoritism–Romans 2:11.
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