[Racialigious] Leaving Jesus: Women Of Color Beyond Faith

This is the backdrop against which women of color struggle with religious and secular belief systems. Even as the moral weight of their communities—reinforced by the dominant culture—is placed on them, many continue to seek refuge in faith and faith traditions because they provide a sense of purpose, direction, and meaning.  Responding to a survey I conducted on high school aged young women and faith, twelfth grader Vanessa Linares* agreed that African American women and Latinas are packing the pews because many of them “believe that women of color need faith/religion to be moral.”  Thus, popular reality shows like the Bad Girls Club and platinum-selling pop artists like wannabe Barbie-doll rapper Nicki Minaj show young women of color that hypersexuality is a quick and dirty form of “validation” for a select few.  These women may appear to be flouting conventional sexual mores with “fuck you” alpha-female sexuality, but they are still rigidly bound by them.  And, by the same token, the goddess cult that so many women of color flock to is also a cul-de-sac.  Goddesses, queens, princesses, and other icons of so-called spiritual authority are by definition floating above the “sorry” muck of mere mortals.  As Women’s Leadership Project program coordinator Diane Arellano comments:

Somewhere in college, I felt the need to proactively counter the general assumption that as a Mexican woman, I must be a Catholic or Christian. This conscious shift in my identity was informed by my interests and participation in activism. When I searched for models of Latino activists, I was very disappointed to see or read about “seeking strength” from ‘La Virgen’ or claiming their work is the work of ‘God.’ I thought about how oppression functions in communities of color and asked myself, isn’t there a good argument that can be made about the Church’s role in institutionalizing the oppressive gender, race, class, and sexuality paradigms that these activists are fighting so hard against?

As a multicultural woman of Puerto-Rican and Irish descent, freethought activist Margaret Downey grappled with many of these sexist religious prescriptions.  Growing up in a devout Catholic Latino family in the 1950s and 1960s, her passion for freethought was sparked by the deep divide between a Catholic religious morality based on bowing down to good patriarchs and the bitter reality of her upbringing.  Her own absentee father was a virtual stranger who never provided for his family:

My father’s abandonment of the family actually brought about some deep thinking concerning belief in a god.  My father-figure could not be counted on to help in any way.  My father-figure would not respond to any type of communication…Why would I honor such a man?  If we wanted or needed something it was up to us to make it happen.  From an early age I decided to give honor and respect to those who earned it!  I was sitting in church when I realized that the people around me might as well have been praying to my father figure.  Their  “heavenly father” was not responding to their prayers and pleas either.[ii]

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