I suppose I should say, by way of introduction, that this is something of an example of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. While Hemant was on a well-deserved vacation (this daily blogging stuff ain’t easy), he had a number of members of the SSA contribute guest blogs. I took offense to one of them, and got up on my horse to shout about it. In a fit of self- aggrandizement I tweeted a link to that post to him, and then promptly went on with my life, my rage spent. Upon returning, Hemant has invited me to write this response and expand somewhat on my argument.

To summarize as succinctly as possible, Derek Miller wrote a guest post in which the basic thesis was that in order to attract more members of minority communities (particularly, in that case, African Americans – it will be to this group I refer for the remainder of this post, but there are similar barriers faced by members of other ethnic groups as well) to the secular/freethought movement, the only thing that could be done was to make the movement more friendly and welcoming in general. A sort of Field of Dreams approach to attracting members of communities of colour – if you build it, they’ll start showing up. I was a bit apoplectic because Mr. Miller has clearly not consulted with, or bothered to listen to, anyone who has been talking about this issue from the minority perspective. This kind of laissez faire approach to recruitment is doomed to fail for reasons I will explain. I’ll also offer some of my own suggestions as to what steps can be taken to more actively include people of colour (PoCs) into the freethinking discussion.

Why don’t black people come to atheist meetings?

The freethinker community has been struggling with this question of late, as more and more speakers have become sufficiently emboldened to decry the lack of ethnic diversity at things like conferences, meetup groups, and other atheist-friendly activities. Increasingly, demands have been going up for a simple answer to this question, and have not been forthcoming. This was, I think, the general thrust of Mr. Miller’s post – there are no simple solutions to this problem. It does not follow, however, that there are no solutions to the problem at all, and we must simply wait for black and brown folks to get over their shyness and start showing up. There are a number of overlapping potential explanations, and until we can begin to see them as a larger context (instead of trying to tackle them one at a time), we’ll simply be spinning our wheels.

There are a few commonly-cited explanations for why black folks just don’t seem to show up:

Atheism as a ‘white people thing’

The face of atheism is, or at least has been, a white one. It’s intimidating for a member of any visible minority community to walk into a room and be the only dark face in the crowd. Whether or not people actually are staring at you (and yes, people do stare), it’s tough to get over the feeling that you don’t fit. Many black people, particularly those in the sciences, are used to being outnumbered, and have figured out a way to deal with it. At the same time, if you’re iffy about showing up to the campus freethinker club or the skeptics in the pub event or the atheist book club, knowing that you’re going to be an outlier is certainly not a point in favour of attendance.

Atheists being racist

If I can echo a statement made by Jen McCreight, it’s not necessarily the case that atheists are more racist than the general population (my suspicion is that we do a pretty good job, by and large), but that it’s more shocking to hear racist talking points from people who pride themselves on rationality and evidence-based decision making. When race comes up as a topic, I’m often mildly amused/horrified to hear the kind of 19th-century ‘scientific racist’ slogans that come out of the mouths of my confreres. I personally have a thick skin about it, knowing that people are well-meaning but just not well-educated. My experience is perhaps a bit atypical, and it only takes a couple of bad experiences to sour the whole idea for you permanently.

The black church

Much has been made of the disproportionate influence that organized religious organizations have over black folks, which may explain, in part, their (our) reluctance to show up to atheist events. The black church goes beyond simple regular religious instruction – in many communities the church takes the place that the government does as a focal point of organization and a social safety net. It’s the lynch pin in many black communities, and distancing one’s self from the church is essentially volunteering to go into exile. To the extent that this prevents many black people from coming out as atheist, this may explain some of the differential participation. However, there are lots of black atheists out there who have already left the church and yet still don’t show, so we can’t simply point at this as the biggest explanatory factor.

Poverty, education, and access

It is no secret that, as a population, black people (particularly in the USA) experience higher levels of poverty than the general population, and definitely a higher level than the white average. This is due to a whole host of factors that are probably outside the scope of the freethinking movement to solve in a timely manner. That being said, socioeconomic factors may have some explanatory power over why black people are less likely to participate. Not every black individual is going to experience more financial hardship than every white individual – to suggest this would be absurd. However, when we talk about this from the level of the population, there is more disincentive for PoCs than for non-PoCs.

Each of these on their own might dissuade individuals from making the decision to attend, but it’s not hard to see how the pressure against participation can accumulate for those who are doing their personal utilitarian calculus.

So how can we be more attractive?

Identifying the problems facing atheists of colour with respect to joining the community is not the same as solving them. One might be tempted to say that these are intractable problems, and all we can do is wait until they resolve themselves over time. That’s certainly how I interpreted Mr. Miller’s response, and many of the comments that followed it. It’s somewhat ironic to watch a group of people who are actively agitating for great separation of church and state, and for greater mainstream acceptance of atheists, to turn around and say “just give it time and it’ll sort itself out.” That line of reasoning coming from an accommodationist theist would be met with derision, and deservedly so. Problems can be solved by committed people willing to take action; we wouldn’t be doing any of this otherwise.

Just to briefly address the above 4 issues I raised as examples:

• We can be more assertive about putting freethinkers of colour in highly-visible positions. I am not talking about bumping Jamal from the mail room to be king of atheism – the assumption that this movement lacks PoCs who are qualified in a variety of fields is wrong, primarily, and racist secondarily.
• We can get serious about talking about race and racism. I’ve long been advocating incorporating anti-racism as a skeptical approach – applying methodological skepticism to racial topics as well as those that are strictly scientific. Just as it took us a while to adopt feminist thought into our lexicon, so too does the effort need to be made to add new tools to our utility belt when it comes to talking about race. While it may not be very interesting from a biological standpoint, understanding race is like understanding theology: just because it’s not real doesn’t mean it doesn’t exert a great deal of influence.
• We can, as Mr. Miller may have been suggesting, make the freethinker community a true community that performs the same function that churches do (minus the chants). Above and beyond simply knowing that each other exist, we can begin mobilizing our collective strength to look out for each other, much the same way we did for Damon Fowler. This will be particularly challenging because of how remote we are from each other – churches are physical entities that are at the centre of both your social and physical community.
• We can take steps to actively reach out to close some of the poverty gap. Major events like TAM or other large-scale events can offer a number of bursaries or scholarships for those that can’t afford to pay. Whether or not you make those tied to ethnic membership is really a decision to be made on a case-by-case basis – there are arguments to be made on both sides. My take on this is that you need to decide how important it is for your organization to have PoCs present, and whether or not you can tolerate doing something that might seem unfair.

Above and beyond these specific remedies, though, there is a larger issue that I think gets less press that was also part of my initial rant. Freethinkers and skeptics have our pet topics: alternative medicine, UFOs, creationism, church/state separation… you know the highlights. I am in no way trying to minimize these topics – they’re all deeply interesting and important. However, these are somewhat esoteric and fringe interests that don’t really speak to the passions of the general public. I know that I personally am more interested in applying skepticism to things like politics, poverty, race, and law. There are many people for whom those interests are part of their daily reality – failing to address those interests means that even those who are technically in your target audience are simply uninterested in debating whether or not chemtrails are more ridiculous than homeopathy.

Concerted effort can change minds.

How do we know that will work?

This is an excellent skeptical question, and I’m glad you asked it. The freethinker movement has, lately, faced two other major fights for increasing diversity. The first was/has been/continues to be the fight to include women. A few forthright women stood up and, despite the pressures against them doing so, spoke out about the lack of female voices in the skeptic community. They challenged many of the assumptions and traditions of the society from which freethought had sprung about the role and abilities of women. We continue to grapple with this issue today, and the fight is far from over, but it’s a lot better than it was say, 20 years ago.

The second major fight was for recognition of issues facing LGBT persons. Freethought is a natural ally in the fight for gay/lesbian/transperson rights, and while initially there was not a lot of enthusiasm for topics that didn’t really fall under the classic ‘skeptical’ umbrella, we eventually (thanks to the hard work of vocal, dare I say ‘strident’, people) made LGBT issues one of the central poles holding up our tent, if you’ll forgive the entendre. To be a freethinker is, now, to be assumed to be queer-friendly. This didn’t happen by accident or by passively making the freethought movement simply a friendlier place – it took effort and active recruitment.

In the same way that we fought and won those battles, we have an opportunity to put in work and solve the problem of a lack of ethnic diversity. We can learn to speak the language of anti- racism, and we can adopt causes that are friendly to those who might not otherwise feel at home in our midst. But above those, we can put actual programs into place designed to actively draw out those fence-sitters of colour who need that little extra ‘nudge’ to get them in the room at the next event. Depending on how well those programs work, we can ask people who come from underrepresented communities what they would do to effect change. Of course, this will also require us to start listening (or get better at listening, excuse me) when people tell us how we can make things better.

Again, all of these proposed solutions are contingent on the assumption that we, both as a community and as individuals, actually care about the lack of diversity within the movement and wish to see the situation improve. If our approach is going to be one of passive diffusion – wait for sufficient numbers of dark-skinned people to find their way into the room such that we can stop harping on this whole ‘diversity’ issue (what is that, anyway?) – then we can just continue to do little. If we don’t care, then we should just say so and be done with it.

(Image Credit: The Guardian)

The thought of writing about my faith terrifies me.

This terror is (mostly) irrational.

Convinced that most secular progressives would launch into a tirade about the evils of the church, (or worse respond with a measured, “Really?” maintain conversation but narrow their eyes and draw their wine glasses closer to their bodies, warding against my offensive Jesus vibes) I tend to keep my religion under wraps.

It’s kind of absurd, really, given the fact that my encounters with these militant secular progressives are entirely imaginary.

Yet, for reasons I shall soon elucidate (reasons both founded and unfounded), I’ve always felt the need to store up an arsenal of defenses, to have in place a series of ‘BUTS’ to interject in case the words  “Yes I’m a Christian” accidentally (always accidentally) slip out of my mouth. It’s really a great exercise in compound sentence formation:

“Yes, I’m a Christian…BUT I support gay marriage,” or

“Yes, I’m a Christian… BUT I’m pro-choice.”

I’ve never had to use these arguments, but when I’m putting off writing a paper or doing an especially mundane activity, I imagine confronting these incendiary secular progressives, and showing them calmly, rationally how I can be both an evangelical Christian and progressive.

But I’ve gotten tired of (hypothetically) defending myself.

I guess these insecurities/weird, imaginary conversations with WASP-y secular progressives began when I moved to America for good in middle school. (Brief background history: my parents are Nigerian, my twin sister and I were born in England, we moved to Gambia when I was four, had a brief stint in Ohio, went back to Gambia, hit up England again, and then moved to Rhode Island to settle in the US for good).

Those were challenging times, man.

Here we were, tall, skinny, dark-skinned black girls with buck teeth and English accents. Armed only with a superficial Babysitters’ Club based knowledge of American preteenager-dom, I was at a loss for quite some time, trying to navigate the confusing world of adolescence.

But soon, both my sister and I came up with a solution. We stuck out like a sour thumb already so why not run with our difference?

So we became that strange, ludicrous, paradoxical human being also known as the black conservative.

I’m not quite sure how it started. I was certainly influenced by my parents who, like a lot of African immigrants, are socially conservative. But somehow I took it to a whole other level. To make matters worse, I married my religious beliefs with my political ones and the results were (as you would imagine) bizarre and comical. I’d slip in references to ‘the Creator’ in my Science papers.  I’d quote Psalms 139 as I’d write about the evils of abortion for my Social Studies class. I watched The O’Reilly Factor every night. Did I mention I lived in Rhode Island—one of the most liberal states in the union?

Gradually, however, my political orientation began to shift. There are a host of reasons why this happened, many of which are too personal and cumbersome to delve into right now, but suffice it to say, by the time I was a senior in high school, my reputation had changed. Granted, moving to another state helped facilitate that transformation, but my sister and I were no longer known as ‘the Bible thumpers.’ We were now the race provocateurs– the ones that couldn’t go a day without bringing up some race-related issue or railing against our sexist, patriarchal society. But even though my political alignments changed drastically, my religious beliefs remained, largely, in tact.

Now a junior in college, I’m at a weird place. I’ve gone from Focus on the Family to Feministing.  And both (albeit one a lot more than the other) have made some valid points over the years; yet the one-dimensionality with which each views the ‘other side’ is appalling. And, frankly, expected on one website, but not so much on the other.

Bloggers on Feministing regularly refer to fundamental Christians as ‘fundies.’ They once posted a (clearly) satirical rap song and cited a (clearly tongue-in-cheek) blog post on Stuff Christians Like about the “Christian side hug,’ presenting it in a very ‘look-at-what-those-crazy-prudish-homophobic-Christians-are-listening-to-these-days’ kind of way.

For Focus on the Family to have a movie review website dedicated to reducing films to their positive or negative ‘moral’ elements is to be expected. For a progressive, feminist site like Feministing to stereotype so crudely is not.

So often I feel like a minority within a minority within a minority. I so desperately want to participate in these conversations about race and sexuality and pop culture. Slut-shaming on the college campus! Let’s talk about it! Modern Family’s increasingly problematic racial jokes? Check! But so often, I stop myself from joining in, because at some point I fear my religion will come up and I’ll have to apologize or answer for any and all of the Church’s flaws.

I know that a lot of Racialicious readers have been burned by the Church. I’ve read your comments. I’ve seen the grateful, positively giddy exclamations of “Thank goodness I’m not the only one who (fill in the blank) by the church” or of “Thank goodness I’m not the only black agnostic!” or whatever it is.

I understand. I really do. My sister is currently working through her own religious issues and Nigerian parents can make that ish especially hard.

But.

Here’s my ‘but.’

I have a story to share too. As a Christian. An evangelical Christian. One who has really felt the transformative power of Jesus Christ in my life (I know; you’re cringing.) And I suspect that there might be more of us in the progressive blogosphere than we let on. And by us I mean, those progressive Christians who read Racialicous or WhatTamiSaid or TransGriot or AngryAsianMan and agree with a lot of the posts and might want delve in, have their toes touch the proverbial water, so to speak, but are too afraid to do it because they feel like they’ll just have to keep apologizing and qualifying over and over again. And, man, I’m tired of all the guilt. I became a Christian to escape all that guilt.

Sometimes the progressive blogosphere can be strangely homogenous—so diverse in so many ways, and yet when it comes to its views on Christianity—so disappointingly unvarying.

But I’m not writing this to whine. Just to give myself some courage. To free myself from (mostly) imagined fears of rejection. Let everybody know where my privilege comes in, what my background is, before I dive headfirst into the crevasse (remember that 30 Rock episode?) and become more engaged in this progressive blogosphere that I call my home.

When I first saw Off and Running I was immediately taken, but then again, my own personal investment in the film’s subject matter was considerable. Like Avery, I’m an adopted Jew of color from New York City. I see only dualities in my maturation, which has been a series of racially charged incidents quelled by moments of encouragement by people and institutions that worked together in a bizarre alchemy to create me.

As a young child my parents sat me down and explained it was important for me to find a faith of which to be a part. I grew up in the predominantly liberal and Jewish bastion of New York City called the Upper West side and at the ripe age of 9, it was Judaism that I felt most connected to; it was what I knew best. I began to attend a Schul after school where we were taught stories from the Bible, Yiddish and about our history and culture. I liked the friends I made and the stories I heard at Schul. The formation of my Jewish identity at that age was informed by Schul where there were transnationally adopted Jews to my right and left and by my neighborhood where I felt my family the apotheosis of what the 21st century family looked like. At 9 years old, I thought being bi-racial and Jewish was a magical marriage of identities.

At 13 years old, in the planning stages of my Bat Mitzvah, my Hebrew School teacher called a meeting at his home to discuss details. He opened his door to see me, my father who is an Ashkenazi Jew and my black mother. Upon seeing my family, without asking, he regrettably informed us that the synagogue, would not allow me to perform the right of passage in their temple because my mother wasn’t a Jew. My wily mother, coyly and smarmily responded “oh, but her mother is Jewish.”

Yes, it turns out my biological mother is a white Ashkenazi Jew.

And with these words, my Hebrew school teacher, as though I was caught in the Woody Allen version of my own life as a film, threw his hands into the air and exclaimed “it’s Bashert [it’s destiny] then! You’ll have your Bat Mitzvah in the Temple!” In that moment I felt a definitive rage. I wanted desperately to be a part of the Upper West Side’s most exclusive and popular clique, Judaism, but felt what would prove to be an indelible stake in this idea of blackness, something pitted against Jewishness. And so there it was, in the home of my Hebrew School teacher that the two were separated, like oil and water.

I was Black and Jewish but I couldn’t be both, I couldn’t be a Black Jew.

I chose not to have a Bat Mitzvah. I did not want play into the manipulations of the Jewish matrilineal system, making me Jewish because my adoptive mother, my actual mother, was not Jewish. My Jewish “blood line” felt tenuous and foreign and I did not want to take part in a brand of Judaism that did not accept that I was Jewish because my father was Jewish. And so I began to create my own rules.

My Jewish identity became an amalgamation of the cultural extensions of the religion. I ate bagels from Murray’s Sturgeon Shop on 90th and Broadway, sang Yiddish songs and memorialized the Holocaust in the “Culturally Jewish” Camp Kinderland and attended Seders at my aunts house. But my connection to the religion was jaded and superficial. It was as though I wore a “Jewish” badge when I felt as though it would benefit or help me to fit in better, but didn’t believe in it at my core, having been turned away because of my race. I could wear Judaism like a person wears a cloak, removing it when I came into my room, putting it on to perform for others.

Last December my roommate decided to throw a Shabbos dinner. It was also the first night of Chanukah. I created a makeshift Menorah in our kitchen, since we did not have one. When I emerged from the kitchen with my creation, I stood in front of it like a proud mother. I quieted the small living room and began to recite the prayer. Most people, even the one or two that weren’t Jewish knew (at least) some of it, the beginning, “Barukh atah Adonai” being the loudest, but by the third verse, the one that you recite only on the Friday of Chanukah, all but three of the twenty people dropped out; me, my roommate and one young man.

After it was over I began to exit the room and was stopped by the same young man that had accompanied me in the last verse.

He insisted, “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

I replied calmly, coolly “Yes, yes I am.”

He replied “But you’re not like, Jewish, Jewish, right? I mean, you don’t look Jewish.”

I walked out of the room. But not without overhearing him whisper to his friend “I mean, c’mon, give me a break, she looks Indian or something, did Sara teach her that prayer do you think?” I left the house after that. It was the first time I’d cried since the day I left my Hebrew School Teacher’s house and written off any formal tie to Judaism. It was then that I realized I was unable to remove my imaginary cloak. The cloak, the performance of Judaism, turned out to be a projection of real desire to feel accepted. I realized I the liberal isolation I had grown up with was not a reflection of race in America and if I wanted to be Jewish I had to make a concerted effort to make people accept me as such.

A few short weeks later I watched Off and Running. In it was one young woman’s unapologetically raw quest to join all identities. Instead of pushing her Judaism away, only allowing it to appear when convenient and comfortable like I had, Avery did not let it go. She allowed Judaism in, steadfast that it was a part of her fabric just as her blackness was becoming. Avery had an incisive understanding that identity is a construction, her blackness another layer of herself that she needed to explore and take from to create. In one of the most poignant moments in the film a therapist asks her “Do you feel black?” to which Avery responds “African-American? I don’t know what that means.” Avery’s transparent and unadulterated battle to find confluence urged me to do the same.

In the time since watching Off and Running I have approached my blackness and my Judaism as two of many other parts working together. I have encountered many Jews of Color who are doing the same. In a recent New York Times article well-known African-American Jewish blogger, Ma Nishtena, asserts that he eats his “gefilte fish as his mother prepares it, seasoned with Jamaican peppers and spices,” harvesting a Judaism that unites his other identities. The documentary Off and Running comes during a moment where American Jewry is at a crossroads. Its face, like Ma Nishtena’s mother’s gefilte fish, is sprinkled with color. The lockstep of conservative American Jewry needs to streamline their identities to complement the generally shifting American consciousness, away from exclusivity, toward sprinkled gefilte fish.

Editor’s Note: Off and Running airs tonight, at 7 PM ET, on PBS. It is also available on Netflix. – LDP

Some background:  for most of my adult life, I have been a fugitive from religion, the monotheistic “Big Three”, anyway. (Sorry, any faith doctrine that includes an interventionist, anthropomorphic, masculine god/godhead is prolly gonna earn some side-eye from me.)  Because my sociopolitical views and general life philosophy are widely regarded as “radical,” the decision to not participate in often conservative organized religion was a sensible and organic one.  The Bébé Fiqah trauma that led to my adult decision to be an unrepentant heathen/sinner/whateverthehell is all a very loooooong story that nobody wants to hear, so I’ll sum up by saying that until recently outside of weddings, baptisms, mitzvahs, and funerals, Grown-Up Fiqah rarely darkened the doorstep of any house of worship.

However, when one of my elderly neighbors, a  very dapper Georgia born-and-bred gentleman, invited me to come to his Southern Baptist church here in Harlem last fall, I accepted.  I was going through a particularly difficult time emotionally, and while the choir was sorta weak (sorry, I’m Southern, and we have standards for this kinda thing), I found the service overall to be very spiritually uplifting and healing. I was delighted by the sermon, as well as the inclusive spirit of the congregation. (”All are welcome”  is the credo of just about every Southern Baptist church, but in many places, certain”children of God” - non-Christians, LGBTIQ people - are most emphatically NOT welcomed.)  I decided that maybe dropping in to Church every now and again wouldn’t be so terrible.

This morning, I attended services at another Southern Baptist church here in Harlem with my buddy J. who never misses a Sunday.  In spite of the late summer swelter, I happily donned my Sunday best, pearls and good heels and headed  on over to Church.  In retrospect, I should have said some kinda prayer asking for patience and composure before I stepped out of the door. Because what awaited me at church would have tested even the most forgiving soul.

You see, J. and I were seated in one of the balcony pews, along with several Italian tourists. European and Asian tour groups and buses are a common sight on Sundays in Harlem.  As annoying and ubiquitous as they are, for the most part, church tourists are ignorable.  Well, this group must have been especially rude, because several members of the group spent much of the service talking. Talking. In spite of being shot admonishing looks by several parishioners and being approached by one of the ushers, the conversation, though lowered to murmuring, continued.  The only time it seemed to stop was when the choir led the church in a song, when the tourists watched the choir and the other attendees with that peculiar mixture of fascination, fear and envy that White people in spaces of color often seem to have. As they watched us, my friend and I watched them, swaying all wrong, clapping off beat and basically turning what was a joyful but sacred experience into a spectacle for their entertainment.

I did my very best to remain silent and non-responsive. And I was good. I really was.

Until devotional.

I had just bowed my head, closed my eyes, and was just about to connect one-on-One with the Lord…when the cell phone of the woman sitting behind me went off.

And she answered.

“Oh, I don’t even believe THIS shit!” I said. J.’s eyes flew open, and she covered her startled gasp with her hand.

“Fiqah. I know…but….God,” she whispered anxiously, waving her hand at the ceiling to indicate God’s presence. An elderly woman sitting right in front of me had turned around to glare at me for cussin’ in the Lord’s house. My friend’s a long-time member of her church, so embarrassing her (and myself) further was not an option, but I was pissed.

“Unless that is God on the line she needs an ass-whooping. Jesus be an electrified fence,” I grumbled, frowning and closing my eyes as J. stifled her laughter.

Later at brunch, we talked about what had gone down. Both of us had attended church in Harlem, so we both knew that the tour groups were common. It wasn’t the first time we noticed tourists – whose presence alone is disruptive – acting out in Church.  We had both also noticed that the groups seemed to be getting larger, testimony to the appeal of these tours for Asian and European tourists as well as to the drawing power of good gospel music.  J. feels ambivalent about the gospel tours because as annoying as they are, no tour group member ever neglects the collection plate.  My own feelings about them were firmly in the negative category. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I have such a visceral dislike of these gospel tours until today, when I decided to gather some information about them so that I could better understand their appeal. Here, an excerpt from an account by a  White tourist from London**  who went to a Harlem church specifically for the music:

I meet Tim Rawlins at the Memorial Baptist church choir practise. He’s rare proof of the fact that white men can sing gospel. He says I’ve got to surrender to the music – feel it – and forget I’m English.

That statement, which positively reeks of cultural fetishizing, gave me a headache. Forget you’re “English” (read: White and proper) and “surrender” (is it attacking you?) to the wild, untamed Black Black Blackity Blackness of the music. Hallelujah, let the Othering begin.

Tim: “What I like about gospel music, is that it breaks from that old European tradition which separates intellect and reason from feeling and really in Gospel music you feel with great thought and you think with great feeling…”

Ummmm…as much as I love traditional gospel music, it has never teased an elliptical statement outta me, so I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.  Luckily, the author knew just what to infer from it.

That probably means loosening up physically too. When the elderly women start to practice I find myself entranced watching the soloist, Lonnie Gray. She’s 77 years old but she’s out there, her face enraptured, her hips swaying, moving with the rhythm – feeling it.

At this point, I’d had quite enough, so I ventured off to other parts of the interwebs to sift around for tour information and possible articles. I discovered that this issue was one that Black churches in Harlem had been facing for almost two decades. The tours,  while often disruptive, are revenue generators, with prices ranging from $45-$99 dollars per person, and many including an “authentic” (sigh) soul food brunch. It’s for this reason that the general consensus amongst many of Harlem’s  Black church clergy seems to be that the gospel tours are a necessary evil. 

Church attendance has dropped significantly across all denominations in the past half century in the United States. Churches are financially reliant upon the generosity of their donor base, which has historically been their congregation.  As tax-exempt entities, religious organizations are able to (presumably) expend their funds on capital expenses, such as building renovations.   This piece from 1996 gives an excellent overview of the tension.  Meanwhile, this quote from it sums up just about everything that I find objectionable about these tours:

“It’s something exotic,” says Nelson Motta, a Brazilian journalist who promotes visits to Mount Moriah in his native country. “Seeing the black people in the church, the feeling is warm.”

In other words, it’s Church Time at the Apollo. Good grief. I repeat: Jesus, be a fence.

Churches have been recognized for centuries as both places of worship and sanctuary in countries with substantial Christian populations. This was also true of Black churches in the U.S.  The roots of Black Southern Baptist churches in the United States can be traced all the way back to the earliest days of the slave era. The first Black churches were organized by free blacks in the North and Southeastern United States.  Gospel music’s call-and-response style, which is common in many different styles of music throughout the African diaspora, was often employed openly during worship and clandestinely by slaves as resistance. 

Organizers of slave rebellions and escapes often sang  gospel “work” songs in the field with double entendre lyrics in earshot of slave masters and overseers, whose presence was constant. (Following Nat Turner’s Rebellion the state of Virginia passed a law that required that a White minister be present at Black congregations.) The gospel work songs often included instructions, directions, and even times of day.  The genius employed in this “hiding in plain sight” method was more often than not missed by slave owners, most of whom did not consider the intellect of the Negro to be sophisticated enough to grasp anything beyond the most basic concepts. (As Dave Chappelle once famously stated in one of his early comic specials: “It doesn’t happen often, but when racism works in black people’s favor . . . it’s fucking sweet.”)

Following slavery’s abolishment, the Black church remained a vital part of the social fabric of African-American communities.  In addition to worship and religious ceremonies, church “socials”, dances, bake sales and other  informal gatherings were common in the American South during the Jim Crow era. The connections between Black-led civil rights movements and the organizations that grew from them and Black churches is well-established.  Civil Rights era protesters often sang gospel songs during rallies and marches, and rallies, marches and sit-ins were frequently planned in churches on non-worship days.

Outside of the South, many congregations remained largely divided along racial lines.  White members of Protestant churches often expressed concern over what they viewed as improper exuberance found in Black churches.  The notion that the style of worship found in Black American churches was somehow vulgar and inauthentic persisted long after the abolishment of slavery, and was far from confined to any denomination. Mahalia Jackson, arguably one of the best gospel singers ever recorded, was regarded by many of her upper and upper-middle class Black contemporaries as an embarrassment. (Yes. Mahalia. Jackson. I know…)

“Negro spirituals” were rarely included in hymn books outside of Black churches, and have only recently been recognized as acceptable expressions of faith through song by many denominations. In spite of the rich faith diversity within Black Chrisitan communities, Black worship and Black gospel were widely regarded as odd at best and sacrilegeous at worst. The fact that the only exclusively American musical forms – blues, jazz and rock-and-roll – emerged from traditional Black gospel music has lent it a sort of global validity. (Although I will note here that even the  stunning Gospel at Colonus, a gospel play based on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus that was considered for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, opened to an initially chilly reception a mere twenty years ago on Broadway.) The beauty and singularity of gospel music is openly praised by the contemporary mainstream. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who’s asking) this acceptance has meant an increasingly secular appreciation (or appropriation…once again, depends on who’s asking) of traditional gospel music.  It has also helped transform places of worship into stages, where both resident gospel choirs and congregation members are put on display for  (oft-times) White tourists:

“This is not a buck-and-dance show,”says the Rev. Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of Harlem’s most politically powerful ministers [whose]  church has resorted to passing out a flier to visitors, explaining how to behave during the service. Congregants complain that tourists annoyingly turn their cameras on the devout at prayer and snap away whenever a shout arises from the church’s “Amen” comer.

This manner of blatant disregard of church protocol and behavior evidences a lack of respect for the sacredness of the proceedings.  The offense here is multi-layered:  a.) the proceedings are not taken seriously, b.) the participants are regarded as exotic curiousities and c.) there is an underlying assumption that the presence of (often) White European tourists is “welcome.”  The unexamined sense of entitlement that accompanies the idea of White people being welcome in any space is the factor that makes these tours possible. (I’m fully convinced that if 100 casually-dressed and snap-happy Black Americans rolled up into a Lutheran church on a Sunday in Haarlem,  the ensuing outrage at their gall would cause an international incident…but I digress.)

Tourist groups in Black churches violate both outer (the church) and inner (the congregation members) spiritual space.  The concept of the church as a sanctuary, as a sweet, soul-sustaining  and necessary respite from earthly troubles and oppression, is blown to smithereens by the transgressive presence of these tourists, no matter how benignly they view themselves.  Never mind messy polemical discussions, ”Jesus and the money changers” versus “The Church is a business”   blah blah BLAHHH.  If the devout are prevented from fully connecting with the divine by disruptive interlopers,  then the spiritual imperatives must trump the financial ones.

*“Soul voyeurism” is a term I derived from the Newsweek article entitled “Soul Voyeurs Invade The House of God” by Gregory Beals and Kenneth L. Woodward.

** The author of this account first attended a Black Baptist church in Harlem as a “drop-in” – not a regular attendee – and then was invited to attend a choir rehearsal. Attending a rehearsal to enjoy the music, IMO, is fine. The tone of the piece is troubling nonetheless.

“What do you mean you don’t know what Easter is?”

I appraised Best Boy with all the understated annoyance I could muster at the ripe old age of fifteen.

“Again,” I said with an eye roll, “not raised with a religion.  And all that comes out around Easter time is new patent leather shoes, dyed eggs, and ham.”

He would not drop the subject.

“How do you not know what Easter is?”

“Did the Rugrats make a special about it? Then no, I don’t know.”

Since I had opened up the lines of fire, he launched his own smart ass attack.

“How do you not go to church, anyway? What kind of black person are you?”

His words struck me deeply, and from time to time I’ve revisited that short conversation and wondered about his motivations and beliefs.  This is not a new idea, but one I am starting to hear more and more often:

What kind of black person am I, if I grew up without a religion?

I’m sure that if that had been an off-handed comment, outside of any sort of  context, I wouldn’t even remember that story.   But as it stands, it was the first articulation of how others would perceive me later – as something strange and stateless.  When Atlasien wrote her piece asking if Buddhism is the anti-Islam, there was one passage in particular that resonated with me:

If the phrase “culturally Christian” strikes you as jarring, it’s actually a pretty simple concept. It reflects the fact that when it comes to cultural institutions, the United States is very much a Christian nation. Hey, I mean this in a sociological sense, not a legal one… I love secularism and I donate to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. But when you’re raised within a majority culture, you become fluent in that culture’s idioms and ways of making sense of the world, no matter what you believe on an intellectual level. Even if you were raised in a family that never even went to church, you’re almost certainly a cultural Christian. I’m a Buddhist, and I’m a cultural Christian. If I spill a hot cup of coffee on myself, I say “Jesus ****ing Christ!” not “Amida ****ing Buddha!”

For me, cultural Christianity is like a stream I’m standing in. I have to stand inside it in order to live in this society and understand its values and language. I don’t have a choice. It isn’t good or bad, it just is. But I’m also outside the stream, to some degree… I can reach out my arms towards other streams and pools.

I could relate.  I, too, pepper my speech with references to Jesus, though I would be classified as an unbeliever by many Christians. And I understand a lot of morality and society through the Christian lens it is often presented through.  But I still hold back from committing to Christianity as a religion.  Partially, it is because I share my mother’s distrust of organized religion – the hard sell, the profiteering pastors, the obnoxiousness of the sanctified trying to inflict their moral authority.  It’s all equally grating to me.

However, I’ve been standing in this stream long enough to absorb some of its water.  I am loosely monotheistic (in that God is in everything kind of way) and I have a lot of trouble rejecting that frame, even when I acknowledge that growing up in the States probably influenced that way of thinking.  I, like atlasien, default to using a lot of Christian phrasing and framework. But I am always aware I am not a part of this stream, and there is some disharmony when I begin to walk against the current.

I do not hate religion.  I see religion as a tool, kind of like a knife. A knife can be used to provide sustenance, to free people, to protect one’s self against those that will do you harm.  And it can also be used to inflict damage.  Neither of these is the inherent nature of the knife – it all depends on the wielder.  In this way, I disagree with some atheists who believe that all religions are harmful.  I have seen religion become a positive focus and direction for men of my acquaintance, both through the paths of Christianity and Islam. So I am not willing to chuck the entire idea of religion, part and parcel.

And yet, I still resent a lot of the ideas propagated along with religion. One of these is the idea of proselytization, where those who feel obligated to spread the word of God do so by infringing upon my personal space.  And another is the idea that Christian is synonymous with black, which does more than erase the experiences of blacks that have chosen another path, but requires a certain adherence to religion to move about freely in black society. 

When Tami talked about the plight of a black agnostic who wrote to Salon’s Cary Tennis for advice, she noted:

Tennis gave one of his predictably lofty and meandering non-answers to “Churchgoing Agnostic”–advice that, I think, doesn’t take into account the unique relationship the black community has with Christianity. The Black Church, as an institution, is about more than worship. It is about community, history, activism and more. For many, Christianity and churchgoing are part of the very fabric of African Americanness. For a people whose African ancestors practiced indigenous religions far removed from the Western view of worship, we have embraced Christianity as ours. A recent survey revealed that blacks are more religious in key ways – including frequency of church attendance, daily prayer life and certainty of belief – than the U.S. population as a whole. Quiet as it’s kept, a whole lot of those presumably white, conservative, Evangelical Christians that get so much ink, look like me. [...]

So, what advice would I give Churchgoing Agnostic? If he were a friend, I would suggest he not make any major pronouncements regarding his beliefs. After all, faith–or lack off–is very personal and needn’t be a public affair. I don’t care for proselytizing of any stripe–religious or secular. I would suggest he dialogue more with his wife about his beliefs on religion to ease her into understanding his views. The hard part will be shedding religious rituals that feel uncomfortable to him, especially ones that are part of his community and family. If he has been attending church every Sunday and prayer service every Wednesday, a sudden disappearance will guarantee some sort of prying confrontation. What then?

I feel a little icky about my advice. It feels like recommending that the letter writer lie to both himself and those he loves. But don’t we do that sometimes, where other things are involved, to keep the peace?

Tami’s advice was a bit jarring to some, but I completely understood what she was saying.  For you see, many of us without religion know what comes when you admit who you are.  To come out as a non-Christian is to bring about a wave of misplaced concern, where people suddenly need to pass you booklets and pamphlets and to encourage you to come back into the arms of Christ, even if you’d never been there in the first place. And that’s probably the best case scenario.  The worst case is to be ostracized from your peer group because of your lack of faith, to have people call you wicked, to have former friends avoid you because they think your existence as a non-believer is a threat to their faith.  It’s a tough and lonely road to walk.  So we engage in a form of religious covering, masking our ambivalence about Christianity with what we have learned standing in the stream.

When I worked in a predominantly black work environment, many of the people there had printed out passages from scripture to line their walls and had a bible displayed somewhere in their cubicle.  Occasionally, after meetings, some one would call for a group prayer.  It was then that I covered, not wanting to be marked as different by those I worked with.  I participated in the prayers, though I resented the imposition of religion in my work life.  But I felt the social cost of public protest was too high of a cost to pay.

When I attended a wedding recently, I covered.  Again in the predominantly black company, I sat through what felt like hours of prayers and discussions, jokes about praying for the right man and the right weave, watching Tyler Perry’s “Why Did I Get Married” as a call-and-response exercise, and almost got my eyes stuck in the back of my head when I listened to the bride tearfully announce she was ready to submit to her husband.  But, again, I covered. It was not worth rocking the boat.

When I visited my boyfriend’s family in the south, I ended up having dinner with his aunt and uncle, both of whom are ordained.  It’s stressful enough trying to make a good impression.  It’s even worse trying to make a good impression while covering.  Before dinner, his aunt asked for us to do a common family ritual.  Everyone was to go around in a circle and recite their favorite verse of scripture.

The first thing I thought was “Fuck!”

This was taking covering to Olympian levels.  But what to do? I didn’t want to shift the focus on myself and start going on about how I wasn’t raised with religion – that tends to make things worse, because then people feel obligated to “save” you, and I wasn’t trying to spend dinner talking about the glory of coming to Christ.  But if I didn’t cop to not knowing a bible verse, I would be stuck trying to pull something out of my ass before my boyfriend’s family. Vaguely, the edges of my secular brain pulled something together. Hmm, the lord is my shepard, I shall not want… that should work.  Three people to go, and it appears that the custom was to cite the beginning of the passage and every one else would chime in.

I was pleased with myself.  Successfully covered!

Or so I thought.  The turn was passed to my boyfriend’s uncle, who was also a pastor but currently suffers from severe Alzheimer’s.  The aunt lovingly turned to him and said “Repeat after me. The Lord is my Shepard…”

Double fuck!

One person to go, and I was about to be outed. I scanned my brain for anything, anything at all to fill the gap.  About to admit defeat, and resign myself to a really awkward dinner, I remembered a passage printed on my old supervisor’s wall.  Right on beat, I chimed in:

“You shall not fight this battle alone…”

Which was actually incorrect.  What I was referring to was this:

¹⁷‘You need not fight in this battle; station yourselves, ^(T)stand and see the salvation of the LORD on your behalf, O Judah and Jerusalem ‘ Do not fear or be dismayed; tomorrow go out to face them, ^(U)for the LORD is with you.”

But I had apparently confused multiple quotes and mashed them all together in my head. But it didn’t matter in the end. The moment passed, and later – when more trust was established – we actually had a decent conversation about the nature of seeking religious insight.  But, in that moment, I still covered.

To uncover still holds significant costs.  I operate in a strange space – someone who believes in one god, but not a religion.  As a result, I normally get along well with people of many different faiths, as well as atheists.  As I am only interested in beliefs, and do not seek to change them, I find that more people are willing to engage with me in religious conversations.  However, I am often reminded of my nomad-like status when it comes down to making life decisions.

My ex-boyfriend continually brought up the fact that I would need to convert to Christianity before marrying him.  His speech was always the same, beginning with “and once you have accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior…”

Interestingly enough, these conversations were apropos of nothing. I wasn’t interested in marrying him and never broached the subject myself; his insertion of religion into the opening conversations was a way of reminding me that my heathen lifestyle was unacceptable.

My current boyfriend also expresses his discomfort with my lack of belief.  As a strong Christian, he entered our relationship content in the knowledge that I was not an atheist.  But as the relationship progresses, it no longer seems to be enough that I believe in a God.  It actively troubles him that I am not a Christian. Once, he asked “What kind of black people don’t go to church,” and I asked him to think hard about whether he really wanted that answer.

I asked my best friend, L, for her perspective, and she explained that dating a non-Christian is a bit of a strain.  Her boyfriend is also a non-believer, and she has the same reservations about advancing their relationship.  When I asked her what did it matter, she pointed out that there is a loss of intimate space when you and your partner cannot speak the same language when talking about God.  And for her, that type of distance was painful.  I wondered aloud if that kind of idea forces others to pretend.  Isn’t a sincere declaration of ambivalence better than an insincere declaration of faith?  We agreed to switch topics, coming no closer to a mutual answer.

L recently grew in her faith as a Christian. She is happier for this and more grounded in her community. I noticed the positive change in her, and she asked me to reconsider my relationship with Christianity.

A couple years ago, she asked me to come to her church for an Alpha session, a program designed to give seekers a better understanding of Christianity, specifically focusing on the life of Jesus Christ.  Seeing as I didn’t know the origin of Easter, I figured I might as well drag myself to a church and at least get correct, non pop culture saturated knowledge.  For a few weeks, I traveled to church after work to have dinner and discussions with other people about the Christian way of life.  It was interesting.  But there were a couple things that stood out to me.

The church my friend attended was predominantly white.  There were minorities, yes, but a large number of converts – especially black converts – ended up switching to an affiliated church with a predominantly black congregation.  I always wondered how and why that happened, even while attending the program.

Secondly, I realized why I’m not really a fan of churches in the first place.  For my friends who are Christian, a church provides a place for fellowship, a place to connect with others who are seeking enlightenment and fulfillment along the same spiritual path.  For me, as a person raised both secular and skeptical of organized religion, this is not a great place.  While I often enjoy sermons and quizzing the pastors about the meaning of faith and life, I hate the hard sell that accompanies the church, the self-policing among the flock, the rigid adherence to a certain set of norms.  And I hate the posturing that accompanies those who feel that they are saved, the pronouncements, the ego clashes.  A friend once told me that he is anti-church, that he believed the only things required in a religious relationship was “a man, his book, and his God.”

After heading to Alpha, I was inclined to agree. I learned a lot.  I received a lot of books which were provocative reading.  I had great discussions with great people.  But religion still left me cold.  By the time we neared the end of the program, each pastor stressed that if we had not yet come to Jesus, we needed to figure out why not.  If we had not accepted Jesus Christ as our lord and savior, we needed to figure out which of our “pet sins” were keeping us away from God.  I searched myself for the answer.  I didn’t know.  Ignoring my growing discomfort, I agreed to make one last effort, heading to the Alpha Retreat, a two day intensive in the country where all of the Alpha classes got to leave their lives and just bond with each other while participating in discussions about the word of God.

The first night, there was a sing-along of sorts.  I’m not sure if it was the food I ate before the sing along, or something else, but I felt myself falling ill.  I listened to the pastors, but felt disconnected.  Then, the singing began, and people began throwing their hands up and surrendering to Christ. I felt like I was watching the assembly scenes in Saved, and wondered what I was doing there.  After the singing stopped, I went back to my room to rest.  The rest of the weekend was kind of a blur, and I felt like I was going through the motions.  Unfortunately, after I had rested, I discovered that the answer was inside of me all along: God, as I understood it, was not to be found here.

After the Alpha retreat, I did not return to the church.  L stopped asking, mentioning friends I had made there from time to time.  However, she too began to have issues with the church we attended together – in addition to moving to a new neighborhood and wanting to be connected to the people there, she was noticing a strange rift in the congregation that had formerly felt so welcoming.  The Obama election ended up rocking the church, often splitting it down racial lines and prompting these normally moderate Christians to post things on Facebook that would have been shouted at pro-life rallies or birther functions.  Disgusted, L invested herself in her neighborhood church, one that is predominantly black – and, interestingly enough, the same church that my boyfriend’s family attends. They have both, separately, asked me to attend services – I’ve left my answer vague, intentionally.

Perhaps I’m just not made for church.  Apparently, this tendency runs in the family.  At a family reunion in South Carolina, where our relatives are so populous we occupy large chunks of a certain town, and where everyone heads to church on Sunday at 9, stays for dinner at 2, and won’t get home until 5, I was wondering how to deal with the church question.  In these situations, it is hard to cover.  But luckily, I didn’t have to.  Seated at a table during the reunion dinner, the family elders began singing a series of hymns.  They explained that our family lineage was firmly rooted in the church, and after slavery, our oldest ancestor rejected his slave master’s surname (Thompson) for the self selected name of Priestly.  The hymns were then sung, but without a book, I was lost.  However, I wasn’t alone.  Stealing glances around the table, I noticed that no one was singing.  Most were just starting off into space politely, waiting for the songs to end.

After the food was served, I decided to take a chance.

I told my grandmother that while I respected other people’s religion, I really wasn’t much for church.  She smiled.

“Oh, me neither,” she said. “I always thought it was more about what’s in a person’s heart.  I’m sure God thinks that too.”

The next day, we opted to miss church services.  My father blamed our absence on his aching back, but somehow we managed to make it to lunch on time. Our relatives each commented on our absence at church, but generally let the matter drop.

Since that day with my family, I’ve felt more at peace with my decision to stay a seeker.  I enjoy learning about religions, talking to adherents, having intense discussions with atheists.  And I love using multiple concepts to steer my understanding of faith, like the concept of jihad as in internal struggle with the will of the self and the word of God, or exploring the eight-fold path, or untangling Wiccan theology from stereotypes.

While seeking, I’ve learned that I like the idea of a deity.  I like that feeling of being overwhelmed by something you can’t explain, but feel close to. I find it hard to articulate why I think that feeling is God, but I just do.  And I am starting to understand that the general absence of this feeling in church, but the presence of this feeling when I am doing mundane things like looking at the clouds through an airplane window or walking in the woods makes me think I will only find what I seek if I am willing to just be.

But, I must admit, I do slightly envy my friends of faith.

I often dream of Death.  Not the bad-ass Tori Amos inspired Death that Neil Gaiman dreamed up and illustrated into existence, but the more grim, river Styx kind. Death is the largest unknown, the only non-negotiable, the reality that begs the question “what is my purpose on Earth?”

One of the things I often envy about my more religious friends is that they have peace.  Or more specifically, a belief, one that allows them to just know  the answers to the questions about the after life. My boyfriend sleeps peacefully throughout the night, untroubled by the universe.  He believes in heaven and hell and that’s it, while my mind endlessly explores the possibilities.

Sometimes I wish the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything really was 42.

The number feels concrete, final, unlike these nebulous ideas of faith and practice, complicated by race.

The similarities are fascinating. Buddhism and Islam in the United States are both minority religions with roughly the same number of adherents. Providing an exact demographic breakdown is impossible, and the issue of demographic study is controversial for both religions.

Here’s a good link to Muslim demographics in the U.S. It’s “good” not because I know anything about the site’s objectivity, but because it outlines the difficulties of achieving anything near an accurate count, and it lists multiple poll sources. There are somewhere between 1 and 7 million Muslims in the United States. In terms of ethnicity, about a quarter to a third of them are African-American, a quarter to a third are South Asian, a quarter are Arab and the rest are a mixed bag that includes a sprinkling of American-born white people and European immigrants.

Here’s a link for Buddhists that focuses on a recent controversial poll and does some great data-crunching. There are somewhere between 1 and 5 million Buddhists in the United States. As arunlikhati mentions in the above link, the 2008 Pew Forum Report has a demographic breakdown that’s horrendously inaccurate. They left out Hawaii, and the survey was conducted entirely in English or Spanish. That would be like providing a demographic breakdown of Catholicism by skipping Texas and asking questions only in English and Vietnamese. It’s completely nuts! Unfortunately, since “Pew” has such a strong brand name, the results of this study are going to be floating around for a while.

The Pew poll underrepresents the number of Asian-American Buddhists. A better estimate is that Asian-Americans represent somewhere from 60-90% of all Buddhists. The rest are composed predominantly of white people, plus a mixed bag with small numbers of African-Americans, Latinos and others. Different Asian-American groups that are well-represented in the US are going to have very different breakdowns. Vietnamese- and Cambodian-Americans will have high levels of Buddhism, Japanese-Americans will be medium, Chinese-Americans are all over the map while Korean-Americans are predominantly Christian.

Unlike Judaism and Hinduism, both Islam and Buddhism are religions with explicitly universal application and a strong history of proselytizing. There are strands within or associated with Judaism and Hinduism that do advance universal claims, but I think it’s safe to say that most adherents don’t claim universality as a goal. As a natural but somewhat paradoxical consequence of this universality, Islam and Buddhism have huge internal divides around race, ethnicity, class, immigration and convert status.

I’ll stop here for a second and say that I’m not going to be talking further about Islam as it’s actually practiced and experienced in the U.S., and neither will I be discussing real, lived Buddhism in this segment. Instead, I’ll be listing opposing pairs of stereotypes of Islam and Buddhism from a mainstream American culturally Christian perspective. If the phrase “culturally Christian” strikes you as jarring, it’s actually a pretty simple concept. It reflects the fact that when it comes to cultural institutions, the United States is very much a Christian nation. Hey, I mean this in a sociological sense, not a legal one… I love secularism and I donate to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. But when you’re raised within a majority culture, you become fluent in that culture’s idioms and ways of making sense of the world, no matter what you believe on an intellectual level. Even if you were raised in a family that never even went to church, you’re almost certainly a cultural Christian. I’m a Buddhist, and I’m a cultural Christian. If I spill a hot cup of coffee on myself, I say “Jesus ****ing Christ!” not “Amida ****ing Buddha!”

For me, cultural Christianity is like a stream I’m standing in. I have to stand inside it in order to live in this society and understand its values and language. I don’t have a choice. It isn’t good or bad, it just is. But I’m also outside the stream, to some degree… I can reach out my arms towards other streams and pools.

As a last caveat for the list of stereotypes, I’m not describing the perspective of certain very fervent and dogmatic strands of Christianity, according to which Islam and Buddhism are equally demonic and indistinguishable from other demonic religions such as Hinduism, Mormonism, Episcopalianism, Satanism, Masonism, Lesbianism, Harrypotterism and so on. This is more of a mainstream, secularly-educated kind of perspective.

Violence:
Islam is very violent. Buddhism is very peaceful.

Proselytizing:
Muslims proselytize aggressively and are intolerant towards all other religions. Buddhists don’t proselytize at all and meld harmoniously with all other religions they encounter.

Body/Mind:
Islam is a religion centered on bodies and seeks to control bodies (submission). Buddhism is centered on the mind and seeks to control the mind (liberation). Visually, Islam is often represented by people bowing in prayer, while Buddhism is often represented by a disembodied head.

Speaking of Heads:
Islam is all about putting stuff on your head: scarves for women and turbans for men. On the contrary, really serious Buddhists shave their heads, and Buddhism is not tied to clothing.

Hierarchy/Egalitarianism:
Islam is a hierarchical, legalistic religion controlled by old, bearded men (Ayatollahs). Buddhism has no hierarchy that reinforces dogma. The Dalai Lama is the Buddhist leader but he doesn’t tell people how to worship.

Religion/Spirituality:
Islam is for people who are religious but not spiritual. Buddhism is for people who are spiritual but not religious. In fact, Buddhism isn’t even a religion.

Race/Ethnicity:
Muslims dislike white people. Black Muslim converts hate white people. White Muslim converts especially hate white people. Buddhism is totally race- and ethnicity-neutral. However, expert Asian Buddhists from Asian countries can act as gatekeepers and legitimacy-markers.

Demand level:
Islam is a high-demand religion that controls every aspect of a person’s life. Buddhism is a low-demand religion and you can pick and choose which aspects to follow.

Gender/Sexuality:
Islam is puritanical, patriarchal and persecutes LGBT people, whereas Buddhism is progressive and welcoming.

Science/Modernity:
Islam is anti-science and medieval. Buddhism is forward-facing and connected to discoveries in psychology and quantum physics.

Reproduction:
Muslims are overly fertile and threaten to overwhelm the nation on a demographic level. Buddhists are subfertile, declining and play the role of global victims.

We could unpack these for a long time and argue over which stereotype is the most inaccurate. However, I think the key is really to ask, what are these stereotypes used for? What do they tell us about the people who propagate the stereotypes? Where do they lead into the future?

A hundred years ago, the clearcut oppositions I listed above were starting to coalesce.

Let’s go back around that time, to when Rudyard Kipling wrote Kim in 1901. I’m edging away from American territory here, but the English imperialism represented in Kim was extremely influential in terms of how Americans came to view “Eastern” religion. If you doubt that, check out this scary article.

I read Kim when I was very young. I read it a bunch of times. It’s an incredibly exciting, colorful, passionate and thought-provoking book. Edward Said wrote a must-read introduction to the Penguin edition. The first few times I read it, I was wholly identified with Kim, the kind of protagonist that children instantly love: poor but destined for greatness, resourceful, adventurous, orphaned and in search of belonging. I also loved the background of India and Central Asia, especially because I’d been there and felt a strong emotional connection. Like Kim, I didn’t really fit in anywhere, and the central philosophical question of the book — What makes a person them? Why am I me? — was also my obsession.

But the last few times I read it, certain aspects of the book started to bother me. I began to stop reading all the way through to the end. Today, I hate indiscriminate use of the word “essentialism” because it’s so often deployed as distancing jargon, but in this case, I can’t think of a better word… I began to realize that all the wonderful, colorful characters in the book were meant to embody certain essential qualities of India and “The East”. I’d taken them for real, but they were starting to look more like puppets. They were not like the real “real” people I knew from my family’s travels in India. They were also totally different from my only other source of representations of Indian people — a stack of Hindu comic books. These were really cool, by the way.

It was also about that time I started processing certain facts of race… for example, that I would never, ever be white, even though my mother was white. I started to understand that Kim was white, and what that meant politically, and how that separated him from the other characters. Even though he was the absolute lowest kind of white — an Irish (and I’m not exaggerating, this is pretty much how Kipling puts it) — he was still white, and that destines him for a promising career in government service. I stopped identifying with him so much.

Kim’s two mentor figures, the Tibetan lama and the “Pathan” (Pashtun) Mahbub Ali, are also representatives of Buddhism and Islam. Both are extremely positive and sympathetic figures. They also get along with each other well. According to this biography, Kipling was a big fan of Muslims, as opposed to the Hindus that he was not so fond of, and his works are full of strong but sensitive Muslim warrior types. Take the lines of this famous poem:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.

Ah, smell that testosterone! Anyway, the “two strong men” in question are the English Colonel’s Son and Kamal, a “Pathan” bandit. People who know nothing of Afghanistan or Pashtuns other than what was written by Kipling (and in his time, this meant almost every European and American) imagined them to be a bunch of awesome freedom-loving ass-kicking supermen.

In the novel Kim, the Tibetan lama is unique figure, a man with a deep understanding of the world who is not afraid of adventure despite his advanced age. For me, a story the lama tells near the end became the true high point of the book:

‘I did not seek truth in those days, but the talk of doctrine. All illusion! I drank the beer and ate the bread of Guru Ch’wan. Next day one said: “We go out to fight Sangor Gutok down the valley to discover” (mark again how Lust is tied to Anger!) “which Abbot shall bear rule in the valley and take the profit of the prayers they print at Sangor Gutok.” I went, and we fought a day.’

‘But how, Holy One?’

‘With our long pencases as I could have shown . . . I say, we fought under the poplars, both Abbots and all the monks, and one laid open my forehead to the bone. See!’ He tilted back his cap and showed a puckered silvery scar. ‘Just and perfect is the Wheel! Yesterday the scar itched, and after fifty years I recalled how it was dealt and the face of him who dealt it; dwelling a little in illusion. Followed that which thou didst see – strife and stupidity. Just is the Wheel! The idolater’s blow fell upon the scar. Then I was shaken in my soul: my soul was darkened, and the boat of my soul rocked upon the waters of illusion. Not till I came to Shamlegh could I meditate upon the Cause of Things, or trace the running grass-roots of Evil. I strove all the long night.’

I don’t have the space to explicate this passage and why it affected me so much, but I’ll point out that the lama’s approach to non-violence is complicated, historically contextualized, and fully embodied. Plus, he’s wearing something on his head.

I hope this literary digression will help establish what stereotypes of Islam and Buddhism have in common and where they start to diverge. They’re both “Eastern” religions. Back in Kipling’s time, they both offered special kinds of benefits, which were accessible or appropriable to special white people. I don’t want to use the word “Orientalist” too heavily, because it has a very specific meaning as well as the more general and theoretical one it has today because of Said’s work. Orientalists were serious scholars. But the kind of access I’m talking about wasn’t restricted to scholars, it was also accessible to anyone who immersed themselves in low art forms like… adventure stories. Today, the method of access to Buddhist mystique retains this dynamic. Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu is a prime example. A special white person stands between East and West, and their destiny is to mediate between the two. It never goes the other way around, though. People whose origins are Eastern can try and mediate all they want, but their hybrid destiny is tragic at best and comically pathetic at worst.

Islamic mystique diverged from the pattern somewhere in the 20th century. The value of the white mediator became not so romantic. Racialization of Islam swelled to truly amazing proportions. Today in the United States, the negative stereotypes of Islam I listed above are not just applicable to Muslims; they stretch to Sikhs, Arab Christians, anyone who looks vaguely Middle Eastern. On the other hand, the positive stereotypes of Buddhism do not extend to East Asians! East Asian cultures are still stereotyped as repressive towards women, lovers of hierarchy and haters of individuality, unchanging and ahistorical, superficially clever but not really innovative, etcetera.

What makes an “Eastern” religion? Why is Islam Eastern, even though it’s from the same monotheist tradition as “Western” Christianity? As far as I can tell, the major difference is that Eastern religions hate life. No, seriously. I read Joseph Campbell’s “Masks of God” series of books when I was a teenager — Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology and Occidental Mythology — and although I learned a lot from them, they were also very disturbing, because some segments really gave me that impression. I had to consciously block out a large proportion of what I read in those books, or I would have formed an image of myself as a potential death-lover.

I think this death-loving/life-loving divide is an idea that holds huge power among cultural Christians. Suicide bombings are a prime example. The stereotype is that Muslims are suicide bombers because they love death. When I think of this stereotype, the image of a famous Buddhist suicide comes to mind… Thich Quang Duc in 1963. The photo of the burning monk is instantly recognizable, but very few people understand the context anymore. If you ask someone who the monk was and why he burned himself, I doubt many younger people would even know what country it was taken in (I experimented a few times this week), much less that Thich Quang Duc had some very specific political complaints about Catholic persecution of Buddhists. Without context, the self-immolation becomes “something that some Buddhists do…”

Joseph Shahadi emailed me a bunch of fascinating essays on political/religious suicides during the Vietnam War. I’ll just go ahead and quote part of his email:

Buddhist self-immolation-as-protest inspired similar actions in the US during the Vietnam war among people of various faiths. It is little discussed but American Buddhists, Christians and Jews all burned themselves alive during this period to protest the war. The most famous of these was Norman Morrison, a Quaker, who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon. It is worth noting that several American women—and many Vietnamese Buddhist nuns– also burnt themselves alive but they are forgotten, while Thich Quang Duc and Norman Morrison both became icons of the peace movement. Partly that is because the entire American history of the practice has been suppressed out of fear of imitations and partly, I think, due to sexism. The fear that the practice would become widespread the west led to some effed-up criticisms of Buddhism as a “cause” of immolations (Sound familiar?).

The idea that Buddhism is death-loving also has a basis in popular misconceptions of Buddhist teachings. From a heavily dualist, culturally Christian perspective, “Nirvana” is an idea that’s almost impossible to grasp (not that it’s easy from other perspectives). Nirvana ends up getting translated as either Heaven or else true, final Death.

All these stereotypes I’ve been talking about are listed from the perspective of outsiders. Once you convert into a religion, or move towards the inside, a lot of them fade, are transformed or totally recontextualized. No matter where you are, though, you can’t entirely banish them.

I think one important step in the right direction is to expose and ridicule the “East/West” divide. I’m so sick of it, yet it’s almost impossible to have a discussion without reinforcing it. I’m not against generalizations — communication would be impossible without generalizations — but I’m against stupid generalizations, and this is definitely one of them.

Even the archaic Occidental/Oriental strikes me as a preferable distinction, because at least it doesn’t pretend to be geographically accurate. Let’s look at exactly how stupid and racist the use of “Westerner” is in a religious context. A “Westerner” is usually a culturally Christian white European or white North American. White Christians south of the U.S. border are included at the margins. African-American Christians are included as long as they don’t get too carried away with that “Afrocentric” stuff and say that Jesus could have been black. Jewish people are included as long as they’re white and as long as they don’t look or act too Jewish. Other kinds of non-white Christians float in and out. Eastern Orthodox Christians are Westerners except when they call themselves Easterners. Any sort of Native American religion is emphatically not “Western”, even when it’s mixed with Catholicism. Syncretic religions native to the Western hemisphere, such as Santeria, are not Western. Arab or Ethiopian Christians are not Western. Asian-Americans of all religions are Frankensteins.

In other words, use of the word “Westerner,” especially in an American religious context, already ignores, marginalizes and insults a substantial percentage of the population. I’m not dogmatic about this. I realize the term is so widespread that not of course everyone who uses it is being stupid or racist. I just think we should be moving away from it as fast as we can.

In place of “Westerner,” I try to be specific and use Christian, culturally Christian, white, Anglo, Eurocentric or European. And to be REALLY specific, I’m not fond of the word “European” as a geographical term, because why does Europe get to be its own continent? It’s just the western corner of Asia. It should be a subcontinent, like India.

On that cranky note, I’ll end this piece. It’s been rather depressing to survey so many of these stereotypes. I may switch the order of these pieces and instead of Complicity and Conflict talk about something much more positive: the unique perspective and wide-open future of a truly multiethnic Buddhism.

Commenters on this post: can you talk about the kind of positive and negative stereotypes you’ve encountered on your own religious or irreligious journeys, and how you’ve processed and/or rejected them?

———–
Postscript: As part of the blogstorm I touched on in the first post, The Buddha is my DJ has a great three-part series on white privilege in Buddhism. We’re touching on some of the same topics for totally different audiences: predominantly people of color who are not Buddhists (my series) versus predominantly white Buddhists (his series). It’s an interesting complement.

Filipinos don’t celebrate Halloween, they instead have a day dedicated to the dead on 1 November, the Araw ng mga Patay [Day of the Dead]. It’s a holiday that is the perfect metaphor for Philippine spirituality: an imported Catholic holiday that hints at an animist past.

Having grown up in Canada I only just recently learned about this tradition, and I experienced my first Araw ng mga Patay only last year. I went to go visit my grandfathers graves, they had both died during the 90s and been brought back to the Phils.

The holiday is an odd one seen through the lens of a Filipino raised in Canada. Families head out to the cemetery to clean the tombs of relatives, bring food, flowers, light candles, and pray. But more or less it just seems like a day where everyone decides to have a family picnic—a picnic that just so happens to be in an insanely crowded cemetery.

It’s an odd sight to be honest. Drunk men playing cards on grave markers next to a family singing karaoke on a portable machine next to parents praying the rosary for a recently deceased child.

Strangely enough, it’s a generally mirthful holiday. There are fast food tents set up in the cemetery just for that day: McDonalds, Jollibee, Greenwich Pizza, Ando’s Chicken, and more—all in the middle of a cemetery.

To my foreign influenced eyes, this holiday seems light and fun; a nice way to remember the past, but in the Phils—despite how casual the atmosphere is—there is a real fear that to not pay respect at the grave of a family member would have severe repercussions from the spirit world.

It’s moments like these that really help remind me of our people’s animist past, and the very real connection to the spirit world that doesn’t exist here in Canada.

This past lives on despite, or perhaps more accurately, within the country’s Christian framework. As one Tala-andig tribal leader told me in during a visit to their community in 2005, “In our political system we have to go through channels–barangay captain up to the President. You can’t just talk to the President, first you have to go to the local barangay captain, then to the mayor, then the congressman, etc. It’s the same way with our beliefs. We start with the spirits and work our way up to [the Christian] God.”

I am particularly fascinated by our living family mythology. As a Filipino, even a Filipino in Canada, all our family histories are ripe with this folklore. I am proud to even have a little of it attached to me.

I’d like to share some of these stories with you, old stories that sometimes seem a world away, and make me nostalgic for a place I can’t remember, for spirits that I cannot recall…

My great-grandfather, my paternal lola’s father, was apparently a Spaniard (don’t hold it against me). My Mommy Es (as we call our grandma) tells me that he was an older man in his 50s when he married my great-grandmother who was 18. His name was Gabriel and he was a soldier with Spain when he was younger.

My grandmother didn’t know him very well, he died before she became a teen and he was stern man who only really interacted with his kids to discipline them. One thing she did remember about him was his magic hat.

This hat was one of the family anting-antings [magic talisman]. They were often amulets worn around the neck (most commonly they gave the wearer invincibility against a specific weapon), but they could be anything—in this case, a hat.

Mommy Es first told me about the magic hat in my teens when I was a massive comic book geek and it caught my imagination enough that I have never forgotten the story, and have never forgotten the sense of loss I felt for not having it—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So he had a magic hat. This hat was said to have an amazing power: he could use it to transport himself anywhere on earth by simply putting on the hat and thinking about the place. It had an unusual caveat: it would only work if the wearer used it in a place where he was out of sight from watching eyes.

I was an atheist as a teen, and I didn’t really believe in its powers, but it intrigued me. Did one have to be completely out of sight or just have no one watching? How far was its range? Did you have to image the place so well that you couldn’t go anywhere that you hadn’t already been? And of course: why didn’t he use it to be a superhero?

The hat was lost during the war with Japan, after my great-grandfather had died. When my Lola’s family was forced to run to flee into the mountains it was left behind. I have no idea how such an important piece of magic could be left behind, I mean you’d think this hat would have been pretty damned useful during a war.

I, of course, also wondered how my Lola could believe in such an outlandish story—and she really believes it was real. She would tell me about how he walk into a room and just disappear or just appear out of no where when she thought she was alone. It’s all just a little creepy if you ask me—knowing that he was a Spaniard in a Philippines just recently free of Spain—to think that he would just appear and disappear randomly through my grandma’s childhood memories.

In the mountains my grandmother had a more dangerous run in with another creature of Filipino mythology.

Throughout my life I have always known my Lola to be afraid of rivers and creeks, it originates from the War and the time she was attacked by a river spirit. She tells the story of how she was in her early teens and went out to the river to fetch water. Usually one of the older family members did it but she felt she was old enough. Her family later found her by the river near dead.

They attribute the incident to a run-in with a river spirit that she forgot to ask permission from.

The theme of river spirits continued with me, but in an opposite direction. I’ve always loved small forest rivers and creeks. I can sit by them for hours.

My maternal Lola, we called her ‘Nanay’ [which means “mother”] loves to tell the story of how when I was a toddler I was always running away from home. At first they would get worried (I have no idea how a baby less than two could run away from home, but that’s the story), but they would always find me in the same place. I would run to the creek in the wooded area near our home and play with my friends the duende.

Duende were mischievous spirits that inhabited the land. While the name is Spanish, the spirits are Filipino, stemming from our animist tradition. Duende were mischievous and often played pranks on people. They could also be very dangerous if offended, and they were easily offended (as my Mommy Es’ story shows). But if you were good to them, they were very protective of you.

Nanay would say how she would often find me there and she would see strange things: like how I would apparently be playing with spirits she couldn’t see, she would see me splash water at an invisible friend–and water would splash back.

She marveled at that friendship as duende were usually creatures to be avoided. In stories even those they befriended usually found themselves in serious trouble. I’ve always loved that connection, and when I went back to the Phils to discover that the creek was gone and the area cemented over and covered in homes I felt a real sadness and I truly hoped that my mythological friends were ok.

To this day when I walk through forests, or come to a creek I would bow my head and greet the spirits. And to this day I’ve always felt safe in wild areas—I’ve had quite a few close calls, but I’ve always come out ok.

Now I’m not saying I believe these stories to be literal truth, but there is wonderful metaphorical truth to be found in mythology—it’s the truth that cannot be spoken of in literal terms, the truth that is within all religions, the truth that’s corrupted by those that see only words but can’t grasp their meaning.

One Filipino wrote on an online criticism of the Araw ng mga Patay holiday “I will never understand the Filipino fascination with the dead, much less their superstitious beliefs concerning the dead among us. I prefer to deal with the land of the living. After all, it’s the living people that need our help as we can do nothing for the dead.”

I disagree, many of our problems in the Phils and as Filipinos (especially those of us raised outside the homeland) comes from this disconnect between the present and the past, tradition and modernity. In our headlong rush to become equal to the West [whatever that may mean], we are quickly discarding our mythologies instead of allowing them to evolve. This stupidity is an attempt to strip us of our relationship to the land, each other, and the past.

But these stories live in us whether we want them to or not because our parents, our grandparents, and our families have lived with these stories and they have influenced how they act and how they have raised us.

Tradition is not a static creature. It lives and evolves within the people they inhabit. We cannot remove ourselves from it any more than we can try to remove our blood from our bodies. We can definitely try, and I know too many that do, but the sad result helps neither the living nor the dead.

(all images: ©2005-07 alex felipe / All Rights Reserved)

The “religion” tag at Racialicious pulls up pieces that are almost entirely focused on Islam. There’s not much coverage of other minority religions yet. I’m pointing this out not to blame — after all, to be published in Racialicious, you have to submit pieces in the first place — but rather to open up the topic for thoughtful discussion, and explain my motivation for writing about Buddhism here.

I can think of several reasons for the number of Islam-related pieces right off the top of my head: the prevalence of Islamophobia and the racialization of Muslims. There’s no corresponding “Buddhophobia”. A white Buddhist is rarely regarded as a freak of nature. Instead of being hated and feared, symbols of my religion are commonly sold in the Home & Garden section of chain stores! Buddhism appears to be eminently compatible with modern American society.

But if you look closely, you’ll see some ripples on the surface…

The overall aim of this series is to discuss how issues of race and ethnicity intersect with the image and reality of Buddhism in the United States. It’s a huge topic so I’ll try to make it more manageable by establishing what this series won’t do. After I provide a very brief historical introduction to Buddhism, I won’t go much deeper into teachings or philosophy, especially since I’m ignorant about so much of it beyond the basics and have zero qualifications as that kind of teacher. I’m going to stick to the surface, to superficial perceptions, stereotypes, illusions, skin color… although what’s on the surface usually connects to other issues which go very, very deep.

I’m going to be discussing a lot of generalizations about different religions. I’ll try to be as sensitive as possible and differentiate my own fairly neutral views. I might offend various kinds of believers, but once I get farther along, I think that the most passionate objections are going to come from other Buddhists. Contrary to popular belief, we’re a fractious bunch. I’ll try to steel myself.

My own background in Buddhism is rather unique. I was half born into it, half converted.

Back in the 6th century BCE, Buddhism began in India based on the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha. Several hundred years later, the Indian king Asoka converted to Buddhism. This was a huge turning point in the religion. Asoka sponsored massive efforts to spread Buddhism through peaceful means. One wave entered Sri Lanka, became Theravada Buddhism, and from there spread across Southeast Asia. Other waves went overland and became Mahayana Buddhism in China and Vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet. The influence of Buddhism waned within India as it became stronger in the East.

The fact that Buddhism has diminished so much in its birthplace is, naturally, a sore spot for many Buddhists. In 1948, a Cambodian monk, Bhante Dharmawara, came to India in order to work towards reestablishing Buddhism. In his life before monkhood, he came from an influential family, and was probably able to draw on these connections to establish the Asoka Mission near New Delhi. According to one story, he mystically cured the sick uncle of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Whatever happened, Bhante and Nehru developed an extremely close relationship, and Nehru sponsored and helped the Mission as much as possible. Nehru himself was a firm agnostic known for his support of secularism and distrust of Hindu fundamentalism.

In the 1970s, my parents came to live at the Asoka Mission. The Mission was centered around a group of monks, but anyone at all was welcome, especially if they pitched in to help.

My mother left the US in the 1960s, mainly for political reasons and disgust at the Vietnam War. She lived on small remittances from her parents, and odd jobs: janitorial and agricultural work, housesitting, and so on. She first went to India to explore her belief in Buddhism. My father, a Japanese fellow hippie, ran into her at the Ajanta Buddhist caves. They fell in love and began to sync up their migrations, since my father’s job also involved a lot of travel. I came along a few years later.

I have fond memories of the Mission. The land was beautiful. Even the dust struck me as having a beautiful color to it. I wandered around anywhere I wanted. The monks were always nice and smiled at me. Sometimes they gave me fun, important jobs like squeezing behind the statues to give them a dusting.

My mother valued her time there and the opportunity to hear Bhante speak. He was an important guide for her. But the living conditions were rough. Every night, she would wrap up our provisions and hang them from the ceiling in an increasingly complicated network of ropes. Every night, the rats would sneak in, perform unbelievable acrobatic feats and grab some of the food anyway. We were used to rough living, but according to my mother’s complaints, the rats were a minor annoyance compared to the heroin addicts. The Mission did not turn people away, and many of those people were hippies who’d fallen as low as you can go in a city where you could buy a fix for a nickel. The stress of shielding children from the sight of drooling passed-out junkies became too much for my mother to put up with. She did a good job, though… when I think back over my time there, I don’t remember seeing anything traumatic.

My father is a Japanese Buddhist in much the same way as my mother’s parents were white American Christians. You’re born into a faith, it’s your heritage, it’s an important part of transitions, such as death, but other than that, it tends to fade into the background of your life.

My first real introduction to a different way of living a religion came around the second grade, in public school in the United States. I was one of those kids that loved dinosaurs. I met another kid in my class that loved dinosaurs too… and he was also the only other Asian kid I knew! His family was from the Philippines. I was so happy to meet him. I was sure we would be great friends. We had so much in common. One day, as we were going through lists of our favorite dinosaurs, I mentioned something about the dinosaurs evolving. My friend was horrified. “God created dinosaurs on the sixth day,” he said. I disagreed. He never spoke to me again. The next day, as I rode my bike up to school, I was suddenly surrounded by a ring of classmates who all pointed their finger at me and chanted “you’re going to HE-ELL, you’re going to HE-ELL.”

My mother’s belief had faded somewhat in favor of an agnostic skepticism. She never joined a Buddhist community again after leaving India. She grew to believe that all religions were wrong, but that Buddhism was the least wrong. However, she still retained a strong attachment to Bhante and continued to follow his career. At the age of 90, he moved to Stockton, California to minister to a large group of Cambodian refugees who had been resettled there. Many were suffering terribly from cultural alienation and PTSD. My mother attended Bhante’s funeral when he died at the age of 110 after decades of service to the refugee community.

Steven Seagal had lately become a student of Bhante, and the funeral was actually delayed for a little bit in order for Seagal to attend, because his flight was late. Bhante’s Cambodian relatives put a good face on it, but one of them did end up snarking to my mother, “couldn’t he just jump out of the plane, like in one of his movies?”

These rambling anecdotes of my family history contain the seeds of what I want to discuss when it comes to Buddhism. First of all, Buddhism stakes its claim as a universal religion. Many (not all) strands of Buddhism don’t proselytize aggressively, but Buddhism is supposed to be for everyone. No one should be turned away, no matter how obnoxious. Not even heroin addicts abusing their American privilege in a poverty-stricken but generous country. Not even (ugh) Steven Seagal. Second, Buddhism is a worldly religion. It’s highly interwoven with race, class, ethnicity, politics and economics. Third, Buddhism is highly variable, and contains huge internal conflicts that rarely come to the attention of outsiders. Fourth, Buddhists in America have had to evolve unique ways of surviving in this culturally Christian nation.

The next installment of the series — Is Buddhism the Anti-Islam? — will talk more about cultural Christianity and how Buddhism and Islam are often stereotyped as polar opposites from a culturally Christian perspective. Complicity and Conflict will discuss representations of global power struggles involving Buddhism, including examples in which Buddhism has been complicit in state repression. Yes, I will be touching Tibet, but gingerly, with a ten-foot pole. Converts and Immigrants will outline the sociology and history of Buddhism in the United States, and provide an alternate narrative than the one in which white converts represent the face of modern American Buddhism. I might change the order and add or subtract from the series based on comments and suggestions, so feel free to comment on other issues you want to hear about. I might not have the space to include it, but I’ll probably try.

—–
Postscript: Although this really belongs more to the later part of the series, I have to mention that there has been a recent blog tempest over some remarks by C.N. Le at Asian Nation.

C.N. Le is Vietnamese-American professor with a PhD in sociology. He’s very well-known and respected in the Asian-American blogosphere. On July 15th, he wrote a post describing his family’s experience at a Buddhist retreat. He mentioned a couple of white Buddhists who did not clean up after themselves, and suggested that just possibly maybe occasionally provisionally perhaps perhaps perhaps… white privilege was involved. The right of C.N. Le to make this rather mild criticism was noted and defended by the few Buddhist bloggers who have a sophisticated awareness on racial issues (the ones I know about are Angry Asian Buddhist and The Buddha is my DJ). Thank goodness for them. Otherwise, the reaction from Buddhist blogs appears to consist entirely of ridiculous racial hysteria and sanctimonious dharma-beating. For example, This person’s post can be summarized as “I AM A PERSECUTED WHITE MAN!! C.N. LE IS THE ASIAN KKK!! AND I BET HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A REAL SOCIOLOGY DEGREE NYAH NYAH NYAH!!”. And this is from a blog called “Progressive Buddhism”. Sigh…

I didn’t want to get to this sort of stuff until the later part of the series, but I’ll provide a brief preview right now. Below is a mathematical equation containing elements that combine to form my perspective as an Asian-American Buddhist contemplating the persecution of a white American Buddhist.

(almost all the problems experienced by white Buddhists) +
(extra problems experienced in general by people of color Buddhists) +
(extra problems experienced only by Asian-American Buddhists) – (-white privilege) =
STFU

I can’t speak for all other Asian-Americans but I imagine more than a few of them share my reaction. It’s why I don’t bother participating in these sorts of communities. I don’t feel like being insulted, ignored and erased when I try to connect to my religion. My only message to them: I’ve already heard everything you’ve had to say. I’ve even experienced it along with you. You haven’t done the same for me. Let me know when you’re ready to start listening.

I’ve been fascinated by religion most of my life.

This is probably because I wasn’t raised with one.

When I say this, people – particularly other black people – tend to hear what I say and interpret it as “lapsed Christian.” As in, a girl who used to go to church and doesn’t go anymore.

Before the age of 21, I can count how many times I’ve been to church on one hand. With fingers left over. All my knowledge of Christianity comes from what my friends tell me and pop culture. And my knowledge of Judaism. And atheism. And any other religious belief system or lack thereof.

So, over time, I think I came to like listening to stories about religion and why people choose their specific belief systems. It’s interesting to listen to the reason for belief (or non-belief) and the battles to fight misconceptions. It’s even more interesting when analyzing the effect of race, gender, and class on religious practice and religious perception.

In launching Racialigious, we hope to explore where race (among other things) intersects with religious practice and belief.

Submissions welcome.