The Post-Christian Plot Twist

coming (out) into freedom and fullness

My life feels full circle right now. Later this morning I will stand and proclaim a message that would’ve felt like heresy to me not long ago. Heresy not because of the genuine curiosities that helped me arrive at the conclusions I now hold, or the underlying intuition that was leading me into a life of theological study. No, I now know that was God guiding me the whole time – “Uni” as I like to call Her. But heresy because of the shame that was planted into my consciousness, embedded in my body, by a tradition I was taught to never question. Growing up Christian meant believing that, at the end of the day, my flesh was a problem – the problem. Hell, all our problem. That “human” beings just can’t get right, no matter how hard we try or how good our hearts may be. We are depraved. And as a result, we all need a savior. You know the plot line:

God (understood exclusively as a man) created the entire cosmos, and it was perfect. Humankind (also understood exclusively as “mankind”) disobeyed and messed it all up. And coincidently, it was a woman’s fault – awfully convenient for patriarchal configurations. Now the only way to get back to this original state of bliss is to believe that the only flesh worthy of worship is Jesus’s, because he was basically just God in human drag.

---

This is the image of God that comes to mind when I think about the logic of Western Christianity…

---

This was the tradition that raised me, the logic that ordained me, and the religious identity many assume I still carry. Like that one woman who came for me on Threads after I stated that the Black Church needs to talk more openly (and honestly) about sex and sensuality (in general):

“So, REVEREND, are you advocating pre-marital sex,” she asked. I knew she was trying me because she kept reiterating “reverend” while attempting to corner me from different angles on the question, what the bible says about it, and whether or not I believed it was a sin.

The tension I felt between blocking her and responding was telling. On one hand, I felt a certain obligation to her. What if underneath the trolling was a true curiosity about something she was struggling with? What if she grew up with the same beliefs about her flesh that I did, feeling bound within a body that wants to live, and love? Clearly there is still a part of me that cares enough to want to see people set free, so I obliged, initially. But once her motive became clear, crickets…still didn’t block her though. On the other hand, however, there was definitely a version of “don’t come on my page with that bullshit” that bubbled up within me. But even this sentiment was based more deeply in the genuine concern of, “Why the hell are we even still asking these questions?” And not just because I’ve been married for 15+ years, and so, “fucking for free” as I used to playfully say. But seriously, it wasn’t “free” because we got all these kids now. But more deeply, because my theology has taken me so far past the felt silliness of this question that I hadn’t thought about it in what feels like forever. There are bigger questions to ask, like “how do we protect children from pedophiles who claim to be Christian?”

This interaction showed me a lot, but it clarified one thing for me: I still feel called to “preach” the good news, just not a “gospel” that is designed to depress and foreclose our fullness. And I accept the call, albeit tweaked. No matter how much I’ve distanced myself from the Church, people are still checking to see what I’m saying about Jesus. And no matter how much I’ve tried to stop talking about him – for fear of being pigeonholed as “another one of them” – he keeps coming up. What I didn’t expect, though, was how differently he would look this time.

These days Jesus looks less like a cosmic cheat code that we can never really mimic, and more like a man who modeled what perfecting the craft of being “human” looks like; less like a God who “came down from on high” and more like someone who figured out how to bring Divinity up from below, out from within his own being; less like a ruler of empire riding triumphantly on a white horse and more like a rabbi whose religious tradition was merely a starting point toward the real religion of Love.

After a lifetime of spiritual seeking, and over 15 years of formal study, Jesus looks more to me like a map – “I am the Way,” as in a way of being-in-relation, akin to a new neural pathway back to the Consciousness from which we all come, and to which we all remain connected. Not just those who pray that particular prayer. And not just in the flesh (as a concept), but with every dimension of our sensuality. We are connected. Jesus gave his life trying to wake people up to this fact.

My life feels full circle right now and I can’t tell you how excited I am to finally wax eloquent about concepts I’ve been cooking up for years, and didn’t even know it. Concepts like imago DNA, and how our sensuality is the substrate of spiritual life; or spiritual muscle, and how the only way to exorcise all this shame I carried was to exercise courage in its place; or the idea that we are divine organisms, “Very God of Very God,” just like Jesus. We just have to re-member.

But here’s the real plot twist…

I couldn’t see any of this until I looked outside the logic of Western Christianity and became okay with it. Embracing post-Christianity is what allowed Jesus to come back to me in all his fullness, but without the bullshit. The truth is, I’ve known I was no longer a Christian since my Ph.D. program. That’s when my hunch was confirmed that most Black Christians were practicing forms of Hoodoo in the name of Jesus, despite the ways colonial Christianity demonized everything about our ancestral roots. Everything from the rhythms we embodied in the Black Church to the rituals we practiced while playing spades, it was all based in a belief that we participate with Spirit, not passively but efficaciously. Like conjurers committed to life abundantly, but critically aware that we are conduits.

But I didn’t know what to call my newfound faith – this faith that honors the Ancestors and my Christian roots. For a while I just silently went by “Pan-African spiritualist” when I reflected on what I would call my religious identity if someone asked. Thankfully, nobody ever did. They just assumed, which gave me time to continue listening, honing, and eventually settling on “post-Christian,” which both acknowledges my Christian formation and the fact that I’ve moved past it. Because both things can be true.

And as my homie Dr. T likes to say, “post-Christian doesn’t mean post-conviction.” In fact, I’m more convinced by Jesus’s teachings now than when I was a Christian. Because neither was he. “Christian” didn’t happen until empire got a hold of it. And as we can see, empire continues to give it a bad name. So, I no longer need the name. Or its cultural comforts. I prefer to follow the Way of being that he taught, even if it gets me crucified too. Because I believe his way to be true.

Taking this step has been difficult but it is one of the best things I’ve done as both a theologian and a seeker of truth. Embracing “post-Christian” as a placeholder has helped me reconnect with the divinity in my own body, in nature, and in all other iterations of life, from quantum mechanics to cosmic mathematics. After all, why wouldn’t the Creator of everything exist in everything they created?

So, here it is that I am about to “preach” my first post-Christian “sermon,” and I couldn’t be more ready.

Signed,

A happy heretic

P.S. And for the woman who just couldn’t let it go, I believe the Creator cares more about the relational ethics of the act than the mere fact of its happening. Uni can hold nuance even if your tradition can’t.