Black in a white church in Australia
This is perhaps the saddest thing to happen in my young life. I will tell the story from the start and hopefully make you understand why I have decided to give up on the ritual of church going. I grew up in a very spiritual home and I have baby photos of me in a church with my mother and father. Before my parents had the idea of me, I had been already joined to a church family and it had been decided that every Sunday for the rest of my life was to be spent in a church. Because my family is African church was not only on Sunday it was everyday with the exception of Tuesday. Monday was family group prayers, Tuesday was ladies prayers, Wednesday was bible study, Thursday was dedicated to ladies afternoon prayer, Friday was all night prayer which would sip into Saturday morning and Sunday was show time! Wash, rinse, repeat.
I would like to say that as a child I hated all of this, no I didn't the reality is I actually enjoyed it.I got to see my best friends everyday , when I started dating I was guaranteed to see and spend holy and sanctified time with whoever my boyfriend was at that time regularly without my strict Christian parents knowing. It worked out very well for teenage me I must say. Growing up I saw everything through the lens of being a Christian and not a black woman. This is the part of the story I would like to stress out to you dear reader. I am still a Christian and I believe in Jesus and what he represents however I don't and cannot be a part of a church anymore.
It is such a cliche but my world changed when Donald Trump was elected ,the “Trump effect” and hate sipped its way through to Perth, Western Australia. Racism was always there but before 2016 people had the decency to hide it. All of a sudden nationalist parties gained momentum with one Clive Palmer running a “Make Australia great ”campaign , Australia is pretty bloody great I don’t know how we can possibly make it any greater.We have one the worlds highest life expectancy, our health system is amazing and the unemployment rate has been under 6% for the last decade!. Clive Palmer having found inspiration from Donald Trump, ran a campaign on immigrants and how we were the reason why Australia could never be great.Xenophobia was on the rise.
I should let you know because of my upbringing in the church I am quite narrow minded, my belief was black or white being a Christian was the thing that could tie us together in harmony, even the bible says so in Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. The bible A lot of my white “brothers and sisters” advocated heavily for Donald Trump, this was not the problem.
We all have the right to support whoever we want and advocate for them accordingly, that is the whole point of democracy. Through numerous conversations I explained to my white brothers and sisters how the “Donald Trump effect” was putting black people at the risk of racial and xenophobic attacks to deaf ears. Towards the end of Donald Trumps campaign my black and opinionated husband and I had been labeled “anti-Christ” and had lost a few friends on Facebook and Instagram. What made it worse was that this was not only being said by only white people but by other black people who I believe suffer from a special bread of identity crises.
To me the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump seized to be about them but about being a black woman and a Christian woman, which one was I first?. I tearfully debated with Trump supporters who were in my “Christian followers” who stated that Trump was “God’s chosen one”. If God’s chosen one puts me at risk of being attacked for the color of my skin then maybe your God is different from mine. All of sudden, my days at church became few and far between. Right now I identify myself as a stay-at-home Christian, much to my parents disappointment. A church is a place of acceptance to bring our truest selves, I simply refuse to leave my blackness at the door. In the words of an unknown philosopher and graphic designer on Pintrest “you are either with me or against me”
