Shame, Shame Go Away

On May 19-21 the Metropolitan Community Church, or MCC, held its seventh annual People of African Descent Conference at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, DC. Dr. Traci West, a Drew University ethics and Africana studies professor, christened the proceedings with a rousing speech about social stigmas. 

Dr. West has a background in illuminating perceived social injustices. She previously authored Holy Conversations: Talking About Homosexuality. The PAD Conference was the perfect platform for the academic to push against normative behaviors through a session called “Creating No-Shame Zones, Truly Claiming God’s Love.”

Central to West’s argument was the notion of sexuality as equal and unprivileged among other identities. On its face, the assertion seems pluralistic. However her ensuing comments betrayed this notion as they emphasized sexuality above other aspects of life, and made those desires and choices definitive of the self. “I have this queer, weird sense of myself,” West divulged. She later spoke of her “heterosexually partnered bisexual self.”

When Christians deny their sexual identity, they “commit a form of self-hatred,” West posited. But if they affirm “your black lesbian … other-gender-loving self,” they “are blessed.”

The ordained United Methodist elder offered no scriptural support for exalting sexual desires and choices in this manner. She rooted her analysis instead in an assumed parallel between sexual identity and racial identity. West recalled the history of racial marginalization of black slaves, primarily through missionaries and slave owners. To her mind slave-owners reinforced messages of inferiority and missionaries assisted in the systematic process. Consequently, black people were taught that “each black soul needed to become white.”

In accepting Christ, a slave would also accept new customs and practices. To slave traffickers this meant that their cargo must accept their role as being good only for “picking a crop.” To European missionaries, this meant that one must adopt qualities of civilized society and discard all African traditions. As a result, West saw conversion to Christianity presented as both a spiritual and cultural abdication.

“Who Jesus Christ is … has to be freed of … the logic of dominance,” West implored. This shameful legacy of generational degradation and abuse of Scripture led her to believe that we need to rebrand Jesus. The current persona, tarnished by centuries of lies, no longer reflects the true sense of God made flesh. We “need to get rid of the God of my parents and grandparents and need to find a god of my own,” she concluded.

West saw the imposition of shame about one’s identity as so widespread that there really aren’t any significant “no-shame zones” in our world. Still she hoped for a global ethos that would create such zones. For example, West argued that it was necessary to end the shame associated with women’s menstrual cycles, “black single mothers,” and people lacking “stable employment.”

“If you are going to love yourself to liberation, it’s going to transform your ability to think,” Dr. West urged.

Indeed racism was insidious in the way in which it imposed false shame upon those who were enslaved.

But not all shame is false. There is also the shame that properly “falls on us … because we have sinned against you [God]” (Daniel 9:8). Such well-warranted shame caused the prophet Daniel, and many after him, to turn to God in repentance. Without that shame, the process of their spiritual restoration could have been cut short.

A focus on feelings of shame can divert one from the deeper issues of sin and salvation. It leads us to fashion “a god of my own” rather than receive the God revealed in Scripture. It sets upon believers the impossible task of “loving ourselves to liberation” instead of relying on the power of the Holy Spirit. It seems Dr. West, though well-intentioned, avert such considerations in trying to recast Christianity as a “no-shame zone.”