get free or die tryin'.

strugglingtobeheard:

Black adoption of Christian dogma brought African Americans into conformity with European American sexist/heterosexist models of gender hierarchy.  As historian Paula Giddings notes, the Black Church played a key role in enforcing black patriarchy because it “attempted to do this in much the same way that Whites had used religion, by putting a new emphasis on the biblical ‘sanction for male ascendancy.’”  This “new emphasis” meant that black men could be rightful patriarchs despite the yoke of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid.  Contrary to the popular belief that black men were “emasculated” under slavery because they did not have unfettered access to and “control” over the bodies and destinies of black women and children, women were still socialized to fulfill gender hierarchical responsibilities like cooking, cleaning and taking care of children.* Black women remained regarded as the primary caregivers of the family, the protectors of home, hearth and the wellbeing of their male partners and children.  Black women were the repositories of moral and social values, entrusted with transmitting them to children.

So because women are responsible for transmitting moral values to children and families, breaking from deeply ingrained Christian ideology, culture and community ties is problematic.  In African American communities where devoutness is the “default position,” the presumption of female religiosity, reinforced by cultural representation, is a binding influence that makes public skepticism for women taboo.

For observant women, questioning, much less rejecting, religion would be just as counterintuitive as rejecting their connection to their lived experiences.  In this regard religious observance is as much a performance and reproduction of gender identity as it is an exercise of personal “morality.”  Many of the rituals of black churchgoing forge this sense of gendered identity as community.  From the often elaborate pageantry of dressing for church, to participation in church leadership bodies, to the process of instilling children with “proper” “Christian” values in church-affiliated day care centers and schools—the gendered social contract of organized religion is compulsorily drilled into many black women.

Perhaps no modern black woman writer and skeptic captured this more vividly than Nella Larsen.  In her 1928 novel Quicksand, Larsen chronicles the claustrophobia of domesticity, religiosity and female self-sacrifice in the African American community.  After a long personal journey from skepticism to religious acquiescence, Larsen’s mixed race protagonist Helga, a pastor’s wife, eventually rejects the existence of God.  Helga’s internal conflict over the dominance of religious belief in the black community reaches a fever pitch after a long painful convalescence from childbirth.  Throughout the novel, Helga frequently disdains blacks’ passive acceptance of “the White man’s God.”  For Helga, “[r]eligion after all, had its uses.   It blunted the perceptions.  Robbed life of its crudest truths.  Especially it had uses for the poor—for the blacks.”  Helga’s observations have particular relevance for the lives of black women, whose servility and self-sacrifice she both admires and abhors.  In one exchange with Sary, a mother of six, she wonders how women are able to bear the burdens of all their family and domestic responsibilities.  Sary believes that one must simply trust in the “savior” to be delivered in the afterlife.  This recurring theme of suffering, female self-sacrifice and deferment repels Helga, ultimately leading her to conclude that there is no God.