Body and Blood
Ten days after a white supremacist carried a gun into a black Charleston church, I was in Los Angeles, listening to a black minister preach about the end of the world. A coincidence of timing, maybe, although the message seemed apt. What could be more apocalyptically evil than a racist massacre within the hallowed walls of a church, an angry young man sitting through a Bible study before slaughtering the nine strangers who had invited him in to pray? Yet on that Sunday, when the pastor talked about the end, he did not mention Charleston or the seven black churches that had been burned throughout the South in the immediate aftermath. Instead, he spoke about fornication. “M-hm,” a woman behind me chimed in, “and gay marriage.” The ladies beside her murmured their assent. Just the day before, the Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage, a decision that seemed to disturb the congregation more than anything that had happened in Charleston. I didn’t understand it. How could marriage equality be a sign of the impending apocalypse, but not a church shooting? How could the evils of fornication be a more pressing topic than the wave of racial violence affecting the very congregation sitting in the pews?
The Christian church has a problem with bodies, which is ironic, as sociologist Michael Eric Dyson notes in his 1982 essay, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply.” “After all, the Christian faith is grounded in the Incarnation, the belief that God took on flesh to redeem human beings,” he writes. “That belief is constantly being trumped by Christianity’s quarrels with the body. Its needs. Its desires. Its sheer materiality.” Within the black church, this quarrel with the body becomes even more complicated. What does it mean to be at war with your own flesh within a culture that already hates the black body? And what does this mean for black women, whose bodies are doubly despised?
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I spent my childhood split between two churches. Though my parents were, and still are, married, my sisters and I went to catechism and mass at my mother’s mostly white Catholic church. We spent Christmas and Easter services at my father’s mostly black Protestant church. At my mother’s church, I learned about transubstantiation, the belief
