PUT RELIGION IN ITS PLACE
This is another bedrock of spiritual practice, for me. I had a conversation with one of my rootwork students about how my Christian faith and indigenous identity interact. What I am about to unpack I do not believe to be the providence of a Christian or Abrahamic person of faith exclusively. I think it is a challenge with any religion. The challenge I see is most religions make claims about the Truth. They see the world a certain kind of way and there is almost always an expectation that followers of it adopt that worldview and approach to life, often without question. This works for some people, the majority of people in fact. Most seem content with just having a rulebook put in their lap and follows its dictates.
Lucky for me, my mom raised me to question things and be critical of organized religion. She was a religious Baptist herself, but she saw through the hypocrisy of many of the local pastors where I grew up. Always men. Many of whom had numerous children with numerous women in the community. Who were also using their churches as meeting grounds for women IN the church—and all of them were already married. She herself was routinely hit on my some of those same so-called holy men! None of that sat well with her, and she taught me that just because someone has the title “Reverend” or “Pastor So and So” does not mean we check our common sense at the church doors.
This hermeneutic of suspicion I was raised with continued well into my seminary training for ministry. I did independent studies on the things I knew seemed to cause the most damage to people in churches and in my family, namely Hell and the Book of Revelation. I quickly discovered that Hell was not real, but a very creative depiction of religious fantasy (i.e., Dante’s Inferno, Paradise Lost, etc.). I learned that Revelation was not a text obsessed with End Times, but an instruction booklet for how Christians are to resist the idolatrous impulses of empire and its declarations of being the sole judge of life and death.
I also studied certain miscarriages of history in depth, such as American Slavery, European Colonialism and the Jim Crow era. In many of these times, religion was used to pacify the enslaved and disenfranchised. I soon saw that the people extolling the virtues of turning the other cheek tended to be the oppressors. I would ask those I oppressed to turn the other cheek too if I knew they were coming for me!
You can be religious and an occult practitioner. I am one example of that. But you will inevitably run into the dishonesty and disingenuousness often in most of the world’s religions. You will see a general distaste for Nature, because Nature is brutally honest. As one example, in Nature there are predators and there are prey. Things get killed and eaten. You can be both, but frankly, the indigenous practices tend to call out the dishonest places within religious ones. Like the fact that many Christians, including Black Christians, will call Hoodoo evil and satanic, but then turn around and pray in tongues and use anointing oils. The mental gymnastics are done by saying that praying to God to do these things makes it good, while every other way is evil.
Nah. Miss me with that. If we choose to walk with both, we will find that they inform each other, and that the folk practices call out the arrogance and imperialism in the other. I cannot identify how this happens in every religion, but using my reflections here should help you on your way to a more authentic practice.
