Abstract
In the USA, the expression ‘bully pulpit’ has traditionally referred to the opportunity given to someone in the public eye using their position to express their views or advance a cause. In this slim but powerful volume Teresa Smallwood co-opts the term to describe the rhetorical violence that is often fired from the pulpits of Black churches in the USA towards LGBTQIA people. This is a deeply human book. As a queer Black woman, Smallwood is herself a victim of the bully pulpit. She has conducted an ethnographic study which foregrounds the stories of Black LGBTQIA people (Christian and Muslim) who have been the objects of disgraceful, humiliating rhetoric from their religious leaders. The devastating impact of Christian hate speech is clear. What is truly remarkable is that somehow, against this unconscionable rhetorical background, many Black LGBTQIA people not only survive but find that Christ is formed in them.
Argued in an accessible but academically credible manner, Smallwood’s contention is that those Black preachers who bully LGBTQIA people are often engaging in ‘white face mimesis’, using some of the same tropes as were used against Black people for far too long. This, she argues, is a hangover from the days of slavery when Christian holiness was carefully identified with whiteness by the masters in an act of what Karen Fields has identified as ‘racecraft’. She compares subjecting LGBTQIA people to deliverance ministry to a public lynching. Smallwood notes that some Black churches in the USA distanced themselves from the Black Lives Matter movement because it was affirming of LGBTQIA people. Smallwood’s plea is for Black preachers to become conscious of how much whiteness is an ‘orientation’, a background to the theology they preach. Black public theology, she argues, has been effective at judging the world, but less willing to subject itself to the same kind of critical analysis.
One of the most striking of Smallwood’s contentions is that in public theology some lives are ungrievable. She demonstrates that this is literally the case in some preaching, the preacher not caring if LGBTQIA live or die and rather hoping that they die out. But it is also true that if the Church does not notice if a certain group of people are not present or does notice but does not care, it is declaring their lives as ungrievable and therefore worthless.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all engage in public theology because we all ‘live our faith out loud’. Preachers have a particular calling to articulate and apply Christian theology in specific contexts. This book challenges all those of us who preach to do so with a heightened self-critical consciousness of our rhetoric and who it might hurt, even ‘torture’. It also encourages those who, against all the odds, have found Christ formed in them to claim some space in the sphere of public theology and to live their faith out loud.
Smallwood demonstrates that, in a world in which equality, diversity and inclusion are now largely accepted as common public values, religious communities can still be places of bully pulpits, terrible prejudice and rhetorical violence, which should shame those who claim the name Christian.