Stigma-Breaking

To me the word that best describes my experience in church today was a hyphenated phrase: "stigma-breaking." I have a lot of negative attitudes towards church that I've been developing for a long time and tend to impact my perception of anything church related in any context. I've always had this sort of contrarian attitude designed to align myself opposite anything I consider a modicum for traditional whitewashed America. I see this as a set of conditions that all connect to institutions of oppression and harm, so anything I associate with this idea I oppose. That's basically how I view white church, a tool of the oppressor since its conception centuries ago. There's a lot of pious and discriminatory church culture in America, embedding itself into so much of life.

Black church is something different. While I respect its unique ability to rally, unite, and organize people I simultaneously see it as a sort of twisted irony. Christianity was used to break down the cultural bonds and identity of people captured from Africa to serve in forced labor, so the fact that it became important to the lives of some people descended from those oppressed is sort of crazy and ironic. It's almost a positive irony or some sort of karmic force that a tool used by white oppressors was used centuries later by descendants of those oppressed to throw off chains, but on the same token I find that from my removed perspective of an agnostic white person the whole situation and relationship between blackness and the church is hard to fathom. It's not my place to speak for black people in any way because I can't speak from a perspective I don't have, but I do think about this relationship a lot and what it implies.

The church service at Ebenezer Baptist church was a lot more positive than I expected given all my predisposed attitudes above. The church was much more inclusive, much more energizing, and much more relevant than I expected. I appreciated that the main message of the church was about including and helping others, not being pious, judgmental, and discriminatory. The music was fun, the people were amazingly kind and grounded, and even though I don't necessarily agree with the whole higher power idea in that structure of Jesus and God I had a positive experience with the sentiment of serving others. The service really shed a more personal and positive light on church than my removed analytical perspective tends to include, and it also gave me some insight into what it was like mobilizing a movement through religion like MLK Jr. and the SCLC did as the service included a protest song and picket signs. It was overall very enjoyable and enlightening.

Brooks Rubin, Baltimore City College