In the beginning…

I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan to a lower middle class working family. I think that is where the story is. In some kind of way, I think if perhaps the economics surrounding my arrival into this world were different, if money wasn’t as tight, or if desperation wasn’t so familiar a scent at the beginning of my life, things would have been different.

Perhaps, then, we wouldn’t have been swept up into the fundamentalist movement. Perhaps God wouldn’t have been the task master, the all seeing eye, the angry, vengeful dictator that lorded over us.

I know there is a connection there as I think fundamentalism is about economics. I think, like military recruiters, it preys on desperation and disenfranchisement. Strike that. I know that’s who it preys on as they are more receptive to it’s influence.

They’re receptive to a religion that promises to fix their problems.

That was the case for us.

Detroit at the time, and still is if the stories I hear coming from home are true, is a place of desperation now that the world has, in the words of Stephen King, moved on.

Known as the Motor City, known as Motown, Detroit has it’s own reputation for being a rough place. And yet I feel a fondness for it even now. Those streets, those houses, the schools, the zip code of 48209 raised me. I am and always will be a Detroiter. There are fond memories there even amidst the trauma. Neighbors I knew and loved who have passed on from this world. Times when things were good, even great.

But with the sweet often comes, especially in a place like that, the sourness. Detroit was a place of shifting extremes. It had become a ghost of it’s former self.

In the summer months chaos reigned with gang fights, drive by shootings, auto thefts, fire bombings, and so forth. Yet, in the winter months, when temperatures dipped well below freezing, the desperate beasts that roamed the landscape in the summer months and early fall, hibernated.

We were all beasts of varying degree making our way in a savage world a day at a time. A circumstance at a time. There’s a kind of barbaric pride in that, in having survived it, in having been able to cope in those circumstances. A pride.

“Yes, I am from Detroit,” is a badge of honor. That name carries weight. It means you’re a bad bitch.

Yet when people talk about these cities, especially in conservative circles, it’s often code for Black. Especially when they talk about our sister city, Chicago when it comes to issues of gun violence. And yes, there were a high concentration of African Americans in our city as there were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Irish, Italian, and Arab American.

And the one thing we shared in common, the one thing that made us all equal?

You guessed it.

Poverty, or near poverty.

And poverty creates desperation and desperate people do desperate things to survive.

Poverty is it’s own culture, it’s own way of life. It has it’s own language. Speech. Ways of being.

Yet for every Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia used by people to talk about ‘those folks’ I can lead you to a rural spot outside of these places filled with white people who speak the same language and live the same lifestyle.

As a matter of fact, if the statistic still holds they way it did when I was a kid, 20 percent of all drugs were inside the inner city. Guess where the other 80 percent existed?

That’s the irony. That’s the joke.

Yet one of the things that helped me escape fundamentalism, or at least started putting the first and finest of cracks in the theology for me, was the exposure to people of color and different cultures and ethnicities.

See, the God of our theology was white.

The rainbow of culture, art, music, dance, language, was all there in that city by the river. It was alive, and in it’s own kind of way, thriving like a dandelion that managed to bust through the concrete specifically engineered to keep it down.

I started peeling away from Fundamentalist Christianity when I was a kid. It was the 1990’s. I was living in Detroit. The racism displayed in the churches I attended, in the doctrine, and in the behavior, was inconsistent with what I was witnessing outside the church walls.

What I mean to say is, If African Americans were so bad, how come they were richer than us poor white working-class folk?

Why did they have titles in my school such as Doctor Hines and Doctor Granderson?

How come they drove nicer cars, wore nicer clothes, were better people? How come the secular schools I attended were safer than the neighborhoods I grew up in — if “God wasn’t allowed there”?

How come black people, especially black women, loved on me a great deal more than my white church did?

How come Whitney Houston could sing like that? En Vogue? Anita Baker? Tina Turner? Aretha?

How can something THAT beautiful come from someone lesser?

What about Black People’s faith which was evident even in secular institutions? It was present on little shelves in my counselors office. It was unspoken, but they evangelized with their presence and the way they comported themselves.

I know a lot of this may sound silly, but when you’re indoctrinated with a certain mindset as a child when racism is in the faith, one has to peel layers back and ask the simplest of questions.

I remember asking a pastor of ours at the time, a man of mixed heritage of Hispanic and Maltese, “What do you tell people who believe that mixed marriages are a sin?”

“It depends on the crowd,” he responded.

How is the truth any less true or more true depending on the crowd?

It was because of his mixed heritage that I asked the question.

I was thirteen at the time. His words stuck with me.

Yes, economics played an important role in my life — in all our lives.

Fundamentalism is also very much economic for the leader(s) as men desire power above all else. Racism, sexism, homophobia, etc are the distractions used by a figure (figures) to attain wealth.

White Supremacy was used in the past by the Southern Aristocracy to convince poor whites to fight and die for their right to own slaves.

We were fighting hyper capitalism not southern genteelism, or grandmas banana pudding, (my God these people can cook.)

Not much has changed since 1860. But what makes it stick so damn bad, is that this lie is not perpetuated by politicians alone. The seeds were already planted and they were planted by the transmission of the faith by pastors.

It came from the pulpit.

So while the followers and the victims wallow in self inflicted misery — the perpetrators count their cash (Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Bob Jones Sr. Southern Baptist Convention, )

Furthermore, it won’t be eradicated by simply shaming racism, White Supremacy, or the fundamentalists who perpetuate it, out of society. Nor will it be eradicated by engaging the politicians and making demands for change in the structure of how the government operates.

While changes in laws are necessary for obvious reasons (Civil Rights Acts, Abortion, and Gay Marriage) All that does is create a greater rift between a reasonable populace and those held sway in the grip of this fundamentalism. Fearmongering has to be challenged and addressed at its source. Whether you like it or not, agnostic, atheist, secularist, Christian etc. religion informs the society in which it exists and is, in turn, informed by the society.

Therefore we cannot be afraid, especially those of us who carry on the religious traditions, to confront other sects of denominations that perpetuate this god awful theology and call them out on it.

White Supremacy, like it had in the past, is also being used now for economic reasons and it is still coming out of the pulpit.

Yes, Detroit raised me.

While chaos reigned outside, it reigned inside as well and for a child whose soul had been saved at seven years old through confession and acceptance of Jesus into my heart, with the promise of Heaven, I was living in Hell.

Originally published at http://deconstructingthedread.wordpress.com on March 23, 2021.