Coming Out of the Spiritual Closet?

While catching up with a college friend this weekend, she told me about a new guy she’d met. Everything was going fine – that was until after dinner when he told her about his atheist beliefs.

Let’s just say that changed the course of the evening. She was in shock. “I’ve never met a black atheist,” she said. “I could never be with someone who didn’t believe in God.”

“I could be with someone of a different faith,” I replied, but I couldn’t see myself with an atheist either.

We could think of friends or family members we knew who have issues with the Black church. People who just don’t go to church regularly. But no atheists or agnostics.

I wondered: Are there just not that many, or are they just not outspoken about their beliefs because it’s not acceptable in many parts of the black community?

Many of my close male friends are gay, and I always take issue with how homophobic the black community can be. So, I felt some type of way about the fact that I’d never thought about this part of the black community before.

I did some Googling and found this interesting article written by Sikivu Hutchinson at afro-netizen.com.

Here’s an excerpt of Hutchinson’s article:

In some Black communities it’s akin to donning a white sheet and a Confederate Flag.  In others it’s ostensibly tolerated yet whispered about, branded culturally incorrect and bad form if not outright sacrilege. For Black atheists like myself, proclaiming one’s non-belief amidst genial wishes to “have a blessed day” is never easy in the seemingly innocuous context of casual chit chat between Black folk. 

No matter one’s actual deeds, life path or personal mores, to be unquestioningly religious in some quarters is to be inoculated from criticism.  Noting this historical irony in his blog, The Black Atheist, Wrath James White states, “In these (black) communities you find more tolerance towards gangbangers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, who pray to God for forgiveness than for honest productive citizens who deny the existence of God.” 

 Many black secular community-based organizations still look to the Black church as a coalition partner and resource.  Disturbingly, the church is often uncritically perceived as the “backbone” of the Black community.  However, as the debate over California’s Proposition 8 demonstrated, the notion that there is a monolithic “marching in lockstep” Black community is terminally outdated. 

On issues of gender and sexual orientation, the overwhelming opposition of many prominent Black churches to granting civil rights to partnered African American gays and lesbians is morally indefensible. 

On the national level the contradictions between American secularism and religion have produced a schizoid tension in the U.S., whereby religious fundamentalism and intolerance for secular thought have become the norm.  When it’s practiced in the non-Western world Americans routinely brand this kind of propaganda as backward and extremist.  Yet, in this, the most swaggeringly “liberal humanist” of all nations, “coming out” as an atheist in a culture that parades religious dogma as a substitute for true morality may be one of the final ideological frontiers for African Americans.   

The discussion with my friend, and Hutchinson’s article made me do some thinking.

The worst thing I could probably do in my family’s eyes would be declaring I didn’t believe in God. I could come back to my hometown a married lesbian with five kids, a drug addict, an Alan Keyes-style conservative, or a double murderer in hiding and all of those would probably be more acceptable. But I couldn’t even imagine the response if I came home agnostic or atheist. Hmm.

What do you think? Do you know any black atheists or agnostics? Do you think coming out as an agnostic would be more or less difficult than coming out as homosexual in the black community?