Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch

Biblical Era

A 1626 painting by Rembrandt paints the scene as depicted in the Bible, Acts 8:34-39 KJV.

On the road from Gaza to Jerusalem, Peter, a disciple of Jesus, was led by an angel to a location on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza where he encountered a eunuch in a chariot who was the Treasurer of Ethiopia and who was reading the prophet Esaias while traveling with Candace, the Queen of Ethiopia. Peter interpreted the scripture as referring to Jesus and the eunuch joyfully requested that Peter baptize him.

711

The Moors entered and occupied Spain. By 750 Christian kingdoms began to reclaim the northernmost areas of Islamic Al Andalus. 

The African Lords of Medina

990

Anti-blackness long existed in Muslim society. Yet under the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, the African "eunuchs of the Prophet" emerged as a powerful and wealthy organization, guardians, and mediators of the baraka (a divine energy as substance and gift of Allah that permeates the universe and impacts the lives of believers). The eunuchs comprised the charismatic force infusing the Prophet's tomb and surrounding sanctuary with mystery.

Eunuchs who may have been enslaved could drastically improve their status. Some could transition from serving as guardians of the private world of the elite householder. They could do this by guarding and serving the women who were living in the sultan's sacred space in Cairo or they could become the ritual keepers of the Prophet's tomb in Medina.  

Under Islam, eunuchs formed sacred societies precisely because they occupied that third space of being neither male nor female. The 10th century's caliph in Baghdad boasted 7000 black eunuchs and 4000 white ones.

Similar societies appeared at the tombs of sultans in Cairo, at the Ka'ba in Mecca, at the Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem, and at the grave of Abraham in Hebron. Sacred eunuch societies have endured in Medina and Mecca as active organizations well into modern times.  

Ibn Battuta left Cairo for Mecca, where he observed in 1326 and described the eunuchs guarding there:

"The servitors of this noble mosque and its custodians are eunuchs from among the Ethiopians. They have a handsome appearance, a clean, meticulous look, and their clothes are elegant."

In 1990 seventeen African eunuchs were still serving in the sanctuary of Madina and fourteen in Mecca.

Ahmad al-Ghazali turned to spirituality and away from politics.

1091

Ahmad Ghazali, the medieval Persian scholar and Sufi teacher, understands the demand for and belief in inequality to be a spiritual problem:

"Every time a rich man believes that he is better than a poor one, or a white man believes that he is better than a black one, he is being arrogant. He is adopting the same hierarchical principles adopted by Satan in his ignorance."

Zheng, the Chinese Muslim Eunuch

1371

Born in Southwest China and known in early life as Ma Sanbao and Ma He, Zheng belonged to a Muslim ethnic minority. After the recently toppled Yuan dynasty, the Mongols controlled the area where his family lived.

Battles shaping the transition from the Yuan to the Ming Dynasty were brutal and bloody. In one battle when Zheng was still a boy, he saw his father murdered. Zheng survived the attack but was captured, and it was a common practice to castrate a captive youth.

Zheng, the Muslim eunuch, grew to almost seven feet tall. As a Muslim wielding power in a Buddhist society, he sailed seven voyages in treasure ships between 1405 and 1431. He journeyed to many countries in Asia and East Africa. He set up trade routes - 70 years before Columbus - that are still in use today.

Zheng had modern thoughts about interfaith equality. He stored stone tablets in a Sri Lankan temple. His trilingual carvings make offerings to Buddha in Chinese, to Hindu deities in Tamil, and to Allah in Persian. In those stone carvings, Yamashita sees Zheng conveying a legacy of tolerance—a message, he says, of “equal gifts for all; all gods exactly the same.

Thousands of eunuchs guarded the Forbidden City (1406-1420), but eunuchs had a much earlier history in ancient China.

1406

In ancient China (until the Sui Dynasty), one of the Five Punishments (physical punishments meted out by the Chinese penal system) included castration. Some castrations may have been voluntary since a eunuch could get a job in the Imperial service.

Since the Han Dynasty, eunuchs ran the day-to-day affairs of the Imperial court. As their duties put them in close contact with the emperor, eunuchs could exert considerable influence on the emperor. This made it possible for some eunuchs to amass immense wealth and political power. Being a eunuch also provided a chance to develop a craft or art. For instance, paper, one of the Four Great Inventions, is said to have been invented during the Eastern Han dynasty by a eunuch named Cai Lun.

Oddly reminiscent of the hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan

1478

The Spanish Inquisition began. The origin and policies of the Inquisition are discussed elsewhere in this project. Note here what this website says about that historical institution.

The picture depicts a re-enactment of an Inquisition ritual parade. A recent study reveals that implementing such harsh practices to organize society based on religious-racism would damage it for centuries.

In looking at the whole of Spain today, researchers found that in the "municipalities where the Spanish Inquisition persecuted more citizens, incomes are lower, trust is lower, and education is markedly lower than in comparable other towns and cities."

Bernal Castillo

1521

Bernal Castillo chronicled the colonizing exploits of Hernán Cortés in a book called,  A True History of the Conquest of New Spain. While conducting his expedition through Anahuac (today’s Texas and Mexico), Cortés notes having observed more than 400 indigenous sacred sites or ‘Mezquita’ (Spanish for mosque). During his conquest of Meso-America, he admired the ceremonial attire of native women dancers. Using idioms inherited from Moorish Spain, Castillo/Cortés describe the indigenous sacred dancers as ‘muy bien vestidas a su manera y que parecían moriscas,’ or ‘very well-dressed in their way, and seemed like Moorish women.’

The privileged life that eunuchs of the Mughal Empire enjoyed.

1526

Lima's Auto De Fe

1570

The first tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition to be held in the Americas conducted an auto-de-fe in Lima, Peru. The custom of running a public act of faith ritual came from the Spanish Inquisition and was practiced much the same way in the New Spain.

This ritual, as conducted by Inquisitors, often relied on tortures, hangings, burnings at the stake, and other public degradation and humiliation of those regarded as apostates or heretics.

Armed Resistance of the Moriscos Against their Forced Explusion

Embarkation of Moriscos in Valencia by Pere Oromig

1609

The Moriscos - converted or Christianized Muslims - were expelled from Spain for economic, political, and religious reasons. All Morisco communities had to leave their villages in Spain. Thousands of Moriscos were killed in clashes prior to the deportation, and hundreds of others were murdered near the ports where their children were abducted.

They mostly fled to Northern Africa, where the Sa'di Kingdom of Morocco and the Ottoman provinces of Algiers and Tunis received many Moriscos. The Moriscos' contributions to the economic and military development of their North African destinations' were remarkable.

According to this source, a sense of guilt about the expulsion of the Moriscos might have stymied the Spanish Old Christians because, as the writer reports, they did not circulate knowledge about the event:

"The expulsion, taken without the permission of Rome, was objected to by a few who preferred that a proper evangelization should have continued. However, shortly after the expulsion, a great silence about the exiled people seemed to prevail in Spain. Even the Spanish theatre, which was the barometer of current issues in Spain, avoided the subject of the expulsion of the Moriscos as if a kind of self-censorship had imposed itself. In fact, for a long time. Historiographers were not interested in the destinations or the integration methods of the exiled Moriscos. Up to the second half of the 20th century, the fate of the expelled Moors has been a sort of enigma."

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Author and Producer of the 1619 Project

1619 

In the words of Hannah Nicole Jones, author of the book and film called 1619:

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the brutal and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.

The 1619 Project speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste that still define so much of American life today. It reveals the hidden truths around our nation's founding and construction—and how the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation but continues to shape contemporary American life.

1632

According to a recent study:

"The Jesuit institution of the statutes of purity of blood was not well-received by members of the assistancy of Spain. Leading Jesuits such as Diego de Guzmán (c.1522–1606), Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526–1611), García Girón de Alarcón (1534–97), Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), and Ignacio de las Casas (1550–1608) opposed discrimination for reasons of blood—the latter in the case of descendants of Muslims."

In league with this view, Father Fernando de Valdés (1584–1642) wrote Memorial para quitar o limitar Estatutos de limpieza. He sought to revoke or at least liberalize the blood purity statutes in Spain.

This Jesuit priest urged colleagues to rethink the relationship between Old and New Christians. As a member of the Jesus Society that generally opposed the blood purity statutes, he tried to humanize the conversos and demonstrate the wisdom of regarding them as citizens valuable to Spain. He promoted marriage between Christians and Muslims, and at the same time, he diligently executed his office as an inquisitor.

Taking Maryland from the Indians

1632

The Massachusetts Bay Colony began to address the question of 'no taxation without representation.' When Lord Baltimore founded the Maryland Colony in 1634, its settlers had the right to religious freedom only.

Fleeing Slavery With The Hope Of Freedom

1691

Excerpts from an Act for "Suppressing Outlying Slaves." Laws of Virgina:

WHEREAS many times negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves unlawfully absent themselves from their masters and mistresses service, and lie hid and lurk in obscure places killing hoggs and committing other injuries to the inhabitants of this dominion, for remedy whereof for the future, Be it enacted...

...in case any negroes, mulattoes or other slaves or slaves lying out as aforesaid shall resist, runaway, or refuse to deliver and surrender him or themselves to any person or persons that shall be by lawfull authority employed to apprehend and take such negroes, mulattoes or other slaves that in such cases it shall and may be lawfull for such person and persons to kill and distroy such negroes, mulattoes, and other slave or slaves by gunn or any otherwaise whatsoever.

The Bible & The Gun Were Used to Malign and Destroy Traditional Religious Practices and Authority

Pacification was a similar process in all of the colonies.

1701

The Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray founded the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). It was the first organization created to improve the negroes. The Society conducted the foreign mission work of the Anglican Church in the American Colonies and other English possessions overseas. SPG sent priests and schoolteachers to America where they ministered to the colonists and spread the gospel's message to the enslaved Africans and Native Americans.

From the colonizer's point of view, SPG is a laudable organization, but not from the viewpoint of the colonized. SPG's leading role in facilitating Britain's pacification policy was an understated aspect of colonization. Missionizing had less to do with reading the Bible and believing in Christianity. It had everything to do with the Caribs and other colonized people surrendering control of their society and land to the colonizers.

An image labeled Maroons would lose its historical specificity because it generally could be used to depict pacification, such as the pacification of Papua New Guinea or the pacification of Hawaii. The pacification programs were so well facilitated by missionary activities that when Cecil Rhodes seized the cattle and land of the Shona people in Northern Rhodesia, the outcome very much pleased the London Missionary Society, as Basil Davidson reports in the video.

Pacification ended the authority of the colonized. Conquered societies were ruled by colonizing power and constantly monitored. They became subject to the control of the colonizer's military or police. Police officers would be recruited from among the colonized people. The strategy was to use members of the colonized people to subject them to colonial rule.

Christ Church, Oxford University, England

John Wesley

1730

John Wesley created a popular protestant religious environment in America that questioned slavery. Initially, he went to Georgia as a missionary with the SPG (Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts). When his efforts to mission to Native Americans and enslaved Africans proved ineffective, he returned to Christ Church in Oxford, England.

Wesley's Oxford friend, evangelist George Whitefield who would initiate the First Great Awakening, was excluded from churches in Bristol upon his return from America like Wesley was. Yet, he saw that city booming with new industrial and commercial development. So Whitefield urged Wesley to see the social unrest, riots, and religious troubles as indicators that Bristol was ripe for field ministry.

Wesley was fifteen years older and more conventional, so he hesitated to enact Whitefield's method. Unhappy about field preaching because he believed in Anglican liturgy, Wesley would have regarded saving souls through field ministry as "almost a sin" earlier in his life. The tipping point occurred with Wesley's sudden conversion on May 24, 1738, after he joined the Moravians in London.

Overcoming his scruples, Whitefield preached to miners in the open air in the nearby village of Kingswood in February 1739. Wesley also gave a sermon at Whitefield's invitation in the open air near Bristol in April 1739. Later, he preached in Whitefield's Tabernacle, and about his experience, Wesley wrote,

"I could scarce reconcile myself to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he [Whitefield] set me an example on Sunday, having been all my life till very lately so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church."

Late in 1739, Wesley broke with the Moravians in London, and those converted by his preaching (and that of his brother and Whitefield), became members of their bands. Wesley believed that the Moravians (who earlier inspired him) had fallen into heresy by supporting quietism (meditation), so he formed followers into a separate society.

According to Wesley, the Church of England failed to call sinners to repentance; many Anglican clergy were corrupt, and he believed people were perishing in their sins. With firm conviction, he thought God chose him to ignite a church revival. No opposition, persecution, or obstacles could prevail against the urgency and authority of Wesley's divine assignment.

As he and a few cooperating clergy could not do all the work alone, Wesley approved local preachers as early as 1739. He evaluated and supported men that the Anglican Church had not ordained to preach and do pastoral work. Wesley and colleagues were redefining and expanding who could be lay preachers, including those that the church authorities would not allow. This democratization of the clergy was central to the eruption and growth of Methodism.

Wesley quickly ran into trouble. From 1739 onward, Anglican clergy and religious magistrates persecuted Wesley and his Methodists. Though Wesley was an ordained Anglican priest, many leaders of his Methodist ministry had not received Anglican ordination. Because Wesley flouted regulations of the Church of England concerning parish boundaries and who could be authorized through ordination to preach, Anglican churchmen saw his approach to saving souls as a threat that disregarded institutions. Clergy attacked the Methodists in sermons and in print; occasionally, mobs attacked them.

Wesley and his followers were harvesting the field, and kept working among the neglected and needy. Meanwhile, they were denounced by the Anglicans for strange doctrines, religious disturbances, blind fanaticism, leading people astray, claiming miraculous gifts, attacking the clergy of the Church of England, and trying to re-establish Catholicism.

Wesley first traveled to Ireland in 1747 and continued his field ministry there through 1789. Preaching the gospel to formerly colonized Ireland, Wesley began to win some converts. He likely appealed to those who wished to be less Irish and more white like the British.

Theodore Allen demonstrates how whiteness was created in Ireland as a privileged social status imposed on Irish tribespeople during the colonial period (1536-1691). Occupying their land and consuming their labor, the British practiced pacification of the Irish like they later would colonize and pacify the Africans and Indians (in America and India).

Catholicism played a considerable role in oppressing the Irish and forcing them as pagans to convert, and it was the main religion in Ireland. Wesley won over the Irish who wanted to distance themselves from the cultural significance of the Catholic Church. He worked to convert Irish people to Methodism. 

Wesley recognized that the open-air services reached commoners, men and women, agnostics, and atheists who would not enter most conventional churches. He seized opportunities to preach wherever an assembly could be brought together. Wesley preached to inspire repentance, prayed for conversion, dealt with hysterical behavior, and preached to thousands through field preaching. Overall, the numbers grew to over 15,000 by 1795.

"Thus," he wrote, "without any previous plan, began the Methodist Society in England." He soon formed similar societies in Bristol and Kingswood, because Wesley and his friends made converts wherever they went. By the time Wesley returned to America, he had created Methodism in Bristol.

Wesley continued spreading Methodism this way for fifty years—entering churches when invited and taking his stand in the fields, halls, cottages, and chapels when the churches would not receive him. Wesley believed that "in this life, Christians could achieve a state where the love of God 'reigned supreme in their hearts,'" giving them inward holiness.

Additionally, Wesley was the polar opposite of his Oxford friend, Whitehouse, on enslaving others. In contrast to Whitehouse, who upheld slavery, Wesley was a reformer against slavery. He even wrote a pamphlet that mentioned the existence of advanced African civilizations and condemned slavery.

George Whitefield Was the Most Popular Preacher of the First Great Awakening

The 1739 rebellion ignited because the colonists had been working on a Negro Act, 1740 that would put new limits on enslaved Africans. It would be illegal for them to assemble independently, grow their food, learn to read or work for money. Owners would be free to kill the rebellious enslaved people. 

Whitefield taught his followers to fear the peril of their souls.

Impact of the Stono Rebellion on the Lives of Enslaved People

1739

George Whitefield's preaching tour of the colonies that ended in 1741 inaugurated the First Great Awakening. He was one of a few former members of conservative churches called the Old Lights. Those churches included Protestant groups like the Anglicans' Church of England; Congregationalists, the heirs of Puritanism in America; and Quakers.

The New Lights, who began as members of the Old Lights, broke away with evangelical zeal. They were the first to express great passion when preaching; some used the fear of fire and brimstone to frighten members into compliance with scriptural readings from the pulpit.

These New Lights, like Whitefield, emerged from the Old Lights congregations with a new message. It rejected predestination and a close reading of the bible given by religious authorities. It encouraged personal interpretations of the bible. They left what they saw as the sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of vigorous emotional religiosity.

The evangelical New Lights formed new protestant denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—who emphasized the adult baptism of converted Christians rather than infant baptism. As one of the New Lights leaders, Whitefield arrived in America in 1739 where he was to change the scope and character of the evangelical revivals. Before Whitefield, the revivals were mainly local and within denominational boundaries. But Whitefield's preaching fashioned and connected mass meetings called revivals into an inter-colonial movement.

Whitefield literally cried in the pulpit for the souls of men during his sermons. He taught a God-centered Gospel in which the thing was not the pursuit of happiness but the sinner's legal standing before God. He preached all are sinners who do not have a proper legal place before God.

Sinners are lawbreakers who deserve God's wrath and curse. Whitefield urged people to realize it was impossible to earn salvation through good works. He taught them to repent their sins and place their faith in Christ alone for salvation. Despite the popularity of the First Great Awakening, the Old Lights religious leaders condemned the New Lights as leading congregants and America into chaos.

Whitefield was Christian, pro-slavery, and he was an enslaver, but he envisioned less brutal enslavement. As recorded in Wikipedia:

"1740, during his second visit to America, Whitefield published "an open letter to the planters of South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland," chastising them for their cruelty to their slaves. He wrote, "I think God has a Quarrel with you for your Abuse of and Cruelty to the poor Negroes." Furthermore, Whitefield wrote: "Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables, but your slaves, who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege."

He did not invoke the wrath of God on the brutal enslavers, but Whitefield did push Georgia to accept enslaved people. He contended that the colony would fail without the farm labor of the enslaved Africans. Having pioneered the establishment of the first orphanage in Georgia, called Bethesda or House of Mercy, Whitefield claimed that with enslaved people, he could keep more orphans to whom he would preach to save their souls.

Whitefield did condemn the enslavers for failing to provide more systematic religious instruction to the enslaved. Journeying through the southern colonies, he found that only a few negros had been Christianized, and most of them only superficially. He warned the enslavers of "impending judgment" unless they created for the enslaved "a program of Christian nurture."

It was not so much their souls he cared for more than the profits from slave labor he enjoyed from his plantation in South Carolina. He was probably persuading Christianization as a program of pacification since there were twice as many blacks as whites in Georgia, and he spoke within a year of the enslaved Africans' Stono Rebellion.

The struggle between England and Spain resulted in a proclamation offering freedom to English slaves who ran away to join the Spanish in St. Augustine. Even when Whitefield was traveling with friends, he wrote that they did their best to avoid "nests of negroes" whom he observed dancing around a fire. As Stephen Stein found in Whitefield's "Letter to the Negroes," his objective was social control. "He preached to the blacks and prayed with them but avoided them at night and refused to nurture their hopes for freedom in this world."

1758

Was the first recorded black congregation organized a black institution, or was it a white one with blacks merely in attendance? The author, Sid Smith, explains how and why the question arose and what the research reveals. As he writes:

I am convinced that, based on evidence, there was a predominantly Black congregation as early as 1758 on the plantation of William Byrd III on the Bluestone River in Mecklenburg County, Va. This church struggled, many members scattered, but the congregation revived in 1772, according to associational records, or 1774, according to church records. That church can trace its unbroken history to the First Baptist Church, Petersburg, Va., a Black congregation today that claims the title: “The Oldest Black Church in America.”

The Manilamen of St. Malo

1763

The first Filipinos in America arrived as sailors and indentured servants who escaped laboring on Spain's Manila Galleons in the 1700s. They hid in the marshlands where the enslaved Africans or maroons had fled and one maroon leader was likely a Muslim by the name of Juan San Maló. The Filipinos, who began to make their living as shrimp fishermen, were the Asian pioneers who by 1763 settled Saint Malo, Louisiana, a town named after that maroon leader. The Filipino settlement was a fishing village established on Lake Borgne in Louisiana in the 18th century the town flourished until a hurricane destroyed it in 1915.

Expulsion of the Jesuits from Mexico (Sonora and Arizona)

1767

The Jesuits were expelled from Spain and from New Spain (Sonora and Arizona) as they were from most Catholic nations and colonies and even from other Christian nations that were not Catholic. They were the intellectuals of the Church who valued philosophy and theology and used such ideas in their defense of Catholicism against the rise of Protestantism. Politically, they were more loyal to the Pope than to nations, and they were culturally liberal, even progressive, so they were thought to be far too friendly with the Jews and indigenous people.

1767

Black Hawk was born in Saukenuk Village on the Rock River in northern Illinois. He is the Indian who later would figure prominently in one significant kind of African American religious experience. He is most famous for fighting the white military for four months in 1832. He led masses of troops to reclaim the homelands his British adversaries had stolen from his people. He finally was captured and domesticated, but continued to denounce the white way for most of his life. A government interpreter recorded his story in 1834, but he mainly was known in the news and by word of mouth. This is how he became a central figure in African American spirituality in the early 20th century.

Jarena Lee (1783–1855)
Preacher of the Second Great Awakening

1790

Jarena Lee is known for her powerful preaching and missionary work. She traveled mostly to African communities to deliver her sermons. For instance, she traveled 2,325 miles and delivered 178 sermons in 1827.

Jarena had spiritual awareness but had never found a religious community that was right for her. At about 20 years old, Jarena moved to Philadelphia to work as a domestic servant. In her spare time, she went to the many churches in the city. One day she attended a service at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church and heard Bishop Richard Allen speak. As a formerly enslaved person, he founded the Church when the white parish he previously attended began segregating its services. There was no segregation at Mother Bethel’s because all parishioners were Black. The services resonated with Jarena’s feelings and experiences. She asked to be baptized into the Church.

It was around 1807 that Jarena felt God had called her to the ministry, but women were not allowed to speak in most Christian churches based on a scriptural prohibition.

Jarena became part of a broad spiritual movement called the Second Great Awakening that lasted from the 1790s to the 1840s. A religious fervor crossed the land and peaked in the 1820s when Jarena began her missionary work. It was not just a religious movement but also a social revolution. The central idea was that anyone saved could be a spiritual leader. Women organized and flocked to huge religious gatherings called camp meetings and converted in huge numbers. About 100 women became preachers who traveled the country like Jarena, seeking converts. Many used their platform to popularize reform movements like temperance, abolition, and women’s rights. For example, Jarena joined the American Anti-slavery Society in 1839.

Jarena Lee and the other female preachers of the Second Great Awakening were trailblazers. At the start of her life, Jarena was not allowed to speak out at church services because people believed it went against the Bible's teachings. By her death in 1855, religious women like Sojourner Truth were meeting with U.S. presidents to demand the abolition of slavery.

Methodist History: The Christmas Conference of 1784

1784

The first General Conference (the Christmas Conference) of the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church forbade its members to enslave people

Richard Allen

1786

Africans comprised about 10 percent of the Methodist church in the United States. Although the settlers and Africans often worshiped together, the Africans enjoyed no freedom or equality. Segregated seating is a typical example. In churches, the area reserved for the Africans was usually called the "Negro Pew" or the "African Corner." Absalom Jones and Richard Allen led segregated Africans out of Philadelphia's St. George Church in 1787 after they were forced to give their seats to white congregants. (Some scholars argue this occurred in 1792).

1795

Whiteness of the Orange Order.

Although Catholic Spaniards colonized America a hundred years before the inception of British slavery in 1619, the Spaniard's inquisitional culture was hegemonic until the British colonized Ireland. This unleased Irish immigration to the America. Before 1715 there was less than one percent in Boston. There arose in Ireland a movement of white elites who described themselves in religious terms. British colonizers regarded the Irish as an inferior race, and oppressed Irish refugees would flood into America in three waves, two in the mid 1700s and in the mid-1800s they were a third of all immigrants. Hence, British Anglicans (protestants) opposed Irish Catholics who they racialized as being less white.

So there arose in Ireland, as Theodore Allen reports, a growing minority movement to emancipate Irish Catholics from racial oppression. British forces suppressed colonized racial inferiors in Ireland the same way that the Ku Klux Klan order combined elite and working-class whites against colonized non-whites in America. 

Irish Catholics demanded independence from colonial powers. Laboring class Anglicans who feared "their racial privileges – such as their preferential tenant status and the right to keep and bear arms" - were threatened by the demand for full Irish integration into colonial Ireland. A clash between the protestant and Catholic tenants of Armargh County motivated a reactionary backlash among protestants.

In the Irish county of Armagh, the Orange Order coalesced in 1795 during an armed Anglican and Catholic conflict. The Irish rebelled at the Battle of Arklow in 1798 the same year that working-class Anglicans established the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. They aimed to defend, sustain and promote privileges they invested in the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland.

Protestant Ascendancy dominated Ireland between the 17^th and 20^th centuries. That fraternity comprised a few British Anglican clergy, professionals, and landowners. A few Irish colonial overseers were recruited to join them. But white British power prevailed over the colonized non-white Irish. Their victory over the colonized was enshrined and formalized through various anti-black penal laws after 1691 that discriminated against the supposedly racially inferior Irish Catholics.

It bears notice that the earlier Irish immigrants did not identify as white. Before arriving in America, most of these immigrants were regarded as the Black Irish. It is impossible to pinpoint this term's origin, but widespread speculations exist. One about Norman and Viking invaders settling in Ireland leaves it unclear how blackness figures. Another legend that refers to blackness claims that Irish indentured servants and enslaved Africans began mixing in the Caribbean around 1632. Another source of Irish blackness entered public discourse when Moorish survivors married into Irish society after the British sank the Spanish Armada during that 16^th Century battle.

The British Americans despised Catholics when John Wesley split away from Anglicanism. Until President John F. Kennedy took office, his ethnic group were despised and excluded Irish Catholics in America. They suffered discrimination from protestant American workers and elites who saw themselves as Christian white producers and benefactors of Boston Brahman elites and other elements of elite American society.

1797

Contrary to popular opinion, America was never a Christian nation. Some of its founders were Christian, and others were not. Religious ideas about the country would seep into government discourse and policy gradually.

King Ferdinand VII and his fourth wife, Maria Cristina

1808

The first attempt (by Joseph I) to abolish the Spanish Inquisition failed. A second attempt was made to repeal it in 1813, but that effort also did not work. Conversos were still being prosecuted by the Inquisition until 1818. Then, in 1826 Spain, the Inquisitors executed a school teacher as the last person to be charged with heresy, but not until after the 1833 death of Ferdinand VII, who had reinstalled the Inquisition, did his wife, Maria Cristina, finally become a regent who brought liberal forces out of exile and joined with them to abolish the Spanish Inquisition in 1834. The Mexican and Peruvian inquisitions ended in 1820.

A Camp Meeting Held During the Second Great Awakening

1820

The Second Great Awakening was a Christian movement that began in 1790 and peaked in 1820. Events called camp meetings drew 25,000 people at a time. This period of revival gave birth to new religious movements and reform movements, including the Abolitionist Movement that would lead to the Civil War. As one historian observed:

"Some questioned why only college-educated elites from wealthy families could lead a congregation, as was often the case particularly in New England. Others (particularly women) questioned why they were excluded from participating in activities, rituals, or decisions. Still others wondered why they needed a clergyman at all, especially when they were perfectly capable of reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves (literacy rates were as high as 90% in Northern states by the 1840s)."

The white Christians acting during this historical period aimed to create heaven on earth. Readying America for the return of Jesus they thought that establishing his kingdom on earth required democratizing religion but mainly for whites. More people began to believe that everyone's life was equally valuable. So this movement that was based on ideas of spiritual equality began to imagine social equality and flew in the face of the hierarchical categories. It no longer mattered if you were a man, woman, white, black, free, or enslaved; you had inherent worthiness to a personal relationship with God, and this included a chance of salvation as Christians viewed these terms.

At the same time, the temperance movement aimed to purify the people so that a better spiritual life unhampered by alcohol consumption would be possible.

In two experimental religious movements (Shakers and Oneida) that emerged, different approaches to sex were involved. Shakers died out because they believed in celibacy. Oneidas believed in complex marriage, which meant there was no expectation that husbands and wives be sexually exclusive. This development, perhaps, was a precursor to the Free Love theme that emerged in the 1960s in reaction to the strict protestant values that had contained sexual expression. 

Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the famous abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was one of the greatest preachers of the Second Awakening. They relinquished their belief in slavery, which they now saw as a perversion of God's Word, as they came to recognize that all humans have souls and are candidates for salvation. With its emphasis on equality, the 2nd Great Awakening increased church attendance among members and nonmembers. Americans, particularly women, and African-Americans, often returned to the Christian faith. In fact, the initial meetings were nearly all women.

Here are some Second Great Awakening beliefs, still popular in the 21st century, as espoused by Charles G. Finney, known as the Father of Old Revivalism:

• No government is lawful or innocent that does not recognize the moral law as the only universal law, and God as the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge, to whom nations in their national capacity and individuals are amenable.
  
• The individual who truly repents not only sees sin as detestable, vile, and worthy of abhorrence, but he really abhors it and hates it in his heart. A person may see sin to be hurtful and abominable, while yet his heart loves it, and desires it, and clings to it. But when he truly repents, he most heartily abhors and renounces it.
• Revival is a renewed conviction of sin and repentance, followed by an intense desire to live in obedience to God. It is giving up one's will to God in deep humility.

The one religious movement born during this period that did not die out was Mormonism, with its emphasis on building large family units through polygamy. Also, Joseph Smith claimed not only to have received golden plates inscribing a new scriptural text but he also advocated that all people's lineages were valuable to God, so valuable that salvation required that each believer's family tree be traced. But when Brigham Young took control of the Mormons in 1844, Africans were banned from the preisthood and sacred temple ordinances for 126 years. Mormons finally allowed African to attain preisthood in 1978. 

Finally, the second Great Awakening was a platform for encouraging Christians to participate in the westward expansion at the expense of indigenous Americans. As the project of land grabbing and indian killing became more typical, the camp meetings became less democratically organized, centering more around a single white male who justified these actions.

Paschal Beverly Randolph

1825

Pascal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) was mixed raced and often identified as a Spaniard of Moorish ancestry. His working life began as a sailor who travelled the world and continued to travel after he became a well-known commentator and guide for those seeking spirituality. Inspired by remarkable women and men he met during his journeys Randolph learned the Eleusinian sex mysteries from the Dilettanti Society in England.

As a Spiritualist in America, Randolph was not content just to believe what they believed. He wanted not to be just a medium and set out to become a spiritual initiate. Working with the public he later would apply his esoteric knowledge by performing his brand of spiritualism as a medium. He offered instruction in his theory of sacred eroticism and he was a practicing sexologist.

For instance, Randolph was the first American to use physiological sexual terms - penis, sperm, womb, vagina, and clitoris - in public discourse. Prudish white Christian associates engaged in Spiritualism considered Randolph’s talks and practices to be lewd and brash. They associated his willingness to engage in and discuss such questionable terms and practices with what they viewed as his hyper-sexed male blackness.

Randolph could not escape anti-blackness. The racialized views that the Christian whites had of him stung Randolph. Still, he felt led to contemplate how humans could seek and attain salvation by taking a wiser path outside of Church, that is, by breaking with the trappings of religion.

Randolph spoke about immersing oneself in the deeper knowledge of the ancient mystery traditions, preserved in secret societies of the far east, middle east and west. Randolph therefore became a well-known figure among the Spiritualists with whom he debated and with the Rosicrucian societies with whom he associated and became their American leader. He wrote and published numerous treatises and books as he strove to propagate a cosmological theory of the origin of man derived from his learnings as an initiate in eastern spiritual traditions.

Randolph’s theories specified the triune nature of man as body, soul, and spirit. He taught that the immortal spirit derives from the eternal divine source and seeks to know itself through the mortality of finite embodiment. Formed as biological life, the human spirit learns to master the body and mind while it thereby builds a soul. He taught that the human’s spiritual quest is to build a soul that recalls and hankers after its divinity and wills itself to merge, once again, with its spirit on its return to the divine source.

Consequently, Randolph argued that disembodied souls of the dead, as well as certain never embodied spirits (neters or elementals), can communicate with the living. He refuted reincarnation except in rare instances where a biological deformity or mental illness impeded one’s the full functioning of one's embodiment and undermined their spiritual quest.

Randolph beseeched humans, especially men, to practice emotional and semen control, in order to harness the sexual energy. Through abstinence, as well as intentional coitus, he believed it possible for women and men to transform sexual energy into a higher register of spiritual energy that would improve relationships and facilitate their return to the divine.

Randolph did not cavalierly commit to his predominantly white Boston community and ignore his roots in the African American community. Much to the contrary, he helped to raise Black soldiers for the Union Army and educated Freedmen during the Civil War. He was one of America's first Black novelists.

In his debates with Spiritualists, Randolph pushed spiritualism to evolve beyond a medium’s passive reception of messages from the dead into occultism - a person’s active search for inner vision and spiritual transformation.

To promote his English-sourced Rosicrucian ideas in America, Randolph established the Brotherhood of Eulis in 1870.  He regarded hashish as an entheogen, employed the 'magic mirror' method of communing with spirits, and his 'sex magic' allowed him to grow in influence.

Randolph's ideas were to influence and shape the early works of his contemporary, Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. It seems they, too, were appropriated by the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and also by a Rosicrucian group that Reuben Swinburne Clymer organized in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. Aleister Crowley took things in an altogether different direction, if not a distorted or perverted one, when he adopted and differently applied ritual practices as the head of Ordo Templi Orientis.

Ozaawindib's Father Who Asked Her to Wear Male Attire

1832

Ozaawindib, an agokwe, was declared chief. This story appears in The Activist History Review. This incredible person was both a celebrated warrior, viewed as a cisgender man, and lived her personal life as a married woman. The author of the essay reports on how Ojibwe authors are describing Ozaawindib in their writings:

"In the 2016 collection of LGBTQ Native science fiction and fantasy writing, Niigaan Sinclair tells part of Ozaawindib’s story as a way to show the complexities of Two-Spirit experiences. A year later, transgender Ojibwe writer Gwen Benaway published an essay which challenged scholars to recognize the kinship between Ozaawindib and the transgender Native women of today. It is her call that I take up in referring to Ozaawindib as a trans woman..."

Ozaawindib, the Ojibwe Trans Woman the US Declared a Chief – The Activist History Review

Amanda Berry Smith, a prominent Holiness preacher was the first black woman to do missionary work overseas

1837

Born enslaved, Amanda Berry Smith was the oldest of thirteen. Her father purchased his wife and kids from their enslaver and moved them all to Pennsylvania. As a young woman, Smith began working and attending a Methodist Church. Influenced by the Second Great Awakening, she started participating in those Christian camp meetings.

By age thirty-two, Smith lost two husbands and four of five children. Attending camp meetings and revivals helped Smith work through grief and avoid depression. At the Holiness camp meetings, where the congregants believed in equal voices, she met Phoebe Palmer, a white Methodist Holiness preacher who led the Wesleyan-Holiness movement.

In 1867, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness was organized, and Smith began preaching the doctrine of entire sanctification at camp meetings. After an experience of the Holy Spirit at church in 1868, Smith declared she had attained entire sanctification. This baptism of the Holy Spirit happens instantaneously as the believer approaches the congregation as a living sacrifice to God having an attitude of total consecration, and faith.

Smith preached 'entire sanctification' as articulated in the founding documents of the Holiness Movement. For instance, the 1885 Declaration of Principles explained:

"Entire Sanctification... is that great work wrought after regeneration, by the Holy Ghost, upon the sole condition of faith...such faith being preceded by an act of solemn and complete consecration. This work has these distinct elements:

1. The entire extinction of the carnal mind, the total eradication of the birth principle of sin
2. The communication of perfect love to the soul...
3. The abiding indwelling of the Holy Ghost." 

Having thus been sanctified, Smith became well known for her beautiful voice and inspired teaching. Opportunities to evangelize in the South and West opened up for her.

In 1875, Smith became a Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) charter member and avid temperance preacher. She associated herself with the Colored Women's Clubs, a progressive organization that addressed issues of importance to African American women.

In 1878 Smith arranged for her daughter to study in England. The two traveled overseas and stayed in England two years. During their journey, the ship's captain invited Smith to conduct a religious service on board. She was so modest that she impressed other passengers who spread the word of her. She next traveled to and ministered in India, where she stayed for eighteen months. Smith next traveled to Liberia and West Africa. She spent eight years in Africa, working with churches and evangelizing. Smith further expanded her family by adopting two African boys.

As a strong proponent of the Temperance Movement in Africa and the United States, Smith was invited by noted temperance advocate Rev. Dr. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler to preach at his Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York. It was the largest church in its denomination where she spoke on her return to America. Methodist minister Phineas Bresee also invited Amanda Smith to lead worship services at Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church in May 1891. (The same church experienced a spontaneous revival, February 8, 2023–February 24, 2023. This recent revival came to be known as the Asbury Outpouring or the Asbury Awakening).

Smith fund-raised for the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned and Destitute Colored Children. It was the first black orphanage in Illinois for poor colored children. Located in Harvey, a suburb south of Chicago, the orphanage opened on June 28, 1899. It provided a home for children to become self-reliant. Funds were sent by the Ladies Negro's Friend Society in Birmingham, U.K.

1840 

Manifest Destiny was the white American's spiritual belief and religious assertion that it literally was God's will for the United States to spread from coast to coast. This idea caught fire and very popular propagandists spread it across the continent and even in Europe. They used this idea to encourage the white Christian Americans to occupy all of the land available "from sea to shining sea." This notion justified hating, displacing, and killing Indians who were thought to impede progress in achieving that objective.

For example, when the gold rush of 1848 was starting to ramp up, the California legislature passed a bill in 1850 called, Act for the Government and Protection of  Indians. It provided that,

"Any white person under this law could declare Indians who were simply strolling about, who were not gainfully employed, to be vagrants, and take that charge before a justice of the peace, and a justice of the peace would then have those Indians seized and sold at public auction. And the person who bought them would have their labor for four months without compensation."

The outcome of this act is described by thorough scholars as a California genocide. It granted permission to vigilante militia and rangers to wontonly kill Native Americans in an effort to eradicate them from areas where the whites were mining gold. The language used stated, "we must exterminate them" so we can mine the gold without them interfering with claims about burial grounds or about stealing their property, or maybe without them trying to steal our gold.

To secure these mining operations that were not under threat, the local, and indirectly, the federal government,

"...offered bounties for Indian heads, Indian scalps, or Indian ears. And so the Indian raiders could bring the evidence of their kill in, and receive direct local compensation. Furthermore, the state of California passed legislation authorizing more than a million dollars for the reimbursement of additional expenses that the Indian hunters may have incurred. And then that was passed on eventually to the federal Congress, where Congress passed legislation also authorizing additional federal funds for this purpose."

One outcome the whites desired was "the removal and displacement of Native Californian Indians from their traditional lands, separating at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages, and cultures from 1850 to 1865." Another desired outcome was population reduction not just in mining badlands, but also in prized white areas. For instance, "between 1850 to 1870, in which the legislation was in effect, the Native Californian population of Los Angeles decreased from 3,693 to 219 people." Parts of the act were repealed when in 1865 the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but the entire act was not totally repealed until 1937.

Witnessing in shock the large scale decimation of indigenous life, not just in California, but throughout the country, and especially in the west, Native Americans gradually developed a spiritual response.

Paviotso dreamers (Northern Paiute) in western Nevada prophecied the need for all Indians to adopt a strict moral code banning war against Indians and whites, allowing dance and song to facilitate visits to the spirit world, return of the dead, ousting of the whites, and restoration of native "lands, food supply, and way of life."

This spiritual movement is minimized in academe as a cult. It began in 1869, and spread to California and Oregon in 1871-1873. It could not just be a cult since many ghost dancers were healed and received new songs from the dead, an interaction that Christianity believes is impossible given its idea that the dead sleep in their graves until Jesus returns to resurrect them.

This first phase ended after the dreamer, Wodziwob, died in 1872. Then, during an 1889 solar eclipse, Wovoka, whose father had assisted Wodziwob, experienced himself dying, speaking to God, and being divinely assigned to teach a new dance and to deliver a new "millenial message." He was more popular than Wodziwob had been. But Christianized Wovoka's spirit communion seems less authentic than indigenous Wodziwob's sacred dreaming.

For instance, Wovoka dealt in affectations like inflicting himself with stigmata to ensure that people see him as a new messiah or even as Jesus Christ. Of course, Wovoka's methods resulted in failure of the ghost shirts he told warriors would protect them at Wounded Knee. That was one of the last battles in the Indian wars where U.S. troops killed hundreds of men, women, and children in South Dakota on December 29, 1890.     

1847

Wong Chin Foo was born in 1847 to a prosperous family that lost everything during the Taiping Rebellion. A white missionary couple converted, baptised, and housed Wong in 1861. He attended college in the states but never finished his degree, but visited other American cities before returning to China in 1870.

In China Wong married in 1871 and took a new name, Wong Yen Ping, while working and when he "was excommunicated from the Shanghai Baptist Church." He promoted the need for a civic improvement organization to enhance the spiritual development and moral uplift of the Chinese people. Due to his effort to overthrow what he saw as a corrupt Chinese government, Wong fled to America during a period of intensifying anti-Chinese sentiment, and leaving behind his wife and child. 

Wong was a writer and activist. After traveling more he settled in the United States in 1874 and began lecturing to promote Chinese cuisine and speak in defense of the Chinese community. He found ways to deal with whites who accused the Chinese people of debauchery, depravity and godlessness.

While struggling for equal rights on behalf of the Chinese people, Wong published an essay in 1887 entitled, 'Why Am I A Heathen.' In this essay, he explained why he returned to traditional Chinese beliefs and rejected Christianity.

That same year, Yan Phou Lee, a devout Christian and Chinese immigrant, countered with his publication of 'Why I AM Not A Heathen."

A Young George Washington Carver

1864

Born one year after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, George Washington Carver was a botanist and conservation environmentalist known for many agricultural inventions and the uplift of his race.

Carver testified before Congress regarding the use of the peanut in 1921. He collaborated as a scientist with the USDA and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 1935. In 1940 he set up a foundation at Tuskegee and funded with his life-savings of $60,000, a scholarship to train African Americans in botany, chemistry, and agronomy. He earned his B.A. in 1894; he became the first African American professor at Iowa State University in 1896. Booker T. Washington invited him to teach and do his research at the Tuskegee Institute in 1897, where he remained until he died in 1943. 

Carver's adoring biographer, Peter D. Bruchard, regarded Carver as a spiritual practitioner, not a religious teacher. Carver appeared to have unusual spiritual power. He explained it this way:

"All my life I have risen regularly at four o'clock and have gone into the woods and talked with God. There he gives me my orders for the day. After my morning's talk with God, I go into my laboratory and begin to carry out his wishes."

One day in the woods and near the end of his life, a flower prophesied to Carver as follows:

Could Carver's spiritual power be the baraka of the eunuchs? That has not been verified but it might explain his preference for a nature-based spirituality (and avoidance of church).

George Washington Carver Longing for Austin W. Curtis Jr.

An urban legend regards Carver as adoring or possibly as having had an intimate relationship with his lab assistant, Austin W. Curtis Jr., a scientist in his own right with a specialty in chemurgy - the industrial use of plants.

Curtis married twice (with a two-year mourning gap after the death of his first wife during their honeymoon) while assisting Carver with his scientific work. Curtis' marriages suggest that he may have been straight or bi-sexual, but do not preclude the possibility that he might have been on the down-low.

In this picture, an artist, 'B,' imagines Carver's romantic feelings for Curtis in a painting and cites four reliable sources. Yet, Carver often articulated that neither his science nor personal life bore the import of his spirituality. He communed with God daily, if not constantly, as he was known to say.

Carver's Letter to Harwick

The claim about Carver's presumed love of Curtis has garnered tangential 'evidence.' For example, Carver wrote unusually affectionate letters to Mr. Hardwick and a few more of his male students.

Peter D. Bruchard, Biographer, Is Inspired by Carver's Spirituality

Burchard notes that Carver's autopsy revealed a scar indicating castration. Bouchard could not place the time or circumstance. There was no evidence Carver was castrated as a child. Given the case of Zheng, it is falsely assumed he would not have grown tall and developed facial hair had he been castrated as a child. Yet, his voice was incredibly high. Bruchard attributes this to the scarring of his throat during childhood whooping cough.

It is known that some gender non-conforming people have engaged in self-castration, but this theory gets no attention in the Carver literature. If he removed his penis, he might have done it to express his sexuality or gender identity, or perhaps he might have seen it as an obstacle to his spirituality. Or, he might have done it to avoid any chance of being accused of raping a white woman. Since bleeding to death was a possible outcome of castration, Carver likely could have survived this surgery, given his intimate knowledge of plants useful in healing.

If he did it to control gender or homosexual impulses for spiritual reasons, he would not have been alone in making this mistake, as Swami Vivekananda notes:

"Many foolish aspirants amputate the organ of reproduction. They fail and repeat eventually. Lust is in the mind. ...A tree cannot be destroyed (completely) by cutting off its flowers and leaves. If the mind is subdued, the tree of lust is uprooted. What a great foolish act is committed by ignorant people not getting proper guidance."

Without further evidence, Carver is presumed and declared gay, but there is no proof he was gay and not asexual or trans. If he had been trans, he would have gone stealthily, for his position at Tuskegee would have required Carver to present as a cisgender man. Carver seemed to have been celibate, free of any sexual interaction except as noted in the remembrances of others at Tuskegee who say he was known for (therapeutically) massaging and roughhousing his male students.

Map of the Transcontinental Railroad, 1869

1864

A small number of Chinese prospectors were miners during the gold rush of 1848-1855, but the real significant number of Chinese workers in America rose when white workers did not sign up to build the Union Pacific, America's first transcontinental railroad.

Just 21 Chinese workers initially were imported in 1865, and a year later, Chinese men were being hired as immigrant labor in batches of 50. On the eastern half of the railroad line they worked with Irishmen and African Americans, as well as with a few Mormons and Native American workers.

By 1869 when the railroad was finished, 90% of workers on the the western half of the line were Chinese. Nearly 20,000 Chinese men were imported who were willing to perform the most difficult labor of completing the railroad on time. Hundreds died from worksite accidents. They were a diverse group hailing mainly from Guandong province in southern China, and came to America fleeing the Opium wars. Most were followers of Buddhism and Taoism, and a smaller number adhered to Confucianism.   

1866

An African transwoman was raped in the Memphis Race Riot. Frances Thompson testified before Congress that she and five other black women were raped by white men who killed many and destroyed much on that fateful day. Ten years later, when someone discovered Frances Thompson was a trans woman, they used that fact to repair the reputation of the white rapist and to discredit Frances Thompson's congressional testimony.

Joseph Pierce, a Chinese American, Fought for the Union Army During the Civil War

1867

Frederick Douglass, the African American abolitionist, spoke in defense of Chinese immigration. He made numerous points, but here are just two reflecting an ideal and moral position.

To white Americans, and some Latinos, who feared that American culture and democracy would be overwhelmed by Chinese immigrants trying to impose their 'Far East' ways upon the Americans, Douglass answered:

Though they come as the waves come, we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions. They will find here a deeply rooted, indigenous, growing civilization, augmented by an ever increasing stream of immigration” from around the world.

Recognizing the interests that the anti-Chinese whites felt they needed to protect, Douglass took the high ground when he gave a spiritual response: “this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency.”

Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, Pa. Class in Government

1877

The General Allotment Act, is also known as the Dawes Act, and also is known as "An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations. The National Archive defines the term severalty as treating Native Americans no longer as tribes with tribal rights but now as individuals only having personal property rights. 

The language makes the Act sound humanitarian in its objective to assimilate Native Americans, once again, it was an assault on their religion.

The Dawes Act grabbed the socialization of indigenous children away from their communities and parents and forced those children into boarding schools. The corporate mentality the indigenous people cherished was central to their spiritual belief that the tribe was the unit of life, not the person.

As noted earlier, their religion did not sanction individual ownership of land. And, by imposing individual land titles on them, the state could introduce not just ownership in communities where land previously had been held in common, but also competition would be arranged. Land owned in common also was easier to defend than individually titled land. Private ownership made it easy for the greedy, malicious, or misguided to sow division within the tribes. Some tribes that initially were exempt from the Act were later folded into it. 

Below, the National Archive recognizes the Act created many problems for Native Americans that previously did not exist:

"...The land allotted to individuals included desert or near-desert lands unsuitable for farming. In addition, the techniques of self-sufficient farming were much different from their tribal way of life. Many did not want to take up agriculture, and those who did want to farm could not afford the tools, animals, seed, and other supplies necessary to get started.

There were also problems with inheritance. Often young children inherited allotments that they could not farm because they had been sent away to boarding schools. Multiple heirs also caused a problem; when several people inherited an allotment, the size of the holdings became too small for effective farming. Tribes were also often underpaid for the land allotments, and when individuals did not accept the government requirements, their allotments were sold to non-Native individuals, causing American Indian communities to lose vast acreage of their tribal lands."

Chinese laborers working on the First Transcontinental Railroad, 1864-1865

1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese labor immigration for ten years. There was an exemption for teachers, students, travelers, merchants, and diplomats. Numbers of Chinese people entering the United States were drastically reduced. The Chinese population of the U.S. was nearly cut in half such that there were just 61,000 Chinese in 1920.

Gradually lifting restrictions on Chinese immigration by Acts in 1943 (when 105 Chinese immigrants were admitted yearly), 1952, and 1965 when nationality restrictions finally were abolished. Chinese in the U.S. had to carry papers to prove their right to be here. The loss of their menial labor hurt U.S. business.

Depiction of the Cakewalk at a 19th Century Drag Dance

Watch this BBC Report about Queen Swann

1882

Channing Joseph wrote an award-winning manuscript entitled, The House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens. It explores the life of Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who in 1882 was arrested for being a gender non-conforming community leader, resistor, and organizer of drag balls.

Queen Swann's house was not just a residence; it was a sacred space offering refuge for interracial, alternate sexual and gender identities based on a moral system the queen dictated beyond the dictates of Christianity.

Her drag ball was where people felt free to express their sexualities and gender identities, so it took on ritual proportions that would heal, mesmerize and fascinate. Hence, people gathered at Swann's place to be themselves and dance the cakewalk (the picture is Mr. Brown from a later period, not Swann, but it illustrates the cakewalk dance and style of dress in Swann's era). They danced in contests similar to the contemporary vogue dance depicted in the drag documentary Is Paris Burning? 

Mato Canli Win reports on the suppression and recovery of Native American spirituality

1883

Code of Indian Offenses, also known as the Religious Crimes Code. 

Despite hundreds of thousands killed by American policies by this time, Native Americans were by this time driven onto reservations. Their culture was most harmed during this period when their sacred practices were banned.

We know it was a pacification program because the American government created its own Courts of Indian Offenses and Indian police forces. The purpose was to secularize Native governance which previously had operated in line with sacred principles. For instance, Robert Clinton identifies some sacred practices as the potlatches, the shaman or medicine man treatment, polygamy, and bridewealth or the giving of gifts in exchange for a daughter given in marriage. He notes that the practice of federal officials refusing food to punish dissidents proved effective because the indigenous people had been pushed onto reservations and had to rely on the American government for food.

As noted earlier, Indian resistance to the unjust law and its enforcement led to the U. S. government's massacre of Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee in 1890. Sadly, the Indian Police established by the Act murdered Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull). He was a holy man participating in the Ghost Dance after he had quit working in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

The federal officials wanted to end the Ghost Dance because Indians saw it as a spiritual way to get rid of the white man. Below, a Native American journalist, Mato Canli Win, expresses the Lakota viewpoint in declaring 1870-1934 "the Dark Ages for American Indian Religious Freedom." She explains that Native American spirituality was intensely suppressed during this time.

The ban on native dance was lifted in 1933 but the general law would continue the legalized suppression of indigenous spirituality until 1978 when the Native American Religious Freedom Act was passed.

Mato Canli Win bemoans how indigenous people suffered "95 years of being denied our holy sacred ceremonies..." In her words, she writes about the intention of the government:

"According to the BIA: "Feasts are simply subterfuges to cover degrading acts and to disguise immoral purposes." In 1883, the Secretary of Interior reported that the heathen practices of American Indians had to be eliminated. He instructed the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to enforce and eliminate dances and feasts. He asked Congress for greater power to deal with the Indian spiritual leaders (often called “medicine men”). He asked that steps be taken to compel “ these imposters to abandon this deception and discontinue their practices."

She continues her report by observing that:

"In 1892, Congress strengthened the law against Indian religions. Under the new regulations, Indians who openly advocated Indian beliefs, those who performed religious dances, and those involved in religious ceremonies were to be imprisoned."

Adding salt to the wound, the amended law would undermine the sacred basis of masculinity in Native society by issuing a further declaration, as the journalist describes below:

"The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1902 told reservation agents: “You are therefore directed to induce your male Indians to cut their hair.” According to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs: “The wearing of short hair by the males will be a great step in advance and will certainly hasten their progress toward civilization.” Under the new guidelines, Indian men with long hair were to be denied rations. If they still refused to cut their hair, “short confinement in the guardhouse at hard labor with shorn locks, should furnish a cure.” In addition, Indian dances and feasts were to be prohibited."

The ban on indigenous spirituality would last until Indians and their allies brought pressure that compelled Congress to pass Public Law 95-341 August 11, 1978, 95th Congress Joint Resolution American Indian Religious Freedom.

Chinese laborers working on the 1st Transcontinental Railroad

1885

Several years following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was known as the time of "Driving Out," according to Wikipedia. Throughout the west, whites bodily pushed Chinese people out of their communities. Large scale violence occurred in Western states. Two of the worst sites included the Rock Springs massacre of 1885 and the Hells Canyon massacre of 1887.

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, located in Sweetwater Country, white miners resentful of Chinese employment began robbing, bullying, shooting, and stabbing the Chinese workers living in Chinatown. Unable to flee the attack, many Chinese people were burned alive in their homes. Some starved to death while hiding, and others were endangered by carnivorous animals in the mountains. Some fled on a passing train but the federal troops sent to protect them really did nothing. They arrested no one; and compensation was offered only for destroyed property after twenty-eight Chinese people died.

Thirty-four Chinese miners were massacred in 1887 near the mouth of Deep Creek, and along the Snake River in Hell's Canyon, Idaho. It is quite a rugged area with rocky cliffs and white rapids where people could easily get hurt, but no one believed these Chinese men died of natural causes. They were there working for the Sam Yup company, one of the six largest Chinese companies. It had just set up shop in the area in the previous year.

No one knows what really happened, but people surmise that seven Anglo-America horse thieves shot the Chinese miners and stole their gold worth $4,000-$6,000. It was never recovered and no one was arrested because law enforcement did not serve Chinese needs, so there never was a serious investigation.

1887

When Leafy Anderson was born, she lived in Louisiana with her first husband and moved to Chicago in 1914 when they broke up. She left Chicago in 1918 for New Orleans.

In 1920 Anderson bought a house and turned it into the Eternal Life Christian Spiritualist Church Number 12, signifying it was a new branch of the same church she had attended in Chicago. While living in Chicago, Anderson came into association with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, but in 1922, that alternative white religious organization expelled its Black members. This put Anderson in charge of an off-shoot Spiritualist church controlled by a woman of African descent. 

She stood out as a woman among Black male clergy. Instead of the typical sermon and choir, she created performances steeped in ritual theater. Unlike the Baptist and AME churches dominating Black life, Anderson hired jazz ensembles to perform in her services.

Anderson also was a cultural producer. This was well illustrated when a convention of the Eternal Life Spiritual Church brought in other congregations from states like Illinois, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. They all came to her church in New Orleans. At this large gathering, she had her say on the history of African Americans by performing her rendition of what Thanksgiving has been like from 1620 to the present in 1926.

Leafy Anderson's work was famous primarily because she channeled Black Hawk, depicted as a spirit of justice. A secondary value was its social justice mission. She trained and ordained other Black women to run Spiritualist Churches. In one well-known case, Mother Catherine Seals ran the Temple of the Innocent Blood church. 

1892

Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, a socialist, wrote the original Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, which contained no religious references. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag during the McCarthy era anti-communist hysteria.

This pacification policy set out to assimilate or whiten Indians by prohibiting their sexual and/or spiritual practices.

1892

Native religious ceremony and dance was no longer tolerated in America starting 1892, on the threat of imprisonment. 

Religious suppression is described in official records as a Christian distaste for religious difference (heathen or pagan), but just like in pre-colonial Spain, the officials use legitimating religious language to mask a mentacidal/religicidal political objective: to pull the spiritual rug from under the feet of their racial competitors and compel their conversion to Christianity.

The aim was to render subject populations incapable of reproducing the strengthening spiritual power of their culture that would enable them to rise again. The ban aimed not so much as to save souls but to spare American whites the trouble of dealing with resurgent resistance. It was inspired by indigenous sacred authority, as exemplified in the Ghost Dance or the Sun Dance. Such laws and BIA policy operated in this regard as a spiritual prophylactic.

Swami Vivekanada Offered Spiritual Power through a Twelve Year Practice of Continence

1893

Swami Vivekananda makes a visit to America with a message about self and world improvement. To deliver his message, he attended the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Afterwards, he met informally with small groups of middle class white Americans and presented the idea of pursuing spiritual practices from India as a path to personal development and self mastery.

Unable to avoid encountering racism during his trip, he nevertheless, introduced Vedanta and offered some instruction in the yoga disciplines. When he was not being reviled or dismissed by the adherents and proponents of racism, the white Americans influenced by him picked up on the physical culture of Hatha yoga that he introduced to them. Their practice with him became the first, real root of yoga in America, but those same white Americans side-stepped his most important offering which was bramacharya.

What is the cornerstone that the builders rejected: bramacharya, he argued, a concept that Vivekananda reduces to continence. As he goes on to explain,

"Celibacy is sometimes considered to be the practice of brahmacharya. However, celibacy is not the cause, but the effect. The practice, or cause, is of constant remembering of the highest reality, absolute truth, the divine, or the presence of God. This remembrance is the cause, and the celibacy is the effect. Since the effect might be so visible when watching a spiritual person, we can accidentally reverse cause and effect, and try to practice mere restraint of sensual urges. Once again, the practice of brahmacharya is walking in the awareness of the highest reality, absolute reality, remembering the divine, or practicing the presence of God."

To elaborate further, he adds:

"By remembering the highest energy or force of reality, that energy is then not dissipated. As it is not dissipated, it is as if it is growing, acquired, attained, or gained. Thus, we appear to gain virya, which is strength, vigor, vitality, and courage. Actually, virya is an aspect of our subtler nature, which has been there all along."

He made a few more trips to America to plant this seed, but the only one that sprouted and took root was Hatha yoga, or the idea of doing yoga to still the mind while improving the body. Bramacharya seemed too simple and too incredulous to buy and thus, it was lost on the increasingly secularized western mind. 

Wax Figure Commemorating A Chinese Revolutionary 

1899

The Boxer Rebellion, also the Boxer Uprising, the Boxer Insurrection, or the Yihetuan Movement, was an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising in China between 1899 and 1901, by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists and towards the end of the Qing dynasty. Western military and religion was expelled.

1900

On the occasion when hundreds of missionaries and their families were killed over a few weeks in China, one response is an editorial in the Chico Weekly Enterprise defending the right of people to practice their own religious traditions. This excerpt appeals to reason against the practice of imposing Christianity on other people:

"Whoever—a missionnary of the Christlan religion or some other—assumes a very great responsibility when he leads a Chinese or any other creature away from the faith and teachings of his fathers; for that religion in which one is bred...is likely to be best for him. ...Change from a native and traditional faith to an alien faith is far more likely to destroy the foundations of morality than to establish or relnforce them; and the separation from racial and family sympathies involved in the abandonment of the traditional religion and the taking up with the religion of the foreigner is almost inevitably a source of personal demoralization. ...All this is not saying that the religion of the Chinese is as good as the religion of the Christian, regarded Intrinsically. But we do venture to suggest that the religion of the Chinese as matters now stand, is as good or better for the Individual Chinaman than our own- especially in China. ...For the present the Chinaman would do bettor by the system which reflects the conceptions, aspirations, moralities and tastes of the Chinese character."

1901

Emperor Mingdi introduced Buddhist teachers into China in 65 A.D. but it's likely that the fame of Buddhism reached China and enhanced its popularity much earlier. The Chinese annals mention Buddhist missionary as early as 217 B. C. There also is mentioned a Chinese General about 120 B.C. who, after defeating barbarous tribes in the northern Gobi Desert, is reported to have brought back among all his trophies a golden statue of Buddha. But not until 65 A. D. did Emperor Mingti give practical effect to his devotion to Buddha and his doctrines. Mingti did this by recognizing Buddishm as one of the state religions to be upheld in his empire.

Interracial congregation led by Bishop Garfield Thomas Haywood, a founder of Oneness Pentacostalism

1901

Thus began the first thirty years of Oneness Pentecostalism (1901-31). It was a unique religious movement due to its unparalleled interracial commitment to a counter-cultural Pentecost. Its earliest primary architects included G.T. Haywood, R.C. Lawson, J.J. Frazee, and E.W. Doak. Yet, one of the contemporaries, Tinney, wrote:

Haywood seemed to transcend race, at least in as much as he overcame long held, previously unyielding resistances to integration, and initiated, along with an array of White, Black, and Hispanic leaders, a meaningful and viable interracial organism, genuinely unique to its day.

The emergence of Oneness Pentecostalism brought about its flagship organization, Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. As viewed through the lens of the Jesus' Name movement and interracial struggles of the period, the key players are Charles Parham, William Seymour, and the Azusa Street revival, COGIC, the newly formed Assemblies of God, and dozens of the earliest Oneness organizational bodies. African American Indianapolis leader G.T. Haywood is central, as are the development of the movement's key centers in the U.S. and the ultimate loss of interracial unity after more than thirty years of relative interracial harmony. These crucial events indelibly marked the U.S. as well as the global missionary and indigenous expansion of Oneness Pentecostalism.

It was known that a man's spiritual power resided in his long hair.

1902

Secretary of the Interior required Native American males to cut their hair voluntarily or else be arrested and fined hard labor along with a mandatory haircut.

The Liberator Editorializes about Religion As A Problem Among the Formerly Enslaved.

1904

Two editorial headlines on the same page of an African American newspaper published in Los Angeles called the Liberator lead into essays noting the adverse impact of settler religiosity on the formerly enslaved population.

The essayists complain about negro religious leaders instilling misplaced priorities that set the building of churches over the building of accommodations for Negroes who otherwise would be excluded from white accommodations.

Intended to encourage positive change, the essayists do not acknowledge that African descent people investing in Black accommodations would provoke white racial violence to destroy Black progress, as witnessed in the Tulsa Riots and bombing of that thriving Black community in Oklahoma. The same thing happened in Rosewood, Florida. So the practice of investing in churches might have been seen as a safer option with the Black people possibly thinking: At least we can safely go here.

Note: That sense of a safe sacred space was lost when white supremacists in Birmingham, Alabama bombed the !6th Street Baptist Church that was a predominantly Black congregation that also hosted the meetings of Civil Rights leaders. 

What follows are excepts from both of the 1904 headlined essays:

AS LEADERS ARE THE NEGRO PREACHERS A FAILURE

"...whatever the negro lacks of being what he ought to be is very largely if not wholly due to the bad leadership on the part of negro ministers. The race as a whole is absolutely in the hands of our ministers, the ministers very largely doing the thinking for it."

A DISGRACE TO THE NEGROES OF LOS ANGELES

"If half of the money the negroes spend in building churches was spent in building first class hotels and places of business, the negroes would have more religion and would encounter less race prejudice.

"This thing of building fine churches to look at and shout in, and have no place to eat and sleep, seems to us to be attempting to climb the hill backwards." 

The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake fire blazes. A Buena Vista Park view.

1906

Who would have thought that racial oppression could and would pause rebuilding the city of San Francisco which was damaged by an earthquake? That is the topic of this Liberator editorial that in part reads:

"For the time being the Afro-Americans in San Francisco are not hindered by the hell-born color line, the earthquake having destroyed it. The loss of life among them was practically nothing owing to the fact that color discrimination had driven them out of the danger zone. The awfulness of the calamity reduced all to a common level. Labor unions that had almost crunched out the Afro-American’s manhood, immediately announced that no discrimination would be practiced while rebuilding the city. If earthquakes will shake down color prejudice, there ought to be real heavy ones all over this sin-cursed country. In the name of God, give us anything that will blot out, even for a while, color prejudice, race hate, and race discrimination, and give the religion of Jesus Christ a chance to get a little foot-hold. The concentration of wealth, hypocrisy, sin and crime are about the only things that are on the increase in this Christian land. Lord, regardless of the means employed, give us a change."

Abdu'l Baha Abbas, Letter to the Congress

1911

Excerpts from the first international gathering on social justice and the races were drawn from papers presented at the Universal Races Congress, held at the University of London, July 26-29. In his submission, 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote:

"The Light of the Word is now shining on all horizons. Races and nations, with their different creeds, are coming under the influence of the Word of Unity in love and in peace.

The Blessed One, Baha’u’llah, likens the existing world to a tree, and the people to its fruits, blossoms and leaves. All should be fresh and vigorous, the attainment of their beauty and proportion depending on the love and unity with which they sustain each other and seek the Life eternal. The friends of God should become the manifestors in this world of this mercy and love. They should not dwell on the shortcomings of others. Ceaselessly should they be thinking how they may benefit others and show service and co-operation. Thus should they regard every stranger, putting aside such prejudices and superstitions as might prevent friendly relations.

Today the noblest person is he who bestows upon his enemy the pearl of generosity, and is a beacon-light to the misguided and the oppressed. This is the command of Baha’u’llah."

Two editorials from the Liberator: unrelated then, related today

1912

The two following headlines opened up editorials in this issue of the Liberator that then may have seemed unrelated but are far more related today, in the era of the demographic shift. Hence, this editorial notes the hypocrisy of the white Christian movements proclaiming "America for Christ."

WHITE CHURCH PEOPLE MAKING SKEPTICS

The white men promoting these movements see "that men and women of color —American citizens are cruelly put to death at the rate of almost one a day by mobs," and yet as the editorialist observes, "these good men have uttered not one word condemnatory of these brutal, cold blooded murders of innocent men and women.

...A religion that cannot condemn murder because the victims are members of a defenceless race, may be alright for dress parade purposes but ... the white pulpits have nothing to say against hanging and burning innocent Negro women provided that white men commit the crime."

BLACK RACE TO RULE THE EARTH

English anthropologist Declares Americans are reverting to Indian type of Red and dark-colored races will rule the earth and the white race will be entirely extinct in a few more centuries, according to Charles V. Lloyd, an English authority in anthropology, who with Prof. Lionel W. Lyde of the University of London, has been making an exhaustive study of the graduation of the white race to that of the Sariuos black races.

Prof. Lloyd said yesterday that the original color of the human skin was a dark brown, the variations from that color being due to different climatic conditions, which serve to weaken or strengthen the underlying pigments. “The various white nationalities of the world are gradually growing darker,” he said. “In this country particularly is there a noticeable decrease in the number of natural blondes. Fair-haired and fairskinned persons are becoming fewer and fewer and dark hair, brown or red complexions and general brunette color, are becoming common. ...

WHITE CHRISTIANS THE CHIEF PROMOTERS OF PREJUDICE AGAINST NEGROES

1913 - The Liberator, July 18, 1913, Vol. XII, No. 16.

The following headline and editorial appear in the July 18, 1913 issue of The Liberator. It notes that white Christians, more than other whites, strive to segregate public spaces. Here, Long Beach, an area black Sunday School children had been using all along, was suddenly off-limits when white Christians began using that beach.

WHITE CHRISTIANS THE CHIEF PROMOTERS OF PREJUDICE AGAINST NEGROES

"The refusal to entertain the colored Sunday-schools was not due to any mis-behavior on their part, their deportment being on a par with other beach visitors. The sad truth of the matter is, that the white Christians entertain a bitter prejudice against Negroes and have no patience with them, regardless of the Negro’s religion or culture. The white sport will drink, eat and gamble with the Negro sport till the two become Christians; after that he is unwilling to engage in any of the noble walks of life with the Negro as an associate."

1935

Poverty-racked Harlem had a genuine spiritual and emotional need. The ostentatious funerals, sponsored by fraternal societies, gave rise to the “high cost of dying.” Not just that but a journalist reports that in 1929 whites controlled 65% of Harlem real estate, and decades later, it is 95%. In a single block, 70% of the Harlem tenants were jobless, 18 percent ill, 60 percent behind in rent, and 33 percent were receiving public or private aid. Observers supposed that “the housing evil” might not be so disgraceful “if Negroes had more of a hand in administrating the property.”

The Reverend Major Jealous Divine was the writer’s main topic. He mused over Father Divine being the exceptional Black property owner of his church, established years earlier, that drew an interracial congregation of 12,094 during the depression. It was attended mostly by women and three quarters of them were Black.

In Harlem, the religious spirit was strong. The sums that the followers poured into church mortgages, salaries, and upkeep is startling. One church paid off a mortgage of $14,000 and still had a $14,424.07 balance. Father Divine's church was one among nearly 200 Black run churches in Harlem, and Negro critics pointed out that half of them were irregular and episodic. Father Divine's church was a daily operation. He owned his properties and shared them with his congregants.

They believed that Father Divine was the embodiment of God on earth. The only charge that one pays for a share of Father Divine’s earthly paradise is a good life and faith. His single requirement was for his followers to turn over all worldly possessions and live a celibate life with free room and board in his properties. Instead of prayer, there is praise, instead of meditation and confession, there was simultaneous absolution. There was no communion, only roast duck, and sweet potatoes; no scripture, for as some say, “it is truly wonderful” without scripture, and there are so many blessings you can’t count them all.

When his wife Peninah, a large black woman they called Mother Divine, suddenly died. Father Divine never announced her death and quickly replaced her with a white woman to the shock of everyone. He claimed their marriage was sex-less and claimed the two women were one and the same. He rather persuasively touted the claim that this 21-year-old white woman, Edna Rose Ritchings was possessed by Peninnah who died in 1943.

Mrs. Lucy Hicks Anderson

1945

Mrs. Anderson was the first Black transgender person to fight for the right to be married in court. Knowing they would be refused the sacred rite of marriage in church on religious grounds, the couple settled for a civil marriage.

She and her husband were convicted of fraud and imprisoned because they got married and lived like a married couple. The judiciary deemed it illegal that they had signed a marriage license and collected his military pension to help fund their marriage. 

Born in 1886 in Waddy, Kentucky, Lucy, identified as a girl at an early age. She told her mother she was not a boy. She demanded to be called Lucy instead of Tobias. She always wanted to wear a dress to school.

The Kinsey Report

1948

The Kinsey Report used research to legitimate the question of sexual variance in large populations.

1950 Harry Hay defined homosexuals as oppressed

1950

Harry Hay defined the oppression of homosexuals and organized gay resistance. Regarded as the founder of the U.S. gay movement, he is considered a pioneer liberator of gay spirituality and creator of gay spiritual rituals. 

The Black Church and Civil Rights

1960  

In this video, Noll reviews church history and reports that Protestants in other countries were against American slavery, but Catholics in other countries did not stand against it. What Catholics stood against was the lack of centralizing religious authority in America that they feared and predicted would split American Christianity into many denominations.

The fight today seeks to empower evangelical Protestantism politically. Some Christians are pushing for a theocratic America that draws all Christians under the far-right Christian banner by imposing their biblical interpretations on Americans regarding the LGBTQIA community.

The evangelical protestant church held sway over the Black Churches until they departed from that racial-religious conservatism and took a radical stand against racial discrimination during the Civil Rights movement. Yet, during that movement, it still seemed necessary for African Americans to follow the leadership of gay Black men like Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin but keep silent about their homosexuality. Patriarchy was sustained during the Black Power Movement that would emerge from the Civil Rights movement, and homophobia was justified.

The stakes are high when sacred texts are read politically. The trend towards scriptural contestation initiated during the second Great Awakening would increase, not decrease. Evangelical Christianity demands conformity to its scriptural interpretations, gradually fostering more division than harmonious fellowship in still very religious Black communities. Religious division over sexuality and gender sown by the far-right church would soon trouble the political aspirations of the African American electorate. Far-right missionaries proselytizing their scriptural interpretation in Africa would spawn rabid homophobia and transphobia producing unjust incarceration and even judicial executions there.

Ted began as a Methodist minister.

Ted's encounter with police brutality.

1962

Ted McIlvenna had served only a few years as a local church pastor before he was appointed in 1962 to Glide Church as Director of Young Adult Work in San Francisco. After connecting with leaders of the local homosexual community, Ted recruited their help in presenting an educational event for clergy called "The Consultation on the Church and the Homosexual." Funded by the Glide Foundation and several Methodist agencies, the major theological takeaway of the event—delivered by McIlvenna himself—was "being or not being a homosexual [is] not salvifically important" (that is, not important for the sake of salvation). This was the first time the idea was driven home that one's sexuality and gender should not be used as a pretext for denying access and precluding one's faith and spiritual needs.

 A committed "sexologist," McIlvenna saw himself on a "sacred" quest to document "what people do" sexually. He aimed to share that information with as many people as possible and helped to create opportunities for sharing that information. While at Glide, he helped to form and run the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, an organization that would begin to promote the access of homosexuals to religion.

He taught and circulated knowledge about a wide range of human sexuality. McInvenna also fought for the safety of homosexuals and tried to protect their right to participate in society. Following his retirement, he co-founded the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas and established the Exodus Trust Foundation and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

Because of his organizing work at Glide and his talks across the nation, McIlvenna was invited at age 80 by Dr. Xiaonian Ma, deputy chairman of the China Sexology Association, to bring a delegation and present a series of talks at the Advanced Sexology Conference in Guangzhou China on March 6 and 7, 2013.

Monica Roberts

1962

Monica Roberts was born in 1962 and left this world in 2020. She was an African American transwoman and activist who in 2006 began publishing TransGriot, her groundbreaking online newsletter for black transwomen.

Drawing from her African cultural background, Roberts did not settle for just being a storyteller of current events. She served as a griot, documenting and critiquing her constituents' experience of historical events.

Roberts used the newsletter to advocate for all black trans issues, including religion. She connected her African American transwomen audience with African trans people elswhere in the diaspora and in Africa.

Another way she used her newsletter was to encourage the emergence of black transmen. Roberts particularly used it to mourn the murders and suicides of black transmen, like she did for black transwomen.

In this regard, Monica Roberts was a political activist and culture broker who contributed tremendously to black transcultural and all its relations.

Reverend Lloyd Keigo Wake with his wife, Marion

1967

Reverend Lloyd (1922-2017) and his wife, Marion, met in the Japanese Detainment camps. She participated with him throughout his ministry and in his activism.

In 1967 Reverend Wake was appointed Minister of Community Life at Glide Memorial Methodist Church. He immersed himself in issues of the day: supporting and supervising the alternate service of 30 Conscientious Objectors; performing Covenant Services for gay, lesbian and transgender partners; supporting students and faculty during the Third World Strike at SF State.

During his 23 years at Glide he mentored and supported hundreds of community activists. He helped to establish the Asian Law Caucus, serving on its Board for 21 years and as chairperson from 1993-1997; chaired the Wendy Yoshimura Fair Trial Committee. Reverend Wake was arrested for a sit-in protest against martial law in the Philippines; participated in human rights support trips to South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Okinawa; taught at the Pacific School of Religion; supported Redress and Reparations for Japanese and Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII.

Troy Perry created and pastored the first church to provide sacred space for homosexuals. Gradually the entire LGBTQIA spectrum was embraced.

1968

Reverend Troy Perry publicly married the first same-sex couple to be wed in America. He also was the first to file a lawsuit praying for the court to recognize same-gender marriages. Perry was a pioneer in the Gay Liberation movement who founded the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968. It was the first church in America to provide a spiritual home for homosexuals.

One year later, in Hollywood, California, he led the first gay rights march that coined a new phrase, 'Say It Loud, I'm Gay and I'm Proud.' The term was inspired by the courageous spirit and defiant mood of the Civil Rights Movement when James Brown released a popular song: "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." The march publicized gay men demanding rights and insisting on claiming the freedom to sleep with the partner of their choice after waiting patiently for 2000 years.

The upsurge of their demand would quickly expand Perry's church into American and international satellites. The first dozen churches in America would amass churches in 38 states with members in every state in the nation. Eventually, the MCC church would become radically inclusive not only of gays and lesbians but also all gender-nonconforming people. 

Perry transitioned from being told all his life that he could not be religious and gay. This exclusionary faith trauma nearly drove him to suicide. Upon hearing God's voice assuring him that he, too, is loved, Perry chose to live.

He began to preach and teach a spiritual message countering the condemnation of homosexuality based on scripture. He wrote books like, The Lord is My Shepherd and I Am Gay. He emphasized that no creation of God can be a mistake. He affirmed sexual and gender differences do not drain people of their spiritual need for fellowship, prayer, meditation, biblical study, or discipleship. His liberation journey was long, operated on many fronts, and relied on different methods. His impact was so comprehensive and groundbreaking that five presidents invited him to the White House, with President Obama being the most recent.

1969

Sylvia Rivera was one of the earliest and most influential transgender rights activists after the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising. She was close friends with Marsha P. Johnson another transwoman foremother of the movement. She spent most of her life fighting for civil rights reform, not only for gay and transgender people but also for African Americans, and as part of the second-wave feminist movement.

1973

Advertisement in The Village Voice February 8, 1973, inviting homosexuals to join in fellowship as Beit Simchat Torah for worship in the Annex of the Church of the Holy Apostles. This church also hosted the MCC. It would be CBST's home for the next 2-1/2 years. CBST later would relocate to its permanent home. The CBST founders and most of the members were Jewish homosexuals. A few friends, inspired by the success of the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay Protestant church, decided to form a Jewish counterpart. One person took the initiative.

“I Was Born This Way,” Carl Bean's Motown Hit

1977

Carl Bean was a homosexual Black man. His Motown hit “I Was Born This Way” expressed the inherent nature of homosexual desire. It conveyed the feelings and sense of self that gender non-forming people felt, despite the fact that the religionists accused them of making the wrong choice or even of acting on an evil intention. They found in his song a way to fortify themselves against false accusations. This is why his tune hit the charts. It became an anthem of LGBTQ+ empowerment in the late seventies. It also later helped to propel Carl Bean into queer spiritual leadership.

1978 - American Indian Religious Freedom Act (discussed in NARF newletter)

After a struggle of 95 years to reclaim their spiritual heritages, Native Americans finally won back their religious freedom. This act did not just say they were freely religious again, it actually provided a set of rights, including the right of consultation regarding the disposition of Native remains and artifacts. This restored some of their authority over their their own cultural production. It allowed them to control the white American practice of controlling native remains and artifacts. It also allowed incarcerated Native Americans the same right to their religious practices as enjoyed by the inmates practicing other religions. But the new federal law was not always observed at the state level, so some members of the Native American Church were still being arrested for having peyote which in some cases their indigenous beliefs held sacred. This publication details the means set up to implement these rights and includes establishment of the Religious Freedom Project of the Native American Rights Fund. NARF also reports on developments regarding Native American fishing and hunting rights.

1979 - Sullivan introduces himself on June 2nd to Nicholas Ghosh, who lives in Toronto. He explains that a friend, Emmon, gave him a copy of the new trans publication Ghosh created a year earlier entitled Gender Review Newsletter, No. 1, June 1978. Sullivan subscribes with a check and requests issues #2 to the present. Sullivan says he admires Ghosh's work and is inspired to create a newsletter for his TV/TS group. Note: the term transgender does not yet appear in their communications, and the publication Sullivan will launch will be called the FTMI newsletter.

1982 - Marsha P. Johnson at the Pride March

1982

The Minority AIDS project saved black lives ignored by other AIDS projects.

1985

Reverend Carl Bean established the Minority AIDS Project as a mission of his church. It was the first organization to address the needs of Black men with HIV and came to exist when their needs were overlooked, ignored, or dismissed.

1987 - Afro-Asian cultural exchange party at 509 Club, Tenderloin, San Francisco

Tibet Must Preserve Ancient Culture

1988

The Dalai Lama, revered as a god-king by Tibetans, said he would settle for less than full independence for Tibet in order to prevent assimilation by China.

“I am not insisting we should be an independent country,” Tibetans' spiritual and temporal leader told The Associated Press. Instead, he said that he was seeking “a middle way” that would preserve the Tibetan culture he fears will vanish if Chinese rule continues for another 10 or 15 years.

1988 - Rupert Raj attends one of the first conferences, sponsored by IFGE, and was scheduled to speak on a session addressing religious aspects of the trans experience.

1988

Rupert Raj is a trans man who wrote articles often reprinted in FTM International and edited by Lou Sullivan.

1988

Joshi meditates at the Hartford Street Zen Center, Castro District, San Francisco.

1988 - A panel 

1988

Sister Mary Elizabeth was a transgender person assigned male at birth who had been raised Southern Baptist. Military service in the Navy was completed as a male, but after transgender surgery in 1975, there was more military service as a woman enlisted in the Army. 

The Sister left the Southern Baptist Church because of its racism. She later took vows in 1988 as an Episcopal sister, only later to join the American Catholic Church and become a sister in that institution. Her proposal to moderate Session 5: Religious Aspects and several other transsexual events at the 1988 IFGE Convention lent great authority to the question.

The IFGE (International Foundation for Gender Education) was created in 1987 to protect people who engaged in cross-dressing or who identified with the opposite sex. The organization began to hold conferences to build alliances and expand its network in 1988.

Session 5, religious aspects - addressed how to deal with the religious problems that arise for the TG/TV/TS communities. Session 17, called the Transsexual Panel, made it possible for the transsexual panelists to introduce themselves and share their views with the TV/TS audience about how they thought they could fit transsexuals "into our community and how can we relate to their needs?" This suggests that transsexuals were viewed as newcomers and outsiders who may or may not be integrated into the TV/TS fold.

1990

In this issue FTMI No. 11, extends its sincere thanks to Rupert Raj for bestowing the first 'Gender Worker Award' to an ardent FTM trans activist, Lou Sullivan. It is a beautiful wall plaque with the following inscription:

"Presented to Lou Sullivan in Appreciation for Your Dedication and Outstanding Contributions to the F-M TS Community, 1990."

Rupert Raj wrote articles often reprinted in FTM International, and edited by Lou Sullivan.

1993

This March issue of the Boys Will Be Boys, No. 12 Newsletter contains a letter to the editor seeking similar gay FTM companionship of color.

Finding a female-to-gay male transsexual who's Latino or Maori is a real pain the neck. If there are any FTM/TS gay men of color in Australia, tell to contact me. Please be discreet with the envelop! Thanks."

Transgender is growing more widely recognized as a new term but has not yet been widely adopted in local communities. This letter to the editor shows that this BIPOC trans person does not use the time and identifies as FTM/TS. This terminology that is older than transgender means: female-to-male transsexual.

1993

Affirmation Washington, D.C. March—Civil Rights Timeline

1993

Gay Pride Day: Marching with the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (between 1993 and 1996).

1993

Native Americans joined African Americans in claiming land rights in their common fight against the 'South Bayshore Plan' of San Francisco. The city aimed to remove the low-income black neighborhood to bring in new residents with higher incomes who would increase revenue by paying higher taxes.

The city is eliminating the Black homeowners and from the Bayview-Hunters' Point using the legal instrument of eminent domain. It compels them to sell their home for very low prices when the Black homeowners would prefer to remain in their homes.

A spiritually conscious and determined indigenous coalition between the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and the Amah Mutsuyn Band entered the conflict to espouse another set of urban needs for the area that could edify indigenous communities and help to preserve Black homes. Because radiocarbon assays reveal large burial mounds in the area, they called for the preservation of ancestral land.

Seeing officials minimize their efforts to appeal the proposed land development, the Indigenous activists wrote the planning commission to assert: "There seems to be a callous disregard toward the possibility that either historic or precontact Native American villages or cemetery sites may possibly be destroyed."  

1994

Sylvia Rivera at ACT-UP March, 1994

1995

Atlanta Action Update, IFGE Newsletter.

Announces that the upcoming IFGE conference will open with a non-sectarian worship/meditation period. The program will include a transgender political caucus.

The newsletter also calls for a quick, fifteen-minute meeting of the God Squad. The purpose was to set up a new infrastructure for working on trans rights in religion and spirituality and address the ceremonial needs of the trans community.

As the call states:

“Any transgendered clergy, spiritual leaders, seekers, philosophers, and thinkers are invited to come to the Highlands Room for about 15 minutes today at pm. We will discuss the memorial service and the establishment of a network.”

1996

The magazine formerly called TV - TG Tapestry is renamed Transgender Tapestry. This indicates that the transgender term is being adopted by the movement as one that is more inclusive and more to the point of malleable gender. This issue features an essay about cross-dressers called, CD Coming Out as a Psycho-Spiritual Initiation. It also announces the upcoming 1997 IFGE Convention theme of California Dreamin.' That conference promises to include a panel called TG and Religion.

The True Spirit Conference, 1999

1999

True Spirit Conference considers the spiritual experience, among other topics, relevant to gender-variant people on the FTM spectrum.

Chris Paige

1999

Chris Paige created a small Transfaith Online website to gather information about transgender spirituality.  Chris uploaded a new and better version of the Transfaith Online website in 2007, which deepened Chris's relationships with transgender spiritual/cultural workers over several years.

Chris helped to found transgender groups in the United Church of Christ (UCC GenderFold Action Alliance in 2010) and The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TransSaints in 2009).

Chris became conference chair of the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference in 2011 as it emerged as the most prominent transgender conference in the world.

In 2012, the once-small project of Transfaith grew as it facilitated a multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-gender process of organizational development, hiring Chris as executive director.

1999

Asian and Pacific Islanders hoist signs for Queer Women and Transgendered Coalition at a Pride Parade.

1999

Of East Indian and German descent, Dhillon Khosla was born in Brussels but settled in the United States and was reborn in 1999 when he began making numerous contributions to trans life.

There is now a new edition of his memoir, Both Sides Now. His short film, Temple Beyond Tolerance, won second place for best documentary at Hollywood’s Rebel Planet Film Festival; it was a Breckenridge Film Festival Selection. He also made an album called The Temple, written over a seven-year period. Two tracks were selected for feature films, and two additional songs were special compilations utilized by television executives for commercial cues.

Dhillon confessed and is known for how his gender transition made him face and overcome his own intolerance.

His spiritual philosophy: "Those of us who preach tolerance and love must first admit and confront our own intolerance so that we do not perpetuate the very thing we seek to eradicate."

1920 - Harlem Takes the Drag Ball to New Heights.

2000

New York Times, June 11, 2000. The article discusses the Harlem drag ball. Notes that the NYC practice grew in the 1920s and peaked in the 1930s when up to 8,000 people would attend the annual ball held at the Hamilton Lodge of the Odd Fellows. Another mentioned NYC hot spot was the 97-year-old Salem United Methodist Church. During the Harlem Renaissance, this church was where the black notaries would gather, and some of them, like Countee Cullen, would hide their sexuality or gender identity by attending and appearing to be cis-gendered heterosexuals. 

2001

Reverend Bobbie Jean Baker (1964-2014) was born in Memphis, Tennessee transformed her life when she pulled herself up from drugging and stealing in the streets of San Francisco to become an influential figure in the transgender movement. Her story exemplifies how choosing to lead a spiritual life can enable a person to reverse a downward spiral. Reverend Baker became that celebrated victory when she dusted her heels, chose a different path after incarceration, and never looked back.

Reverend Baker’s initial position was a leader of transgender groups for the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center in San Francisco. She served as an usher at the City of Refuge UCC in San Francisco, where she joined and enjoyed singing with the Transcendence Gospel Choir. She was appointed an adjutant minister in training with Bishop Yvette Flunder. Reverend Baker enrolled in seminary at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and served as the West Coast Regional TransSaints Minister of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries. She founded the Sistah-Kin Project and was a Trans Community Advocate at the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples Movement (FICPM).

Additionally, Bobbi Jean Baker became a lay minister at Transcending Transgender Ministries.  She worked in several Bay Area non-profits as a speaker and workshop leader. Relying on and perhaps modifying the survival skills she learned in her earlier life, Reverend Baker also developed new skills in her various roles, including serving others as a peer advocate, case manager, and housing manager. Additionally, she was certified as an HIV Risk Assessment Counselor and as a Domestic Violence Specialist.

2003

Advancing the BIPOC trans-spiritual movement in small ways is achieved via headlines that appear in newsletter, like those in the Bay Area Reporter (BAR), 3 April 2003, Vol 33, No. 14. At that time it was considered progressive for the BAR to include any transgender issues.

Domestic partner bills survive first vote

Youth-led silent protest echoes LGBT oppression

Stars come out for New Leaf gala. Fundraiser for community service agency offering community mental health. The agency has provided HlV/AIDS, mental health, and substance abuse counseling and services to disenfranchised individuals, families,
and groups

Notation on the first lesbian march to occur in Mexico City.

Two front-page headlines on opposite sides of the war in Iraq:

1. Gay AWOL Marine Seeks Conscientious Objector Status

2. Gays Voice Support for War

What Flavor Is Your Restroom?

Pride Breakfast to Focus on Gays in the Military

Protection for TG Students

Indonesian cross—gender artist Didik Nini Thowok appears around town at the Odeon Bar, Theatre of Yugen, and the ’N Touch

Rev. Al Sharpton joined Bishop Yvette Flunder in delivering the keynote addresses. They urged black churches to unify around LGBTQ issues instead of allowing themselves to be divided by them.

2006

Black churches had to confront the critical question: Should they allow the Christian far-right to hinder the Black community's political objectives by using rhetoric to fan the flames of black people against the LGBTQIA community? What should the Black church do about this festering division in the Black community?

The Black churches who dared to discuss this thorny question decided to unify to oppose their far right adversaries. According to revcom.us, "The advance of the Christian fascist theocrats among the Black clergy and churches is extremely dangerous development..." and a step towards a solution was sponsored by the NBJC (National Black Justice Coalition), the Black Church Summit was held in Atlanta January 20-21 at the First Iconium Baptist Church.

Rev. Al Sharpton and Bishop Yvette Flunder delivered the keynote addresses.

Sharpton called on Black churches to "break the backs of those who are trying to use homosexuality as a political weapon," enabling them to steal minority votes from the issues that matter most to the Black community. Flunder called for African Americans (and all Americans) to see value in developing "a nonpunitive discourse on human sexuality." Flunder pointed out that Black people must talk about homophobia so we can close ranks and "eliminate the opportunity for others to defile and separate us."

In an interview, Sylvia Rhue, in charge of religious affairs and constituency development at NBJC, said that African American religious leaders must note LGBT contributions to their communities and understand how marriage discrimination harms amd not helps, African American children and families.

The conference shifted its opinion towards supporting the view that the church should not host black homophobia. An understanding emerged that the few Black preachers supporting the far-right Christians' homophobic agenda were not acting in the interest of African Americans.

Such self-defeating attitudes had been used before to divide and conquer people as revcom.us concludes: "...these pro-Bush preachers are reminiscent of the Judenrat under the Nazis--Jews who were given special privileges and power under the Nazis and who convinced themselves that things would go better for everyone if they rounded up their fellow Jews instead of forcing the Nazis to do it. The Judenrat told people not to resist and snitched on those who did."

Angelic Ross attained national stature due to her acting and activist career

2007

Angelica Ross, an African American transwoman, explains how readily she was able to attain success after becoming a Buddhist.

Pauline Park

2010

As a Korean born in 1960, Pauline Park, for years, was the primary Asian transgender voice in America. She has a lengthy profile on her blog page, which mentions that she was designated in 2009 as “a leading advocate for transgender rights in New York” on Idealist in NYC’s ‘New York 40’ list.

As an activist working with various groups and a multitalented transwoman, Pauline has served the LGBTQIA2 community in many ways. She has served as a legal strategist, a trainer, a publicist, an organizer, a writer, and a musician.

Park penned this essay to explain and promote the right of trans people to have a spiritual life.

Bishop Yvette A. Flunder - Propagator of Radical Inclusivity

Bishop Yvette Flunder, Coalition of Welcoming Congregations Address

2011

Bishop Yvette Flunder, as Senior Pastor of City of Refuge United Church of Christ, shares her concept of "Radical Hospitality" at the Coalition of Welcoming Congregations of the Bay Area Clergy and Lay Leaders Retreat on August 16, 2011.

Rev. Louis Mitchell

As a panel participant in 2017, Reverend Louis Mitchell reports he was inspired to change his life by the spiritual power that Bishop Yvette Flunder emanated.

2011

Louis Mitchell, an African American transman, worked with Chris Paige, a non-binary Co-founder and Executive Director of Transfaith™/Interfaith Working Group. As an online resource, TransFaith organized conferences and has helped trans people to find local spiritual support.

Mitchell got his feet wet when he became the aide of Supervisor Tom Ammiano in San Francisco, where he also was a founding member of Lesbians and Gays of African Descent for Democratic Action. Mitchell came out as trans in 1995 and transitioned in 1999 by making himself into what he calls an "intentional man." 

Mitchell appears to be a pivotal figure in the emergence of BIPOC trans-spiritual leadership. When Carl Bean was starting Unity Fellowship in 1985, Mitchell met him, and later Mitchell joined City of Refuge, that Yvette Flunder founded in 1991. He became a pivot man connecting other BIPOC trans people to sacred spaces and leadership development opportunities they may not have known. In 2008 Mitchell set up Recovering the Promise Ministry in his home. Since then he mentored many BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders as well as secular leaders in the transgender movement. Before that, he studied with Angela Davis and served as her teaching assistant, but was not yet developing his spiritual leadership at that time. 

Today, Reverend Louis Mitchell primarily regards himself to be ordained by God and he is known around the country and abroad as an elder, advocate, teacher, student, minister, parent, and friend. He currently serves as the Associate Minister of South Congregational Church in Springfield, MA.

Speaking in 2017 on a panel entitled Emerging Transgender Identities in the Church, Rev. Louis Mitchell candidly reports he was inspired by the power of Bishop Yvette Flunder to change his life. He heard her speak early in his career at a conference. He was amazed by her strength, her ability to touch people while conveying important information about equality in faith communities. Her presentation inspired him to clean up his act and become a preacher. He later pursued his divinity degree with a commitment to be ordained. He saw in Flunder a reason to do his work on himself like she apparently was doing hers, and the result of her work was opening doors for him.

2011

Wilhemina Perry is an African American lesbian who lost her lover, Antonia Pantoja, a famous Puerto Rican civil rights activist, after a life of 30 years together. Yet, the dying partner encouraged Perry to shift her activism from the Puerto Rican Community, where they had served for decades building leadership and community development work, to work instead in her black community as an LGBTQIA2 activist.

"Spiritually devastated" and rendered suicidal by her partner's death, Dr. Perry bemoaned the economic vulnerability she experienced only because they were not legally allowed to marry before her partner transitioned. The couple's loss that stemmed from their denied access to sacred space motivated Perry to change the situation for all LGBTQIA2 people. She let go of her former reliance on political ideology and returned to her former religious training to help shift the churches to being radically inclusive of LGBTQIA2 people.

Perry set out to interrupt the harm she saw churches doing to LGBTQIA people. With her renewed spiritual approach to social justice, Perry founded an organization in 2022 called the LGBT Faith Leaders of African Descent. This social justice organizing allowed Perry to collaborate with her local community to create a safe, sacred space for BIPOC LGBTQ people who had no sacred space. Those who got to seek peace in the sacred space Perry created established the Circle of Life Celebration ritual to honor their community members killed by AIDS and hate crimes.

Voices of Witness: Out of the Box

2012

IntegrityUSA, in collaboration with TransEpiscopal, created the documentary, 'Voices of Witness: Out of the Box.' As described by Integrity Director of Communications, Louise Brooks: "Voices of Witness: Out of the Box is a groundbreaking documentary giving voice to the witness of transgender people of faith courageously telling their stories of hope, healing, and wholeness.'"

LaSaia Wade

2013

Living in rural Tennessee, LaSaia Wade demanded a local community center to make space for trans people, and not just for the white ones, she said, but for all trans people.

The organization she created there was called Tennessee Transgender Justice Project (TNTJ). Wade's concern about a lack of space and resources for trans people drove her to build a thriving community.

Speaking to managers of that community center, she said:" 'You will give us space. You will allow us to have space. And we will not accept a no.'" As an NBC journalist reports, Wade said: "That's just my motto. I need to be safe, and I will be safe now, so give me my safe space."

LaSaia Wade attended Murfreesboro Tennessee State University and earned her 2012 Master's in Business Administration in Business Management. She was one of the key organizers for the Trans Liberation Collective Chicago that coordinated one of the largest marches for trans rights in Midwestern history. She also is a leader in the practice of Midwest Ballroom, hailing from The International Legendary House of Prodigy.

The BIPOC trans-spiritual leader, Valerie Spencer, was a supportive inspiration for Wade, who otherwise might have remained isolated. Regarding how much Spencer means to her, Wade told AlJazeer, "She saved me when I didn't have anyone else to save me."

From Tennessee, Wade moved to Chicago and created a multi-million dollar Black-led, trans-led organization called Brave Space Alliance to service the most marginalized LGBTQ communities in South Chicago. 

Rabbi Koach Baruch Frazier

2015

In a historic move, the largest U.S. branch of Judaism decides to back transgender rights which includes helping BIPOC transgender people like Dr. Koach Baruch Frazier become rabbis. 

Asian American Transgender Filmmaker, Christopher Lee

2015

Transgender people were able to have their chosen gender recorded on their death certificates when the Respect After Death Act (California Assembly Bill 1577) took effect in California.

This change began when a Chinese Mexican trans masculine person called Chino Scott-Chung felt concern about the misgendering of his trans friend who died - Christopher Lee (1964-2012).

Chino and his wife Maya met Lee in 1997 when Lee, a filmmaker, was emceeing the Transgender Film Festival he co-founded. Lee had made several transgender films including one about himself called, Christopher's Chronicles. So, he was well known in the Bay area, but when he died, his death certificate listed him incorrectly, based only on his genitalia. 

Chino Scott-Chung brought attention to the death certificate issue by contacting the Transgender Law Center. The TLC staff initiated and lobbied for the passage of AB 1577.

Three years later when AB 1577 passed, Kris Hayashi, a Japanese American, had become Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center. Yet when CBS reported on the victory, they did not seize the opportunity to celebrate the leadership of Asian Americans who made the bill possible. Even if they could not find Scott-Chung, they could have spoken to the new Executive Director about what this bill means to the Asian American trans community as well as to the larger community.

Instead CBS lauded Masen Davis as if he was the organization’s executive director. Davis was allowed to give a statement, rather than it rightfully coming from Hayashi, to define the historic moment. Davis said “It brings us one significant step closer to making sure that all transgender people are able to live – and die – authentically in accordance with who they really are." But one wonders who is us?  Why did Davis did not pass the opportunity to speak over to Hayashi? Why did CBS miss the opportunity to celebrate Asian American trans leadership?

Rabbi Ramona Hernandez-Perez

2017

Ramona Hernandez-Perez is a female Black-Mexican rabbi in her 60s. Her trans-spiritual as a rabbi is accomplished through a mission she started called Abyssinian Reform Hebrew Congregations. Hernandez-Perez declares she is from the same line of rabbis that goes back to Rabbi Arnold Ford and Rabbi Wentworth Matthew, and many other rabbis of the African diaspora. She formerly identified as transgender and is now female, explaining "I don't want to be a third gender. My transition has passed. I want to be female, period. I'm me."

Reverend Robin Henderson-Espinoza

2017

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, a Latinx transmasculine person, speaks about the BIPOC trans-spiritual experience with others at 'Rolling the Stone Away' Conference.

Trans Spiritual Care Initiative: A project of Sojourn Chaplaincy

2017

The San Francisco General Hospital offers spiritual care services to its patients and staff that Sojourn Chaplaincy provides. Trans leaders worked with clergy from the Global Ministry Center (Church of the Nazarene) to develop new standards of gender-affirming care appropriate for transgender patients and staff. They initiated a new service that never existed before. They began to recruit clergy and chaplains trained in gender diversity. These new gender-affirming recruits joined the project to accompany transgender patients and be their healthcare advocates. They called it the Transgender Spiritual Care Initiative (TSCI).

Transgender: Back to Jamaica | BBC | Newsbeat YouTube

2016

Jaimacan Americans who are trans do go home to come out, fearing religious abuse.

Reverend Mykal ONeal Slack

2017

Mykal O'Neil Slack and spouse, Lehaina, created an inclusive spiritual space for trans and queer people of color in Durham, North Carolina called, The Clearing.

A Conversation With Native Americans on Race

2018

A Conversation With Native Americans on Race | Op-Docs, New York Times - YouTube - April 15, 2018

2018

Reverend Nicole Garcia

Reverence Nicole Garcia with her ministerial colleagues

2019

Before coming out as transgender, Nicole Garcia prayed daily that God would “fix” her. When her prayers weren’t answered and the feeling in her gut didn’t go away, she gave up on religion.

In 2008, Garcia was appointed the transgender representative to the national board of directors of ReconcilingWorks: Lutherans for Full Participation. Four years later she was admitted into the Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minn.

Garcia earned a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology in August 2013 to become a Licensed Professional Counselor and trainer for La Familia - a bilingual guide addressing LGBT inclusion in Catholic and Protestant Latino families and congregations. 

Nearly four decades after thinking religion was not for her, Garcia declares her devotion to ministry at Westview Lutheran Church in Boulder Colorado: “Nobody can question my faith, my devotion to Christ, my devotion to the church. That’s why I’m the pastor here,” Garcia, who turned 60 in 2019, told NBC News. “Being trans is secondary.”

Shozenji Temple - Japan

2020

As of yet, there are no temples run by trans Buddhists in America, but Japanese Americans who return home and other visitors to Japan can meditate in a temple run by a Buddhist nun.

Shozenji Temple shelters Buddhist practices under the guidance of 65-year-old Soshuku Shibatani, the first transgender nun in Japan. Living authentically was lost when Shabatani's gender identity had to be hidden at work after graduating from college. Upon earning a doctorate, finding Buddhism, and surgically transitioning to female in 2010, Nun Shibatani resigned from her company, took up the study of Esoteric Buddhism, joined the priesthood, and initiated the building of the temple in 2017.

Daitokuzan Johoji Temple is the official name of this sacred space. The name was changed after Nun Shibatani's predecessor passed her the responsibility for this temple. Accepting the mantle bequeathed to her, Nun Shibatani nicknamed the place, Shozenji, a term that derives from the "seizensetsu" doctrine. It declares that all humans are inherently good and capable of attaining enlightenment.

This safe space welcomes all based on the belief gender distinction did not exist before the Buddha and on the principle that all people are equally free to live as themselves.

The 2nd Annual Two-Spirit Powwow 2020

2020

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum with NYC  Mayor David Dinkins

Rabbi Kleinbaum (third from left) at a 1980s protest

2020 - Sharon Kleinbaum DD, has been CBST's Senior Rabbi for more than thirty years. On September 11, 1992, she was installed as CBST’s first rabbi and CBST’s first full-time staff person. The synagogue she has built and led is in the process called rabbinical transition. On December 16, 2022, Rabbi Kleinbaum announced she is stepping down as of July 31, 2024.

He was born and died that way

2021

Once suicidal, Beam tried to kill himself, but failed. He then came to be known as a 'beacon of light' in the LGBTQ Church movement because he practiced two spiritual values: 'know thyself' and 'to thine own self be true.'

They are five women including one transwoman publically mourning their missing sisters in a ritual way that politicizes the act of their having been taken or slain.

After responding in kind, the protestors resorted to their signature ritual act of covering the offender's door, fence, and sidewalk leading up to his house in red paint handprints, symbolic of the dead or missing women.

2021

All over the world MMIWG2S disproportionately experience gendered racial violence. It targets feminine bodies most, but it also will strike at male and two-spirit bodies that do not conform to the enforces heteronormative, colonial, binary, gender system.

Not only do the most feminine Native people protest this violence, but even their protests are subject to being attacked. Thus, their forms of protest are often non-violent ones, that adhere to the principles of relationality and accountability. They create highly ritualized and ceremonial ways to symbolize the violence and the losses they endure by holding up a mirror in which the society producing the violence can see itself.

.

Safer and More Collaborative for Transgender Sikhs to Connect Online

2021

In a pride march, an American Sikh protester carried a rainbow sign that read: 

"Some parents are their child's first bully." How significant that a Sikh, member of a small American religious minority, is marching, and maybe with other Sikh's. That same sign states: "GSA's save lives."

The phrase points to the Gender-Sexuality Alliances that consist of school clubs and college offices created to promote Gay-Straight Alliances. In the late 1980s, they became centers of learning and safe harbors for LGBTQIA students. New space then that really made a difference.

Additionally, here, are year old quotes about trans-sikhism by Harmeet Kaur Kamboj, from his essay in the revealer, published October 6, 2022:

"When I asked trans Sikhs if and how they see transness affirmed in the Sikh tradition, all responded with evidence directly from Sikh spiritual sources. Together, we started piecing together the beginnings of a trans Sikh liberation theology."

"sahiba asserted, 'Throughout Gurbani [Sikh sacred texts], Guru Sahib [the Divine] is not married to a specific gender. Guru Sahib is always shifting. The project of Sikhi, as far as I can tell, is focused on the abolition of gender. We don’t need these boxes…they’re holding us back.'"

"manpreet singh, a trans masculine spoken word poet, illustrator, and author of Singh is Queer, cited the janamsakhi (story) of Guru Nanak meeting a genderfluid Sufi Sheikh as a significant source of trans affirmation. In the account, Guru Nanak finds Sheikh Saraf, a male-bodied person, dressed as a bride and asks why the sheikh is wearing traditionally feminine clothing. Sheikh Saraf responds saying they are waiting to find their beloved. Rather than reprimanding Sheikh Saraf for challenging gender norms, Guru Nanak joins the Sheikh in song and discussion on spirituality and love for the Divine."

"manpreet reports that, 'If I had exposed myself to Brown and Black trans people first instead of white trans people [on Tumblr], I don’t think I would have ever gotten top surgery. There are seven billion people in the world, which means there are seven billion genders. Everyone performs their gender differently.'”

2021

To Understand the Story of 'Black Wall Street,' Go Back to the 'Trail of Tears' | OWN Spotlight | OWN - YouTube - June 2, 2021. Blacks know about Black Wall Street. Indians know about the Trail of Tears. Few know that they were one and the same people.

During Indian Removal when the Cherokee and other southwest nations were marched across the south to Oklahoma. Many African descendent people traveled with them. Some were spouses or other relatives, and some had been enslaved by the Cherokee.

Upon their arrival, the Indians were granted land allotments. Later, so were the blacks. They all lived nearby and when the white supremacist burned down Black Wall Street in Tulsa, the Indians knew they would be decimated next.

That story of what the greedy elite whites did to the Indians, with poor white pawns, is told in a 2023 film by Martin Scorsese called Killers of the Flower Moon.

Machi Mapuche Juan Curaqueo

2022

The Regional Report - Latin America - CEEB 2022, summarizes the situation of trans people in Latin America and the Caribbean through the analysis of 4 axes:

1) access to the right to gender identity;

2) poverty and social exclusion;

3) forced migration; and

4) institutional violence.

The Regional Report 'Invisible Never Again' was launched in the framework of the 52nd General Assembly of the Organization of American States, from Lima, Peru.

Theological Grounding for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, A Discussion

2020

Slide show with audio presents a workshop. Its participants summarize a report of research findings based on a study of 1,103 participants in UU (Universal Universalist) churches across the United States. The four panelists of color call on the UU to be accountable to its theological values. It states the UU's essential commitments, identifies the cross-cutting themes, points out the key areas that require systemic change, and presents options for implementation drawn from comments gleaned from the national UU membership sample studied.

2022

Trans-spiritual leader and writer, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza identifies as a theologian because theology has shaped their faith and practices because "all theology is ethics. … My gender, my sexuality (are) all deeply informed by my understanding of theology and the craft of doing theology through things like story, and the fact that we are always becoming, we’re always changing, and that God is in all things."

Henderson-Espinoza continues:

"The church is a fold of supremacy culture. The church socializes people into what they think is right — cisgendered, straight and white body supremacy. That was my experience. Knowing that I was mixed Latinx, knowing I was different sexually, and in terms of gender, there was this internal feeling of ‘this is not right.’ But, you can’t come up against male leadership or male dominance in the church because they are the ones that are right.

I always knew in my gut that the way I was being socialized was not true for me. It wasn’t until I earned my degrees and had some level of authority that I could speak on this topic, to actually try to reduce harm, because I think I was harmed in the church. I think the ways I was socialized, the ways I was expected to be and act and believe was weaponized against me."

How Spirituality Helped an Interracial Couple Confront Racism

2022

A white male descendant of a very religious family of evangelical ministers rejected their Christian tradition. Nolan and his siblings instead joined the B'hai faith that teaches equality. He met his African American wife while practicing his new faith. She says he gave up some of his white privilege to marry her. He already belonged to the NAACP before they met and with the advent of their marriage, he began to understand for the first time the racial abuses black people suffer daily. She says that they bonded both through spirituality and activism.

2022

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, A manual for transitioning. Revised and reprinted.

Is Affirmative Action Asian Americans' R@.cial Triangulation? Asians Are Speaking Up

2023

Many Asian Americans are tired of whites using them as a model minority and as a wedge between whites and African Americans, who are being pushed to the bottom so whites can remain on top. While many Asian Americans have bought into the far-right political propaganda that says it unduly benefits Blacks and also marched for the fall of Affirmative Action, other Asians, saw the value that Affirmative Action held for Asians. They stood by it in coalition with Blacks and are trying to help their people to recognize that opposing Affirmative Action is not in their best interest. Now that the Supreme Court struck it down, they want their people to understand that they, too, will pay the cost of this racial retrenchment.

2023

Since the 1970s, there has been a growing movement in African American communities to go beyond the white man's religion. The assumption is that some spiritual truth has been hidden or misconstrued from a racial point of view.

Constraints on what Christians are supposed to believe and how they are supposed to behave began loosening when Mother Leafy Anderson began channeling Black Hawk in church.

Some African Americans left Christianity and went to Judaism or Buddhism. The idea grew that some of the original Jews were Ethiopians who had a Torah that long preceded the Christian Bible. Others returned to Egypt for spiritual teachings in the Pharaohs' pyramids. Still others turned to traditional African religions.

In short, for many African Americans, Christianity came to be seen as a misleading Western interpretation of the human relationship to divinity or universal consciousness. This turn away from being churched was stimulated by the missionary message that Africans were primitive polytheists or animists with no concept of a unitary Source.

This speaker reminds Africans and BIPOC coalitions that Africans were monotheists before the Muslims or Christians enslaved them. The gist is that people can directly relate to the Divine without being churched or ministered by others. This is not unique to African Americans or Indians who go their own way. It was the point of evangelical Protestantism to affirm that members of the congregation do not need a preacher. Like Stevie Wonder, they can have a talk with God.

THE PEOPLE ARE DANCING AGAIN: THE SILETZ TRIBE OF WESTERN OREGON by Charles Wilkinson

2023 

Who is Native American? Who is Black?

2023

Native Americans who form BIPOC coalitions are standing firm with history but may be going against the wishes of their nation when they affirm that many people classified as African Americans actually are Native Americans.

Cultural genocide is the topic discussed here by Professor Andrew Jolivette who identifies as a Louisiana Creole who has black, native and european ancestry.

He acknowledges the Kumeyaay people on whose land he works in San Diego area and he affirms the primary argument of this project: that the legal inquistional term, limpieza de sangre, gave rise to divisive terms that keep African Americans and Native Americans apart.

Here, he refers both to the one 'drop rule of hypo-descent' and to the federal concept of 'blood quantum.' Colloquially speaking, the one drop rule is all that is required to make one black. And yet, making that claim disqualifies black Indians who may have a sufficient 'blood quantum' from registering under federal terms as the official member of an indigenous nation.

Native Americans are required to carry a Certificate of Degree of Indian and Alaskan Ancestry Blood (CDIB), a certificate issued by the BIA that qualifies Indians as members of a certain tribe. Jolivette explores the implications of this fallacious policy and and considers what damage such thinking and practice does. He further suggests that African and Native American people would do well to relinquish this archaic thinking, even if white Americans do not.

Ari Melber Interviews Billy Porter

2023

Billy Porter, who had a rough childhood, reveals how he survived religious abuse and found his superpower when he finally had the spiritual courage to unleash his BIPOC third space authenticity having tried to suppress it for decades.