BAME Anglican

Dear Naomi, Thank you for tweet asking how to be a good ally. In our current situation, it is important that liberal voices unite and stand together, as Christians, we are commanded to speak up against injustice. Racism like ever other discrimination is ugly and has the power to hurt and humiliate. Unpleasant interactions have the power to cause people to lose their faith. To be an ally takes courage, to listen and act, it requires self-examination. You will hear things that will make you feel complicit in racism, it is uncomfortable to hear this as you are an ally, however this is where you must ask yourself how you benefit from this system. For example as a non disabled person I benefit from a world that caters to my body, seldom thinking about ramps, parking, hearing aids and crowds. While I am sympathetic to the cause I benefit from being able bodied. To change that I must change the way I think of the world. This change takes time but it is possible. ...

A while back we were talking about how to reach out to BAME people in church. I said it would be nice to organise events that celebrated blackness and included black people in the daily services. After a minute of silence someone said ‘we can celebrate Eid with the local Muslims to improve race relations’.  Most of the white people in the room looked pleased with themselves, the only other person of colour and I looked at each other rolled our eyes.   We were specifically asked about race not religion and the issue of inclusion of BAME Anglicans. Islam is not a race and the religion is not confined to race or ethnicity. All people of colour are not Muslim either. BAME Christians live under a constant gaze, we are asked to prove our credentials at all times. The church often becomes a checkpoint where we have to display our documents to prove we are who we say we are. Our allegiance is always suspect. I worship in a church with white neo converts, they ...

A despotic king orders his servants to perform sexual favours, they refuse, he slaughters them. A sexual revolutionary enraged by his subjects lack of sexual openness after their conversion to Christianity kills them. The story of the Ugandan martyrs is read in many ways, either through racial or queer retellings. Certain afrocentrists have presented King Mwanga II Basammula Ekkere as a bisexual man who was trying to resist foreign Christianity. Anti LGBT groups have written about this incident pointing out the depravity of gay people. Context in which these acts took place are lost in these politicised retellings. Christianity in the continent of Africa has had a long history appearing in the early days of when the faith was being established and also during colonial times. As with conversion through the centuries neo converts have had to negotiate their place in society, which often turns hostile towards them. Rejecting their non-Christian past converts ha...