“Don’t ever discount the wonder of your tears. They can be healing waters and a stream of joy. Sometimes they are the best words the heart can speak.” — The Shack by Paul Young
The prophets of God always express collective truth and speak to the powers that be. I first encountered the true prophet James Baldwin while acquiring my Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary. I was never assigned anything like The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin until 2019. Baldwin opens this book with an open letter to his 14-year-old nephew, also named James. Baldwin tells his nephew about the boy’s grandfather, who was utterly destroyed by believing what White society said about him: “As a Black man, you are subhuman.”
Religion was James’s grandfather’s saving grace. Baldwin, on the other hand, was not religious; Baldwin represents a new turning point and a departure from old ways of thinking about assimilation to Whiteness. The author encourages his nephew not to make the same mistake as his grandfather by believing what White people say about him. This rejection of Whiteness as a standard was a revolutionary idea to read while at Princeton, where I very clearly felt that Whiteness had been the standard and the norm.
After reading the book and turning every page, I remembered my rage at White supremacy. I remember thinking: “Baldwin wrote this almost 80 years ago, but it speaks to my whole spirit, summing up my experience as a Black woman today. How can this be? How can his writing be timeless and eternal, yet timely and relevant to today’s headlines? How could he have written something 80 years ago that feels like it was written yesterday?” My first experience with Baldwin was like finding a home in my discontent with the state of our often racist, sexist and homophobic world. Reading Baldwin made me feel like Blackness could be the standard for the first time in my life.
It made me angry that I hadn’t found Baldwin’s voice crying out in the wilderness sooner. “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time,” Baldwin said. So when I speak truth to power – sometimes with teary eyes and a grief-stricken heart – that is what it means to be prophetic. Like Baldwin, I have truth that must be told, and it was in the pages of his epistle within The Fire Next Time that I felt called to harness my gift of writing to rage on the page. From Baldwin, I learned that being prophetic means surrendering to righteous rage and succumbing to sacred tears to challenge oppressive systems that keep us detained, depressed, defeated, and destitute, even when it is unpopular and uncomfortable.
God sides with the oppressed, writes James Cone, founder and advocate of Black theology and Black liberation theology. Public theology cultivates faith into action in the public square personally and politically, through truth-telling. To tell the truth, as Martin Luther King Jr. said at the National Cathedral less than a month before he died in 1968, is to promote communal flourishing as “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” A public theology that bends toward justice allows righteous rage to propel communities toward creating a more just society through amplifying marginalized voices, and this theology sees dignified humanity in every individual.
For example, public theologies of merit understand there is no dignity in the genocidal acts maintained in Palestine. “Anatomy of a Genocide,” a report from the United Nations written by Francesca Albanese, said, “Genocide, as the denial of the right of a people to exist and the subsequent attempt or success in annihilating them, entails various modes of elimination … Genocide is a process, not an act.” Building tolerance for suffering is a process. Desensitizing us to the next school shooting is a process. The truth is that police brutality is a form of racial genocide, with police murdering unarmed Black people at a higher rate than any other racial group. Thus, writing as a type of public theology brings attention to the issues that affect our most marginalized people. All notable public theology prioritizes the last, least, lost and left behind.
The intersectionality of oppression
My overlapping identity as a Black, queer woman deepens my understanding of public theology. My writing becomes a vessel through which I express my faith and woundedness as a human living in a country marked by violence and hatred toward Black bodies. To add a layer, I am often too Christian for the queers and too queer for the Christians. Thus, our theology must have a self-awareness of how Christianity has historically marginalized Black and Brown folks and queer and trans people. Therefore, a worthy public theology prioritizes advocating for the most vulnerable people’s safety, dignity and community care. We can only advocate around issues of which we are conscious, so my public theology seeks to raise awareness.
Many people seek to become more conscious of oppression through an intersectional lens. Just this past Christmas, at the dinner table, I told my family how hard it is to show up to family gatherings and listen to them bash trans people. I attempted to convey how hard it was for me to listen to them call trans women “female impersonators” because I relate to the trans experience as a nonbinary person. I candidly opened up about how isolating it was to hear how they spoke with so much ignorance about an identity that I felt a quiet kinship with. They were Black, yet they couldn’t see how they were contributing to an added layer of marginalization for another historically oppressed group.
Despite my fear of telling them about how I contemplated not coming to holiday celebrations anymore because of their ignorant comments, I spoke my truth. Despite how they had made me feel isolated and uncomfortable over the past several years, they were quite receptive. They responded with openness, apologies and a request to learn more to understand my experience, how to move forward and how to engage more meaningfully with my intersectional identity. Their response reminds me that people seek to become more conscious of identities outside their own, but sometimes, they need to become more cognizant of their gaps in understanding or awareness.
Public theology can potentially fill gaps in understanding within the intersections of race, gender, faith, and grief.
Public theology can potentially fill gaps in understanding within the intersections of race, gender, faith, and grief. For example, the cultural norms and expectations surrounding Black grief and rage have been historically overlooked and ignored. Scant theologies around lament situate Black women as expected to remain strong amid personal and societal loss, while their feelings are often invalidated. The cultural stereotypes of the “strong or angry Black woman” aid in silencing Black women’s grief and rage and contribute to the perpetuation of systemic oppression and racism. Therefore, suffering from disallowed grief due to negative stereotypes becomes an issue of public concern.
After all, currently, these stereotypes contribute to adverse health outcomes for Black women. A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, covering almost 1 million births between 2008 and 2017, discovered that Black women are nearly 25% more likely to undergo unnecessary C-sections compared to White women, a practice that needlessly exposes Black women to the risk of life-threatening surgical complications. Furthermore, according to a CDC article, Black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth compared to White women in America. Many factors contribute to this inequity, such as the availability of quality healthcare, pre-existing health conditions, structural and medical racism, and implicit bias. Such stereotypes like the strong Black woman stand as barriers that inhibit Black lament, and they become an issue of public theology and basic civil rights as Black maternal mortality has become a public health crisis. What’s worse is the church plays a role in profiting from theologies that glorify suffering instead of centering marginalized voices.
Often, Christian narratives about suffering do not permit Black women to lament or rage. In an article in Essence magazine (2004), Professor Renita Weems identifies that many women in the African American church believe that “a good . . . faithful woman is [a] self-sacrificing woman, one who takes up her crown.” Embodying self-sacrifice normalizes Black women’s suffering to the point where they are so giving they give up their time, money, and their right to express emotions. The problem becomes this: the more they sacrifice in the name of faith, the more society will expect them to sacrifice, including their bodies and lives. This cycle quickly leads to the exploitation of their labor within Christian faith communities.
In light of the realities faced by Black women in America, my approach to public theology embraces a God who cries publicly and feels pain privately. This resurrects a God whose presence, amidst my pain, is sometimes only visible through tears. Public theology that goes beyond offering thoughts and prayers after tragedies; it allows my grief to fuel social change, with my tears and Baldwin-like rage catalyzing radical transformation. In this theology of Black tears, the waters of my ancestors well up in my eyes, becoming the only way to express my gratitude as I thank God that even in the face of racism, sexism, and capitalism, I can still speak out as a prophetic witness.
In the poignant hymn “Lift Every Voice,” the composer-prophet James Weldon Johnson penned the line “The God of our silent tears.” This powerful verse acknowledges the enduring sorrow experienced by Black Americans, echoing the rage and lament endured by my ancestors due to injustice. A genuinely honorable public theology recognizes this God of our silent tears, who deeply cares for the marginalized. Even when predominantly White institutions make one feel like Blackness could never be the standard. Even when family members say things that feel “othering” and isolating. Even when my ancestor’s trauma becomes mine. Even when our eyes collectively overflow with tears from centuries of struggle. Our tears become a form of prophetic witness. Psalm 56:8 reminds us, “You number my wanderings; You put my tears into Your bottle; are they not in Your book?” My faith rests in the knowledge that my tears are watering the ancestral seeds planted for social change. My faith rests in the knowledge that something will bloom from the very thing that right now feels buried. My faith rests in the revelation that I can cry out to God, and she will answer.
