Blacks, Mirroring Larger U.S. Trend, 'Come Out' As Nonbelievers

[Ahimsa]

WASHINGTON (RNS) Standing before a room full of fellow African-Americans, Jamila Bey took a deep breath and announced she’s come out of the closet. Her soul-bearing declaration is nearly taboo, she says.

“It’s the A-word,” said Bey, 33, feigning a whisper. “You commit social suicide as a black person when you say you’re an atheist.”

Bey and other black atheists, agnostics and secularists are struggling to openly affirm their secular viewpoints in a community that’s historically heralded as one of America’s most religious.

At the first African Americans for Humanism conference recently hosted by the non-profit Center for Inquiry, about 50 people gathered to discuss the ins and outs of navigating their dual identities as blacks and followers of the non-religious philosophy known as humanism.
…
Mia Fite, a student at Johnson & Wales University in Colorado, attended the conference for that assurance. She counts herself as one of the few non-religious people among her predominantly black circle of friends.

“You expect it from white people, but it’s rare for African-American people to talk critically about religion,” she said.
…
Yet the movement is seen by some black leaders as more of a threat than an opportunity. On any given Sunday morning, the Rev. Kenneth Fowlkes’ voice rises in dramatic crescendos from his pulpit at Kingdom Builders Church of God in Christ in Hanover, Md., rousing the congregation to clap, stomp, and dance.

“Humanists are encouraging African Americans to go to hell,” he said in an interview.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

Once upon a time, I suppose you could say the American Negro was the archetypical Christian sufferer, dispossessed, powerless, and leaning on God as his or her only hope. And by and large they still don’t seem to have the same opportunities. Gospel music came directly from their suffering.

But now a lot of them are involved in the inner city gang warfare, the drugs, the hip hop music scene, and one could wonder just how many are really religious. Coming from the other side of the Pacific without any first hand experience of US culture, this might seem a bit sweeping, but the old style African American appears to be a far cry from his modern counterpart.

And with atheism a rising trend in the US, I’m not surprised that it is affecting African Americans as well, particularly as they get more educated.