The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

I took note of Mr Natino Thompson’s response to an opinion piece I had forwarded to the dailies recently. Thompson’s LGBTQI polemic brought to mind progressive “Christian” author Jan Hatmaker’s affirmation of same-sex marriage in 2016. Hatmaker, Troy Perry and Rob Bell have failed to successfully repudiate the historic church’s entrenched position, dating two millenia, on LGBTQI. The apostle Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin all condemned homosexuality as a deviation from the natural order prescribed in Genesis 1:26-28 and 2:23-24. Thompson and an increasing number of Black LGBTQI apologists recognises this, and have consequently aligned themselves with the militant atheism of African American novelist James Baldwin. I came to this assumption based on Thompson’s anti-Christian letter. Baldwin was a homosexual. His performance in a 1965 debate about the American Dream and the Negro with William F Buckley at Cambridge University is considered legendary within the LGBTQI community. Born in 1924 in Harlem to a father who was a factory worker and Baptist preacher and a mother who was a domestic worker, Baldwin dabbled in the Christian ministry at age 14, when he preached for three years at Harlem’s Fireside Pentecostal Church.

According to a Washington Post eulogy published on December 2, 1987 -- a day after his demise in France due to stomach cancer -- Baldwin believed that the “church was in part responsible for the oppression of Blacks in America.” Two of his novels, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room,” are largely autobiographical, according to The Washington Post. The former is considered Baldwin’s public acknowledgement of his sexual orientation. His 1948 relocation to France was his way of escaping racial and sexual discrimination in the US. He would eventually move back to the US in 1958, where he, along with another prominent African American homosexual named Bayard Rustin, assisted Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in the Civil Rights movement. Baldwin would serve in the Congress of Racial Equality. Perhaps the involvement of Baldwin and Rustin in the movement to end racial inequality has led LGBTQI apologists to conflate homosexuality with race. I also suspect that Baldwin’s radical opposition to Christianity was due to the traditional church’s refusal to affirm his sexual orientation. This would lead him to embrace militant atheism. Bahamian LGBTQI members, at least many of them, seem to be following in the footsteps of Baldwin. Like Baldwin, they have fallen prey to a false narrative that Christianity is the White man’s religion. However, nothing can be further from the truth.

According to African American Christian apologist Jerome Gay, Namibia, Mauretania, Byzacena and Libya all had thriving Christian communities a full millennium prior to the German Reformation. In fact, the Cappadocian Fathers Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa were all deeply influenced by the African Patristic Fathers Origen, Didymus the Blind and Tyconius. Moreover, the African theologian Athanasius was nicknamed “The Dark Dwarf,” which suggests that he was short and black. And Augustine, considered to be the greatest theologian in church history not named Paul the apostle, was an African. Other notable African church fathers are Clement, St Anthony, Cyprian, Lactantius, Minucius Felix and Tertullian. Had Baldwin known this, maybe he would’ve had a different perspective on Christianity, without excusing the blatant racial discrimination within the evangelical church in North America. Moreover, like Baldwin, Mr Thompson, assuming he’s an atheist, must repudiate the Big Bang Theory; the Cosmic Microwave Background; Hubble’s Law; Pascal’s wager; Thomas Aquinas’s five arguments for the existence of God and the Second Law of thermodynamics.

I know of no atheist who has been able to do so. In the final analysis, militant atheism appeals to LGBTQI Bahamians because it absolves them of the moral responsibility that they intuitively know that they have to their Creator Who will one day judge them. And I stand by my original position that the Davis administration does not need to specifically mention the LGBTQI community in its Blueprint for Change. As Thompson has already rightly or wrongly noted, this current administration is the queerest in history. At this point, I am left to wonder if Thompson and his camp will soon agitate for the creation of a ministry of LGBTQI+ affairs.

In closing, I would like to leave two important quotes from Pastor Jerome Gay, of which I hope Mr Thompson will read:

“The whitewashing of Christianity and its Eurocentric focus has led to growing sentiment among people of African descent, as well as people across the globe, that Christianity is a Western-created, European-influenced, white-owned religion of oppression.”

“In order to accurately present the gospel and the Christian faith, we must understand that Christianity is not the cultural property of any single racial or ethnic group; rather, it has always existed as a family of chosen people composed of every nation, tribe, and tongue.”

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport, Grand Bahama.

July 25, 2022.