says poet and prophet Lucille Clifton. Something has tried to kill me and has failed. Over the past few few years, I have been forced to confront the somethings that have failed at killing me: white heteropatriarchal capitalist theological constructs, abusive religious leaders, heartless pundits, law enforcement organizations with military-strength capabilities. This has led me to conclude that, in words of theologian David Guetta, “I am titanium.”

A couple of years ago, I was sitting in my spiritual director’s office when he reached across his desk and handed me an interview of British theologian, James Alison. When asked what drew him to academic life, the ever-honest Father Alison quipped, “I’m...not sure that I’ve ever been drawn to the academic life as such. Theology has been a matter of survival for me.”

In that moment, I realized that like Father Alison, I do theology as a matter of survival. Like him, this journey has not been as full of lofty academic or professional goals as it has been the ebb and flow of life with God: desolation and consolation, life and death, oasis and wilderness.

While some do theology from the perches of power and privilege, others of us do theology as a form of survival. Never at one point during my short twenty-five years has my way of thinking about and reflecting upon God, Scripture, Church, or Life have I not wrestled with how these realities intersect with my own lived experience.

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I remember being a sophomore in college and sitting through sex week at my southern Church of Christ university chapel. During it, a local minister spent two days addressing homosexuality. On day one, he made the claim that the average gay man has no less than forty anonymous sexual partners per year and then went into eye-opening detail about anal sex.

Ever the scholar, I searched the minister’s claims on Google, desperately concerned that my experience as a person who was beginning to understand himself as gay was being misrepresented. This led me to find a group of Church of Christ members in Manhattan who were studying same-sex attraction and the Bible.



Months later, I had a lengthy conversation with that study group’s facilitator, a conversation in which I - a gay, black college student in rural Tennessee - told this New York-based former pastor that I understood myself to be gay and that I needed to figure out how I was going to continue living as a baptized person. Because for me, my budding understanding of my sexual orientation and the practice of Christian faith had become less a zero-sum showdown and more an awkward prom dance.

During that season of self-discovery, I began the difficult work of reflecting on the lines that had echoed in the inner-recesses of my heart for years:

“I am a failure.”

“I am going to hell.”

“There is no hope for me.”

“God will only love me if I’m straight.”

And then, for a few moments at a time, I would grant myself permission to wonder. Wonder if these lines actually held any truth. “Am I actually a failure?” I’d wonder aloud to God. “Am I really going to hell? Is there really no hope for me? Will you only love me if I’m straight?”

These are the questions of those of us who do theology as a matter of survival, the bare bone challenges we present before God and the church, daring them to look us square in the eyes and utter the truth. These are the questions of courageous people, of people who have experienced the underside of human experience, people who desire space to love and be loved. These are the gritty questions we often prevent ourselves from asking in Sunday School.

Theology as survival is Joseph telling the angel-god, “I will not loosen my grip on you until you give me a blessing.” Theology as survival is Job waving his fist before the Almighty, demanding an answer to the unmitigated suffering he experienced as God looked on. Theology as survival is Mary, the blessed Mother of God, making sense of her surprising, revolutionary pregnancy under brutal Roman occupation. Theology as survival is Rahab, more likely called harlot than heroine, lying just to keep a band of foreigners alive.

Doing theology as a matter of survival is doing theology as a matter of life and death. It is making sense of wounds inflicted by the people who are supposed to love, care, and protect us.

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Theology as survival is the mother who came up to me on the streets of Ferguson, MO on the afternoon of August 23, 2014 - two weeks after Michael Brown’s lynching by Darren Wilson - who said that she and her children would remain on the streets of that war-torn suburb until justice is done. I don’t care what FOX News or Glenn Beck say: That woman is not a victim. She is a survivor. She witnessed state law enforcement officers sworn to protect and serve her occupy the streets of her community like a foreign army. She watched as peaceful American protesters were teargassed by American state troopers. She took care of her children while local schools postponed the first day of classes due to civil unrest.

I grew up in a multicultural middle class neighborhood in Fort Worth, TX from birth until age 18. I was in classes and developed friendships with white, Latin@, Vietnamese, and Thai classmates. My parents took my brother and I on vacation every year and we always had warm, hefty Christmases. My grandparents lived five minutes from us, so we never had to go to day care. We spent every holiday with our large extended family; with my dad and uncles barbecuing the best brisket this side of the Mississippi River and my mom, aunts, and grandmothers preparing potato salad and baked beans even Ina Garten would drool over.

Since we were all black, I didn’t give much thought to racism. I watched my parents, aunts, and uncles play spades while my cousins, brother, and I talked about the newest episode of Kenan and Kel. Again, I didn’t think much about it. Because it’s all I knew. I knew I was loved. I knew I was safe. I knew I had nothing to worry about. Until I was sitting at Olive Garden with my immediate family one scorching evening in July.

I received a notification on twitter that said that George Zimmerman had been found not guilty in the death of Trayvon Martin, an eighteen year old unarmed black boy. I announced it to my and we just fell into silence for the next twenty-four hours. What could be said in the face of such evil, in the wake of another chapter in this nation’s ongoing campaign of terror against black people? Nothing.

That same evening, in a different region in the United States of America but in the same zip code in Black America, Alicia Garza took to Facebook to voice her rage. At the end of her lengthy post she wrote, “Our lives matter. Black lives matter.”

Little did I know that almost exactly thirteen months later, this mantra would emerge as the hashtag of a generation, the foundation of yet another iteration in the long journey toward black liberation on this continent. On August 9, 2014, after being killed by Officer Wilson, Michael Brown’s body lay limp and unattended in the oppressive Missouri sun for four hours.

According to my friend, Dr. Andre Johnson, a scholar of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner; he could have gotten word of Michael’s death at his home in Memphis, driven to St. Louis, and still have found Michael’s body lying in the middle of Canfield Drive. Over that four hours, the three hundred ninety-six year chasm between white and black people in this country grew exponentially. Because, just like in past eras of white terror, the black body had been left “hanging” or “lying in state” so that the rest of us could visualize our own fate.