A church in Chicago has taken the annual award for the most religiously embarrassing event of 2022 just three full months into the year.
The First United Church of Oak Park has been “fasting from whiteness” for Lent — the 40 days of penance and sacrifice that begin Ash Wednesday, and during which sane Christians prepare for the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.
As Lent began, the church announced that it would not perform hymns written by white composers or musicians. And apparently, it “fasted” from anything else that crawled out of the fetid swamp of white privilege and supremacy.
A Big Mix
The church announced that it “is doing a mix of ‘giving something up’ and ‘taking something on,’” the New York Post reported. Anything the white man wrote has been exiled from its musical selections.
“In our worship services throughout Lent, we will not be using any music or liturgy written or composed by white people,” the church announced:
Our music will be drawn from the African American spirituals tradition, from South African freedom songs, from Native American traditions, and many, many more.
As well, the church announced, “for Lent, it is our prayer that in our spiritual disciplines we may grow as Christians, united in the body of Christ with people of all ages, nations, races, and origins.”
Video dated March 6 features a priestess, Lydia Mulkey, explaining to the congregation why “white voices” will not be heard. Giving up television and chocolate for Lent isn’t enough. Whiteness is the real enemy to conquer:
In this fast from whiteness, of course, I cannot change the color of my skin or the way that allows me to move through the world. But I can change what I listen to, whose voice I prioritize. And so that is kind of the place for our worship services, through Lent, that we would fast for a time from prioritizing white voices, and that we would use the music and poetry of black, indigenous, and people of color, and see what the spirit might do among us.
What all that has to do with Lent isn’t quite clear, but anyway, the church confessed that its hate-whitey “Lenten theme has spurred considerable discussion, with some people questioning the message,” its website says:
In practice with the Lenten spiritual discipline of fasting, our intent was to lay aside our usual frames of reference and open ourselves to hearing the Gospel message through the voices of Black People, Indigenous People, and People of Color. Our worship services in Lent have been diverse and beautiful. We pray that God oils the hinges of our hearts’ doors that they might swing open gently to receive the good news of Christ’s resurrection, which we all await at the culmination of Lent.
The neocon Turning Point USA published photos of the church’s “Fasting from Whiteness” lawn sign and one of the church’s “evotionals,” which is devoted to leftist radical Bruce Reyes-Chow, an “elder” in the Presbyterian Church USA.
An excerpt from Reyes-Chow’s book, In Defense of Kindness, defends violent street protest, TPUSA reported. Law-abiding Americans, he believes, must not stop them. Cities must burn.
Reyes-Chow views “civil discourse” this way:
For many of us, being uncomfortable about public protests or what we perceive as aggressive expressions of frustration simply identifies our privilege and our ability to shield ourselves from the struggles that others are facing. May our call to civil discourse be more about listening to the genuine struggles of our human sisters, brothers, siblings, neighbors, and strangers than about protecting our own spaces of security. Most people do not engage in public protest or in expressing anger that may put risk on their life, work, or status. So when groups of people are pushed to their boiling point, the least helpful thing to do is to silence them.
Reverend Craig Howard, the executive presbyter of the United Church of Christ’s Chicago district, supports the hate-whitey fast, the Washington Times reported.
“I find it’s like a reversal of the racialized reality in which we live,” he told the newspaper. “Where, in this reality, the assumption is that what is to be known, is what the majority culture, the white culture, determines or says these are the rules.”
Howard continued:
It sounds to me that they’re kind of flipping it, saying instead of making the majority voice the loudest voice, we’re going to listen to the minor players [who have not] been heard in the past, and make them the primary players again.
They did not say, we’re going to ignore the white voice. We’re just going to now just tone it down and see what voice has come to the top and see what message we may get from those voices.
In fact, “ignoring the white voice” is exactly what the church said it would do.
The church did not say whether its members should not consume hot cross buns — a traditional Easter treat invented by a white English monk in the 14th century, some accounts say.
