From “The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing” by Yolanda Pierce
So it grieves my spirit that so many churches, so many religious spaces, have been sites of humiliation and shame for individuals and groups. I mourn that a place that taught a little Black girl that she could go to a college no one had ever seen before is the same place that tells someone else they are going to hell for who they love or who they marry. I lament the private and public humiliations suffered by those whose truths and identities are mocked from the pulpit. I grieve with those whose humanity, vocational calling, or salvation seems under debate by way of narrow-minded sermons and poor biblical exegesis.
The hot sting of shame in your cheeks and your chest, that feeling of humiliation that settles into the pit of your stomach: those are far too common experiences in churches. I’ve heard people shamed from the pulpit for what they were wearing or how they styled their hair. I’ve listened as ministers shamed the poor or those with addictions. I’ve grieved as pastors humiliated single mothers and unmarried women in sermons from behind the sacred desk.
These hierarchies, in which those with power and privilege – or those who simply wield the microphone – shame and blame others and reinforce their “superior” social standing, diminish the radical equality God promises in places like Galatians 3:28. These hierarchies fail to recognize that we are all one in Christ Jesus and that our work as Christians is to exalt God, not to shame our neighbors.