Over 40 years ago American Blacks marched and rioted for their well-deserved civil rights of equality in the United States, yet in the recent Presidential election of President-elect Obama over 70 percent of Black Americans voted against Gay Marriage with Proposition 8. The reason being, that the majority of Black Americans in their own transition as denigrated slaves to becoming American citizens with equal rights absorbed the identical prejudiced White Christian Fundamentalist religious belief system that condemns, devalues, and dehumanizes homosexuality.
The symptoms of Black America’s prejudices can no longer be addressed with religious or political band-aids, while the spiritual disease and its cause goes untreated. Tragically, the only choice for African Americans to escape the murderous persecution of the Anglo Christian Puritanical government of British Colonial America from the early 17th Century to the late 18th Century was to concede to the dominating prejudices by enforcing the same belief systems upon themselves and their children.
The most famous and well-known religious emigration to America was the migration of the persecuted White Puritan separatists from the Anglican Church of England, who fled first to Holland, and then later to America, to establish the English colonies of New England, which later became the United States. The Pilgrims sought spiritual freedom along with the desire to Christianize the American Indian and the Black slaves that came with them. A massive emigration of all races followed the Pilgrims over the next 200 plus years, where people from around the world came to the United States to seek peace, freedom, and opportunity with the ideal of a spiritual oasis with economic freedom.
Sadly, the desire to convert others or remain in a perpetual conflict over belief systems, versus being in a natural state of peace, is still the prevalent societal factor of most of the US multi-racial population. When one studies ancient African religion and other animistic cultures, trying to convert another to a belief was considered not only disrespectful, but completely ‘taboo’.
The American Black culture arrived in the British Colonial Americas enslaved and culturally raped of their true belief systems that were rooted in nature worship, not in the Puritanical extrapolation of Anglican Christian dogma of biblical scripture, nor the ensuing Calvinist, Baptist, Quaker, or Mormon faiths. The African Americans were forced to give up their Spiritual animism that was viewed as “devil worship” to become Protestants and baptized Christians or die just as the Jews and other religious minorities were pressured into cultural unity in Europe by the Catholic Inquisition from 1438 - 1843 to become Catholics, loosing their core beliefs in order to survive or be burned as heretics.
The African animism of the pre-Christian era viewed homosexuality the same as heterosexuality in an integral part of human nature, just as pre-Christian pagan Romans and other great animistic civilizations of Egypt and India did. Homosexual persecution was born with the advent of Old Testament Hebrew teachings of Mosaic Law some 5,000 years ago in Israel that were later adopted in New Testament interpretations, which established Catholicism that followed with the further New Testament edits that created the ‘hybrid Christian faiths’.
There were tens of thousands of animistic tribes in pre-colonized Africa that believed in a creator God with a pantheon of archetypes within nature that were represented as deities. With the highly evolved Yoruba of West Africa that were founded over 8,000 years ago in the Sudan of pre- Pharonic Egypt, there is no specific belief in a Devil since the Yoruba belief system is not a dualistic philosophy - good versus evil, God versus a Devil.
Nor is there the concept of a ‘distant judgmental God’. Instead the universe is seen as containing forces of expansion and forces of contraction. Theses forces interact in complex ways to create the universe. All things are seen to have positive aspects, and negative aspects much the same as the East Indian concept of cause and effect in ‘karma’. Nothing is seen as completely "good" or completely "evil", but all things are seen as having different proportions of both.
Similarly, no action is seen as universally as “wrong” or “right” but rather can only be judged with the context and circumstances in which it takes place. This concept is sometime derided as "situational ethics". In this context the individual is seen as made up of both positive/constructive impulses as well as negative/destructive impulses.
An individual's sexuality, talents, and facilities are seen as having a potential of both positive and negative expression in a balance within natural law. Therefore, there is a great deal of attention and focus on each individual striving to develop good character and doing good works.
Good character is defined as doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not out of fear of retribution or as a way of seeking rewards, but simply because it is right. All humans are seen as having the potential of being good and blessed people (no original sin), although they have a potential to make evil choices, and the universe is seen as benevolent.
African Spirituality was actively suppressed and outlawed during slavery from the onset of the Islamic conquest of Africa that brought the Arab slave traders, who forcefully converted these noble people to Islam and turned African slavery into a huge labor-force business for themselves, the Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and finally for the Americas.
On the European colonized continents of Africa and the Americas native traditions were viewed as inherently backward and "primitive” by the European colonizing forces, who set out to actively "civilize" the natives through a number of mechanism including torture, rape, male castration, female reproductive mutilation, execution; kidnapping the young and putting them in " Catholic or Christian boarding schools;" bribing or using other material incentives. Intimately implicated and complicit in this process were Christian missionaries, who charged themselves with "saving the souls" of the native peoples by converting them from their millennia old traditional spirituality in “Nature Religion” practices to that of Christianity.
Within the European and North American Christian culture African Spirituality has been historically demonized, sensationalized and distorted. Hollywood’s portrayal of African traditions has been mired with gross distortions and exaggerations that are filtered through a Judaic-Christian fear paradigm that sells shock-entertainment.
The historic repression of African spirituality in the context of slavery has as well as racism been portrayed with cultural imperialism and supremacy that has ballooned into cancerous contemporary values. The notion that a legitimate, sophisticated spiritual philosophy could have originated in Africa flies in the face of widespread distortions in Europe and North America about the backwardness of African culture. The controversies and criticisms of this tradition have to be viewed within this historic context.
The only way the Black American could elevate himself in society over the course of the last 135 years since slavery was abolished within the United State’s was to completely identify with the cruel and bigoted white culture and loose all connection to their animistic religious roots. Sadly, there are many Black Americans who are unconsciously angry that they were mandated into Christianity and told that their African beliefs were unnatural, barbaric, and evil. Simultaneously, the Black American societal tendency to disparage their race and become intolerant and totalitarian occurred as the White Christians Supremacists perpetuated them.
The African cultures of the more tolerant Spanish colonized Caribbean and South America countries retained their spiritual beliefs and synchronized their religion with not only Catholicism, but with the Caucasian race. The rebellious and unorthodox Catholic based white culture of these colonies blended with the African culture, while that did not occur in the spiritually and racially intolerant fundamentalist Protestant government of British ruled Northern US. French colonized Louisiana was Catholic, and there was a cultural mélange that occurred there until the Civil War that brought Northern social values to the South.
In the non-British colonies, when a white master/mistress married a Black slave he/she adopted her/his beliefs, which was not the case with Northern US slave owners. This is due to the Protestant core theology that pervaded all aspects of the society in the American North. Today, the fact is that there is a happier Black culture in terms of tolerant belief systems thriving for the most part as a collective race in the majority of the Spanish Caribbean and South American nations than there is in the US per capita.
When government and society are ruled by a fear-based religion such as Christian Protestantism, a collective ignorance prevails, preventing the individuated experience or thought to exist. Secret societies raise suspicion and speculation among outsiders, and few individuals respect that the initiated members of such societies are the guardians of ancient spiritual wisdom; in the same way a Catholic Priest or Jewish Rabbi has received their initiations.
Spiritual secrets are protected and concealed behind a wall of silence from the ridicule and contempt of the profane or uninitiated. The sacred can easily be eliminated when religion or government is ruled by the psychological manipulations of shame, fear, and guilt that support victimization and human denials, which historically perpetuate financial greed and domination to establish unity.
What is not understood is inevitably hated, mistrusted, and savagely destroyed such as the primary world religions brutally did to the of spirituality of the indigenous people of the Americas, the great Tantric sexual sects of India and Asia, Polynesian Paganism, and African Animism.
We have entered a time in which the core ignorance of antiquated Imperialistic global religious cultures that support such fear is slowly being transformed into an illuminated wisdom through the very painful cause of its creation in the highly visible “War of Belief Systems”.
How can the Black American become aware of his inherent ancestral belief systems, when White Christian Americans created an evolving Black generational spiritual genocide that has developed the African American culture into a White culture clone?
Contemporary Christianized Black culture could benefit collectively by looking deeper into the truth of their religious origins with an educational effort free of Anglo fear-based religious superstition to see how there culture has been brainwashed into Eurocentric beliefs that are not founded on their true African identity in the world’s oldest religion – Animism.
Zachary Selig, Yoruba Priest
© Zachary Selig 11.8.2008
Website: www.zacharyselig.com
