By Jimmie Briggs
Last May, two successive gatherings occurred in the neighboring African nations of Uganda and Kenya less than 24 hours apart. Despite being geographically distinct, their respective attendees held disturbingly coordinated agendas: to promote policy, legislation, and cultural practices intended to curb the visibility and rights of LGBTQIA+ Africans.
In Uganda, the first Pan African Family Values Conference was held from May 9–11, while the subsequent one in Kenya, the second Pan African Family Values Conference, took place from May 12–17. Delegates came from throughout the African continent and the global West, including donors, faith-based leaders, nonprofit representatives, and government officials from Uganda, Kenya, Egypt, and the Gambia, among scores of others.
These two events represent a growing and existential threat to Africans who self-identify as queer on a continent where 31 of 54 nations legalize varying forms of oppressive restrictions on being openly so.
At the forefront of the movement of African and Black American faith leaders to counter the efforts of these so-called “family values” activists and the largely U.S.-based actors supporting them is an openly gay minister named Bishop Joseph Tolton. Reared by a single mother in Harlem, he aims to do nothing less than revitalize a new Pan Africanism — the anti-colonial philosophy that espouses the full socio-political and cultural empowerment of all African-descended peoples — as presented by leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jomo Kenyatta in the early to mid-20th century. They aim to build an intergenerational movement standing against a rise in global authoritarianism and anti-gender rights in both the United States and the African diaspora.
“When I was five years old, I would come home from church and put the bible on my windowsill,” recalled Tolton. “We lived on 118th Street between Eighth Avenue and St. Nicholas. My room faced an alleyway between two buildings, and the neighbors would call my mother and grandmother, asking, ‘Do you hear him preaching?’ Whenever we played ‘church’ as kids, I would always play the pastor, and it was very visceral. I felt extremely connected to both the substance and the performative aspects of it, even as other children my age didn’t feel the same connection.”
Growing Up in the Black Church
Tolton’s mother, an educator and activist, saw him as a direct product of the still-nascent, but wavering, Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s, enrolling him in Head Start and Montessori School. When he was in third grade, she advocated for his transfer to PS 6, a prestigious school in Manhattan, which marked a pivotal change in his educational journey and set him on a path to success. Reared in a strong religious community curated by his mother and grandmother, and raised as an only child, he grappled as an adolescent with reconciling his faith with his sexual identity.
“To feel this anointing and call to preach at 8, 9, 10 years old, but also to know that ‘wait a minute, something else is going on’ — what’s going on inside of me [was] on a collision course with what I’m being set up for because I know what the bible says. In college at Vassar is where it started to change.”
Graduating with a degree in religion, Tolton spent the next five years in therapy, hanging out with friends as well as searching for a church that he hoped would affirm his whole self.
Bishop Tolton ministering in Africa.
“I came out to my best friend in the church who was getting married, and he wanted me to be his best man,” recalled Tolton. “In part, I came out to him ’cause I didn’t want to stand next to him [at his wedding] without telling him the truth. I had no interest in him [sexually], and he was truly a brother to me. I came out to him and his fiancée. Then, they turned me in to the pastor, saying I couldn’t be a part of the wedding. That was also a major turning point for me, where I knew I am unsafe here [in that church].”
Eventually, Tolton found a New York-based church started by the late Carl Bean. A Baltimore native and founder of the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church, Bean was a pioneering minister not only known for a successful hit song celebrating being gay, “I was born this way,” but also an outspoken activist who challenged the Black community to embrace and care for those felled by AIDS at the height of its spread. He sent an associate to Brooklyn to start planting an incarnation of the church in Brooklyn, and it was discovering it that “broke open” for Tolton what could be accomplished as a gay Black man in the church.
“When I told my mom I was leaving [our] church and going to this church in Brooklyn, it got tense at home,” said Tolton. “She was devastated, not just because her son was gay but because this was going to upend her ‘project.’ My grandmother stood with me the whole time. [She] was Baptist. My mom was Pentecostal. Eventually, [my mother] came around to being accepting of who I am as a person, as an intellectual, as an activist. She still doesn’t reconcile the theology, but she certainly embraces the anointing and the call of God in my life.”
An MBA from Columbia Business School led to Tolton spending nearly two decades working in marketing for clients including Mercedes-Benz, while evolving his theological practice and community organizing skills. Eventually, he planted a handful of churches in East Africa and established the LGBTQIA+ inclusive, “straight-friendly” Rehoboth Temple Christ Conscious Church in 2006.
Increasing Support in the Black Community
The views of Black Americans have become much more nuanced and diverse in the past decade, although that was not always the case, especially at the height of the AIDS epidemic, which ravaged the community throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. According to the Pew Research Center, support for same-sex marriage among Black Americans grew twofold between 2007 (26%) and 2017 (51%).
Blacks who identify as Christian oppose marriage equality at a higher rate than the general public, but support among them has nevertheless grown as well. Support for trans Americans is much softer. Two-thirds of Blacks believe gender identity is that assigned at birth and cannot be changed, again, much higher than that of the American public at large. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Black Americans (2/3) believe that more should be done for young, Black LGBTQIA+ people.
In 2019, Tolton founded and became president of Interconnected Justice, an initiative to unite global racial justice movements, specifically Black Lives Matter and Pan-Africanism, to confront white supremacy, patriarchy, and anti-rights efforts regarding gender and sexual identity. As part of Interconnected Justice, he is building the “Affirming Elders Council” to create greater thought proximity and support for Black spiritual leaders, young and old, on the African continent and in the United States. To date, he has co-founded three churches in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda, as well as established working partnerships with more than 22 multi-national counterparts.
“There is a profound need, and opportunity, for a renewed Pan African mobilization to address people of African descent globally,” said Chicago-based, Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, a globally recognized advocate, founder, and executive director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, and member of Tolton’s Affirming Elders Council. “It’s important to connect U.S. policies — especially the ‘Project 2025’ blueprint being enacted, with their international impact, particularly in Africa. African Americans have a responsibility to make a difference. There are persistent challenges of homophobia and transphobia within the Black community, but we need to move beyond a monolithic view of Black faith and elevate human rights conversations grounded in theological reflection.”
Carruthers acknowledged the reality that younger generations may be more open to certain conversations about gender and sexuality, and said there’s a gap in historical knowledge and legacy leadership that has to be addressed. “The Elder Council, as envisioned by Bishop Tolton, can play a crucial role in bridging this gap and sharing wisdom across generations, especially considering the accelerated pace at which generations are now defined, due to technological advancements.
The Fight for Africa
The investment of financial resources and messaging tools used in anti-LGBTQIA+ efforts in Africa by U.S.-based evangelicals is well-documented and growing. As the LGBTQIA+ community garnered increased social acceptance and legal protections in the late 1990s and early aughts in the 21st century, a number of right-leaning faith-based leaders and entities shifted more focus to Africa. It’s estimated that U.S. evangelical groups spent tens of millions of dollars (at least $54 million between 2007–2020) in Africa to influence laws, policies, and public opinion against sexual and reproductive rights, with a significant portion directed toward Uganda, which is considered to have the harshest penalties for homosexual identity on the African continent.
Global gatherings such as those that occurred in Uganda and Kenya in May reinforce cultural mindsets that queer people are a threat to “traditional” values and threaten the existence of nuclear families. Conservative Christian groups actively lobby African governments to push for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, as well as spread hate-fueled misinformation linking gay Africans to deviant behaviors and threats to children. Paradoxically, many of the current anti-gay legislation in Africa extends to pre-decolonization, when countries such as Britain, France, and Belgium exercised proxy rule over millions of Africans throughout geographies.
“Religious leaders, especially here in Kenya, often have their words equated with divine authority,” said Dr. Dorcas Chebet Juma, an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of East Africa and a senior lecturer at Pwani University who met Tolton around 2013 or 2014 while department chair at the Presbyterian University of East Africa. “It is critical to have the right religious leaders promoting inclusivity and respect for all individuals. In Africa, they have the authority to empower or marginalize communities, which imposes challenges on both sides.”
Having completed her PhD at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, Chebet Juma was drawn to working with Tolton through workshops and program development for faith leaders in Africa and the United States, to address an epidemic of sexual violence and promote intersectional justice for all.
“We read scripture from a liberating perspective, focusing on gender-based violence in biblical texts,” she said. “Human sexuality is a power issue, and powerlessness allows marginalization and silencing of vulnerable groups. Increasingly, we’re seeing more LGBTQI+ people speak out about their identities, but safety is always an issue.”
Despite the tremendous success Tolton has had to this point in building a movement at the intersection of Black Lives Matter, a revitalized 21st-century Pan Africanism, and LGBTQIA+ rights with his Black American and African partners, he understands the Herculean task ahead in light of the re-energized anti-rights movement with the ascendance of autocratic-leaning heads of state around the world, including the United States.
“This work between Africans and Black Americans comes full circle for me,” Tolton said. “After working with LGBTQIA+ leaders in East Africa for about 10 or 11 years, it became very clear to me that there was an opportunity for a project that I think is even deeper and richer: the reconciliation of people of African descent across the continent with those of us in the diaspora.
“Our primary focus is building a constructive movement that harvests Black internationalism in the interest of rebuking the global white Christian agenda. They are destabilizing African democracies by creating moral panic around matters of human sexuality by driving these anti-gay bills, leading to campaigns where countries want to de-democratize their constitutions and enshrine the possibilities of bigotry … it makes Africa’s resources pliable, and we know that’s really what they want.”
Tolton pointed out an economic aspect to this issue: “When you can exhaust the people by channeling their efforts and energy toward anti-gay campaigns, which are ultimately anti-Black and anti-human campaigns, it makes Africa’s [natural resources] like gold, copper, and cobalt much more exploitable.”
The post Gay by the grace of God: A Black pastor’s journey appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.