Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd

by Tamice Spencer Helms

Where do you run when the only person you can turn to is White Jesus? I could not breathe. I could not sing another damn song about joy. I didn’t know it then, but I was fellowshipping with the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump, and there was leaven in the bread.18 How could they be so oblivious to the issue at hand? How could they not see it? Why did they argue with me so much about it? Why did I have to calm down? They were convinced all those who had been killed had done something wrong, something to deserve being gunned down like beasts with no family, no future, and no dignity. Why were all the pictures of the slain so dark and thuggish? Why were all the murderers in uniforms and family photos?

Even still, they were positive they were not racists. How could they be, when they were friends with me? They were just being objective, radical for the truth, swayed only by facts.

There had to be a way to love both God and my neighbor with a clear conscience and common sense. It had to be possible to love and follow Jesus in a way that would let me sleep at night. There had to be an answer for the carnage and something stronger than the rage. There had to be a way to love the Lord and breathe. I could not breathe. I didn’t need Jesus to be on the throne, I needed Jesus to come down here.

Sitting there alone on that creaky, wooden pew, my heart felt frozen as if I were witnessing a tragedy but I couldn’t even tell which way was up, let alone save myself. I went back and forth between missing Jesus and resenting him. I loved him and I doubted his existence. I identified as an atheist at least twice a week and still resorted to certain worship musicians when days were particularly dark. I had no idea where I was when it came to Christianity, but for some reason I never stopped taking communion. It was special to me. It was what I remembered most from my earliest days in church. I was drawn and driven to the mystery and tenderness of it. It felt like home in a way. It held space for me. Every week was the same as I wept and whispered some variation of the phrases: I think I still believe. I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what happened. I still love you. I can’t do this. Please don’t make me go back.

Whiteness is an ideology that normalizes the practices, beliefs, perspectives, and culture of white people so that they are the unspoken standard by which everything else is measured.51 In other words, it is the normalizing of white supremacy.

Whiteness isn’t an ethnicity. It is the subtext of everything whether theology, or ethics, or history, or economics. It is a logic and a hermeneutic—that is, a way to interpret and view the world.

In the Exodus story, God did not ask the Israelites to give up bread, just leaven. Unleavened bread symbolized the delineation between the people of Yahweh and the Empires all around them. Jacob and his family went to Egypt in search of bread and ended up in bondage.53 It was the same for me. My experience in white evangelicalism started with a spiritual hunger that the yeast of whiteness almost ruined over time. As I began recognizing and extracting the poisonous and putrid ideologies and belief systems that animated the Jesus I met there, I got free. Freedom happened for me the same as it did for the Hebrews: with a call to unleaven the bread of life.

Since the near accident with the “GOD IS REAL” car, I’d always felt close to God, but they told me he was far away from me. They said my name couldn’t be in the book until I repented of my sins and accepted Jesus. They said that though I had thought I was following God, I was really following something called my “flesh” the whole time. They told me God killed Jesus. What did Jesus even do to deserve that? I thought Jesus was a good guy. Why did God kill him? They told me it was because of me. They told me I had to identify as a sinner and admit that’s who I was at my core. This was news to me. My parents named me after themselves and my grandmothers. My father, Thomas, and my mother, whose middle name is Michelle, combined their names to make my first name, Tamice. And my middle name, Namae, is a combination of the middle names of my grandmothers: Leah Naomi and Dorothy Mae. Names are important to my family and testify to where I come from and who I am. But after meeting White Jesus, I wasn’t Tamice. I was a sinner. I wasn’t distinct. I wasn’t special. I wasn’t anything really apart from sin. It confused me because White Jesus was adamant about my name on the golden stairs, and now I was finding out that he had no use for who I was as an individual.

They told me that I shouldn’t question God, and the real question I should be asking was why any sinner would be allowed into heaven in the first place. After a while they grew weary of my questions, which confused me. My goal was to learn as much as I could about Jesus. I wanted to be a good Christian. And God didn’t seem to mind my questions before I was “saved.” but they told me I had to show God respect by obeying him and not questioning him. Through time I came to learn that my questions had been the result of my insufficient faith. Now I was becoming the person God made me to be. I began to feel like most of who I was needed to die if I wanted to follow Jesus. They said that was correct.

My suburban upbringing gave me the skills to navigate White Jesus’ church. I observed from a young age that there were two ways to be in the world. You couldn’t talk about certain things at school the way you could talk about them at home with family. White people didn’t mind if you were Black as long as you were not, you know … Blaaaaack. If you could take a joke and not be too sensitive, there would be no issues, and you could maintain the illustrious position of Black Friend.

The passion that once made me the life of the party was now an obsession that made me a recluse. The ache to be back in my room worshipping swallowed up every moment I wasn’t there. To do anything else or be anywhere else was unbearable. I was behaving like an addict. The need to satisfy my craving became overwhelming.

Many of my Black siblings walked out during this time. I should have, but I didn’t think I could. I was so afraid of being wrong about God. I wanted Jesus to like me and trust me.

The yeast of whiteness got in the way of my white friends’ ability to tell the difference between the violent, hegemonic nationalism at the Capitol and what is actually true about God. Democracy is not a threat to God. But democracy can be a threat to whiteness. The insurrection was not the Kingdom coming. My white friends and I were not on the same team, and we hadn’t been for some time.

Whiteness always asserts that its priorities are more important than any other, no matter how trivial.

The Bible cannot speak or interpret itself, and no one can read it bereft of their cultural lens. Too often, the Bible is a prop or an instrument to enforce the will of the wielder. And when the Bible is a prop, it can’t be prophetic. But scripture, taken on its own terms, cannot be a weapon because it is too often confounding and mysterious.

“We love you Tamice, you know that, but the scripture is clear. We cannot have fellowship with you anymore.” “Everybody keeps saying they love me lately. Right before they stop talking to me. If this is love, I want whatever came before it. I thought y’all were my friends. You guys are like my family. I didn’t realize that I was so disposable to so many people. Will I ever see you guys again?” “Well, a lot of us have been concerned about you for quite some time now. With you going on ad nauseum about Critical Race Theory, your decision not to fight for your marriage, and now this—surely you can’t be surprised that you’ve lost so many people.”

My experience with white evangelicalism was similar. It was toxic in so many ways, but it also offered me something. It made the world simple and straightforward. There was us and there was them. People were either saved or not, and we knew who was who. Light and truth were found here, evil and darkness were over there. I knew that sin and righteousness were incompatible and never the two shall meet. Whiteness creates binaries. Its entire purpose is to separate and categorize people and cultures according to a hierarchy. It’s evil, but evil can comfort, in its own perverted way.