Cultivating Agapic Energy
Content Warning: This essay contains discussion of racism and violence.
Why Lessons from Black Christians in the Civil Rights Movement?
Learning from the whole body of Christ is always a valuable endeavor. We are almost automatically enriched by understanding more about the lives and faith journeys of people and people groups unfamiliar to us, and the Side B community is largely unfamiliar with the lives and faiths of Black American Christians at this time. However, this is changing rapidly and consistently through testimony and relationship!
One of the issues that LGBTQ+ and same-sex attracted Christians, and especially Side B folks, have often dealt with is conflict from other Christians and from Christians who we ostensibly already have theological agreement with. Frequently, what is experienced isn’t just conflict but also material harm inflicted by both individuals and institutions. This is an experience shared by and openly addressed by many Black Christians since the earliest days of the American colonies. As such, it is worth looking at how Black Christians have found ways to deal with this feeling of separation from other Christians in sustainable, life-giving, Jesus-centered ways.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer was a Southern Black American woman born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, on October 6, 1917. She occupied many roles throughout her life, including wife, Christian, sharecropper, civil rights activist, community organizer, proto-environmental justice advocate, and mother. She and her husband, Perry, parented several youths in her small community, though she did not have biological children, in part because of a hysterectomy conducted on her without her consent by a white doctor. Hamer herself coined this procedure the “Mississippi appendectomy,” and it was one of several forced sterilization procedures frequently performed by eugenicist doctors on “undesirables” without their knowledge or consent in the 1980s: usually poor women and disproportionately Black, Asian, and Native American women.
I bring this up because I think it is hard to quantify the sense of despair, violation, helplessness, and rage experienced by women like Fannie Lou Hamer, who had their bodies invaded and altered for white supremacist purposes with no recourse until such violence was treated as routine, because it was routine, along with the financial desperation, hunger, and dehumanization. Hamer’s life and work were built on a foundation of love that allowed her to reach out to folks whose hearts were genuinely filled with hate for her and people like her. At the same time, that love did not allow her to be complacent in confronting those with the power to change her life circumstances and that of many like her. Resistance motivated by agapic love lives in this tension–a productive tension that forges Christlikeness in the people who live in it. This Christlikeness both calls to the carpet fellow believers who refuse to care for their siblings in Christ but does so from a place of seeing the possibility for good in them, and calling them to live into the fruit of the Spirit.
The resistance work that Hamer was particularly involved in was voting rights, economic opportunity, and education for African Americans in Mississippi. In 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to her town of Ruleville to inform African Americans of their constitutional right to vote–a fact that many, including Hamer, had no idea of. From the moment she learned that she should have been able to vote, Hamer was committed to doing so herself and supporting others in seeking the right and opportunity to vote. This journey took her all the way from the county registration to speaking at the Democratic National Convention, to running for office as a state representative, with threatening phone calls, arrests, and physical beatings from police officers in between.
Re-centering on Love
In her book Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Racial and Environmental Justice Concerns, Rev. Dr. Karen D. Crozier explores Hamer’s approach to resistance based on Hamer’s understanding of the law of God. For Fannie Lou Hamer, the basis of that law was love. Like many other Black Christians, love is the core of resistance and resilience, the core of tearing down idolatries and building up communities. First, the love God poured out on us by coming to live with us, to die for us, and to rise again and prepare a place for us by His side. This love of God showed up as tearing down idols that seek to supersede the position of God in our lives and loves—in this case, the idol of supremacy in general and white supremacy in particular. This emphasis–this core motivation–shows up again and again in the writings, speeches, songs, and strategies of Black Christian advocates of Civil Rights: from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to James Baldwin, from Dr. Cornel West to Fanny Lou Hamer herself.
The second love making up the Black Christian core of resistance is love for one another, for those who are pursuing the life of Christ and the coming of the kingdom of God together, often termed “brotherly love” or “Christian love.” This love means caring about the plight of our siblings in Christ and being concerned with changing the conditions that negatively affect their lives and souls. However, she also recognized that Christian love had not moved most land owners, lawmakers, pastors, or sheriffs from their position of supporting racial segregation, an institution that purposefully separated and disenfranchised everyone not considered White. As Dr. Crozier puts it is that “Christian love needed to be broadened, tested, and refined in ways that entailed both personal and social change to stand against the laws enacted and practiced that dismissed the humanity of black lives.”
The third type of love that motivated resistance in the Black Civil Rights Movement from Black Christians is love for anyone and everyone created in God's image, for each person, and for each part of God's handiwork. This love always included love for one’s self as a part of God’s creation, as one made in the image of God, and as a member of the Body of Christ. Love for oneself showed up as internalizing a sense of personal dignity (in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, a sense of “somebodiness”) and, from that sense of personal dignity, advocating for oneself to be treated as such. This type of self-regard was formed in Hamer when she was a child by her mother. Noticing that her family never had enough to eat, new clothes, or sufficient housing despite how long and hard they worked (Hamer was picking cotton upwards of 200 pounds a day by the age of 13) and noticing the vast difference between the lives of Black and White Americans, she asked her mother why hadn’t they been born White. Her mother immediately told her that she may not understand now, but she needed to love and value herself and acquired a Black baby doll for Fannie Lou to play with to help reinforce a sense of love and care for herself.
Diane Nash, a civil rights activist and founding member of SNCC, termed this driving force that refuses to accept injustice and dehumanization and also refuses to use dehumanization as a tool of resistance because of the love of God, humanity, and self “agapic energy.” At a talk in 2017, Nash spoke about the principles of agapic energy: “‘The first principle is: People are never your enemy,” Nash said. Unjust political and economic systems are enemies,’ she said. Racism, sexism, ignorance, and mental illness are enemies, she added. ‘If you recognize that people are not the enemy,’ she said, ‘you can love and respect the person at the same time you attack the attitude or action of that person.’” The illness Nash describes would be better phrased as “spiritual sickness,” a term many Christians have used to describe racism as a way to grapple with its absurdity, corruptibility, and seeming intractability. Rev. Dr. Crozier points out that it is this agapic energy that fueled Fanny Lou Hamer.
The reality is that people may wed themselves, their churches, and their organizations to destructive attitudes and actions that harm LGBTQ+/same-sex attracted people, such that they cannot even see the fruit that obedience to Christ is producing in our lives. But there can never be doubt about the humanity, the made-in-the-image-of-God-ness, of our siblings in Christ. This made-in-the-image-of-God-ness, however, doesn’t mean that we cannot speak up about the harms LGBTQ+/same-sex attracted people are experiencing and the ways these harms actually make it more difficult for us to trust in the love of God and the wisdom of God.
Speaking up doesn’t always and only mean verbal pushback. An under-explored portion of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life is her establishment of the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Because agapic energy is not only a force faced outwards against injustice but also faced inward to promote respect and care for self and others, Hamer was moved to begin the work of feeding her community through cooperative participation. Even after the closing of the co-op, she continued to advocate for Black farmers and sharecroppers of Mississippi and all over the South.
It may seem naive, but we can proactively and productively deal with the sting of separation from–rejection by–other Believers by building community re-centered on love: love of God, love of others, and love for ourselves. It really is as simple (though sometimes deeply challenging) as being emboldened and enlivened by the great commandments that Jesus shared with us:
…‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ Matthew 22:36-40 NRSV
I offer that by responding to God’s love in worship and prayer, by not waiting for the approval of institutions to act in the interests of the people around us, by establishing God-honoring and human-honoring boundaries about the types of treatment we will receive, and by knowing how we will (and won’t) respond–and honoring those boundaries with ourselves–we cultivate the same kind of agapic energy that sustained Civil Rights Movement leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer. This was an energy that could not be sapped by the lack of support from fellow Believers, and, in time, even drew some into relationship and resistance at long last.
