Judgement: Do You Want A Revolution?

image: a black angel on a purple gradient background.

The first thing we gotta talk about is Gabriel.

For it is Gabriel who was elevated through their willingness to destroy. For it is Gabriel whose elevation hinged on their willingness to sound the alarm for the new.

It's Gabriel who greets us on Judgement. They have woken a horde of corpses.

For those of us raised evangelical, Judgement is immediately recognizable. It's the rapture.

It's proof that evangelism has only a minor relationship with the bible.

This image, with Gabriel blowing a horn, is not canonical.

The horn that sounds to start the rapture is disembodied.

That horn is a symbol of Christian supremacy. That horn is, quite literally from the standpoint of Christians, the sound of revolution—the millennium.

The Tower robs us of our choices. It asks us to make whatever we will from the clay of faith.

Judgement is The Tower's opposite. It rains the same fire and brimstone. It dangles the possibility of damnation in front of our faces.

But it does something much more frightening than The Tower could ever.

Judgement asks us to make a choice that will change our lives. Judgement asks us to take our fate in our own hands, then live with the consequences.

The decisions made under the auspices of Judgement are always a big fucking deal. There's no turning back.

Students often tell me that The Tower is the card of revolution. I don't disagree necessarily. We should be able to see the possibility for radical transformation everywhere.

My bets, however, are on Judgement.

Do you want a revolution?

I cannot stress enough that church elders thought Kirk Franklin, One Nation Crew and the Family were unbearably subversive.

It was relevant. They weren't wearing church clothes. They were RAPPING.

The young folks in my church endured endless castigation from the big hat saints. There was no way, they insisted, to fuse rap and gospel.

It was weird, because we weren't the first generation to mix the worldly with the sanctified.

What my elders really hated was that the music was relevant. They wanted to force their worship styles to be relevant to us. They often succeeded.

But God's Property had a hold on us.

Kirk Franklin was the only gospel artist to span across the divide between my grandmother's conservative AME church to my mother's gay as fuck Unity Fellowship Church.

This was a feat. We stomped in the sanctuary. We sang "Lean On Me" after libations.

We wanted a revolution.

The Book of Revelation is really fuckin' weird. An African bishop name Dionysus proved in the third century that it was not thee Beloved John who wrote it. It was merely a John. John the Elder.

It's helpful to know this because, it was written during a kinda shitty time to be in the Jesus cult.

Nero was Emperor. Nero was to be the only object of worship in his kingdom.

The other John wrote from exile.

Most reasonable people read Revelation as a symbolic historical account written by someone very oppressed for their faith.

Only through this lens can one understand the desire to watch your oppressors have the worst time ever while your god gets his lick back.

It's this fiery image that's presented to us on Judgement.

The sleepers wake. The rapture begins. So do the tribulations.

This is what my ancestors were forced to believe on the wrong end of a gun.

This is how my ancestors were converted to a second colonial religion, if not a third. What were the enslaved to their Christian slavers but sleepers waking?

What were slavers to the enslaved but the end of a world.

Religious colonialism is spiritual violence

The Christianity I was raised in is violent.

Not just toward those of other faiths, but to the people who practiced it. No conversion made below the barrel of the gun is complete.

Something subversive will always survive.

And that something, those West African retentions, have survived in the Black church.

The Dikenga drilled into the floor of First African Baptist Church. The spirit possession. The esteemed church band, the guitarist foremost in our hearts.

Yet the role of the church was to "naturalize" those retentions. They sought to flatten what was too complex to stay a single thing.

They do so by mandating an absolute and crushing conformity, one that can only be transcended through exceptionalism.

Everyone knows that the only person allowed to be gay in a Black church is the choir director.

It's an old joke, and like all old jokes, it endures because it is true. A gay who is merely a member, a part of the church, will be pushed to its fringes.

Yet the gay who can gay so hard that god is like "yass queen" can stay, can be loved.

This decree comes more based on the exaltation of men, any men, within the church than a limited permission.

The church queen cannot BE gay, cannot be loved outside the church. He (and this role must be played by a he) must draw all his love from Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

He must henpeck any discordant alto into practicing at home or quitting the choir. He must correct sleepy children, those late to practice, and press wrinkles from the robes by force of will.

He must support the church diva and make sure her voice rings out, but never overwhelms the rest of the bunch.

If he can do this, he can stay. This is, we are all certain, his rightful place.

I don't know if this class of man still exists. But when I was young, they were standard bearers. It was permissible, though not acceptable to be gay, so long as you were gay like that.

So long as you loved Jesus more than any earthly man. So long as you were lonely, but filled with the spirit. So long as you sought the company of no one.

So long as some woman would keep your secrets but never ask for marriage. So long as she, too, wasn't suspected. You could be loved. You could stay. You could have a godly community.

These are the choices that Judgement presents. Stay where you are, however imperfect, and live the life that awaits you. Or pivot, and accept the consequences.

Every day a church queen passes away. Every day, a church queen tells off the pastor, and leaves the church on lighter feet than the ones he tipped in upon.

Church attendance is under 50% now. I don't see it coming back up.

Abandoning colonial religion is a revolutionary idea. It's a necessary precursor for any real social change. Letting go of its internal hold is another. We must see it for what it is.

Refusing gods that colonize, mandate oppression of women and minorities, who make you hate yourself is a step in getting free.

But we have to choose it. Do you want a revolution?