nice, churchgoing black ladies

I work with some very nice, churchgoing black ladies. The sort who are very sweet and kind people who can be counted on to always be honest and do the right thing. Not a mean or duplicitous thing about them. Loyal, dependable, intelligent, and with some of the most peculiarly skewed and limited worldview I have ever encountered.

I have a very dear and close friend of over thirty years, who now lives in another state. A couple of years ago, to the joy and surprise of all his old friends, he announced that he was being ordained as an Episcopal priest in the small town where he had become active in the church. Several of us here packed up on short notice to take a couple of days off to visit for his ordination, his first mass, and some attendant partying. I was excited to tell my coworkers why I was going to be out for a day or two.

When I returned, one of my favorite coworkers in the category in the heading greeted me and asked if my friend had successfully been made Pope. I had a few minutes to spare, so I explained to her that my friend was merely a priest, that there was only one Pope, and that he was head of the Catholic church anyway, and my friend was Episcopalian. She said oh, okay, but not as if she understood. So I went on to tell her, as simply as I could, that in the early days of the Christian church, Peter was the first Pope, being the rock on which Christ built his church, and all the others were supposed to have followed directly from him, taking on the authority which Jesus gave to Peter. After fifteen hundred or so years, when people were really getting upset with the excesses of the Church, it began to split up, and new, Protestant churches were founded by Christians who denied the authority of the Pope. The Episcopal church was descended from the church started by Henry the Eighth, who got mad at the Pope when he wouldn't let him get married as many times as he wanted.

My friend listened to all this with interest as if it were something that she had never heard of before, at least anything that happened after Jesus and St. Peter. She nodded, and said, mmmmmm-Hmmmmm. Then, she said something polite, to the effect of, well, that's an interesting thing to believe....

Not only hadn't she ever heard of anything that happened after the Acts of the Apostles were written, but she didn't think I was giving her a lesson in history... She thought I was telling her about some kind of strange, white-folks', intellectual, Yankee, suspect alternative religious belief which was likely to get me in trouble in the afterlife, although she was too polite to say so!

It goes beyond boggling my mind. It makes my head hurt. It makes flashes of sputtering light in my brain like a defective neon sign, just to think that people would not know, not want to know, and not have it occur to them that there even WAS a history of their own church. I guess this is the kind of thinking that lets people live with the kind of contradictions there are between their church and their religious faith. It's also the kind of thinking, for example, that lets these same nice churchgoing black ladies believe (because they have told me they do) that homosexuals are a kind of pervert who are different from the rest of us, and who do not have any interest in "normal" sexual relations because they only want what's abnormal, and the normal and abnormal never co-exist. I believe that this unshakable denial has to be one reason why AIDS is spreading fastest in the US among heterosexual black women.