Part 1: 2016-2020
The earlier archive: public theology, structural analysis, digital ethics, political economy, gender/sexuality, the movement between Facebook and Unfit Christian, and the emergence of recurring questions.I would not make every claim herein exactly as I made them in 2017-20. That’s partly why it belongs here. An intellectual archive should document development, not manufacture the fiction that its author emerged fully formed.
2016
Artifact I: Kim Burrell & Theological Malpractice
Permalink: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EnkpGowwa/
Text: Kim Burrell’s homophobic commentary is the embodiment of picking an easy target to avoid grappling with a more difficult conversation. She’s up here cutting her nose off to spite her face. With all her homophobic religious rhetoric, did she ponder for a moment that a significant portion of her fan base is LGBTQI?
Or even that most of her colloquial language can be attributed to the Black gay ballroom scene?
Moreover, we’re about to embark on a presidency that’s going to devastate MILLIONS who look like us socially, financially, and physically? But I suppose it’s easier (and more satisfying to the ego) to get resounding amens based on emotional preaching than to encourage a sociopolitical engagement of the church. It is easier to raise an offering based on fear of fighting real battle and the comfort of the same ol’ hierarchy of sin theology.
Her haphazard waging of war against LGBTQI identity in the pursuit of holiness is nothing new. It is the same message of death that has been preaching and traumatizing generations of Black Queer Christians for years. It is lazy. It is trite. And it is damaging to not just our Black Queer Christians, but to our WITNESS. Period. Leave that s**t in 2016.
Artifact II: When White Supremacy is Bigger Than God
Permalink: I began this thinking on Facebook, then I extended this thesis here: https://www.unfitchristian.com/god-white-supremacy/
2017
Artifact I: On Gabby Douglas & Cancellation Culture
Originally published: Facebook, November 18, 2017
Permalink: On Gabby Douglas & Cancellation Culture
What I was asking then:
What does accountability require when someone has caused harm? Does Christian grace require continued interpersonal access? Can a community withdraw access from someone while still believing that person capable of transformation?
What I can see now:
I was already separating categories that public discourse frequently collapses: divine grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, access, accountability, and restoration. More importantly, I placed myself inside the argument. I named beliefs and behaviors for which I had needed correction and argued that my own transformation did not obligate anyone else to tolerate continuing harm. The underlying commitment was not to being perpetually correct, but to becoming corrigible.
Artifact II: A Negress in Paris & INternational Political Discipline
Originally published: Facebook, April 30, 2017, from Charles de Gaulle Airport
What I encountered:
I had gone to France. Apparently I was constitutionally incapable of simply seeing the Eiffel Tower and eating a baguette like a regular girl.
Instead, I found myself watching French news, talking with locals in my broken French, observing racial and class differences in the labor I encountered around Paris, and comparing Marine Le Pen’s nationalist rhetoric with the American election I had just lived through. The resulting post moved among race, migration, nationalism, labor, capitalism, and comparative politics.
What I can see now:
Some of those observations were just that—observations. A few became broader claims than the evidence available to me in an airport could responsibly establish. I preserve that distinction.
What matters to me about this artifact now is therefore not that twenty-nine-year-old me had produced an authoritative analysis of French racial capitalism between customs and baggage claim. It’s that the post preserves a recurring behavior of mind: I encounter something, become curious about what larger structure might make it intelligible, and follow the question across whatever disciplinary boundaries it crosses.
What persisted:
I now describe much of my cultural criticism as using encounters as apertures into larger historical and structural questions. I did not possess that language in 2017. This artifact doesn’t prove that I did. It shows that the intellectual behavior I am now attempting to describe has a history.
2018
Artifact I: John Gray & the Religious Preconditions of Gender Violence
Permalink: The aperture of this thesis begins with John Gray on Facebook, then I widened the aperture through Rae Carruth in an extended thesis for Rewire News.
Artifact II: Capitalism, Liberalism, & the Ventriloquism of Black Martyrs
Permalink: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1J9hok9T9b/
Text: It should not be lost on anyone that this tone-deaf ad comes on the heels of the NFL’s buckling under pressure of Cheeto Charlatan’s criticism of players who decided to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to peaceful protest. The same NFL who roundly discharged and rejected Colin Kaepernick and then [allegedly] blocked owners from signing him after leaving the 49ers.
Just this morning, news outlets described the property destruction in Philadelphia as “raucous and rowdy celebration” after the city’s Super Bowl win. Yet, these same news outlets and audiences that overlooked property destruction over a sports win last night have been known to not be as forgiving to Black and Brown bodies that cry out in protest.
When property is destroyed from frustration of our communities being site of constant gentrification and genocide, there is no empathy or accountability for the harm wrought against us. In fact, Dr. King’s words are often caricaturized as a rebuke against our righteous indignation, adding insult to injury.
No matter how well-intended Fiat Chrysler Automobiles U.S. was with this ad, its debut in a climate like this is nothing short of infuriating. I extended this thesis here: https://www.unfitchristian.com/mlk-jr-super-bowl-lii/
2019
Artifact I: Whose Fruit Are ‘Ye?
Permalink: https://www.unfitchristian.com/kanye-west-king/
Text: “It has long been a practice of the Black church to find acts of worship beyond the sanctuary. Hearing a riff of 2pac or Blackstreet from the musicians is as common as hearing a hallelujah in many Sunday services. I have no desire to be a gatekeeper of gospel music nor do I stand in critique of the soundness of Kanye’s theology.
If his album lacks cohesive, sound theology, then he finds himself in the company of many contemporary gospel artists whose music also lacks in that area.
Yet despite a rush to call Jesus is King a transformative work, I’m compelled to ask as Jesus did in His Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:16, whose fruit is ’Ye? The essay was presented to Facebook accordingly: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Deddx3YXq/
Artifact II: Losing Church, Keeping God / Smithsonian
Permalink: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BifP9rLjF/
Text: #SundaySermon: Losing Church, Keeping God
“They’re preaching to me that holiness is right, but I just watched another Black body be gunned down by state-sanctioned violence. They’re preaching to me that as a woman I need to be silent or not ‘walk in the spirit of a girlfriend’, but I’m watching my pastor not live what he’s teaching.”
When asked why I do what I do as the leader of #UnfitChristian, this is my why. I am so deeply convinced that people need a space to be in community with others that nurtures us holistically — where the sacred is recognized in the secular. Where the nuances of living as Black and multiple intersections are not denied. Where we can show up as our whole selves and be loved. I truly show up to disrupt the way we do faith.
Thank you for taking the journey with me.
2020
Artifact I: RBG Is Dead / Election 2020 — Power, Systems & Human Responsibility
Permalink Cluster: 1. https://www.unfitchristian.com/election-2020/ 2. https://www.unfitchristian.com/rbg-is-dead-white-supremacy-lives-another-day/
Text: Rome is falling — again.
Only America’s unbridled racism could be so unconstrained that it must manifest its presence in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
Only America’s ugliest self could be so dominant that looted institutions of capitalism enact more immediate political response than dead bodies of Black folks, Brown folks, LGBTQ nightclub attendees, and school-aged children.
I’ve always known we were broken as I’ve always lived my life being Black in America. But I knew we were irretrievably broken when our political structures opposed gun regulations after Sandy Hook. There was no politicized bodies involved. No favorability for race, gender, class, or orientation that so often is avoided as a championed cause for the sake of “equal protection.” Just a couple dozen innocent babies whose lives had not even begun.
We didn’t care enough to protect and preserve future generations. Especially if it meant dismantling convenient norms and customs of the dying generations behind us.
You cannot fix the system. It is not broken, it’s working as it was designed: to protect white supremacy.
You cannot modify the system. It was never meant to operate beyond its intended purpose.
You can, and should, destroy the system, though. No resistance of this system is too small. From sharing posts to amplifying the voices and movements of physical resistance, to prayers and rituals of protection for our foot soldiers.
Do not capitulate to respectability, you can’t accomplish your way out of the crosshairs of the system. It was always designed to destroy you.
But by the grace of Gods and the spirit of those before us, I believe we were designed with the power to destroy and dismantle oppression.
Abolish the system. Disrupt the system. Burn it all down.
All week, I’ve seen certain church folks give their usual spill of tepid, passive response to this rapturous racial unrest. Often, they cite 2 Chronicles 7:14 as an instructive in these uncertain times. Since it is Pentecost Sunday, I thought it fit to modify the text “for such a time as this.” Disrupt. Resist. Abolish. Amen.
“If my people who are called by my name
Would humble themselves from doing the most to appeal to white gaze
And pray for destruction of systemic oppression
Seek my face for the strategy to fight
And turn from their wicked ways of placating evil with Black Sociopolitical Moderation.
Then will I hear from heaven, the real one, not the whitewashed evangelical idea of one
And will forgive their sin of enabling white supremacy
And heal their land, eradicating racism as a matter of public health.”
Reimagining 2 Chronicles 7:14
Artifact II: Black Parade → Black Indigenous Theology Final Friday — Ritual, Religious Categories & Collective Inquiry
Permalink Cluster: 1. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBxvLb9JxHT/?stkn=MTFrZmpwd2ZraXZodA== 2.https://www.instagram.com/tv/CHDY6mulbDU/?stkn=ZHZ0NHgxZGN2cGFv
Text: My life goal is making Black church folks confront the Africanisms and deep ritual nature of our worship so that I might lead us towards and reaching toward comparative Black religious thought as a tool of liberation and justice. My aperture in this collection widens from Beyoncé → ritual invocation → Black church worship → Christian exceptionalism → Africanisms → classification of legitimate/illegitimate spiritual practice.
By using popular culture as an aperture into ritual practice, I often interrogate the categorical boundaries separating Black Christian worship from African and African diasporic religious traditions. By October 2020 Unfit Christian holds its first convening, Black Indigenous Theology, where practitioners and the curious meet across ancestral veneration · Ifá · Lucumí · Vodou · divination under the question: “Who have we been calling down spiritually to help us?”
What persisted:
Nine years later, questions about cancellation, digital public judgment, context collapse, reputational harm, the boundaries of inherited Christian categories, and transformation remain part of my work. What has changed is the scale of my analysis: I am now increasingly interested not only in the ethics of individual participation but in the technological and economic systems that organize digital judgment itself.
Years 2021-2025 continue right this way ➡️ 💻
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