Andre Henry (MA Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a Los Angeles-based writer, musician, former editor of Relevant Magazine, and a wanna-be theologian who stopped believing in God years ago.
In a conversation with fellow unbeliever Jo Luehmann, a self-described “Christian Atheist” who doesn’t believe in God but believes in Jesus, and therefore spends all her time deconstructing and decolonizing the faith, these two exceedingly ignorant souls cover a wide range of topics, with Henry explaining that the Christian prohibition on necromancy is basically white oppression
Our story picks up with Luehmann revealing that she needed to ‘break up with ‘white Jesus” in order to reconnect to her true self, and then Henry jumping in.
“I so relate to what you’re saying, including disconnecting from your ancestor. And I write about this in my new book where I talk about when I was in Jamaica last year, I was doing a lot of reconnecting with my extended family and hearing about where my mother’s bloodline began, between an enslaved woman and a slaveholder named (unintelligible)
I couldn’t stop thinking about her- my first ancestor in Jamaica. And I kept thinking about how the version of Christianity that I received had like this very strong- you’re not supposed to commune with the dead, basically. It’s like when people talk about connecting with their ancestors and stuff like that, that’s something that was so foreign to me, because I was like, you know, they tell us not to do that basically. And for the first time, I really asked the question ‘why would it be so important for these oppressors to tell us not to connect with our ancestors.'”
Bonus comments from Luehmann, courtesy of @wokepreachertv
“I don’t believe in God. At all. But I believe in Christ, and to me Christ is just the embodiment of divinity in me, in you, in all of humanity. So for all intents and purposes, I’m a Christian atheist…I just tell people I’m a Christian to avoid all of the ‘what do you mean?'”
“Ancient Jewish spirituality, which is what Christianity borrows from, is indigenous spirituality. And because it was stolen and because it was corrupted and appropriated by systems of oppression doesn’t mean that I have to reject it.”
