The Hammond B3 organ, famous in Black churches all across the country. It fills the room and vibrates in the sternum, carrying the cries of our ancestors deep down in the soul. The old saints would say it ushers in “the anointing", and before a single chorus is sung or a Word is preached, it establishes the emotional foundation for the room, filling every corner.
Growing up in the Black church (Black Missionary Baptist to be exact) theology wasn’t something up for debate, but it was the lived experience, and the message was continually heard in our music.
As the choir sang “I been up, I been down, I been almost to the ground,” this wasn’t a Nicene Creed we were pledging our allegiance to; folks were sweating out a week of hell.
And sure enough, we had a song for every weight the world seemed to press against us. It didn’t matter if it was Vickie Winans singing, “Long as I got King Jesus, I don’t need nobody else” or the choir screaming Dr. Charles G. Hayes’s promise that “If you turn it over to Jesus, He’ll work it out.”
Inside the lyrics, there was a not-so-subtle admittance that the racism, exhaustion, and the poverty were too heavy for human shoulders alone. When the choir got to the vamp, ”Work it out!”, it became a roll-call-type of expression of economic oppression.
"How you gonna pay your rent?
All your money spent."
It kept it right in focus.
"Got a light bill due,
know ya got a gas one too.
Telephone disconnect,
waitin’ ‘til your next paycheck."
It dragged the unpaid bills right up on to the altar.
The music was doing what the music of Black expression has always done, carrying what we could not: naming the struggle and giving us a place to put the weight down as a collective. The faith had to match the fight.
The hardest part of walking away from the faith isn’t necessarily the theology; that's honestly one of the easiest parts. It is the guilt that by leaving the sanctuary, you are abandoning the people who are still fighting for their lives in it.
This is the danger of the balcony, because once you're looking down from safety, it is easy to critique the choreography of the service below. When you have things like access to therapy, monetary/political capital, and other forms of material security, it feels noble, dare I say righteous, to demand that everyone else trade their “myths” for your “reason.”
But for the marginalized, religion wasn't always about the universe. It was about the landlord, the boss, the cop: the institutions designed to keep us in place. To walk into that small Black church sanctuary, even in your mind, and dismiss their survival technology as merely a lie is to miss the point entirely. I agree that truth matters because lies have body counts.
But so does contempt.
It is to demand that they dismantle the only house that has ever sheltered them, without offering them a single brick to build a new one.
My path away from faith was paved by the very texts I once defended. Studying the writings of biblical critical scholarship didn't only dismantle my fundamentalism, but it also reconstructed my appreciation for the Bible as ancient literature.
When you stop trying to force these books to be “God's Holy Word,” you are free to let them be what they actually are: literature birthed through trauma. You get to see a people trying to process the horror of the Babylonian exile (friends and family dead, temple destroyed) desperately writing down their history so they'd still exist when the empire was done with them.
They weren't trying to create the “Bible” as we know it today. These authors were doing what humans have always done when the world falls apart: making meaning out of it.
Gotta make it make sense.
This is why I cannot dismiss the tradition, even as I leave it, because it functions as a tool for liberation in ways that pure “logic” and “rationality” cannot duplicate.
James H. Cone, the father of Black Liberation Theology, forced us to look at the cross and the lynching tree side by side in his book of the same name. It wasn't written to prove the historical inerrancy of the stories of the Gospels, as much as I do enjoy critical and textual scholarship. He wrote it to weaponize the narrative against the oppressor that handed it to him. He argued, for Black people in the United States, the cross was the only religious symbol powerful enough to empower them to face the lynching tree and not be destroyed by it.
This is where I have to separate two things: facts and truth. Cone wasn't arguing for the historicity of the resurrection, but wrestling with a philosophical problem: the paradox of finding dignity in a symbol of defeat. If I view this solely with the tool of “rationality”, meaning if I only ask whether or not this happened, I miss what the truth of the story meant to them, and essentially answering a question that Cone wasn't asking.
He was reclaiming humanity from a system designed to destroy it.
It is very tempting to romanticize this, to treat faith purely as a source of comfort, but the faith that keeps you alive isn't one that always keeps you comfortable.
Consider Fannie Lou Hamer. We love to cite her singing “This Little Light of Mine” as a symbol of civil rights resilience. But, we're also quick to forget that her faith made her a threat, not solely to white supremacists, but to the “respectable” Black clergy in the Baptist conventions who feared her radicalism. She threatened their politics of respectability: the belief that if Black folks just behaved “correctly” enough, white supremacy would eventually dismantle itself (still waiting on this, by the way).
To the middle-class ministers guarding the pulpit, a sharecropper with a sixth-grade education and a theology of revolution wasn't the “right kind of Black.” She was basicaly seen as a liability.
Furthermore, her faith didn’t just comfort her after her “Mississippi appendectomy” (a forced sterilization by a white doctor aka eugenics), it also demanded that she risk her life to vote and that she challenge the power structures of her own community. She carried a fire that fueled her fight, and it burned the hands of everyone who tried to control it.
The church included.
To dismiss it as delusion is to kick in the floor that kept her standing.
And I'm not here to put that fire out, but I did need to step out of the room.
My Sundays are a little different now. There is no Hammond B3, nor shouting. There is just coffee, whatever light Georgia decides to give me that morning, and another book in a TBR pile I'm surely not to finish before I die.
But I love this silence. For years, I was never really alone with my thoughts: someone was always watching. I lived under the constant surveillance of a deity who knew my thoughts even before thinking them. Every doubt was a sin and every private frustration was a silent rebellion.
To step out of that surveillance is a relief, both mentally and physically. It is the feeling of taking off a tight shoe crushed against your pinky toe at the end of a long day. But relief wasn't the only thing I felt. Some days I miss the music the way you miss a version of yourself that doesn't exist anymore.
I look at the sky now and I see... nothing, absolutely nothing. No divine parent, nor a cosmic plan. No scoreboard of right and wrongs. Just the indifferent wonder of a universe that has no clue who I am.
Yet I am not frightened by this silence, it feels like adulthood. It feels like the first time I have ever truly been alone, and therefore, the first time I have ever truly been myself.
It feels like me.
after the asterisk
But the silence is rarely empty and old songs still find ways to break in.
I was listening to G Herbo and caught a sample of Thomas Whitfield's “Soon As I Get Home.” The choir loops in the background, promising: “I shall wear a crown... when it’s all over.”
G Herbo goes on to rap about rent being late, about his mother hand-washing clothes in the sink, about the family struggle in the projects of Chicago.
The gospel continues to carry this struggle even within “secular” music. And that's how it has always been: the ancestors’ music still finds its way into the mouths of their children, even when those children have stopped praying.
And although I don't believe in the crown anymore, the choir still carries the memories of mass choirs, robes, and the 3:30 p.m. service.
It happened at Thanksgiving as well. We got in a circle the way we always do. Cousins, aunts, and kids running around and filling the room. My mom started to pray.
I didn’t close my eyes, I can’t really fake that anymore. But I did not leave the room. I just stood there, holding my wife’s hand, listening to the sound of my mom's voice.
I stood there, thankful for the people in the circle, without needing to send that gratitude anywhere else other than to those around me. My wife and I still take turns saying grace before meals. When it’s my turn, I keep my eyes open. I look directly at her.
I am not talking to God. I am talking to the person across the table.
I admit, I still haven’t constructed a reassuring replacement for everything I have lost. And maybe the replacement isn’t a system.
Maybe it’s just a table, a hand, and a reason to be grateful.
I have left the faith.
But I will not leave the table.
And I will not pretend the choir isn't still singing.