Atlanta killer never received the message Easter memorializes
As Christians around the United States prepare to celebrate Easter, a holiday celebrating the triumph of good over evil, life over death and joy over mourning, our nation also grieves over violent acts of racism, xenophobia and patriarchy against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
As a Black Christian who belongs to a majority AAPI religious community in the East Bay, I stand in solidarity and denounce the racist attacks against my AAPI brothers and sisters and their communities. I also grieve for the way in which my faith tradition has been implicated in violence by White supremacists and White nationalists.
Robert Aaron Long, a White American with a history of Christian faith, has been charged with the murder of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, in Atlanta. It is clear to me that Long never fully received the message that Easter memorializes despite his religious upbringing.
During this season, the faithful commemorate the oral accounts of the physical resurrection of the Christian Messiah. Christians retell sacred narratives where atrophy is defeated and decay is reversed. The innocent are vindicated. The unjustly killed are restored.
We rejoice that a wounded and beaten body experienced redemption from trauma and violence. Easter exalts bodily integrity and the value of our human corporality and proclaims that the human body itself is worthy of salvation.
How can someone like Long grow up in this hope-filled and body-honoring tradition and yet desecrate so many beautiful lives? Unfortunately, many pulpits across the country have vitiated the Easter message through preaching a heretical disembodied Gospel tainted with White supremacy.
In the disembodied Gospel, despite the message of the physical resurrection, God is only concerned with ethereal things such as the soul. This disembodied Gospel makes you lay down your melanin, culture, ethnicity and history at the feet of a Eurocentric deity who views all identities outside of whiteness as idolatry.
Consequently, as a person of color, the disembodied Gospel normalizes the racial trauma, violence, xenophobia and microaggressions that we experience because of White supremacy assaulting our bodies. We are the virus, and White supremacy is merely responding to the infectious threats we represent to the system.
The disembodied false Gospel teaches that Scripture is silent regarding our lived experiences, stifles protest and offers the same piecemeal spiritual panaceas regardless of the infirmity. In the disembodied Gospel, the commands to love your neighbor, care for the widow and welcome the foreigner are reduced to mere platitudes with no substantive plan for implementation.
Long demonstrates why the disembodied Gospel is so dangerous. He was taught a gospel that focused on the spiritual at the expense of the physical. He had a faith that made room for racism, patriarchy and xenophobia because it denied the corporeal value of humanity. The lived experiences of racism, discrimination and prejudice are seen as tangential to the disembodied Gospel.
It is through this exclusion that human bodies lose their sacredness and become profane and disposable. Long received a gospel that forgot the honor that the story of the physical resurrection of the Christ ascribes the bodies of all people.
This Easter may we stand in solidarity with the AAPI community and contend for their bodily integrity. May we reject theologies that excise the parts of the Easter message concerned with our lived experiences, cultures and identities.
May we promote faith dialogues that exalt the human body as we advocate for theologies, policies and systems that protect the bodies of our AAPI brothers and sisters.