Melissa Harris-Perry: Good to still have you with us here on The Takeaway.

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: I believe that Jesus lived in a way that embodied blackness and embodied queerness. He loved regardless of the rules, the status quo.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Taking the Long Road Home is a new documentary short film from PFLAG, the nation's largest ally organization for LGBTQ+ community. This film explores the faith journey of queer Black folk seeking wholeness and reconciliation with the religious communities of their youth. I spoke with the director Qiydaar Foster and one of the film subjects, Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart. Qiydaar told me why he began the film with Reverend Naomi's affirmation.

Qiydaar Foster: When I was doing research to figure out who we were going to speak to. I came upon that quote while Googling and I almost fell out of my chair because I had not ever heard anyone speak that way and so I knew that I had to speak to her and literally Reverend Naomi was the linchpin for the whole thing. For me, it unlocked something and allowed me to have a different idea of who Jesus was.

I had grown up with this hippie white Jesus that I had grown to almost be against like he was an antagonist in my life because I had only been able to view Him in a way where he was used to oppress people of color and so Reverend Naomi actually unlocked a new idea of Jesus for me in the project which I am extremely grateful for.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love this language of hippie white Jesus. [chuckles] As soon as you said it I could see in my head these very badly done pieces of art that are sometimes sold almost on the side of the road or flea markets and Jesus of Nazareth is always represented in this very particular way that as soon as you say hippie, I'm like, yes, I get where you're going with that. Reverend Naomi, can you walk us through a bit for those who haven't been to seminary who may not understand quite the nature of the claim that you're making here. Can you walk us through the claims that are about the historical person of Jesus versus the ontological experience of the Christ the savior?

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: Sure. I think to understand Jesus's spiritual significance it's important that we understand Jesus in his historical context. Jesus was born into a community that was under government occupation, under state control. That would've exposed him to the precarity of life under occupation that would've exposed him to the violence that the state used to keep people in line and under control. Then we know He was born into a scandalous family situation. He was born "out of wedlock" and so that means that he would've not had some of the social and communal and religious legitimacy that people born into "intact families" would've had would've experienced.

He was already born into a vulnerable situation and that resonates so much with folks who are living today, who are born into vulnerable situation, who are deemed illegitimate and illegible, who are the victims of state violence. Then as He lived, He violated so much of the order of His day. He hoped and wanted people to experience full flourishing and that means He wanted people to be restored to community. He touched people's bodies and helped them remember that they too were beloved. All of this living that Jesus did amounted to a criminal's life according to the state.

He was going around to people that God loved them. He was going around telling people that there were some rules that were unjust and nonsensical and so His death makes a whole lot of sense. I think that while there is spiritual significance to a man who comes from a humble beginning making life possible for so many who had already been sentenced to a social death that revolutionary activity only makes sense if we understand His historical context.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Qiydaar, let's talk about what it felt like to you to discover this way of presenting and thinking about Jesus and about the church and where you begin the film for us is the pandemic death of your grandmother and in your sorrow falling to your knees in prayer, but somehow feeling like a hypocrite for doing so.

Qiydaar Foster: I was trying to process the death of my grandmother which I had a lot of complicated feelings about and I did start praying again and it half didn't make sense to me and it half felt like I was being hypocritical because I had spent so many years running away from prayer and from this idea of God. I had explored other religions and other spiritual practices and even then I always felt a sense of guilt.

It was just weird divine timing, I guess, that the project dropped in my lap because it allowed me to reconcile these feelings and these ideas with traumas from my past and forced me to unpack and face a lot of things that I had put away and decided that I wasn't even going to engage with.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk a little bit more about the reasons that you decided to leave the church as a young person, because you were very much raised in, I think, as-- I'm a southerner. You were raised in a way that I think many of a particular generation or of particular geographies may recognize whereas like, I don't really care whether you want to go on Tuesday, Wednesdays, Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, but that's what we're doing.

Qiydaar Foster: Oh, that's right. They used to call it the old time religion. That's what I was raised in, give me that old time religion. My mother's side of the family mainly comes from the south from North Carolina. There was a lot of this church is the 10th pole of your life and of community and this is what you need to do and don't question anything and basically follow the leader. That's the environment that I was raised in. It was all the answers are in the Bible. All the answers are in church and my godfather was the preacher of my church. Everything just felt so pointed and personal and unquestionable really.

I felt like you would be punished for having questions and maybe for not fitting in this particular box that everyone was trying to put you in. That was a struggle for me for a very long time in the church. What resulted in my leaving the church was, one, it was my burgeoning romantic feelings for men and then, two, my mother passed away when I was 16 and that double whammy knocked me into this mental space where the church didn't make sense to me. The religion didn't make sense to me.

I felt like it was criminalizing me in a way and making me feel like just not a whole person, not a complete person and that whatever I did I was wrong from the outset and I had never felt comfortable. I was just living in discomfort in my body and in my mind and in my heart, in my soul and in my community and where I was physically I didn't feel like I had a place.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Reverend Naomi, you were talking about the life of Jesus and talking about how He touched people. Physically actually touched people and then we just heard from Qiydaar this notion of feeling as though even his own body was a problem, was wrong in the context of the church. Of course the documentary also spends time with transgender individuals and I'm wondering about this notion of bodies and how particularly maybe Black Christian traditions, what we think of as the Black church has typically erased, ignored or made problematic any embodied experience.

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: Sure. Melissa, I think that's right. I think that we have many complicated reasons for criminalizing as Qiydaar said our bodies. We want to perform a certain kind of cleanliness, purity, respectability that was denied us for so long. That means proving with your body that you are pious, that you are clean, that you are holy and that means really denying your fleshliness, denying its holiness in favor of an unreachable perfection so our bodies become problems. Even as we're trying to prove, we're trying to compensate for the ways in which for so long our bodies were considered subhuman, abnormal.

Yes. I think that that body mind spirit split that we can trace certainly back to the enlightenment and before then, back to the Apostle Paul really has caused so much problem. It's interesting to me because Christianity hinges on a body. The Jesus narrative is contingent on God being made flesh. God putting on flesh to access the fullness of the human experience. How can we with this faith that requires a body, deny ourselves our own bodies? It doesn't make sense as Qiydaar.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Reverend Naomi, build on that for me. What does it mean as you're saying the word flesh I keep running through my mind that moment in Toni Morrison's Beloved where Baby Suggs holy is in the clearing with free Black folks who have freed themselves in the context of slavery. She's talking to them about loving their flesh. Is that the alternative? What is the alternative to this seeing the body as a problem, how can we come closer to God by embracing the body, the flesh.

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: I grew up in a faith community where they always told us that our bodies were the temple of God. It was as a way to get us to leave our bodies. You can't be in your body if it's God's dwelling place. What's interesting to me is I want to retain that idea that my body is divine. That my body is holy. My body contains the very spirit of God. I want to reframe that though and say, "Wow, what a wonderful thing that God chooses this dark flesh, this bruised and broken flesh. This flesh that has been rejected, this flesh that has been violated." God desires that flesh and that is God's home.

What if we saw that as the good news of Christianity, that incarnation that God's dwelling in flesh is actually critical to God's intervention in the world. How could flesh be dirty and unclean? How could flesh be sinful. If it is the very substance that God needs, God uses to break into our world. It's really about loving the flesh because as Baby Suggs preached yonder they don't love our flesh. Self flesh love is I think the first step of reclaiming a faith that actually liberates.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Qiydaar, as you are listening to Reverend Naomi, are you starting to get happy? Feel the spirit as we would say?

Qiydaar Foster: [laughs] Reverend Naomi gives me life. Honestly I think I communicated this to Reverend Naomi in the interviews but I really wish that she was around when I was a kid or people like her were around when I was a kid because then I would've been able to see a different possibility for my life. It would've been very affirming and very wonderful to have preachers who instead of preaching fire brimstone and sin and punishing me, it would've been wonderful to get this sense of acceptance and inclusivity and love.

Mind you, there were moments of beauty and love and warmth and grace that I experienced in church as a kid. It's just when I got older and started questioning things and thinking for myself that the tide turns a bit. Reverend Naomi is the best and I'm just so grateful that she agreed to be in the film because it was really the linchpin for the whole thing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to go to exactly what you've just said which is, I think reflected in the title. When you talk about having felt a certain kind of love, kindness, acceptance, familial warmth as a child and then discovered it having left when the fullness of who you are could not be accepted or affirmed in that space, because this is as you write a Long Road Home. It seems to me that you're still defining the church as home. Are you?

Qiydaar Foster: In some sense, yes. I'm not currently a member of a church and I'm not sure I'm ready to actually rejoin a physical church but as Reverend Michael Shannon told me in the doc, he said that I am the living church and that really struck a chord in me that I can carry church with me wherever I go and I am the church. For me the title is pointing a little more towards this idea of home within me which it took me a long time to get there and to get here.

That's where I'm at right now. It's the long road home back to myself, this self acceptance and love and joy that I had as a kid and that I lost along the way. I'm rediscovering myself and giving myself permission to enjoy my life and to enjoy my sensuality and to enjoy community and engaging with people. For me that's the road home. That's where I'm headed

Melissa Harris-Perry: Reverend Naomi, can you tell us, you've given us so much about the theology, the approach. Give us a bit about your story which you do share in the documentary. I know the death of your father was critical, a turning point for you but talk to us a bit about your own pathway. What was home and how you found yourself back there after a long road?

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: I will say that my childhood church community was not as vitriolic as some of my friends' childhood church communities were. By that I mean I did not hear any homophobic sermons. I did not hear queer sexuality demonized in an explicit and public way in my childhood church. I'm grateful for that. At the same time, there was a completed racial I think of sexuality. Even the cisgender heterosexual couples in my childhood church, didn't act like they were married, didn't act like they were intimate partners.

Again the removal of bodies and the things that bodies feel and do from our religious discourse was in fact very harmful because it meant that I didn't trust my body to give me information that I needed about myself and about my spirituality. I was basically asexual in public until I became an adult. I had this double life. I was drawn to, attracted to who I was attracted to and drawn to, but I never allowed that part of my life to meet the public part of my life.

I for a long time had a lack of integrity as it relates to my faith. Then as you say my father died and that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Not only was I trying to negotiate living a double life, but I found that my theology was holy and sufficient to help me deal with the sudden and random nature of this loss. I found that, no, this did not happen for any reason that made any sense to me, so don't tell me it happened for a reason. I found that a God who would take my father away from me, for whatever purpose to add another angel in heaven or whatever the kinds of things that we say was a cruel God that I didn't want to be involved with.

For me the death of my father forced me to revisit all of it including what I believed about sexuality. It took for me meeting out Black LGBTQ+ identified Christians who loved God and loved themselves to show me that that was actually what God was calling me to do. It was a long road home for me as well. I'm with Qiydaar. I don't know that I found home yet. I'm a minister who is a free agent. I don't have a church home community. I don't pastor a congregation.

I firmly believe as Qiydaar has said that the church is in the wild. The church is in the wilderness. The church is in the places where people have been marginalized and exiled. That's where I want to be. The churche is in the protest. It's not that I don't find worship. I think I've walked away from even the churches of my childhood because they no longer capture a God relationship that I want to have.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Qiydaar, are you feeling hopeful in this moment?

Qiydaar Foster: I have my good days and I have my slightly less good days, but since I've worked on this film, I've been getting a lot of messages on social media from people. Those messages have actually given me a sense of hope because I've gotten messages from preachers who say, "Oh, my church is the only one that is inclusive in my city, and everyone's mad, thank you for making this film". I'm getting messages from people my age, who grew up with a very similar situation and they felt like they were alone in their suffering, in their questioning, in their seeking and their questing, and they realize that they're not alone.

I honestly got a lot of healing from the film as well which I was not really expecting. I wasn't supposed to be in the film in the beginning of the process. I'm actually very glad that PFLAG convinced me to be in the film because it forced me to open up a lot of things that I had repressed. I do have days where I'm like, "You know what? This is a wonderful thing that's happened that I directed this film and the film has directed me in some ways to be honest through you."

I do have days where I feel hope because the reverends have shown me that there are other pathways and not just the pathway of pain and condemnation that I grew up with, and that you can carve out space for yourself in the church and in your spiritual life. I'm still working on full-time hope. I'm very happy with where I am now as opposed to where I was a year ago. I'm able to see a lot of growth and change and evolution in myself and in the church, frankly.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Qiydaar Foster and Reve Naomi Washington-Learpheart, thank you both for joining the takeaway.

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: Thank you, Melissa.

Qiydaar Foster: Thank you so much, Melissa. Thank you, Reverend Naomi.

Naomi Washington-Learpheart: Thank you Qiydaar.

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[00:22:43] [END OF AUDIO]

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