Confessions of a CHURCH GIRL

A post-RENAISSANCE stream of thought

I was invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Sunday show to talk about Beyoncé’s significance for black Christian women (listen from 10m40s). After nearly crying during the interview, I started to writing down my thoughts. You’ll find them below. (Listen with CHURCH GIRL playing on repeat for a 360 experience.)

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“Nobody can judge me, but me, I was born free…”

“I’ve been praying and I just feel like if you move to London, you’re gonna end up having sex within a year – I know the way these London man are!”

I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I remember where we were. We were sitting at the bus stop and I was looking down at my shoes. He was stood in front of me, punctuating his thoughts in the animated way he always did, this friend who was so concerned about me moving to London at the end of summer that he was implicitly invoking God’s name.

When someone tells you that they’ve prayed and then feel like they have some information, direction or a revelation to share, you don’t have to call on Jehovah – the authority is evident in the order of events. And when you are a zealous, young Christian, as we were, that authority was something to be considered with seriousness.

So what did I do? I went home and prayed myself. It sounds ridiculous now, more than a decade after the fact, but I went home and prayed one of those Elijah-on-Mount-Carmel type of prayers, where your voice is going hoarse and your eyes are screwed so tightly shut, you swear that you’re sweating from the effort.

“God, if I’m gonna move to London and lose my virginity within a year, then I don’t even wanna go!”

Because the way we talked about virginity was as if it was a treasure that could be plundered; something that could be taken from you while you lay beaten on the roadside, praying a Good Samaritan might find you and restore your dignity.

“Help me, Lord! I don’t wanna go if that’s gonna happen! Guard me, keep me, shut all the doors that need to be shut!”

Well, as it happens, the door didn’t shut. A week after I turned 18, I was on a train bound for London.

“She ain’t tryna hurt nobody, she’s just doing the best she can…”

From my experience, “church girl” was never used in a complimentary way. It usually meant that you adopted the appearance of being holier-than-thou when really were just a “hoe”. There was no other conceivable reason why someone would call you one, because “church girl” and “Christian” were not the same thing.

Back when I was in college, it felt like the zenith of youth church culture. Every weekend there was a concert, an event, an outreach to attend, and mid-week we’d hop from Bible study to Bible study, meeting new people and picking up acquaintances along the way that formed a loose network of young people with varying levels of religious devotion. 

One of these acquaintances told the friend who had introduced us that I was “the type” to get pregnant and drop out of college. We barely knew each other, so I don’t know what gave her that impression. Soon after my friend passed on this information, I watched the same girl get so overcome by the Spirit that she ran praise laps around the church sanctuary, shouting in tongues and praying out loud.

When girls “fell” and got pregnant, they disappeared from view, like a ship sinking under the waves. We’d hear the story and the scandal, often told through eyes hooded in judgement and lips that could not help but curl. We knew who the fathers were and too often they were men with years on the teenage mother-to-be, and almost always men from the same church communities that were quick to drown the unwed mother in shame and speculation.

Because even if your virginity was something to be plundered, you were still the only one responsible for squandering it. The fear I felt when that young prophetess made her declaration was enough to turn my stomach with a shame that was not mine to feel. Was that how people saw me? Even though my wardrobe was filled with boys’ clothes and I would sooner sag my trousers than roll my skirt up? What she saw in me felt like a disease, a prognosis that I was running from. 

“Church girl, don’t hurt nobody…”

As it turns out, that first year in London I didn’t have sex… didn’t even get close. But the following year? Well…

In another conversation, I admitted to my friend – the same one so weary of London man and their predatory ways – that I had in fact had sex now. I remember thinking that for all of his gesticulation and concern a couple of years before, his reaction to the news was quite chill…

…until I got phone calls from others in our social group letting me know how disappointed they were with me. I think one of them was even crying. When my youth pastor was told, he recommended I take a “relationship fast”. The idea was to cut off contact with my boyfriend for a week, pray and see if that relationship was the right one to be in. I was due to return to Birmingham for the summer, anyway. God’s timing.

The result of the fast felt conclusive: I believed there was nothing wrong with the relationship apart from the sex. I took a trip back to London, met my boyfriend in the KFC on Walworth Road and we spoke about the boundaries we’d need going forward.

Other relationships, however, did not survive. Was it my disappointment in being so swiftly and self-righteously betrayed, or their disappointment in me returning to the boyfriend I had fornicated with? Probably both.

“I’m warning everybody, soon as I get in this party…”

I liked dancing too much to ever be told that Christians shouldn’t go raving. By my reasoning, as long as I wasn’t getting drunk or dancing on boys, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. So when my friend started organising raves, I came onboard as a volunteer promoter. I wore a branded t-shirt, manned the doors at events, and was a certified hype girl – ready to get the party going when no one else would. 

When I moved to London, raving felt like a whole different thing. In Birmingham, because I only went to my friends’ events, the club was a glorified house party. But in London, the maths of entry fees, stricter dress codes and dance floors filled with semi-hostile people barely dancing didn’t make sense.

The one time I did go out, I saw someone I knew in the crowd. We had a mutual friend and had met a few times before. So as we were walking towards each other, each stuck in a current of people going in opposite directions, I smiled and opened my mouth to say hello. She stared through me, and then quickly looked away.

I heard from our mutual friend a few weeks later.

The girl had reported me to him, as one of those “church girls” who loves raving.

“But she was there too?!” I remembering saying. “That’s how she saw me!”

“Them pretty tig old bitties…”

To grow up as a girl in the church is to be told that your body is grenade. If you don’t handle yourself correctly, you will cause great devastation.

You hear it from the pulpit when the pastor goes on a tangent about the ways that young women are dressing these days. You see in the face of the usher that greets you at the door one hot Sunday in summer, the disapproval in their eyes feeling hotter than the sun that inspired you to put on the skirt you’re wearing.

You are told to guard yourself, to wrap your body in modesty for the sake of the brothers that should know better. Your reward for this commendable display of humility and self control is one of the godly men that you have spent your adolescence hiding your cleavage from. One of those men who you are told are not able to control their animal urges, and so you must play your part on their behalf. 

Because apparently you know what you’re doing when you’re turning up to church with unacceptable parts of your body on show. As if you haven’t been propositioned by men since the age of 14, walking next to your mother in your school uniform. But the preacher talks like your body is something to be at war with, like its existence betrays you every time the wandering eye of man travels across it a little too slowly. The message is clear, it belongs more to the lewd imagination of strangers, that it belongs to you. This is something you must find a way to make peace with.

And if you are hoping that the reward of marriage will make the policing and shame worth it, wait until your bridal shower, when an older woman with decades of marital bliss under her belt, tells you that your body won’t belong to you in marriage either.

“Even if you don’t want to have sex, sometimes you just have to… y’know.”

Heavy shoulders shrug, palms upturned as she offers defeat dressed up as wisdom.

“Let it go girl, let it out girl…”

The other day I was doing a hip-opening exercise in yoga and I started crying. As I felt the muscles in my groin stretch and loosen up, I felt a rush of tension leave my body and my tears went with it.

My last counsellor said that I needed to pay more compassionate attention to myself. She gave me exercises to try at home that would encourage me to have a more embodied approach to life after I told her that I tried to have no opinion on my body and viewed it as a machine that needed to do what it needed to do. I thought this was a virtue. She saw it as a problem.

In my first pregnancy, we were encouraged to do exercises to increase the flexibility of our pelvic floor and decrease the chance of tearing. One of these exercises involved inserting a thumb into your vagina and massaging and pushing against the pelvic floor from the inside. We were meant to use a mirror to do this, but I couldn’t bring myself to look.

Even after childbirth, when my stitches healed into a keloid that was uncomfortable for a while, I still couldn’t look. An operating room full of strangers had stared down my vagina during the assisted delivery of my son, but me? I could only navigate it by touch, the thought of seeing myself in the mirror making me feel queasy.

There are many places women learn to dissociate from their body, to readily offer it up for consumption and critique while feeling like they’re living in a stranger’s skin. I learned it in church.

“Spend that cash a little harder, and she might let you dive in the water…”

We will never talk about sex honestly in the church. We will never discuss the ways that the policing of purity culture means that the marital bed is not the promised land we were sold in the wilderness.

We will not discuss how hard it is to switch off the shame and repression that was woven into the earliest conceptions of ourselves as a sexual beings, even though we are warned that if we don’t, our husbands will find sexual expression elsewhere.

We will not talk about the fact that while young girls were being taught the stories of responsibility, young boys were being taught it was their divine right to rule. We will not talk about women who are “the necks that turn the head”, but also the spines that get crushed on impact. 

We will not talk about the whispers of relief that we were told came when Uncle turned his sights elsewhere and Auntie was allowed to roll away from his needs in the middle of night without guilt.

We will not talk about how we would never want that for ourselves, but we can certainly understand it.

“You can get it tatted if you want to…”

My body is a vessel for things to pass through: The Holy Spirit, God’s Love, my children’s lives, a man’s pleasure.

My body is a place for things to be buried: a weeping face, a small searching hand, a man’s power.

My body is a pillar, a foundation. My body is a soft landing, always accepting.

My body is a blank space, ready accept whatever is projected upon it, but in all it’s elastic expanse, I cannot find myself.

I would not want my daughter to ever feel this way, so I’ve started speaking to myself the way I wish someone would have spoken to me at 15: with kindness, understanding and a sense of mischief tempered by wisdom.

I am a 32-year-old woman with real life children, trying to re-mother her teenage self. Like all mothers, I am not sure I have the skills. But like all mothers, I must learn.

“I’m finally on the other side, I’ve finally found the urge to smile, swimmin’ through the oceans of tears we cried…”

Whenever I’ve “fallen”, “failed” or “f––ked up”, I’ve had people call me crying. If they were crying for my soul, that would be one thing, but it feels like they’re crying out of disappointment from how far the real me appears to be from whatever version of me that lived in their mind.

When you realise that the narrow path that Jesus spoke about, has actually transformed into a tightrope, you feel something like to vertigo. But when you finally fall from that pedestal you were set on, there are those few precious seconds when you feel weightless.

Yes, your stomach is in your chest but somewhere behind the fear is the small voice that whispers “but look, you didn’t die!”

So are you falling or are you flying? It all depends on how you land.

“I’m gonna love on me, nobody can judge me, but me, I was born free…”

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If you are interested in more thoughts from black women on sexuality and the church, in capacity as editor at Black Ballad, I’ve commissioned a few articles on the topic. They are better edited too (lol):

We Need To Talk About Purity Culture In The Church by Habiba Katsha

Purity Culture, Feminist Theology & The Sex Our Foremothers Never Got To Have by Rasheeda Page-Muir

What The Church Doesn’t Teach You About Abstinence by Ronke Jane