Dr. Christena Cleveland – Feminism and Religion

After a beautiful and insightful Foreword by Christena Cleveland, Chelsea begins her engaging book by telling us, “Up until the age of 26, I didn’t struggle to align my identity and my life experiences with the white, evangelical way of seeing the world.” Born in the late 1980s and raised in a nondenominational megachurch, she grew up with a strong sense of belonging. All was well as long as she matched her thinking and experiences with authoritarian expectations. “I was able to exist in those spaces just fine until, quite suddenly, I wasn’t.”

What changed? Pregnancy. “It was the first splinter in a crack that eventually ripped my whole worldview apart, forcing me into a crisis of theology where I felt I had to choose between myself and the church I loved.” Experiences surrounding pregnancy and childbirth opened Chelsea’s eyes to the realization that as a woman in a patriarchal structure, built by men, she didn’t fit. Interpretation of Biblical text empowered men. “I couldn’t see my femininity reflected in and affirmed by the God they made in their image.” She fled her home church.

“I walked through many lonely years trying to wrestle my way into a version of faith that reflected my reality and contained my life experience.” Chelsea, as a child, had memorized Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” No room in her natal faith for “heart knowledge” since logic and reason superseded intuitive thought. She had learned to mistrust and silence any wisdom that came from within her own Being.

Though we often assume that Christianity was introduced to Africans after colonial enslavement, groundbreaking work by historians such as David Daniels unveils the truth that many African communities practiced a version of Christianity while still living on their ancestral lands Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese established Catholicism in the Kongo, and many Kongolese made magic by integrating the most life-giving aspects of Catholicism with their Indigenous spiritualities. Specifically, many Kongolese Catholics nurtured a deep devotion to the Virgin Mary, elevating her beyond her diminished status as an unassuming and relatively powerless “servant of God” to co-chief of Christ and a goddess in her own right. Despite the patriarchal teachings of the Catholic Church, the Kongolese drew upon an Indigenous cosmology that affirmed the divine power of women and embraced the Virgin Mary as an emboldened Christ figure who possessed all the powers and grace that Jesus and the Father possessed. They implicitly understood what Black Madonna devotee Mirabai Starr would teach over 250 years later: She is “. . . the quintessential Mother, the feminine face of the Holy One, fierce protector and gentle consoler . . . She refuses to be defined as the passive, obedient handmaid of the Father. She is the radical, powerful, engaged Mother of the World.”