Exorcism With Better Manners

This is a companion to Healed From What?, which sits in the silence after the question and shows what the silence was keeping out. Start there if you want the scene in full. Here I want to follow a different thread — not the question the preacher couldn't answer, but the answer the whole church is about to offer instead, the one we will all applaud, the one that will not repair a thing.

In July, at the 65th Annual Session of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a preacher stood in a pulpit draped in kente and offered the LGBTQIA+ community healing. A pastor — the Rev. Dr. Brandon Thomas Crowley, who has spent a ministry making that congregation's welcome real rather than rhetorical — asked six words back. What do LGBT people need to be healed from? The question went unanswered, and in the companion to this piece I sit in that silence, because the silence is the most honest thing that happened that day.

But silence is not the only response the church has on hand. There is a louder one coming, and it will look like progress. Sooner or later — maybe at the next session, maybe after enough of these threads go viral — a convention like this one will decide it has learned its lesson. It will widen the welcome. It will add the line to the statement. It will invite the previously excluded into the previously restricted room. And most of the people watching will exhale and call it healing.

I want to argue that it won't be. Not because inclusion is bad, but because inclusion is not what the moment requires, and the difference between the two is the whole subject of the book I'm writing.

Exorcism with better manners

Start with what the church actually reaches for when a queered body comes into view, because it tells you what the church thinks the problem is.

In 2014, at COGIC's Holy Convocation, a young man named Andrew Caldwell stood before the delegates of an entire denomination and announced he was being delivered from the spirit of homosexuality. He said he would love women. He said he would carry himself like a man is supposed to. The room danced. The preacher invited others down for their own healing. The clip escaped the sanctuary and lived on the internet for years.

That was loud. Ecstatic. Unembarrassed. Come out of him.

What happened at PNBC was quiet. Pastoral in tone. Progressive-sounding, delivered from the pulpit of a convention that exists — exists, this is not decoration — because a group of Black Baptists in 1961 refused to stay silent about freedom. The convention Dr. King chose when the other house would not hold him. They need healing.

Twelve years, two denominations, two registers. The first is exorcism. The second is exorcism with better manners. And I want to be precise about what makes them the same thing under the costume, because the manners are doing real work — they are the entire reason the second one is harder to name.

Both rest on a single prior conviction: that the queered body is the thing that has to be gotten rid of. The COGIC version gets rid of it by casting the spirit out on the floor. The PNBC version gets rid of it more gently — by defining the person as someone in need of a cure the church is gracious enough to offer. But the grammatical object is identical. In both sentences, the thing to be removed is a person. In neither sentence is the church itself ever the thing that needs to change.

This is the move to watch for, because it survives translation into the language of welcome. You can take the exact same conviction — the queered body is the problem — and dress it in affirmation, and it will still be the conviction. That is what makes the coming wave of inclusion so seductive and so insufficient at once. It changes the manners. It does not change the object.

A word about the haint, briefly

I develop this at length in the companion, so I'll keep it short here.

Where I come from we don't say specter. We say haint — not a ghost in general but the unquiet dead of a particular house, local, named, carrying a grievance, distinct from the ancestor who is fed and remembered and consulted. The haint is the one who was wronged, or buried badly, or never mourned, and who therefore will not leave.

And the queered body is not the haint. The unconfessed harm is the haint. What will not leave the Black Church is not the gay musician or the woman kept from the pulpit or the child told to keep the man's secret. It is what was done to them and never named. Respectability is the haint blue we paint over it — the pale porch-ceiling wash meant to keep a restless spirit from crossing, applied at every threshold of Black church life, a coating and not a repair. It manages the grievance without touching it. You paint the ceiling because you do not intend to dig up the yard.

Hold that, because now I can say the thing this piece exists to say: inclusion is a fresh coat of the same paint.

Inclusion widens the door. It does not rebuild the house.

Here is the seduction. From the outside, inclusion is indistinguishable from transformation. The institution opens its doors wider. It adds a sentence to the welcome. It invites previously excluded people into previously restricted roles. There is a photograph. There is applause. Somebody cries. And every visible sign says something has changed here.

But look at the architecture, not the doorway. Inclusion adds bodies to a structure it leaves standing. The rules that decide how bodies get sorted — who can hold authority, on what terms, under whose gaze, subject to whose approval — those stay exactly where they were. The queer deacon is welcomed into the same regulatory machine that spent a century deciding he was a problem to be solved; he is simply now a solved problem, permitted inside on the condition that he not reopen the question of how the machine works. Inclusion says: we will stretch this sentence to fit more people. The moment actually requires something the church is far more afraid of: this sentence is wrong and has to be rewritten.

You can feel the difference in what each one costs. Inclusion costs the institution a line of text and a moment of discomfort, and it returns a reputation for having grown. It is, in the deepest sense, cheap — not because it is insincere, but because it is designed to leave the load-bearing walls untouched. The people it lets in are let into a house that was built to exclude them and has now simply widened a doorway. They are guests in a structure that still, in its bones, regards their presence as an accommodation it generously made.

This is why inclusion so often produces a queer person who is welcomed and still exhausted, celebrated and still careful, present in the record and still unable to say the whole truth about what the room did to get here. The door is wider. The grammar is intact. Haint blue works. It has always worked. That is the problem with it.

And here is the tell, the way you know inclusion has left the architecture standing: the institution keeps the authority to decide. It decides how much welcome, at what pace, up to which office, revocable when. The power to define who belongs never leaves the hands that always held it; it is merely exercised more generously for a season. Inclusion is regulation in a better mood.

Discharge rebuilds the house

So if not inclusion, what?

I want to take the church's own word and turn it around, because the church already believes in getting rid of things. It has a whole liturgy for it. The altar call, the laying on of hands, the naming of the thing, the expulsion of the thing, the break in the music when the thing has gone. Deliverance. Discharge. The Black Church is fluent in casting out.

Fine. Let us cast something out. Just not a person.

What needs to be discharged is not the queered body. It is the distortion the grammar installed — the century-old conviction that Black desire is a problem to be managed, that the body is a threat to be policed at the threshold, that holiness is measured by how successfully a person can be made to disappear the truest thing about how they love and how they carry themselves. That is the unclean thing. That is what arrived, from outside, and made a home in the house, and can be made to leave.

Notice what this does to the deliverance service. It keeps the intensity and flips the object. The thing to be named and expelled is not the person at the altar. It is the regulatory apparatus that put them there. The community lays hands not on the queer body but on its own inherited machinery for sorting bodies, and says come out to that. This is discharge as demolition — not widening the door of the old house but taking down the wall that made the door necessary.

I named the book Holy and Haunted: Haintology and the Regulation of Black Desire for exactly this reason. The regulation of Black desire is not a side effect of the Black Church's respectability; it is the engine of it. We inherited a Christianity that made our sexuality the evidence of our unfitness for freedom, and we responded — reasonably, protectively, at terrible cost — by policing desire so hard that no one could use it against us again. Kelly Brown Douglas has been telling us this for thirty years: the silence around Black sexuality is not ordinary American prudishness but a survival reflex to a specific violence. But the reflex outlived the emergency, and now it runs on its own, and it reaches automatically for whoever is most visibly carrying desire in a body the room did not authorize. Inclusion leaves that engine running and lets a few more people ride. Discharge is the decision to finally cut the engine off.

That is a harder thing than a welcome statement, and it is the only thing that actually rebuilds the house.

The witnesses were never the threat

Which returns me, finally, to who has been standing at the altar this whole time.

The gay musician. The woman kept from the pulpit. The child told to protect the man who harmed her. The unpartnered woman who would not perform the role. The one who served in silence and taught the pastor how to preach and was welcome at the console and not in the record. The church has spent a century treating each of them as the disturbance in the house — the thing to be delivered, cured, managed, or, in the enlightened version, generously included.

They were never the disturbance. They were the witnesses.

They are the ones who saw exactly how the machine worked, because they are the ones it worked on. They carried, in their bodies, the knowledge the structure was built to keep out of reach — the plain fact that the house was haunted, that the grievance was real, that the blue on the ceiling was hiding a grave in the yard. A community that had wanted to know the truth about itself could have asked them at any point. It did the opposite. It defined the people holding the inheritance as the reason the inheritance had to stay buried.

This is why discharge and burial are the same act, and inclusion is neither. To bury the dead properly — to name the harm out loud, in the register it was inflicted, and let the impacted steer what comes next — is to stop treating the witness as the ghost. It is the moment the haint stops being a haint and becomes an ancestor. Not by leaving. By being named, on purpose, with a name. And an ancestor is not accommodated in the house. An ancestor is why the house stands — consulted, honored, built around.

Inclusion offers the witness a chair in the old house. Discharge tears down the wall and discovers the witness was holding up the roof.

Crowley asked what LGBT people need to be healed from. The convention could not answer, because the honest answer is that they don't. We do — and not by widening a door, and not by curing anyone with a kinder face on the cure. By cutting off the engine, digging up the yard, and finally holding the funeral the Black Church never held. Everything short of that is exorcism with better manners.

This piece draws on my larger project, Holy and Haunted: Haintology and the Regulation of Black Desire, and is a companion to Healed From What?

If it named something you have carried in your body: you were never the haint. You were the witness. There is a difference, and the whole house depends on it.