What if black Americans woke up this weekend and didn’t go to church or Sunday school? What if they instead took that time to enrich themselves in other ways, like talking to their families about their worries and insecurities, or reading books? What if the thousands of black Americans who follow Creflo Dollar, a multimillionaire megachurch pastor in command of mansions and a Rolls Royce, stopped donating their money and time to him, and instead used those resources to improve their own lives? What if they, as Tyson has done, became scientists out to explore their world in new ways? Would they get happier? Would the ones who hate gays finally be able to get over their fears? Would some of them sit at the kitchen table with their mothers and sob because the world seems so confusing and hurtful all the time? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and perhaps they’re the wrong questions to ask. But I do know that improving the black community via the church is an idea that seems to have run its course, and I’d like to move forward.
Look, I know Cord. I went to school with him. He’s not a horrible human being, but he’s pretty smug, and he frequently came across as condescending in conversation. I want to back him here, because I agree with him, but when it comes to something as personal and as thorny as religion, maybe he could have dialed down the patronizing tone.
Especially when it comes to that story about his grandmother. Woof.
I gotta testify, come up in the spot lookin' extra fly...
