True Stories, Fake Christians, Real Christendom
by Sabrina Dawkins
On a weekday,
the white preacher didn’t want to touch my hand:
scared he might catch something.
It wasn’t Sunday,
and he was dressed casually,
so he thought I didn’t know his profession.
The self-hating black street preacher
with a bullhorn
in front of Applebee’s
literally cringed
when I told him Christ was black.
He’d heard it before
on the internet
and rejected it:
It sounded too racist (lol).
The earth is a spinning ball
with people walking on the sides
and even upside down,
water held in place
by very real gravity,
he said,
because he can drop an object,
and it will hit the ground.
He hadn’t considered
that earth is flat.
His white godless public-school education
didn’t teach him that.
He told me he didn’t care
what color Christ was,
even if whites had erased his history
and the Bible was HIS history book.
But he didn’t care.
He was being anti-racist
by never accepting that Christ
was in a black body while on earth,
getting $5 treats from old whites
as a reward
for teaching their version of the Bible,
a modern Pharisee rejecting the Lord.
I wondered where all the real Christians had gone.
Then I saw Creflo Dollar, T. D. Jakes, and Joel Osteen
packing arenas,
giving pretend Christians
itching-ear fictions.
And I realized it perfectly fits
Kierkegaard’s Christendom.