“Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches”
by Horace L. Griffin
Wipf and Stock, 2010, 256 pages

At A Glance: Griffin names the silence at the heart of the Black church’s treatment of its own lesbian and gay members, and asks what it would take to break it.

Overview: The Black church has always fought oppression. Griffin’s question is why that fight has so rarely extended to its own gay and lesbian members. He traces the history of that silence and the theology built to justify it, then makes the case that a church committed to liberation cannot keep carving out an exception for its queer members.

Griffin writes from inside the tradition he’s critiquing. He knows what the Black church has meant to its people, and he refuses to let that history excuse what it has withheld from lesbian and gay Christians within it. The book names the cost of that exclusion plainly, and points toward what reconciliation would actually require.

“Their Own Receive Them Not” belongs on the shelf of any pastor or church leader wrestling with what it means to preach liberation while practicing exclusion. It won the Lambda Literary Award in 2007, and it holds up as one of the clearest theological accounts of why the fight against racism and the fight against homophobia were never meant to be separate.

Thoughts from Readers: