College Prof. Doubles Down After Declaring That Christ Was ‘Potentially Queer’ and ‘Bigots Invented a White Supremacist Jesus’
Roundly lambasted after her Holy Week essay, “The right’s made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus,” hit the Internet, a Rutgers University professor doubled down, declaring that if your Christianity is compatible with “white supremacy, homophobia, or patriarchy” then “you get called out.”
Brittney Cooper — who teaches women’s and gender studies and Africana studies and calls herself a next generation black intellectual — used Indiana‘s religious freedom law as a springboard, saying that when “right-wing conservatives declare that they are trying to restore or reclaim something, we should all be very afraid.”
While the law’s critics said it might open the door for discrimination against the gay community, Cooper said that “given our current anti-Black racial climate, there is no reason to trust that these laws won’t be eventually used for acts of racially inflected religious discrimination, perhaps against Black Muslims or Muslims of Arab descent … ”
“As a practicing Christian, I am deeply incensed by these calls for restoration and reclamation in the name of religious freedom,” she wrote. “This kind of legislation is largely driven by conservative Christian men and women, who hold political views that are antagonistic to every single group of people who are not white, male, Christian, cisgender, straight and middle-class. Jesus, a brown, working-class, Jew, doesn’t even meet all the qualifications.”
Roundly lambasted after her Holy Week essay, “The right’s made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus,” hit the Internet, a Rutgers University professor doubled down, declaring that if your Christianity is compatible with “white supremacy, homophobia, or patriarchy” then “you get called out.”
Brittney Cooper — who teaches women’s and gender studies and Africana studies and calls herself a next generation black intellectual — used Indiana‘s religious freedom law as a springboard, saying that when “right-wing conservatives declare that they are trying to restore or reclaim something, we should all be very afraid.”
While the law’s critics said it might open the door for discrimination against the gay community, Cooper said that “given our current anti-Black racial climate, there is no reason to trust that these laws won’t be eventually used for acts of racially inflected religious discrimination, perhaps against Black Muslims or Muslims of Arab descent … ”
“As a practicing Christian, I am deeply incensed by these calls for restoration and reclamation in the name of religious freedom,” she wrote. “This kind of legislation is largely driven by conservative Christian men and women, who hold political views that are antagonistic to every single group of people who are not white, male, Christian, cisgender, straight and middle-class. Jesus, a brown, working-class, Jew, doesn’t even meet all the qualifications.”
