Jackie Hill Perry
The shortest interview in the archive and the least defensive. She spends most of it saying the Black church has not answered this question well, and then explains why that is a failure of nerve rather than of evidence.
Jackie Hill Perry. Writer, Bible teacher, poet, and hip-hop artist. Author of Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been (B&H, 2018), Holier Than Thou: How God's Holiness Helps Us Trust Him (B&H, 2021), and Upon Waking. Her work has been featured by The Washington Times, The 700 Club, Desiring God, and The Gospel Coalition.
Also anchors session 6.3 of the learning path
Who she is
Jackie Hill Perry is a writer, Bible teacher, poet, and artist. She wrote Gay Girl, Good God, Holier Than Thou, and Upon Waking.
Hers is the shortest interview in this archive, nine minutes, and it is worth reading precisely because of how she uses them. She spends almost none of it defending Christianity. She spends most of it saying the Black church has handled this question badly, and naming exactly how.
A note before you start: she says plainly that this was never her own stumbling block. She is not telling a conversion story here. She is telling you what she has watched happen to other people, including in a room full of Native American young people, and what she thinks the church owes them.
What you are getting in this dossier
Her diagnosis of why the objection persists, which is about representation rather than evidence. The self-indictment she delivers to Black pastors. The one book of the Bible she thinks settles it. What she heard from missionaries on a reservation, and the sentence it produced. And a piece of research advice almost nobody follows.
Why it persists
She starts with the ordinary mechanics rather than a conspiracy.
"But I also think if you consider Christianity or American Christianity in particular, I think it's easy to assume that when a lot of the spokesmen for religion might be white, when most of our commentaries are written by white men, when you have pictures of Jesus and he is white, when it seems like any valued voice when it relates to Christianity is white."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
1,188 more words and 3 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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