Resisting the Spiritual Violence of ICE

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi. Great to be with you on this Monday and joined by somebody who is a first-time guest on this show, but with whom I've gotten to meet and talk with and spend time with over the last six months, and feels like somebody I get to see all the time, and that is the Reverend Alba Onofrio. So, Reverend Alba, thanks for being here.

Reverend Alba Onofrio: Thank you so much. I'm delighted.

Brad: You are the executive director of Soul Force and the host of Teología Sin Vergüenza, and we're going to talk about both of those right now.

I want to start—I want to start just diving right into all of it. And all of it is the terrible moment we're living in, and that moment is one in which, in the United States, we're seeing our Latinx neighbors living in fear of masked secret police coming to their neighborhood, to their apartment, to their work, to their kids' school. We're also seeing queer folks targeted and made as a kind of cultural scapegoat for all the pain and grievance of certain populations in the United States, including Christian nationalists and white Christian nationalists and so on.

You work for Soul Force. You lead Soul Force. You have done for over a decade. And Soul Force is not an organization that everyone listening is going to know about, but you have been doing work that meets this moment for two decades at Soul Force. Tell us about the guiding principles of Soul Force and why you have resources and trainings and podcasts and videos and all kinds of things that may be of real help to people right now.

Reverend Alba: Unfortunately, we are perfectly adept to be in this moment right now. It's kind of a job that you always hope you're working yourself out of, and yet we find ourselves here again.

So Soul Force is an organization that started in the late '90s. It started basically as an organization to give the far right hell. The founder moved directly across the street from Liberty University, was a ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell, and then became like an adversary in all things related to whether LGBT people should be included in what is understood as the kingdom of God, or as God's children.

So we live into that legacy of relentless, nonviolent resistance, which is not a hidden-away kind of resistance, but rather one that goes directly to folks, having real conversations that doesn't shy away from the Bible or theology, what we’ve been taught, or the really sticky questions, like: Is there a hell? Am I going? Does God hate me? Does the Bible say this about me? Sodom and Gomorrah? Trans people? I mean, just go down the list.

And so that kind of fearlessness is what this moment, I think, calls for. Even when we don't feel it in our spirits, we see it in each other, and it helps us be brave. And so we live into the kind of humans that we want to be.

And how we're doing that in these days is around ideological change work, which basically just means you have to understand what's happening beneath the surface, because white Christian nationalism is the current whack-a-mole that has popped up. But underneath that there are theologies, of course, as you know and you talk about all the time on Straight White American Jesus. Like there is a lot of original sin in this country and before this country through colonization and other things.

So we just want to get to those understandings and help people be able to demystify and uncover what is going on around us. When we find ourselves agreeing with things and we're like, "Wait a second, but the conclusion of that is something really harmful." So we should all be questioning what we've been taught and what our morality is if we find ourselves aligned with folks who are doing things like disappearing our fellow community members.

Brad: I've had a chance to get to look at the kind of archive of Soul Force and what Soul Force has done for two decades. Are there a couple of things you'd want to highlight—resources or things we've done in the past, or videos we've made, or a kind of handbook that will help people with certain kinds of nonviolent resistance? Would you want to highlight a couple of those?

Reverend Alba: Always. Thank you. One that's really current is our Spirit Resource Library, and that's for free on our website. It has theological resources, like "The Truth About Sodom and Gomorrah" and "Refreshing Nonviolent Resistance," which is kind of historical analysis of what nonviolence has meant and what it has not meant. And there's lots of really useful tools—biblical tools, theological tools—for folks thinking about LGBT community, abortion, anti-rights groups, and things like that. They're all there and available for free.

Some of the fun things that I love to talk about that were before my generation, some of the old school folks—and I say this in part because part of what we're told is that we don't have any ancestors, that there was nobody. This is this new thing that popped up called "trans" or there's this new thing called "gender ideology" that just came out of nowhere, or out of the pits of hell or whatever. But it's not real because it hasn't been a long time. It hasn't been here forever. And so part of what is really important to talk about always is that we have lots of queer and trans ancestors and predecessors to those ancestors.

And so it's really critical to tell the stories of those who came before. So this is not many generations ago. This is just maybe our grandparents' age, maybe one more back. But some of the things that Soul Force has done in the past is showing up with queer Catholics at the Vatican with shirts that say, you know, "God's Queer Children," and being denied sacrament, the sacrament of communion. Or showing up at the Southern Baptist Convention at the Superdome in Louisiana with an entire brass band with a coffin filled with letters from families of LGBT people talking about how this theology is killing us.

We've had folks like Yolanda King, Sylvia Rivera, Billy Porter, who have been a part of these direct actions, many of whom faced a lot of direct arrest and time in jail through things like nonviolent civil disobedience.

And we also had a wonderful program that went for years where young folks in particular went around to Christian college campuses trying to have dialogue with folks on campuses around LGBT issues. And that was phenomenal.

In recent years, we've been doing a lot more of the ideological change work. So we train social workers and other clinicians to understand what spiritual violence is, which is kind of a very core principle in who we are and what we do—which is the co-optation of religion, particularly religion of power, which, of course, in our context is Christianity, and using that to deny the sacred worth or value of any group of people or human beings.

And our LGBT community feels that most intensely in this rejection that places that are supposed to be safe are no longer safe for our communities, even our own homes and families. So our LGBTQIA folks are folks who have that direct, embodied experience, and we're working with churches and community groups, the academy, to try to get that information out there and help folks understand how to resist and how to heal.

Brad: I think one thing that I want to make clear to folks is that, you know, there are some places where in the United States, folks can find really great queer theology resources and channels and books and so on. There's also places where I think people can find what we might call Latinx theology in the US context. It's rare to find an organization, a podcast, a channel, a set of resources that are focused on the intersection of Latino people and LGBTQ people in the context of faith. And I just want to make sure that folks sort of understand that that is what we're talking about when we talk about so much of the work of Soul Force. Of course, Soul Force does a lot of things, but that is a pretty singular dynamic coming from your organization.

Reverend Alba: It is, and it comes out of lived experience. Every generation of Soul Force has been very representative of that leadership and of the group of people there. We kind of make Soul Force what it is, because when your mission is to end the political and religious persecution of LGBTQIA+ people and sabotage white Christian supremacy, it covers almost every social justice issue, group of people, because, of course, we're in all communities.

And so this current iteration is a reflection of who we have in the organization, and me as the first Latine executive director. We started with two co-executive directors, and we were both first generation from Latin America communities and families. So that's how we started making this shift.

And what happened is pretty straightforward. As we were doing more and more work with organizations and community members in Latin America, we kept hearing, "This is really cool. What else? Where else can I learn more? How else can I understand? Are you a unique unicorn who's coming through as this woman who's also a minister, who's also queer, who's also non-binary, who's also non-monogamous, who's also, also, also all these things? Or are there more like you?"

And you, as you know, there are so many of us in the world who are doing this kind of liberating theology work in many generations now. So part of our work started and kind of blossomed in that area because of the absolute monopoly of the far right on all media in Latin America and in Spanish, and the lack of access to theological education for folks who maybe don't speak English, or who don't have access to academic journals or all the books that are published in all the European languages and things like that.

So that's really an organic story about how things moved and became what they are now. But we're really proud to try to do that South by South. So US South, which is where I'm from, Global South, and particularly Latin America, kind of conversation and cross-pollination.

Brad: So you have a new series—well, the Soul Force channel, the podcast channel, has a bunch of great content. It has Teología Sin Vergüenza in English, which we're going to talk about in just one minute. But it also has "Love Letters from Reverend Sex." And Reverend Sex is you.

And so we're not going to get the full Reverend Sex/Reverend Alba story today—you're going to get a little bit, people, and then I'm going to tell you, go listen to "Love Letters from Reverend Sex" if you want more. But you are a person who is an activist. You are a minister, and yet you are also Reverend Sex. So how do we arrive at a place where Reverend Alba becomes Reverend Sex? And this is the condensed three-minute version, because I know more of the story, and it's a three-hour story.

Reverend Alba: So many wells. I was raised in Appalachia. My father's family are coal miners and factory workers, and my mother was an immigrant from Colombia. So I come from this very particular kind of fundamentalist, insulated, poor white mountain culture in Appalachia. And that theology, that evangelical, Southern Baptist kind of theology, really stuck with me.

And fast forward, I come out as queer. That world kind of crumbles, and it begins the crack in the wall. And I often say that queerness saved me, because it was the first thing that said, "I've been told all these things, but my lived experience is different. How do I put those two things together? How do they be in conversation?"

And it started a journey around asking many, many questions, and eventually going back to divinity school after receiving a call that sounds very much like God to me, which is a kind of snarky and very serious, like, "Yeah, it does suck that LGBTQIA+ people don't have spaces to worship and be their full selves and be understood as beloved children of God." And then, of course, the next question is always the same: "What are you going to do about that?"

So that's kind of how my journey meandered into divinity school. It was specifically around, "How do we address this harm that's caused against our LGBTQIA+ communities and others who are told that we're not enough, or we're not good, or we're not beloved by God?"

The Reverend Sex part comes in because every single time that I am talking to particularly ministers, particularly men, you know, particularly evangelical kinds of pastors, there's always this, "Prove to me that God loves y'all" or "Prove to me that God made you this way" or "Prove to me that the Bible says or doesn't say this or that."

And I'm happy—I find actually great joy in those conversations. But once we get through a couple hours of debate, and this usually happens on planes, in airports, in fellowships, in funding meetings, pick the thing, conferences—once we get through enough of those questions, underneath that is always this feeling of fear that what's going to happen to his body is the same thing that men have been doing to other marginalized bodies, be they women, be they children, be they other men, whatever it is. That idea of this male rapist kind of orientation is the thing that's actually driving that really intense rhetoric, or their own internalized homophobia, because of what's true for them inside.

So it is always 100% of the time—so far it has been one of those things. And so for me, I'm like, let's just skip over that. As a co-founder of the Sexual Liberation Collective, doing my studies in sexual ethics, I took on the name Reverend Sex because I'm like, we can actually just skip all that Bible stuff, because what's underneath it, just like the ideologies of white Christian supremacy, what's underneath it is the stuff we actually want to talk about.

So if you're feeling freaked out because what happens if a guy flirts with you, or you're feeling some kind of way because what if something happens where you don't have the same kind of bodily autonomy that you've enjoyed your whole life? Then let's talk about that, and let's talk about the societal issues behind that, rather than, you know, all of the Bible stuff.

And then on the other side, I use Reverend Sex because so many of our folks—their goodness or not goodness is determined by who they are imagined to be having sex with, which also includes our kink community and other sexual minorities, sex workers. This is not just about queer and trans people, but about a lot of other marginalized people who think, "God hates me because I'm a sex worker," or "God hates me because I'm into this kind of kink or that kind of kink." And so those communities I see as primary in my ministry, alongside LGBT folks.

Brad: There's so much there. And I just was cringing at the idea that you have to talk to people like that for hours and hours. So you're not only a reverend, you're a saint to do that.

That leads us, I think, to Teología Sin Vergüenza, which is a podcast that you've done for seven seasons in Spanish, and it's become kind of a phenomenon across Latin America. It's become something that really throughout Latin America as a whole, and the diversity therein and the various experiences people have with Christian supremacy, with ways that they've been told as queer folks that they are—as you said, "God hates you"—but also things like purity culture, things like colonial theology.

There's no way to do justice in a translation to "sin vergüenza." So unpack that for us. What does it mean to be sin vergüenza? What does the podcast do? Why does it exist?

Reverend Alba: There's a lot of questions for just a couple minutes. What is sin vergüenza? Start there.

Brad: I mean, okay, so I, in my very middling Spanish, could translate that as "shameless," but it's one of those instances where as soon as you translate it as shameless, you know that we need six footnotes to actually say what it really means. So give us those footnotes.

Reverend Alba: Totally. So sin vergüenza is a term that actually changes meaning a little bit depending on the country and the context. But pretty much across Latin America, una sin vergüenza is usually someone who is gendered as woman or girl. It's a very gendered term. It is also very sexualized in a lot of places.

A sin vergüenza is someone who maybe wears her clothes a little too tight, a little too short, owns her own body and her sexuality. It's kind of the same—I grew up in the South, and so somebody would say, "Have you no shame?" Like it was like, "Put on some clothes," or "Bring your voice down," or "Sit down and be quiet. Nobody asked you." Those kind of things. So it's about self-possession in many, many ways, and its intention of trying to shame the person that you're using the term against. So una sin vergüenza is supposed to be something that makes you become more small.

So this reclaiming, very much in the similar way of, you know, "womanish" and womanist theology in queer community, is taking that thing that was used to try to fit us into a smaller box of what was allowed and what was okay and saying, "Okay, what if I don't have shame? What if I don't have shame about being a Christian? What if I don't have shame about being a feminist? What if I don't have shame about being an activist or an academic talking about Jesus?"

Because a lot of folks in activist spaces feel like they can't bring their spirituality, if it is Christian at all. Any other ones are okay, but especially Christianity is not allowed because of all the harm that colonizing Christianity has caused. And on the other side, a lot of folks in church spaces feel and believe and are treated as they are not allowed to be feminist or they're not allowed to be activist, because they're not supposed to be of this world. They're supposed to be above this world, and they're supposed to care about their eternal soul and not this current moment.

So there are exceptions, of course, to both of those things, but in general, it's about claiming this intersection. And in this moment, and particularly now that we're talking about the United States context, I'm not ashamed to be Latine, I'm not ashamed to be an activist, I'm not ashamed to be queer, and I'm not ashamed to be Christian. All of those things live inside my body, and stepping into that reality and claiming it is such a powerful position from which we get to talk about lots of things that are normally hidden in the closet otherwise.

Brad: So it seems to me that one of the ways that this work, the sin vergüenza podcast, Teología Sin Vergüenza in Latin America, has really opened a space where people can be shameless in every dynamic and expand into every aspect of themselves. And now that it's in English and you're really focused on a kind of US context, it brings us right back to where we started today, which is—you just said something that gave me like goosebumps. You're like, "I'm proud to be Christian, I'm proud to be queer, I'm proud to be Latine. I'm all of those things." And you're not going to make me shrink, you're not going to make me shiver, you're not going to make me afraid, and you're certainly not going to make me feel any shame about any aspect of who I am.

And we can imagine that in that white Christian nationalist lens, but we can also imagine it in activist spaces, where, as you say, religion is often not welcome. Or in the church setting, where maybe there's lip service to welcoming queer folks, but you know, as long as it's like—I was just gonna say, as long as it's like a suburban queer, middle class, two kids and a dog, kind of queer life. I mean, you tell me, does that sound right?

Reverend Alba: One thousand percent.

Brand: And so you're saying we want to—well, we're opening a space where every aspect of our queer identity, our Latine identity and our Christian identity is welcome, and given what it needs to grow and expand to its fullness.

Reverend Alba: Yes, and saying that it's congruent, right? It's like, here is the space for this identity, here's the space for this identity, and here's the space for this identity. And when you walk through that threshold, you kind of shed all the rest of them, and you just take on your full embodiment as that one identity.

So a lot of times in church, they're like, "Well, we don't see race. We're all children of God." And it's like, that's totally wonderful in an ideal world that we do not live in, where the realities of people's embodied experience are so dramatically different. If you are a Black person, if you are a Latine person, if you are a white person, etc.

So it's about saying, for example, in my case, it is not my faith that I have to squish into my identity. It is rather my identity that provokes and demands that I take action. It is because of my faith that I believe, that I continue to have hope, that I continue to do justice work. These things aren't just a scattering of things that get smushed into one bag together. They actually flow perfectly harmoniously together. And if anybody tells you that they don't, then you're in the wrong place.

And this is trying to be that place where we say a lot of times, those of us who come from diaspora—and this is not just Latin America. Many of us who come from diaspora all over the world have this feeling of, "The homeland that I was not born in or did not grow up in still exists in every part of my family's life, in our culture, sometimes in our language. But I am not quite a part of that. But it's enough of it that I'm not quite a part of this either."

And that liminal in-between space that we use the phrase "ni de aquí, ni de allá"—neither here nor there—is like that liminal reality is something that we very rarely talk about, at least in my experience, in Latine spaces. And it has everything to do with God, has everything to do with politics, it has everything to do with identity, and it has everything to do with bodily autonomy and agency. And so that is a place where we do theology.

Brad: Gosh, beautiful and powerful. What will people hear if they listen to your conversations on Teología Sin Vergüenza in English?

Reverend Alba: The goal is to remind Latin America that diaspora is still part of them, and to remind those of us in diaspora that we are actually not far away from where we come from at all, even if you've never been there, even if you don't speak Spanish or Portuguese, even if you don't know that in your bones, it still is there in your DNA, it is still there in your culture.

So it is hopeful that folks, when they listen in, they get to listen to amazing humans, some of them immigrants themselves, some of them first generation, some of them a couple generations in, varying identities all over the country and from all over Latin America. And they get to hear those really nuanced conversations that center the person we're talking to in their wholeness, not just their credentials—that you are Reverend Dr. So-and-so. That's great, but if you're invited on the show, we already know you have the credentialing to have the authority to speak about theology and the Bible and whatever. But we're trying to honor the wholeness. So what's going on in your life? What feels true about your story? Your growing up, right? And how do all of those things impact us right now? And what is the good news of the gospel, if there is any in Christianity at this moment? What is that? And how do we apply it?

And some of the answers are just phenomenal. I go through these interviews and I just am sitting there beaming from ear to ear, because I'm so grateful myself, even after all these years of doing it, to hear folks and what they're thinking about, what they're praying about, what they're worried about, what they're solving. And the creativity will blow your mind, from like church inside video and virtual realities to growing up under dictatorship in Argentina to recently arrived immigrants from Central America. I mean, it just runs the gamut. It's so fascinating, these humans that we have.

Brad: It is amazing. And, yeah, you know, we need to close. I will say—and just forgive me for a minute to interject, but I wrote an essay about eight years ago called "Mapping My Adjective," and I'm mixed race, and I was living in a place that was the whitest place I'd ever lived. I was like a continent away from all of my culture and my family and my people. And as a mixed race person who is not only white-passing but has to work to convince anyone that he's actually Asian, I wrote in that essay that my adjective felt like—you know, in one of those cop movies or spy movies, where one person falls off a building and the other one's holding the other one with one hand, like, "I'm not gonna let you go," but like they look like they're gonna be falling off the Empire State Building?

Reverend Alba: Yes.

Brad: That's how my Asian American identity felt at that moment. Like I feel so far from who I think I am, because the world I live in not only doesn't reflect it, but the world doesn't also think of it as me. And I just, you know, when I listen to what you say about the work that's being done on the pod, I'm like, you're giving people a home, a table, a space to be their full selves. And for that adjective, for that identity not to fall away, internally, externally, and go anywhere. And it's really fantastic work that I know so many people in Latin America have benefited from over the last seven seasons, and so many people in the US and other English-speaking contexts are going to benefit from now that it is in English.

All right, tell us, where do we find you? Where do we find Reverend Sex? Where do we find Soul Force? Where do we find all of it?

Reverend Alba: Yes, you can find us on social media at @soulforceorg, or at @teologiasinverguenza. That's the Spanish language channel. You can find me at @reverend_sex, or reverendsex.com.

And I think it's really central to talk about this idea that I read once in an essay, that the identity that needs the most defending is the one that I foreground in my work. And I feel like that's very true in this case, also as a mixed race Latine. I feel like it is the thing that we need to talk about right now, in this moment. And it's not just for Latine folks—that is the central core audience—but I think that so many people who are trying to understand what's going on in the world around them right now will find a lot of what they hear to be relevant to the conversations that they're having at the grocery store or around the dinner table, around Latine folks, whether they're queer or not queer, whether it's part of your family lineage or not.

So I just encourage everyone to come find us and listen in. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Brad: You won't. I promise too. And I agree. I've had the chance to listen to so much of the pod, and told many friends, "You know, this is a pod that centers all the folks we've been talking about today, the communities." But there's going to be a lot of white people who listen to this and have their souls refreshed and are going to learn. And it's one of those moments you get to sit in the back, white people, and learn and listen and just kind of hang out. But you are welcome. And that's like the thing that often people—you know, not people listening to this show, but others—don't understand, which is, just because you're not in the front doesn't mean you're not welcome. You can come hang and come be here and come learn and take food from the table and just be part of the community.

So anyway, all right, y'all. Thank you for listening today. As always, look for us on YouTube and what I'm doing live streaming every week. See us on Wednesdays, where it's "It's in the Code," Fridays for the Weekly Roundup, and everything we're doing at Axis Mundi Media, including Teología Sin Vergüenza in English and "American Unexceptionalism" from Dr. Matthew Taylor and the Reverend Susan Hayward, all about global lessons on religious nationalism. So lots happening. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.