Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church by Ellen Lewin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church by Ellen Lewin Lynne Gerber Ellen Lewin, Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) For his fans, dancing to “mighty real” disco queen Sylvester was a religious experience. “His disco,” like his upbringing, “was straight up Pentecostal.”1 But he was too queer to stay in that religious world, “too real for the down low,” according to his pastor and friend Rev. Dr. Yvette Flunder, “and ‘too real’ for his church.”2 When Sylvester died of AIDS in 1988, Flunder officiated at his funeral and was tasked with one of the most sacred duties—arranging for the diva’s posthumous hair and makeup. Filled with the Spirit is an ethnographic journey into The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), a religious “coalition” founded by Flunder in 2000 and led by her today. TFAM brings together churches, individuals, and ministries from a range of Christian denominations to support each other in forwarding their central theological commitment and organizing principle: “radical inclusivity” or “the mandate to reach out and embrace the most marginalized and despised of people, to draw them into Fellowship churches, and to lead them [End Page 148] to understand that God loves them just as they are” (48–49). Most of TFAM’s members come out of black church traditions and all are affirming of same-gender loving people, the language they favor over LGBTQ. But TFAM is decidedly not a denomination. Instead its more elastic coalitional form is designed to allow members to stay true to their particular histories while being open to the ways radical inclusivity may change them. Like Sylvester’s, Flunder’s roots are also in the black Pentecostal church, and she also left the Church of God in Christ when she realized that as a woman and a same-gender loving person she would not be able to fulfill her call to preach there. In the early 1990s she founded City of Refuge, a “Metho-Bapti-Costal,” largely African American congregation in San Francisco that prioritized the marginalized: people living with HIV, people with substance abuse issues, LGBTQ people, and sex workers. The congregation’s work became the blueprint for TFAM which, while developing a more expansive constituency, still names those communities as their own. The book’s author, Ellen Lewin, is an anthropologist of LGBTQ life in the United States and the author of groundbreaking volumes on queer kinship. She was introduced to TFAM by a gay couple raising a son whom she interviewed for her work on gay fathers. One was a minister at a TFAM-affiliated congregation and invited Lewin to visit. She was smitten. In the kind of reflexivity that marks a skilled ethnographer, she recounts her initial resistance to religion as a topic of study. She describes herself as a white, generally atheist but sometimes religiously engaged Jew who had never done scholarly work on religious communities before. But she notes that her Judaism likely eased her embrace by a community she was largely an outsider to. “Not being black,” she writes, “and not being Christian seemed to have enhanced the welcome I received, perhaps because it spoke to the truth of radical inclusivity” (26). Filled with the Spirit is the result of Lewin’s seven year immersion in TFAM. A multi-site study, it considers TFAM churches, informal social gatherings, and its national conference. Lewin’s work is oriented toward narrative rather than experience. This orientation shines in her vivid analyses of sermons, stories, and ethnographic moments. Her detailed attention leads her toward the book’s most significant contributions, including to questions about queer religious life, the role of memory in religion, and the promises and pitfalls of radical inclusivity. One of those contributions is Lewin’s nuanced exploration of coming out, what it means in the TFAM context, and why it’s so strongly emphasized there. Most TFAM participants don’t consider themselves part of a “gay church,” and, in contrast to other experiments in LGBTQ Christianity, TFAM is not organized around affirming gay identity. “I don’t want...