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The following is an excerpt from his memoir,On the Other Side of Freedom, out today.
It wasnt that I didnt believe in God, but that I believed in Storm more.
The X-Men seemed somewhat more relatable to me than a Jesus who died for my sins and rose again.
I went to church because I had to.
Church was about more than God to me then.
Or rather, it was not about God so much as it was about the other things.
It was this feeling of freedom that I most remember from church, that it taught me.
But for my father, church was holy.
He even thought he might have been called to be a preacher.
But for me, church was a place I went because I had to go.
I did not truly know God then.
I said my prayers when I ate because it was a ritual.
It was its own marvel, its own force field.
I knew she was a goddess.
I knew how she led the X-Men while letting them lead.
Storm taught me how to imagine.
But she wasnt the only one.Professor X did too.
And so did Rogue.
I learned how to live beyond the constraintsjust like they did.
It didnt matter anymore.
Storm could control it.
She had that too.
Storm, again, in control.
But that never made sense to me.
We often see the limitations all around us because we need to see them to get to survive.
Not to see them would be deadly.
We become gifted at knowing how far to push before the world pushes back on us.
Storm didnt live in a world with those constraints.
And for thirty minutes each weekend, neither did I.
Our superheroes are more than just entertainment.
I even think about the games we played, games like Mario Kart.
But now it makes sense.
The superheroes and these games were teaching us so much.
We learn constraints that we face intimately, mostly as a matter of survival.
We learn the fabric of our constraints early.
But sometimes, our world becomes those constraints.
On every episode, they faced a challenge that was bigger than themselves, even with their superpowers.
And then the first four sentences she uttered were all about the constraints.
And this smaller set of people generally tends to have less influence than they should.
Consider the issue of mass incarceration.
And when I say rules here, I mean standards that communities set as norms.
And when I say consequences, I mean a structured or standardized response to the breaking of said rules.
Now, everything else is open to change.
Weshouldhave more public conversations about how to enforce the rules.
Both require a relationship with the future that is not solely dependent on the past.
Both require a belief in things yet to come.
This will be a challenge because they are often so potent, so present.
But we can name and expose our limitations, and then work around them.
Thus we need a compass.
In many ways, the civil rights movement was born out of institutionslargely churches and schools.
Ill never forget the chills I got as we all watched her pray.
The police immediately eased up, as did the protesters.
It immediately changed the tone of the tension.
I think I gained an understanding of God and faith during the movement.
On the first night that I drove to Ferguson, I got tired.
If I kept on driving, I was certain that I was going to run off the road.
So I tried to find a landmark where I could sleep in my car for an hour or so.
I found a church.
And while I was walking, trying to find someone who could help, a man waved to me.
It was an understanding of God that helped me to think more about accountability.
Moral courage is the courage summoned because you are firmly rooted in the righteousness of the task at hand.
And I think that faith is often an easier facilitator of moral courage than is its absence.
And thus religious belief has not been the anchor it once was.
And I have been thinking about what it means to win in the absence of a belief in God.
I found faith in the streets and in seeing a set of churches live their commitment to justice.
I learned more about God and faith in the protests.
But Storm raised me.
Copyright 2018 by DeRay Mckesson.
