Femi Olutade To the extent that Black people are oppressed, they cannot learn about the Orthodox Church.
Femi Olutade is a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan. Tell us about your background and how you became Orthodox.
My parents are from Nigeria, and they emigrated to America just before I was born — my mom was already pregnant with me when she came over. They are both physicians. I was born in Atlanta. We also lived in West Virginia and later in Jackson, Mississippi. I went to Stanford University and stayed in the Bay Area for about seven years after graduating. I also lived in China for a while because my wife is Chinese. We moved to New York in 2018. Nigeria is roughly half Christian and half Muslim, mostly divided by tribe — a result of European colonization and Arab trading, and how different religions spread through the country. My parents both grew up in the Anglican church. When they were in college, they became part of a large charismatic revival that was happening throughout Africa. It was transformative for them. They were from different tribes, and their new faith tied them together and gave them unity and direction. When I was growing up, faith was the most central part of our lives. Even your social life as a family was probably centered on it?
Everything was! Absolutely everything. Some of my earliest memories are of my mom praying in the morning. We had Bible studies as a family every single night. From the time I was 8, we read through jacob's well
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the whole Bible every year. We went to some kind of church gathering four times a week. We didn’t go to a traditional Black church. My parents were not African American, so that wasn't their cultural heritage. And they were concerned that traditional African American churches were not well rooted in Scripture or disciplined in practice. The churches they agreed with in terms of theology and practice were predominantly white. When we moved to Mississippi, we went to a church where we were the only Black family. A few years later there were maybe five other black families that had joined us at the church. All of them were Nigerian. But the church was still overwhelmingly white. That was normal. You mean it was normal for you on Sundays, or all the time?
I was around white people all the time. At some point, maybe in middle school, I might have actually preferred being around white people rather than African Americans. I didn't talk slang, and for my parents everything was about spiritual life. We didn't listen to secular music; we didn't watch a lot of movies. My first real experience of spending significant time around African Americans was high-school football. In middle school, I had played in the band with all my white, nerdy friends, but in high school I left the band to play football. As a result, I had to find a new group of people to stand with before school and sit with at lunch. Standing with the football players made the most sense, but like so many social groups in America, the football team was divided by race. I realized that I had more in common with the African
