Rdr. Doyin Teriba

Doyin Teriba is a tonsured reader and parishioner at St. Gregory the Theologian in Wappingers Falls, N.Y.

We become more ourselves as we become increasingly Orthodox. Personally I’ve become more and more aware of my ethnicity because I’m Orthodox.

Could you talk about your faith background?

Yes, I always talk about my parents when I tell this story. My dad was raised a Muslim; my mom was raised as a Baptist Christian. My sense was that they decided not to force any one religion on my brother or myself. I only found out that my father was a Muslim when I could read my birth certificate, which has a name that I knew had Islamic connotations. So I wanted to be a Muslim at that point, just out of love for my father. But I only flirted with that for a month or so. I took an Islamic class, but I was only there for two classes. I felt that it was not for me.

That also has to do with my time in England. Even though we were not going to church in England, there was something about the culture of English choirs, like at Cambridge, that spoke to me when I was a child. At my school in England, I took part in a Nativity play when I was four years old. I was the moving star. I was dressed in all black, and I held a wand with a star, and I was told to merge into the darkness. I remember seeing my mother and my brother in the audience. That experience stuck with me. It was my first exposure to the Nativity story and to Jesus in general. That childlike mystique of English Christianity stayed with me. I think it’s the reason my interest in Islam didn’t take root. Even though we wouldn't go to church on Sundays, my mother would take my brother and me to a church on Christmas and Easter.

Later, I went through a Pentecostal phase. I became a Pentecostal through a friend, and then I went to university in Nigeria as part of a very fervent Christian group. We went to four or five meetings every week, and we fasted from sunrise to sunset, no food whatsoever. We read the Bible from cover to cover and woke early every morning to pray. That was what I was doing when I came to the United States.

How old were you at the time?

I had just turned 25.

And you came to continue your education?

Yes, I came to pursue a master's in architecture at the University of Oklahoma. I stayed there for three-and-a-half years, then I moved to the New York area to look for work. That was in 2004. I’ve never really left the area.

When I was in Oklahoma City, I became an associate minister of a charismatic, nondenominational church. It was in that context that I started moving toward Orthodoxy. I started on an intellectual journey, where I looked for early Christian writings and wanted to learn Hebrew and Greek and even Aramaic. After I moved to the Bronx, I went to the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a nondenominational church at the Fulton Mall. I remember one Sunday, just sitting by myself after everybody had gone, and I felt that was the last time I was going to be part of that church.

I felt that the charismatic church could not grapple well enough with the relationship between Christ and culture. As an architect, I wanted my Christianity to inform my professional life. I wanted to make Christianity relevant to architecture—specifically, Nigerian architecture, which I wanted to create. I wanted to, in a sense, baptize that architecture with the Gospel, and I felt that the charismatic church did not have the tools.

That’s a beautiful idea. Where did it originate?

At the time, I subscribed to First Things. 1 It was full of essays about literature, philosophy—you name it, they wrote about, and always through a lens of theology. They showed that theology was not separate from those disciplines, that the Gospel had something to say about them. That was the first place I encountered David Bentley Hart 2, and I know we both share a love for his writings. I was also listening a lot to something called Mars Hill Audio Journal.3 I’ve been a subscriber since 2003. As a Pentecostal, I had been taught, indirectly, to be suspicious of the intellect. But those two resources taught me that the intellect was part of God’s creation, that it was not separate from the supernatural. That we should love God with our minds as well.

I would think Catholicism must have appealed to you at the time...

Yes, at first, I was drawn to Catholicism. There was a Catholic church just a few blocks away from my home in the Bronx. But as a Pentecostal, I was used to services that were three or four hours long. The Mass was only 59 minutes!

I had heard about Eastern Orthodoxy through two things that happened at the same time, while I was still in Oklahoma. One of them was an interview with David Bentley Hart on Mars Hill Audio. The other was that Father Peter Gillquist visited the University of Oklahoma, and there was some kind of open house on Eastern Orthodoxy. So I knew about the Orthodox Church. After going to the Catholic church for two Sundays, I wanted to explore Orthodoxy. I went online and found the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, the OCA parish in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was the first Orthodox parish I went to, and spiritually I fell in love. I was overwhelmed by the icons and the choir.

But that parish was too far away on the subway, so I decided to try Christ the Savior, the OCA parish on East 71st Street. I went there on Easter Sunday, and it was locked! But two ladies happened by and said, Oh, there's another church around the corner and that one’s Greek. It was the Greek Orthodox Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, where there was an Agape service underway. Fr. Robert Stephanopoulos, the father of George Stephanopoulos, was the Cathedral’s dean at that time. I became Orthodox a year after that, and I stayed there for three years.

I was the only Black person there. But after living in Western countries for 27 years, that is something I’ve gotten used to. I’m the minority almost everywhere I go. And I was welcomed in a tremendous way there, to Father Robert’s credit.

1. First Things is an conservative religious journal founded by the Roman Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus in 1990. It publishes essays and cultural criticism by writers from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish traditions.

2. Hart is an Orthodox theologian, philosopher, novelist, and provocateur, and a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies. He wrote a column for First Things from 2003 to 2017.

3. Mars Hill Audio Journal is a bimonthly, 90-minute audio digest with interviews on philosophy, theology, history, literature, and economics.

You didn’t feel you were treated as an outsider because you weren’t Greek?

There was no doubt that I occupied a special place at the cathedral! Every single service there is broadcast, and people who watched it faithfully online or on TV would say, I saw you on TV! Sometimes my picture came up in the National Herald, the Greek newspaper in New York.

I’m curious about whether your ethnic background has informed your faith much. Father Moses Berry has often harped on how a big part of the ancient Church was anchored in Africa, and he helped start an organization, the Fellowship of St. Moses, that is devoted to raising awareness about that. Has it played into your experience?

If anything, my time as a Pentecostal played more of a role in me becoming Orthodox than my ethnicity did— but the connection to my ethnicity has been belated. I have to bring up Albert Raboteau here. I moved to Princeton to work on my PhD in 2008. I was there for almost nine years. I met Al Raboteau at an OCA parish there. He is a historian of African American religion, and he wrote the book that is still the definitive book in its field, called Slave Religion, about the religious practices of Black Americans in this country. He also wrote sort of a spiritual autobiography, A Joyful Sorrow, that is incredibly profound.

Reading Slave Religion belatedly, after becoming Orthodox, reconnected me with the spiritual world in Nigeria, where ancestors play a remarkable, remarkable role. There is also an awareness there of principalities and powers and spiritual realities. So it’s as if after becoming Orthodox, I reconnected with my African ancestors and the spiritual world that was part of where I grew up in southwest Nigeria. This is the path all of us have as Christians: We become more ourselves as we become increasingly Orthodox. For me, it’s an evolving thing, where I’ve become more and more aware of my ethnicity because I’m Orthodox.

You’re saying one of the similarities is that in West African religion, the ancestors are constantly invoked, and in Orthodoxy, we pray to the saints?

Yes, exactly. It’s a similar awareness. Once upon a time, in southwest Nigeria, every person had the equivalent of an oral poem called the oriki. It includes an allusion to ancestors. You know that you come from a certain ancestry, and so whenever the oriki is offered, you’re just—“activating” is not the word, but you have a greater sense of being in the presence of your ancestors. One can easily connect that to how we commemorate saints in the Orthodox Church and ask for their intercessions. We have a sense that they are always with us.

Throughout your time in America, have you experienced distinct racism very often?

Very often, no. There have been a few times when I have, and it was only in retrospect that I realized, Oh my goodness, this was racism. I’ll give one example. Around 2004, I was accosted at a subway station. Now that I think about it, it was stop-and-frisk. I had a lot of MTA cards, and I forgot which one still had money on it, so I was swiping one after another. About two or three officers came and seized me. They handled me roughly, and one of them started taking things out of my wallet. Finally he saw my employee ID card.

Where were you working at the time?

I was at a development company in the Empire State Building. The officer gave me back my wallet and just told me to go. I was scared and bewildered. This is the first time I’ve spoken about it, and this was 16 years ago.

What has been your reaction to the protests since George Floyd’s death?

In many ways it has been difficult. I’m a flawed human being, as we all are, and I’m not immune to moments of despair and anger. I’ve also found that sometimes I walk down the street and see people of

There is an architectural solution here. I think that if we can cultivate neighborhoods that are diverse, where children of different backgrounds grow up with one another, where they go to church together, where the Church—the Orthodox Church, ideally—is in walking distance, that will help.

another race, and there’s a climate of suspicion on both sides. It comes to the fore when I wear my Nigerian clothes. I like wearing them, both because they’re so comfortable, and as a matter of ethnic pride. But, oh my goodness, about a month or two ago, when the riots were really at their zenith, just wearing those clothes, with my big beard—when some people saw me on the street, they would go in another direction. Or, I would go in another direction just to dispel any kind of tension. I think that encapsulates everything.

A lot of what we've experienced in the last few months are symptoms of a greater disease. There are fewer chances for strangers to meet and strike up spontaneous conversations. Partly because of technology, we’re isolated, and we form our impressions of people who don’t look like us from the internet, from Twitter, from television. So by the time we see somebody who doesn’t look like us, from another race, we already have this opinion about them. I think a lot of the current racial tension comes from that.

But at the same time, we tend to trust our neighbors, irrespective of what ethnicity or race they belong to. If you've lived near somebody, if your children were raised with their children, there's more likelihood that you will develop a bond that is very powerful, that transcends race. Back in the day, people used to just go down the street and find a significant other, and they would court and they would get married. So there is an architectural solution here. I think that if we can cultivate neighborhoods that are diverse, where children of different backgrounds grow up with one another, where they go to church together, where the Church— the Orthodox Church, ideally—is in walking distance, that will help.

There is a lot of literature on “the neighborhood church,” and in Orthodoxy, I feel strongly that this is something we need to think about. The reality is that in our day and age, many people drive to church. But imagine a scenario where we live in a diverse neighborhood and we all go to the same church, which is right there.

We emphasize the fact that every human being is created in the image of God, and there is neither Jew nor Greek. Christ talked about every person being our neighbor. The idea of the neighborhood can really bring that Biblical idea to fruition.

So to tie it all together: you’re saying that if we make an effort to live in diverse places, and if we have our churches located in diverse places, this will be a step toward broader racial reconciliation.

Yes, absolutely. One of the things that often connects people of a certain age is that their children go to school together or play in the same neighborhood. Friendships, and romantic relationships if the parents are single, can come about through those connections. When you see the other as part of your neighborhood, part of your everyday experience, it erodes the racial barriers.

Interview by Nick Tabor