Femi Olutade

Femi Olutade is a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan.

To the extent that Black people are oppressed, they cannot learn about the Orthodox Church.

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 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

Americans, so I ended up gravitating toward them. The other introduction was from music. When I was about 13, I got into hip-hop, and I started listening to 2Pac and Jay-Z. 2Pac totally changed my view about African Americans.

Could you give an example?

The first hip-hop song I ever listened to was called “Thugz Mansion.” 1 2Pac says in the first verse, “So much pressure in this life of mine, I cry at times / I once contemplated suicide, and would have tried /

It blew me away because I had never heard the African American perspective articulated that way. To hear his struggles with depression and feeling unloved, of having to run from the police, of being poor. He talks about finding a place where he and his friends can smoke marijuana. I wasn’t interested in doing drugs, but after hearing that song, I thought, Oh, I get it. They’re suffering and they’re just trying to find a way to medicate away this pain. It totally changed how I saw African American culture.

I did well academically, and I graduated third in my class. I ended up winning the hall of fame award for my high school. There was one moment around graduation that really stuck with me. One of the guys on the football team said, “Hey, guys, Femi represents us! When he was getting an award, I felt like I was getting an award.” Somebody else was like, “Yeah, now that's real talk.” It was huge for me, because I never hung out with them outside of school and never partied with them. I imagined they thought I was too white. But they had nothing but reverence for me, and they really wanted me to succeed. I started to understand my identity more as Black than as just Nigerian American. I started realizing that these were my people.

1. “Thugz Mansion” appears on 2Pac’s 2002 album “Better Dayz”, the fourth album released after the artist’s death in 1996. But when I held that 9 all I could see was my mama's eyes / No one knows my struggle, they only see the trouble / Not knowing it's hard to carry on when no one loves you / Picture me inside the misery of poverty / No man alive has ever witnessed struggles I survived.”

So how did you wind up in the Orthodox Church?

It started around 2016. There were three factors. The first was a video series, produced by a Protestant, called The Bible Project. 2 Its strategy is to help viewers understand what the words of the Bible would have meant to their original audience. It helps you understand that the Bible was crafted as literary art. It really humbled me. I had thought I understood 90% of the Bible, but I realized I only understood like 10 percent.

The second factor was the election of Donald Trump. I’m politically moderate. I could understand people voting for Trump. What I didn’t understand was evangelical leaders endorsing him when other candidates were still in the race. I got into a few online debates with some Christians I grew up with and noticed how some basic aspects of their theology led them to very different political views than mine. I started to realize that theology really matters. Between that and The Bible Project, I realized I needed to understand how the earliest Christians, the Apostles, understood theology. In my reading, I picked up The Orthodox Church by Kallistos Ware. I thought, THIS is the theology. I was immediately convinced, but I read about Orthodoxy for a year before my wife and I visited a parish. Experiencing Divine Liturgy totally sealed the deal for me.

The last thing was Kendrick Lamar’s album “DAMN.” 3 It’s a modern take on Deuteronomy, the book of Jonah, and the Sermon on the Mount. It's about following God's commandments, about forgiveness and humility in the midst of harm and violence. It led me to read the Sermon on the Mount for the first time in years, and I thought, Jesus actually wants us to take this to heart. That album made me more or less a pacifist. It redirected my focus to the Gospels and the kingdom of God—which had not been my focus in evangelical Protestantism.

2. The Bible Project was founded in 2014 by the sometime Protestant pastor Timothy Mackie, who has a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his friend Jonathan Collins. Their website, bibleproject. com, has scores of videos and podcast episodes on Biblical history and exegesis.

3. Lamar’s 2017 album “DAMN” was the first nonjazz or classical album to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music. Olutade contributed to the fifth season of the podcast Dissect, where the album’s lyrics are broken down song by song. dissectpodcast.com.

I’ve never heard someone say Kendrick led them to Orthodoxy.

The first time I saw Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral in New York was because of Kendrick Lamar. I noticed that there was an Orthodox three-bar cross in the background of one of his music videos. 4 I zoomed in and looked up the church name, and that’s how my wife and I ended up going there after we moved to the city. I looked it up on Google, and that’s how we found the church. By then my wife and I had been attending an Antiochian parish in California for about six months. The first time we visited the cathedral, it was a fast-free Friday when they had a dance party. Doyin Teriba is also Nigerian, and I met him there. I was glad there was at least one other Black person there. But even if there wasn’t, I would have continued going.

4. The cathedral appears in the video for Lamar’s song “Rigamortis”, from his 2011 debut album “Section.80”.

How has your relationship with African Americans, as a group, changed over time?

I’ve realized the lives of other Black people are intimately connected with my own life and my future. If people think African Americans are uneducated or lazy or violent, they might walk across the street when they see me coming. When you notice people are clutching their purses or locking their doors because you’re nearby, you realize they’re afraid of you, and you must be careful. This was something I learned both from hip-hop and my parents. When I started driving, my parents had a Honda minivan and a Lexus. Of course, I wanted to drive the Lexus. But my mom would say, I don’t want you wearing your durag, driving a Lexus. Cops are going to pull you over and harass you. They’ll think either you’re selling drugs or you stole it.

When the protests started this spring, after the death of George Floyd, my first reaction was, We’ve seen this before. There were protests after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray. Nothing has fundamentally changed. But after a week or so, it became clear this moment was different, if only in terms of the scale and the longevity. What’s your perspective on all of this?

I think some things just take time. Documentaries like 13th 5 coming out, along with videos and books about systemic racism that have reached nonBlack people—that has helped. Partly it was just the egregiousness of this event. And there was a lot of pent-up energy because of COVID. People were without jobs, nothing to do, and they decided, We have nothing to lose. The world is burning.

Then there was a lot of discussion about the violence of the protests. I think MLK said everything the best about this. He said that riots are the voice of the unheard. He said, I believe in nonviolence; I think that’s the best way. Acts of violence and destruction are going to create more problems than they solve. But at the same time, I need to say-and white people need to hear it-that we need to get angry about injustice as much as we do about destruction of property. We can’t bring the

13th, a documentary by the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, presents evidence of a throughline between American chattel slavery, the Jim Crow period, and mass incarceration. It was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature in the 2017 Academy Awards. lives of these people back. What would cause people to commit violence or put themselves at risk or go out of their way to not go to work? It’s because things are really bad!

It’s not just theoretical for me. A Nigerian friend at Stanford had a bad experience with the police. Once he was biking to a professor's house for dinner. A cop drove by and did a U-turn. He jumped out of the car and pointed a gun at him. My friend immediately raised his hands. To convince the cop he belonged there, he started explaining things that only Stanford students would know. But the cop just yelled more. My friend thought that if he ran, he’d only get shot in the back. He thought of his mom weeping. Eventually, he thought to toss his student ID to the cop, who let him go.

Why do you think most Orthodox converts in America are white?

Well, I was able to study the faith because I had time on my hands, and because I learned how to study at an elite university. I learned to pick up random academic books and start reading them. Most African Americans don’t grow up in school districts that prepare them for that level of learning. In many cases, they’re trying to survive; they’re trying to not get killed. At the very least they’re just trying to put food on the table. So, to the extent that Black people are oppressed, they don't have access to secondary education, they don't have extra time—they cannot learn about the Orthodox Church. They cannot, if those things are not addressed! It’s just not possible. Otherwise, you have only people like me, who are at these very extremes of privilege.

Honestly, Nigerians are some of the most privileged Black people in America. The stereotype is that most Nigerians are doctors or engineers. We have access to our African culture. We have good parenting. We learn to function in white society.

I feel like I have a responsibility to African Americans, based on my understanding that Orthodoxy is the one true Church. If you claim that you’re the one true church, you have this responsibility to make it so that people who have been deprived of the Church actually get to hear about it. All the mentions in the Gospels about the poor, the rejected—that is the African American community!

Yoruba Nativity (1948)

artists: Oye-Ekiti, Workshop of Nigeria, present location unknown

So what should the Church do differently? For instance, do you think having icons of African saints helps?

I think that’s not enough. Are you celebrating those saints’ feast days? You celebrate the Russian feast days. Are the African saints central to the Church’s liturgical life? Do you tell their stories?

There’s a Biblical theme of Africa representing the fulfillment of the Gospel, of God reaching the ends of all nations. In the Book of Amos, you hear God saying to Israel, “Aren’t the Ethiopians just like you in my sight?” In Acts, the Gospel starts in Jerusalem, then is taken to Judea and Samaria, and finally Phillip baptizes a royal official who is on his way back home to Ethiopia. We should talk more about this, as part of the Church’s theology and history.

We should look at how we depict Jesus. When I have showed Black people icons—even the ones at our church in New York City, where Jesus and the saints and Mary are brown—you have no idea how many are like, This is amazing! It redeems Christianity for some people.

And people learn visually—particularly younger people, who perhaps don’t have the access to education. The church really hasn’t invested in understanding how people learn. It needs to make its theology and history more accessible, especially for Black people, who, unfortunately, have tended to be excluded from traditional educational institutions. The Bible Project is a good model.

What do you think laypeople can do to help?

If visitors are coming from an evangelical Protestant church, they will notice how many people in a parish stop and greet them and talk to them. In most parishes, that doesn’t happen with people who are the most different. But a lot of Black visitors are looking for that.

It’s going to take time to reach more and more people. Fortunately, there are people like Doyin and myself who have come into the Church because we’ve had certain advantages. The Church needs to invest in those people, whatever that looks like.

- Interview by Nick Tabor