Oprah OWNs Greenleaf’s Homophobia
Greenleaf was an original series on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network, where the media mogul, talk-show tycoon, self-improvement guru and erstwhile weight loss pitchman served as the show’s Executive Producer, and occasionally guest-starred as recurring character and black sheep in-law, Mavis McCready. The program centered around an extravagant megachurch out of Memphis, Tennessee, Cavalry Fellowship, that was run by the equally decadent eponymous Greenleaf family: Bishop James (Keith David), First Lady Mae (Lynn Whitfield), prodigal daughter Grace (Merle Dandridge), eldest son Jacob (Lamman Rucker), guileless Charity (Deborah Joy Winans) and the recently deceased Faith, among others.
The series commenced with Faith’s funeral, whereupon Grace, or Gigi, foregoes a promotion to cable-network news to answer her calling to preach as Cavalry’s Associate Pastor with a renewed spirit and the audacious pluck to exorcise kindred scandal. Its Season One premiere drew slightly over three million viewers, predominantly from the cadre of zealots who worship everything Oprah, making it the best series debut in OWN history.
To its credit, Greenleaf had good production value, offered solid acting performances all around, particularly from Dandridge, Keith and Whitfield, and its pilot episode portended intriguing narratives regarding the culture of ecclesiastical life of an aristocratic black family and the inner-workings of a money-laden megachurch in the heart of the country’s Bible Belt.
But the dwindling audience evidenced the deficiency in a serial that offered so much anecdotal promise. Apart from standard telenovela grist, the show propagated theological conservatism, promoted status quo orthodoxy, and churned out disturbingly homophobic messaging — red meat to the base of a constituency who is unnervingly out of touch with egalitarian America. That Oprah, as OWN’s icon and Greenleaf’s Executive Producer, acquiesced to the broadcast of such turpitude bespoke more of a predilection for ratings demography by way of vitiation and exploitation rather than cultural change via scrutinization and erudition.
Greenleaf utterly failed to understand, appreciate, and adequately deal with the diversity of human sexuality when it introduced two story-arcs exemplifying the sanctimonious convictions of the black church and its latent prejudices towards the LGBT community. One such arc promoted noxious bigotry and glorifies a wanton homophobic pogrom waged by the Christian right against their gay observers. The other belabored the merciless stereotype that homosexuality is a mendable defect, and that wrestling with one’s sexual identity is therefore narcissistic and duplicitous.
The first story arc revolved around the character Carlton Cruise (Parnell Damone Marcano), the church’s out gay music director. At his initial job interview circa Episode Seven (“One Train May Hide Another”) of Season One, he confessed to Charity Greenleaf, Cavalry’s music minister, that his checkered job history at other congregations, including his litigious proclivities, was owed to his sexual orientation. When he asked her in earnest if that would preclude his hiring, she responded, quite explicitly, that his homosexuality would not be an issue at her church.
Carlton instantly became Charity’s confidant as she not only blossomed as a gospel artist under his guidance but, coincidentally, when she also sought comfort from her distanced husband Kevin (Tye White), who struggled with his own sexuality. Carlton’s amity with the youngest of the Greenleaf siblings even won him a measure of acceptance inside the Calvary world.
But, by the Second Episode (“Strange Bedfellows”) of Season Two, Carlton’s marriage drew the ire of the Deacon Board and the tithing elite. One longtime patron even conditioned her fulsome bequest on purging the congregation of its lone same-sex couple. Since Lady Mae shared their revolting intolerance, she heeded their call for his capricious ouster.
Despite having vouched for Cavalry’s forbearance, Charity proved herself a feckless defender of her unduly embattled intimate, succumbing to her mother’s false pretext to end Carlton’s employment. Grace would intervene to ensure that such abhorrent deed was carried out with some measure of dignity, but dallied in her undertaking after suffering a bout of scruples.
Devising Gigi’s procrastination, Mae struck pre-emptively and discharged Carlton with aplomb, contriving “unforeseen financial issues” as grounds. After the First Lady priggishly bloviated scripture, par for this vacuous evangelical, Carlton appropriately retorted: “I will pray for the broken part in you that has to believe that there is a broken part of me.”
The story-line ended abruptly, with Grace visiting Carlton at the end of the episode, acknowledging her mother’s wrongdoing, exclaiming: “I’m sick about this.” Even Carlton’s curious pledge not to sue, despite the Greenleaf daughters, as agents of the church — having exposed Cavalry to obvious liabilities with Grace’s admission to his undue dismissal and Charity’s ostensible count of promissory estoppel — betrayed a character who formerly served notice of his wrongful termination. Why not prosecute the church’s hostile attitude towards homosexuality and its backwards stance on gay-marriage? Instead of stipulating the complaints and deliberating the controversies, Winfrey’s opus defaulted — thereby giving license to Cavalry’s gratuitous discrimination and, broadly, unwarranted cover to congregations and its leaders who mimic such grossly indecent behavior.
The unsettling resolution also belied the Grace Greenleaf archetype — the prodigal daughter whose homecoming was kindled by a passion to reform her family’s excessive, impious church and beget a more contemporary and just denomination. Although gifted with evangelism, here she strangely abstained from taking to the pulpit to admonish prejudice, plead forgiveness, or preach tolerance — despite being righteously sickened by the outcome. What better drama than sermon? Stand before your congregation and show its bigots the door. Instead, Grace merely offered Carlton hollow consolation to his gratuitous lay-off with her question: “But will you keep coming to church?”
By concluding this story arc so injudiciously, Greenleaf further demurred from showcasing the generational conflict over the issue of gay marriage. Although data from Pew Research Center has shown that 75% of Millennials support marriage equality, leading the country, followed by Generation X at 60% and Baby Boomers at 45%, the dogmatic view that same-sex unions are sinful and are a perversion of God’s plan for marriage prevails at the fictitious Cavalry. Sadly, this is still true at too many actual churches across the country.
Clearly, this prime-time melodrama catered more to older, religious conservatives than younger, secular progressives. Perhaps this explained why the show contracted its audience than grew its to appeal. If, for example, the Greenleaf progenies had mounted a challenge to the antiquated establishment norms of their parents, it might have attracted new viewers and helped to generate better ratings. How sweet would it have been for Grace’s teenage daughter to have raised her mother’s consciousness to more reformist doctrine as she undertook her own discipleship, and sumptuous for Gigi to have dueled Mae over the First Lady’s anachronistic sectarianism?
What Greenleaf failed to do was narrow the emerging gap between a younger, more liberal, less discriminatory generation that has lost faith in church organizations and government institutions, and those geriatric leaders therein who pontificate intransigence and venerate chauvinism. Neither did it address the prevailing twisted ideology in our black congregations that pairs a commitment to fundamentalism in one’s faith with an inexplicable fealty to neoliberalism in one’s politics — as an overwhelming percentage of these conservatives on Sundays nevertheless vote Democrat on Election Day. Nor did it reconcile how far too many in the African-American community rightfully denounce private country clubs for their sordid tradition excluding Blacks and Jews from membership, yet demonstrate some of the very same hostility and intolerance towards the LGBT community in their parishes.
The second, troubling story arc involved the youngest Greenleaf daughter and her husband, Kevin, over his unquenchable attraction to men. His tense posturing and pent-up urges, which pushed Charity to fellowship with the openly-gay Carlton, eventually yielded confession after his wife announced her pregnancy in the Twelfth Episode of Season One (“Veni, Vedi, Vici”).
With Kevin, Greenleaf echoed the church’s bias against homosexuality — that it is an objective disorder and purely aberrant, and that gay sex is a moral ailment and positively sinful. But Greenleaf went one step further in the wrong direction by giving credence to conversion therapy as a viable cure for the purported malady afflicting Kevin — as he enrolled himself in such a program that counseled him to suppress his true feelings, and prescribed him a foul, unregulated elixir to curb his ‘unnatural’ yearnings.
Conversion therapy is an assortment of dangerous practices that erroneously claim to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, and have therefore been rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization. Five states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws that prevent licensed mental health providers from offering conversion therapy to minors, and twenty more states have introduced similar legislation.
There was neither a single dissenting voice nor opposing viewpoint on Greenleaf to this controversial treatment — other than Charity’s brief, “I don’t know if I buy this whole ‘pray the gay away’” rebuttal. No public service announcement about the peril, that some of the techniques employed amount to criminal abuse, or its rejection as junk science by the entire psychiatric community, either. I further question why Oprah herself has not been asked to comment on her views regarding conversion therapy.
In addition to propagating a suspect therapeutic to a spurious affliction, the depth of Mae’s unfathomable homophobia sunk to a new abyss, as Kevin and Charity commenced their dissolution of marriage. First, Mae egotistically sourced Kevin’s wrangling over his sexuality as the cause of her daughter’s pain, and bemoaned the indignity she suffered from it. Then, she called for his outright expulsion from the Greenleaf home, their family and church, and threatened to air his dirty laundry had the divorce proceedings spun out of control — not exactly model conduct for the wife of a pastor, let alone a human being with any semblance of decency.
The powers that televised this OWN program could have used their forum to impeach draconian canons of the church and the deleterious bearings of its ministers. Instead, they willfully precluded such indictment. This foreclosure took form in a last-minute rider to the settlement agreement finalizing the divorce that indemnified Cavalry from liability should the Greenleafs fire Kevin. Under an ostensible duress so ludicrously counterfeit that it belied judicious adversary, he nevertheless consented to this additional provision so absurdly inequitable that his lawyer insisted he sign a malpractice waiver for rejecting her counsel against it.
Not only did this indemnification clause shut down further litigation, to the detriment of novel drama, it was offered as standard legal fare, despite being completely extraneous to the bona fide practice of law — as Tennessee legislation currently prevents redress for discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. So, Greenleaf further miscarried the opportunity to call into question such unjust regulations that, for example, preclude workers fired for being gay from suing their reprobate employers.
In lieu of adjudicating these flagrant human rights offenses, Greenleaf imbued its most fanatical with Christian Arianism promulgating the obedient and doctrinal uber-disciple, and desecrated those who are open and affirming as impure and perverted. That Oprah oversaw such atrocious propaganda is disquieting. She also silenced her mighty voice to the disgrace and ignominy of a religious institution on the “down low,” and the lack of pastoral care afforded those deemed by it to be “outsiders.”
No doubt, Winfrey is a pioneer for black women in media. She has deployed her celebrity to back causes, foster awareness, augment charity, and combat inequity — not just to peddle merchandise and plug self-help devices. She has also used the Broadway stage and the broadcast medium to tell powerful, untold stories about the African-American experience. But, with Greenleaf, Oprah gave us television that ended the discussion about the troubling relationship that the black church has with the LGBT community, rather than started the conversation as to how to accept and improve it. Moreover, she allowed the fictitious Cavalry to conflate dutiful religious worship with fundamental moral conduct, rather than challenge when they actually diverge — particularly on the issue of sanctioned Christian weddings and the law of marriage equality. Lastly, she produced a gospel according to Greenleaf that expounded prejudice and discrimination, and ordained a black church — in the South, no less — that rejected gay rights as civil rights. For these reasons, Oprah OWNs Greenleaf’s homophobia.
