These Pastors Ain’t Loyal

In a recent sermon posted on YouTube called, “I’m My Enemy’s Worst Nightmare,” Dr. Jamal H. Bryant quoted a song by troubled R&B; singer, Chris Brown, when Bryant exclaimed, “These hoes aint loyal!”

While his congregation responded enthusiastically at the time, Bryant has come under fire from others outside of his church for referring to women as “hoes,” once the Tom Joyner Morning Show got ahold of the clip. Bryant took to Twitter to defend himself, arguing that the original YouTube clip posted by a church attendee was only 40 seconds long, and therefore out of context:

Well, now I’ve watched the whole 29-minute clip he provided and now I’m “mad whole.”

First, the “context,” that Bryant refers to in his tweets is possibly worse than quoting the lyric. In “context,” Bryant’s meandering sermon makes reference to the plight of Black women and the church, in general, in such disturbing ways that make “These hoes aint loyal!” an almost obvious climax.

He starts the sermon by trying to prove that “the ‘enemy’ longs to destroy Black boys and detain Black girls,” by referencing Boko Haram’s killing of Black school boys early this year and kidnapping more than 300 girls two months ago.

Let Bryant tell it, “The enemy, in his attempt at diabolical chivalry, won’t outright destroy women, as much as he will try to suppress their imagination.” It’s a shame Bryant wasn’t around to explain the rules of ‘diabolical chivalry’ to the killers of Renisha McBride, Hadiya Pendleton, Kasandra Perkins and the countless Black women who have been brutalized and destroyed by ‘the enemy’ in this country since slavery.

For Bryant, Black women are a secondary target, the ones ‘the enemy’ goes after only if he can’t get to his real prize, Black men. He makes reference to this when he speaks about the surging number of Black women in prison, the “fastest-growing prison population,” in the country, “not for violent charges…but for refusing to testify against their men.” Sounds like Black women are “loyal” to their men, even to their own detriment. This is only one of many contradictions in Bryant’s sermon.

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