Thread by @CandiceBenbow

Mike Todd not being theologically trained doesn’t really matter in this instance. There are many who have gone to seminary/div school and still peddle soul tie theology because it’s lucrative. It gets the shares and retweets. Everyone shared that clip. It served its purpose.

Mike Todd not being theologically trained and spouting positions that aren’t rooted in scripture or a generative understanding of God’s heart as if they are does matter, tho. Because soul ties, the way he and others preach it, is void of the transformative love of God.

Also, be clear: the only time the Bible speaks of souls being tied together is when the biblical writers describe the relationship between David and Jonathan. Sit with that for a minute and be still.

It amazes me how we have created entire theologies that demonize cishet sexual agency when the only place scripture speaks of it is in regards to two men who loved each other beyond the bond of friendship. David and Jonathan were soul mates.

So, when you talk about soul ties in a sexual context- please know you’re not even in scripture. That matters. That matters a whole lot.

Also, the idea that you cannot be who you are meant to be if you have sex with someone who isn’t your spouse is just dumb. Full stop.

David literally impregnated a woman who wasn’t his wife, had her husband killed and TO THIS DAY niggas love him and create men’s ministries to be like this guy who was “a man after God’s own heart”. Show me where David’s purpose was stunted. It wasn’t—and he was a murderous thot.

The Bible is full of men who had multiple wives and concubines and find themselves in the Hall of Faith in Hebrews. Rahab was a whole sex worker and she’s in there.

Many of Mike Todd’s pastoral colleagues sleep with everyone but their wives and get caught up in a scandal every other year yet they still have their churches and are dominant in pop culture faith spaces. Where exactly does this truth about sex show up in their lives? It doesn’t.

So much of our rejection of our sexual identity is because we do not love ourselves. We buy into Calvinistic views of the flesh that negates our humanity. We hate ourselves and think we need to believe the worst about who we are for God to love us.

There are so many biblical scholars who make it clear that scripture is not as definitive on sex as we claim it to be. And that’s okay. There is room for us to honor our agency because God does.

Also, so much of this is about the regulation of Black women’s sexuality. It’s this idea that if a Black woman exercises agency over her body, she will be out of control and nothing in her life will be fruitful.

And for the brothers who buy into soul ties for themselves, it also reinforces the belief Black men are barbaric and only think about sex. Their sex drive must be brought under subjective or they’ll be out screwing everything with a breath.

When Black folks preach soul ties, we’re doing White folks work for them. We’re reducing ourselves to the wanton, sexual savages that they said we were in enslavement and during Reconstruction. We become what they’ve always said they had to protect the purity of Whiteness from.

Soul tie theology works to undermine the value of Black flesh and keep us tethered to White theologies and ideologies for salvation. It’s a tale as old as time but it’s tired as hell now.

If a person chooses not to have sex with multiple people because they don’t want to, that’s their prerogative and it’s admirable. But to say that doing so rips part of them away from themselves and prevents their full flourishing in God’s will is simply not true.

We are more than who we have sex with. We are more than how often we have sex. We are more than when we have sex. We have always been more. God has always seen us as more.

Folks like Mike Todd will always be popular and they’ll always preach sermons that deserve the deepest of side eyes. The evangelical pockets that create and fund them are deep and ain’t going nowhere. But we can be as loud about the counter narrative tho.

Last thing: I don’t rock with soul ties at all but the fact that Juanita Bynum has literally been erased from its mainstream success is...telling. All these dudes are just remixing what she did with “No More Sheets”, after she’s been kicked to the curb by the major players.

We can have all the opinions of Juanita we want but the erasure of Black women from their own cultural productions is real. And that’s what’s happening regarding the popularization of soul ties.

((crawls back under blanket with laptop to finish this draft and break this fever))