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Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd
In her powerhouse debut, Tamice Spencer-Helms exposes the leaven of whiteness that pervades so much of Christianity in America today.
At a young age, the Black church introduced her to a God of love, empowerment, and joy. But an encounter with White Jesus set her on a path that nearly destroyed her faith altogether. Persistent police brutality against Black people, and the white church's persistent excuses for it, forced Spencer-Helms to carefully identify how the idol of whiteness keeps Christians captive, and how we can burn the idol down. With brilliant prose and gripping storytelling, she takes us on the painful but liberating journey of extracting the leaven from spirituality, and rediscovering the parts of ourselves that a colonized Christianity seeks to suppress. This book will confront readers with the stomach-turning reality of constant injustice, but also delight and overwhelm them with the freedom of Christ.
"Much has been written about the young white exodus from evangelical religion. Rarely have we been invited to journey alongside young evangelicals of color. Tamice Spencer-Helms takes readers by the hand and walks them through her exodus and liberation. We witness the scales falling from her eyes and see with her, for the first time, that the white evangelical waters she once found respite within are actually filled with rotting bodies of theology and discipleship stunted and killed by White Jesus. Walk with Tamice through each stage of her healing and transformation, and encounter unleavened faith. This is a worthy read, indeed." —Lisa Sharon Harper, president and founder of Freedom Road, LLC and author of several books, including The Very Good Gospel and Fortune
"Tamice is an incredibly important voice as someone who lives faith at the intersection of practitioner and theologian. Her reflections on historical events that have shaped this emerging generation is a gift to anyone who mentors young people of any racial background, since these events have shaped our ecosystem." —Rev. Sandra Maria Van Opstal, founder of Chasing Justice
"I learn so much from listening to stories unlike my own. In this memoir of evolving faith, Tamice bravely invites us into a journey that is tender but unflinching, heavy with grief and suffused with hope. I am challenged by the ways we disagree with one another, and even more challenged by the ways we agree." —Gregory Coles, author of Single, Gay, Christian and No Longer Strangers
"In Faith Unleavened, Tamice Spencer-Helms vulnerably provides us with her exile experience in white evangelicalism and her courageous exodus out of it. Doing so, she offers a gift for the rest of us, inviting everyone to let go of White Jesus so we can encounter the living, liberating, and unleavened Bread of God. Read this book!" —Drew G. I. Hart, Associate Professor of Theology at Messiah University, author of Who Will Be a Witness?, and co-host of the InVerse Podcast
"We all need fellow sojourners on our path to a more beautiful, just world. Tamice Spencer-Helms has a powerful, honest, and clarion voice in Faith Unleavened. This book is a must-read for all who care about the role of faith in a world seeking justice." —Doug Pagitt, pastor, author, activist, executive director of Vote Common Good
"Tamice Spencer-Helms guides us through the wilderness of a Black woman contorting herself to a white Jesus and into freedom as a Black woman fully seen and loved by herself and Jesus. She powerfully names how white supremacy gaslights all of us and she gives hope to those still on the journey." —Kathy Khang, author of Raise Your Voice
At a young age, the Black church introduced her to a God of love, empowerment, and joy. But an encounter with White Jesus set her on a path that nearly destroyed her faith altogether. Persistent police brutality against Black people, and the white church's persistent excuses for it, forced Spencer-Helms to carefully identify how the idol of whiteness keeps Christians captive, and how we can burn the idol down. With brilliant prose and gripping storytelling, she takes us on the painful but liberating journey of extracting the leaven from spirituality, and rediscovering the parts of ourselves that a colonized Christianity seeks to suppress. This book will confront readers with the stomach-turning reality of constant injustice, but also delight and overwhelm them with the freedom of Christ.
"Much has been written about the young white exodus from evangelical religion. Rarely have we been invited to journey alongside young evangelicals of color. Tamice Spencer-Helms takes readers by the hand and walks them through her exodus and liberation. We witness the scales falling from her eyes and see with her, for the first time, that the white evangelical waters she once found respite within are actually filled with rotting bodies of theology and discipleship stunted and killed by White Jesus. Walk with Tamice through each stage of her healing and transformation, and encounter unleavened faith. This is a worthy read, indeed." —Lisa Sharon Harper, president and founder of Freedom Road, LLC and author of several books, including The Very Good Gospel and Fortune
"Tamice is an incredibly important voice as someone who lives faith at the intersection of practitioner and theologian. Her reflections on historical events that have shaped this emerging generation is a gift to anyone who mentors young people of any racial background, since these events have shaped our ecosystem." —Rev. Sandra Maria Van Opstal, founder of Chasing Justice
"I learn so much from listening to stories unlike my own. In this memoir of evolving faith, Tamice bravely invites us into a journey that is tender but unflinching, heavy with grief and suffused with hope. I am challenged by the ways we disagree with one another, and even more challenged by the ways we agree." —Gregory Coles, author of Single, Gay, Christian and No Longer Strangers
"In Faith Unleavened, Tamice Spencer-Helms vulnerably provides us with her exile experience in white evangelicalism and her courageous exodus out of it. Doing so, she offers a gift for the rest of us, inviting everyone to let go of White Jesus so we can encounter the living, liberating, and unleavened Bread of God. Read this book!" —Drew G. I. Hart, Associate Professor of Theology at Messiah University, author of Who Will Be a Witness?, and co-host of the InVerse Podcast
"We all need fellow sojourners on our path to a more beautiful, just world. Tamice Spencer-Helms has a powerful, honest, and clarion voice in Faith Unleavened. This book is a must-read for all who care about the role of faith in a world seeking justice." —Doug Pagitt, pastor, author, activist, executive director of Vote Common Good
"Tamice Spencer-Helms guides us through the wilderness of a Black woman contorting herself to a white Jesus and into freedom as a Black woman fully seen and loved by herself and Jesus. She powerfully names how white supremacy gaslights all of us and she gives hope to those still on the journey." —Kathy Khang, author of Raise Your Voice
- GenresFaithAnti RacistReligion
188 pages, Paperback
Published February 17, 2023
11 people are currently reading
159 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 22, 2023
Tamice invites us into her story of a wilderness: the "otherness" that she experienced in white evangelicalism between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. This beautifully written book will challenge you to listen, think, empathize, and discover Jesus in a Black woman's marginalization, self-discovery, and liberation. Those in white evangelical churches should wrestle with this story and allow it question long held assumptions. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, Tamice’s story matters and deserves to be listened to.
March 7, 2023
Summary: A memoir of how Tamice Spencer Helms came to faith in Jesus, but then how to disentangle white culture and Jesus.
On the front end of this, I want to say that I have all kinds of tangential connections to TAmice Spencer-Helms, but I have never met her, and I am not sure that I have previously read anything by her. Faith Unleavened is the first book by the new KFT Press, which grew out of the Emotionally Healthy Activist project by Jonathan Walton at Intervarsity. An acquaintance also used to work with Tamice, so I was aware of the work of Sub:culture, which Tamice founded, and I started following her on Twitter because of her connection with my acquaintance. But I do not know Tamice, and while I am aware or were connected to many of the organizations and events mentioned in the book, again, there are no direct connections. I say this partially because of the fact that reviews and endorsements have been a topic of discussion lately, and I want to disclose my relationship at the front.
I am a big fan of memoirs because while one person's story is never exactly the same as another person's story, one of the advantages of our current world is that we can learn from people's stories and try not to make the exact same mistakes. We will make new mistakes, but when it is possible to learn from others, we should. I have been interested in the role of trauma, and disillusionment plays in spiritual formation because I am a spiritual director and need to grapple with my own disillusionment about Christianity.
I started reading Faith Unleavened immediately after finishing All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore. Both have trauma and disillusionment and working out who Jesus is for them over time. But the connections matter, as well as the differences. Tamice grew up in the Black church within a healthy family. Beth grew up in a White SBC church within a dysfunctional and abusive household. Tamice was convinced by white teenage friends that her faith and family were inadequate and that she had to reject the Black church and, in some sense, her family to find a deeper faith. In contrast, Beth found a church community that supported her and helped her find a way out of her abuse. In both cases, however, there was a limit, and they needed to discover a new faith expression because of the limitations of churches that were unwilling to allow them to be whole Christians in the ways that they felt called.
I wish either of these stories were new to me, but they are not. Abuse and cultish, authoritarian, culturally inappropriate expressions of faith are common. The ongoing discussion about the social realities of sin makes no sense to readers of either of these memoirs. Sin is rarely only harmful to an individual. And sin frequently impacts people even if there were good intentions.
Tamice, as a teen, went to a Hell House gospel presentation where she was confronted with images of hell and sin and manipulated into praying for salvation. The (white) youth pastor literally was dressed up as Jesus to save her at the end of the "play." And for well over a decade after that night as a teen, she grappled with how white culture was confused with Christianity. She was all in following the White Jesus that she was told was necessary for her to be saved. In a podcast interview with KFT Press she summarized that the Hell House used fear to manipulate her. And then, once she was saved, fear became a driving force in manipulating her to do the next thing: drop out of college to work in a prayer ministry, vote in a particular way, live a particular lifestyle, etc.
I am paraphrasing here, but in the podcast, she said, "I was made to see that Jesus was a white man and that I was a Black woman. I could not be a white man, so there was no way to come to Jesus because I could not live up to the requirements." This echoes the point of Willie James Jennings' book After Whiteness on theological education. If we theologically shape people to be white men, then we are distorting people into a shape that God did not create them to be. (This, again, is part of the reality of the problems of that article at The Gospel Coalition this week, where the gospel becomes distorted by creating hierarchies where some people are more like Christ than others.) When we create requirements for people first to change before they can come to Christ, we are fundamentally distorting the message of Christianity, which is that all may come to Christ.
I do not want to make this post more about other things and not about Faith Unleavened, but Faith Unleavened was clarifying for me because it so clearly lays out the reality of why it matters that we explore the cultural constraints of our faith. It is a requirement that Christians, especially Christian leaders, expose themselves to cross-cultural Christianity so that they can see at least some of the ways that our cultural expressions of Christianity distort Christianity and how that directly harms them. In the case of Tamice, part of white Jesus was also gender hierarchy, which directly impacted her because she thought that submitting to her husband included submitting to his abuse. It directly impacted her when she turned to alcohol and drugs to dull pain because she could not contort herself to become a white man.
Toward the front of the book, she tells the story of how she would regularly come to a church that left out the communion elements and take communion by herself after the service. She was often still hung over or sometimes took a drink to get up to courage to go to church for communion.
The central metaphor of the book is leaven. In the Exodus story, God asks the people to give up Leaven in their bread as part of what became the Passover. God didn't ask them to give up bread, just the leaven.
In the metaphor, the leaven is Whiteness. She defines that as, "Whiteness is an ideology that normalizes the practices, beliefs, perspectives, and culture of white people so that they are the unspoken standard by which everything else is measured. In other words, it is the normalizing of white supremacy." By Whiteness, she does not mean white skin. She does not need to leave all white people to find faith. She has to leave the cultural belief of white superiority, where Jesus was culturally white, and where the white cultural choices were normative so that all need to become culturally white to become Christian.
The book is well written. And I think many will find help to see the problems of hierarchical Christianity. At the same time, I know many will reject parts of the book because they will reject some of her choices. The problem is that, as she demonstrates, Christians often have problems because they reject people instead of ideas. When Tamice divorced her abusive husband, many of her (white) Christian friends rejected her because they saw continuing to be in a relationship with her as a denial of their understanding of Christianity. The abuse was less important than upholding the cultural ideal of marriage. Or in other words, the health and safety of Tamice as a person was less important than the theoretical ideal represented by marriage, even if the particular marriage that Tamice was in did not live up to that ideal.
I have a few more quotes on my Goodreads page. Faith Unleavened is short. Only about 150 pages, but it is a helpfully clarifying book. I recommend it.
On the front end of this, I want to say that I have all kinds of tangential connections to TAmice Spencer-Helms, but I have never met her, and I am not sure that I have previously read anything by her. Faith Unleavened is the first book by the new KFT Press, which grew out of the Emotionally Healthy Activist project by Jonathan Walton at Intervarsity. An acquaintance also used to work with Tamice, so I was aware of the work of Sub:culture, which Tamice founded, and I started following her on Twitter because of her connection with my acquaintance. But I do not know Tamice, and while I am aware or were connected to many of the organizations and events mentioned in the book, again, there are no direct connections. I say this partially because of the fact that reviews and endorsements have been a topic of discussion lately, and I want to disclose my relationship at the front.
I am a big fan of memoirs because while one person's story is never exactly the same as another person's story, one of the advantages of our current world is that we can learn from people's stories and try not to make the exact same mistakes. We will make new mistakes, but when it is possible to learn from others, we should. I have been interested in the role of trauma, and disillusionment plays in spiritual formation because I am a spiritual director and need to grapple with my own disillusionment about Christianity.
I started reading Faith Unleavened immediately after finishing All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore. Both have trauma and disillusionment and working out who Jesus is for them over time. But the connections matter, as well as the differences. Tamice grew up in the Black church within a healthy family. Beth grew up in a White SBC church within a dysfunctional and abusive household. Tamice was convinced by white teenage friends that her faith and family were inadequate and that she had to reject the Black church and, in some sense, her family to find a deeper faith. In contrast, Beth found a church community that supported her and helped her find a way out of her abuse. In both cases, however, there was a limit, and they needed to discover a new faith expression because of the limitations of churches that were unwilling to allow them to be whole Christians in the ways that they felt called.
I wish either of these stories were new to me, but they are not. Abuse and cultish, authoritarian, culturally inappropriate expressions of faith are common. The ongoing discussion about the social realities of sin makes no sense to readers of either of these memoirs. Sin is rarely only harmful to an individual. And sin frequently impacts people even if there were good intentions.
Tamice, as a teen, went to a Hell House gospel presentation where she was confronted with images of hell and sin and manipulated into praying for salvation. The (white) youth pastor literally was dressed up as Jesus to save her at the end of the "play." And for well over a decade after that night as a teen, she grappled with how white culture was confused with Christianity. She was all in following the White Jesus that she was told was necessary for her to be saved. In a podcast interview with KFT Press she summarized that the Hell House used fear to manipulate her. And then, once she was saved, fear became a driving force in manipulating her to do the next thing: drop out of college to work in a prayer ministry, vote in a particular way, live a particular lifestyle, etc.
I am paraphrasing here, but in the podcast, she said, "I was made to see that Jesus was a white man and that I was a Black woman. I could not be a white man, so there was no way to come to Jesus because I could not live up to the requirements." This echoes the point of Willie James Jennings' book After Whiteness on theological education. If we theologically shape people to be white men, then we are distorting people into a shape that God did not create them to be. (This, again, is part of the reality of the problems of that article at The Gospel Coalition this week, where the gospel becomes distorted by creating hierarchies where some people are more like Christ than others.) When we create requirements for people first to change before they can come to Christ, we are fundamentally distorting the message of Christianity, which is that all may come to Christ.
I do not want to make this post more about other things and not about Faith Unleavened, but Faith Unleavened was clarifying for me because it so clearly lays out the reality of why it matters that we explore the cultural constraints of our faith. It is a requirement that Christians, especially Christian leaders, expose themselves to cross-cultural Christianity so that they can see at least some of the ways that our cultural expressions of Christianity distort Christianity and how that directly harms them. In the case of Tamice, part of white Jesus was also gender hierarchy, which directly impacted her because she thought that submitting to her husband included submitting to his abuse. It directly impacted her when she turned to alcohol and drugs to dull pain because she could not contort herself to become a white man.
Toward the front of the book, she tells the story of how she would regularly come to a church that left out the communion elements and take communion by herself after the service. She was often still hung over or sometimes took a drink to get up to courage to go to church for communion.
Sitting there alone on that creaky, wooden pew, my heart felt frozen as if I were witnessing a tragedy but I couldn’t even tell which way was up, let alone save myself. I went back and forth between missing Jesus and resenting him. I loved him and I doubted his existence. I identified as an atheist at least twice a week and still resorted to certain worship musicians when days were particularly dark. I had no idea where I was when it came to Christianity, but for some reason I never stopped taking communion. It was special to me. It was what I remembered most from my earliest days in church. I was drawn and driven to the mystery and tenderness of it. It felt like home in a way. It held space for me. Every week was the same as I wept and whispered some variation of the phrases: I think I still believe. I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what happened. I still love you. I can’t do this. Please don’t make me go back.
The central metaphor of the book is leaven. In the Exodus story, God asks the people to give up Leaven in their bread as part of what became the Passover. God didn't ask them to give up bread, just the leaven.
Unleavened bread symbolized the delineation between the people of Yahweh and the Empires all around them. Jacob and his family went to Egypt in search of bread and ended up in bondage. It was the same for me. My experience in white evangelicalism started with a spiritual hunger that the yeast of whiteness almost ruined over time. As I began recognizing and extracting the poisonous and putrid ideologies and belief systems that animated the Jesus I met there, I got free. Freedom happened for me the same as it did for the Hebrews: with a call to unleaven the bread of life.
In the metaphor, the leaven is Whiteness. She defines that as, "Whiteness is an ideology that normalizes the practices, beliefs, perspectives, and culture of white people so that they are the unspoken standard by which everything else is measured. In other words, it is the normalizing of white supremacy." By Whiteness, she does not mean white skin. She does not need to leave all white people to find faith. She has to leave the cultural belief of white superiority, where Jesus was culturally white, and where the white cultural choices were normative so that all need to become culturally white to become Christian.
The book is well written. And I think many will find help to see the problems of hierarchical Christianity. At the same time, I know many will reject parts of the book because they will reject some of her choices. The problem is that, as she demonstrates, Christians often have problems because they reject people instead of ideas. When Tamice divorced her abusive husband, many of her (white) Christian friends rejected her because they saw continuing to be in a relationship with her as a denial of their understanding of Christianity. The abuse was less important than upholding the cultural ideal of marriage. Or in other words, the health and safety of Tamice as a person was less important than the theoretical ideal represented by marriage, even if the particular marriage that Tamice was in did not live up to that ideal.
I have a few more quotes on my Goodreads page. Faith Unleavened is short. Only about 150 pages, but it is a helpfully clarifying book. I recommend it.
February 21, 2023
This book is stunning.
I've known Tamice as a friend and as a mentor for a little while, meeting her in community where we break bread together, and this book feels like she is right with us sharing about her life and her thoughts and her passions.
The book itself is her story of the journey from what can feel like a comfortable, disembodied Christianity that asks nothing of us but to sit and listen to people speak, learning how to repeat sentences to help mask the pain of living in this world, to a faith that is rich and full and where Jesus is embodied within us and where we confront this world that attempts to destroy us with our own hearts set afire for justice and peace.
Tamice is a gifted communicator and a lively community organizer. You can't help but want to be along for that journey, and in reading this book I again am reminded of how much I have learned and been shaped by participating with her in our faith journey together.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough to you who are looking for a way to hold on to Jesus while discarding the religious clutter you've accumulated over the years or even decades as you've struggled to fit in to the modern culturally American church where you've abandoned so much of your own personhood. Tamice's testimony is one that will help you uncover for yourself what it is your belief and how it is you want to act upon those beliefs.
This is a book of a lively faith that you will not want to stop reading until the end--and then you will wish, as I do, that this journey will continue the rest of our lives together.
(Note that I received an ARC of this prior to publication but I also purchased the book.)
I've known Tamice as a friend and as a mentor for a little while, meeting her in community where we break bread together, and this book feels like she is right with us sharing about her life and her thoughts and her passions.
The book itself is her story of the journey from what can feel like a comfortable, disembodied Christianity that asks nothing of us but to sit and listen to people speak, learning how to repeat sentences to help mask the pain of living in this world, to a faith that is rich and full and where Jesus is embodied within us and where we confront this world that attempts to destroy us with our own hearts set afire for justice and peace.
Tamice is a gifted communicator and a lively community organizer. You can't help but want to be along for that journey, and in reading this book I again am reminded of how much I have learned and been shaped by participating with her in our faith journey together.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough to you who are looking for a way to hold on to Jesus while discarding the religious clutter you've accumulated over the years or even decades as you've struggled to fit in to the modern culturally American church where you've abandoned so much of your own personhood. Tamice's testimony is one that will help you uncover for yourself what it is your belief and how it is you want to act upon those beliefs.
This is a book of a lively faith that you will not want to stop reading until the end--and then you will wish, as I do, that this journey will continue the rest of our lives together.
(Note that I received an ARC of this prior to publication but I also purchased the book.)
February 21, 2023
While I've read many a book about leaving behind controlling, religious constructs for a more authentic faith, the beauty of this book is being brought along on one woman's journey through and ultimately out of these spaces. Tamice Spencer-Helms leads the reader through her road of being asked to give up more and more of herself, her identity, and her freedom. We also then get to experience through her descriptive writing, the redemptive arc of her story. She writes in a captivity and brilliant way, naming things that often are hard to put your finger on. I hope this is only the beginning for this author.
February 22, 2023
Tamice is the friend who turned me onto James Baldwin, and her writing pierces my soul in the same way that his writing does. Her clear and brutally honest voice reflects and puts words to a world that I lived in and the harm it caused, particularly to black and queer people. Tamice shares how she surpassed her blackness, her queerness, and even common sense in pursuit of holiness while following White Jesus in evangelicalism. The current alarming direction evangelicalism has taken and the harm caused in the name of love by those who claim to follow Jesus in America today is critically examined through her story. It is so moving, heartbreaking, and inspiring. This is a must read for anyone else who lived through BLM and the rise of Trump as a Christian or peripheral to Christian spaces. Even those who are outside of evangelicalism but are baffled by the direction of the far right and Christian nationalism in our country would benefit from this insight behind the veil.
September 18, 2023
4.5 stars. I love the unleavened bread metaphor to describe Tamice’s journey with faith. Her powerful story caused me to reconsider ways there may still be hidden leaven in my bread of life.
Put simply: “whoever has ears, let them hear”. I think the topics she sheds lights on are worth pondering on long walks with a hot drink.
Put simply: “whoever has ears, let them hear”. I think the topics she sheds lights on are worth pondering on long walks with a hot drink.
February 24, 2023
Tamice's debut is stunningly vulnerable and a journey into the damage white evangelicalism has done to Black faith and mental health.
Deconstructing faith is like undeavened bread-all of the essentials of faith without the bloat. You enter with her into grief and awareness and it's a journey wort traveling. Beautiful storytelling.
Deconstructing faith is like undeavened bread-all of the essentials of faith without the bloat. You enter with her into grief and awareness and it's a journey wort traveling. Beautiful storytelling.
October 20, 2023
Great book, though a sad/sombre story, if with a positive outcome. It's really sad what (predominantly) the US has done to Christianity, and the pain it has caused. I'm glad Tamice is where she's at now.
March 6, 2023
Tamice takes the reader into a raw, vulnerable, heartbreaking, and hopeful journey. Unleavened faith is faith that has not been corrupted, and Tamice recounts the way she realized she was partaking in leavened faith, leavened with White Jesus – which brought her to the brink of despair.
What stood out to me was how Tamice was pursuing her faith so earnestly - except the systems of white evangelicalism suffocated her and robbed her of the kind, genuine, loving Jesus that she longed to see and believe in.
Tamice writes with an approachability, genuineness, and thoughtfulness that made me want to love Jesus more. Especially the last few chapters, Tamice shares deeply and vulnerably – it made me weep for joy at the end, where through her journey through wilderness, she was resurrected by the process of unleavening her faith.
I finish reading this book refreshed in my own faith - that "Jesus doesn't call people into a systematic theology - he invites people to a meal." I'm grateful for Tamice sharing her story through this book. It has made me consider which parts of my faith have been leavened, and leaves me longing for unleavened bread of life.
My favorite line from the book reads: "Unleavening helped me see that Jesus doesn't seem to be as obsessed with sin as we are. Sin conversations are too shallow. Jesus was obsessed with love." Amen!
What stood out to me was how Tamice was pursuing her faith so earnestly - except the systems of white evangelicalism suffocated her and robbed her of the kind, genuine, loving Jesus that she longed to see and believe in.
Tamice writes with an approachability, genuineness, and thoughtfulness that made me want to love Jesus more. Especially the last few chapters, Tamice shares deeply and vulnerably – it made me weep for joy at the end, where through her journey through wilderness, she was resurrected by the process of unleavening her faith.
I finish reading this book refreshed in my own faith - that "Jesus doesn't call people into a systematic theology - he invites people to a meal." I'm grateful for Tamice sharing her story through this book. It has made me consider which parts of my faith have been leavened, and leaves me longing for unleavened bread of life.
My favorite line from the book reads: "Unleavening helped me see that Jesus doesn't seem to be as obsessed with sin as we are. Sin conversations are too shallow. Jesus was obsessed with love." Amen!
February 2, 2024
Damn. This is the powerful memoir I needed, exploring the broken failures of the white church—most egregiously in their embrace of Donald Trump, but existing long before that. Rather than walking away from her faith, Tamice Spencer-Helms reclaimed it from "White Jesus." It's a quick read, but powerful, full of hypocrisy and abuse, but also history and theology and real-world living. Sometimes the personal parts feel too abbreviated, but overall I think we get just enough of her personal experience and don't drown in the details.
March 19, 2023
This is one of those rare books that communicates deep truths about life and faith in an extremely accessible, engaging way. Its pages and succinct chapters, each on a life stage of the author, offer a new perspective on how Evangelicalism permeated in white culture and norms can exclude, omit, and injure its marginalized members. I was sad when the book ended; I wanted to hear more of Spencer-Helms' voice.
December 16, 2023
This short memoir was a breath of fresh air. Tamice shares her journey into, and then out of, the high-control, Calvinist, black-and-white view of scripture that white evangelicalism has embraced for decades, which views Christ through a decidedly colonialist lens. Her story is just one of many that highlights how white evangelicalism leads with power and not with love, especially when it comes to the queer community and people of color.
January 27, 2025
Faith Unleavened is such a beautiful memoir detailing the faith journey of Tamice Spencer-Helms. Her descriptions of the communities she interacted with growing up were beautiful — though many of her experiences were anything but that. Many of the passages resonated deeply with me. I've followed the author on Instagram for a while now, so I've been very excited to pick this one up and am very glad I did! It will definitely be one I purchase and re-read in the future.
February 23, 2025
READ THIS BOOK! Tamice Spencer-Helms weaves together solid theology, faithfulness, their own story, and the stories of Black beloveds who made the news because they were murdered. The result is a compelling example of lived faith beyond the confines of White Jesus and American evangelicalism, expressed in the fullness of identity that embraces race, sexuality, gender, and faith as gifts of God for justice and love of neighbor. This is an important voice for our times!
December 13, 2023
So much perspective and heart in this book! Thank you for sharing this with the world Tamice.
December 5, 2024
Wow. As a queer Christian and a therapist who sees a lot of queer clients, this book was very powerful and I highlighted and starred many sections. I selected it to read about Tamice’s experience with decolonizing her religious experiences but also discovered an author whose words are powerful. Your story and your words matter Tamice.
October 1, 2023
Tamice's story pulled my right in. It's so engaging I had a hard time putting it down. I finished Faith Unleavened the same day, & if you know me, you know that's unusual.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews