Thinking through America’s Religious Crisis with James Baldwin

Abstract

Thinking through America’s Religious Crisis with James Baldwin Darrius D. Hills In his candid published interview with anthropologist Margaret Mead, James Baldwin expounds upon life in the US, considering the making and meaning of his own development, and the scope of Black identity.1 He speaks not simply to a sustained critique of White supremacy but also to the interplays between race and gender that contour Black people’s displacement from the mainstream. Another significant feature of Baldwin’s perspective, one that has been taken up in subsequent Baldwin scholarship, is the role of religion and, in particular, Black church culture.2 In the back-and-forth between Mead and Baldwin, the former, at points, presses Baldwin to discuss how religion shapes his literary themes and content, his overall understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and social trajectory of African Americans. [End Page 1] No small part of Baldwin’s development was religious. Baldwin’s Christian background (he was, for a time, a Pentecostal child preacher) leads him to consider a crisis in White American Christianity—at odds with the faith and justice commitments they presume to be normative. Consider this admission, which I quote at length: I was raised in the church and I left when I was seventeen…. But I never understood white Christians. I still don’t. I remember the photographs of white women in New Orleans, several years ago, during the school integration crisis, who were standing with their babies in their arms, and in the name of Jesus Christ they were spitting on other women’s children, women who happened to be black, women with their babies in their arms. I have never been able to understand that at all. To put it in exaggerated primitive terms, I don’t understand at all what the white man’s religion means to him. I know what the white man’s religion has done to me. And so, I could— can—accuse the white Christian world of being nothing but a tissue of lies, nothing but an excuse for power, as being as removed as anything can possibly be from any sense of worship and, still more, from any sense of love. I cannot understand that religion.3 Baldwin describes—a crisis grounded in the dysfunction of (White) American Christianity and its failure to embody and inspire authentic and wholesome race relations. Such religiosity is marked by enforced separation, disunion, and, most strikingly, the dearth—really, the non-existence—of love. What I focus on in this short essay is another approach to the problem of religious crisis, accented by Baldwin’s critique of American Christianity, which is central to the US’s racial sins and moral disintegration. This crisis is the crisis of disunity and estrangement— this is both the inability and refusal to embrace the humanity and integrity of those deemed “others.” Following Baldwin, religion that is not grounded in love, connection, and mutual care, is illegible. American Christianity, in this way, was not authentic, “real” religion, but rather an insidious and offensive doppelganger that is “Christian in name only,” subject to moral apathies that topple mutual concerns of well-being and further broaden racial divides. The subject of Baldwin’s personal religious orientation has raised considerable scrutiny, particularly concerning the difficulty of pinpointing what Baldwin professed to believe. What emerges from most accounts is that Baldwin’s relationship to the meaning and scope of religious faith and its capacity for guiding human conduct was tortured at best. Some biographies reveal a younger Baldwin [End Page 2] who is disillusioned with both the arrogance and impotence of local ministers to address material suffering and with the racial provincialism shared by both White and Black Christians who adopted a segregated interpretation of Christian community.4 Baldwin’s attitude toward religion is marked by paradox. He was at once turned off by the church’s impotence to address race relations and the material existence of suffering people yet drawn to the Black Christian culture of his youth—so much so that the style, rhythms, and cadences of the Black church seem to have strong influence over themes in his writings and personal sensibilities. Regardless of these religious...