The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

by Greg Garrett

necessary counterpoint to my own narrow Anglo angle of vision, gained insights I could never have reached through my own straight white middle-class filters, and was inspired to continue arguing that art and culture can and must be read not just critically but also in the light of how they represent, distort, and transform our own lives.

He was born Black and poor in Harlem; I was born into the white middle class, and my childhood was suburban, sometimes even rural. I have driven a tractor, ridden a horse, stacked hay bales, for God’s sake.

These testimonials come from all sorts of people, from all over, and they could fill their own book. Over the years I have been working on this project, I have often heard how Baldwin has lighted the path for someone, no matter how similar or different their own experience from his.

is and always will be an exquisitely thoughtful guide to What Matters,

know whence you came.”

1924 in Harlem, the grandson of a slave,

Baldwin watched his father consumed by despair, he made it his mission to avoid that fate. The primary means through which Baldwin was able to pull off that escape was language. Words helped Baldwin make sense of what destroyed his father and words helped him figure out what liberation might look like.2

In middle school, Baldwin encountered one of the first of the great Black writers who would shape his future, the poet Countee Cullen, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, that flowering of African American artists and writers that took place from 1918 into the 1930s. Baldwin attended DeWitt Clinton High School, a mostly Jewish high school in the Bronx, where he edited the school’s magazine with Richard Avedon (later one of America’s most famous photographers), and to which he contributed stories, poems, and plays. In high school, Baldwin was introduced to the African American painter Beauford Delaney, who demonstrated how a Black man could be a top-flight artist, and who became a longtime friend and mentor.

Two seminal events happened that first winter in Leukerbad: there in the Swiss Alps, Baldwin finished the novel he now called Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953),

In 1963 he convened a group of Black artists, entertainers, and activists to meet with Robert F. Kennedy, then the attorney general for his brother John, and although Robert Kennedy was taken aback by the anger of some of those present and stunned by what he initially perceived as their disloyalty to America, that shock later led him to radical reunderstanding: many of those present felt no loyalty to America because America had manifested no loyalty to them

I Am Not Your Negro).

Sacvan Bercovitch, a literary and cultural critic who studied the roots of American exceptionalism, argued in his influential 1978 monograph The American Jeremiad that American prophets have long taken the nation to task for falling short of its ideals, for its sins of commission and omission—but also have held out the hope of some sort of salvation if, as Jeremiah preached, we truly amend our ways and our doings, if we truly act justly one with another.

Wen Stephenson noted in the New York Times that “we Americans, the jeremiad proclaims, have failed to live up to our founding principles, betrayed our sacred covenant as history’s (or God’s) chosen nation, and must rededicate ourselves to our ideals, reclaim our founding promise.”

The Devil Finds Work is criticism as gift and challenge, criticism in service of truth and in service of justice, and it is James Baldwin as the world first encountered him, the thoughtful, fierce, and idealistic observer of culture who demanded that art show us ourselves as we are, all of us in our full humanity.

Baldwin believed that great art should take on the sicknesses and psychoses of those who consume it, show them their flaws and failings, and offer them the chance to become well, to help those readers, listeners, and viewers to live into their full humanity.4 Baldwin said that a great artist was in a loving war with his culture, “and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.”

Baldwin wrote in Giovanni’s Room (1956), “is to say Yes to life”—just as, at the conclusion of The Devil Finds Work, he suggests that we see the devil in that moment “when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself.”

Great art can help us become something other than we are, but first it has to honestly show us ourselves in a way that we can accept and from which we can learn.

Baldwin also expresses genuine critical objections to the elder writer’s work. In saying what he did not think fiction should do—perhaps especially by pointing out examples in his mentor’s popular and widely acclaimed novel—Baldwin expresses his own aesthetic of what art should be and do, even if he begins by negation.

He then goes on to define and discuss sentimentality, which for him is a cardinal literary sin since it relies on stock situations and dishonest emotional appeals to command the reader’s attention. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist,” he concludes, “betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”18

So it is that Baldwin writes of a “race film” like The Defiant Ones (1958), starring Tony Curtis and the great Sidney Poitier, two escaped inmates shackled together who are trying to reach freedom, that it is a movie “with people we are accustomed to seeing in the movies,” but that it sugarcoats its message of racial tolerance and that even “the unmistakable truth” of Poitier’s performance is placed in the service of a lie.40 The shackled prisoners are represented as hating each other, but the film ignores a very simple truth, as Baldwin sees it: “Black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks.” White men hate Black people, he says, because of terror and dread, because of the myths they have created and spread that Black people are dangerous and subhuman. “But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children’s way.”41 Simply put, whites hate Blacks because they fear what Black people could do to them; Blacks hate whites because of what white people have done to them. It is not in any way the same, and the fears of white audiences are imaginary, despite all the damage those fears have caused and continue to cause.

If bad art lies about the culture, minimizes or glosses over hard truths; if protest literature focuses on issues to the detriment of its characters; then Baldwin argues that great art tells the truth, the whole truth.

3 By all accounts, Baldwin was an exciting, inspired, and gifted minister of the Christian faith, albeit within the context of a sin and salvation gospel and a racially constricted understanding of how God was and was not moving in the world and in American society.

Like many people I know (and indeed, like my younger self), Baldwin rebelled against the strictures and structures of the church in which he was raised, finding them untenable or even soul-killing. At the same time, it became clear that he saw some continuing value in understanding himself within a Christian framework, that he never stopped recognizing himself as a person somehow steeped in faith.

Baldwin spent his adult life consciously separating himself from institutional Christianity. He witnessed the ways that both the white church and the Black church failed the faithful and the world. As Baldwin said on The Dick Cavett Show, it meant that he couldn’t afford to trust most white Christians, or to trust the Christian church, which, as he says in No Name in the Street, “has betrayed and dishonored [their] Savior.... The Christians do not believe in their Savior (who has certainly failed to save them).”12 But given the many religious references and symbols in his work, given the rhetorical flourishes and the Christian epigraphs, Baldwin seems to embody Paul Thomas Anderson’s line from Magnolia (1999), a powerful film about alienated and broken people: “We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.”

What Baldwin believes about faith, I would argue, is that belief and action badly applied make us more dangerous, more limited, more blinkered in our vision. A bad religious understanding may breed jealousy, greed, and hatred. Bad faith may in fact be worse than no faith at all. But rightly applied, faith and hope make us bigger, better human beings, capable of seeing and loving the world and all those in it, capable of working for larger aims than our own desires, capable of living in hope rather than in fear. Baldwin argued late in life, “I know that we can be better than we are.”16 It was, he said, the limit of his wisdom.

have heard Kelly Brown Douglas say that slaveholders may have introduced enslaved people to Christianity, but they did not introduce them to the liberating God.

American Christianity was both a comfort and a curse. Baldwin believed that despite the Blackness of his church, God remained white, the God of white people, and Jesus was and still is often depicted as white despite his earthly incarnation as a brown-skinned Palestinian peasant.

If Christianity has whiteness at its heart, then where do nonwhites belong? Baldwin himself wondered, since, in his day, God and Jesus both were white, and he was not. “The blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatsoever,” Baldwin lamented about his time in the Black church. “I was just as black as I had been the day I was born.”40 Ultimately he could not be part of an American Christianity that elevated white heterosexual men,

All the great villains in my life are also damaged; I can wish that they had responded to their brokenness without harming me or anyone else, yet harm often grows out of harm: hurt people hurt people.

“race problem.”

So it is that Baldwin guides us into conversation about race and racism—what it is, how it works, why it exists—as he also directs us into conversation about the America where racism has been endemic throughout history. What he was saying was that the story of Black people in America was, in a very real sense, the story of the nation, and until we were willing to acknowledge that truth, excavate that history, and repent the very great sins of that past, present, and future, we could not hope to make any sort of progress toward the soaring words of the founders, no matter that, as Cavett points out, “There are Negro mayors. There are Negroes in all of sports. There are Negroes in politics. They are even accorded the ultimate accolade of being in television commercials.”

Baldwin did not think of race—or of the resulting prejudice of racism—as a natural phenomenon. He understood that race is, instead, a construct, a mythic structure erected by white men, especially, in order to subjugate Black people (and others who were not white men), a story that many white people had lived in for so long that they couldn’t see the dimensions unless the architecture was pointed out to them. Baldwin said that whiteness was created as a mirror image of Blackness, as a way of elevating some and enslaving others, yet the ultimate result was so demeaning and enslaving to all who were caught up in this worldview—which is to say, all of us—and there was no hope until we threw off the chains of racial thinking.

Few people short of slaveholders, eugenicists, and Nazis have ever professed to believe so. In this understanding that race is an imaginative construct with a defined set of repressive goals, Baldwin fits squarely into the mainstream of thinking.

One’s born in a white country, in a white, Protestant, Puritan country, where one was once a slave, and where all the standards and all the images that you open your, when you open your eyes in the world, everything you see, none of it applies to you.

Baldwin argued that “white people invented black people to protect themselves against something which frightened them.”

One reason Baldwin stepped away from the church was that he felt Christianity had failed Black people, that the God presented to him and others was a white God, and that no amount of prayer or time on his knees or faithful service would make him resemble that God the slightest bit more.

In his understanding of these myths and inventions, Baldwin would agree with Churchwell’s formulation: that what white America wants more than anything is to maintain its sense of innocence, and also its ignorance, since they are directly linked.

Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?

Biblical scholar John M. Bracke, reflecting on this section of Jeremiah, notes how it clearly calls for the king/ruler/government to administer justice, and how Jeremiah “identifies the substance of justice to be the protection of the weaker members of society from oppression by those more powerful.”12 It is a concern throughout Jeremiah, a calling for everyone in the society, “rich and poor, common citizen or monarch alike” to seek equity and fairness for all, with that failure leading to what should now be familiar language from Jeremiah 5: Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look around and take note! Search its squares and see if you can find one person who acts justly and seeks truth— so that I may pardon Jerusalem.13 Is there not one righteous among them?

Richard, like Baldwin himself, is ultimately released.

Meanwhile, Baldwin said, Black people have the difficult task of recognizing that we are all bound up in our shared and corrosive history of American racial oppression. As Dagmawi Woubshet wrote in The Atlantic about The Fire Next Time, “Writing two years before the end of legal segregation, Baldwin demands black people not only to accept whites, but to do so with love, positioning black love as a vital instrument for white liberation and interracial renewal on a national scale.”64 It was a heroic task to ask of the oppressed—again, the words “human courage and honor” come to mind—but Baldwin had seen the end results of fear and hatred, and would have agreed with Dr. King’s formulation that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”65 Dr. King argued that what was required was the capacity to love, to love until the oppressor is humbled and brought to his knees.

Baldwin wasn’t sure that it was always good to define himself at all.

And then the questions arise: Why do we have to call them anything at all? Why do we have to have a category for human beings, a convenient box in which to drop a human life? Won’t there come a day—in the New Jerusalem or when we gather at the Welcome Table—when we won’t ask what someone is but simply see them as who they are, that is to say, just another human being?

Baldwin listened to him talk about the mixing of the races, and then claim that he had never held ill will toward any “colored person.” Baldwin believed him, he says. “But I could not avoid wondering if he had ever really looked at a Negro and wondered about the life, the aspirations, the universal humanity hidden behind the dark skin.”15

Saints are not saints because they’re picture-perfect. They’re saints because they show up and put their hands in the real and get them dirty. And they’re saints because they inspire us.

Sister Margaret in The Amen Corner illuminates the meaning of the closing word “Amen.” It means “Let it be so.”2 So we’ve learned that Baldwin believed that two truths summed up his total knowledge about the world. Live the life you’re given. We can be better. And I can only say, Amen. May it be so.