The Gospel according to James Baldwin Quotes

“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.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“He argued then—as he did elsewhere for decades—that the future of America was precisely as bright as the future of Black people in America. That we would rise or fall together.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long (Garrett quoting “The Price May Be Too High,” New York Times, 2 February 1969).”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Baldwin was clear that the moral damage done to white people by racism was so killing, that white people experienced daily damage from oppressing just as—in a more direct way—Black people took daily damage from being oppressed.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“People need to believe in their innocence and will do much to preserve it. Historian Tyler Stovall notes in White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea that people don't consciously choose evil; they choose a myth or myths they can hide behind, that can allow them to avert their eyes from such a judgment.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Baldwin saw racism as damaging to all who are caught up in its lies. It was, though, Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color who were most powerfully affected by the construction and application of race, by the overwhelming weight of racism in the United States and elsewhere.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Race, the treatment and attitudes of people of color, and this nation's past, present, and future are, Baldwin said, interlinked. The issue of racism and the experiment we call America cannot be understood apart from each other, and America will rise or fall based on how it ultimately deals—or does not deal—with those interrelated issues.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Churches can be havens for some within them—and hell for others.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Ultimately he could not be part of an American Christianity that elevated white heterosexual men, while women, people of color, Indigenous people, and LGBTQ people were left to fight for scraps and to suffer deprivation and degradation.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“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.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“In his explanation for rejecting the Nation of Islam in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin makes clear that despite their Muslim trappings, the organization feels too much like the Christianity he left; what he is suspicious of is dogmatism in any faith, particularly views of one’s own rightness and fitness that lead inexorably to hatred and violence, whether those views are espoused by white Christians or by Black Muslims.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“We don’t like being held accountable. And we blame others. I never enslaved anyone. Despite Socrates’s dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, the American experience remains largely unexamined, marked by an ignorance, blindness, and intellectual dishonesty against which another great American writer, Henry David Thoreau, railed in Walden.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“One of the benefits of Baldwin’s lived experience—Black, gay, artistic, exile—was that it offered him the opportunity to evaluate and reevaluate an America that was primarily white, heterosexual, economically and politically ascendant, and supremely confident.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“James Baldwin is as alive in this moment as he has ever been, his voice as clear and measured. And what does he have to teach us?

It is nothing less than a commitment to being fully alive, a way to be fully human, an awareness that love, freedom, and justice are the universal desires of every human being.

It is a commitment to look at our world and at our lives and to strive to tell nothing but the truth/”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity