James Baldwin's American Religion

Part 1 of a major essay called "James Baldwin: American Prophet"

(I’ve been working on an important essay titled “James Baldwin: American Prophet.” This section, a short 8-minute read, is Part 1, “James Baldwin’s American Religion”— I’ll post the next few parts (“Contingency & Courage,” “Black Star,” and “Prophet, Preacher, Writer”) shortly, before posting the whole, but I figure breaking it up will make it more readable. In my class with literary critic James Wood on “The Essay”, we had an assignment to write a 2-3 page paper on any of the authors we read in class; I ended up writing 18 pages, propelled by pure passion for James Baldwin. Baldwin is, in my view, a central character in American philosophy and literature, one whose prophetic voice we need now more than ever; the full essay explores deeper why this is, and how he became a prophet.

The bolded, italicized footnotes contain interesting thoughts, quotes, and supplementary ideas— I highly recommend clicking these highlighted footnotes, which can then link you right back to where you were in the text.

This essay is deeply grounded in American philosophy and Christianity. It’s written in Baldwin’s preacherly style, with his characteristically long sentence structure of interesting commas, clauses, semicolons, and em-dashes— this enables a sort of spoken-word naturalness. Read on to learn how Christianity and American philosophy can fuse to create a uniquely American religious impulse towards a truly ‘achieved America’ of democratic brotherhood.)

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James Baldwin’s American Religion

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time prophesies a uniquely American religion. Like any good sermon, it inspires the will to believe, the will to act. In order to write it, Baldwin not only needed to believe in the words he wrote, but also in the power of language itself— to believe that words cast upon souls like embers can catch flame, transform, and empower our liberty to make different choices when the crucible of reality demands action. Baldwin’s historical and prophetical consciousness in this essay is of a human magnitude rivaled only by the great prophets of old— Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, perhaps Muhammad, Jesus of Nazareth— and the new American prophets— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Baldwin’s contemporary, Martin Luther King Jr. All Americans are implicated in his serious moral endeavor; it concerns the future of our very character, individually and nationally, whether we have the courage to truly listen or not. What does Baldwin believe? Why does he believe it? And can we today become true believers in this old and new American dream?

The main essay, Down at the Cross, is split into three parts; over its course, in Dostoevskian fashion, Baldwin moves through a classic dialectic— from the first faith he is given, through the negation of that faith,¹ and into a larger faith freely chosen.

Young Baldwin, recoiling from the Harlem streets, and looking for something larger to give himself to, meets the pastor of his friend’s church— a woman; “she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indian blended in her face.”² This symbol of a beautifully unified America asks “Whose little boy are you?” and James’s heart replies at once, “Why, yours.”³ In this moment, James is baptized, twice at once— both into Christianity, and into a uniquely American religion that extends Christianity. His life task becomes to reconcile the two.

In the immediately following paragraph, later that summer in the writer’s life, he has a classic mystical experience, an epiphanic religious moment that resembles the inspiring visions of Alyosha or Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov.⁴ “One moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping and, at the same time, working out in my head the plot of a play⁵ I was working on then; the next moment, with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me.”⁶ Knocked low, unsure of how he got there, his religious vision simultaneously presents two truths which seem impossible to reconcile.⁷ He has a genuine feeling of unity with the universe, but at the very same time feels “the unspeakable pain” of knowing that black Americans like him are taught to “give up all hope of communion.”⁸ He reaches the democratic metaphysics of Walt Whitman as an extension of existential sociality and Christlike love: he genuinely realizes that his self is inextricable from the “universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people;”⁹ he knows that other people are the most important and wonderful parts of himself. However, this cosmic unity is struck short in the same sentence, because the larger social whole to which he would belong “has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.”¹⁰ He recognizes the possibility of a beautiful, various, large unity, but simultaneously recognizes the fact of its seeming impossibility across the color line; he feels all the anguish and despair in the gap between the limitations of the church he knows, used time and time again by power to justify the separation of white and black, and the truly unified, truly unlimited Church it could be if it took the heart of Christ’s teachings to “love thy neighbor as thyself” seriously.

In the church, Baldwin first feels genuine communion. He feels a community, a religious connection, a collective effervescence; he encourages us to imagine if this truly felt unity could be achieved between all in America. Amidst the music, the drama, the dancing, the moaning and rejoicing, the voices all coming together in ecstasy, he confesses that there is “no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord.”¹¹ This sentence is America— a phanopoetic image, a cave painting, whirling dervishes, a Shakespearean drama of democracy in motion on a stage in Harlem. It contains darkness and light, Emersonian hope and Melvillean witness to the facts we’d prefer not face. It is also, especially, an image of America inflected with the black experience— the blues, jazz, and spirituals that form the tone and timber of America’s deepest voice, a prophetic black voice that knows the weight of America’s pain, the flight of liberty as a feeling of wind on freshly freed wrists, and the loving solidarity that gives us the strength to endure any suffering. We multicolored, worn Americans— can we, like this dancing church, become triumphant, transfigured? Can we speak the depths of ourselves to life together, and weave this dancing tapestry, this romance of endless diversity, this rocking song of ourselves in shared joy? As the fire and excitement fills a church, could we fill America with a single loving spirit?

The failure of the church to live up to its own ideals forces Baldwin to lose part of his original religion. For the church he witnessed was reinforcing the color line more than erasing it; on one side, whites abused Christianity to maintain their own blindness, power, and perceived superiority; Jesus was believed to be white, and men like Baldwin were condemned to fatal separateness as sons of Ham. Meanwhile, though, Baldwin also realized that the compensatory ethnocentrism of black churches couldn’t achieve the whole unity he desired, either. For many in his black church, whites were the sons of Cain, not included in the salvation black Americans imagined for themselves. “Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?”¹² asks Baldwin. But Baldwin thinks we must have the will to believe, like William James, that we can become truly moral human beings, accounting for the fullest range of ourselves. Thus, at the very end of the first section, he “divorce[s] himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.”¹³ It is only by negating his given faith that Baldwin gains the space, the individual freedom, to choose his own religion: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.”¹⁴ This is a concept of God capacious enough for an America in pursuit of ever-widening liberty and democracy.

Baldwin fuses Christian love and American ideals of liberty and democracy into a liberal democratic civil religion, the religion of Walt Whitman and John Dewey, a pragmatic religion that dreams of freedom expanding through connection and co-creation. This religion stems from his genuine felt sense of unity engendered by the classic “mystical experience” recorded by prophets of most religions throughout history— the felt sense of integral connection with an oceanic Oneness, the realization that oneself is bound up in everything else irrevocably, inseparably; that the universe is infinitely interconnected and that one’s self is a locus of those very same connections; that oneself plus the world equals one; that we are never all that different after all, though we’re changing all the time; that this world is a single song of ourselves. Thus, Baldwin says, “One is responsible to life.”¹⁵

But to put this abstract ideal to the pragmatic test of race in America proposes a challenge, forces us to make new choices in the social world if we are to really discover who we are, who we’re bound up with, what we’re freed by. For, in our corner, the universe is very much other people— dense loci, close to our heart, closest to what we are. Our web of freedom is a shared responsibility; thus, says Baldwin, speaking to his nephew about white people: “We cannot be free until they are free.”¹⁶ Salvation is a social affair.¹⁷ Invidious color lines have painfully limited the growth of selves on all sides in stunted dialectics.¹⁸ Baldwin is concerned for blacks’ “dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negros may make to do to others what has been done to them”;¹⁹ he also recognizes that segregation limits the soul of the white man— were the white man “to consent, in effect, to become black himself,” then he could finally join the full religious chorus, could “become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power.”²⁰ Black and white “deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation— if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity.”²¹ We can only walk through the gates together. We can only become truly free by freeing one another.

This realization of a democratic metaphysics, of our existential sociality, requires us to act in ways that bring more of our connections into consciousness— and it is precisely the connections we most look away from that might teach us the most. Whites and blacks in Baldwin’s America couldn’t look one another in the eyes as equals,²² as shared selves in maximally creative communion. But if they could, they could save one another— and in saving one another, save themselves. “If we— and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks— who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others— do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”²³ In Baldwin’s American religion, Americans will be endlessly curious about one another; they will consciously co-create their own widest freedoms, and pursue communication towards its ideal limit on the path of discovering who they are. Authority emanates, not from somewhere far away, but from ourselves, mutually self-reliant, responsible to one another— responsible to harsh realities and precious possibilities.

James Baldwin’s religion dreams of “the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.”²⁴ Its grounds are universal, but for him it is most alive as an American religion, because America is the historic situation he finds himself in— with our peculiar problems, and thus our peculiar, pragmatic opportunities.²⁵ If we can achieve a liberal-democratic religion of expansive, trans-racial, shared humanity here, then it’s possible elsewhere— an experiment with global significance.²⁶ Here, in this half-forged nation, is where we now make our choices. The nation is our chance to co-create a higher shared identity, the next step forward in our progress towards becoming truly moral human beings, beings who account for as much diversity and integrity as possible. For Baldwin, an achieved America is heaven.

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1. This negation is represented by his encounter with Elijah Muhammad’s black nationalism; at the end of that section, during which his conflict with Muhammad solidifies his own belief in a truly integrated world, he is brought from the black world to the white and set down “at the enemy’s door” before the essay’s second and final section break, completing the dialectical hero’s journey into a larger black-and-white synthesis. (It is also worth noting that, in the depths of the negation movement, we get the moment where Baldwin most uses the word ‘I’, and where he says “I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.” (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 333). Thus the individual negates the collective.

2. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, in the Library of America’s Baldwin: Collected Essays, 303

3. Ibid

4. For example, the first time we see color in The Brothers Karamazov is when the hero, Alyosha, after visiting his mentor Elder Zosima’s corpse, rushes outside and collapses to the ground feeling deep connections through the stars to “other worlds” (Norton Critical Edition, page 312); or, when Dmitri falls asleep in police custody and has his vision of a cold and starving baby, which teaches him a deep sense of Christian empathy, and girds him with a willingness to “suffer for all men” (page 499).

5. Baldwin here perhaps acknowledges his own dramatization of this religious experience in the essay, acknowledging that, as a good writer and preacher, a certain bit of storytelling, flair, and evangelistic mythmaking is helpful in stoking a fire in the minds of a church.

6. The Fire Next Time 304

7. Befitting a visionary whose brilliance cannot help but see in what Dubois calls ‘double-consciousness’— through the veil of color, and behind our ignorance.

8. Ibid 304

9. Ibid 304. This is an excellent example of what I call “democratic ecology” or “ecological democracy,” which is a natural corollary to democratic metaphysics.

10. Ibid 304

11. Ibid 306

12. Ibid 309

13. Ibid 314

14. Ibid 314

15. Ibid 339

16. Ibid 295

17. Ibid 310. “But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?”

18. As Hegel noted, the imbalanced dialectic of power between ‘lords’ and ‘bondsmen’ creates a situation in which neither party can get the true recognition from an equal that we all really crave.

19. Ibid 334

20. Ibid 341

21. Ibid 342

22. In Philip Pettit’s book Just Freedom, he discusses the ‘eyeball test’ of whether a society has reached a state of true republican freedom, the freedom of non-dominated sovereign citizens who can stand tall and look one another in the eyes as equals.

23. Ibid 346

24. Ibid 333

25. Ibid 339. “America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity.”

26. This is American representativeness, not American exceptionalism— mirror images, these ideas depict entirely different points of view and conceptions of ‘pride.’ There can be no exceptions in a democratic metaphysics— but one can be a more or less ‘representative’ locus of various wholes from given positions.