Month: March 2021

On the Human Institution of the Church

The conversations we shared during the presentation this week made me reflect deeply on how I experienced the different elements of religion in Go Tell It On the Mountain. I feel like the discourse around an angry/wrathful God, the commentary on love and prophethood, as well as the analysis of the deep and structural flaws of the human part of the Church continue to be relevant time and time again. 

In these conversations, I am reminded of the Vatican’s (somewhat) recent statement of refusing to bless same-sex unions, stating that God “does not and cannot bless sin,” even though many Catholics (including many religious leaders) have acknowledged the holiness of love between committed same-sex couples, and recognize this love as divinely inspired and supported, which therefore meets the standard to be blessed. Instead of focusing on radical love, the human element of the Church is overly punitive and rigidly exclusionary, which in turn further isolates individuals since the Church is supposed to be a reflection of God and His divine will. All the characters in Go Tell It On the Mountain are afraid of God’s wrath, of the day of judgement, and are quick to condemn others as a way to project the fear and shame they feel for not being God’s perfect servant. Every step they take and every action they carry out is weighed down by the all-knowing, all-judging eyes of God, and there is almost no room left for love since everyone is too focused on, for a lack of better word, not messing up. Every character is also weighed down by the judgement of others, who are always quick to find fault in other people’s actions, so it’s not just a theology of an “Angry God,” but also one of an “Angry Church.” 

I believe that this is Baldwin’s main argument against institutionalised religion — there is so little room for love, since everyone is so focused on “getting it right” rather than nurturing one another and practicing empathy. The profound sense of isolation that so many of the characters in this novel feel (John, Roy, Florence, etc.) is a result of the disconnect between the love they are taught and the hate they experience. Institutions are primarily interested in maintaining power and social influence (something we can see during Gabriel’s observations of the high priests), and that is best enforced through fear and judgement. Love requires accountability and mutual respect, and is a completely opposing force of power that would force change at a level so radical that the Church as we know it (and the Church that Baldwin knew) would become unrecognisable.

A Churchgoer Walks Into a Bar…

In our last in-person discussion, I was very flummoxed about not being able to empathize with the religious perspectives and themes in Go Tell It On The Mountain. I think that I got too wrapped up in the community aspect of John’s life being a purely religious one rather than some other form of community. But I think I am starting to understand Baldwin’s beliefs in a joint communal-individual salvation. In Giovanni’s Room, the first bar scene illuminates both the goals and desires of an individual (David) and the greater community around him. This bar certainly does not present salvation in the traditional sense, but it presents Giovanni, who gives David an opportunity to love and be loved, and it gives the rest of its patrons a similar opportunity.

I did not comprehend John’s salvation because I don’t think John really comprehended it either; him being saved goes completely against his beliefs throughout the book that he cannot be saved because he is attracted to men. The religious dogma being taught to John (and at the same time Baldwin) made me upset, and my feelings of anger toward the institution of the church blinded me to the opportunity for growth that religion presents to individuals. While the institution of the church itself is flawed, its tenets of love are actually beneficial for those who cannot learn to love on their own. There are those in the church who choose a path of living in and teaching fear rather than love, but if love is taught effectively, people can live happier through learning about it. But again, the church itself is flawed and sometimes love is not presented as the end goal of its teachings. But the bar in Giovanni’s Room, while traditional viewed as an institution of sin and lust, actually brings the David towards a true love with Giovanni.

While I have not finished Giovanni’s Room, and thus do not know the result of David and Giovanni’s love or how Giovanni ends up arrested, the love is currently presented as pure and true. At first, it seemed Jacques was roping David into going to a bar purely out of lust; his goal seems to be simply sex. But David ends up having a rather meaningful and lovely conversation with Giovanni. Nothing overtly sexual occurs, yet they find themselves infatuated with each other throughout their entire evening together. The bar gives them this opportunity to do so. Like the church, it brings people together and places them in an environment where they can begin to express love. Obviously, this is not always the rule in a bar, and in fact many people at bars simply end up lusting after others like Jacques. But the bar does not instill the same dogmatic fear of not being saved in David that the church does to John. It is a place that is explicitly secular, yet gives David the ability to find love with Giovanni. Again, I do not know how the novel proceeds after Part I, but as of right now I see both David and Giovanni living through love rather than through fear.

Holiness vs. Goodness

In “Down at the Cross,” the part where James Baldwin tells his father that his Jewish friend “is a better Christian than you are” really stuck with me during my initial reading (CE 308). I feel like there are a lot of people who identify themselves as Christian but fail to recognize what is one of the most important principles of Christianity: to “love thy neighbor.” This brings to mind the difference between following the letter of the law (taking what is written in the Bible literally) and following the spirit of the law (working to understand the underlying messages in the Bible). I would guess that David Baldwin was much more of a “letter of the law” kind of man based on how James Baldwin wrote the character of Gabriel in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Gabriel (David) seems to care a lot about his image in the church and about doing whatever will make him appear to be a holy man, but the lack of love and kindness he has for his son, whether that be because of John’s (James’s) sexuality, his intellect, his illegitimacy, his friendships with white people, or a combination of these and other factors, shows just how much he does not understand the most basic tenet of Christianity. David cannot get over his own pride and anger, so he takes it out on others instead of treating them with the love and compassion that the Bible demands of Christians. I think David Baldwin needed a reality check in that just because he considers himself a “holy man,” this does not make him a good person; one does not have to belong to a certain religion or claim a specific identity in order to live a good and virtuous life. She can still attempt to “love her neighbor” even without thinking about it from a Christian perspective, and I think that the effort and actions matter more in this case than the specific reasoning for that effort.

The Curse of Ham

In class, the curse of Ham has been brought up on several occasions. I have read Genesis 9:21-27 several times throughout my life, yet this was a concept I was unaware of. After digging deeper into this ideology, I further understand Baldwin’s point of view on Christianity as described in his writing, specifically “Down at the cross”. 

In Genesis 9:25, Noah curses his son Canaan for seeing him naked. Noah states, “‘Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.’” This story has been used for decades to validify slavery and the putting down of people of color. According to Time Magazine, “In its boiled-down, popular version, known as “The Curse of Ham,” Canaan was dropped from the story, Ham was made black, and his descendants were made Africans” (Rae). In reality, all the brothers had the same father and were the same race. However, Africans being seen as the descendents of Ham is accepted, and blacks are deemed as less than due to fate. 

The curse of Ham is a concept that Baldwin is taught and continues to struggle with during his time in the church. In “Down at the Cross”, Baldwin writes, “I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave” (Baldwin 307). Baldwin believes that he is meant to be less than according to the word of God. He does not understand how God can be loving to some people and not loving to others. Therefore, Baldwin not only doubts the love Christians show, but the love of God resulting in his loss of faith.

A Final Thought on Baldwin and Religion and A Look Ahead

In “Down at the Cross,” James Baldwin describes his experience preaching to children, saying, “When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?” (309). In this quote, Baldwin criticizes acceptance of present suffering in the hope of reward in the next life. His critique appears to hint at the way white Christians used this same tactic to discourage slave insurrection and revolt in the antebellum South (Field, 445). However, Douglass Field writes that Baldwin felt a similar disdain toward the black church, which fostered “a tendency towards passivity” (446). 

Over the past week, I have thought a lot about Martin Luther King Jr. and his call for love of white people, a call Baldwin similarly emphasizes in his relationships with religion. King seems to emphasize the love of Christ, rather than the fear of eternal damnation in his speeches, living out the kind of Christianity Baldwin appreciates. Yet, eventually, King’s emphasis on love, which is both active in its confrontational nature and passive in its disdain for violence, falls out of favor in the civil rights movement, replaced by a more militant approach to equality. I wonder how Baldwin views this shift. If love is the right path toward civil rights and equality, it seemingly requires a reciprocal reaction from the oppressing group, which could take a long time if it ever comes at all. Thus, the turn away from love, or at least from unconditional love, makes sense since African-Americans should not have to wait to receive the rights that fundamentally belong to them. To me, unconditional love and the fight for civil rights remain in an uneasy union and I look forward to seeing how Baldwin’s writings on the civil rights movement accept or nuance his emphasis on love shown here.

The American Condition (and Lil Nas X?)

Reading “Other(ed) Americans in Paris: Henry James, James Baldwin, and the Subversion of Identity” by Eric Savoy, although it was focused primarily on Giovanni’s Room, many connections can be found in Baldwin’s novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, and with new discussions of otherness in pop culture. Baldwin argues that Americans lost the history that they set out to find, that “our history…is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears.” He says that his Black ancestors had no desire to come to America, but neither did the ancestors of those who became white (Savoy 340). This recognition of the past, or the privilege to refuse it, is something I see in the characters of Gabriel and Florence. For Florence, she claims that she did not want to become white, but she wanted to run from the history her mother shared with her and the “common niggers” she found she lived around. The otherness she was refusing in herself and those around her is what Jacques and Savoy call the American Condition: “the despicableness of the inability to perceive the reality of otherness,” (Savoy 344). 

The American Condition is also reflected in Gabriel, as he cannot love anyone for who they truly are, their otherness, especially John. However, Gabriel’s rejection of otherness goes further because it is based in fear. Baldwin says that Americans failures to accept the lessons of history result in the dangerous disrespect for other people’s personalities, and the consequences of this disrespect is the inability to sympathize or to love one’s own otherness (Savoy 343). This is present in Gabriel, as he continues to try to create a “royal” line of children that continues to fail. Instead of facing his own mistakes and accepting his failed history, his own inability to love his otherness is projected onto John and many other family members around him.  

I think we continue to see the disrespect and lack of self-love on individuals’ otherness in the modern day. Not just in the obvious racism that this country is built on, but also through many other forms of otherness, including homosexuality. Although one could see this as completely unrelated, I find the recent conversations surrounding Lil Nas X, and his otherness to fit into this topic. Pop artist, Lil Nas X just released a song that highlights his homosexuality and the condemnation gay people have always experienced, and he is a black man, so conversations of race have inevitably risen, as well. Many arguments have involved the topic of his music video influencing children to a life of sin, but I argue that the American Condition has already done that. The fear of the wrath of God has allowed those that believe in religion to become the judges, the jury, and the executioners who have decided that any hint of otherness requires their own condemnation, on sight. Although the human condition and pop culture could extend back to Michael Jackson, and Prince, I wanted to focus on Lil Nas X, as he is the most recent.

Strangerhood

I found all the presentations this week interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the one on strangerhood the most. Strangerhood presents the idea of always feeling a sense of not belonging in one’s environment, and just being a stranger. I found this concept being related to Go Tell it on the Mountain interesting because it was something we had discussed during Native Son, and I did not think of the concept of strangerhood in John’s life before the presentations. Seeing the presentation made the connection of John constantly being aware of his strangerhood very obvious. I do wish I had also connected the dots and thought about this earlier. Now, when I think about Go Tell it on the Mountain in light of John’s strangerhood, I think John strangerhood is first clearly stated when Baldwin writes that “the darkness of his sin was in the hardheartedness with which he resisted God’s power.” (Baldwin 31) Here, John feels guilty for not fully taking part in the church and following what he has been told are the church’s teachings. At the same time, he is resistant to accept God’s power, which he has been told, can save him. John has been brought up around the church and its teachings. If he feels guilty for not accepting what he has been taught all his life, by the institution which is supposed to represent the almighty which he must pray to, then he is a stranger to the environment in which he has been raised. Like Bigger, no one in his house really understands him and his thought process. Clearly, John’s strangerhood is a representation of Baldwin’s, which was touched upon in the presentation. Baldwin left everything, including his family, behind in America and moved to France because he was a stranger in the country in which he was brought up. He felt unsafe, from the white folks that he had seen all his life, in his motherland. Since he moved to France, with barely any acquaintances there, he was a stranger there as well.   

Strangerhood & Exile

After the thought-provoking presentations on Wednesday, Rae’vonne’s presentation about the idea of strangerhood in Go Tell It On the Mountain struck me. Her discussion of John’s and Baldwin’s experiences of strangerhood was a really powerful way of framing the themes of religion that run through these novels, particularly her insight that the church often creates strangerhood, rather than providing experiences of belonging. 

Kiera linked this idea to Jesus’s comment in the Gospels that no prophet is accepted in their own hometown. To this point, I think there’s a connection between strangerhood and exile. This is a theme throughout the Christian Bible. As we see in the book of Exodus, God’s chosen people are not those in power. Rather, God’s preferential option for revelation of Godself is to the dispossessed, the marginalized, the stranger. 

In Go Tell It On the Mountain, John’s otherness in his communities makes him feel like a stranger, but he is also cast as a prophetic character. These two traits are directly linked. John’s experience of being a stranger causes him to question his surroundings and try to understand where he fits. His transformation at the end of the novel describes God’s grace acting on John, and perhaps John can have this religious experience precisely because of—not in spite of—his identity as a stranger. 

Similarly, it’s not a coincidence that Baldwin writes this novel when he himself is in a time of exile: living in Paris, experiencing a fraught relationship with his family, and feeling othered by his race and his sexuality. Is it his very experience of exile that shapes his self-understanding as a prophet? Baldwin could see the fractures in Christianity and in the church with clearer eyes than those around him, because these institutions never provided him with a place of true belonging. In that exile, he found a prophetic voice. If neither the church nor America saved Baldwin from strangerhood, his stranger status may well have equipped him to be a prophet. 

Night v. Morning

The imagery of blindness and sight was striking in Native Son by Richard Wright. In Giovanni’s Room, the same image is there, but subtler and more natural. Instead of literal blindness, the darkness emerges in the night–time. In the mornings, then, for David, reality is searing and often painful. First, it is important to establish that David, like many other characters we have seen so far in the semester, is weighed down by a deep sense of shame. For him, the shame resides in his homosexuality. This shame leads him to shut others out. When speaking about his father he says, “I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me” (232). This desire to not be known ebbs and flows from morning to night. 

In the very first lines, this dichotomy of morning and night emerges: “I stand at the window…as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life” (221). This foreshadowing, of the terrible morning to come, reflects his attitude towards the harsh realities of life. He then imagines the train ride the next day, thinking about how he will have to mask himself once again, confuse the girl across from him by refusing to flirt. In the night–time, though, he does not have to hide as much. There is solace in not having to be seen, exposed, and forced to hide. 

In a later scene, when David overhears Ellen and his father arguing about him, the same imagery occurs. He listens in on a late night discussion about his father’s parenting, which makes him think to himself, “I wondered what I would see when I saw them in the morning” (231). In this instance, David almost has more access to reality in the night–time, because he hears an unfiltered conversation between adults. Perhaps the morning is scary because the social realities take hold. His father and Ellen will act as if nothing has happened, they will wear a mask and deceive David into thinking that everything is fine. 

This theory, that the morning is a time when one must face the social reality of the world, holds when David recalls his first sexual encounter. He spends the night with Joey, performing the “act of love” (225). In the night he is free and joyful. The morning after, though, he sees Joey’s naked body and feels a deep sense of shame at what he has done. His thoughts immediately focus on the perception of this act from others: “I wondered what Joey’s mother would say when she saw the sheets” (226). David does not want anyone to see or know what he has done in the night. The morning acts as a rude awakening to the external pressures which cultivate the shame he feels about his sexuality and self–worth.

“The Most Segregated Hour”

One of the recurring topics of our class has been the fact that the Christian Church in America is a tool that reinforces segregation. We first saw this in I Am Not Your Negro, in which Baldwin, in an interview with Dick Cavett, exclaims: “I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian Church which is white and a Christian Church which is Black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians and I certainly cannot trust the Christian Church.” I was interested in this quote, as we discussed the misattribution of it in class on Wednesday. For that reason, I did a little bit of research about the quote as well as the topic of racial segregation in Christian churches. 

Although Baldwin attributes the quote to Malcolm X, I was only able to find a similar quote from Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “I think it is one of the tragedies –– one of the shameful tragedies –– that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America” (King). Baldwin reiterates King’s point in later works such as “Down at the Cross,” in which he writes “In the same way that we, for white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed forever, white people were, for us, the descendants of Cain” (Collected Essays 310). 

This begs the question: has anything changed? Are churches today more integrated than they were fifty years ago? Well, the answer is complicated. According to a 2001 article, up to 87% of Christian churches were racially homogenous, with 69% of congregations being almost entirely white and 18% of congregations almost entirely Black (Vischer). But of course, such a statistic is suspect, as the study only considered Black and white Americans, without noting if a church was attended by Asian, latinx, or Indigenous populations. More recently, the Pew research center noted that “[m]any U.S. congregations are still racially segregated, but things are changing” (Lipka). According to their 2014 study, 20% of Americans attend a church in which no single racial group constitutes more than 80% of the congregation. This begs new questions: is a Church that’s 80% white, but say, 20% latinx no longer a tool of anti-Black segregation? Likewise, just because 20% of Americans attend such churches, that doesn’t mean that anything has changed. Maybe those individuals just attend a handful of “Megachurches” with huge populations. Regardless, the fact remains that Christian churches, on average, are largely racially homogenous. Until things seriously change, Baldwin’s statements reflect a vital and highly disconcerting critique that Christians of all denominations should reflect upon.