Near the beginning of The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity, author Greg Garrett points out all the identity categories where he differs from Baldwin. Garrett, a straight, white, middle-class male with an “embarrassment” of college degrees became “deeply and even traditionally Christian in middle age” (2). Baldwin, black and gay, grew up in desperate poverty, couldn’t afford to go to college, became a teenage preacher at fourteen and left the church two years later, never to return. Baldwin’s devastating critique of Christianity’s role in the historical and contemporary subjugation of people of color is unequivocal.
There has been an explosion of books, articles, and interest in Baldwin over the past decade, and it’s not unusual for writers, especially white writers, to note their positionality in relationship to Baldwin. This is due in part to emphasize the ways that Baldwin’s work reaches across divisions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. But it’s also an acknowledgment of Baldwin’s message—that while we want a world where categories don’t matter, where we are all “individuals”— we live in a world where they do matter and we need to come to terms with that fact. For white people, that means shedding a false “innocence” about race in America, an innocence that has perpetuated racial injustice. Garrett, an Episcopal Theologian and a prolific author of over two dozen books, has taken up Baldwin’s challenge to whites, especially white Christians.
This slim but powerfully written hagiography comes out of Garrett’s experience teaching Baldwin, as well as his own extensive reading of Baldwin’s oeuvre, including unpublished manuscripts. He draws widely from Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction including Raoul Peck’s 2017 film “I Am Not Your Negro.” While the book isn’t solely aimed at Christians, Garrett clearly thinks that Christianity needs Baldwin now more than ever in a period when Christian nationalism is on the rise.
Baldwin has often been identified with Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, who warned a religious nation of forthcoming destruction if it didn’t live up to its covenant with God. Baldwin’s use of the Jeremiad (a sermonic form associated with Jeremiah) is most evident in “The Fire Next Time,” the essay (first published in the New Yorker in 1962) that brought him to fame. Baldwin ends that essay by imploring “the relatively conscious whites, and the relatively conscious blacks” to “end the racial nightmare” and avoid an “historical” and “cosmic vengeance” (105). As Garrett notes, the Jeremiad has long been a staple of American sermons and literature, and cites its most famous critic, the Canadian scholar Sacvan Bercovitch. What Garrett does not mention is that Bercovitch saw the Jeremiad as a socially conservative discourse that did more to bolster the belief in American exceptionalism than to bring an end to the evils it decried.
In “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin reflects on the death of his deeply religious and bitter father, whose biblical sayings and admonitions were Baldwin’s inheritance. He writes:
All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death, like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped” (Notes of a Native Son 113, quoted in).
This apt metaphor for the tension between form and content has always fascinated me and seemed to express what would become a challenge for Baldwin, especially after his dire predictions in “The Fire Next Time” seemed to be fulfilled with the assassinations of civil rights leaders, massive civil unrest, conservative backlash, and the buildup of the carceral state. To what extent did Baldwin’s inheritance—those “empty bottles,” the words and stories of the Christian Bible—do more to contain rather than advance the new meaning Baldwin wished to impart? I see Baldwin in the post-civil rights years as struggling to find new forms, stories, and language to reveal the truths of his experience, although as Garrett accurately points out, religious reference and language continue to be part of Baldwin’s characteristic style throughout his work.
Garrett organizes his book thematically: Baldwin on culture, faith, race, justice and identity. The Devil Finds Work (The Dial Press, NY, 1976) is Baldwin’s cultural critique of Hollywood films. His commentary on race reconciliation films (such as In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) continues to resonate, making us ask to what extent a movie reflects actual black experience. Or is it fantasy, a salve for the white conscience? Garrett revisits Baldwin’s argument with Richard Wright and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the controversial early essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” embracing Baldwin’s rather problematic argument about the relationship between art and protest. For both, the fully developed, complex character of the realistic novel is the litmus test for “good art.” In the chapter on race Garrett reexamines the tense meeting of Black intellectuals and activists that Baldwin organized at the request of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, noting that it led to greater FBI surveillance of Baldwin and the others who attended, but also credits that meeting to a shift in Kennedy’s view of race as a moral issue. In the chapter on faith, Garrett describes Baldwin’s last unpublished play, The Welcome Table, finding that “Baldwin still had faith in something very much like the church he longed to see and perhaps to be a part of: a place of refuge, welcome, encouragement, and transformation driven by love, respect, and shared responsibility” (80).
During Baldwin’s lifetime many characterized his writing after the mid-sixties as bitter, aesthetically wanting, and out of touch with American racial progress. But a renewal of interest in Baldwin’s work, beginning over twenty years ago, began to reverse these judgments; and with the killing of Trayvon Martin and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, Baldwin was suddenly inspiring a new generation of writers and activists.
The Gospel According to James Baldwin is both scholarly and deeply personal. It opens and ends with Greg Garrett’s pilgrimage to Leukerbad, the Swiss village where Baldwin finished writing Go Tell It on the Mountain (Knopf,1953) and where Garrett would also finish writing a novel. Seeking “St. James”, Garrett testifies to the way Baldwin has been “a necessary counterpoint to [his] own narrow Anglo angle of vision” (2). He tells us that Baldwin has challenged him to do better. “To love my wife and family more fiercely. To cling to some kind of faith more powerfully. To reach out across the divides of race and culture. To be a witness to injustice, even when it cost me something” (162).
Lynn Orilla Scott is professor emerita at Michigan State University.
Lynn Scott
Date Of Review:
April 30, 2024
