It’s embarrassing how much we don’t know. As it turns out, we don’t know almost everything. Occasionally, someone comes along, or you discover someone from the past, who opens our eyes to our vast ignorance.
Some of you have heard of James Baldwin. He was a Black American writer, essayist. He was somewhat of a celebrity. You can find clips of interviews of Baldwin online.
He is one of those people who seemed to say things decades ago that we were ahead of their time. It can be disheartening, in these days of polarization and fear, to see that we are yet miles away from some of the positive realizations of his social commentary.
As we are at a time of significant societal shift, the reflections and thoughts of Baldwin are once again finding more common currency. As I encountered his voice in the writing of many others, I thought it well worth going to the source.
Here are two extended quotes from Baldwin. The first is from an essay called, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” The second is from an essay called, “Stranger in the Village.”
“Everybody’s Protest Novel” is a scathing critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist whose work is often cited as influential in the fight against slavery. While Baldwin was engaged in the struggle for civil-rights, he clearly found the novel to perpetuate stereotypes and paternalism.
The quote below is a criticism of the sentimentality of the novel, the two-dimensionalising of people, including the very people for whom Beecher Stowe considers herself an advocate.
Sentimentality is the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel. The wet-eyes of the sentimentalist 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.
“Stranger in the Village” is a reflection on Baldwin’s repeated stays in a small Swiss village. He draws out how the people in the village (pretty much all white), regard him as a curiosity. He uses this encounter to articulate larger truths about the west and various ideas of race.
Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen paradoxical distress, confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us, have boomeranged us into chaos in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.
In that same essay, Baldwin mentions his own father and the nature of his Christian faith. He says about his Dad: “At bottom he never forgave the white world for being saddled with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed.”
Like all good social critics, Baldwin invites the reader to consider their own blindness. We could take the quotes above and place them over our experience, including placing them over the experience of evangelicalism for those of us familiar with that particular culture.
How was evangelical faith a kind of blunt sentimentality? How did it pose as meaningful, when it was really, often, a way of avoiding, rather than engaging, the world and humanity?
Baldwin, in critiquing Beecher Stowe’s novel, draws a distinction between a devotion to humanity a devotion to a cause. The latter, he says, becomes inhuman, “Causes are notoriously bloodthirsty.” In my experience of evangelicalism (the theology and worldview more than the people), I saw this devotion to a cause or to various causes. I saw how a way of seeing the world, time after time, prevented me and others from seeing people, particularly those who thought and believed differently. I suppose the same critique could be leveled against the activism of the liberal left, but that critique is best expressed by those from within that particular history.
In regard to the problem of categorization, I likely don’t have to spell out much there. Evangelical culture often majored on categorization, starting often with the empty and damaging division of believer/unbeliever.
I saw then, and see now, in the fresh ruins of evangelicalism, what Baldwin called the “boomerang into chaos.” What happens when categories that were once so strong, so insistent, are properly challenged or relinquished? There are a lot of evangelicals and exvangelicals clutching the straws of their definitions. Some people will argue that the letting go of such categories is moral decay in itself. For those who hold Christian faith, put that up against what Jesus did to the categories that the so-called purveyors of morality insisted upon during his earthly lifetime. Maybe what has been sold to us as belief turns out to be belief in categorization more than belief in Jesus.
Finally, in consideration of Baldwin’s father, I see the potential gift of unbelief, the necessity of it for growth. If you are not willing to let go of belief, you cannot grow. I don’t mean that you have to let go of faith, though you might well choose to. What I mean is that real growth entails that, on some level, you are always letting go of belief. Baldwin’s father saw that the very people who enslaved black people had actually let go of belief in Jesus in order to hang onto belief in racial and societal hierarchy. They fit Jesus to this faith which was to them much more important.
How did the evangelicalism of my experience do that kind of thing? How do I still do that now?
It’s okay if people make you think.
Sure, we all need mindless distraction at times. However, we also need people like James Baldwin to challenge the vanity of our treasured beliefs. True faith can handle this. In fact, it is the better for it.