This was written for a class on African American literature I took in college in 2003.

Throughout America’s history, there have been many misconceptions about African Americans in this predominantly white society. These delusions extend from blacks being lazy workers to their men being brutal rapists and their women sexual deviants. One that is rarely acknowledged as a misunderstanding, however, is the view that all African Americans have been and still are devout Christians or Protestants. On a general level, Americans picture fiery sermons and enthusiastic chanting and singing in black churches across the country, but there is another side to the black community, disillusioned with Protestantism and Christianity and their respective hypocrisies.

This disenchantment can be traced back to as early as the 1940’s and ‘50’s, when writers such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright were first being published. These two authors in particular cleverly worked not only their own doubts and critiques of religion and its followers into their writings, but the growing feelings of black writers, intellectuals, and nationalists across the nation (Berry and Blassingame, 102). For the purposes of this essay, examples of the disillusionment of this historically groundbreaking period in America will be shown in these authors’ most famous works – Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Wright’s Native Son.

James Baldwin first experiences with organized religion were negative ones, embodied in his stepfather, David Baldwin – a Baptist preacher. While he tried hard to please his stepfather, he felt that he never could, and he always came down on his stepson very hard. At the age of 14, however, James had what he perceived at the time to be a divine vision – an epiphany that led him to become a preacher himself for three years (Eckman). After this period, however, Baldwin began to write more and look more critically at the church, soon realizing he no longer believed in the religion he had been raised to follow. “It was agonizing for me to face the fact that I didn’t believe anymore. I didn’t believe the lies I was telling…” he stated in a later interview (83). This experience prompted him to write his partially autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

The main character, John Grimes, has a tyrannical father who is also a preacher. While John clearly represents himself, he also represents the dilemma everyone must face when following a religion – the “cruel choice” between a devout religious life or one filled with worldly pleasures. He wants desperately to understand his father’s mistreatment of him and follow the beliefs laid out for him, but he can’t help but wonder why he must fear whites, nor can he help but keep in mind the strong hatred his brother Roy has for their father’s beliefs and physical beatings. He attempts many times to think on his own, but the guilt over “sinning his hand” and seeing whites as real people who may deserve heaven (His father despises whites.) keep these thoughts at bay.

The bulk of the novel focuses on the past lives of Gabriel, John’s aforementioned father; Florence, his sister; and Elizabeth, John’s mother. By jumping inside their thoughts, Baldwin reveals that their lives are far from holy. Gabriel spawned an illegitimate son through an affair, who he disowned, and is now too proud to face the truth. Florence cannot let go of hatred for her brother, for “common niggers,” or for her own race, covering up her true skin color with whitener. Elizabeth cannot stand up and tell her husband how she really feels because Gabriel’s arrogant religious attitude brings her down and forces her to feel guilty. It is also discovered here that John is really Gabriel’s stepson and that his real father committed suicide. It is no coincidence that these flashbacks all occur in the church. These three are representative of what churchgoers are truly like – flawed. Florence is filled with hate, Gabriel is filled with a false sense of pride and feels that his life as a preacher makes up for all his past sins, and Elizabeth just feels broken and guilty (Baldwin).

To the common reader, John’s spiritual rebirth on the threshing floor may appear like the light at the end of this dark tunnel, but close readings suggest otherwise. This experience may make him one with the congregation, but would one really want to place himself amongst hate, guilt, and hypocrisy? Their religion merely serves as an escape from their harsh realities, a way to deny their real problems. John wishes to be unlike his father, or stepfather in this case, but he is headed down the same path of denial. Does a denial of reality truly help the black community’s status in society? Does a religion that merely breeds hatred towards whites truly help race relations?

“…he seems to accept the prevailing social theories that treat Christianity as simply a force to keep black people insensitive to the need for more immediate freedom” (O’Neale, 131).

The idea that the white man used “the same Bible both to convert and to enslave” (127) the Africans did not sit well with the disillusioned blacks of this time, and Baldwin was no different.

Richard Wright’s portrayal of the black struggle in America was quite different from Baldwin’s, although they shared some common themes throughout their works. In his late ‘20s, Wright became a member of the Communist Party. Many blacks embraced the ideas of the party at the time because Communism promised to eliminate social classes and give each worker his equal share (Berry and Blassingame, 221-226). Wright jumped on this bandwagon for about a decade, writing and publishing Native Son in that time. Communism was based on the writings of Karl Marx, who rejected organized religion as “the opiate of the masses” and found it an unnecessary part of society because all it did was bring the people down and control their thoughts and actions, similar to how some blacks felt at this time. Wright’s experiences with and observations of oppression of his people led to the creation of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son (Gaster).

This oppression and the feelings of hatred and desperation it creates in the minds of blacks is the central theme of the novel. The anti-religious sentiment is not as blatant as it is in Go Tell It on the Mountain, but it is nevertheless present. As Wright puts it…

“Some of the Negroes living under these conditions got religion, felt that Jesus would redeem the void of living, felt that the more bitter life was in the present the happier it would be in the hereafter.” (How “Bigger” Was Born, 26)

Bigger became “estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race,” however. This can be observed early on in the novel when he gets annoyed over his mother’s singing of the spirituals at breakfast. He hates how his mother uses religion as a way to cope with their terrible station in life, accepting the roles that whites have assigned them in society. Communism is shown as an escape from the way Bigger is used to being treated. Jan and Mary are the first whites to ever talk to him like a real person, although Jan does not fully understand him until almost the end of the novel. Boris Max, his lawyer, is also sympathetic to his position and uses Communist propaganda to try and help save his life, but it is to no avail. Reverend Hammond, however, is the biggest symbol of religion’s worthlessness to the black community.

Hammond discusses love and hope with Bigger in their first meeting within his prison cell, which immediately fills Bigger with guilt, comparing the death of this dream of an afterlife to Mary’s death. The preacher gives him a cross to wear around his neck, which he does, despite giving up his faith long ago. He is now filled with a new sense of hope, feeling almost Christ-like because he will be a martyr for “the crime of being black.” It is not until he sees a burning cross amongst the mob outside the Dalton’s home that he realizes how false this hope really was. These people are using the same religion to oppress him, and he throws the necklace away when he gets back to his cell. He refuses to see Hammond ever again, realizing that the church only offers happiness in the afterlife, and he wanted it right then. This was another argument made by blacks of the time who rejected the medieval view that all their suffering on Earth would lead to a greater reward in heaven, leaving those in power to walk all over people and live as they pleased. These people were not about to have history repeat itself. Religion, as Wright stated in his youth, was…

“…a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering (Brignano, 125). Bigger may go to his death with fear and some uncertainty, but at least he is now sure of who he really is (Native Son, Wright).

Both James Baldwin and Richard Wright ingeniously offered real contemporary views through their works of fiction, giving Americans both then and now some integral insight into an often-overlooked part of African American society. More importantly, their novels paint a colorful picture for historians to flesh out the beliefs and disbeliefs of a nation of people through the raw emotions of characters whose lives do not stray far from their inspirations. And while most blacks still follow Christianity and Protestantism to this day, those who do not can trace their roots in both the fiction and nonfiction section of any respectable library.

Works Cited:

Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Clinton: Colonial Press Inc., 1966.

Brignano, Russel Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

Eckman, Fern Marja. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin.
New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., 1966.

Gaster, Snally. Richard Wright Biography. 29. Nov. 2003 (http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/wright/wright_bio.html).

O’Neale, Sondra A. “Fathers, Gods, and Religion: Perceptions of Christianity and Ethnic Faith in James Baldwin.” Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Ed. Fred L. Standley and Nancy V. Burt. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1988.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Perennial, 1987.
- – -. “How “Bigger” Was Born.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son.

Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1972. 21-47.