A Queering of Black Theology

James Baldwin's Blues Project and Gospel Prose

E. Kornegay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137379061
• eBook ISBN: 9781137376473
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Kornegay's brilliant and insightful use of James Baldwin's literary genius offers a way forward that promises to overcome the divide between religion and sexuality that is of crucial importance not only for black church and theology but for socio-political-religious and theological discourse generally.

1

The Prolonged Religious Crisis

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin recounts at the age of 14 undergoing a “prolonged religious crisis.”¹ The onset of the crisis is shaped by Baldwin’s awareness of “God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell” and a fear of the evil, within and without of himself.² The “evil” is the soulful awareness of sexuality that makes him and the other girls and boys “. . . unutterably different and fantastically present.”³ The awareness of his newfound fantastic inward sexual awareness and outward fantasized and fetishized body presence created fear in Baldwin. The fear for Baldwin is not the sexual presence itself or its power, but the unquestionable desire to be wanted by someone and the social and religious accountability that comes along with it.⁴ Desire for Baldwin rests uncomfortably at the crossroad of the church and street: one a (religious) call of “spiritual seduction” and the other a call to “carnal knowledge.”⁵

Baldwin points out that there is no difference in the language used to identify to whom or where you belong: be it the preacher or pimp, the church or the “Avenue.” Baldwin’s inward sexual awareness and outward bodily presence were both oppressed and unsafe in the church and on the street (the Avenue). The religious crisis for Baldwin is formed by the inability, the lack of moral authority needed, to find safety in God, the church or the community for his sexualized and racialized body.

Baldwin uses the “word ‘religious’ in the common and arbitrary sense . . .” meaning that defining religion is done at the discretion of the individual: what the word religious means for one might not be religious for another.⁶ The meaning of religion is not “fixed.” For and foremost I assert that for James Baldwin, religion is an exercise of power: the moral authority to validate his sexual self and budding manhood and safety when it is found. Baldwin understood the inherent dangers for a black boy attempting to face the difficult task of sexual self-discovery and manhood in a racist society that, at the same time, denied both. Baldwin faced a crisis: the inheritance of a religious tradition that did not offer him the moral authority (power) and community where his faith, belief, sexual self, and manhood could find acceptance and safety. He felt the awareness of his power expressed in the moral authority to validate his sexual self, budding manhood, and the discovery that puritanical religious influences would somehow expose him to an internal/eternal hell equal to or much worse than the external hell he found himself in.

The concern for his own safety is based on a fourfold inheritance for Baldwin: his dread of God and His blazing Hell (a theological threat to safety), his understanding of the dangers of being black in a racist society (a sociological/racial threat to safety), his sense of personal corruption (a sexual threat to safety), and his father’s masculinity (a gendered threat to his safety).⁷ This fourfold coconstituted concern for safety is an inherited puritanical “theological terror.”

This is the framework for Baldwin’s “dark puritan imagination” and subsequent religious crisis.⁸ This brings into focus Baldwin’s own understanding of his “prolonged religious crisis,” namely, the effect of puritanism on what it means to be religious, to be black, and to be sexually aware (in the body). In contrast, Baldwin seeks to find a “religion of love” centered on bodily self-discovery and self-expression of love that can be safely acted upon.⁹ As Baldwin says, “The word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it.”¹⁰

Baldwin locates his individual need for safety within the universal human need for safety. In this way, being religious is to have a personal ultimate concern for human safety and a means for questioning those things, such as a God and religion that Baldwin says is “supposed” to make us safe in and against the world.¹¹

If safety is the real meaning of the word religious for Baldwin and if “God and safety” are synonymous then Black American religion presents him with a prolonged crisis of attempting to reconcile the moral authority (power) of religion with his sexual self and budding manhood. He needs a religious interpretation and understanding that can overcome the puritanical rendering of an all-powerful Christian God and His blazing Hell. In this way, Baldwin’s religious crisis is hermeneutical in that ultimately he refuses to hold onto interpretations and beliefs in a God that do not “make us larger, freer, and more loving” or make us safe.¹²

Safety: The “Prolonged Religious Crisis”

James Baldwin’s argument—his religious crisis—implies that safety and the Christian God are not synonymous, thereby creating the ground for contradictions between himself, society, religion, God, and family.¹³ The contradictions often highlighted in most critiques of Baldwin pit his Christian religious upbringing against his sexual self-discovery—black manhood that is an open expression of homosexual love—and against the anointed privilege of whiteness and racist social conditions seemingly attended to by the same Christian God. Michael F. Lynch’s discussion of a common misunderstanding of Baldwin’s work is helpful here.¹⁴ Lynch states that Baldwin’s work suffers because of “critics’ dualistic approach to his work,” wherein his political concerns are set against spiritual ones.¹⁵ Lynch sees Baldwin as a “dialectician” whose work maintains a “vital tension between political reality and spiritual vision” used by Baldwin to develop a “theology based on Christian ideals and on his individual quest for a loving God.”¹⁶ Lynch’s assessment of the “spiritual theme” of Baldwin’s “theology” is his search for an “elusive, undefined, God and his evolving theology of self-examination and love.”¹⁷

Yet, Baldwin’s quest is not concerned with an elusive God hidden by whiteness or blackness, but with a religion that obstructs his own moral authority and requires him to hide his sexual self and manhood in order to belong. In this sense salvation is the ability to love, be loved, and belong to God and community as you are. In this sense Lynch’s view of Baldwin in relation to a theological viewpoint misses the complexities of race, sex, gender, and religion and in particular the quest for safety in his work and life.¹⁸

Lynch’s characterization of Baldwin’s work as a search for an elusive God borders on a notion of the kind of sentimentality Baldwin rejects. A quest for a loving God assumes that God cannot love Baldwin as he is. This assumes Baldwin feels that God does not love him because of his sexuality and his blackness. In doing this Lynch himself invokes the whiteness of the God who shows up in American Black religious puritanism. Lynch recasts Baldwin’s quest for safety as a social gospel of black civil rights and black theology culminating with moral authority remaining affixed to whiteness and black people in search of a God that will love them.

In a similar way Clarence E. Hardy, III obfuscates Baldwin’s quest for safety as a religious crisis saying Baldwin “rarely” engaged Christian doctrine. However, Baldwin’s religious crisis and quest for a safety is based on a vision of a loving God. Again God is not hidden and Baldwin refuses to hide: this is the crisis. Baldwin writes about love more than anything else and the commandment to love is his key to Christian doctrine. Hardy notes that Baldwin’s critique of Christian tendencies and institutions is concerned with Christianity’s “corrupt connection to imperialist state power.”¹⁹Again, social justice related to black political motives limit Baldwin to a narrow form of black moral authority related to Negro protest and puritanical proscriptions that inform notions of black respectability. Baldwin must either accept his homosexuality and reject the social gospel of the Black Christian church or deny his homosexuality and accept the black Christian church and its fight against a white god. His view that religion offered safety for his whole self was implausible in the face of the realities of the influence of puritanism on both of these planes.²⁰

When Baldwin was coming of age, there was insufficient evidence for him to believe that a life of crime or a Christian life resulted in safety. According to Baldwin, the lack of a guarantee for safety meant: “Every Negro boy . . . who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a ‘thing,’ a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is.”²¹ Choices for safety afforded black males who adhered to “Christian virtues” did not prevent them from “being polished off with no effort whatever.”²²

According to Baldwin, the “Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being” that created the “moral [religious] barriers” between Christianity and a criminal career “were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent.”²³ The decision not to choose a gimmick was never an option and the choice to be religious or more specifically choosing the uncritical acceptance of black religion and the black Christian church was, for Baldwin, a “momentous” decision to opt for safety first from the imposition of his own (personal) dark puritan imagination and second from the puritanical social (public) conception of his dark body.

To Baldwin, being present in the world was to be haunted by the circumstances of a puritanical psychosocial bifurcation, which produced the American Negro, the secular and sacred as well as black saints and black sinners.²⁴ It was this coming to an awareness—the awakening—of his psychosocial twoness, which left him bound for damnation no matter the choice. Gimmicks didn’t matter, because being born black “forced” him to make a decision to think and to live in spite of the lack of safety and danger associated with blackness.²⁵ For Baldwin, it is a matter of being pragmatic. Baldwin says,

It was this last realization that terrified me and – since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers – helped to hurl me into the church. And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick.²⁶

The dread caused by the hand he had been dealt drove him to make an objective (Kierkegaardian) “leap of faith” if you will into the arms of a waiting God whose harsh judgments produced a theological terror in Baldwin that “drove” him into the church.²⁷ In this sense, a religious choice did not offer safety: not even from the darkness he imagined for himself or experienced in his world there in Harlem. As such, being religious is to acknowledge these facts, as well as a sense of twoness that makes being itself unsafe. However, he understands that for people to find safety, they must first face their fears. Baldwin says, “To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it: fear must be faced.”²⁸ What must he face to achieve safety? Baldwin says that he must face the “living proof of inheritance.”²⁹

Baldwin’s Inheritance: An Epistemology of Black Religious Tradition

One of the primary struggles faced by Baldwin is that of inheritance. This fourfold inheritance (theological, racial, gendered, and sexual) imparted to Baldwin his “dark puritan imagination,” which affects his understanding of God, homosexuality, and society.³⁰ I contend that a primary source of his private and public religious discontent is due in great part to what Baldwin came to understand as puritanism and its effects on American Christianity. What is puritanism to Baldwin and how does it relate to (his) inheritance?

The impac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   The Prolonged Religious Crisis
• 2   Between James’s Gospel and Jimmy’s blues
• 3   Living Exiled in the Promised Land
• 4   Queering and Theological Signification
• 5   Conversion: Queer Theory and Black Theology
• 6   Desire: Queering in the Black Church
• Conclusion: James Baldwin, Queer Theory, and Theological Reflection
• Notes
• Index