When religion does not keep its promise
The gospel of Baldwin
The Book:
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By James Baldwin
Vintage Books
1952
The Talk:
“There are many paths which may lead to such happiness as is attainable by men, but there is none which does so for certain. Even religion cannot keep its promise.” ~ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
James Baldwin’s 1953 novel Go Tell It On The Mountain tells the story of John, a Black boy in 1930s Harlem struggling to find his way up and out of the family, culture, and religion that he discovers himself a part of as he reaches the threshold of adolescence:
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.
The whole story is there in the opening lines. And though the reader may desire that something will--that something *must* change, it will not. The reader’s desires will be frustrated right along side John’s. The moral, that humans rarely change as much as they believe and wish they could, is a bitter subterranean flood that threatens destruction if denied. The flood does not come at the end of the novel, but it does not go away either. It is the truth. And the reckoning is due.
Baldwin’s gospel
Near the beginning of the book, John’s mother asks him to sweep the living room rug. John hates this task. As he sweeps, it only makes clouds of dust that settle down back onto the rug. The rug is never truly clean. Cleaning the rug has the appearance of a task but makes no real difference in the end.
Yet for each dustpan he so laboriously filled at the doorsill demons added to the rug twenty more; he saw in the expanse behind him the dust that he had raised settling again into the carpet; he gritted his teeth, already on edge because of the dust that filled his mouth, and nearly wept to think that so much labor brought so little reward.
Later in the story, John and Elisha, an older boy who John secretly likes, clean the church before the Saturday evening prayer service. In the same way, they clean the floor, but during the service it’s clear the dust remains. As the congregation stomps and dances, it only makes the dust rise up higher.
The story occurs during the Great Migration, a period when many Black Americans travelled northward to seek out better prospects in Northern cities. The stories of all the Black characters in the book follow a similar path—they either leave the South to escape something bad from their past which they never truly escape, or they believe they will find some better situation in Chicago or New York only to find themselves in basically the same situation with different street names.
Bigotry in the South, prejudice in the North. Baldwin lets us into the minds of the Black men and women on the receiving end of white abuse. In their minds is murder, a murderous rage, that never finds an outlet in the novel, but simply boils under the surface.
In a sense the migrants to the North are doomed because they take themselves with them—their flaws, their failures, their sins. And their skin. In one scene, a Black woman applies whitener to her face in order to whiten her skin. A character tells her that no matter how much you try to change, you are Black. You can’t change, no matter how much whitener you apply.
All of these elements swirl around the core of the story, which traces the histories of John’s aunt, father, and mother. John’s father, Gabriel, is a preacher who travels around giving revival speeches to win souls for the Lord. Gabriel gives impassioned sermons about his life before he was saved, what a sinner he was, and how God turned him from his evil ways. His passionate preaching is presented as the evidence of God’s ability to transform souls.
And yet we learn that Gabriel never really changes his ways at all. Gabriel was a sinner, and he remains a sinner. And the whole idea that he was ever truly changed is the lie. The lie he tells himself, and the lie he tells others. The lie that makes others feel wretched, begging for a God to transform them like he did Gabriel.
Gabriel too lives in private torment, as he begs God to change him, but God never does. Moreover, his apparent righteousness becomes an occasion for his infidelity and his physical abuse of his children and his wife. In a scene reminiscent of Abraham and Isaac, Gabriel is belting John’s brother Roy.
“My Lord, my Lord,” his father whispered, “my Lord, my Lord.”
He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it.
Aunt Florence stares him down.
“Yes, Lord,” Aunt Florence said, “you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t not use to try and take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.”
It is the story of redemption that allows people to set themselves over others. Gabriel’s position as preacher allows him to call out the sins of individual congregation members in public, shaming them into submission. They must turn and be changed.
Ashamed of masturbating, John repeats a verse from Revelation to himself bitterly, “He who is flithy, let him be filthy still.” But Elisha tells him that if he converts, God will remove all his fleshy desires:
“But when the Lord saves you He burns out all that old Adam, He gives you a new mind and a new heart, and then you don’t find no pleasure in the world, you get all your joy in walking and talking with Jesus every day.”
Conversion will fix him. John will become a new man. Changed. He just has to give his life to the Lord, and everything about him will be different, his sex drive eradicated. In Baldwin’s story, most of the characters beg God to change them, but God never answers their prayers. The church insiders are no different than the church outsiders; there are good and evil people in both camps.
At the end of novel, when Florence confronts Gabriel with evidence of his past sins, she threatens to tell the whole world about it.
“I’m going to find some way—some way, I don’t know know how—to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord’s anointed is got on his hands.”
Go tell it on the mountain, so to speak. The original meaning of that phrase is to tell the good news, the gospel, that salvation is here. But Gabriel’s sister has a different kind of news: That Gabriel is a sinner just like everybody else.
“You ain’t never changed,” he said. “You still waiting to see my downfall. You just as wicked now as you was when you was young.”
She put the letter in her bag again.
“No,” she said, “I ain’t changed. You ain’t changed neither.”
“I ain’t changed. You ain’t changed neither.” That is Baldwin’s inversion of the Gospel. The news, Baldwin suggests, the news that sets captives free, is that the devout are just like everybody else. Once understood, the ability of religion to abuse and psychologically torture people, its ability to hide evil and even feed it, is broken. Go tell that on the mountain, says Baldwin, and be free.
What’s changed?
At the start of the book, John sees it all, the dust, the sin, the hypocrisy, the injustice, the abuse. Inside he feels a rage against his father, and his one wish is to oppose him, to fight him, or to flee him somehow. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he decides that if his father is on God’s side, then John must be on the side of the devil. So be it, thinks John. And he digs in with all his willpower to oppose his father.
But by the end of the story, the social pressure of the church, everyone around him pressuring him to give his life to God—it’s too much for him, it’s too much for any fourteen year old boy. He gives in, he coverts, he is saved. After the service, John feels enormous relief but also confusion and fear. What has actually changed now that he is saved?
The church members are not even home yet before Baldwin seems to remind us that basically nothing has changed at all--Gabriel’s sins are about to be revealed, John’s true paternity is likely to come out soon, and the stakes of John’s homosexuality have only increased. The only “salvation” is the truth coming out to destroy the peacefulness of this brief moment of relief.
To me the ending has a similar feel to the end of 1984, when we watch Winston Smith’s emerging consciousness slide back into the groupthink. Or the end of Babbitt, in which George Babbitt’s freedom melts away. The main character believes they have been saved, though as readers we stand opposite them, watching them lose their identity into the suffocating community of believers. The difference is that Baldwin implies that the truce at the end of the novel could blow wide open.
Amor fati
What happens when God does not show up and does not transform you? What do you do with that reality? When all the people around you say “true,” but you know “false”? You cannot remake the world; you cannot remake yourself. You are stuck in a place, in a community, in a body and mind and soul, that will not change.
The first step, Baldwin’s novel suggests, is to bear witness to the truth. If the truth is that one has not been transformed by the Gospel, despite repeated attempts and earnest seeking, one must bear witness to that truth. It is, in fact, a Christian imperative to do so. The refusal to blaspheme, claiming divinity where there is none, is an expression of Christianity even as it opposes Christianity. As philosopher John Gray writes in Straw Dogs, “Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for truth. No pagan is ready to sacrifice the pleasure of life for the sake of mere truth.”
The second step is to surrender to the truth with one’s whole being. To love one’s fate. In a later novel, Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin would write:
But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
If we read Giovanni’s Room back into Go Tell It On The Mountain, an alternative ending interpretation could be: John chooses to embrace the life in front of him rather than deny it, even as we know that whatever peace and happiness he experiences, in whatever brief moments he can find it, is fragile, tenuous, and fleeting. John has so much more to live, to learn, to feel, to love, to suffer.
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