Saint James Baldwin One Hundred Years Later

“Go tell it on the mountain!” James Arthur Baldwin would have been 100 years old on August 2nd. A century later, he has no equal.

Baldwin is the patron saint of children who are “too smart for their own good.” Old souls “who have been here before,” he spoke for all of us.  

Three years in the pulpit was enough for him. At seventeen years old, he had already figured out that going to church was not the way to God for him. 

A non-canonical voice in the Black Church tradition, Baldwin’s spirituality was his story. “The salvation I was preaching to others was fueled by the hope of my own,” he wrote in an essay titled “To Crush a Serpent.”

No secrets, his writings read like a travelogue, a journey of faith, confessions made that some pastors probably didn’t want to take. Still, he wrote it and thus, embedded it in our literary memory.

Baldwin came to bear witness, to testify, to not merely take the words that the world had to offer him but to offer them back to the world. A mirror, what his oeuvre reflects is the beautiful insights of an ugly human condition and hateful traditions. 

Insufficient for his human being, his writings call into question racial identity and a racialized existence in service to membership and belonging in the American colony, namely, specifically and unequivocally.

Baldwin questioned race, whiteness and all of its supporting identities. Though oppressed by his social condition, he wrote about it so masterfully.  

Because he knew the position he was in and that, at least in part, words had put him there. Not Christians per se, but “white people” specifically have agreed to it, as he wrote in “White Racism or World Community?”

“I think everyone knows that no child is a criminal, I think everyone knows that all children are sacred, and yet the Christian world, until today, victimizes all black children and destroys them because they are not white,” he said.   

There. He said it and we should not be ashamed because it is what many of us were thinking and what most of us know to be true today.

Avoiding the designation of theologian (“Since I am not a theologian in any way whatever, I probably ought to tell you what my credentials are,” he wrote in “White Racism or World Community?”), still Baldwin’s speech is sermonic, his words prophetic. 

From his pulpit-desk, Baldwin wrote with the authority of a preacher and I listen to him with the reverence of a congregant. “That’s my pastor!”  

It is due in part to Baldwin’s witness that I am freer than I have ever been. Speaking in tongues that would warrant a beating if my grandmother were alive to hear me. 

She might even call it heresy, tell me I have backslid and need to come back to Jesus. A strange dichotomy, I keep company with faith and unbelief yet I have never felt closer to God. 

This is what Baldwin does. He opens me up. 

His words cut through the fluff, the pretentiousness of roles in religion, gender and race. He makes me a believer in ways that all my years of sitting and standing in a church building could not have. 

Baldwin wrote it out and accomplished the goal of every writer— to hear yourself out. There is no fear of interruption; he has changed locations to ensure this, moving to Paris to escape American racism, which is to the reader’s benefit.  

His story is uncompromising, unforgiving and unrelenting in his naming of our shared reality and who we really are. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment— to say what you really mean, how you really feel, what really happened to you and what you are really up to.

Baldwin lays it all on the line and puts it all on the page. But it doesn’t stay there. 

Everyone who reads his words are gripped by them. Baldwin practiced what he wrote. “Tell as much of the truth as one can bear and then a little more,” he told us. 

Baldwin pushes us and the boundaries of religious and racialized narratives. His writings always take us a step further and invite us to take a step back to see the world as it is and is not.

Baldwin wrote in “On Being White… And Other Lies,” “But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen. And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white.”

He saw human beings for what they were and pointed out what they were not. “White” was one of them and it bears repeating one hundred years later.

Baldwin said, “What you have to do is make it possible for others to live. … That’s the only reason to be here. Who needs the rest of it, really?”  

I couldn’t agree more. If we’re not going to change the world, if our being here doesn’t make a difference, then what is the point?  

Yes, Jesus saves but saves those who believe in him for what and to what end? That is the question. 

Our answers would make for a lovely gift to James Baldwin to celebrate his 100th birthday.