Editor’s Note: This is the first of a four-part interview with Dr. Greg Garrett, who will be a guest on the Good Faith Weekly podcast on Friday, March 15. The interview has been minimally edited for conciseness. (Part 1 can be found here.)
My interview with Greg Garrett, author of “The Gospel According to James Baldwin” and a professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, continues. Now we delve into the diagnostic abilities and medicinal benefits of art, “the soul cost of white supremacy” and the future of the “white church.”
Starlette: In the chapter titled “Baldwin on Culture,” you propose, “Baldwin believed that great art should take on the sicknesses and psychoses of those who consume it, show them their flaws and failings, and offer them the chance to become well, to help those readers, listeners, and viewers to live into their full humanity.” Baldwin’s writings are both diagnostic and medicinal. What corrective or cure does he offer his readers if taken seriously?
Greg: It seems super sappy to talk about love. (Dr. King would not call it sappy, nor does Baldwin.) But truth-telling and love are at the heart of what Baldwin sees as at the same time our failings and our way forward. If we avoid the truth about our American history, we are failing ourselves and each other. If we fail to love deeply and dangerously, we are failing ourselves and each other.
I think this is at the heart of Baldwin’s oft-repeated wisdom that we can do better. It is easier to live in ignorance and feigned innocence (for white people) because as Baldwin says in “The Fire Next Time” and “No Name in the Street,” “knowing” these failures means we have to take action.
The status quo can’t be maintained if we know and act honorably on the past and present. White people benefit economically when the status quo remains status quo. But emotionally and spiritually, we do not: as Baldwin tells his nephew in “The Fire Next Time” and repeats often, white people are wrecked by white supremacy, not in the same way people of color suffer, but in the soul cost that comes from dominating a fellow child of God.
Baldwin talks in “No Name in the Street” about a conversation with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Alabama, and how Shuttlesworth shook off Baldwin’s concerns for his safety: “They endangered him, but they doomed themselves.” Black people are damaged by white supremacy, and white people are damned. And often enough, I have seen white people realize that they feel empty or spiritually crippled. When enough individuals awaken to the soul cost of white supremacy, when truth and love are put to work, I think Baldwin would say change can happen.
He didn’t have a program and neither do I, but I have seen individual and even institutional movement here and there that suggest he was right.
Starlette: You write in a chapter titled “Baldwin on Faith, “Even today, the white church remains racist and often unrepentant over its long, hateful, and unchristian history.” Do you see a future where this is not the case?
Greg: Howard Thurman, Dr. King, and Malcolm X all repeated the wisdom that Sunday morning is the most-segregated moment of the week in America, and surveys from PRRI indicate this remains the case. A big part of repairing this past and present would be making it possible for those boundaries to be crossed, for Black people to sense their welcome and acceptance in white spaces, and for it to be genuine, done in love.
I want to live in a world where no white church tells the mother of the great liberation theologian Anthony Reddie that her family is not welcome there because of the color of their skin. I’d like for the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas—and all the conservative churches extolling white nationalism—to change their hearts and to welcome gay people, Indigenous people, and people of color into their white-washed institutions.
I also don’t know if that does those pioneers any favors. The White Church is a mess at this moment, wrestling with hypocrisy and sexism and sexual assault as well as racism, and as Mr. Baldwin used to say, “Why would I want to be integrated into a burning house?”
I’ll be honest. White American Christians—or at least the branch of evangelicals embracing MAGA and Donald Trump—do not seem to offer much hope for repentance and repair. But I have also spoken in a lot of white churches and for church organizations, and I was present when Baylor University offered its third conference on racism in the white Church in February.
These three conferences were organized around Jemar Tisby’s Acknowledgement/ Relationship/ Commitment vision of how the white church can do and be better, can be leaven in a culture of racism and selfishness. People came to Baylor and watched online, carried wisdom back to their churches, and activist communities formed around that work, which continues. Sessions from our 2022 program have been watched online almost half a million times. And this is not the only beloved community work being done by white Christians, within white denominations, or in partnership with Black churches. I have hope despite the headlines.
Here’s an option for those waiting on my white siblings at First Baptist, Dallas to see the light (it will, I’m afraid, be a long wait). Dr. Thurman said in “Jesus and the Disinherited” that it was the responsibility of the Black Church to welcome whites, which on the one hand feels like absolutely too much to ask of the disinherited and excluded. But I also can testify: if a Black church had not welcomed me, I wouldn’t be alive today. I was rescued and loved back to health by St. James, a historically African American Episcopal Church in East Austin.
They taught me not only about radical hospitality and moral courage, they taught me that a faith that doesn’t embrace justice is something less than true faith in the Jesus who cared for people’s bodies and spirits. Maybe people who are already heroes of love and justice are better at radical welcome than pampered people afraid of losing what they’ve got. If I were one of those saints who formed St. James, I don’t know that I would have agreed with their later willingness to welcome everyone as though they were Jesus.
But in any case, I will never stop giving thanks for St. James Episcopal Church. Coming back to your question, I am aware of and grateful for how their love and care for me have made a difference in the places I live and work. I became a Christian who preaches, teaches, and tries to live justice, and I could not have done it without their example and support.
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
