Religious Frenzy

“Go Tell It On The Mountain,” by James Baldwin, 1952

For an atheist, no matter the author, this is a hard book to read, ‘classic’ or not.  This is about a group of black fundamentalist Christians, centered around one family from the U.S. South who move to New York.  They strongly believe in heaven and hell, Satan and God, being ‘saved,’ prayer, physical abuse and bad marriages.  They hate sex, masturbation, homosexuality, children born out of wedlock, the non-religious, the blues, movies, drinking and other ‘sins’ too numerous to name.  As one character remarks later, their ideas make religious people miserable, but in a different way.

If You Want to Climb That Mountain...

This fiction book is written in a feverish tone, where simple naturalism is invaded by multiple psychological fantasias of fear and loathing.  The young boy in the book, his foster father and his real mother are tracked in their internal frenzies of evil and salvation – in page after page after page.  This gets hard to read because their emotions become disconnected from anything but biblical verbiage, like bad dreams doled out by a Christian drunk.

The book ends during a Saturday night revival service attended by only a few faithful at a store-front church in Harlem.  The revival lasts until dawn. The young boy John, who is 14, hates his abusive foster-father, the holy-roller pastor of the church Gabriel.  The pastor Gabriel dislikes this foster son, as John is not his actual genetic child.  Gabriel’s own son Roy has just denounced his father earlier in the evening, so it’s not going well for Gabriel.  His sister Florence also dislikes Gabriel over the years for his censorious ways.  But he is God’s mouthpiece, so … they have all congregated in the church, along with a few other hard-core Pentecostals.  And there, John gets ‘saved’ - even though he might be gay.  He is forced into it as the son of a preacher-man.  This ‘salvation’ is tentative at best.

But sometimes the people who rage against sin are the biggest sinners.  That post-frenzy dawn, Florence produces a letter from Gabriel’s dead first wife Deborah that she’d been holding onto for 30 years. It describes events earlier in the novel.  The letter indicates that Gabriel had a ‘love’ child with another woman while dutifully married to Deborah, and while working as a pastor.  Subsequently shunned by Gabriel, this irreligious woman went off to Chicago to have the baby and died in childbirth.  But the child survived.  After that, Gabriel had nothing to do with his son, even when the boy lived with his mother’s relatives in the same southern town as Gabriel did.  He kept it a secret but his wife figured it out quickly.

Standing behind this pressure cooker of religion is the oppression of black people.  In the background, white thugs kill uppity Negroes at will in the southern town, while racist store-owners and cops in New York accuse any black person of a crime. The ‘demons’ of poverty, crime, drink, drugs and sex lure those who fall off the ‘straight and narrow.’ Marx called religion ‘the opium of the people’ and indeed it functions that way for many today, no matter their ethnicity.  But not all, as the continuing split in the black community between the bible-thumpers and the more secular is made evident in the book.  This has not changed.

The black church is a refuge, but also a jail.  It has a liberal wing and also a very conservative wing. This book reflects the latter.  It was Baldwin’s first novel, and it reflects his heavy immersion in fundamentalist Christianity as a young man, and his beginning rejection of it.

Most black socialists and radicals do not trust the church, as it many times either collaborates with a wing of the ruling class or holds back struggle within the black community.  It refuses to recognize the class structure among black people themselves. It doesn’t look at the world scientifically, but instead looks at it from a moralistic, punitive point of view.  The radicals feel that individualist attitude of "bearing witness" is insufficient.  MLK represented the best of the black Christian church.  Jesse Jackson, John Lewis and others from King’s circle of preachers have tried to follow in his footsteps.  His present attempted successor is Reverend William Barber, leader of Moral Mondays and the Poor Peoples Campaign II.  But not all black preachers are of this type, even today.  There is still a large, crazed wing that is similar to other Christian fundamentalists in this country and again, mostly based in the South.  They are reflected in this book. 

The current black Atheist movement, which got inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance, will appreciate this book the most.

Other reviews re James Baldwin:   "I Am Not Your Negro" and "Finks."

And I bought it at May Day Books excellent fiction section!

Red Frog

June 16, 2018