James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. By Clarence E. Hardy, III. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 147pp. $30.00 (cloth).

This probing study by Clarence Hardy is an insightful examination of how James Baldwin was shaped by his black holiness, evangelical heritage. Hardy synthesizes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon literary and cultural theory to interpret the material, embodied, and theological legacies of black holiness culture as portrayed in the writings of James Baldwin. The book is centrally concerned with Baldwin’s sharp rejection of Christianity, its god, and its symbolic world that vilified black people.

Baldwin is well-known for his extensive use of the black church as literary context. Several authors have written on his proclivity to represent religious conflict and the sultry atmosphere of black urban church life. Hardy brings a different style of interrogation and new questions to this project, however. Unlike most authors, he centers his study on Baldwin’s rejection of Christianity and its god as products of bad faith. And Hardy sustains an argument that this bad faith is indelibly shaped by whiteness, giving way to black self-contempt and rejection of the body, inter alia. Other writers, while acknowledging Baldwin’s departure from Christian claims, have not investigated at length the strident nature of Baldwin’s critique of Christianity and the links between black Christianity and the symbolic world that whiteness calls into being. It is precisely here that Hardy fills a critical gap.

It is difficult to miss the peculiar politics of capitalization at work in Hardy’s text. There is an interplay between “God” and “god” throughout the study that perhaps merits a study of its own. It is clear enough, however, that Hardy employs the lower-case to denote the malevolent or otherwise indifferent deity of illusory faith, particularly white interests and white social identity, while reserving the upper-case for a transcendent being who exists, perhaps, beyond the stranglehold of oppressive imaginings.

Especially important to Hardy’s explanation is the notion that conversion is initiation into an escape from blackness, to the degree that the black convert hopes to be washed and made “whiter than snow” (35). Although not the first to make this observation, Hardy here again moves beyond previous attempts with the degree to which he identifies the depth of antiblackness in African American Christianity. The conversion experience and its attending desire for freedom, he argues, takes on troubling dimensions in connection with a hostile regard for the body and sensuality, orientation to the material world, etc.

In chapter three, Hardy examines Baldwin’s response to the intransigence of black suffering. Here Hardy interprets Baldwin’s struggle to expose the illusory nature of the white Christian god while continuing to embrace the vivacious black culture so deeply informed by its misguided pursuit of that god. He explains how Baldwin became less patient with the failed promises of liberalism and unfounded optimism, particularly after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. This led him to condemn the myth of redemptive suffering and to further castigate those who simply demanded that blacks be more patient. In chapter four, Hardy goes to the heart of Baldwin’s perspectives on sexuality, white supremacy, and the body. He persuasively develops a portrait of Baldwin as an apostle of the body, illustrating how Baldwin used literature to signify the primacy of sensual experience. Baldwin recognized that fear and hatred of the body compelled distraught human beings to deny themselves the healing, love, and pleasure they were entitled to experience.

Hardy explains how Baldwin evaded the easy labels of “gay” and “bisexual” due to his critical insight into the limitations of identity construction; yet he is also attentive to the pitfalls of Baldwin’s reticence to “come out.” Readers will likely find most helpful Hardy’s cogent exposition of how Baldwin, from such location, operated as a cultural critic and public intellectual whose deeply religious insights and pronouncements center not on God but on the body, black suffering, and the human capacity to love beyond fear and difference. The author demonstrates how Baldwin continually sought to “jostle God to the sidelines” as a necessary act of exposing black self-hate and the falsity of white innocence (73).

Readers will also appreciate the sophistication with which Hardy sheds light on Baldwin’s understanding of white social identity (chapter five). Baldwin, in essence, sought to anthropologize whiteness by exploding its mythological claims to substance and exposing the nakedness of its foundation––a false claim to innocence. Hardy argues that Baldwin’s response to racism was distinguished by understanding that whites needed to be saved from whiteness; they had given up control of their identity in order to become white, hoping this exchange would afford them the ability to dominate blacks.

Throughout his study, Hardy emphasizes Baldwin’s penchant for the jeremiad––the posture whereby one assumes the public pulpit of moral scolding, often backed with a threat. But whereas the jeremiad typically intoned divine retribution, Hardy identifies Baldwin’s use of a naturalistic sense of justice; if whites did not stop their racism, cataclysmic destruction would inevitably rein down upon them.

Hardy ends his study by examining Baldwin’s “bastard” metaphor, by which Baldwin sought to capture the displacement and exilic status of black American existence. The author identifies Baldwin’s concern with white Americans’ denial of literal familial kinship with blacks. Hardy notes the elucidating qualities of this critique but also examines what it reveals about Baldwin’s exaggerated desire for recognition from whites. This chapter also continues a consistent analytical vector in Hardy’s work that renders visible the ways masculinity shaped and stunted Baldwin’s ability to diagnose the symptoms of white supremacy and the violations experienced by blacks. It is in this chapter that Hardy introduces a very provocative assessment of African American culture: Afro-Protestantism is on the decline and has already witnessed its best days (the Civil Rights movement) as a significant cultural force. He names Baldwin as the first to perceive this decline.

Hardy’s critical approach to black religion avoids the all-too-familiar naturalization of African American Christianity. One of his underlying concerns, in fact, is that Afro-Protestantism is a veritable condition of estrangement (exile), in part because it has depended upon anti-African meanings and conquest that have constituted cultural genocide by vilifying African religion. This is one argument, however, that Hardy could have made more prominent; it comes across as muted or subterranean. It is evident, nevertheless, that the semantics derived from such conquest constitute part of the racial ugliness Hardy develops as an analytical category (30).

Hardy’s thoughtful, provocative interpretation of Baldwin’s intellectual legacy reveals the portrait of a writer whose greatest contribution was not his novels but his preachy, non-fiction essays, whose timeless relevance and passion were due to Baldwin’s connection with the black holiness heritage. The irony of it all, Hardy urges, is seen when one realizes that this black evangelical heritage––marked by a loveless white Christian god and black self-loathing––is the very thing Baldwin spent his life trying to escape. Hardy thus concludes that it was Baldwin’s nemesis, yet also his strength, the marrow and substance of his impassioned public intellection.

Sylvester Johnson, Florida A & M University