Hardy, Clarence. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee
Press, 2003. 146 pp., $30.00 (USD). ISBN:1-57233-230-1.
[1] Hardy’s James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope,
and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture is a provocative analysis
not only of James Baldwin’s work but also of black religious
response to crises in life. Hardy repositions Baldwin’s
work and its significance for black religious criticism by correcting
what he finds to be a curious and glaring silence about Baldwin’s
work. That is, he wants to bring Baldwin within the canon
of black theological discourse. He argues, rather convincingly,
that Baldwin’s writing serves as a model for black theologians. Further,
he argues that Baldwin’s writings are in and of themselves
prophetic pronouncements on a divided America. It is because
Baldwin operates “outside the traditional boundaries of
theological reflection” that his work is important in understanding
the tensions within black religious life. Finally, and
most tellingly, Hardy contends that black liberation theology
has not sufficiently attended to Baldwin’s “peculiar
relationship with black Christianity” and the ways in which
that tension “exposes the anatomy of a religious heritage” (xi).
[2] This anatomy that Hardy wants to explore through Baldwin’s
work is that of black holiness culture. For Hardy and for
Baldwin, black holiness culture is steeped in crisis. Drawing
on Baldwin’s books and essays, Hardy constructs a description
of black holiness culture that is apocalyptic in outlook, sensuous
in worship, pregnant with possibilities, and rife with internal
contradictions. Hardy contends that Baldwin’s membership in
and eventual estrangement from black holiness culture allowed him
the vantage point from which he could initiate serious critiques
of black life in America. What Baldwin saw and what Hardy
(through Baldwin) sees is a religious culture that is oriented towards
closure. That is to say, black holiness culture produces within
the black body shame, guilt, and fear. The expectations of
black holiness culture overwhelm the desires of individuals, sexual
and otherwise. For Hardy, Baldwin takes black holiness culture
to task for perpetuating a fear of and shame towards sex and the
black body and for producing a “conversion-brokered religious
perspective” (23). Such a perspective is as bound by
lust and desire as is the “juke joints of southern Louisiana
nightlife as places where the sacred and profane meet and move together
in the gyrations of women who have a love for ‘sin’ and
for the movement of their sensuous bodies” (ibid.). Through
the figure Gabriel, “the hated stepfather” in Go
Tell It On The Mountain, Baldwin presents the argument that
there is not much difference between the sacred and the profane.
[3] Hardy persuasively argues that Baldwin criticizes black
holiness culture for promoting a type of conversion experience that
denigrates black bodies and reduces black lives to a drudgery that
has to be endured in order to attain “security in the next
life” (30). The denigration of the black body and the
reduction of black lives to a tedious existence that can only gain
release in death leads to the characterization of sexuality as shameful. Baldwin’s
critique of black holiness culture often presents the black church’s
attitude towards sex and the black body as archaic and in need of
reform. According to Hardy, Baldwin describes the black church
as holding a “tenuous grip … on the potentially wayward
sexual desires that it both fears and depends upon” (16).
[4] As Hardy reads Baldwin’s work, black holiness
culture relies upon the dangerous nature of black sexuality in order
to inscribe a hegemonic presence over and against the black body. In
other words, the black church uses a conception of black sexuality
as dangerous and uncontrollable to offer black people a way to control
these dangerous sexual impulses. The control exerted by black
holiness culture offers black people the tantalizing reward of first,
respectability in this life and second, a secure afterlife.
[5] However, as Baldwin reads this cultural discourse on sexuality
and blackness, it renders blackness as ugly. Hardy notes that
this ugliness is disruptive: “Ugliness does not simply describe
a lack of attractiveness; in the context of Baldwin’s life,
ugliness is linked with a blackness that circumscribes and restricts
the life chances of those who labor within its concealment and are
unable to give or accept love” (28). Thus, black holiness
culture’s emphasis on the ugliness of black bodies and black
sexuality has far-reaching implications for black life and black
religion in Baldwin’s work. As Baldwin works through
the perception of black ugliness, he indicts the “god white
America worships” as being malevolent. God in Baldwin’s
work is indifferent to the plight of black people. Despite
that indictment, Baldwin is not yet resigned to casting God into
the dustbin of theological discourse due to the suffering of black
people in America.
[6] For Hardy, Baldwin’s work in an indispensable resource
in understanding the real tensions in black life concerning the
black body, its purported ugliness, and the relationship between
the black subject and God. In Baldwin’s plays, novels,
and short stories, the protagonist is usually caught up in an existential
battle with God. In other words, God is on trial for having
abandoned black people to the vicissitudes of white racism. It
is through white racism that black people have received an interpretation
of the Bible that casts black bodies as ugly and subject before
a white God. According to Hardy, Baldwin judges God to be “an
aggressive god who ruthlessly seizes the body and the personality” (42).
[7] God is indifferent to black suffering. God does
not attempt to alleviate black suffering, nor does God attempt to
validate black bodies. Despite Baldwin’s apparent rejection
of an all-loving God, he maintains a fascination with the black
church. Hardy argues that Baldwin’s works “appear
prepared to leave God in place to hate” (46). While
Baldwin retains God as an object of scorn, he does not reject the
redemptive possibilities of black suffering. The suffering
of black people and the apparent indifference of God to such suffering
suggests for Hardy a “nontheistic existentialism.” Hardy
argues that Baldwin is able to allow for the possibility of redemptive
suffering because he identifies suffering as “intrinsic to
the creative process” (49). According to Hardy’s
interpretation of Baldwin, as suffering is an important part of
the artistic process, it is also an important part of the development
of human beings. As Baldwin explores the human body in its
groanings and sufferings, he also explores the body in pleasure. Hardy
contends that, for Baldwin, “sexual intimacy holds a sacramental
quality as a vehicle for love and truth” (61).
[8] Despite Baldwin’s tension with black holiness culture
and his seeming rejection of God, he does not thoroughly reject
his religious heritage. For Hardy, Baldwin not only is shaped
by his heritage, he employs it in his indictment of white America’s
treatment of black people. Although Baldwin demotes God “from
a vibrant personality to a joyless force of nature,” Hardy
recognizes that the language in Baldwin’s writings is filled
with “the heat of moral indignation and promises of a surely
coming doom. His language passes judgment on the United States
even as it reveals the inadequacies of American society” (81). He
presages the development of black liberation theology when he contends
that the white Christian god will be “crushed” and “new
(black) gods will arise in the future” (81).
[9] As I read Hardy, I find his work provocative in that he
seeks to position James Baldwin’s work as a prototypical theology
of protest and liberation as well as prefiguring a decline in the
influence of Christianity among black people in the United States
(106). However, Hardy does not let Baldwin be read as abandoning
Christianity. Rather, Hardy reads Baldwin as consciously and
subconsciously articulating a dynamic tension in black life concerning
Christianity, black suffering, and black bodies. To attempt
to understand and give shape to this struggle for meaning in black
life is important for both Baldwin and Hardy. As a text that
opens the reader up to new interpretations not only of Baldwin’s
work, but also of black religious culture, I can find few texts
that accomplish that task with the level of sophistication that
Hardy has brought. This text is essential reading for both
the student of black religious thought and of James Baldwin’s
works.
Roger Sneed
Vanderbilt University
roger.a.sneed@vanderbilt.edu
