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