The Prophetic – The New York Times
I am a child of the church. In an early memory, I am 6 years old, half-asleep in the back of my grandparents’ station wagon on the way home from a revival. It is thrillingly late. I am contented, safe, warm. The car is quiet save the sound of traffic passing in the other direction, and the murmur of Family Radio — which was always playing in my grandfather’s car. My ears still buzz from the stadium speakers, and from the choirs and the preachers’ hooping and the audience praise shouting.
The God of my revival childhood was all-powerful and relatively benevolent, but there were a great many rules about what we should do (go to church three times a week, live by the Word of God, literally interpreted), and what we shouldn’t (listen to secular music, play cards, watch movies, drink). These commitments and privations were rewarded with God’s love, palpable, like a bird alighting on a shoulder.
I left it all behind as a teenager, when I plunged into the world on the other side of the stained-glass window. My defection brought a heady, delicious freedom that also left me a little bereft. Then, as a college student, I read James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Here was so much of my own experience, intimately detailed, as though he were whispering to me about how it had been and what we’d lost, how much of it we’d never understand. Here was a blueprint for how to be both: how to grow up in the conservative church and become an artist, how to be poor and Black and tell about it with due pride and complexity, how to disbelieve but be imprinted by belief. And how literature could articulate these quandaries, could give me all of this, and more.
This essay, like others to follow in this series, maintains that American literature is also imprinted by belief, freighted by ideas about morality, justice and standards for living that are derived, alongside manifold wrongs and derelictions, from the nation’s historically Christian heritage. Christianity’s imprint on our literature isn’t necessarily about piety or doctrine — though that is sometimes the case. It also trucks in paradox: At worst, it justifies great evil; at best, it inspires decency and generosity, and acts as a hedge against oversimplistic notions of society and of the individual. It asks us to hold contradictory realities in mind and heart; there is sustenance and insight to be gained in that wrangling.
