James Baldwin Was a Preacher

James Baldwin was a preacher. This historical fact must be taken seriously if we are to understand his work, which in turn can help Christians understand their own work today. Of course, Baldwin was also a gay, African-American writer who became a major spokesperson for civil rights until his death in 1987. Even though Baldwin ultimately left the institutional forms of the holiness-pentecostal movement,  telling Desmond Tutu that he was no longer “a churchgoing man,” he never really broke with the ethos of the movement or its religiosity. Instead, Baldwin’s critical remarks about holiness reveal the theological and spiritual tension in the movement itself—its emphasis on an ecstatic encounter with love and its promotion of a rigorous morality as the manifestation of this love.

The dominate metaphor of fire, prevalent within holiness circles, can be taken in either direction—it can be the fiery passion of ecstasy or fiery judgment. Much of the time it is both, as Baldwin illustrates quite powerfully in Go Tell it On the Mountain. One finds both expressed through the book’s two primary characters Elisha and John and their spiritual experiences at their church, the Temple of the Fire-Baptized. The young Elisha receives his Spirit baptism when he speaks in a tongue of fire under the power while John must “go through this fire, and into this night” as part of his spiritual encounter on the threshing floor. For one, fire symbolizes the ecstasy of tongues and for the other the agonizing dread accompanying the internal battle with death and judgment.