The Fire Next Time

In Baldwin’s estimation, both Christianity and Islam fail to provide African Americans with the power that they need to overcome the discrimination and injustice they face on a daily basis. Baldwin grew up in the church, and he became a pastor at a young age as well (which helped appease his strict, religious father). From personal experience, Baldwin observed how Christianity operated as a systemic form of control over African Americans. He viewed Christianity as the teachings of a White religion that sought to keep African Americans chained to ideas of suffering and slavery, and which upheld systemic racism in a capitalist society, by promising Black people amazing rewards after death. This meant that Black people should simply deal with death and destruction in life because this was God’s will. This type of thinking completely undermines the struggle for equality by rendering struggle as godly, good, graceful, and enduring. As such, Black people become martyrs for the sake of rewards in heaven, while their physical reality suffers from death and destruction at the hands of oppressors. This is in fact how slaves were kept in line during slavery. They embraced Christianity (taught to them by White slave owners or those in favor of slavery) and endured their suffering on earth because their reward in heaven would more than make up for it. Baldwin refuses this way of thinking as detrimental and dangerous to African Americans.

Having dismissed Christianity as practiced in the US, Baldwin turned to Islam. Though he felt Islam couldn’t help, he wanted to see if it truly offered the solution to racism that it espoused through the African Americans of the day who embraced it as a viable alternative to Christianity. What Baldwin found, however, only further distanced him from religion as a saving grace. In particular, the famous Elijah Muhammad, among others, termed all White people “white devils.” Baldwin finds this blanket demonization of White people alarming and in direct conflict with his own spiritual and political views that seek a reconciliation, not domination, between White and Black America. Baldwin believes that White America and Black America must not only work together to bring about equality but must see one another without animosity and as equals. Neither Christianity nor Islam addressed the need for mutual acceptance and reconciliation for Baldwin.