I love the physical form of this book. I got it from Mudd library. It is small, slender, and gray. The spine says simply JAMES BALDWIN. The front cover has a faded embossing of a symbol–a leaping dancer holding aloft a flaming hand. It is unassuming. And yet, as the title of the book suggests, it is full of fire.

I’ve been trying to read books that are linked to one another, that flow into, compliment, and expand the depths of each other in their reading together. Last month, I read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. The final chapter of her book “The Fire This Time” is a direct reference to this book, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which she also quotes from to great effect. I’ve long known that I should read some of Baldwin’s writing (truthfully, I read Giovanni’s Room my freshman year of college, but I wasn’t in a place where I was able to pay attention to it or absorb it) given his reputation as a tremendous writer. So when I came upon the references in Alexander’s book, my interest was piqued. When I asked a friend who knows, “Which Baldwin book should I read?” and she responded without hesitation, “read The Fire Next Time,” it was confirmed.

This book is a lovely, passionate, and articulate memoir of growing up black in the United States and a treatise on race relations. It was originally published in 1963, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and is incredibly prescient. Much of it–distressingly, perhaps–seems to me as though it could have just as easily been written today.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section, Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of my Emancipation, is a brief, but powerful, letter written to his nephew about growing up black in the US on the one hundredth anniversary of emancipation. It contains some incredible bombshells:

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

and,

Many [white people], indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

and, perhaps most powerfully,

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.

The second section, Down at the Cross, the bulk of the book, is a memoir of growing up, joining, then leaving, the church and Baldwin’s experiences meeting Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. There is too much in here to share everything I found striking, but here are a few choice pieces:

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

and,

In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down—that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day—it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing one has done so. All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color.

The book is full of heartbreaking analysis, anecdote, and insight about race in the US and Africa–most of which still applies today.

---

I’ve been thinking, lately, a bit about atheism. I consider myself an atheist and I generally believe that the virtue of religious faith–in the traditional and, I think, inescapable sense of believing things without good evidence for them–is a dangerous abuse of human intellect. I read Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion some years ago and–despite approaching it with high levels of skepticism–found it completely persuasive by the end. This fact I divulge only rarely given my next points, however.

I have recently been considering, though, given the intractability of religion and the plethora of other problems in need of more direct remedy, whether atheist organizing or activism is really an effective way of improving the world at this point in time. This feeling is only increased, lately, because I’ve grown weary of trying to associate myself with a concept whose dominant voice is smug white men insisting that people should simply absolve themselves of their childish notions. Dawkins is, of course, included in this group as perhaps the smuggest of them all.

Righting the injustices that are often perpetrated under the mantle of religion is more complex than simply telling people to get over it, and I’m not convinced that the modern atheist movement is ready to consider that. I’m prepared to discuss the intersections of religion, race, class, and the role of religion in the world at large. I want to talk about the systems that drive people into religion, either willingly or not. I have yet to see any prominent atheist thinkers engaging with these issues.

And yet, what is so striking about Baldwin, is how atheistic so many of his sentiments are. Most explicitly:

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

Through the book it is clear that Baldwin does not believe in one particular religion or another, but sees them as what they are at their core: communities, movements, and political powers. This insight does not come to Baldwin unearned. The first part of the book chronicles how, as a youth growing up in Harlem, joining the church saved him from “a criminal career.” Yet he also details how, in the end, the church failed him:

Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? Perhaps I might have been able to reconcile myself to this if I had been able to believe that there was any lovingkindness to be found in the heaven I represented. But I have been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.

Later in the book, when he meets Elijah Muhammad, he is critical of the Nation of Islam, but he also explains, very clearly, the reason it exists–the racial context that created it. He explains, in many ways, why this means that he cannot stand against it:

I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm [X]’s statements simply because I disagree with his conclusions, or in order to pacify the liberal conscience. Things are as bad as the Muslims say they are—in fact, they are worse, and the Muslims do not help matters—but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed quite the contrary.

Reading this book completely has given me some new thoughts about atheism and also some despair. If a queer black man in 1963 could address religion articulately, critically, and with a nuanced understanding of its complex benefits and oppressions,–what has become of that voice today? How has the dominant conversation about religion become so polarized and simplistic–to the point that I can’t feel comfortable engaging in the conversation at all?

I’ll leave off with this passage:

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.