Weighing Your Gods and You

Abstract

We have to try to be better than the world is integral to Baldwin’s credo: “His passionate belief… passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become—to change the world in which he finds himself [emphasis added].” ¹ Let me say again that I have found no evidence that he believed in a personal “God”—a conscious deity who has created and intends to redeem the cosmos—after he left the church. But Baldwin does bring to mind the ancient idea that “God” is an activity that human beings cannot c ontrol—thunder, lightning, deluge. For Baldwin, “God” is a p redicate. “God” is not love for him; love, rather, is “God.” Human g oodness—a manifestation of love—is thus “God” for him, for “God” in its creative modality (and its destructive one) is a mysterious, uncontrollable energy—“some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you,” as he puts it in “In Search of a Majority.” The text that best exemplifies his “theology,” however, is his magnum opus, The Fire Next Time. Several things went into the making of Baldwin’s most celebrated work: reworked material on the Nation of Islam, also known as the Black Muslims (material Baldwin had promised to Commentary’s editor, Norman Pohoretz); Baldwin’s essay, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”; and a trip to Africa in 1962.