Baylor professor finds gospel truth in Baldwin’s writings

Baylor University’s Greg Garrett has nothing and everything in common with the late James Baldwin.

Garrett is a white, happily married English professor at a Baptist school who has lived much of his life in Oklahoma and Texas.

Baldwin was a Black, Harlem-born writer who wrestled with his sexuality and completed some of his most significant literary work as an American expatriate in France and Switzerland.

Garrett was raised Southern Baptist but wandered spiritually more than two decades until he found a home in the Episcopal church, where he is a canon theologian.

Baldwin followed in his father’s footsteps as a young preacher in a theologically conservative Black church, but he ultimately left organized religion far behind.

Nevertheless, Garrett has found—and continues to find—not only relevant cultural insights, but also theological depth in Baldwin’s essays, novels, short stories and plays.

‘America’s great prophet’

In fact, Garrett sees Baldwin as “America’s great prophet,” as he describes him in his new book, The Gospel According to James Baldwin.

“He has helped me understand things about my own life and about faith,” Garrett said in an interview. “He also helps us understand this current moment that we’re in.”

Garrett said he—and many others—can relate to leaving the inherited religious tradition of their childhood.

Although Baldwin never formally returned to the church, he continued to draw upon the language, symbols and metaphors of the Bible. Baldwin’s personal correspondence included requests for prayer and references to theological issues with which he struggled. At his memorial service at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City, mourners listened to a recording of Baldwin singing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

Garrett said he believes Baldwin has much to say to those who do not claim any specific church affiliation, choosing to identify as “spiritual but not religious.”

“When I think about Baldwin and the church, there is a sense of sadness around it, because he didn’t get rescued in the same way that I did, but he never left his faith behind,” Garrett said.

“One of the big lessons Baldwin can give us is what it looks like and how can you pull together a life of the spirit if you don’t feel like you belong in the church in which you were raised.”

Baldwin “found a way forward” by creating his own gatherings of people with whom he felt a sense of belonging and common purpose, he said.

Gathering at ‘The Welcome Table’

In fact, Baldwin’s final unfinished play “The Welcome Table,” which draws its title from a Negro Spiritual, deals specifically with that issue, Garrett said.

“For Baldwin, it was all about, ‘Where is this place where we all can gather, diverse as we are? … Where can we find this place where we can all be fed, all be recognized, all be loved, all be understood?’”

Baldwin also often used the metaphor of the New Jerusalem to describe his vision of a better tomorrow.

“Someday we will reach this place where all the divisions between us no longer matter. Speaking as a Christian theologian, these are intensely theological understandings of who we are and where we come from. It feels very much like Baldwin leaning into the belief that these things are possible,” Garrett said.

Baldwin possessed both the courage and the gifts to bear honest witness—“to see and to say” what he experienced and also to cast a prophetic vision of what could be, he said.

“This is a person who was honest about what America was and is, but also believed in the possibility that we could do better and be better,” he said.

Called to be ‘a witness’

Although Baldwin rejected his early commitment to preaching Christian doctrine, he continued to speak of his “calling” to be a “witness,” Garrett observed, noting it is a “loaded term.” In New Testament Greek, the word for “witness” is the same as the word we transliterate as “martyr,” he said.

“The idea was these are people who believe so deeply in something that they gave themselves for it,” Garrett said. “I think it doesn’t have to be witness to the death. It also can be witness in life.

“Baldwin’s great gifts were of observation, description and storytelling. … What he was saying was, ‘I’m going to use every one of my gifts to be present and to describe what I see—and to point out the possibilities.’”

As a Christian, Garrett finds the gospel—the good news—in Baldwin’s writings about the “primacy of love,” even for oppressors.

He quoted Baldwin as saying as a child, he was taught in church to “love everybody,” and even if others did not believe it, “I did.”

Baldwin’s disenchantment with the institutional church focused largely on its unloving actions and its failure to live up to the example of Jesus, he noted.

“Diverse as we are, separated as we are, there is still hope in this possibility of love,” Garrett said.