Baldwin argues that social institutions like the church and conceptions of race allow people to avoid personal responsibility for societal problems. In his novel The Fire Next Time, he aims to awaken a sense of universal responsibility. He critiques how the church teaches passive acceptance of suffering rather than freedom. Baldwin sees religion as a way to defer guilt to God rather than accept one's own role. By identifying with social groups, people limit their moral influence and condemn those outside the group. Baldwin calls for abandoning these identities to achieve radical social change and recognition of a shared "human trouble" beyond any single institution.

1. Hayley Swartz
Jordan Stone
English 1102
March 4, 2014
A Call to Consciousness
During the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, James Baldwin suggests that the nation is in fact
not terribly anxious to be equal. How can this be when the nation seems to be drowning is
discrimination and inequality? Baldwin suggests that answer lies in man’s fear of personal
responsibility. America has not moved toward greater democracy because the people do not
actually seem willing to receive personal accountability. Instead, he suggests the nation takes
refuge in social institutions: organizing concepts through which people dilute responsibility and
defer guilt to a disparate faction. In his novel The Fire Next Time, Baldwin attempts to awaken a
deluded nation to the disillusionment of attaching the symptoms of sin to social institutions and
posits a universal responsibility in which one’s moral influence cannot be contained to socially
constructed boundaries.
In order to understand this universal responsibility, Baldwin first points to the evidence of evil that
he recognizes in the world. He points to the magnitude of sin in that “the wages of sin were
visible everywhere” (20). The manifestations of sin are not exclusive but extend “everywhere”
leaving no one untouched. The idea of wages for sin implies the idea of responsibility and
payment for the sinful actions of man from which Baldwin is not absolved. He admits to “the evil
within [himself] and [being] afraid of the evil without” (16). Not only is evil out on the streets, but it
also remains in the personal and private dwelling of his soul. Without this statement, Baldwin
would lose all credibility in accusing the world of universal responsibility for evil. Everyone is
included in sin, and everyone is responsible, even Baldwin.
The only way to take responsibility for one’s own moral influence is to recognize the permeable
boundaries of one’s actions. Susan Feldman in her essay “Another Look at Another Country”
recognizes the “critical failure to recognize that the boundary separating the personal and the
political, the individual and the collective, is merely an illusion” (100). Baldwin recognizes that
individual, nation, and globe are so intrinsically related that one cannot suffer without affecting
the other two bodies. The borders that we draw are simply social constructions that aren’t
immune to actions of man. Lawrie Balfour argues that although he invests hope that “America is
uniquely positioned to overcome racial injustice and to create a new, more democratic way of
life” –possibly because America has created certain institutions through which democracy is
expect to thrive—Baldwin does not confine this democracy to the institution of nations, or any
institutions at all. It is actually the very dependence on social institutions for democracy that seem
to have hindered the nation from reaching its goals of equality. In fact, Balfour appeals that
Baldwin “recognizes that the constitution of America is itself [an] undefined territory whose
contours cannot be mapped in advance of social change” (Balfour 137). Political institutions and
social constructs cannot be neatly placed in disparate factions. The consequences of men’s
actions cannot be confined to the depths of his heart, walls of a church, or the borders of a nation.
Baldwin’s goal is to awaken a responsibility of “ ‘moral influence’ “ in which society should
become “alert to their responsibilities” as both “human beings and as citizens” (Balfour 137). Man
would like to believe that his own moral influence stays contained to his own life, but it diffuses
into both his national and social identification. In other words, one cannot be a good member of
his country without being a good member of society. In fact, where do the boundaries between

2. the two begin and end? He describes the state of the nation as a “nightmare” on the “private,
domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine
them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country;
and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disease” (89). The core of
the universal depravity being experienced by the world ultimately begins with individual lives.
The only way that man can reasonably deny responsibility for the world’s sin is to choose not to
assess his own part in it. This is solution that Baldwin seeks—to awaken a nation into
consciousness towards personal accountability for private, social, and political problems.
This sort of awakening would call for a total detachment to which society has attached his identify
and moral influenced. Balfour critiques that Baldwin’s “call to consciousness is not especially
satisfying as a political agenda” and that he “offers little concrete guidance about the mechanism
of social transformation” (Balfour 138). However I believe this is exactly the point. Baldwin does
not give the reader clues how to change through social reformation of the existing formations but
rather a destruction of current institutions all together: a social revolution. He appeals for a
radicalism that calls for a “creat[ion] of something truly new” and that this depth of transformation
would call for an “overhauling of all that gave us our identity. The Negro…will not de dependent,
in any way at all, on any of the many props and crutches which help form our identity now”
(Baldwin, “The Dangerous Road before Martin Luther King,” in Price of the Ticket, 262). The
beginning of this social revolution begins with a look at societies main crutch: social institutions.
Baldwin contends that the way current and present corporate bodies operate poses a danger and
impediment to any attempt at social change because they ultimately come to serve the purpose
of allowing its individual members to escape responsibility. In short, his critique of the Christian
church and the Nation of Islam, or the nature of race relations, is not aimed so much at any
religion or race, but at the way corporate bodies such as these, through which people identify
themselves, function to maintain that very identity and that identity’s innocence of any fault or
having played any role in the current social reality. For instance, though the Christian church is
theoretically an organization bound together through the love of Christ and neighbor, Baldwin
argues “[p]eople always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to
do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility” (81). If each man truly
does contain the evil that Baldwin suggests, then every person would hold the heavy
responsibility for the consequences of an evil world. Therefore, banding in corporations is less
about mutual affection and more about defining a line between who is to blame and who it not.
He reveals the absurdity of those who defer responsibility and place blame by connecting evil to
abstracted and generalized characteristics that supposedly all individuals of a corporate body,
such as race, share. He claims that the “value placed on color is always and everywhere and
forever a delusion” that “is not human or personal reality” (104). Generalized characteristics, such
as skin color, have no logical connection to the evil actions of men. Something as literal as
iniquitous behavior cannot be generalized to something as abstract as race. One cannot diffuse
responsibility among people with similar skin color because connecting the two in the first place
is a delusion of reality. Having a certain skin color does not vindicate any man from the current
social realities. Man only creates these connections because of his desire to defer responsibility.
Baldwin warns to “be careful not to take refuge in any delusion;” (104) not to hideaway in social
constructions that are not reality but rather a creation of the human mind.
Baldwin first discovers the world’s delusions through his involvement in the institution of the
church, a social construct that preaches freedom from the evil of the world. Upon arriving at the
church, he is asked, “Who’s little boy are you?” while also acknowledging that he actually
“wanted to be somebody’s little boy” (28). The institution of the church is clearly a corporate body
that requires its member to have a total transformation of identity to the rules and regulations of

3. that society. Clarence E. Hardy acknowledges Baldwin’s uses of the words pagan and desperate
to describe his conversion. He claims that these words “depict the basic human responses he
experienced on Mother Horn’s church floor. The incomprehensible character of evangelical
conversion does not simply appear in the act itself but also in how the experience seizes the
human personality and lays bare the very essence of an individual’s identity” (43). In Baldwin’s
conversion to Christianity, he is not simply going to church on Sunday, but he has in fact
undergone a complete abandonment of his personal identity to that of a corporate one. It is from
this experience that Baldwin discovers the importance of maintaining personal identity.
He soon finds that he is unsettled by the permanence of black suffering that is taught by the
church. That which has been assigned the characteristics of “Faith, Hope, and Charity” seems to
only have adopted a new theology of passive reconciliation to depravation (31). Instead of
freedom, he finds “Loneliness and Terror” (31). Much of this terror lies in the church’s production
of a “gentle Jesus” that asks his followers to “reconcile themselves to their misery on earth” (39).
The only thing worse than accepting their miserable lives would be taking responsibility for it. He
describes the oppression in the church as surviving because of the ultimate principle of
“Blindness” that is “necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny [Loneliness and Terror]”
(31). The use of the word cultivated suggests a deliberate act of volition in turning a blind eye
towards the evil of the world, the evil in themselves. There is no freedom in the church, only
denial of their qualities of “Terror” (310).
Thus, it seems that the particularly redemptive qualities that society has assigned to the church
are in reality a form of denial to the depravity of the world and a deferral of guilt to an omnipotent
cosmic being. Baldwin acknowledges this hypocrisy in his claim that Christians “ought to love the
Lord because they lov[e] Him, and not because they [are] afraid of going to hell” (35). Being afraid
of going to hell suggests some knowledge of one’s depravity and a desire to escape that guilt.
The point of the Christian religion is the idea that Jesus, claiming to be a deity, took on the sins of
those who believe. From the previous statement we can conclude that Baldwin sees religion as
strategy through which society attempts to escape the responsibility of sin by simply conceding
guilt to God. Upon being an insider in the church, he begins to notice the “subtle hypocrisy” and
learned how to manipulate and “work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered—it
was not very hard to do—I knew where the money for ‘the Lord’s work’ went” (38). In his book Re-
Viewing James Baldwin, Michael F. Lynth assesses that Baldwin found blacks’ faith “‘actually a
fairly desperate emotional business’ because it was essentially synonymous with fear of a
vengeful ‘God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet’” (Lynch 35). By
deferring personal guilt to a cosmic being, the church is then able to also place the symptoms of
sin on those that do not concede to God. We see evidence of this when Baldwin brings home a
Jewish friend to his father, who is a Christian minister. When Baldwin reveals that the Jew is not
a Christian, his father responds by “slam[ing] [him] across the face with his great palm” (37). After
his father’s reaction, Baldwin wonders if he is “expected to be glad a friend of [his], or anyone,
was to be tormented forever in Hell” (37). Baldwin understands the absurdity of his father’s
condemnation of anyone simply based on his or her membership to a different social institution.
According to Baldwin, one’s identification with a specific religion cannot validate or acquit him or
her from societal reality. He claims “the passion with which we [the church] loved the Lord was a
measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers” (41).
This suggests not a holy love for righteousness, but in reality it was a protection of those in the
church and a hatred of anyone that does not belong. Therman B. O’Daniel summarizes: “The
admonition to love everybody applied neither to white people nor to blacks whose beliefs were
different from theirs. But Baldwin could see no value in salvation that did not permit him to
behave with love toward others regardless of their behavior toward him” (O’Daniel 99). Baldwin
did not understand the containment of morals to the boundaries of one social institution’s rules.

4. Hardy claims that Baldwin’s rejection of the church’s boundaries “only solidified as he saw how a
narrow parochialism could dominate the Christian faith of his youth, despite all its pretensions to
having a generous universal spirit” (Hardy 79). The parochialism he refers to is the limits felt on
God, Christian rhetoric, and the language of vengeance that dominated the black Christian
church. In this way, the church lives “within these limits” and “sometimes achieve[s] with each
other a freedom that was close to love” (41). The limits he is referring to are the bounds of the
“nature of [their] oppression,” (41) meaning those characteristics that create the institutional
boundaries, in this case, race. Thus, grouping together in the name of religion is not for love for
God, but rather a synthetic love—a commonality that comes from the reinforcement of corporate
boundaries by the circulation of those who recognize and accept the parameters of the church.
Upon understanding the delusion of social schemas, Baldwin acknowledges truth behind social
constructions without conforming to them as truth, suggesting a divergence from social
compliance. It is true that for the “horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no
language” (69) and that “they knew it was ‘the man’—the white man” (19) who oppresses them. In
fact, Baldwin himself encounters white cops that leave him “flat on his back in one of Harlem’s
empty lots” (20) and tell him to “‘stay uptown where [he] belong[s]’” (19). In his book The Cross of
Redemption, Baldwin recognizes the cry of people asking, “What should I do about the Negro
problem?” (47). He responds saying, “There is nothing you can do for the Negros…The price for
that is to understand oneself...Most of us still believe and act on a principle, which is no longer
valid, that this is such and such an optimum, that our choice is the lesser of two evils, and this is
no longer true” (47). The framework on which society operates, that is a dependence on social
institutions, is not longer relevant or helpful; however, the “price of liberation of the white people
is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation” (97). This represents an aggregate change in
thinking that intrudes upon the safety of social institutions. He argues that “the whole root of our
trouble, the human trouble, is that we…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” (91). There is a “human trouble,” not a black trouble or a white
trouble. Humanity cannot solve this trouble by hiding behind social institutions. It is a burden that
must be carried by the entirety of humanity. Balfour recognizes that “any call to racial dialogue is
meaningless if it serves merely as an alternative to concrete change, his aim is to wake readers
from their dreams of innocence” (Balfour 137). Baldwin argues that the true solution lies in
breaking away from social institutions to which man has attached his identify. Although the white
race has caused the black race much pain and trial, this does not mean that they are evil
because they are white, but because they are partaking in the “human trouble” of “imprisoning
[themselves] to…race” (91). Any real change implies the breakup of social institutions and
relinquishing all to which man has given his identity. It is the end of safety. For Baldwin, “there is
simply no possibility of real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-
reaching changes in the American political and social structure” (85). Giving up identity through
race or religion really comes down to the same fear from which they were created in the first
place—the fear of the consequence of accepting personal responsibility for sin.
However, what Baldwin is aiming to make clear is that it is this very identification to corporate
bodies that will bring the judgment that society fears. The importance of a complete shift in
thinking is the prevention of the dooming judgment that will come in the form of total self-induced
societal collapse. In other words “a bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay”
(103). Although America hides in the ignorance of social institutions, a “vengeance that cannot
really be executed by any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police
force or army” is coming (105). As for the church, Clarence E. Hardy points out that “ for many
black people, religion in Baldwin’s words would seem to operate ‘as a complete and exquisite
fantasy revenge’ where white people are punished and (righteous) black people rewarded…

5. within this desire for retribution, a black evangelical rhetoric that embraces a cosmology with a
hell can be understood as coded language that cloaks its hostility towards a white elite” (Hardy
79). Baldwin confronts society on the illogicality of hiding in corporate bodies when these
institutions, nor anyone for that matter, have any protection against the doom that is coming for
each and every man. In fact, Baldwin suggest that “it is the threat of universal extinction hanging
over all the world today that changes totally and forever, the nature of reality…We human beings
now have the power to exterminate ourselves” (57). Not only is death a looming reality, but also it
is in the hand of society. It is not in the hands of white people, God, or whoever else to which one
might defer their responsibility. In fact, “[e]verything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we
have no right to assume otherwise” (105). Responsibly lies in the hands of all humanity. If society
continues to become blind to sin, diffuse responsibly, and shift guilt, they cannot be prepared for
judgment, a judgment that comes because of the consequences of evil. In the words of Baldwin
in No Name in the Street, “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed
themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.” This judgment will
not come from some cosmic being with a strong fist, but rather the consequences will be real,
immediate and earthly. They will set fire to their lives, a universal and unquenchable fire.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell, 1963. Print.
Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. New York: Dial, 1972. Print.
Baldwin, James, and Randall Kenan. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New
aaaaaYork: Pantheon, 2010. Print.
Balfour, Katharine Lawrence. The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise
aaaaaof American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. Print.
Hardy, Clarence E. James Baldwin's God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture.
aaaaaKnoxville: University of Tennessee, 2003. Print.
Miller, D. Quentin. Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple UP,
aaaaa2000. Print.
O'Daniel, Therman B. James Baldwin, a Critical Evaluation. Washington: Howard UP, 1977.
aaaaaPrint.