A novel approach to understanding the work of James Baldwin and its transformative potential

The relationship of James Baldwin’s life and work to Black religion is in many ways complex and confounding. What is he doing through his literary deployment of religious language and symbols?

Despite Baldwin’s disavowal of Christianity in his youth, he continued to engage the symbols and theology of Christianity in works such as The Amen Corner, Just Above My Head, and others. With Jimmy’s Faith, author Christopher W. Hunt shows how Baldwin’s usage of those religious symbols both shifted their meaning and served as a way for him to build his own religious and spiritual vision. Engaging José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification as a queer practice of imagination and survival, Hunt demonstrates the ways in which James Baldwin disidentifies with and queers Black Christian language and theology throughout his literary corpus.

Baldwin’s vision is one in which queer sexuality signifies the depth of love’s transforming possibilities, the arts serve as the (religious) medium of knitting Black community together, an agnostic and affective mysticism undermines Christian theological discourse, “androgyny” troubles the gender binary, and the Black child signifies the hope for a world made new. In disidentifying with Christian symbols, Jimmy’s Faith reveals how Baldwin imagines both religion and the world “otherwise,” offering a model of how we might do the same for our own communities and ourselves.