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Baldwin + Christianity - Coggle Diagram
Baldwin + Christianity
American Christianity is not Love or of Superior Morality
(1:05) “And I can’t say its a Christian nation...the record is too long and too bloody...All your buried corpses now begin to speak”
(22:30) “I was not a member of any Christian congregation as I knew they did not live the commandment ‘love thy neighbor’”
"In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues"
"I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door"
"Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty"
"...the schizophrenia in the mind of Christendom had rendered the domain of morals as chartless as the sea once was, and as treacherous as the sea still is"
Christianity in America calls for ancestry and sexual innocence as requirements for power while Black people are over sexualized and robbed of ancestry.
"I am called Baldwin because I was...kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross"
"When I was ten...two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess"
"We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God's name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do."
Christian Morality As an Excuse
(27:01) Malcolm X: “And following the ignorant negro preachers, we have thought that it was Godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us”
"But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live"
"Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated"
"And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection"
"...the Bible had been written by white men...according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to a be a slave"
"And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it"
Christianity as Salvation and Nationalism
"And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven...then utter disaster was my portion. Yes it does indeed mean something...to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black.
God's love alone is left. But God...is white"
"I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life."
The paradox of relying on Christianity for liberation while being excluded from it.
"The Christian church itself...sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God"
"The boy could see that freedom depended on the possession of the land; he was persuaded that, in one way or another, Negroes must achieve this possession"