Born in a Christian Culture

Abstract

In “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin asserts that his father, David Baldwin, paid a tremendous price for “having taken his own conversion too literally.” He did not forgive “the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed” (CE, 120). ¹ In his address “White Racism and World Community,” delivered to the World Council of Churches in 1968, Baldwin said that he “never expected to be standing” before that august ecumenical assembly as he had “left the pulpit twenty-seven years ago.” In the published copy of his address, Baldwin asserts that his exodus just about sums up his “relationship to the Christian Church” and “in a curious way” accounts for “part of [his] credentials”—his right, so to speak, to address the worldwide church, prophetically. He speaks to the council “in the name of [his] father, who was a Baptist minister, who gave his life to the Christian faith, with some very curious and stunning and painful results.” Baldwin writes that this pain goes a long way toward explaining why he sees himself as having “always been outside” the church even when he “tried to work in it,” and why he thinks of himself “as one of God’s creatures, whom the Christian Church has most betrayed” (749).