"Come-to-Jesus Stuff" in James Baldwin's 'Go tell It on the Mountain' and 'The Amen Corner.' - a novel and a play

African American Review, Summer, 1997 by Barbara K. Olson

David himself says quite simply that he "stopped believing." He leaves his mother's church behind to pursue a life in music. But he does so on grounds that his mother herself later sanctions. It is unlikely that David would have left if his mother/pastor's theology had been more of the sort she voices at the play's end:

Children. I'm just now finding out

what it means to love the Lord. It ain't

all in the singing and the shouting. It

ain't all in the reading of the Bible.

(She unclenches her Fist a little,) It ain't

even--it ain't even--in running all

over everybody trying to get to heaven.

To love the Lord is to love all His

children--all of them, everyone!--and

suffer with them and rejoice with them

and never count the cost! (88)

Ironically, David's earlier explanation of his leaving home and church contains this same identification with humanity's needs and joys. He feels a call to the blues, if you will, because they involve him with the rest of the world:

... something's happening in the

world out there, I got to go! ... Every

time I play, every time I listen, I see

Daddy's face and yours, and so many

faces--who's going to speak for all

that, Mama? Who's going to speak for

all of us? I can't stay home. Maybe I

can say something--one day--maybe I

can say something in music that's

never been said before. (79-80)

David is a sort of messiah--the anointed one his mother has been hoping for, a Davidic one, who goes out to the world beyond the closed circle of the church. He rejects the exclusionary enclave that his mother's church has

become. He rejects the "safety" his mother has said is nowhere to be found outside of God and their church. If the world out there has for him, as his mother has warned, only a "broken heart," then so be it. He must "speak for" that pain.

But his mother comes to the very same realization without having to abandon God as her reference point or the Bible as her standard. She has learned what true religion is and, in fact, what true Christianity is. She has learned the lesson which her parishioner Sister Boxer quoted earlier from the Apostle John: "... the Word do say, if you don't love your brother who you can see, how you going to love God, who you ain't seen?" (47). If Margaret had learned this lesson earlier, we wonder, would David have felt it necessary to leave and stop believing? Or would his going off on his own, a necessary passage to adulthood, have required such a stark choice between the church and the world? It seems unlikely.

The play Amen Corner, then, while ending with David's rejection of the church and Margaret's exclusion from it, cannot be said unequivocally to reject Christianity itself. Some have argued that Margaret's concluding speech extols a humanistic creed rather than a Christian one. But her remarks come in the context of a Christian preacher's rebuke to her congregation and to herself. She finds for them and for herself a recognizably Christian antidote to unhealthy, fear-born lovelessness. Hers is a message not at all at odds with Christian dogma, a message not at all discordant with the strains of "Jesus Loves Me" which accompanied her earlier conversation with her disillusioned son. It is true that her congregation resists this Word of love she brings them, but their reaction only reminds us that this is a Word she must do and not just preach. Her people cannot hear it because they have themselves been hurt. She has failed to love them in the past as she has now learned she should. They must be loved into hearing the Word before they can do it, too.