James Baldwin: On Love and Salvation
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
February 15, 2026
He could have grown to adulthood consumed with hatred. In fact, he harbored great anger at the way his country treated him and other marginalized people. He moved to France as an adult to preserve himself. But as he said, “I was saved.”
James Baldwin had a harsh childhood, with bleak prospects. He grew up in Harlem, the grandson of enslaved people, with a stepfather who was a pious preacher on Sundays but who, at home the rest of the week, was physically and verbally abusive. He was a young Black daily confronting the impact of fear, disdain, and maltreatment from American whites in the first half of the 20th century. And as a queer man, he was forced to navigate society’s contempt and fear of this core aspect of his identity as well. Police harassed him, for entertainment. He knew every day that he was not welcome, either in his stepfather’s home or out in the streets. But he found that he was welcome in the church.
In traditional religious terms, James Baldwin was ‘saved’ by a mystical experience that left him writhing on the dusty floor of a storefront church in Harlem; an out-of-body experience that felt as though he had been flung down into a dark pit, only to be raised up by the chanting and exhortations of the congregation, who assured him that he had been saved.
Now, there are many ways to be saved. In the short term, Baldwin recounts, his sudden commitment to a religious life of preaching and church leadership might well have saved him from the streets, where, as a young adolescent he was watching more and more of his friends becoming caught up in crime and substance abuse. His religious life saved him from that. It also saved him, in the short term, from his stepfather’s abuse; as a high school student who suddenly happened to be also a popular preacher, Baldwin had excuses to isolate himself from family life in order to study and prepare his sermons. His stepfather left him alone. It must have been a huge relief to the young boy.
This period of intense religiosity did not last. Baldwin attended high school at DeWitt Clinton High, where he became friends with a number of Jewish students. James fulfilled his religious obligations by bringing Christian tracts and pamphlets to school in order to try to convert the others, who seemed to be able to poke holes in the contents. Eventually James began reading the material with a more critical eye, and he began to question much of what he had learned and experienced.
James’s stepfather, David Baldwin, objected to James’s friends. One time a Jewish friend came to the house, and David asked if he had been saved. Hearing that no, the friend was Jewish, he struck James in the face. “He is a better Christian than you will ever be,” responded James.
By the age of 17, Baldwin wrote, he could no longer believe in the form of Christianity that he was espousing. He wrote, “I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things…I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.” (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, p. 39.)
No love in the church. He could no longer be a participant.
Years later, Baldwin became acquainted with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam. In a lengthy section in his bestseller, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin closely examined the Black separatist beliefs of Nation of Islam adherents. At a dinner with Elijah Muhammad, he found himself agreeing with many of the assertions about the history of American Blacks, but stopped short of agreeing that all white men are evil and that they eventually would be annihilated.
Elijah Muhammad believed that whites would not control society or survive much longer. He referred to them exclusively as ‘white devils’. And Baldwin thought to himself, “I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?” (Ibid., p. 71.)
We can be saved by many things. To think of salvation in only one way, as nothing but a pathway to eternal life, is to ignore all the ways in which life and love can open up the world for us. I always say that I was saved by attending college, which was not a given in my blue collar family.
What do you think has saved you during your lifetime?
The first time James Baldwin was saved was at the age of 10, when a white schoolteacher, Orilla Miller, saw the potential in the shy, small boy, and encouraged him to write, taking him to movies and plays, broadening his horizons, showing him glimpses of a world that he might otherwise not have seen. This mentoring lasted for a few years, only ending when James at 14 turned toward the church and for a time turned away from culture and secular writing. Not only might Ms. Miller have saved James from a life of menial work and poverty, she also saved him from hatred. Because of the love she offered him, which he returned, he could never see all white people as evil. He was able to love some of them.
Despite his harsh family life and all the factors that marginalized him, James Baldwin was always able to make friends, as we have seen, reaching out to Jewish students, to white people, and ultimately to people in Europe after he moved to France as an adult. In building this singular life for himself, he somehow transcended fear and hatred.
“Fear,” wrote theologian Greg Garrett, “can keep us from loving and risking; it is in itself a kind of death.” In recent years many in this country have chosen fear as their orientation to the world: fear of people not like themselves, fear of hearing other languages in the grocery store, fear of alternative gender expressions, and fear of losing any advantage, of losing what they perceive as the little they have to people who are less deserving. Fearful people choose this path: choose to see the world through a lens of scarcity, of not enough to go around; rather than through a lens of abundance; a vision of a creation bursting with life and love, if you know where to look.
Over and over again, authors in the Bible urge us to not be afraid. “Fear not!” “Be not afraid!” Why is that message so important?
What if fear turns out to be one of our greatest sins? After all, fear works in us to separate us, to keep us from seeing each other’s humanity, and worth.
The theologian Paul Tillich spoke of sin as separation; what we call sin can be anything that separates us from God, from our neighbors, from ourselves. (In Garrett, p. 76.) Nothing causes such separation as much as fear of the other.
A religion, any religion, that amplifies that fear, that causes us to want to separate from others, can be harmful, and is a ‘bad faith’. Somehow James Baldwin was able to absorb the messages of his childhood church, that God loves everybody, and used that as the yardstick against which he measured the authenticity of religions. As he grew up, he could see that perhaps God loved everyone, but the human folks in a given faith community certainly didn’t. He walked away from those institutions but he never lost the belief that a religion of love can be what saves us.
Baldwin emphasized salvation through a love that is founded on the sharing of suffering and pain. (Field, Douglas, “Pentecostalism and All That Jazz: Tracing James Baldwin’s Religion,” April 2008. Literature and Theology 22(4):436-457)
Baldwin wrote, “Salvation is accepting and reciprocating the love of God. Salvation is not separation. It is the beginning of union with all that is or had been or will ever be…Salvation is as real, as mighty, and as impersonal as the rain, and it is as private as the rain in one’s face. It is never accomplished; it is to be reaffirmed every day and every hour. There is absolutely no salvation without love: this is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not divide… It is not the exclusive property of any dogma, creed, or church. It keeps the channel open between oneself and however one wishes to name That which is greater than oneself.” (from “To Crush a Serpent,” found in Hunt, Christopher, Jimmy’s Faith, 2024, p. 141.)
There is absolutely no salvation without love…. I cannot read this without thinking of our Universalist forebears and their confident claim that God is Love. And here in the 21st century, we assert that Love is at the center of all of our values, guides all of our values.
When I read James Baldwin I always wonder what he would think of 21st century Unitarian Universalism. My guess is that he would like our words, but might, in his uncompromising way, in his ability to see underneath the veneer, might be able to find areas where our words do not match our actions. It would be a fascinating conversation. We would agree, I believe, that we are saved by love and by connection, a love that Baldwin defined as “our endless connection with, and responsibility for, each other.” (Garrett, p. 89.). This is not the love of Valentine’s Day, of hearts and flowers and chocolate, but the greater love, agape, that fosters our growth and the realization of our human potential.
In 1965, in an interview, James Baldwin described love as “something active, something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you…I mean a passionate belief, a passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become, what a human being can do to change the world.” (Ibid., p. 68.)
My dear ones, Love will change us, open us, help us to see in new ways, and help us to change the world. And so we and the world are saved by love. May you, like James Baldwin, know this great force, like a fire, like the wind, and may you feel saved by it.
Amen.
