Religion In Richard Wright's Black Boy

From emotionally captivating sermons to the harrows of a Christian school, Richard Wright’s childhood consisted greatly of the Christian church; despite this, Richard never became an authentically pious individual. In Wright’s Black Boy, an autobiographical bildungsroman which follows the renowned author from childhood to adolescence, religion isn’t as central to the story as the motifs of Southern racial relations or poverty per sé. Richard’s main reactions with religion occur in his late childhood and early teen years with his Grandmother’s conservative and limiting views, his forced baptism in the Methodist church, and his horrid Christian schooling with his aunt, so it’s no wonder that he never fully committed. However, the absolutes upheld

by the religion that encapsulated Richard’s childhood and their manifestation in Richard’s family illuminate essential elements of Richard’s moral beliefs and the stark contrast between himself and unconditional values.
Richard’s beliefs regarding “right” and “wrong” fall into a grey area where the severity of “right” and “wrong” depend on the context of the situation and the players affected. For example, Richard rationalizes his larceny of the cinema house proprietor by explaining that, “he was white, and I could never do to him...what his kind had done to me...stealing was not a violation of my ethics, but of his” (203). Although he still felt compunction for his actions, Richard concluded that the justification done unto him outweighed the harm done unto the white proprietor; to Richard, trying to balance an unjustly weighted system justified his sin, although he still believed that it sinful. In this situation, Richard concluded that he committed a sin-worthy crime, but accounting for the grand scheme of things allows him to feel ethically justified. Religion, quite on the contrary, believed that a lie was a sin no matter what the circumstances were.
When Richard is erroneously convicted of eating walnuts in his Christian school, Aunt Addie beats him instead of the true persecutor because the true walnut-eater never spoke up. Richard failed to accuse the boy because of his street-gang instincts and assumed that the guilty boy would rightfully own up to his punishment. At home that night, after Richard confessed to withholding the truth, Aunt Addie threatened to beat him for lying. When she said this, Richard thought, “I could not explain how much I valued my code of solidarity” (108). Had he tried to explain this phenomenon to her, Richard felt that he would’ve failed in communicating that he prided his honor over his honesty because he believed that taking one for the team in order to maintain “the team” trumped saving his own skin by tattling. Richard sees the situation as multi-faceted with overlapping elements to consider, whereas Aunt Addie sees the situation as a matter of truth or life, black or white. Richard sees beyond the absolutes of truth or lie and prioritizes the “why.” Aunt Addie believes that lying is sinful, and despite Richard’s justifiable reason for lying, she chooses to recognize only the action and not the thought behind it. Addie, the epitome of the Christianity that Richard is exposed to, believes that a sinful action cannot be redeemed even if there was righteous intent; her logic is more ‘one-way-or-the-other’ than Richard’s. For obvious reasons, he feels unable to accept this absolute since his values lie somewhere interim. Clearly, Richard’s ethical opinions and philosophies contradict that of the religious South.
This contradiction stems largely from Richard’s hardships as a child. From his mother’s crippling strokes, to his chronic hunger, and the battles his mother knew he needed to endure, Richard matures incredulously prematurely. During the scene in which his mother has her first stroke, Wright retrospectively states that “though I was a child, I could no longer feel as a child, could no longer react as a child” (86). He continued to develop as a young boy, but with experiences that forced his perspective beyond his twelve years of age; unfortunately, Richard’s family failed to comprehend his experiences and how they impacted his outlook on life. Aunt Addie, Granny, and Uncle Tom see themselves as ultimately superior to Richard, largely due to their Christian faith and Southern society.
In the Bible, children symbolize the innocent who require nurturing from their elders to transform into thriving individuals.

Southern society promoted a more sinister version of this hierarchy which deems the older, whiter, and more pious worthy of the most power. Richard, an impudent young boy in need of religious convincing, has the least amount of power according to a combination of the two ideals. Richard reflects on this in the midst of his most intense qualms with religion: “Wherever I found religion in my life, I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn” (136). Numerous times throughout the story, his family tries to mollify Richard’s impudence towards obedience and make him thoroughly Christian by either using their own power to enforce their argument or by putting him into a position of powerlessness. His mother forces him to be baptized to maintain public pride; Granny tries to use Richard’s peers to persuade him to commit to the church; Addie tries to reassert her dominance over Richard and therefore his irreligiousness in the schoolhouse; and Tom beats him in an effort to break his spirit. Richard’s powerlessness emerges most lucidly when he is in a religious predicament or being punished, and these two events often occur simultaneously. When Addie beats him for lying during the walnut incident, he said, “I felt the equal of an adult [because] I knew that I had been beaten for a reason that was not right” (107). In this instance, he stands up for himself and realizes, for the first time, that there is no correlation between age and wisdom. In seeing himself as an adult, he recognizes that he sees his ethical opinion matters as much, if not more so, than his Aunt’s. Richard sees beyond the absolutes of childhood innocence and age-equivalent power, both evident the Christian church, as they render him increasingly silent and

incapable.
The silencing of his external voice, however, did nothing to staunch his attempts of fulfilling his curiosities. Ironically, the ultimate satisfier of Richard’s curiosity was literature. After a school teacher who stayed with his grandmother read him the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives, Richard recalls that “my sense of life deepened...the sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me” (39). Richard’s suspension of disbelief in the world of Bluebeard awakened an innate passion within him for the intense emotions and allure of the plot. He reaches a sort of nirvana when he immerses himself in stories, whether it be through reading or writing. Although his hunt for literature leads him to sell KKK propaganda among other questionable actions, this desire becomes a driving force in his life. After his baptism, Richard finds that “the Bible stories seemed slow and meaningless when compared to the bloody thunder of pulp narrative” (155). Richard’s search for a fitting faith didn’t lie in uncovering definitive truths–which this passage implies about the Bible–but in self-fulfillment and enlightenment. His church, on the contrary, focused on eternal punishment and not revitalization. He reflects on how he could be temporarily frightened towards emotional belief of Hell and damnation, but was ultimately deterred from utter commitment due to his increasing apathy to metaphysical threats. The discovery of the world around him probes Richard to discover the empty threats of Hellish punishment.
The threat of eternal damnation frequently accompanied his family’s persuasions of obedience and their earthly punishments. Earliest, this occurs when his mother prays for God’s forgiveness with him when he killed the cat; later, with Grandmother and Uncle Tom for his impudence and dabbles in fiction. However, in all cases, it was not some divine force which delivered the fatal blow, but Richard’s family. This hypocritical absolute of Godly punishment shatters what frail fears he held of damnation and punishment. Richard appreciates tangibility, as he appreciates the realness of his literary emotions, and condemns the unseeable, as he does with the lack of emotion in Biblical text. His family and the religious community disagree with Richard and apply themselves with blind faith and, to Richard, misplaced hope. He understood, however, why they turned to such an evocative entity: “I knew more than [Grandmother thought I knew about the meaning of religion, the hunger of the human heart for that which it is not and can never be, the thirst of the human spirit to conquer and transcend the implacable limitations of human life (119). In other words, Richard understands the necessity of worldly awareness and understanding life beyond human capacity. Richard simply found the same sense of enlightenment as the Christian believes through literature, not Christ. It is important to note that Richard didn’t condemn them for believing in something utterly intangible for him, nor chastise them for their disregard of his beliefs, not show hostility towards them to settle an archaic vendetta of ethical dominance. Richard ventured beyond the ultimatums of disagreement and discord to understand that he and his family searched for the same sense of self-fulfillment. However, instead of convincing his pious relatives that he was more right than they, he accepted that no amount of debate could conclude in a describe answer of “right” or “wrong”–something that neither religion nor his pious relatives ever did for him.
The voice of Richard Wright would never have developed if the absolute values of sin, childhood, and fulfillment–which tainted his religion and his family–hadn’t berated him so abrasively. The conflict he experienced between himself and his community forced him to confront his own beliefs and create a strong set of morals in order to maintain his sound individuality within the conforming nature of the South. In the face of adversity, Richard developed an augmented sense of understanding and empathy for those around him, while maintaining his nonconformist and tenacious personality. And yet, despite his family’s admonitions, Richard grows from a uneducated black boy of the impoverished South to one of the twentieth century’s most influential and profound writers. Wright’s insight into the mind of Black America shows through the unexpectedly poignant story of social injustice and racial prejudice. Whether caused by the world that was rapidly evolving around him or something innate and unreachable within Richard, Wright’s voice carried an element of irrefutable change that challenges the reader to question the absolute values around them and live undeniably in an area of grey.