The Role Of Religion In James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain

James Baldwin’s novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain focuses on the role of the christian church in the lives of African-Americans during a delicate moment in his life as a teenager in his search for identity. Christianity and religion plays a complicated role in many African American’s lives as they deal with peer pressure and sexuality. Similarly, in James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region of my Mind, Part 1” he feels the constraints religion has upon him as well as the freedom and liberation it can play in his life. Both of these texts deal with three conflicts. The clash between father and son expectations, the coming-of-age struggle and the religious crisis. However, the rhetorical purpose of James Baldwin’s letter is to deliver the message

It states, “ The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it, are historical and public attitudes.” This passage is significant as it ends the excerpt because it claims that each individual is only a product of the ideals and beliefs of their ancestors, history and society. Racism, discrimination and oppression are all boundaries that have been formed in our minds from past historical events they are tied to our ancestral roots. Therefore, we can never escape it, it forms and molds within each generation as beliefs are passed on. For instance we see racism towards African Americans being played out in the text. This racism can be tied back to slavery in which the whites enslaved the blacks. In Baldwin’s letter it states, “ negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it.” Baldwin even admits to the sad truth that racism was a result of past generations

He is not a strong and independent character as is the man in the letter. The boy in Go Tell it on the Mountain is a vulnerable creature trapped in his own pitiful desires and society’s beliefs he states, “ his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive” (11). This poor boy’s mind is filled with guilt for an action that he committed out of his own free will. However, he is so worried about what others may think about him that he can not be happy. In contrast, the man in the letter does not care what others think of him and does not desire to follow in his father’s steps he claims, “ school began to reveal itself, therefore, as a child’s game that one could not win, and boys dropped out of school and went to work. My father wanted me to do the same. I refused, even though I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me.” Even though, most men went to work the man in this text is a strong-willed character whom resists his father’s ways. He is a strong and confident individual opposed to the weak and vulnerable boy seen in the