7. James Baldwin's the Fire Next Time and the Jeremiad

JAMES TACKACH

7. JAMES BALDWIN’S THE FIRE NEXT TIME AND THE JEREMIAD TRADITION

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time fits many genres—personal memoir, religious journey, an analysis of the racial landscape of the United States early in a tumultuous decade, a critique of the Nation of Islam and black nationalism. Baldwin’s extended essay that originally appeared as an article in The New Yorker late in 1962, and in book form early in 1963, also takes the form of a jeremiad, an admonitory sermon to Baldwin’s American countrymen for the putative sins they had committed. The jeremiad, originally a type of sermon that took its name from the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah, presents a warning to the unrighteous and the wavering that God’s justifiable vengeance will be coming as payment due for individual and communal sins. The jeremiad traveled to America with the English Pilgrims and Puritans who settled in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century; it became a staple of their pulpit. Secularized and adapted to a wide range of social and moral issues, the jeremiad has endured, over almost four centuries, to become an important component of American religious and political rhetoric; it survived the decline of Puritan hegemony in New England, was adapted by American patriots to the cause of American independence from Great Britain, found new energy during the abolitionist era and Civil War, and remains alive—and not merely in evangelical Christian churches—almost four centuries after it sailed to America with English religious dissenters. The Fire Next Time is a mid-twentieth-century jeremiad, a condemnation of American racism that connects Baldwin to the Puritan vision of America—a special place inhabited by a special people who were given a special mission in the world and would be held responsible by God for failing to achieve that mission.

THE JEREMIAD AND THE PURITAN VISION OF AMERICA The British Pilgrims who sailed from Holland aboard the Mayflower and established Plymouth Plantation in 1620, and especially the British Puritans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Arbella and established Massachusetts Bay Colony a decade later, saw themselves as God’s newly chosen people. The majority of them did not come to America for gold, furs, land, or anything else of material value that this so-called New World might offer. Unlike their British predecessors who landed in Virginia in 1607 and established Jamestown, most of these New England migrants crossed the Atlantic mainly for religious purposes— to set up a new society, both ecclesiastical and civil, far from the Anglican and

Catholic religious ideology and practices that still prevailed in post-Reformation England. They were indeed pilgrims embarking for a holy land in America where they could live and worship without interference from British civil and religious authorities. Their mission to this New World was unique and exceptional, they believed, an errand in the American wilderness guided by their God, who had established with them a special covenant, similar to the one that he had formed with the ancient Israelites: If these new Israelites obeyed God and carried out his work on Earth, he would bestow upon them special blessings that no other earthly communities enjoyed. The Israelites of old had become too worldly and, thus, had failed to uphold this covenant, but it was renewed by God with these seventeenth- century Pilgrims and Puritans. As the Puritan historian Perry Miller (1967) has stated, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony “conceived of their society as in covenant with God like Israel of old, which supplied meanings and directions not alone for theological speculation but for the civil polity as well” (p. 415). Pilgrim and Puritan literature—sermons, histories like William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, journals and letters—is filled with references to Moses and the Israelites journeying toward and arriving in the promised land of Canaan. The New Englanders saw themselves as the new Israelites and America as their promised land, their new Jerusalem. As the historian Nathaniel Philbrick (2006) has noted in Mayflower, the Pilgrims emigrated to America “with the conviction that God wanted them to go.” It was their “patriotic and spiritual duty to plant a godly English plantation in the New World” (p. 6). Two Puritan sermons of 1630 eloquently articulated the vision of the Massachusetts immigrants. Before the Arbella departed from Southampton, England, for America, Reverend John Cotton, the pre-eminent Puritan clergyman living in England, delivered to the ship’s passengers a sermon titled God’s Promise to His Plantations. For his sermon’s biblical text, Cotton appropriately chose a passage from II Samuel: “Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more” (II Samuel 7:10). Although Cotton would not be crossing the Atlantic on the Arbella—he would come to Massachusetts Bay Colony a few years later—he blessed the journey, comparing the departing Puritans to the ancient Israelites, led by Moses, escaping the pharaoh in ancient Egypt and journeying to the land of Canaan. Cotton (1630) also offered the travelers God’s pledge for a special place of their own: “It is a land of promise, where they have provision for soul as well as for body” (p. 77). A short time after Cotton delivered his sermon, the leader of the Puritans aboard the Arbella, John Winthrop, a layman, offered a sermon that remains one the most influential American speeches, A Model of Christian Charity. In this sermon, Winthrop suggested that this Puritan outpost in New England would be no ordinary earthly community; it would become, as Winthrop’s title suggested, a model community based on the ethic of Christian charity. According to Winthrop (1630), the Massachusetts Bay Puritans must “be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection” (p. 83). These bonds of love that would hold the community together must become like “a bond or ligament” that holds the human body intact

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