Replay-The Enduring Power of James Baldwin: Author, Activist, Visionary w/Greg Garrett, PhD

Dr. Greg Garrett, a professor, theologian, author, and cultural observer, discusses the life and work of James Baldwin. He shares his personal journey and the influence of storytelling and personal experiences on his work. Dr. Garrett explores Baldwin's education, faith journey, and his role as a prophetic witness. He highlights the importance of understanding Baldwin's humanity and the impact of his writings on American literature and culture. Dr. Garrett also discusses Baylor University's approach to difficult conversations and the potential of Baldwin's unfinished play. He emphasizes the power of movies in promoting racial reconciliation and the need to analyze films while celebrating progress. Finally, Dr. Garrett addresses the importance of understanding and engaging with Black lives. In this conversation, Greg Garrett discusses the role of white people in racial reconciliation and allyship. He shares a conversation he had with Kelly Brown Douglas, where she challenged the idea of being an ally and emphasized the need for white people to go into white spaces and talk honestly about racism. Greg also highlights the importance of understanding and loving people who are different from us. He hopes that his book, 'The Gospel according to James Baldwin,' will inspire readers to lean into big questions and love big, even in difficult times.

Buy the book: https://a.co/d/9qLAmCE

Guest Bio:
Dr. Greg Garrett is a professional writer who teaches creative writing, film, literature, and theology classes at Baylor University. He is the author of over twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and translation, including the critically-acclaimed novels Free Bird, Cycling, Shame, and The Prodigal.

Dr. Garrett is best-known as one of America's leading voices on religion and culture (BBC Radio), and he has written nonfiction books including The Gospel According to Hollywood, Stories from the Edge: A Theology of Grief, and One Fine Potion: The Literary Magic of Harry Potter (named a 2011 Best Theological Book by the Association of Theological Booksellers). His most recent nonfiction books are Living with the Living Dead: The Wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse (Oxford University Press, 2017), Crossing Myself: A Story of Spiritual Rebirth (Morehouse, 2016), and Entertaining Judgment:

The Afterlife in Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015). His books have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and Czech editions. He has also written hundreds of articles and essays for publications including Salon, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Tablet, Patheos, Christian

"The Faith Roundtable" is a captivating spinoff from the Faithful Politics podcast, dedicated to exploring the crucial issues facing the church in America today. Hosted by Josh Burtram, this podcast brings together faith leaders, theologians, and scholars for deep, respectful discussions on topics at the heart of American Christianity. From the intersection of faith and public life to urgent matters such as social justice and community engagement, each episode offers insightful conversations

Transcript

0:17

Welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, I am your political host Will Wright, and I'm joined by your faithful host Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Hey, and today we are thrilled to have with us a professor, theologian, author, and cultural observer Dr. Greg Garrett, who's written a ton of books, too many to list here. We'd have to make this like a two-day long episode, but one book in particular that we're really curious to talk to him about is called The Gospel According to James Baldwin. So welcome to the program, Greg. Well, thank you, Will and Josh. It's such a joy to be with you and I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. Yeah, me too. And I guess just to start us off, I always like to ask these questions to many of our guests, but what was it that inspired you to get into this field of theology, religion, and just dedicate your life to just studying culture? Well, you know, the sort of big intersections for me in my life as a writer, as a teacher, as a preacher, and as somebody kind of doing this racial reconciliation work. Story is really important to me in all of those areas because story is how we communicate our lives to each other. So when we talk about James Baldwin in a little bit, we're going to be talking about the stories that he presents us that help us understand our own stories and the stories of the gospel and the stories of America. as we try and kind of wrestle them into shape. The personal things that kind of come together for me, I was raised in the deep South, and I was one of the first groups of white students in integrated schools in Georgia and North Carolina. And like there was incredible cultural and political ferment around that. And for me as a kid, all I saw was the human dimension of it. It's like, you know, here are these kids and we're all in class together. And this is my friend and this is my friend. And I don't know why my teacher treats one of us differently than the other. And so that's something that I've kind of held in my head my whole life. And then the other thing that is really important is that I was raised in a Southern Baptist tradition and it was not a good tradition for me. My family is still a part of that. My younger brother is a Southern Baptist pastor in Alabama. which is about as Southern Baptist as you want to get. But I kind of fled for the exits when I was 17 years old. And then for 25 years, I was kind of wandering in the wilderness and trying to find a usable faith and a body of Christ that would accept me and understand me and take my gifts and forgive my shortcomings. And in one of the darkest moments of my life, I was taken in by a historically African American church in East Austin. I live in Austin, Texas. And they saved my life. They saved my life. They patched me up and they said, now it's your turn. So it's time for you to go out and take what we've taught you about the gospel, about social justice, about the very simple fact that in God's eyes, we are all beloved. and go out there and see what you can do with this. And so, you know, in the classroom at Baylor and in the writing that I do, like this book on James Baldwin, preaching, teaching, I mean, all of that kind of comes together. And, you know, we are all, you know, the product of our histories, which is the thing that James Baldwin says. But that's my history, and that kind of is what brings me here to you this afternoon. That's so fascinating. I really appreciate you sharing that story. It touches my heart to think about it and I can definitely relate to those feelings. Who is James Baldwin and why did you choose to write about him? I think that's a fairly fundamental question for us today. it's such a good question because I've done a ton of media around this book. And often I will hear from somebody who said, I had never heard of James Baldwin before we got your book in the mail. And, you know, there's a part of me that's just appalled. It's like, what you like, you hadn't heard of what James Cohn or, um, you know, um, Martin Luther King. Um, but, but Baldwin is first, he is one of our most important American writers. And as a lifelong baseball fan, I kind of think of it in the way that we think about the greatest players of all time. You know, like they're five tool players, you know. So like in baseball, we talk about somebody who can hit for average, who can throw, who can hit for power, you know, all these other things. Baldwin wrote great novels. He wrote plays that were produced on Broadway. He was a critic. He was an essayist. And he was somebody who looked at America and said, I'm gonna be a witness to what I see, and I'm gonna tell the truth about it. And you're not necessarily gonna like that truth, because truth can be hard, but that is my calling. And so Baldwin is somebody that we should all know because he is a significant American writer, you know, in the same way that, I don't think we should talk about Spike Lee as a black filmmaker. Like James Baldwin is not a black writer or a gay writer. He's just one of our greatest writers. And I often say that the first seven pages of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which 60 years ago spent like 42 weeks on the bestseller list. James Baldwin was like one of the best known people in America. He was on the cover of Time. He was in Life Magazine. But those first seven pages of The Fire Next Time are as good as any seven pages ever written by an American writer. And they preach. And so for those of our listeners, viewers who don't know who James Baldwin is, that's my good brief introduction. He's an essential voice in American literature, in American culture, and in American history, because he was a civil rights advocate and activist. And all of that grew out of his faithful witness, to pay attention to what was going on in the world and to try and tell the truth about it. Wow, that's really powerful. And just a quick sort of side note, for some reason your video is a little sticky. So if you end up saying something and there's a delay in our response, it's probably because you had already finished and we're just hearing it. So I'm just forewarning it, like the recording all happened sort of in your computer and then at a... upload when it's all done. So I just want to address any sort of awkwardness if you're like, why are they just looking at me that way? That was dumb, why did you say that? Yeah, I mean, thank you for letting me know. And I mean, like we have all been through the pandemic in our bedrooms. So this is a for Zoom household. And so, I would hope that everything would be working just fine, but some days. Yeah, no worries. Okay, so with regards to James Baldwin, I'm interested in learning maybe a little bit about his education. Maybe if he went to seminary, I mean, as a prolific the Christian witness and how it applies in the greater American experiment. How did he become who he became, especially given the accessibility to higher education during the time in which he grew up? Yeah, and Baldwin is actually kind of like Ernest Hemingway, one of our great examples of self-educated writers. So Baldwin began school in Harlem, not great schools, attended better schools where he was able to write and to sort of express himself and to be encouraged, but he never went past high school. So I think his education largely came from travel. He spent much of his life outside of the United States. He went over to Paris shortly after he became an adult and lived and wrote and worked and learned there. But I think the other sort of seminal learning experience would have been in the church for him. His stepfather was a pastor, and Baldwin is like 100% acquainted with the Bible. He's got like the King James version like coursing through his veins. And for a couple of years as a teenager, he ascended into the pulpit and was like one of New York's most acclaimed black preachers. So as a teenager. Now Baldwin's faith journey is a little bit similar to mine, and so although we differ in a lot of ways, both of us walked away from the formal church. and I was lucky enough to find a way back in. He never found a way back in. And so, to the end of his life, he will say, I'm not a church goer. But it's very clear that he continued to be a person of faith. When I was looking through his private correspondence, for example, over and over again in his letters, he asked people to pray for him. And because I was raised with this sort of, I don't know, vending machine theology of prayer, I'm still trying to figure prayer out. But I also know that you don't ask for prayer unless you have a belief that it's efficacious in some way, that it makes a difference, that it changes the way, you know, that love and energy flow in the universe. And so those are the two big things. conversant with the scriptures from a very early age, and they continue to occupy his mind. It is rare that one of his books doesn't have a scriptural epigraph. I mentioned in the book, he is asked in the early 1960s about Malcolm X, and in that interview, Baldwin says, I would never want to be a theologian like that. This is the early Malcolm X became a much more loving and sort of sympathetic figure after he had his own travel experience of being around faithful Muslims of all different colors. But for Baldwin to use that language, I mean, we don't... people always ask me what a theologian does. So, you know, like I'm canon theologian to the American cathedral in Paris, and they're like, what does that mean? I'm like, well, I think about God a lot. I write things and I preach things and I talk to people about things. And that's essentially what Baldwin does. And so out of those kind of two twin impulses, you know, to see the world and to meet like incredible people of all sorts, and then to have this kind of core experience with the Bible, and maybe with a couple of other... he talks a lot about Dickens. So like there are a couple of literary figures that are home base for him as well. Like kind of, I mean, we all have this sort That's our go-to place. But for Baldwin, the scriptures was like right there in the center of that shelf. That's awesome, man. So sorry about that delay. So it's interesting the idea of James Baldwin as a prophet of humanity. Can you kind of help us, like this kind of moniker that's been used of him, can you kind of help us understand that and how did this influence his, like how did this influence his social, literary contributions, how? Yeah, I mean, that's a very curious phrase to me, profit of humanity. So help us understand that. Thank you, Josh. That's such a good question. That was a very conscious choice on my part, to include that kind of prophetic witness as a part of the title of the book. Various times in his life, other people talked about Baldwin as a prophet, and there are places in which Baldwin himself kind of takes on that mantle. So, like, one of the most descriptive things, and for those of us who are conversant with the scriptures and our people of faith, several times he talked about himself as a sort of Jeremiah. And Jeremiah is one of my most fundamental faith influences. And as we lean into this 2024 election, I know that you guys are having a ton of conversations with people about what it means to be faithful. And Jeremiah, of course, in his temple sermon said, You think you've got God figured out, and you think you're doing the things that will make God happy, and you're not doing the things that will make God happy. God cares about justice. He doesn't care about your burnt offerings, and you know, it doesn't matter how long you stand here in the temple. God will not be with you until you do these things that God has asked you to do. And so for Baldwin, this idea of being prophetic was to call America and individual Americans back into a right relationship with justice. And you know from his own lived experience, he had a multitude of examples of injustice and as he witnessed people who looked like him and lived like him, he saw plenty of that as well. But there's this very strong sense in him that this was his calling. So as a writer, even after he left the preaching behind, he said in a letter toward the end of his life, people tell me that I never really stopped preaching. And I believe that 100%. So it is him looking at the places where America has fallen short, where American Christianity has fallen short, and calling us to something better. And one of my favorite quotations from Baldwin comes from toward the end of his life, and he says, the sum total of my wisdom is this, we can do better. And that's, you know, that's what gets me out of bed every day, and I'm sure that's a motivating force for you guys as you think about your work and trying to make the world, the church, America, better. But that was Baldwin's very clear sense is that this is my calling. And I'm going to be as faithful to it as I can, as terrifying as it was at times. Um, you know, to be a black man going into the American South in the 1960s, um, you know, following up the freedom riders and, um, and, um, loving three of the great figures of the civil rights era who were all murdered. Um, one of the interesting things, this is like a sidebar, but it's a tragic sidebar. Mm-hmm. Sometimes when people ask me why we don't know James Baldwin better, I say it's because he lived. know, Martin and Malcolm and Medgar Evers did not, but they were three of his dearest friends and he worked closely with them. And he had, I'm going to say, the blessing of outliving them so that he could continue to write and reflect and we could have his voice for longer. That's really, really cool. So I'd imagine writing a book like this, you did a copious amount of research, you probably already came to it with an understanding or awareness of who James Baldwin is, was, but I often wonder about folks that write about a particular individual, especially sort of like how they... think, believe, process information. I think a lot of actors that get into role, and they don't leave their role until the movie's all done or something. So as a person that's kind of been inside the head of James Baldwin, did you discover anything about him that either magnified your already... established appreciation for him or made you kind of like, I really wish he didn't have this section in his life because Josh and I were actually just talking right before the show about Martin Luther King and how he's known for a tremendous amount of really, really great stuff for civil rights and whatnot but he was also like an adulterer. So we tend to kind of compartmentalize somewhat, we're like, okay, that stuff was bad, but this stuff is amazing. You know, and, and we, we also, you know, talked about how we feel a lot of that actually happens even with like, say Trump, you know, folks like on my side of the other, of the I are like, he's bad, everything he does is bad. You know, no good can come from anything, you know, he does, which I know is incorrect, because like, he's human and he will do. some things that are good for humanity. I mean, he established Juneteenth as a holiday. So I got to give credit where credit's due. So yeah, so I'm curious to hear about sort of like your journey and understanding who James Baldwin is, especially as it applies to this book. And I love that you've used the word journey because that's what the book is, essentially. I follow James Baldwin all over the world. And the book begins and ends with me following him up into the Swiss Alps. And so I'll tell you more about that in a second, but what you need to know is that I am terrified of heights. And like this was, I describe it in the book as like the worst theme park ride of all time. You know, like riding this bus up switchbacks, you know, with like drops of thousands of feet, you know, out next to my left elbow. And so the journey idea is a really important idea. And I embrace that as a writer as well. You know, because we all go on journeys. They're internal, they're external, they're spiritual. I think the thing that actually became most important to me is something that I wrote about in the last chapter of the book. Because I spent so much time with Baldwin, not just carting his books around in my backpack for seven years as I chased him around the world, but reading his correspondence and finding out about his dark times and his, I mean, as you were saying, sort of less admirable moments. What it did for me is the same thing that knowing these things about Dr. King does for me. It's like we make Dr. King into a postage stamp or a monument, and it diminishes the sainthood because it denies his humanity. Dr. King did things that I wish he hadn't done. Mr. Baldwin did things that I wish he hadn't done, but out of that intense humanity. I mean, like, we all fail, we all fall short. I mean, you know, it's... Paul has talked about it. But to imagine somebody responding to the world around him in the same way that Dr. King did or that Baldwin did... what I ended up with, interestingly enough, is the more that I learned about the messiness of Baldwin's life, the more I appreciated the magnitude of his achievement. and it's kind of like, you know, we were just talking about the Apostle Paul, you know, who, I mean, honest, like more honest words were never spoken. Like, I know the thing that I should do and I do it not. That is like me getting out of bed every morning and trying to do the right thing. But I think the biggest thing that I learned about Baldwin, and I have taught him forever, I have read him forever, I've written about him for a long time before this, was just this incredible admiration for the tiny human being who like bravely stepped into all of these situations. And the same with Dr. King. Like I have stood at the pulpit of the old Ebenezer Baptist Church. Dr. King was a tiny person. I mean, he expanded the more chicken he ate, but like he was a tiny person. And you know, when you start thinking about the physical aspects of these people. not just the moral, not just you know... James Baldwin was a tiny, scrawny person who went out and put his body in danger to tell the truth. And it's like, you know, I can forgive a lot when I see that. So that for me is the biggest thing. I feel like I know him in a really powerful and intimate way after spending like these six years working on the book. it also kind of cycles back when Baldwin talked about what great art does. Great art is not about propaganda, although it may be about big themes, but it gives every person in a story their full humanity. You know? So what makes Baldwin a hero is that he got up every day and he went to work, and some days he was suffering from depression and some days he had too much to drink. And some days his heart was broken. But he got up every day and he went to work. You know, I just one quick question I know Josh had something to say, but I'm curious about professors at Baylor because like, you know, Beth Barr, who we've had on the show, is a big fan of Marjorie Kemp. Um, and when I asked her about Marjorie Kemp, like, like she just kind of lit up and, you know, told a really, really fantastic story about, about Marjorie Kemp. And, and I'm curious, like, are professors at Baylor, like, required to have sort of, like, one figure that they, like, have studied for years? Like, yours is James Baldwin, hers is Marjorie Kemp. You know, I don't know what some of the other professors have, but like, is that pretty normal? You know, professors tend to specialize. You know, so I am on a hallway with like one of the great world authorities on Irish poetry and Victorian women novelists and Mark Twain and Shakespeare. Like my own tendency, because I'm a professional writer first and an academic second. So like my, I mean, you were talking about my books earlier. They've been all over the map, you know. I write about what I'm passionate about and what I want to understand better in that moment. But I think that that's a very typical sort of thing. But I will also tell you that because Baylor's, you know, ongoing impetus is to be maybe the great Protestant university in the world, I mean, like, if you're going to lean, lean big, we want to, we want to teach well, we want to do research well, we want, we want to go out and change the world. And here's this, this is an interesting thing and it's one of the reasons that I wanted to come on your show. Baylor's motto is pro ecclesia pro texana, for church and for state. And the idea is that Baylor graduates will go into the world and transform it, that they'll go into churches and disciple and change people spiritually. And It's one of the things that I love. I'm 34 years into teaching at Baylor. And because I live in Austin, there is this ongoing terror at Baylor that I'm gonna be offered a job at the University of Texas, which is like four miles away. And I'm like, you guys go ahead and think that. That's good for me. But no, this is to be able to teach in a Christian research university, not a Bible college. a Christian research university, and to engage with the world and to engage with hard topics. And here's the other thing. I did an hour and a half interview with Fox News that never aired. They asked me a lot of questions that I don't think they liked the answers to. But the biggest thing that I said is, in a serious university, we have hard conversations. And in this moment in which, you know, the legislature of Texas, the legislature of Florida, the legislature of a bunch of different southern states have said, we don't want to have these hard conversations because they're uncomfortable. I love the fact that I can walk into my classroom and know that we're going to have an engaged and difficult conversation that's going to be in love and in a safe space because we all affirm each other as children of God. It's an amazing thing. I start school on Tuesday and you can kind of tell that I'm getting a little bit pumped. Hmm. I love that. It's really cool to see someone who loves their work so much. It's very inspiring. You know, Baldwin obviously had some pretty sharp and incisive critiques and ideas about our culture, certainly the culture of his time. And now even these ideas reverberate and continue into today. What? Would you imagine, like how did it impact, his views impact the culture in America of the time, and how do you see them continuing to impact our culture today, even moving into the future? Well good, let me start with past and then we'll kind of move to present and future. So I was talking about The Fire Next Time, and for any of our viewers, listeners who want a place to start with Baldwin, this is the place to start. This was at one point the number one book in America in 1963. It was the book that everybody was reading, everybody was talking about, and Baldwin was interesting because he was not Martin King. coming from a purely Christian standpoint, he was not Black Panthers, which came later, you know, advocating for violence, Malcolm X, early Malcolm X, you know, by any means necessary. Baldwin, in fact, described himself sometimes as the great white hope, and he did that sort of cynically, humorously, because he thought, you know, that white people were like, well, you know, at least he's not advocating for people to come out and shoot us. for the terrible sins that we have committed historically. Baldwin's place in our history and where he matters to us now is that he reminds us, we were talking earlier, I think even maybe before we started shooting about reaching out across the divides. And so, I was talking about that Swiss Alpine village. earlier where Baldwin used to go to write. And the first time that he went there, he had this incredible insight that informed everything he wrote about race after that. Baldwin was the first person of color that these villagers had ever seen. And he said, you know, they followed me around and they wanted to touch my hair and they wanted to see if my color would rub off, uh, which I know it's a weird thing, but I've also been in a Kenyan village where I was the only white person they had ever seen and they had similar questions, including about how we poop. We all poop the same, just, just so everybody knows. Um, but in that village, Baldwin had this insight is like, You know, when I'm done writing, I'm going to take that terrifying ride back down the mountain and they don't ever have to think about me again. I don't belong here. We don't have that luxury in America. You know, Republicans and Democrats, Christians and atheists, black and white, we all are occupying the same space and we have to learn. to live together and, as Baldwin says, to love each other. I mean, as profoundly difficult as that can be. That's the advice that he gives to his nephew in those opening seven pages of The Fire Next Time. And the other thing that he says we have to do, white, black, I mean, every iteration of who we are as Americans is we have to tell the truth about our history and where we came from. Because if we can't claim our history, then we can't move forward. And this is a huge issue for me personally, as a white person raised in the American South. It's a huge issue for me as a faculty person at Baylor, which is an antebellum university built by enslaved people whose three founders were slaveholders. Like for the last five years, we have been leaning hard into this, how do we tell the truth about who we are and where we came from? and repent of it and try to move forward into reconciliation. And for me, Baldwin expresses all of these things that matter to me about how we reach out across these divides. It's not about violence, it's not about diminishing somebody's humanity, it's not about weaponizing faith. It is largely about love. and he thinks about love in the same way that Howard Thurman does, in the same way that Dr. King does, that love is not this sentimental feeling but an active engagement. Love is hard, but it's the only way forward. And so what Baldwin would have to say to us in this present, which I don't know that it was worse than his present in the 1960s. I mean, it feels like it to us because we're in it. But, you know, when cities were burning in 1965 and 1966, I mean, I'm sure it looked to a lot of Americans then, like the end of the world. So I think that's what Baldwin has to say to us in any age. And it's actually something I say in the book. Baldwin speaks to the age of Kennedy, and the age of Nixon, and the age of Reagan, and the age of Trump, and whatever the next age is going to be. Because he is asking us to live up to the best that we're capable of. Did Bonwin ever address issues surrounding LGBTQ? He was uncomfortable about that. And largely he was uncomfortable around it, not because he was uncomfortable about himself, but because what he wanted to lean into in terms of identity was this space where those things didn't matter. And like they still matter tremendously. I mean, like we've got all these anti-LGBTQ issues and laws and legislation. But one of the things that I discovered about Baldwin during the course of writing the book is that he leaned very hard into two theological concepts. One of them was the New Jerusalem, and one of them was the Welcome Table. And when I came back to faith at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin, one of the communion songs we used to sing was, I'm gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days. And it's an eschatological vision about how someday it will not matter what we look like or how we voted or, you know, what we think or who we love. Like, we will be able to see each other in love as God's children. And so the remarkable thing that I discovered during the course of this book, almost nobody knows this, is that Baldwin at the end of his life was working on a stage play called The Welcome Table. And it's this incredibly diverse cast, religious, sexual, racial identities, political identities. It was based largely on his home in the south of France and also at the dinner table of Josephine Baker. the great dancer and activist and it turns out secret agent for France during World War II. And what Baldwin used to say about identity was that he was uncomfortable with the word gay because it didn't feel like it encompassed everything that he was. And you know he was glad that people read some of his fiction like Giovanni's Room, which is considered to be like a pioneering gay novel. and were able to see themselves reflected in that. But for him, the ultimate goal was the welcome table. The place where who we, well, who people say we are fades away and we are just, you know, human beings around the table. It's one of the most beautiful things about it. And I will tell you, I've read the play. It's in the Schomburg Research Center in Harlem, and it's not quite done. But I would love for somebody like a Barry Jenkins. Hehehe that play out and film it, I think it would be a really fitting kind of conclusion to Baldwin's great life. Mmm, that's powerful. Do you think having somebody like Lin-Manuel Miranda do a Hamilton-ish version of it, would that work? I am all for Lin-Manuel Miranda. I've got like, right? Okay, two shelves up. I've got my volume of Hamilton, which I teach pretty regularly and have seen seven times in the theater so far. goodness. Jeez. Yeah. That's amazing. So, you know, obviously James Baldwin had a lot to say about race and a lot of very apt critiques on, again, the American culture. But what do you think was unique about the perspectives that he brought to the conversation about race, you know, vis-a-vis maybe like... Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. We've mentioned them, right? But maybe go into a little bit more specificity about what are those areas of difference that he brought this unique perspective that makes him even more worth listening to. I think one of the things that sets him apart is that, you know, as opposed to say you're Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, you know, he was not just a speech giver. He was not just a preacher. He was also a person telling stories about, about recognizably human characters. And so in his novels, we have this opportunity that we don't get. I mean, you know, when I was talking about, you know, Baldwin is our five tool, uh, our five tool player. Um, it's, it's Baldwin writing about his childhood in Harlem in his first novel. Uh, it's writing about this expansive cast of New Yorkers, multiracial, multicultural, uh, in like what I think may be his greatest novel called another country, um, it's about him writing this play, um, blues for Mr. Charlie. which is based on the murder of Emmett Till. And I've been doing a bunch of programs lately with Robbie Jones, who I know that you guys have talked to. And in Robbie's new book, you know, he's talking about the national monument, the Emmett Till National Monument. One of the things that a great artist can do, and this is, Baldwin told us this and I write about this in the book, is A great artist can tell us a story and allow us to step past our preconceptions and our walls. So, for like the last eight or nine years, I've been doing a bunch of programs on racial reconciliation built around great films on race. So like you watch Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, or you watch Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, or you watch Get Out. And there is this, what C.S. Lewis talked about is... as being able to step around the waking dragons of reason. I mean, and C.S. Lewis was talking about writing fantasy in science fiction literature, but it's the same thing about any great story. What Baldwin offers us that Dr. King couldn't do that actually none of the other big figures who were political and social advocates is he allows us to enter into the lives of these characters. and understand them. So, like, one of the most important things about Blues for Mr. Charlie is that Baldwin said we have to understand the villain of this play, this lower-class, white, you know, store owner who kills a black man, and recognize that, you know, we've got to recognize his humanity and not simply villainize him. So there's this incredible sympathy and this incredible understanding that comes from his gifts as a storyteller. That I think, I can't say that it elevates him above those other figures, because they're monumental figures. Baldwin was not allowed to preach or teach at the March on Washington, because like Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington, he was gay. So. You know, I can't say what he would or could have done on that occasion. But you know, what I can say is that my students of whatever, like identity, reach out to me weeks, months, years later, and say, I am still thinking about the things that we read from James Baldwin. Like he is still shaping me. He's still helping me understand the world. He's still helping me understand my faith. And that's, I mean, James, if you're listening, thank you for that. That's the most incredible gift that an artist can give the world. Yeah, I bet. You know, I want to kind of piggyback on something that you said, because it sort of piqued my interest a little bit, especially with regards to movies like, you know, Do the Right Thing and others. So I'm married to a phenomenal woman who is white. And she was a pastor kid. She actually was the one that brought me to the faith back in 2008 when we got married. And it's, she grew up in Indiana, northern part. And it's, I'm always just fascinated just to talk with her about just random stuff as far as like how she grew up and how I grew up. So, I grew up in Southern California. I was born in Los Angeles, kind of in the ghetto. A lot of... gangs, drugs, we moved out of that area when I was like in fourth grade or something like that. But my early childhood experience was vastly different than hers. I mean, I grew up listening to like NWA and Two Life Crew and like, I mean, it's vastly different, you know? And so, probably like, I don't know, like what... No, sorry, that's my generation, but... Oh, Waterdeep, yeah! know, some of the other Christian bands at the time, you know. Like, yeah, a lot of Michael W. Smith, you know, like I don't even know the names. Side story, actually, when I came to Christ, I started listening to a bunch of Christian music, because like that's the thing you do, right? You're like, oh, I'm saved, so I need to go like turn on K-Love or something like that. So there's a song that came on by Mac Powell from Third Day. And I was like, oh man, this song jams, you know? And I'm like, is this new? And she's like, no, I was listening to that when I was in elementary school. Because there's a whole world of music that I had never been exposed to that all of a sudden I was. Anyways, that was a bit of a tangent. But anyways, I want to talk to you about movies like... you know, like do the right thing or probably one of my favorite that have come up recently. It's called Sorry to Bother You. And if you're unaware of what this movie is, you're watching, it's like this teller marketer that basically finds out that he can be much more successful if he uses his white voice. Like Danny Glover's in there and he's like, yo. You know, hey, blood, like, quit using your black voice, use your white voice. And he's like, I don't have a white voice. He's like, no, everybody has a white voice. So like, instead of him just talking as he normally would, he's, you know, sort of, I think they call it code switching, basically, in order to like, you know, reach an audience. So I'd love to just get more of your insight about how movies like that really, you know, help. either one, the conversation forward in America when we think about racial reconciliation, or if it has some other unintended benefits or consequence in our society. Well, I'm lucky enough that I don't teach straight theology classes. I'm a writer, so I teach writing classes, fiction writing, screenwriting. But I teach American lit. I teach film. And so I'm teaching a film class this semester, which is centered largely around race and identity. And so what it allows us to do is to have some historical perspective. So like, I mean, We're starting out with 1915's The Birth of a Nation, which is this like crazy racist masterpiece by the great film director, D.W. Griffith. So like Baldwin actually who did a book on film criticism, The Devil Finds Work, said it was a masterpiece intended to inspire genocide. And you got to hold those things in tension. So for seven, eight years, I've been doing programs with the great liberation theologian, Kelly Brown Douglas, and we show films. And my favorite iteration of this is that pre-pandemic, we did a bunch of weekend film series at Washington National Cathedral. So like we were watching. know, do the right thing in the nave of Washington National Cathedral, where presidents get buried, you know? And I mean, yeah, because it's sacred space. And so, like, here's one of the things that I would say, just as a sort of observational, practical thing, when you have these conversations in sacred space, you're elevating them. You're talking about how important they are. And so, like, whenever I go out and do things in churches, I'm like, I'm encouraging them, let's watch this in the worship space. And that's not to say it won't get tangled up, and you may not get some, you know, deacons who get on you about, yeah, there were bad words in this. So like my quick side statement about this is that Linda Livingston, who is the president of Baylor University, came to the National Cathedral to do like the official welcome from Baylor, because we were co-sponsoring this program at the National Cathedral. And So we are watching Do the Right Thing together. And there are bad words and there are bare human bodies. And I mean, and I love my president, but there were moments where I felt like I was watching this R-rated movie next to my grandmother. But here's the thing. The story did its work. Like she laughed, she cried, she got up after the film, and gave this welcome, which encompassed all of the hard things that we had just lived through and do the right thing. And I've been teaching this movie for 33 years, what did it come out, 1989. There has never been a time when I've taught this film or talked about it in church when a young Black person has not been recently killed by the police. I mean, just let that sit for a sec. But what film allows us to do is it brings in the emotion and it takes us out of the equation, which is the interesting thing. Cause it's not like Thanksgiving dinner when your crazy uncle Bob is espousing his racist theories down at his end of the table. Or God help us, my grandma Irene, my father's dad, who didn't... mostly lived through Trump, thank God, because that would have been a really cognitive dissonance for me, because she was like the most faithful Christian person I have ever known. But I remember a Thanksgiving when I sat down across from her at the table, and she was like, how about that Sarah Palin? Don't you just love her? And I was like, no, Grandma, I don't, actually. But what what story lets us do and whether this is a novel and you know if you're in a church setting people are not going to read novels. I mean I'm so sorry to say that as a novelist but you know you can do your one church one book thing and like this tiny group of people is going to read it. But in an hour and a half or two hours a roomful of people can sit down and experience a story during a film and because we're watching these characters let me let me give you like this example that I love so much in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, where Sydney Poitier plays the black fiancé that, you know, a white girl is bringing home to her liberal family. And it turns out that her dad is not maybe as crazy liberal as we thought. the But The Dad is played by Spencer Tracy. And I don't know how much you or our viewers know about classic Hollywood, but Spencer Tracy didn't play bad guys. Like his sincerity, his willingness to wrestle was at the heart of every role that he played. And to have this character kind of standing in for us and going, I'm wrestling with this thing and I'm wrestling hard. It... it makes a ton of difference. And so that's one of the weird things. Like my last book for Oxford University Press was about race in Hollywood films. And because of the pandemic, I ended up like zooming into all of these faith communities after George Floyd was murdered to talk with them about next steps. And one of my next steps that I was always prescribing was let's talk about some movies together. Watch some films, watch them in your sacred space whenever that's possible again. And Baldwin is really good about that as well, because he can give us a reality check. In his book, The Devil Finds Work, he talks about things that white audiences embrace, that black audiences are like, that's the stupidest thing ever. So there's a movie with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, they're escaped convicts on the lam. and at the end of the movie Tony Curtis is trying to catch this freight train that Sidney Poitier has already gotten on board and he can't get on the train and Sidney Poitier jumps off the train to share his fate and every wide audience was like yes brotherhood and Baldwin says about watching that movie in Harlem that people were screaming at the train or screaming at the screen get back on the train you fool Ha ha That's funny. So, you know, he's smart, he's wise, and he's sort of helped me in this. And the other thing that I would plant very quickly, when Kelly and I do these things, especially around historic films, like I am not presenting The Birth of a Nation as any kind of paradigm of moral anything. It's a terribly, terribly disturbing film. But Kelly asked this question about a character in... in one of the films we showed one night, and she said, what do we celebrate and what do we lament? I was like, that's a great approach. So we celebrate that guess who's coming to dinner takes racism as a serious topic. And we lament the fact that Sidney Poitier's character has to be presented as an absolutely perfect human being so that the only reason that he can be rejected is his race. I mean, that's not fair to anybody. Hmm. How has your work on all of this been received? You feel like being that you're white, you are this your historian and a autobiographer, right? Talking about not autobiography, you might have written an autobiography, but a biographer of James Baldwin as a black man. What? How has that and you had your experience in the black church? How? How has that been received? Have you received criticism? How have you worked through that? And maybe even just how has it been received even on both sides of how you have, you know, from where you stand? question. First, I want to be very clear that I stay in my lane. So I have not to echo Nikki Haley, but I didn't have a bunch of Black friends. I have a bunch of Black friends. I know about their lives. I know what their children's names. We eat together. We celebrate together. We lament together. I know that their experience is outside of my experience. I get up every morning and I'm white all day long. And that means when I get pulled over by the police because I haven't updated my sticker on the car, I'm not worried about getting shot like some of my black friends are. So like I'm very aware of where my lane is and it's not to co-opt anybody else's story. But I had a conversation with Kelly Brown Douglas during the pandemic that was central for me and I think might be central for white listeners and viewers as they think about what white people's roles might be in racial reconciliation. This was during the Black Lives Matter movement. People were marching in the streets. It was the middle of the pandemic. Kelly called me because I had asked her to explain something she had posted on Twitter, which I'm just gonna continue to call it. And all of the well-meaning white people that I knew were posting things about allyship. You know, we support Black Lives Matter. You know, I'm a Black Lives Matter ally. And Kelly had posted something on Twitter that said, we don't need or want you to be an ally. And that was that felt so counter-intuitive to me, because, you know, I was trying to do the best that I could as I understood it. like I am a sympathetic white person. I know that racism is a real thing personally, systematically. I want to do the right thing. And so I asked Kelly to call me. And so I spent most of my life during the pandemic in this room. And so to give it some like liturgical oomph, I took Kelly's call in the bathtub. Not naked. I mean like that's just weird. But like, I moved spaces because I'm Episcopalian now. And you know, we wanna give liturgical weight to things. We process the gospel before we preach. And so like, I processed into the bathroom to take Kelly's call. And her explanation was simple and I mean, absolutely convincing to me. She said, Greg, when you are saying that you wanna be my ally, You're saying that this is my problem to solve. I didn't create this problem. You did. and only you can solve it. And so I had this idea that what I was called to do was to march like three feet behind, three steps behind and show solidarity. But what she challenged me to do is to say, go into white spaces. and talk honestly about this and tell the truth. And it's a conversation that Robbie Jones and I have had a number of times because we are kind of soul like twins. You know, he's a sociologist, I'm a storyteller, but like we meet here in this same space where what we're saying is we've got to go out and our lane is not to talk about black lives and black experience, but it's to talk about our lives and our experience and what we're called to do. in response to injustice. So, Your question started off with the book. And one of the things that I tried to be very clear about in the book is to say, James Baldwin and I are so different in so many ways on a surface level. But James Baldwin fled from the church as a teenager. James Baldwin's heart was broken. James Baldwin considered taking his own life. James Baldwin felt like he was called to be a witness to justice. And so end of the day, I lean very hard into that stuff that he talked about, which is, whatever surface differences we recognize that keep us apart in this culture, you know, my heart, your heart. It all breaks the same. So that's kind of where I land on that. And I think it is incredibly important to be deeply in relationship with people who are different from you and to hear their stories and to love them. And I think it's important for me to go into spaces. Like so much of my work in the church is talking to white churches or white clergy, which is mostly what we have in the Episcopal Church. about why we need to do better. So I'm, it's not easy. It is hard as hell. Yeah, it's so good. I was thinking about something somebody once told me about allyship, because I'd mentioned something to them about how I'd like to consider myself an ally for LGBTQ folks and community. I just really, really have a heart. And especially feel like as a Christian. I just need to speak up just to say I see you, I appreciate you, so on and so forth. And this person told me that allyship isn't something that you can ascribe to yourself, it's something that the community you want to be an ally for has to label you as. Because my definition of what it means to be an ally may vary vastly from what... what their definition is. And kind of a comical example would be, I used to be an avid Chappelle show watcher. And they had a skit where it's like the racial draft. And in this skit, they're drafting certain prominent black folks sort of in the media or pop culture or whatever. And then the black delegation was like... you know, the black delegation formally request Eminem to be a pirate. And I'll never forget that because like, as a black person, like most black people respect him. And we're like, that dude can rap, you know, that dude is super talented. So like, nobody was necessarily saying, oh man, Eminem really, you know, and it was just sort of very emblematic of, of what I just said, how like... It's the community that chooses your level of allyship versus the individual. So I guess, you know, my last question to you is, is like, what do you hope, you know, this book in particular will accomplish? I know it's been out since September, I believe. But like, what do you hope, you know, people take away from reading, you know, the Gospel according to James Baldwin? Well, I would love for it to lean into those two kind of eschatological, theological ideas that Baldwin espoused, that he thought were important. That idea of the New Jerusalem, that we are moving in this direction of what, you know, those of us who are Christian think about as the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven. That we are in this process initiated by Jesus, the Christ being embodied on earth. in which God is changing the universe and changing us in the process. And so what I would hope is that Baldwin inspires people to lean hard into big questions and to love big even when it's hard, which it certainly feels like now. You know, when I look at some of the people, you know, my family, aside, but when I look at some of the people at MAGA rallies, I'm like, I am having a hard time figuring out what our connection is other than like we're processing oxygen into carbon dioxide. And yet that is the very worst part of me thinking that we don't have these human connections, that we don't have the same fears, we don't have the same concerns, that we don't love our children in the same way. And what Baldwin just reminds me constantly is every human being has reasons for the things that they do. Every human being is leaning into these hard questions and looking for answers. And I think maybe the aspirational thing that I get from Baldwin is just this, after everything that he had experienced. he talks about how after Dr. King died, like for a while he couldn't write anymore. And then he thought, no, it is, I'm not honoring his memory. if I don't lean into the work that I've been called to do. So I think I would hope that people who read my book or who read James Baldwin will be affirmed in the hard work of being human at this moment and loving hard and trying to be the hands and feet of Christ in this world, which is just what I feel like is That's the calling, to get up every day and do that. So, I mean, and that's the ironic thing about Baldwin who left the established church. But he wrote an open letter to Desmond Tutu toward the end of his life. And he closed that letter with, in the faith, James Baldwin. That's it. Get up, do the work. That's so good. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Greg. Man, what a what an opportunity and an amazing conversation. So fascinating. I could have sat there and listened for hours, honestly. And I'm very intrigued about James Baldwin now. So there's one person that you've gotten is very intrigued. And I want to read what he has to say. Yes. And so exactly. So you the gospel, according to James Baldwin, we want our listeners to pick it up and watchers to pick it up. How can they keep in contact and kind of follow you, Greg, as you're putting out more works? Well, I am on all the social medias. And so I'm gonna continue on Twitter as long as I feel like I can do some good there. But my big place is Facebook and I'm maxed out in terms of friends, but people can always follow me there. And then I write a regular column for Baptist News Global. And I am getting ready to lean into the election year. and to talk about this very thing we've been talking about a lot, how do we move across these divides in our culture and try and live out... I know that you guys talked with Tim Alberta early on, and I've got an interview with him next week, but there's a pastor in his book who says Jesus deserves a better Christianity than this. And that's my big project in my journalism this year, is I want to talk to a whole bunch of people who are like, how can we do better? as a church, as followers of Jesus, especially in this like really divided time this election year. I mean, so thank you. Thank you so much for asking. Yeah, well count us among people to reach out to if you like, because we'd love to connect with you again on that. Well, me too. Me too. We are definitely. So to our faithful watchers and listeners, thanks so much for joining us. And we'll see you next time. And until then, don't keep your conversations right or left, but up. God bless you guys, and have a great day.