On Baldwin’s “Open Letter to the Born Again”

Moral clarity in complex crises.

James Baldwin is one of those prophets who speaks to our current moment time and time again. Of the many writings and essays worth reading and rereading is his 1979 “Open Letter to the Born Again.” In just 1289 words, Baldwin speaks more profoundly to the crisis of being a Western Christian today than others have preached in a lifetime. 

The letter was written in defence of civil rights activist and Christian minister Andrew Young, well known as Martin Luther King Jr.’s close friend and compatriot. Young had recently been involved in a controversy in which he had met with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization while acting as the United States Ambassador to the UN. Having learnt of a report prepared by the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights which called for the creation of a Palestinian state, Young sought to delay the report in order that it might be raised at a more strategic time for the then Carter Administration. To this end, having met with various representatives from the Arab world, he met with Zuhdi Labib Terzi, the UN representative of the PLO, to discuss this proposal. 

The United States, however, had promised Israel that it would not meet directly with the PLO until it recognised Israel’s right to exist. Through an illegally acquired transcript by Mossad (what’s a little espionage between friends?), the details of this meeting between Young and Terzi were made public and was met with significant controversy. 

Baldwin stood by Young, defending his actions as a genuine expression of the struggle for liberation, justice, and peace. Yet in doing so, Baldwin sets nothing less than the entirety of Western Christendom in his sights, calling out the rank hypocrisy that undergirded the outsized criticisms of Young’s actions. 

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Being a child of the church himself, Baldwin speaks of the fundamental contradiction of a Christianity today that fails to live by its own commandments to neighbour-love, or to even come close to recognising its true neighbours. Instead, those who call themselves the “born again” are more often caught up in the maintaining of a neocolonialist system that extracts wealth and life for the sake of reifying those who inhabit whiteness, the “most exclusive private club in the world, a club that the man from Galilee could not possibly hope—or wish—to enter.”

Baldwin centres his letter around Christ’s commandment in Matthew 25:40 in which Jesus famously challenges his listeners that whatever they do for the least of these they do for him. “Do not,” Baldwin counsels, “attempt to defend yourselves against this stunning, unwieldy and undesired message.” It is, he writes, “a hard saying,” one which “is hard to live with.” And yet, Christ’s challenge cannot be avoided. Instead: “It is a merciless description of our responsibility for one another. It is that hard light under which one makes the moral choice. That the Western world has forgotten that such a thing as the moral choice exists, my history, my flesh, and my soul bear witness.”

In this way, Baldwin draws a complex diplomatic controversy into startling intimacy. He contends that Christ’s words are not merely to be taken to refer to one’s immediate neighbour—though they are not less than that—but instead extend to the wider struggles for justice that face our interconnected world. Such struggles, Baldwin contends, exist not in isolation from each other but are deeply connected—not only by our increasingly globalised relations but by one’s responsibility to care for the least of these, by one’s responsibility to love one’s neighbour. The contradictions created, then, by the exploitations of Western Christianity, seal their own fate. What we do for the “least of these” we do for Christ himself, including the “least of these” that we ourselves have made through our creation of an unjust world order.

And such contradictions are plentiful. “Let us not belabor,” Baldwin writes, for example, “the obvious truth that what the Western world calls an ‘energy’ crisis ineptly disguises what happens when you can no longer control markets, are chained to your colonies (instead of vice versa), are running out of slaves (and can’t trust those you think you still have).”

Another example, speaking of the ways in which Jews and Blacks interact in American society: “I was not stupid: the grocer and the druggist were Jews, for example, and they were very very nice to me, and to us. The cops were white. The city was white. The threat was white, and God was white. Not for even a single split second in my life did the despicable, utterly cowardly accusation that ‘the Jews killed Christ’ reverberate. I knew a murderer when I saw one, and the people who were trying to kill me were not Jews.”

Yet another contradiction, on the histories of genocide and land theft that founded America: “I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised ‘forty acres, and a mule.’ The Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.”

Finally, Baldwin writes:

“Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises. From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead. The Zionists—as distinguished from the people known as Jews—using, as someone put it, the ‘available political machinery,’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire—promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever…

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”

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There are many things that strike me about this letter. One of them is the immediate connections Baldwin makes between the various struggles we face—histories of genocide of Indigenous peoples, the unjust redistribution of stolen land for settlers, the racialised structures of a white supremacist society, the neocolonialism of global capitalism. Baldwin thus speaks of the importance of solidarity, of internationalism, on the fact that none of us are free until the “least of us” are free.

Nowhere is this call to solidarity more pressing than with the current genocide Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians in Gaza. Our struggles are connected. Are we indeed all Palestinians?

Another thing that stands out is this: complexity, for Baldwin, never stands in the way of moral clarity. For example, Baldwin shows through his own experiences how Jews in America are made to do “the Christian’s dirty work.” While many of his personal experiences were positive, and while the antisemitism of a white Christian society was obvious, he also recognises how such structures of white supremacy destroys opportunities for solidarity. “The Jew, in America,” then, “is a white man. He has to be, since I am a black man, and, as he supposes, his only protection against the fate which drove him to America.”

And while he speaks of the broken promises made to Jews themselves, this itself stands in tandem with his unambiguous opposition to Zionism and its violent effects on Palestinians. Palestinian lives become fodder for the machinations of empire which churn out settler colonial violence. Baldwin’s essay, and the minor diplomatic crisis that occasioned it, is thus a reminder of both the complexity and simplicity of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. The wheels of history cannot be undone, and they are never linear or progressive. Yet one can still offer witness to that which is wrong, to unequivocally reject the oppression of a people group stripped of land, dignity, and self-determination.   

Baldwin’s own moral clarity challenges us to speak out directly against what we see: to reject the conditions of life which create death for black and brown people, extract unjust wealth from stolen land, and wage war against those who resist.

To do so is to seek to live under the gospel’s “merciless description of our responsibility for one another.”

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At Metanoia this year we are exploring the question “Can Christianity be saved?” The question is designed to provoke, of course, but it is a provocation to take seriously the challenges which face the church in places like Aotearoa and beyond in which Christianity has been the cause of so much harm. It’s a provocation to truly consider the possibility that Christianity can in fact not be saved; that saving ourselves was in fact never the point. It’s a challenge to consider what parts of our faith might need to die.

For many of us entering into this type of question now—perhaps radicalised by the current conflict taking place in Gaza, or waking up to the long colonial legacies of Christianity in this land—it might be easy to assume our struggle is a recent one, a task to which we have only now been given. 

Baldwin’s essay is a reminder that this struggle against hatred, war, and oppression, and of the admixture of this violence with our own colonial Christianity, is not new and has in fact been going on for many years.

The prophets are always speaking, very often outside our frame of reference, outside of our erected walls. The more pertinent question is: are we listening?

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“Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians.”

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Peace and grace,

Andrew

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More links/books/thoughts

Of course, you must read Baldwin’s letter in full. It’s shorter than this post here, and much better. I really should’ve just quoted the whole thing.

Vicky Osterweil over on All Cats Are Beautiful wrote a fantastic reflection on the recent shipping crisis arising from the Baltimore accident and Houthi attacks (among other disruptions to global distributions) that reminded me of the criticism Baldwin raises of the so-called energy crisis of the late 1970s.

Mohammed El-Kurd also recently wrote a haunting reflection on the question which I linked above: “Are we indeed all Palestinians?” The piece is difficult and uncomfortable.