Experiences of Religion and Racism

Langston Hughes, in "Salvation," describes his childhood introduction to religion, specifically Christianity. Hughes is forced by social pressure to claim that he has experienced the presence of Jesus within himself, when in fact he has not had such an experience, and the experience sours him on religion and on Jesus. The essay is an example of human beings completely misunderstanding what it means to have a personal experience of God.

Hughes is remembering the event which he underwent at the age of 12. The culture in which he lives believes that finding Jesus is an entirely emotional matter, that one gets swept up in a revival atmosphere and joins other "sinners" in taking the step to "come to Jesus" (Hughes 161).

What the adults in Hughes's do not understand is that "finding Jesus" must be an individual matter which is sometimes emotional, sometimes inspired by social encouragement, sometimes an intellectual matter, sometimes a step taken out of desperation. To say this does not place a higher value on one way over another, but it is to say that the act of "finding Jesus" must not be forced. If it is, as in Hughes's case, then the result brought about by those doing the forcing is precisely the opposite of the one desired. "Finding Jesus," then, is an act, or decision, which must be taken or made in complete freedom.

Experiencing God, as Smith points out, is also about love and not forced acceptance of a religious ideology: "The love of God is precisely wh

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rself has not yet learned to swallow the bitterness of racism. She decides to "write my angry letter to the president of the united states all by myself" (Lorde 199). She concludes her essay: The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C., that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of the trip and it wasn't much of a graduation present after all (Lorde 200). Anne Moody, in her autobiography, which portrays racism in the United States, shows that racism remains a major problem in the country in the 1950s, almost one hundred years after the end of slavery, just as it remains a problem for Lorde and other blacks decades later. One passage from Moody's book shows how blacks in the South believed, wrongly, that racism did not exist outside of the South, just as Lorde believed, wrongly, that racism no longer existed in the country and that the symbols of freedom and democracy in Washington, D.C. stood for reality. In Moody, the reader finds that racism is rampant not only in the South but in the rest of the nation as well, as this letter fr

Category: Psychology - E