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Callaloo 24.1 (2001) 346-362



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"You Think a Man Can't Kneel and Stand?"
Ernest J. Gaines's Reassessment of Religion as Positive Communal Influence in A Lesson Before Dying

William R. Nash


In the bayou country of Ernest J. Gaines's fiction, everyone has an opinion about the church. Indeed, although professional religious figures rarely play prominent roles in Gaines's stories, none of his works overlook the issue of religion and its impact on the African-American community. 1 Throughout most of his corpus, that impact is primarily negative, largely because of the consistent weakness of the preachers who minister to the communities Gaines portrays. From Reverend Armstrong in Catherine Carmier (1964) to Reverend Jameson in A Gathering of Old Men (1983), Gaines's ministers preach an adherence to Christ and a concomitant social passivity that ultimately proves unacceptable.

The sole exception to the rule of social passivity is Reverend Phillip Martin, the protagonist of In My Father's House (1978). Unlike his fellow clergy, Martin is active in his community as a Civil Rights leader; his history prior to the beginning of the novel's action includes numerous successful protests against white institutions and several arrests for his resistance to oppression. However, although Martin has been socially active in the past, the events in the novel force him into a passivity that undermines all of his previous efforts. Though he starts stronger than any of his peers, he also falls much farther, thereby reinforcing Gaines's challenge to the efficacy of the minister as social figure in these early works.

With its portrayal of events from the Civil Rights Movement, In My Father's House makes explicit a current in Gaines's fiction that appears more subtly in his earlier work. In Catherine Carmier, "The Sky is Gray" and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Gaines sets up conflict between ministers and young, educated, militant African Americans and consistently resolves it in favor of the younger generation. The tension between generations he describes resonates with historical tensions between the generation of ministers who formed the foundation of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the active, increasingly militant young people, such as Stokely Carmichael, who formed the nucleus of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 2 These early works, therefore, implicitly condemn the minister's role as activist in the Civil Rights struggle and simultaneously celebrate an agenda of reform that is not strictly tied to the church.

That condemnation becomes overt in In My Father's House, where Phillip Martin fails to save either his son or himself from the sins of his past and where he sacrifices his community in the course of his futile attempts. The minister's weakness and his inability to connect with young, militant African Americans suggests both an irreconcilable generational rupture within the African-American community and the fundamental uselessness of the church as an agent for meaningful change. Advancing this position throughout his early work, Gaines consistently aligns himself with a political position that scholar Charles Hamilton identified in the late 1960s and early 1970s: [End Page 346]

There is a widespread attitude among many young black people in their late teens through their twenties and mid-thirties that the church, generally, is not a very useful institution in the black community. Their criticisms are even more severe against ministers. . . . This criticism sees the church as playing the role of making people complacent with their lot on earth and offering them rewards in the hereafter. The ministers are seen as the major perpetrators of this belief, as well as the major beneficiaries. (208)

This cynicism and the related belief that religion is actually more harmful than beneficial to the African-American community informs the recurrent critique Gaines offers in his early fiction.

In A Lesson Before Dying (1993), however, Gaines steps away from that pattern, affirming and empowering the minister and the church as agents for change within the...

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