James Baldwin & Queer Spirituality - An American Prophets Program

American Writers Museum presents a discussion with scholar Christopher W. Hunt about his book "Jimmy's Faith: James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion." Despite James Baldwin’s disavowal of Christianity in his youth, he continued to engage the symbols and theology of Christianity in works such as "The Amen Corner," "Just Above My Head," and others. Hunt shows how Baldwin’s usage of those religious symbols both shifted their meaning and served as a way for him to build his own religious and spiritual vision.

Hunt is joined in conversation by professor Ivy Wilson. This conversation took place September 16, 2025 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. To see a full list of upcoming events with the AWM, visit our online calendar here: https://americanwritersmuseum.org/cal...

This program is part of the AWM’s "American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture" exhibit and programming series, which examines the relationship between American writers and religion. American Prophets opens November 21, 2025 and is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

More about "Jimmy's Faith"

The relationship of James Baldwin’s life and work to Black religion is in many ways complex and confounding. What is he doing through his literary deployment of religious language and symbols?

Despite Baldwin’s disavowal of Christianity in his youth, he continued to engage the symbols and theology of Christianity in works such as "The Amen Corner," "Just Above My Head," and others. With "Jimmy’s Faith," author Christopher W. Hunt shows how Baldwin’s usage of those religious symbols both shifted their meaning and served as a way for him to build his own religious and spiritual vision. Engaging José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification as a queer practice of imagination and survival, Hunt demonstrates the ways in which James Baldwin disidentifies with and queers Black Christian language and theology throughout his literary corpus.

Baldwin’s vision is one in which queer sexuality signifies the depth of love's transforming pos­sibilities, the arts serve as the (religious) medium of knitting Black community together, an agnostic and affective mysticism undermines Christian theological discourse, "androgyny" troubles the gender binary, and the Black child signifies the hope for a world made new. In disidentifying with Christian symbols, "Jimmy’s Faith" reveals how Baldwin imagines both religion and the world "oth­erwise," offering a model of how we might do the same for our own communities and ourselves.

Order your copy of "Jimmy's Faith" here: https://bookshop.org/a/628/9781531508814

DR. CHRISTOPHER W. HUNT is Assistant Professor of Religion at Colorado College, and received his PhD from the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Hunt’s work considers the relevance and meaning of Black religion for those on the margins or considered outside of traditional religious spaces.

DR. IVY WILSON (Ph.D. Yale University) teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His book, "Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism" (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with articles in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes edited volumes on James Monroe Whitfield, Albery Allson Whitman, Walt Whitman, and on the emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the "long" nineteenth century. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national.