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“Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind” is structured as an essay and is not addressed to any particular reader or specified audience. The first part relates Baldwin’s experience in the Christian church from a young age until he left the church. When Baldwin was 14 years old, he came to understand that “God and safety were synonymous” and existed within the church. As a young teen, however, he started to realize that life in Harlem was full of peril. The whores, pimps, and racketeers he saw every day were products of the same environment as he was. Baldwin’s friends began drinking and smoking and pursuing women. The young women tried to keep the boys in line, to prevent them from becoming criminals. Many of Baldwin’s peers believed that school was not a path to success for Black men and dropped out of school to work instead. Baldwin chose to stay in school, despite his father’s insistence that he, too, should drop out and get a job. Baldwin did not believe that school would elevate his status, but he saw that many of his peers had become homeless alcoholics.

Read an explanation of a key quote from The Fire Next Time (#3) about the toll racial prejudice has on people oppressed by it.

Baldwin describes the regular humiliation and danger of day-to-day life as a Black youth in Harlem. At age 10, he was frisked and mocked by two police officers, for their amusement, and left him in and abandoned, empty lot. A number of his peers escaped Harlem by joining the military (during World War II), but many of those were killed or changed for the worse. Baldwin instead chose to join the church. As he recognized that hard work and saving money would not yield financial success, he also considered the fact that the standards and expectations of the white world did not apply equally to Black life. This extended even to morals and values, as adhering to Christian values did not make one wealthy or successful. If he did not want to become a criminal, he would need a gimmick. Assessing his capabilities, he decided he lacked the skills to be a boxer, a singer, or a dancer. He did not dare to dream of becoming a writer. Nonetheless, at some point Baldwin expressed to his father the thought that he was capable of doing anything a white boy could do. When his father’s reaction displayed alarm, Baldwin reasoned that his father was just old-fashioned.

Although Baldwin’s father was a preacher, Baldwin once went with a friend to a different church. While singing and clapping during worship, he suddenly collapsed at the foot of the altar, full of pain and dread. He lay on the floor all night as the other worshipers prayed over him, but he received no satisfactory answer to his question why Black people, specifically, had to suffer so. The realization came to him that most Christian churches were governed by the principles of Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, not Faith, Hope, and Charity. Eager to outshine his father, Baldwin became a Young Minister—a young lay preacher—in his father’s church. This status soon brought him power, recognition, and a welcome degree of distance from his father.

Baldwin was initially very pleased with all of the attention and praise he received as a Young Minister. After a year, however, Baldwin began to feel a disconnect from the church and from Christianity. At the time, he was attending a high school where most of the students, including his best friend, were Jewish. Baldwin had trouble connecting the Jewish adults he had met (pawnbrokers and landlords in Harlem) with the students in his school, but he viewed all of them as white, and it occurred to him that the Bible was written by people like this—fallible white men. Baldwin started to notice hypocrisy in the church. He had witnessed the abuse of both money and trust by his peers and did not respect the people he worked with. Despite all his religious striving, to be saved and to save others, his station in life had not changed. He was still Black. He would have preferred to tell his congregation to stay home and, perhaps, go on rent strike, instead of coming to church to worship and to give money. He claims he found no love in the church, only self-hatred and despair.

Read about a Main Idea (#3) in the book: Religion is a political tool that serves to continue its existence, not to help people.

Stepping back from his narrative, Baldwin discusses the role of Christianity in history. He talks about the power Christianity once held, dictating that its adherents should liberate infidels, often with arrogance and cruelty. Religion was (Baldwin claims) just a vehicle for planting a flag. The conquest pursued in the name of Christianity justified any subjugation that followed. Baldwin concludes the first part of the essay by stating that anyone who “wishes to become a truly moral human being … must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.” If worshiping and talking about God cannot make people “larger, freer and more loving,” it is “time we got rid of Him.”

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