Coates’ Contradictory Faith

Oliver Hoover

Professor Tiwari

WR 123

4/14/16

Coates’ Contradictory Faith

        The first reference to faith that Coates makes is “our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms” (12). From the sentences after that, and other parts of the book, we can define magic as religion, faith, hope, and diving justice. These sentences at first glance seem to make a convincing claim. Coates seems to suggest that U.S. culture likes to give big, seemingly simple answers to complex issues but without dealing with really questioning those answers. But then Coates makes sweeping generalizations about all religions, and in this quote seems to suggest that it’s a fad of today’s culture, when in fact religious history spans thousands of years. So why does Coates, not believing in any religion or even hope, use religious references/imagery to describe what is important to him? Why does Coates, when he’s extremely invested in pursuing to be free in his body continue to reject religion when a highly religious man “spoke like a man who was free”? The Mecca is a tool Coates uses to reinforce his own self-deception that he can find freedom in inquiry, and escape the possibility of real freedom in his body through belief in a religion.

        Coates repeats over and over that he only cares about the physical world, because that’s all he believes exists. He keeps reminding his son that he must “always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (10). He is so concerned with discovering how he lost his body, and how to become free again in his body, that at Howard University he spends copious amounts of free time educating himself on the history of racism, and making himself feel good about being black by reading about great black civilizations of old.

        “I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries.” Coates describes religion as a “retreat,” and God as on white people’s side (28). This invokes the history of white colonization of the U.S., which Coates later mentions, where evangelism was used to justify all actions of racial injustice that happened. Therefore Coates suggests that religion, especially Christianity, was used as a sort of weapon justification of the destruction of the black body. It also suggests that Christianity, from the word “retreat,” is one of the tools that white Americans use to keep the Dream alive.

        After analyzing Coates’ relationship with religion, it doesn’t seem quite so obvious what his beliefs and values and position on religion are. “The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing” (50). Coates absolutely limits the possible questions he could ask himself about religion by lumping all religions and the values that come with them. He gives himself an immediate answer, and immediate conclusion, from a young age, that he doesn’t ever question. With all of his striving for inquiry, and for not asking questions as a means to an end, it’s astounding that he doesn’t ask himself questions about religion. He completely contradicts himself. I’d even say that he wants to believe in religion, and is pushing it away to keep living in his own Dream of thinking he knows what the answers to life are. Even though he totally rejects this kind of thinking.

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