LITR 4332 American Minority Literature Model Assignments Final Exam Submissions 2013

Tara Lawrence 

Christianity in American Minority Literature:  How the Religion of the Dominant Culture
Serves to Both Unify and Differentiate African-American, Native-American and Mexican-American Literature

Christianity and it's symbols are found throughout the canon American minority literature. This common theme helps to illuminate both the inherent similarities and differences between African-American, Native-American and Mexican-American literature. By illuminating these similarities and differences in the three minority group's narratives, through a common theme, our understanding of the complexity of American minority literature grows. Each minority group and each minority author grapples with, or accepts Christianity to their own end. In tracing the theme of Christianity throughout our course texts, I believe some similarities of minority experience become crystallized. While some similarities become crystallized, there is also an undercurrent of uniqueness to each minority group and author's relationship to Christianity, the religion of the dominant culture.

            The first question that came to me as I was pondering the prevalence of Christianity in minority texts was, "why does the religion of the dominant culture feature so prominently throughout minority literature?" The answer to this question is not an easy one and I will not even attempt an answer, but I believe there is value to pondering the question as it relates to the minority/dominant culture dynamic and it is where a key similarity between minority experiences is found. The root answer to this question leads directly to course objective one and the concepts of "forced participation"/"voiceless and choiceless." Christians believed that in wiping away the brute and heathen religions of the minority, they were doing God's work. This was the highest mission and calling to many Christians and was looked upon as doing a great favor for the minority. This experience unifies both the African-American slaves and peoples native to North America and is the most major and visible way in which most minorities have assimilated to the dominant culture. This forced assimilation is portrayed in a mostly positive, sometimes ambivalent manner throughout the minority narrative.

            In the slave narratives of both Fredric Douglass and Harriet Jacobs the conversion to Christianity is viewed as a positive event. This positive outlook by the African-American slave on the conversion to Christianity is seen most vividly in the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley:

 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, 
Taught my benighted soul to understand 
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too: 
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. 

While the narratives and poetry of the slaves espouses a bright view of conversion, there is an underlying tone of negativity regarding the un-Christian behavior of the Anglos who so fervently preached conversion. This touch of ambivalence is more fully seen in the Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya.

            Christian imagery appears at the beginning of Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich and continues throughout the novel. The images and symbols of Christianity in this novel seem to be subverted by Erdrich to take on special meaning to the Native-American. This subversion is consistent with the alternative narrative of, "loss and survival," that is unique to Native-American literature; American Indians have lost much of their own religious narrative, so the narrative and symbols of the dominant culture stand in for what has been lost to form a new narrative with symbols that have different meaning. The Christian symbols and imagery of Jesus' death and resurrection become associated with June's death and subsequent "resurrection." June's death and resurrection, as a Firebird and in Gordy's car as a deer, have little to do with Christianity,         and everything to do with native beliefs. Christianity in Bless Me, Ultima is not necessarily good, bad or ambivalent. It is simply a way of spirituality that you may chose. This choice reflective of the different choices of identity that face Mexican-Americans as a "frontier people."

            Christianity is common to and shared by African-Americans, Native-Americans and Mexican-Americans. While this common religion does underscore key similarities between minority groups it also serves to differentiate between them. In the end Christianity means something different to each group and these difference are apparent in their literature.