Religion in the Poetry of Langston Hughes,” Mary Beth Culp addresses several long-running themes that she asserts are a significant and typical feature of the way Hughes views and presents religion. Religion was an inherent part of the black experience in Hughes’ perspective, yet Hughes himself was a seemingly a-religious man, who led to a complex and multifaceted understanding of religion as both a means of indoctrinating and anesthetizing the masses of African Americans, and a means of providing security, community, and hope to this population. in “Salvation,” this mixed quality of religion is quite clearly seen, with the young Hughes at the center of the story happily waiting for Jesus and at the same time bitterly disillusioned by his absence. Religion does provide hope, and for the characters around Hughes such as his aunt it provides an avenue for fulfilling hopes and providing connection, but ultimately Hughes sees this as a false hope built by a people willing to fool themselves if it means not facing the truth. By reading this story I realize that the black culture and social experience, have a great connection to Africa because as a Haitian I experienced religious manipulation when I was in Haiti.
Daily Archives: February 9, 2022
“Salvation” by Langston Hughes shows how 12-year-old Langston changes from the beginning of the story to the end. In the beginning, he believed his aunt that when you are saved, many great things happen to you. The author included many exclamation points when describing what his aunt was saying. I feel like this enhanced how positive she was about Jesus saving you. You are able to see a light and you would feel Jesus with you after that (Sharpe). He believed this so much that when he was waiting to get called, he expected all these great things to happen. Langston saw everyone get saved and was the only one who hadn’t. He saw someone he was sitting next to get up, but Langston knew that the boy hadn’t gotten saved either. He eventually got up to pretend to be saved by Jesus. Langston lied and pretended because he felt ashamed and didn’t wanna get in more trouble. This made Langston feel guilt and brought him to tears that night. He stopped believing in Jesus because he didn’t come to help him. At the end of the story, you can see that he definitely doesn’t feel positive about getting saved, he feels sad and betrayed.
In the narration “Salvation”, Langston Hughes experiences an epiphany that changes him. In the beginning, he believed in the possibility of God and hoped to get saved during the big revival at his aunt’s church. He expected to see a light when he received salvation (Sharpe). However, by the end of the narration, Hughes no longer believes in Jesus. He gets disillusioned because he waited for Christ until he could no longer wait, yet nothing happened. On the night of the revival, Hughes cries in bed because he did not experience salvation as he had expected and hoped he would at the beginning of the story. The epiphany leads Hughes to question the existence of God. In addition to the spiritual epiphany, the narrator also realizes that adults do not always know everything. At the beginning of the narration, Hughes believed in the idea of salvation because he had heard his aunt and many other old people speak about it. He trusted that he would experience the coming of Jesus exactly as the adults had narrated. By the end of the day, he realized that adults were not always right. For instance, when his aunt heard him crying, she thought it was because he had received the Holy Spirit. The young narrator became aware of his capacity to lie to people around him just as he had deceived the people in the church.
In the beginning, the character starts out with a sense of belief in faith and is truthful. He is totally hopeful that he will see what he believes everyone else will see. Throughout, when the other boy goes up even though he did not see anything and has no consequences, the protagonist still tries to hold out hope until he realizes that he is just holding everyone up by not going up. When he finally gives in and goes up even though he sees nothing, he basically just gives up this sense of hope he has in his faith. He later ends up crying out of guilt and shame. He ends up questioning his faith because of what is said was supposed to be seen and him not seeing anything and not enduring any punishment for lying even though his faith says otherwise. He basically ends up having a crisis of faith because of said thing not happening and is too embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone.
At first Langston was nothing more than a normal child who was curious about everything in the world, especially to something abstract like God. He genuinely anticipated the result of being saved from what his aunt told him seeing the light. As the time went by, looking at his peers saved, he started to get upset and was confused whether Jesus existed and came to save him. Then there were two factors from the outside that intensified his change, to become a person that he didn’t want to be. The people who should take the most responsibility for this change were the adults. The minister kept saying “Why don’t you come?” and his aunt knelt down and cried. They unknowingly gave pressure to Langston as if he had to be saved today. I believe the ending would be totally different if they said to Langston that’s fine and try another day. Another reason was by Westley. “God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple.” Langston finally gave in and stood up, just in order to not waste time and make everyone happy. Children’s belief is naive and easy to establish that they believe all what the elders tell them is true about God. However, all the same time, once their faith was destroyed, they probably would have trauma that never comes back again. At the end, Langston cried hard at night, and I believed that’s when real salvation happened because he felt guilty for blasphemy. Unfortunately, he didn’t believe in Jesus anymore.
In the beginning of the story, Langston starts off his church experience with a sense of innocence, and nervousness, or excitement. He sees everyone celebrating seeing Jesus, and him coming to them. He’s almost anticipating it happening for a moment. Until his friend is sick of just sitting there being watched as people waited for them to join, and decided to lie. I think in that moment, Langston lost all that innocence. Because Jesus wasn’t coming to him, and he’s sitting there alone, hoping that he will come, but his friend just started pretending and faced no consequences of that. That innocence, and hope and belief that there was a God left him.
I believe Professor Conway assigned “The Most Handsome Drowned Man,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the first story for a few different reasons. One of the reasons would be due to the enthralling setting revolving around a dead man. This story was able to bring about a lot of discussion between the different analogies each student was able to come up with. Another reason would be the fact that this story was able to not only bring about imaginations to the villagers in the story, it also riled the entire class up with our own imaginations and stories. These are the reasons why I believed that Professor Conway assigned “The Most Handsome Drowned Man,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the first story of our semester together.
The story’s beginning exposes readers to a young and innocent character Lanston. Langston’s aunt wants his nephew to be saved and tells him he will see Jesus once he is saved. With his aunt’s ideology, the young boy joined other young sinners who knelt in front of a congregation to be prayed for and get saved. However, to his dismay, Langston did not hear, see, or feel Jesus in his heart despite church members’ efforts to pray for him. He was convinced that the only way to be saved was by seeing Jesus. Langston ended up giving up his beliefs to save his aunt and other church members the trouble in praying for him. After getting up, the whole church cheered him, not knowing he had lied. That night Langston was furious that he had lied to his aunt and the congregation and cried a lot. His aunt believed that he was crying because the Holy Spirit had filled his heart. However, it is ironic because Langstone was crying because he could not stomach that he had lied. Langston had also made up his mind that Jesus does not exist.
