President Donald Trump has signed an executive order setting up a task force to counter “anti-Christian bias.” Trump claims that the task force is necessary to fight discrimination against Christians. But in practice it seems designed to enforce a very narrow version of conservative Christianity. The task force will counter efforts to prosecute demonstrators who block access to abortion care and to allow for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on campus. It will encourage the federal government to elevate right wing Christianity as a national ideology.
Imposing Christian morality on the U.S. seems out of step with the separation of church and state. But it’s not exactly out of line with American tradition. For example, at the height of the postwar Red Scare in March 1953, leftist poet and activist Langston Hughes was hauled before Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. PSI was looking to root out communist influence. But in that regard, many of the questions centered on religion — and on a poem that the subcommittee believed showed that Hughes was anti-religious and therefore pro-communist.
The poem in question was “Goodbye, Christ,” which Hughes wrote on a trip to Soviet Russia in 1932.
“Goodbye, Christ” offered a blistering critique of the ways in which kings, generals, and millionaires use Christianity and religion to solidify their power to crush the poor and marginalized. “Listen Christ / You did alright in your day, I reckon — / But that day’s gone now,” the poem begins. Below is the heart of its indictment:
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all —
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME —
I said, ME!
Go ahead now,
You’re getting in the way of things, Lord.
And please take Saint Ghandi with you when you go,
And Saint Pope Pius,
And Saint Aimee McPherson,
And big black Saint Becton
Of the Consecrated Dime.
And step on the gas, Christ!
Move!
Most contemporary debates about the poem have followed the McCarthy hearing by focusing on Hughes’ own beliefs and his relationship to Christianity. But a more interesting and pressing question is this: Is the poem accurate in its critique of American Christianity becoming a weapon for the wealthy, bigots, and politicians?
Whether we look at Hughes’ time or our own, I think the answer to that question is yes.
Hughes and Christianity
Scholars such as Wallace Best have argued convincingly that, while Hughes’ views on Christianity vacillated over the course of his life, he was never a doctrinaire atheist. For example, the 1931 poem “Christ in Alabama,” written around the time of “Goodbye, Christ,” compares Jesus to a lynching victim, framing Christianity as the religion of the persecuted. In the late 1950s and the ’60s, Hughes wrote many explicitly religious works, including the play “Black Nativity.” Poems such as “Christmas Eve: Nearing Midnight in New York,” published in 1965, are straightforward (and arguably saccharine) in their piety:
Our old Statue of Liberty
Looks down almost with a smile
As the Island of Manhattan
Awaits the morning of the Child.
In line with his latter, more conventional religiosity, Hughes tried to distance himself from “Goodbye, Christ” in a series of increasingly apologetic statements through the ’40s and ’50s.
But the skepticism of “Goodbye, Christ” wasn’t unique in Hughes’ oeuvre either. It is echoed, for example, in his description of his own religious conversion in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea. This (not really) salvation happened when he was almost 13, at a revival meeting at his aunt’s church. His aunt and the preacher encouraged Hughes to approach the altar and declare himself saved. He finally did so, even though he felt no call.
His aunt was pleased. But Hughes was traumatized. That night, he says, “I cried, in bed alone, and couldn’t stop.” His aunt thought he was crying out of joy at being saved, but in fact, Hughes says:
I was really crying because I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn’t come to help me.
This shouldn’t be taken as a doctrinaire statement of lifetime unbelief. But it does echo and provide background for themes in “Goodbye, Christ.”
Hughes’ early experience with religion was one of hypocrisy, lies, and, importantly, social pressure. The preacher and the people at the revival meeting called outwardly for authentic expressions of religious conviction. But what they actually engineered were public confessions of conformity. At least as Hughes describes his experience in retrospect, Christianity was not, for young Langston, a call to virtue, honesty, or belief. It was a structure of compulsion, which demanded its adherents bend the knee not to God, but to authority. Christ in this context is not the personal savior who stands with the coerced. For Hughes — as for trans people facing government discrimination or women being denied access to reproductive care — Christ is the coercion.
“You’re getting in the way of things, Lord”
This is also the sentiment at the heart of “Goodbye, Christ.” Hughes doesn’t categorically reject or condemn Christ. (“You did alright in your day, I reckon.”) Instead, he says that Christ has been co-opted by popes and preachers who have “Made too much money from it / They’ve sold you to too many.”
As Hughes said in defending the poem in the ’40s, it was “a poem against racketeering, profiteering, racial segregation, and showmanship in religion which, at the time, I felt was undermining the foundations of the great and decent ideals for which Christ stood.”
When Far Right demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith attacked “Goodbye, Christ,” Rev. Charles C. Hill, chairman of the Citizens Committee of Detroit, defended the poem: “I can join Langston Hughes with teeming others in saying ‘Goodbye Christ’ — the Christ as held up by the white supremacists.”
“Goodbye, Christ” is, in short, a denunciation of Christofascism — the form of Christianity that provides a justification for the Trump administration’s purge of federal LGBTQ+ employees or for his ban on Afghan refugees. It is an attack not on all forms of Christianity, but on the form of Christianity in which Christ is used by kings, millionaires, and generals to slow and obstruct the progress of freedom and justice. Christ, Hughes realizes, is not only a symbol of peace, salvation, and brotherhood. In practice, he is often used as a bludgeon.
“He didn’t come to help me”
Anyone who doubts that Christ can be used as a bludgeon by the forces of evil only needs to see what happened to Hughes himself. He said that Christ can be used by racists, warmongers, and the wealthy. And then racists, warmongers, and the wealthy immediately lambasted Hughes with Christ.
The poem was an excuse for criticism of Hughes — and implicitly of the Civil Rights causes he championed — for another thirty years until he died in 1967. Christian nationalists such as anti-communist, antisemitic, and segregationist Gerald L. K. Smith used the poem as evidence that Hughes was communist, atheist, and un-American — categories which were easily conflated. Similarly, Los Angeles-based evangelist Aimee McPherson, whom Hughes mentions by name in the poem, was so incensed at the personal rebuke that she denounced Hughes as a “radical and anti-Christ” and (embracing explicit racism) as a “red devil in black skin! ”
And Hughes was targeted by Congress. In demanding that Hughes affirm a Christian faith, the subcommittee recapitulated Hughes’ experience as a child, when his family and church pushed him to make a public, hypocritical testimony of salvation. When chief counsel for the subcommittee Roy Cohn (who was, somewhat ironically, Jewish) asked Hughes, “Would you call this poem, ‘Goodbye Christ’ a sympathetic dealing with religion?” the clear implication was that if Hughes did not generally believe in God and specifically adhere to Christianity, then his status as an American would be in question and his career would be damaged. That, again, is Christian nationalism.
For the PSI, the question before them was not just whether Hughes was a communist, but whether his poem expressed anti-Christian animus. Scholar Lerone A. Martin argues from archival research that former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover believed that the U.S. was “a Christian nation and that the Bible really [was] the bedrock of American democracy.” The questioning of Hughes shows that Hoover was not alone in that belief. For the PSI, too, loyalty was linked to a willingness to bend the knee to a state that saw nationalism as intertwined with the Christian religion.
But for Hughes, in “Goodbye, Christ” the question was whether Christianity had been so institutionalized and so co-opted by its relationship with power that it could speak only for that power. Some 93 years after Hughes published his most controversial poem, we have an administration that claims the mantle of Christianity as it declares that women should be tortured with sepsis, that trans people should be denied health care, and that Muslims should be refused admission to the country. “Goodbye, Christ” still, unfortunately, speaks to Christians in power and to those over whom they hold sway.
Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He blogs regularly at Everything Is Horrible.
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