Salvation Langston Hughes Analysis

Imagine if Germany never admitted to the horrors of the holocaust, if England never acknowledged the downsides of British rule in India, and if America never recognized slavery or the lack of civil rights for African Americans. Imagine now if the minority among us who harbor racist bigotry were able to hide these sentiments under an innocuous looking cloak of religious piety. Just as with other atrocities of historic proportion there is a symbiotic relationship between horror and the human propensity for self-deception. This relationship is no less true today as an accurate description of the cycle growing within the American Christian population, of religious hypocrisy. Like a poisoned limb from a tree this connection
Religious hypocrisy fortifies congruity in poisonous societal classes. For example, in the short story Salvation written by Langston Hughes we find a young boy brought up to believe that he would see a light when he was saved. During a church revival meeting the minister asks all the young unproclaimed to come forward and be saved and one by one they all went to the altar claiming to be saved. All except for the narrator who was still waiting to literally see a light indicating that he too had seen Jesus. However, while he waited the entire church congregation kept pressuring him to be saved. Langston notices that the others who had lied had not been struck down. Under the weight of pressure from the rest of the church, Langston conceded and decided to follow suit; lying for the approval of his fellow congregation. “So I got up. Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place.” (13) Further illustrating the implications of conformism. We find here that Langston took his elders words literally and chose to believe them as such. He wanted to stay true to his faith but the longer he waited the more and more he was pressured by his fellow congregation to be saved. Langston conforms to the lie that he had been saved in order to save everyone from having to wait any longer and just go home. As a result, the crowd burst with joy and celebration despite the fact that they themselves were celebrating a lie. Not only that, in pressuring Langston himself to lie upon his faith, the celebration validated living a life with false faith. Another example of this conformism can be seen in the Harlem ghetto described by author James Baldwin in his essay The Fire Next Time. In this essay Baldwin explains that the boys and girls began to see the Avenue for what it was, a personal menace. “They understood that they must act as God's decoys, saving the