After reading Langston Hughes’s “Salvation,” there is a strong sense of how likely it is that a child, or even an adult, would experience a need to express being saved when this does not actually happen. It is human nature, first of all, to want to feel and think in ways that conform to those around us. We want to be accepted and valued within the community and, when that community emphasizes the need to truly see and know God, the pressure becomes enormous. Hughes makes this extremely clear in relating his own story. He tells of his Auntie Reed and her commitment to the revival church, and how she had told him that, when he was ready to be saved, Jesus would come into his life and being. The boy would see the light of heaven and know that Christ was in his soul. Hughes never blames his aunt or presents her as demanding that he go through this experience.

At the same time, however, and when the boy is in the midst of the praying, singing, shouting, and waves of religious emotion filling the church, the literal pressure is too intense for Hughes to resist. He wants to see Jesus as his aunt told him he would, but the preacher’s begging him to come to God is too much. He then rises to accept God. Everyone rejoices and his aunt embraces him in tears. It is not real, however, and the boy cries in the night because he knows he has deceived the church and all the faithful. In plain terms, a sense of shame for being unable to see what everyone else claim to have seen is what drives him to lie, so this is a pressure basically “built into” the setting of the revival church.

At the same time, however, there is another side to this problem, and because it cannot be assumed that the faithful in the church – including Hughes’s aunt – have any real intent to force a connection with God for anyone. It seems that they more want to share the joy they have discovered, which is an obligation on the part of the Christian believer. This is in fact a truly admirable side to human nature, and something going to the heart of Christianity itself. On its most pure level, there is the deep desire to bring others to this intense happiness. It is then understandable that a preacher and a congregation would combine to encourage, as much as humanly possible, the revelation and the salvation. In simple terms, this is a case of the best intentions in play, and a community’s united wish that all those in sin and pain may experience peace through admitting Christ into their lives.

Ironically, Hughes’s own story ends with a greater distance between himself and Jesus because, when he most needed the Lord to reveal Himself, He did not come. This is a likely effect of such events. It is unfortunate, but the faithful so committed to bring others to the light seem to forget the human realities of the experience itself. They place all their belief on the power of Christ and then trust that only willingness to see Christ is what is needed for another’s salvation. What is ignored in this is the sheer power of the scene in such churches. The potential convert is surrounded by extremely powerful expressions of how faith moves the others, just as, in Hughes’s story, there is even a direct plea to the individual, and wonder at why they are not yet moved. The human then outweighs the possibility of transformation. To be saved becomes, not a beautiful thing to be wanted more than anything, but a responsibility, and failure to fulfill this must frighten the individual; it is probably felt that, if they do not express the knowledge of being saved, they will be seen as weak or hopeless sinners by all those who known them. It is another irony that this pressure, meant in a loving way, may easily create lifelong issues for the one not saved, apart from Hughes’s distance from Christ. They may always see themselves as actual sinners and live in ways attaching blame to themselves. Charismatic churches are powerful places and it is not a bad thing that they allow the faithful to rejoice. Nonetheless, it would be better if all those so grateful for salvation understood that it is an intensely personal experience, and “forcing it” can only move the person, child or adult, farther away from faith itself.