I’d Rather Be the Devil by Stephen Calt

Author:Stephen Calt [Calt, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1994-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

To James, and other Baptists, these “sancts” (as he called members of the sanctified sects) were getting away with something. “They pretend to live above those things, and not to be tempted. But they’ll lie,” he said of them. “Yes, they do. Yeah, ’cause when I’ve tried it out on them, I know some of them very sancts that was dancin’ by that sanctified music come and danced by some of my blues music.”

Abstractly, he bore the typical Baptist view of mankind as a sin-blackened creature. “You born in sin and shaped in iniquity,” he said. The idea that one could live “above sin” struck him as the ultimate blasphemy. “If you’re livin’ free from sin and above sin, what you got to ask God for? Huh?” he asked in later years. “You don’t need His assistance, because you gonna be equalized with Him.”

James’ view of sin was equally extreme as that of Holiness members, but ran in the opposite direction: sin was not only inescapable, but omnipresent. “Onliest way that you’ll live free from sin is when you’re ready to leave here,” he said. “For the few moments or seconds that you’re leavin’ here, you may be free from sin, because your mind ain’t on nothin’ else. Nothin’ can contaminate you or confuse your mind . . .”

Yet for all of his hypothetical saturation in sin, James did not have the slightest understanding of what sin amounted to, in conventional Christian terms. The reason sin so readily contaminated people, he reasoned, was because it was imposed from without. “You can’t think righteousness always because of the environments around; the atmosphere is poison with sin. And it’s impossible for a person to live holy and righteous in this sinful world.” This conclusion, no doubt, presented him with a ready rationalization to do much as he pleased in life, while maintaining his own piety.

It is tempting to view James’ lurid view of sin as a reflection of his own lowly image of himself compared to his lofty father. “The best you can do,” he would maintain, “is filthy rags in the sight of the Lord.” But despite this self-abasement, his own Biblical outlook bore a curious underlying resemblance to that of the “sanct.” He had very little contrition, or even humility. In the 1960s he persistently regarded himself as a Godly person when, by the standards of his Baptist faith, he had no religious qualifications whatsoever, and never even attended church. It was no accident that his wife would be a “sanct” who was more tolerant of him than any Baptist mate would have been, though she did not share his claim to be “one of the best men who ever walked.”

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