Langston Hughes Salvation Summary

"Salvation" by Langston Hughes is an Essay written about the pressures young adults can face in their lifetime. It represented the life of a young boy and the pressures he received to accept Christ into his life. The story reflected lies, sarcasm, and hypocrisy from his peers, his family, both immediate and church. This young boy was told that Jesus would come to him, he would “See” Jesus, he would know. He was faced with the misconception of “How” Jesus would come to him, he was misguided. The young boy went forward anyway, walking to the pulpit, and accepting Christ. Although he had never experienced Jesus coming to him, he had never seen Jesus, he goes anyway, pretending to be saved due to social pressures. Later he returns home and cries

His aunt is really excited about him joining the church community: “my aunt spoke of it days ahead”. With his aunt at the church, young Hughes gets sat in the front of the church and with the entire congregation looking at him and the other kids that were getting ready to be saved. One by one they all experience God and His divine touch up to the point where only Hughes is left sitting on the bench. After some more time, he decides that he would rather loose his belief in God and lie about his presence than to keep everyone else waiting and looking at him. He lies and gets up and moves to the “saved” side. By lying and pleasing the society, we find out the effect that this has on the congregation: “the whole room broke in a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise”[pg. 181].

'Salvation', by Langston Hughes is part of an autobiographical work written in 1940. The author narrates a story centering on a revival gathering that happened in his childhood. During the days leading up to the event, Hughes' aunt tells him repeatedly that he will be 'saved', stressing that he will see a light and Jesus will come into his life. He attends the meeting but when Jesus fails to appear, he is forced by peer pressure to lie and go up and be 'saved'. Hughes uses his story to illustrate how easy it is for children to misinterpret adults and subsequently become disillusioned.

In most people's lives, there comes a point in time where their perception changes abruptly; a single moment in their life when they come to a sudden realization. In Langston Hughes' 'Salvation', contrary to all expectations, a young Hughes is not saved by Jesus, but is saved from his own innocence.

Langston Hughes’ short essay, “Salvation,” is a controversial yet interesting story that brings many conflicts between people in society. He discusses his personal point of view about his religious experience. Although religion has impacted many people throughout the years, it is still an extremely debatable topic. Many people believe that if you go to church you’ll be good for the rest of your life and just because you convince them as kid to behave a certain way, it will stop them from making poor choices, but it does not always work that way. Religion has historically been a problem for so long; it has divided humanity in so many ways. This story represents how much religion can use fear to gain power, but it also brings a sense of hope

Immediately, Hughes directly states his thesis in the first two sentences of his introductory paragraph: “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved.” His thesis serves as an example of a paradoxical statement because he contradicts his claim that he “was saved from sin” with the assertion that he was “not really saved.” He inserts paradox in his thesis in an attempt to attract the reader’s attention by emphasizing his tone of irony. Additionally, his thesis provides both the limited topic and focusing idea of the essay. The limited topic of his essay is his intended salvation as a child while his focusing idea is the fact that his supposed salvation was not honest. His thesis foreshadows the irony of his narrative, and it establishes the main points that he will address.

In most people's lives, there comes a point in time where their perception changes abruptly; a single moment in their life when they come to a sudden realization. In Langston Hughes' "Salvation", contrary to all expectations, a young Hughes is not saved by Jesus, but is saved from his own innocence.

In "Salvaiton", the main point that Hughes is trying to get across is that he "believed" in something only because it was what he was told was right. There is evidence of where he mentions "I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved." Hughes also mentions that one of his fellow peers at one point had said how "He was tired of sitting, so let's get up and get saved." It is clear that throughout the essay, Hughes delivers an image of confusion and seeing people as hypocrites and it really gives an understanding of what Hughes was going through. The structure of the essay also allows the reader to understand and follow the confusion and these experiences as they unfold on young Langston.

Langston Hughes dramatically describes his relationship with faith in “Salvation” (1940). Many of the paragraphs are accented with theatrical words and mentions

Salvation is defined as the deliverance from sin and its consequences. In a Christianity sense, salvation is when a person accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior, and they believe the fact that he died for the sins of Christians. The term of salvation is often referred to as being “saved”. Salvation is when one delivers not only their body in a physical to the church and God, but it is also a committee to Jesus mentally and spiritually. Getting saved can be a very pressuring and life changing decision. That is sometimes forced upon young adolescents. Ultimately it can cause one to question their spiritually sometimes even damaging their belief in Jesus. In Langston Hughes’

The details provided in the book explain the story moderately well. In the book, Langston writes about how much pressure he felt from the altar to be saved by Christ. The book paints a good visual picture on how crowded and hot the church was. In the book , Langston explains how devoted

Langston Hughes is one the most renowned and respected authors of twentieth century America not simply one of the most respected African-American authors, though he is certainly this as well, but one of the most respected authors of the period overall. A large part of the respect and admiration that the man and his work have garnered is due to the richness an complexity of Hughes' writing, both his poetry and his prose and even his non-fictions. In almost all of his texts, Hughes manages at once to develop and explore the many intricacies and interactions of the human condition and specifically of the experience growing up and living as a black individual in a white-dominated and explicitly anti-Black society while at the same time, while at the same time rendering his human characters and their emotions in a simple, straightforward, and immensely accessible fashion. Reading the complexity behind the surface simplicity of his works is at once enjoyable and edifying.

Langston Hughes in several poems denounced religion, inferring that religion did not exist any longer. In reading these poems, the reader canes that Hughes was expressing his feelings of betrayal and abandonment, against his race, by religion and the church. Hughes had a talent for writing poems that would start a discussion. From these discussions, Hugh es could only hope for realization from the public, of how religion and the church treated the Black race.

In Langston Hughes 's autobiographical anecdote, “Salvation,” the author reflects on his childhood, and also examines the basis on which his religious views were founded. Hughes 's nonfiction piece, written in adulthood, allows him to look back on his past and reconsider what he learned about salvation, as well as organized religion and conformity, as a child. Because of this inquiry, he begins to question the ways in which adults pressure young people to conform to their views of religion, even without having the deep feeling of faith required. When people are young, they are often asked to conform to roles that they don’t really understand or think deeply about, and religious duty is thus carried on without a lot of free will. Langston Hughes divulges the hypocrisy and the fraudulent faith of the Church and its indoctrinated members through irony and his own indoctrination into his damning salvation. The church service pressures and bullies young Hughes into falsifying his salvation. This ceremony proves that the church values tradition over faith.

According to Biography, James Mercer Langston Hughes is considered to be an African American poet who is college educated and comes from a middle-class family (Langston Hughes Biography). He attended college in New York City and became influential during the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes Biography). Although Hughes was a talented writer, he faced some challenges early on and it was stated that his “early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life” (Langston Hughes. American Poet). They believed that his work helps the spread the stereotypes of African Americans. “Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations” (Langston Hughes. American Poet). Langston Hughes’s poems “The Negro Mother”, “Let America be America Again” and “The Weary Blues” were influenced by his life during the Harlem Renaissance and the racial inequality experienced in the late 1920s through the 1960s.