Religion Theme Analysis

Malcolm’s religious journey is marked by a continuous struggle to find a faith in which he can believe and flourish both spiritually and intellectually. As with his views on race and racism, Malcolm’s views on religion play a key role throughout his life, but also evolve as his own understanding and experience changes and broadens.

Despite the fact that Malcolm’s father was a Christian minister, Malcolm never felt at home in Christianity. As a child, he simply finds it hard to believe in Christianity. As he puts it, “Even at that young age, I just couldn't believe in the Christian concept of Jesus as someone divine.”

When Malcolm later begins to study more about history and religion while in prison, and then to preach as a minister of the Nation of Islam – which practiced an idiosyncratic variant of Islam that held black people to be gods and whites to be devils – his issues with Christianity become explicitly tied to his views on race. More specifically, Malcolm argues that Christianity played too large a part in European imperialism and oppression of blacks – both physically and psychologically – for it to be something in which black people could find spiritual sustenance. First, he argues that Christianity had, in practice, been used by whites in hypocritical ways to oppress black people. As Malcolm puts it: “I read, I saw, how the white man never has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true manner and spirit of Christ's teachings—meek, humble, and Christ-like.” More specifically, he argues that whites used Christianity’s message of “turn the other cheek” for their own gain: forcing Christianity on African Americans, who are then compelled to forgive the white man even as the white men take everything from them (even their freedom). Second, he preaches that Christianity conditions black people to worship a blond, blue-eyed God, which functions as a kind of psychological warfare upon black people’s self-image.

Not surprisingly, Malcolm’s preaching puts him in conflict with many Christian black leaders – including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – who are both outraged by his slandering of Christianity and, as leaders of the Vivil Rights Movement, feel that a more moderate approach of dialogue and peaceful protest is more likely to produce progress than Malcolm’s (and the Nation of Islam’s) more incendiary language. Malcolm, in turn, accuses these leaders of having themselves been “brainwashed” by Christianity’s message of forgiveness.

Yet what Malcolm desires in a religion is not just something that justifies his political beliefs, but rather something that gives him ideals in which to truly believe. Malcolm thus experiences cracks in the foundations of his belief when it’s revealed that the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, who was held up within the Nation of Islam as someone who “surely stood next to God,” had numerous affairs and then attempted to cover it up. As Malcolm puts it: “And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.”

After his doubts about Muhammad lead to his ouster from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm continues his quest to find a religion in whose beliefs and ideals he can thrive. This question drives him to make the Hajj to Mecca – a traditional Islamic pilgrimage. During the Hajj, Malcolm encounters a version of Islam that exposes the exclusionary practices of the Nation of Islam and the cult of personality around Elijah Muhammad. The brotherhood of the Hajj emphasizes a religion in which everyone is equal under the one true God, in which there are no good or bad races and there are no “Divine Men.” Malcolm’s attraction to the Islam he experiences on the Hajj stems from its openness to exploration of truth and equality between people. Put another way, while the Nation allowed him to see his dignity as a black man, orthodox Islam now confirms his dignity as a human being.