“These Holy Idiots”: Violence and Christianity in Marlon James’s « John Crow’s Devil » (2005)

Content warning: this article discusses scenes of torture and sexual violence.

Introduction

In the fictional town of Gibbeah, Jamaica, the setting of Marlon James’s debut novel John Crow’s Devil (2005), most of what goes down could just as well have taken place in Sodom and Gomorra. The biblical resonance of James’s religious fiction is made even sharper by the fact that contemporary life barely intrudes in Gibbeah. Situating his novel in 1957, five years before Jamaica’s independence from the United Kingdom, the author decides to observe “a microcosm of the possibilities of independent nationhood” (Harrison, 2018, 64) entirely removed from the outside world. References to the rest of the island are few and far between, and most characters have never left the walls of this backwater town. In John Crow’s Devil, James places a fictional Jamaican community under a metaphorical microscope in order to draw a grotesque picture of Jamaican society at large, essentialized to its core components: ignorance, violence and the need for some sort of spiritual guidance.

Born in 1970, Marlon James grew up in an extremely conservative religious environment, to the point of undergoing an evangelical exorcism to ‘drive out’ his homosexuality, before renouncing the church and leaving the Caribbean for the United States in his thirties. Scholars have examined James’s difficult relationship with Jamaica as a gay man and his subsequent portrayal of the island in his novels, pointing to the fact that the author’s personal experiences “reveal an early intimacy with a deep and scarring violence” (Bucknor and Page, 2018, iii). In a 2006 interview with Annie Paul for the Caribbean Review of Books, James talks about the role of religion in Jamaica and his concern for charismatic and fundamentalist religious movements: “Fundamentalism is anti-intellectual, it is anti-free thought […] I am so sick and tired of these holy idiots”. He talks of Christianity in colonial Jamaica and its ongoing legacy as a tool designed to oppress marginalized people and maintain citizens in a state of illiteracy. James draws a parallel between ignorance encouraged by religious institutions and the violence that derives from it: “We have more churches per capita than anywhere else in the world, but we kill ten people a day” (Paul, 2006).

In John Crow’s Devil, Christian beliefs are far from the only ones the townsfolk partake in: most, if not all of them, also believe in Obeah, a broad term that refers to African diasporic religious practices. By the eighteenth century, European and colonial writers argued that Africans did not have the intellectual capacities of producing a system that could be considered a ‘religion’ – the term came to mark the boundary between a respectable set of beliefs and beliefs that warranted contempt and repression (Layne, 2018). In James’s novel, Obeah is not necessarily counter-indicative to the practice of Christianity: most villagers believe in equal parts in Christian tenets as well as in the power of Obeah teas, herbs and oils. Christianity, however, holds much more power over the inhabitants: for instance, it measures their daily lives by the weekly masses, especially after the arrival of Apostle York.

The figure of the preacher is all the more significant in James’s novel as for country people who do not know how to read, the preacher serves as a vessel for the holy word and represents daily guidance. In John Crow’s Devil, Pastor Hector Bligh is an inveterate drunk whose convoluted sermons no one listens to, until one Sunday morning, a foreigner named Apostle York comes to church, beats Bligh half to death and takes his place at the pulpit, effectively taking control of the entire town of Gibbeah. This religious coup d’état recalls Max Weber’s concept of charismatic authority, developed in his 1922 book Theory of Social and Economic Organization, which he considers a form of leadership where the leader’s authority derives from his personal charisma: “a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at lease specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (Weber, 1922, 358). Weber also notes that people often aim to pursue their own goals and find justifications for their own actions in religious doctrine. Both of these considerations find echoes in Marlon James’s novel, where ordinary men commit unimaginable acts regardless of who leads them, but find themselves emboldened by the powerful rhetoric of an apparent Messiah to the point of leading their community into destruction.

The novel explores the tension between faith and violence, highlighting how religious institutions – ostensibly meant to provide guidance and moral order – become instead complicit in perpetuating ignorance and brutality. The following analysis will first tackle the hypocritical attitude of Christianity towards sexuality and how as a consequence it both facilitates and encourages sexual violence. It will then consider the role charismatic leaders play in fostering religious fanaticism for personal gain, and finally examine how the apocalyptic ending of the novel represents a community consumed by its own contradictions to the point of annihilation. John Crow’s Devil presents an indictment of religious rhetoric and authority and their ability to both enable and justify oppression, ultimately questioning whether redemption is truly possible for Gibbeah.

1. Sexual violence and sin: the hypocrisy of Christianity

Some of the most salient characteristics of Marlon James’s writing are its extremely graphic depictions of physical and sexual violence. His characters engage in acts which prove shocking for the reader: rape, bestiality, pedophilia and murder. So many of these deeds seemingly go unpunished: Aloysius Garvey, who owns most of the village’s land and houses, is a known “sodomite” (28) and keeps around him a flock of light-skinned boys he calls his nephews who are essentially his sex objects. However, his social and financial status places him outside the reach of public punishment, embodied in his large red house that sits at the top of the village and remains unattainable to the commonfolk. Only when iniquity is exposed can God’s judgement strike, like the lightning that kills the Contraptionist, a cowherd who had built a guillotine-like contraption that allowed him to adjust his height to “fuck cows of any size” (78). Garvey also meets a gruesome death, decapitated by Apostle York, one of his former ‘nephews’, but he dies in relative privacy, inside his own home, and is only discovered at the very end of the novel by the Widow Greenfield despite having disappeared early on from the narrative. This difference in reckoning, between the public death of the Contraptionist and the secret sentence that befalls Garvey, shows the inability of the people of Gibbeah to deal with the ignominy happening behind closed doors. When Hector Bligh is chased out of the church by Apostle York, he lets go of his burden, thinking “Let somebody else worry about mothers sticking blame unto sons and fathers sticking penises into daughters” (47). The repetitive grammatical construction draws a grisly parallel between parental blame and incest and highlights how violence is most extreme when happening in the secrecy of the family unit, while also stressing the inability of the pastor to prohibit promiscuous and sinful behavior in his followers. This can lead the reader to wonder how to make sense of this harsh portrayal of incest, pedophilia and bestiality, “normalized yet ignored parts of rural Caribbean life” (Harrison, 2018, 3).

James’s use of horror and repulsion ties in with what Harrison calls a “New Black Gothic” which functions to “disrupt absolutes […] in unexpected, obscuring, and disturbing, rather than illuminating, ways” (Harrison, 2018, 8). The novel’s violence serves to criticize the hypocrisy of a Caribbean society that brandishes Christianity as its banner while endorsing gender and sexual violence. In this pre-independence town of Jamaica, the boundaries between religious sin and religious propriety are constantly blurred: the Contraptionist is stricken down by divine lightning for committing bestiality, but for years Aloysius Garvey gets away with raping young boys along with Pastor Palmer, Hector Bligh’s predecessor. Ordinary men and men of God alike commit sexual perversions, the use of religious rhetoric becoming only a foil to justify their actions: “The Apostle would tell them they only need one love – for God and His servant the Apostle” (227), after ordering his five henchmen to gang rape a girl for trying to climb over the fence separating Gibbeah from the outside world. James draws attention to the hypocritical nature of religious teaching in Jamaica that he portrays as “a place of violation and repression and presented via a poetics of excess”, where violence endorsed by religious discourse can only “spill out” (Bucknor and Page 2018, iv). The hypocrisy of religious doctrine in Gibbeah extends beyond its passive tolerance of sexual violence; it also manifests in the unchecked power of charismatic leaders who manipulate faith for personal and political gain. This convergence of faith and violence underscores the novel’s critique of spiritual corruption, demonstrating how the same structures that fail to protect the vulnerable also enable powerful figures to seize control.

2. False prophets: the power of charismatic leaders

The novel addresses the notion of charismatic authority and questions how fast people can surrender to religious leadership and cult ideology. With the arrival of Apostle York comes a substantial number of changes in the daily life of Gibbeah: in two chapters entitled “Revival: Part One” and “Revival: Part Two”, the congregation witnesses a series of miracles and little by little, townsfolk come back to a church they had left when Pastor Bligh stood at the pulpit. However, as the novel progresses, York’s sermons become increasingly forceful as he exhorts the congregation to brutality: “The Lord says cut it out! Cut it out! Cut it out! Come now, church, who is ready to be violent for the Lord?” (101). The repetition of the imperative in the exclamatory form, and the fact that ‘the Lord’ as grammatical subject then object brackets his tirade, turn York into a vessel of divine intervention and create a crescendo effect as he stirs up the crowd in front of him. As it turns out, the people of Gibbeah are indeed ready, and the crescendo of York’s commands is mirrored by the following escalation of group violence: they give a public lashing to an adulterous couple, trample a shepherd to death, and eventually kill Pastor Bligh by stoning him. James establishes a direct correlation between York’s religious rhetoric and the murderous frenzy that takes over the town: “It took the Apostle’s holy thunder and a couple verses from the Book of Daniel to mix the crowd’s fear and rage into a mob” (128). Again, York is characterized as more than human and definitely divine as his speech literally turns into a natural phenomenon. However, the excessive quality of ‘thunder’ is offset by the collective noun ‘a couple’ that shows how little incentive the congregation really needs. James uses the metaphor of a culinary recipe to highlight the two ingredients necessary in order to turn a community into a murderous mob: charismatic spectacle and religious justification.

In doing so, James draws a parallel between Apostle York and a series of Jamaican political or religious leaders who used the figure of the messiah in order to create their following. Alexander Bedward, who initiated Bedwardism, a religious movement of the early twentieth century, was sent to Kingston Asylum after declaring he “was the second coming of Christ” (Vijetha, 2023, 381). Similarly, the real-life civil rights leader Marcus Garvey mobilized crowds through religious rhetoric, earning the nickname “Black Moses” from his devotees (Vijetha, 2023, 382). This culminates in James’s novel when York argues he “became God” (213) during his last confrontation with Hector Bligh. Like Bedward, his declaration of hubris blurs the line between faith and insanity, which manifests in York through the fits of madness racking his syphilis-ridden body. In John Crow’s Devil, James creates the ideal setting for a self-proclaimed prophet to take control of the masses, and by referencing real-life figures of Jamaican history he stresses the connection between politics and religion. Apostle York’s rhetorical use of religious sentiment therefore works like a charm to control the black illiterate working class of Gibbeah, whose members confuse Mammon with ‘salmon’ (124) and who live under the financial thumb of Aloysius Garvey, the owner of the village named after the real Garvey.

In his 2006 interview with Annie Paul, James discusses how his initial approach to writing about “these backward country people” was one of contempt, which led him to rewrite the novel in order to interrogate the reasons that lead a community to fanaticism. John Crow’s Devil showcases how powerful religious rhetoric and individual charisma can turn people away from rational thought and provide them with justifications for violence.

3. An apocalyptic ending: a community “reaching the end of itself”

The non-linear narrative structure of John Crow’s Devil forces the reader to learn the ending before the rest of the story: the chronology of the novel is disrupted and reversed, since the first chapter is titled “The End” and the last “The Beginning”. “The End” tells the aftermath of Pastor Bligh’s biblical lapidation and the ensuing massacre of congregation members by white doves, as the Apostle orders the burning of bodies and the building of the fence surrounding Gibbeah, before establishing an authoritarian regime of terror where he teaches boys the tenets of his new religion and relegates girls to cooking, cleaning and sexual violence (“until one or two or all of the Five were ready to usher them into glorious womanhood”, 226). However, the novel does not end with “The End”: after Pastor Bligh, the other false prophet meets his reckoning as Apostle York is bludgeoned to death by Clarence, his lover, when he finds out the Apostle gave him syphilis. The two echoing chapters are ripe with biblical imagery: Clarence describes the Apostle’s blood splattered over his skin as “a new baptism” (229) and the village’s punishment for the murder of Hector Bligh is described as “God’s white fury [that] had swept down on them with beaks and claws and the beat of a thousand wings” (16). The figure of the vengeful bird is closely associated with that of the apocalypse: in the Book of Revelation, John is seen calling the birds to eat “the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great” (Revelation 19:18). However, the birds that descend on Gibbeah to kill its sinful denizens are white doves, also symbolically associated with the Holy Spirit and representative of new beginnings, peace and prosperity. It is therefore significant that the bird that leads the remaining members of the congregation out of the fence of Gibbeah is also a white dove.

In a personal essay entitled “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself” (2015), Marlon James uses the phrase “reaching the end of [one]self”, heard during a sermon in a Kingston church, to refer to his growing up in a hyper-masculine and homophobic Jamaican society, telling how he eventually resorted to an extreme evangelical exorcism to rid himself of his homosexuality. Harrison argues that John Crow’s Devil reproduces this “end of self” by ending shortly after an apocalyptic event “in which a community has laid bare all its horrific hypocrisies […] effectively reaching the end of itself” (Harrison, 2018, 2). James uses biblical imagery from the Book of Revelations, since he is invested with the god-like power of the writer, to punish his characters but also to allude to the promise of new beginnings: after the eruption of violence, the dust settles and the people of Gibbeah now see “judgement and redemption, rescue and damnation, despair and hope” (232). This quote, taken from the last paragraph of the novel, uses three successive antitheses to emphasize the dual nature of humanity. The narrator does not promise to absolve or erase the sins of the community, but rather opens up possibilities for reconstruction. The novel reaches its end as if having gone through an exorcism of its own.

However, James once again destabilizes certainties and disrupts absolutes: the white dove leads the remaining people of Gibbeah outside the fence to the character of Mary Greenfield, one of the novel’s protagonists. Standing on the other bank, she is described wearing a long dress blowing in the wind and she “raise[s] her right hand and point[s] two fingers” (232). These two characteristics are immediately reminiscent of Apostle York, who is regularly portrayed wearing robes billowing even without wind and who manipulates the congregation by pointing two fingers (33, 34, 127, 147). To a lesser extent they are reminiscent of Hector Bligh as well, who is similarly characterized. However, selecting Mary Greenfield as “femme finale” (Shoemaker 2018), making her the last woman standing after the clash between two religious men, shows that James relies on the image of a woman as a symbol of futurity. It is also testament to the “particularly gendered, complex experience of heteronormative, patriarchal citizenship in mid-twentieth century Jamaica” (Shoemaker, 2018, 21). Nevertheless, reusing characteristics repetitively attributed over the course of the novel to two false prophets enables James to question the actual reconstruction of Gibbeah and to wonder whether its people will not simply succumb, given the right incentive, to yet another spiritual leader.

Commented excerpt

The following excerpt is taken from the sixth chapter of Part One, entitled “Revival: Part Two”, and is placed after the Apostle has taken control of the congregation. Lucinda, one of the novel’s protagonists, has made herself York’s self-appointed assistant, irresistibly drawn by the seductive nature of York’s preaching. The passage shows how the figure of Lucinda, split between dignified Christianity and profane, indecent Obeah, eventually finds unity in her lust for Apostle York.

The excerpt opens with a resultative – “had beaten her in two” – which from the onset allows the reader to connect Lucinda’s split-personality disorder with violence. The following remark “Her mother was the same” evokes a cycle of generational trauma, almost a rite of passage, and enables the reader to immediately understand that Lucinda is also “a church-going sister on some days, a spell-casting obeah woman and whore on others”. The forced separation associated with a punctual event, a beating that had taken place before Lucinda’s thirteenth birthday, then becomes an active process, as Lucinda describes how she “would split in two” in order to avoid further violence at the hands of her mother. The use of the modal ‘would’ indicates a repetitive habit of the past, one that we understand is born out of survival instinct. Lucinda’s splitting between two personalities becomes so habitual that she even “carrie[s them] into adulthood with ease” – here, Lucinda seems to be carrying her two selves like metaphorical suitcases, their reality so tangible to her that they become material possessions.

Furthermore, the split not only happens at a psychological level, but also at a syntactic one: the entire excerpt is ridden with structural parallelisms, as we can see here: “who spoke about Sunday school […] who helped her mother find the callaloo plant”. The nouns ‘day’ and ‘night’, sometimes adjectivized in conjunction with Lucinda’s name, form a repetitive anaphoric chorus: “Day Lucinda […] Night Lucinda […]”, “day […]; night […]”. However, the constancy of the binary opposition is upset by the last sentence of the first paragraph, introduced by the conjunction ‘but’ whose initial position expresses a strong contrast with the previous clauses. The reader understands that the Apostle’s arrival brings in a significant change in Lucinda’s usual dichotomy. The second paragraph embodies that change: the syntax seems to get strangely tighter, with both ‘day’ and ‘night’ aspects of Lucinda’s personality crammed in single sentences – “day was for discipline; night, chaos”. “Then came the Apostle” is repeated a second time and here it is followed by the personal pronoun “she”. It seems as if the Apostle’s arrival brings together the two Lucindas even in the use of the pronoun that had been almost entirely absent from the first paragraph. She is no longer Day Lucinda or Night Lucinda but a single entity, united in her desire for the Apostle.

Finally, the good Christian-bad Obeah woman dichotomy is destabilized through the replacement of biblical symbolism by phallic imagery. In a form of parody, the text substitutes the serpent of Genesis for “a green banana” and both end up as metaphors for Apostle York’s penis. Similarly, the crucifix “pointing to the bold red tip of his circumcision” turns into another object of Lucinda’s masturbatory fantasy by embodying the point of convergence of the sacred and the profane. Lucinda reconciles the split fragments of her identity through her lust for Apostle York in an ultimate demonstration of irony.

Bibliography

BUCKNOR, Michael A. and PAGE, Kezia. 2018. “Authorial Self-Fashioning, Political Denials and Artistic Distinctiveness: The Queer Poetics of Marlon James”, Journal of West Indian Literature, volume 26, n°2. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/e26742789.

HARRISON, Sheri-Marie. 2018. “Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic”, Journal of West Indian Literature, volume 26, n°2. URL: https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-9930293

JAMES, Marlon. 2005. John Crow’s Devil. New York: Akashic Books.

LAYNE, Jhordan. 2018. “Re-Evaluating Religion and Superstition: Obeah and Christianity in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and William Earle Jr.’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack”, Journal of West Indian Literature, volume 26, n°2. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26742795.  

PAUL, Annie. 2006. “Reading, Writing, Religion: Marlon James, Mark McWatt, and Annie Paul in Conversation”, The Carribean Review of Books. URL: http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/10-november-2006/reading-writing-religion/.

SHOEMAKER, Lauren. 2018. “Femme Finale: Gender, Violence and Nation in Marlon James’ Novels”, Journal of West Indian Literature, volume 26, n°2. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26742793.  

VIJETHA, Jillella Mercy. 2023. “Religion and Rebellion in Marlon James’ John Crow’s Devil”, Rivista Italiana Di Filosofia Analitica Junior, volume 14, n°2. URL: https://rifanalitica.it/index.php/journal/article/view/241.

WEBER, Maximilian. 1922. Theory of Social and Economic Organization, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and its Routinization”. Talcott Parsons.

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Emma Cottrel, “These Holy Idiots”: Violence and Christianity in Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil (2005), La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), mars 2025. Consulté le 15/04/2025. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/litterature-postcoloniale/these-holy-idiots-violence-and-christianity-in-marlon-james-s-john-crow-s-devil-2005