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Langston Hughes 'Story Salvation'

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In Langston Hughes’ story, “Salvation”, he is a young boy growing up in his aunt Reed’s religious household. Hughes talks about a personal experience that is related to religion and his interpretation of it when he was a child. He questions the understanding of this belief system that his aunt has been into and within the story, Langston Hughes is suddenly dropped into a difficult position for a youngster. When his auntie Reed decided to take him to a religious recital one night to be saved by Jesus, she told him that when you see a light and feel something inside, that is when you know Jesus has come into your life. As any kid would, Hughes processed that literally, and when the night came, Hughes ended up as the last person on the bench …show more content…

In the 1800’s Manifest Destiny became a widely-held belief among settlers, their mentality was that they were destined to expand across North America pushing the natives out of their land. This attitude among western settlers fueled the removal of Native Americans and war with Mexico. The thinking of some of these settlers was both inevitable and justified by their God to expand and take more land with no limit. Geographically speaking, modern day America is the result of this “Manifest Destiny”. This was also happening around the time the United States experienced its second “Great Awakening”, which was another protestant religious revival movement happening in the early 19th century. The second “Great Awakening” created another incentive for Americans to drive west, with the thinking that Native Americans were heathens. American missionaries of Protestant belief thought that by Christianizing the tribes, they could save the souls of Native Americans (“Manifest Destiny”). It was also during the 1800’s when Thomas Jefferson coined the term “separation of church and state”, pointing to the First Amendment of the Constitution which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” ("Jefferson's

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