Du Bois on Religion

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They examined how he revised Marxian economic determinism by including race as a social force. But these scholars have generally paid little attention to his religious views DeMarco ; Green and Driver ; Lewis ; Rampersad ; Zamir He used religious idioms and rhetoric to frame and discuss social problems, social forces, and social solutions, and he evaluated society and groups based on whether or not they met his requirements for a Christian peoples.

In this way, Du Bois was not only a pioneering sociologist of religion, but his work was also deeply influenced by religious ideas and values.

To him, Christianity was an ethical and moral system that had the power to lead individuals and groups to behaviors that would bring social equality and brotherhood. In his first book-length autobiography, Dusk of Dawn: The real Christian church, thus, should battle materialism, oppression, exploitation, hate, and war Du Bois []. On other occasions, Du Bois made similar assertions. The older children tended more toward phrases which sought to express the fact that religion had reference to some higher will.

They evidently are not impressed to a sufficiently large extent with the fact that moral goodness is the first requirement of a Christian life. His evaluation of their answers shows that Du Bois held a priori assumptions about what true Christianity was and what it was not.

W. E. B. Du Bois

The function of churches and religious leaders was to inculcate these beliefs into their parishioners in order to create a truly Christian society. This responsibility was especially crucial for African American ministers. Du Bois viewed them as essential to the uplift of the race because they had the power to install the moral fiber necessary to disprove and combat white supremacists who claimed that people of color were inherently sinful. Much of The Negro Church, for example, evaluates the morality and behaviors of African American ministers in order to assess and help to improve the quality of religious leadership for people of color in the United States Du Bois, ed.

In an argument that squared nicely with Marxian theory, Du Bois suggested that unequal material conditions led religious believers to alter their egalitarian religious faith, which in turn religiously-legitimated those exploitative conditions.

In other words, slavery led white Christians to repudiate the leveling principles of true Christianity and their new version of the faith merely upheld the racial status quo. In The Suppression of the Slave-Trade to the United States of America, , the published version of his Harvard dissertation, he discussed how economic values triumphed over religious ones and in turn created new sets of morals.

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Du Bois found the Christian authorization of racism, exploitation, and materialism almost ubiquitous in the United States and the western world. He found any claims to the contrary appalling. And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ. He regularly blasted Christian missionaries for preparing the way for economic and political imperialism.

I grew up in a liberal Congregational Sunday School and listened once a week to a sermon on doing good as a reasonable duty. Theology played a minor part and our teachers had to face some searching questions. At 17 I was in a missionary college where religious orthodoxy was stressed; but I was more developed to meet it with argument, which I did.

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My "morals" were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a "believer" in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer.

When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer, but the liberal president let me substitute the Episcopal prayer book on most occasions. Is it that secular historians have recognized the power of Du Bois's intellect and sought to claim him as one of their own?

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While Blum believes there are "dissenters" who have examined Du Bois's religious thought, including Phil Zuckerman and David Howard-Pitney , fn 18 , he does argue that, "the irreligious Du Bois presented by so many historians, especially David Lewis, is a mythical construction that serves the purposes of the secularized academy far more than [it] elucidates the ideas and beliefs of Du Bois" Like Blum, Zuckerman notes that other scholars have essentially ignored Du Bois's religious scholarship; but Zuckerman, unlike Blum, does not concentrate on Du Bois's own original religious ideas.

Instead, he focuses on establishing Du Bois as a major sociologist of religion, and on demonstrating the sophistication of Du Bois's religious scholarship.

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Four other possibilities may explain the omission of Du Bois's religious thought in much of the existing scholarship: Blum clearly addresses the first of these issues, noting that "while church orthodoxy enraged him, authentic expressions of faith were entrancing" American Prophet , Blum distinguishes between Du Bois's views of churches and his views of religion, while noting quite clearly Du Bois's admiration for churches and clergy who challenged racism in America.

The second issue presents greater problems. Blum admits that no one can truly understand another person's relationship with God; indeed, Blum notes, "this book refuses the audacious assertion that anyone can know such information" Yet Du Bois clearly had an active and vivid religious imagination. Second, Blum seems to argue that because people responded to Du Bois in religious ways, and found religious inspiration in Du Bois's message, Du Bois's message must therefore have been religious.

It is possible, however, that it was the readers' religiosity, and not Du Bois's, that sparked the religious nature of their responses to Du Bois's work. Blum has no way of disentangling the two strands. The third possible reason that Du Bois has been read out of the "Congregation of the Rightous" is the existence of his multiple religious personas. Du Bois adhered to liberal and modernist religious beliefs and accepted the major tenets of the social gospel.

This belief system put him solidly in the tradition of the educated northern elite and thus distanced him considerably from most African Americans. While this difference was most starkly apparent when he refused to lead a public prayer at Wilberforce University in the s, it nonetheless followed him much of his life Indeed, as early as , Duane Lockard argued that W.

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Du Bois encouraged African Americans to reject the "traditions, religion, and behavior patterns of lower-class blacks," an idea that may have set the pattern of scholars seeing Du Bois as anti-religious. Last, Du Bois's modernist and social gospel leanings ultimately led him to view Communism as the "political and economic manifestations of the teachings of the biblical Jesus" without creating, for him, a theological conflict Du Bois had long argued that whites, convinced of their racial supremacy through a perverted view of religion, had used that distortion to mislead millions of people; he was thus comfortable with the idea of religion being the "opiate of the people.

The quick association that most Americans made, and make, between Communism and Atheism makes it easy to cast the late-in-life Du Bois as irreligious, possible even anti-religious. Blum recognizes this tendency, noting that "Du Bois's attempt to square the teachings of Christ with those of Communism may sound hollow to historians" This association may have been easier to make had Du Bois merely been a Communist, but his vocal defense of the Soviet Union associated him directly with a government engaged in religious persecution.