W.E.B. DuBois - The Negro Church: With an Introduction by Alton B. Pollard III

alton b. pollard iii

Race, Religion, and the Politics of Knowledge

One of the principal means by which any discipline or profession seeks to introduce new or potential members to the guild is by way of narrative account, through the presentation of a distinguished historycomplete with texts, theories, thinkers, and applications. Over the course of time and for strategic reasons, certain historical factors tend to be excluded and trivialized while others are emphasized and elevated to the official status of canon. The production and dissemination of an authoritative history is basic to communicating to group members a collective sense of meaning, purpose, power, and identity. The history of an organization acts, as it were, as a kind of sacred script, ritual artifact, or fixed discourse on the way things naturally came to be. Simply stated, the past orders the present with a narrative truth beyond the power of mere mortals to change. For newcomers to the group, the metanarrative is transmitted with its special meaning both as a matter of course and as an important source of truth.

Where the history of sociology in the United States is concerned, venerable canonical accounts have proven extraordinarily successful at concealing a long legacy of cultural and hierarchal power arrangements in the profession. For its part, the process of masking, silencing, and deception in the social study of religion has been equally opaque and problematic. Sociologys willful disregard of W. E. B. Du Bois as one of the founders of the discipline, including the study of religion, is recounted here as both rejoinder and primer in the politics of knowledge, in the politics of hierarchy (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class, considered among others), and on which aspects of social and religious life deserve to be considered, researched, underscored, and known.

W. E. B. Du Bois was editor and principal investigator of The Negro Church , published in 1903. Issued as number eight in a series of social studies made by Du Bois at Atlanta University from 1896 to 1910, it is the series longest work. The Negro Church is a groundbreaking study in a number of respects. It is the first full-length treatment of the Black church in the United States. It is the first scholarly history of the Black religious experience in the United States. It is the first monograph on the sociology of religion in the United States. It is the first empirical study of religion to be done at a Black college or university and to be administered and led by Black scholars.

In short, The Negro Church is a landmark text conceived by one of the seminal minds of early social science in the United States. Yet and still, the work languishes in intellectual and historical obscurity. Despite its pioneering status, The Negro Church is scarcely referenced in the chronicles of sociology or religion in the United States or, for that matter, in more contemporary works on religion and society. These are but a few of the reasons why the appearance of this text for a new generation of students, scholars, researchers, and religious leaders is cause to celebrate. Recognition of The Negro Church is long overdue and justly deserved.

Scholarly Religion

Du Boiss most famous assessments of Black religion are found in The Souls of Black Folk , also published in 1903. There he wrote in culturally specific ways and in lyric social-scientific terms about the religious experience of people of African descent in the United States: The Negro church of today is the social centre of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristic expression of African character. But it was not until the publication of The Philadelphia Negro in 1899 and the even more focused statistical studies of The Negro Church that Du Bois began in earnest to investigate the centrality of religion in African American life.

Du Boiss person and place in the world of science and letters was continuously made tentative by rampant and unrepentant racism in the American academy. Despite the marginalizing tendencies of his white contemporaries, in the end they were unable to diminish his accomplishments as one of the premier analysts of the United States context, inclusive of religion, at the dawn of the twentieth century. In point of fact, it was only a matter of time before Du Boiss own progressive social vision proved larger than the fledgling discipline of sociology he had helped to establish. During the early years of his career, however, he completely and uncritically embraced the norms of positivist science and confidently and enthusiastically immersed himself in the methods of empirical and statistical analysis, ethnography, and historiographyand more through his work on the Black church and other social dimensions of life in the Black community including the family, labor, and education among others.

For the record it is here noted that Du Bois published his venerable work, The Negro Church , a decade or more earlier than such other renowned writings in the sociology of religion as Ernst Troeltschs The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912), Emile Durkheims The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), and Max Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920). Du Bois stands alone among his contemporaries in the employment of empirical methods and practices, which while no doubt rudimentary by todays standards, are nevertheless foundational to the early sociological study of religion.

Spiritual Strivings

Not surprisingly, efforts by contemporary scholars to understand Du Boiss religious views, personal and academic, are still quite piecemeal and incomplete. Akin to the very religious expressions that Du Bois sought to study, his views on religion were critical, controversial, complementary, challenging, creative, and complexreflecting an overt set of commitments and internal recognitions many researchers still find perplexing and contradictorybut which are in fact utterly and dialectically consistent. Over the course of his ninety-five years Du Bois defied easy either/or religious labels, all the while making his way from an early and staunch belief in the orthodox tenets of New England Puritanism to a fervent and unremitting faith in the spiritual strivings of Black folk the world over.

From Du Boiss own recollections, we know that as a young man growing up in the town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, during the 1870s he knew intimately the Protestant ethic of hard work, frugality, morality, and respectability. In the last of his autobiographies (he wrote three), he writes that he and his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, a respected and devout Christian, worshipped on occasion at the new African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church, which in his youthful inexperience seemed to him a curiously segregated institution. However, due mainly to reasons of close proximity and white beneficence, they faithfully attended the First Congregational Church where they were the only colored communicants. Du Bois recognized early on that modest class distinctions existed between Great Barringtons local Protestant and Catholic churches, but given the towns small Black population, he had no real experience with the intrigues and trials of race until he went south at the age of seventeen to attend Fisk University in September 1885.