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  • Spiritual, Yes; But Religious?A Review Essay
  • Kevin M. Schultz (bio)
Edward J. Blum, W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

In 1933 W.E.B. Du Bois, one of America's most brilliant and versatile intellectuals, penned a fictional story about a man named Joshua. It was an obvious biblical parable, with Joshua playing Jesus (Joshua, Du Bois knew, was the correct translation of Jesus's Hebrew name). Joshua is born of virgin birth (Mary gets beaten when she explains this to her husband). Joshua befriends lowly prostitutes and other social deviants. He raises his friend Laz from the dead. He eventually gains a following, preaches soapbox sermons that update the Sermon on the Mount("It's the meek folk who are lucky." "There won't be any rich people in Heaven." "You got to be easy on guys when they do wrong"). And he is, inevitably, seized by a mob, which hangs him for violating the most deeply held feelings of American society, although no one can quite identify Joshua's specific crime. He was thirty. He was also a black man living in Depression-era America, preaching racial equality and fighting against the worst abuses of capitalism,which might have been a clue to his martyrdom.1 San Diego State University's Edward J. Blum, one of the brightest stars of a generation of upcoming religious historians, uses examples like this—and literally hundreds of others—in his bookW.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet to argue that Du Bois was, in addition to everything else, "one of America's most thoughtful religious writers" (141).

In the wake of David Levering Lewis's monumental, two-volume, twice-honored-with-the-Pulitzer biography of Du Bois, finding something new to say about the man must feel like finding something new to say about Reconstruction after Eric Foner released his 1988 synthesis of that period. But, like Reconstruction scholars Julie Saville, David Blight, and indeed Blum himself (in his first book, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898) have shown, the task is not impossible. And in W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet, Blum goes after the low-hanging fruit. Du Bois has long been thought of as an atheist or an agnostic, a non-believer astounded by the uses and abuses of religion, particularly Protestant Christianity, in the denigration of his people. Du Bois's ex-pat status and his embrace of communism in the 1950s seem to clinch the notion that he was never a man of much religious faith,and certainly not of any institutional one. David Levering Lewis said of Du Bois:"Although he called himself an agnostic, it was an agnosticism professing such complete indifference to the hypothesis of an interactive supreme being as to be indistinguishable from atheism."2

But as Blum shows, Du Bois wrote a lot about religion, and about Protestantism in particular. In every aspect of his writing—fiction, history, sociology, social analysis, literary theory, political pamphlets, journalism, and more—religion and religious allusions play prominent roles. They even appear in his famous 1949 petition to the United Nations, which referred to a lynching as a "crucifixion"and quoted both Micah and Zechariah while demanding that the UN investigate human rights abuses against black people in the United States.

Religion was crucial to Du Bois's thinking about society and race, and he convincingly demonstrates that DuBois's writing is shot through with biblical allusions. Blumis even quite convincing when hear gues that Du Bois explained his turn to communism in religious terms. Christ was acommunist. Equality, individual dignity, justice: these were principles of both communism and Christianity. What was not Christian, said Du Bois, was what Blum calls the "conservative, frightened religion" of the early Cold War, in which "capitalism and American nationalism became tied even more directly to Christianity" (182). Du Bois's turn to communism was, therefore, consistent with what Blum sees as his religious vision. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev hinted at Stalin's "grave abuse of power, "Du Bois wrote: "I still regard Stalin as one of the great men of the twentieth century...

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