W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (review)

The classic biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois have alternately pronounced him irreligious, antireligious, unreligious, anticlerical, agnostic, or atheistic. Francis Broderick (1959) and Elliot Rudwick (1960) first crafted this narrative on Du Bois and religion, and it has been influentially reinforced and burnished by David Levering Lewis's Pulitzer Prize winning works (1993, 2000). It has become, so to speak, an article of faith: W. E. B. Du Bois had, at best, little patience for and, at worst, something akin to outright disdain for religion and its modalities.

Edward Blum's W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet explodes this narrative and corrects three generations worth of the study of Du Bois and religion. From comprehensive and original archival research, Blum reveals a Du Bois who from the beginning to the end of his career was obsessed with religion, its rhetoric, typologies, practices, and moral virtues. This book—really, an intervention—is long overdue. To be sure, Blum is not the first scholar to contest the antireligious Du Bois, but one would have to have been listening extremely closely to the last twenty years of Du Bois studies to know that a few scholars, here and there, had begun a sympathetic reappraisal of Du Bois's relationship to religion. It is only now with Blum that we have a full-length text on Du Bois's substantive engagements with religion. (Disclosure: my book, Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, Oxford UP, 2009, follows Blum's.)

We are indeed fortunate that this first work is written so superbly and capaciously. Blum traverses the tremendous diversity of Du Bois's writings, revealing the religious Du Bois from known texts like The Souls of Black Folk and from almost unknown regions of his corpus such as his series of black Christ parables. Moreover, we learn that Du Bois's use of religious vocabulary was not limited to what Michael Dawson characterizes as Du Bois's early political liberalism (243–44). Blum shows that Du Bois's religious renderings persisted throughout his life, even as he turned toward communism in his latter decades. In fact, though Blum "eschew[s] a chronological approach to Du Bois's life" (Blum 14) by structuring his chapters around genres of Du Bois's texts and not time periods, he productively breaks this genre-based approach in the penultimate chapter on "religion for an aging leftist." With this last dash of chronology, Blum does two things. First, he produces a total narrative of Du Bois's religious life, and, second, Blum valuably reminds us that religion is not a static force, but like politics, it is capable of coherent change and adaption.

The challenges of fathoming the religious Du Bois are many. Chief among them is the inconsistent, heterodox, and even contradictory place religion assumed in Du Bois's vocabulary. Indeed, it is not that Lewis and others do not have evidence for their version of Du Bois; Du Bois did speak extremely harshly of religion and institutions, and he at times renounced a Christian supernaturalism. But Blum rightly urges us not to make the flat-footed mistake of hearing Du Bois's criticisms of religion for simple irreligion: "Du Bois was not antireligious; he was against faith used for fraud, belief used to bully, and Christianity when used to control" (10). Blum wields this distinction to tremendous lengths to reveal a Du Bois of a robust religious faith that was indispensible to his political and social vision. This is crucial to Blum's case: religious vocabulary was fundamental to Du Bois's articulation of his most crucial concerns—from his unwavering focus on the poor and disenfranchised, to his Pan-Africanism, to his internationalism.

For Blum's book, this point about religious vocabulary or rhetoric cannot be understated. Blum openly disavows writing a religious biography of Du Bois where the putative goal is to get inside Du Bois's head to definitively determine his own beliefs. Instead, Blum is after...