American Religious Liberalism

Eight: “We Build Our Temples for Tomorrow”: Racial Ecumenism and Religious Liberalism in the Harlem Renaissance

e i g h t “We Build Our Temples for Tomorrow” Racial Ecumenism and Religious Liberalism in the Harlem Renaissance J o s e f S o r e t t Introduction In 1926theNationalAssociationfortheAdvancementofColoredPeople(NAACP) sponsored a yearlong conversation regarding the relationship between race, the arts, and popular culture. Hosted on the pages of Crisis, this discussion included such topics as representations of “the Negro” in Ameri­can literature, the appropriate aims for African Ameri­can artists, and the possibility of a black artistic tradition in the United States. Of course, this dialogue was not an isolated event, but an outgrowth of what is now commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, a moment of tremendous black cultural flourishing and the most celebrated phase in a longer New Negro movement that began near the end of the nineteenth century.1 Regardless of nomenclature, during the 1920s the world witnessed a flurry of black cultural production never before imagined, which achieved such popularity that ­ Langston Hughes—­ commonly considered Harlem’s poet laureate—referred to it as the moment “when the Negro was in vogue.”2 Beyond the pages of black periodicals like Crisis, debates regarding black art and culture appeared in main­ stream pub­ lications like Survey Graphic, which featured a special issue on Harlem in 1925, and The Nation, which staged a debate between two of Harlem’s most promising young black writers—George Schuyler and Langston Hughes—in June of 1926. 190 “We Build Our Temples for Tomorrow” 191 George Schuyler, a disciple of H. L. Mencken who would come to be known as the sage of Sugar Hill, wrote first with a sharp-­ witted essay entitled “The Negro-­ Art Hokum.” In it he sardonically dismissed the idea of “aframerican” art as ludicrous, because of how long blacks had been in the United States. If a racial art were to ever develop, he opined, it could do so only in Africa; such talk on Ameri­ can soil was “self-­ evident foolishness.” He insisted that artistic expressions credited to black people, such as spirituals, blues, and jazz, were more accurately attributable to regional and class variations than to any particular racial characteristic. According to Schuyler, “This, of course, is easily un­ derstood if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lamp­ blacked Anglo-­ Saxon. . . . Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your Ameri­ can Negro is just plain Ameri­ can.” Schuyler found African Ameri­ can religious life to be especially illustrative of this fact. He explained, “He reads the same Bible and belongs to the Baptist, Methodist and Episcopal and Catholic church. . . . It is sheer nonsense to talk about ‘racial differences’ as between the Ameri­can black man and the Ameri­can white man.”3 Schuyler did not discount the reality of the United States’ racial history, or the continued impact of slavery and segregation. Yet what mattered in discussions of art was that blacks and whites alike were contributors, as well as heirs, to a shared Ameri­can cultural heritage defined more by what David Wills has termed “the encounter of black and white” than by any distinct traditions identifiable as black or white.4 Moreover, that New Negro artists were well versed in European and Ameri­ can aesthetic traditions was, for Schuyler, of greater significance than any common racial classification. Offering a rebuttal to Schuyler the following week, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes insisted that there was a distinct racial aesthetic, and it could be discerned in black folk cultures. Perhaps taking a cue from Schuyler, he too pointed to churches as evidence. Where Schuyler argued that a shared Ameri­can Christianity made the case for a unique black culturalsensibilityunfeasible ,Hughesexplainedthat“theNegroChurch”wasnot a monolith. He agreed that there were black churches modeled af­ter “Cau­casian patterns,” but Hughes attributed this to black bourgeois impulses to­ ward respectability . He further described the churches of black elites (i.e., mainline denominational churches) as inclined toward an “aping of things white,” and conceded that they were ill-­suited for the cultivation of a racial art.5 How­ever, Hughes implicitly clarified the classed nature of his claims by then shifting attention to the churches of “the low-­ down folks.” For him, such churches (i.e., 192 Josef Sorett storefronts) were among the best places to espy the stylings of a distinctive racial culture. In...