The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions

Seven Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions

seven ⭈ Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions SYLVESTER A. JOHNSON When Arthur Fauset set out to examine African American religions in the northern urban centers of the twentieth century, he was necessarily entering upon the site of multiple contestations. Fauset’s objective was not to map what was characterized as ‘‘normative’’ religion; so, for instance, he was not studying the ‘‘Black Church.’’ His primary interest, in fact, lay in making visible the patently unusual and novel manifestations of African American religion that were not reducible to normative Christianity or conventional church-based religion. These religious communities were the ‘‘cults,’’ the new religious movements among primarily urban African Americans of the increasingly populous metropolitan North. Arthur Fauset’s work was distinctive for several reasons. First, given that the ethnographic study of religion among modern Westerners is still establishing itself in the twenty-first century, it is remarkable that Fauset was employing this method of study in the 1940s. Second, Fauset was directing his attention to religious communities that were not normatively Christian. These religions were not only outside of the realm of expressive normativity, but they were also performed by a marginal demographic—African Americans, largely from the South, who were viewed as unsophisticated misfits in a cosmopolitan world. These persons were also marked as racially inferior—unintelligent, naturally backward, and prone to criminality. Third, Fauset was keenly interested in examining ideas about the relationship between 146 Resurrecting Fauset’s Vision African religious culture and the new religious movements among these African American religionists. I identify these three points as especially noteworthy and most helpful for parsing the methodological implications of Arthur Fauset’s work for those concerned with studying African American religions today. I am especially interested in what these points reveal about a central question that informs the title of this chapter: What counts for religious data in the study of African American religions? How does one recognize ‘‘real’’ religion when one sees it? Arthur Fauset, for instance, was not attempting to ridicule feeble attempts by blacks who claimed Jewish descent (such as Rabbi Wentworth Matthew) or even divine status (such as Father Divine). Instead, he interpreted these instances of expression as authentic religious data to be taken seriously in the intellectual study of black religious life. Fauset’s Intellectual Context: Twentieth-Century Studies of African American Religion The major context for Fauset’s work lies in the disciplined history of imagining religion among African Americans through the category of the Black Church, an entity whose historical reality is not nearly equal to the exaggerated proportions that emerge in the majority of scholarly histories of black religion. The earliest scholarly study of African American religion is perhaps best recognized as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Negro Church.1 Phil Zuckerman has rightly emphasized the tremendous debt that current scholars in sociology, religious studies, and history owe to Du Bois’s pioneering application of sociological methods to examining religion in America.2 As the nation’s first sociologist, Du Bois was centrally concerned with moving beyond armchair theories of society and grounding social analysis in ethnographic research. The result was his rich volume that incorporated an impressive level of data to make sense of how African American churches actually functioned. Despite the title of the book, however, Du Bois was clearly aware that African religion was a vital and central aspect of religion among African Americans. In fact, in both The Negro Church and in his classic Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois would clearly indicate his view of the importance of African religion in black American life: ‘‘The first Negro church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism. . . . After the lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.’’3 Carter G. Woodson’s study of African American churches, on the other hand, Religion Proper and Proper Religion 147 departed quite forcefully from Du Bois’s view of black religion, rendering African religion invisible and primarily employing a Christian denominationalist view of African American religion.4 Woodson’s study fits well within the trajectory of white scholarship on church history, which was also in essence a history of denominations and notable parish ministers. Woodson, in other words, was merely employing...