Abstract
In W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociology of the Black Church and Religion, 1897–1914, Robert Wortham presents W. E. B. Du Bois as a founder of the subdiscipline of sociology of religion. Du Bois contributed to systematizing knowledge of the quality of African American life, the Black Church, and the development of the concept of “double consciousness”; and these contributions can be canonized into an exclusive group of classical sociological statements. The author raises the issue that Du Bois integrated quantitative and qualitative data analysis with greater depth than Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel in defining the subdiscipline of the sociology of religion. The book’s significance rests in its emphasis on how the Black Church preserved the basic functions of African tribal life. “The Negro Church came before the Negro home, it antedates their social life, and in every respect it stands today as the fullest, broadest expression of organized Negro life” (p. 33). The book provides an alternative perspective to Durkheim’s claim of the family as a basic unit for analyzing social life by demonstrating that the Black Church provided similar functions within the African American context during the dawn of the twentieth century. The dates 1897 to 1914, listed in the title, are significant in that those years describe the era after the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruling that brought Jim Crow laws into full fruition until the beginning of the First World War.
The book’s timeliness rests in the idea that African Americans and other racial minorities within the United States have been subject to revisionist accounts that truncate the Black Church’s significance as providing a foundation for an alternative civil society for the excluded and a means of survival. The author defends the slave uprising in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture and the insurrection under the leadership of Nat Turner as attempts toward asserting equality. The backlash from the Turner insurrection led to laws that became embedded in the “slave codes” as an attack on the remnants of African tribal life. “A wave of legislation passed over the South prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with Negro religious meetings” (p. 98). When such social movements are framed as violent rebellions, attention is diverted from the violence that instituted and sustained slavery in the West. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociology of the Black Church and Religion supports Allison Calhoun-Brown’s central argument in “Upon This Rock” (1990) that the Black Church was the premiere black freedom movement in the United States while providing evidence of African Americans’ ability to self-govern.
The acknowledgment of Sunday morning as the “most segregated hour of the week” testifies to one aspect of the condition of U.S. race relations and religious life. Such an expression ignores the contributing factors that led to near racially homogenous congregations. Voluntary racial clustering within the African American worship tradition safeguard a sacred heritage and exercise the collective will of self-determination. The Black Church of the period 1897 to 1914 resembled a syncretic religion as it embraced Christianity with a Calvinist creed and elements of Western African traditional spirituality. According to the author, most slaves in the United States came from parts of Africa that valued religious organization.
In Part III of the book, Wortham includes selections from Du Bois’s classic The Souls of Black Folk to show how traditional American folk songs and Negro spirituals both suggest that liberation serves as the basis of African American religious life. Likewise, the presence of a distinct civil religion within “the veil” constructs a fringe racial group embodying a “double consciousness” that non-”Negro” Americans can at best study but never fully comprehend. “Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism” (quoting Du Bois, p. 156). Wortham selected chapters that capture the lamentations of a people enduring emotional torments of fear and despair while the legacy of slavery remains a part of the living memory of some, and a near-slave system for the masses living the culturally foreign plantation life in lieu of the tribal life.
Overall, the book favorably assesses the Black Church as an institution that gave rise to the “New Negro” of the early twentieth century, predominately second-generation postbellum. “The Church preserved in itself the remnants of African tribal life and became after emancipation the center of Negro social life” (p. 190). Present scholars can look to the Black Church as a sacred space that cultivates collective behavior through, in some cases, intercongregational networks. The book provides raw data from extensive survey research from the Atlanta University Conference Studies, which illustrate how the churches functioned as socialization agents in terms of religious identity formation, care giving, and social etiquette.
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociology of the Black Church and Religion has the potential to appeal to a broad audience beyond social science scholars, including religious practitioners and activists. Within the social sciences, Wortham integrates a significant aspect of the African diaspora with the religious and policy discussions that can capture the interest of critical race theorists through the book’s accounts of the undercurrents of U.S. laws that derive from anxieties about not only black criminality, but also black success.
The book can inform clergy and officers of historically African American churches that have experienced intergenerational declines in membership and attendance. Early in the book, Wortham notes that the decline in the number of young adults in the church began in the early part of the twentieth century. As the twentieth century progressed, Black Church demographics became predominately elderly. In addition to the notable disappearance of young adults, many scholars have overlooked the idea that church attendance has also declined due to smaller family sizes. However, throughout this book Wortham implies that a sense of urgency existed during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century that has become less prominent. “Du Bois maintains that the Black Church appeals primarily to the African American middle class, and its purpose is to provide moral instruction and strengthen families” (p. 118). A large segment of the African American population does not self-identify as middle class, with relatively less familial capital and weakened kinship bonds when compared to the prior century. Activists can reference the book as it draws from social scientific methods to study potential means of resistance and navigation.