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Abstract
"Singing, dancing, shouting, clapping the hands, etc., while generally characteristic of American Negro cult worship, are not essential features," declared Arthur Huff Fauset in the "Summary of Findings" to his Black Gods of the Metropolis (1944).1 Among the many accomplishments of Fauset's ethnography was his constant emphasis on the intellectual, political, and economic facets of black religious belief. Unlike his social-scientific forebears, Fauset believed African American religious behavior was more than a jig and a song. However, despite this landmark rebuttal, scholars of religious studies continue to contend with such romantic reductions of the African American religious subject, positing it as the attendant opposite to the modernist, the contemplative, the cosmopolite. Historiography of the civil rights movement in particular dawdles in the consolidating patronage of scholars uneducated to denominational difference or theological discord. Despite the alacrity of Arthur Fauset's mid-twentieth-century exemplum, narratives of black spiritual life continue to simmer with primitive suppositions, as political resistance is maintained by a generic spiritual resilience, and organizational similitude explained by mass cohesion to the Black Church. Even if Fauset intended to designate other "essential" worship features to "American Negro cult worship," his intention hardly disseminated to the subsequent historical record. The African American believer remains the body in motion, the voice in song, with eyes affixed, unblinking, to God. Consider the recent Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America, published in 2000 and authored by Bret E. Carroll.2 This atlas is a part of a larger series thatincludes volumes mapping the history of American railroads, women, African Americans, and presidential elections. Slender and beautifully illustrated, these volumes offer a charming and affordable accessory to an introductory course, integrating transhistorical geographic scope to the documentary readers or textbooks normally assigned in order to translate processes of history to neophyte students. The contents of Carroll's particular contribution are admirable, including plots of revival barnstorming and Vedanta temples, Southern Baptist percentages and black Catholic migrations. Bracketing the details of the scholarly labors of this text, a turn to the cover of the volume reveals a staggering summation of its contents. Recall that the purpose of this 140-page book is to map the history of religion in the United States, the missionary successes and indigenous displacements, the immigrant occupations and charismatic trends. The summary surface icon of these presumed summary contents? A black woman, arms outstretched, mouth agape, apparently singing. Her plump form is encased in a housedress of quilted print fabric, her singing head capped with a white bonnet reminiscent of plantation labor. Behind her are about fifteen skinny white youth, assembled in some sort of protest, all of their gazes, including hers, faced toward an unseen center. She dominates the tableau and translates the greatest protest enthusiasm-she is not merely protesting, she is the protestation, the spiritual bracket on a nation's geographic past and political possibility. The background of this black-and-white photograph is a map borrowed from the volume, the one demarcating "northern hunting traditions" of precontact indigenous Americans. Bannered above her bonneted head, then, are labels reading "vision quests," "buffalo rites and dances," "earth diver tales," and "cannibal spirits." If this cover is to be believed, the entirety of U.S. religious history might be aptly outlined by primal experience, from cannibal phantoms to black protest wails, each offering the beginning and end of essential faith, real faith, and earnest experience.3 Religion in America is not pulpits or creeds, doctrinal squabbles or ethnic differentiation; religion in America is the suffering of the oppressed, the displaced, the enslaved, captured in an open-mouthed melody and a nostalgic memory for a time when visions and dances and song comprised faithful action. Religion in America is a celebration of the signifying primitive. For any scholar of African America, such a cover, such a summary reduction, is hardly surprising. We know that the African American religious subject lingers still in abstraction. We know that the sale of books is best served not by a complex, differentiated, denominated believer, but by a shiny face singing songs of universal wisdom. Where does this primitive subject come from? Why is it so tempting to our religious redactions? Why is it so hard to relinquish "singing, dancing, and shouting" in thehistoriography of African American religion? To answer this question, a return to the past is inevitable: A return to the problem of the primitive, its emergence as a critical analytic category in the early twentieth century, and its propagation in theories of religion, history, anthropology, and art. Arthur Fauset's anthropological labors seem to have limited trickle-down effect within the broader historiography of religious studies; it seems the black subject is still a singularly reduced one, embodying the primitive essentials that all other religious (and racial) forms subsequently complicate. In order to encourage a shifted position for the primitive subject, then, it seems necessary to recollect the sources of this primitive character. Through an examination of the primitive compulsion in early twentieth-century scholarly literatures, we will find that the primitive has a primal hold on our disciplinary origins. Rereading the history of the "primitive" within religious studies points to the way religious studies itself has been knit with a racial particularity. This essay offers a preface to Carroll's wailing cover, to the ways in which the primitive prescription has dominated research into African American religiosity.
Incidents of racism against Asians have been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic turned global in early 2020. Employing Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Kathryn Lofton’s insights on the function of religion to demarcate group boundaries, this article argues that American religion constructs Asian American stereotypes to limit the discursive space within which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. These discursive limitations have, in turn, buttressed white supremacy. This article examines how some Asians and Asian Americans respond to anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic by performing a close reading of an op-ed by prominent Asian American politician Andrew Yang in The Washington Post. This reading reveals that Yang’s colorblind solution upholds whiteness as the American gnosis and limits the discursive space in which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. This article also discusses how the myth of America as a white Christian country withstands challenges from minority groups contesting its dominance.
The tenor Roland Hayes came to international fame in the Harlem Renaissance, but the obscurity that followed his success reveals the catch-22 that confronted him and many of his contemporaries. Hayes’s career was plagued by the choice between, on the one hand, assimilating black music to narrations of primitivity and authenticity and, on the other, subscribing to projects of black music’s transformation under the tutelage of Western form. The first part of this article traces the tangled discourse on the meaning and significance of the spirituals from Frederick Douglass to the Harlem Renaissance. The second examines how this context shaped Hayes’s career and its reception. The third turns to James Cone to articulate a constructive theological reading of divine liberation in the spirituals. Here, the essay argues that the spirituals’ theology must be heard both within the songs’ historical complexity and as witness to a different understanding of history itself.
In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld presents numerous instances when members of religio-racial movements contested the racial classificatory system provided by the federal government and confronted state administrators with their own alternative religio-racial identities. For Weisenfeld, these sorts of exchanges highlight, first and foremost, Black agency in religio-race making. But, as she indicates, they also make visible the contours of religio-racial whiteness as state administrators struggled to defend the status quo. In this article, I focus on how Black contestation and confrontation with racial hierarchy can reveal the racial whiteness operating beneath the surface of normative “religion.” This article draws on sources ranging from a police surveillance report to angry letters from white Catholics in order to argue that Black Catholics interrupted the presumed normativity of white Catholic religious life and, in so doing, revealed white Catholicism as a racial formation.
“We should be able to live and thrive, not just survive.” With these words, the Black feminist leaders of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans refuse the religious and racist terror of post-Hurricane Katrina recovery—and theorize beyond the lethal logics that set their organizing home ablaze in a still-uninvestigated arson attack. This article approaches WWAV’s gauntlet as “theory on the ground”: theory developed in the midst of lived struggle, which carries forward the enduring resistant visions of generations past, and grows them in and through the geographies of the present, towards new and more livable futures. Drawing inspiration from Judith Weisenfeld’s study of religio-racial movements in New World A-Coming, this ethnography moves on the ground and in step with my comrades at WWAV to show how the spiritual work of building otherwise can transform both what we write (the content and theory of our scholarship) and how we write it (the methods and ethics of its undertaking). Centering WWAV’s world-building theory, learning from it, moving with it: this is essential decolonial academic praxis, which comes from and flows through a commitment to ending white supremacy and being an accomplice to Black liberation. In offering “theory on the ground” as both a model and an intervention, this article shows how ethnographers of religion, as well as those who use our tools and our texts, might study differently to build our field and our world otherwise.
This article reviews the origins and goals of the religio-racial framework that grounds the approach to early twentieth-century Black new religious movements in New World A-Coming. It discusses how the articles in the roundtable offer case studies that extend the framework of “religio-racial identity” to model approaches for locating the analysis of connections between race and religion as central to the work of religious studies.
This article employs the trinary framework to interrogate American religious freedom and religious actors' interaction with the us state. It focuses on issues of governance and the classification and management of state subjects and their activities, showing how these lived effects are entwined with more "academic" or intellectual concerns about the categories religion and superstition. The article uses "superstition" in two ways. First, it is a term many Americans, from jurists to popular writers to academics, have used to describe human activities, often with racial assumptions and implications built into the framework. Second, scholars today might use the term, as part of the trinary, as an analytical device. The argument is that because the United States guarantees religious freedom, the state (or, more specifically, a particular state agent) must classify beliefs and practices as religious. This leaves a third category of activities that are clearly not secular but are also not religious, because they are not protected. Thus, we might call this third category "superstition" or "the superstitious." The article tests this framework with two brief case studies drawn from the early and late twentieth century, respectively.
In the midst of the Great Depression, the American government initiated one of the most ambitious national photographic projects ever undertaken. Such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks-all then virtually unknown-were commissioned to chronicle in pictures the economic struggle and social dislocation of the Depression era. They explored every facet of rural life in an effort to document the troubles, as well as the spirit, of the nation. Fanning out across the country, these photographers captured a nation alive with religious faith-from Dust Bowl migrants singing hymns to orthodox Jews praying in rural Connecticut. In Picturing Faith, the preeminent historian of religion Colleen McDannell recounts the history of this extraordinary project, telling the stories of the men and women who participated in it and exploring these little-known images of America. Lavishly illustrated, Picturing Faith teases out the various and conflicting ways that these photographers portrayed American religion and enhances our understanding of how religion was practiced during this critical period of American history.
W. E. B. Du Bois's contribution to the study of the Negro Church was his historical argument about the viability and influence
of African culture. Du Bois asserted the partial autonomy and creativity of black culture. This was a crucial achievement
in his day when normative theories of African cultural “backwardness” prevailed. Du Bois's detailed analyses of particular
local black communities also enriched his theories on black culture and made possible more accurate generalizations about
social change in black communities, an important task in a time when measurements of black progress or decline consumed observers
of the “Negro Problem.” Du Bois anticipated postmodernist debates about Western religious claims to universality, and in his
work among African Americans, he wrestled with many issues that we currently engage with in the contemporary self-reflective
mode of our discipline. His work challenged the theoretical boundaries of the newly emerging disciplines of religion, sociology,
and anthropology.
In 1883, the African American Baptist preacher George Washington Williams published his History of the Negro Race in America, 1619–1880. The book, a fundamentally optimistic account of the black presence in the New World, represented an attempt by the well-educated, northern divine to balance his commitments to an American evangelical tradition with an awareness of the ongoing oppression of his fellow African Americans at the hands of whites. “I commit this work to the public, white and black,” he noted in the preface, “to the friends and foes of the Negro in the hope that the obsolete antagonisms which grew out of the relation of master and slave may speedily sink as storms beneath the horizon; and that the day will hasten when there shall be no North, no South, no Black, no White,—but all be American citizens, with equal duties and equal rights.” The work revealed much about Williams: his upbringing in antebellum Pennsylvania as the child of an interracial union, his training at Howard University and Newton Theological Seminary, and his work experiences at Baptist churches in New England and Ohio. But this particular passage highlights the motivating force behind the book: it reveals, in anticipation of a historical narrative of over two hundred years of African enslavement, Williams's desire to recast much of the American past. Williams's historical account was, at heart, an attempt to impart moral meaning to the present by reconstructing the historical consciousness of both blacks and whites. In this desire, Williams fit precisely Friedrich Nietzsche's characterization of “historical men,” those who “believe that ever more light is shed on the meaning of existence in the course of its process, and they look back to consider that process only to understand the present better and learn to desire the future more vehemently.”