Edward Blum and Jason Young have put together a very important collection of essays on different dimensions of W. E. B. Du Bois's reflections on, writings about, and uses of religion. Blum and Young regard this book as building on Blum's W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), which they assert (quite oddly, given that the author himself is one of those making this claim and the book is still being debated) “shattered the common portrayal of Du Bois” by scholars such as David Levering Lewis, Arnold Rampersad, Shamoon Zamir, and Eric Sunquist (xi). I hesitate to say that the book is primarily about Du Bois's personal religiosity because the editors acknowledge that the focus is on what Du Bois said, not what he did, and that it is not a study of his church attendance (or lack thereof), or how, if at all, he lived religion (xx–xxi). The collection then is about explicit religious and biblical references in Du Bois's writings and speeches, the ways in which people heard and interpreted Du Bois (in religious and spiritual terms), Du Bois's use of religion as an impetus for social justice and a means of inspiring and challenging others, and as an aesthetic orientation to suffering and tragedy (which brings us closest to questions about his personal religiosity). The book illuminates aspects of Du Bois's life that deserve careful and more detailed attention and indeed seems to make the case for a more synthetic biography of Du Bois (even in light of Lewis's magisterial work!) with the many questions and issues in mind that are raised by the individual authors.

The book is divided into four parts and twelve chapters: part 1, “Was W. E. B. Du Bois Religious”; part 2, “The Importance of Souls” (a reference to the title of his important book, The Souls of Black Folk [1903], and the meaning of “souls” as a religious and spiritual term in Du Bois's capacious vocabulary); part 3, “Rhetorics of Religion and Redeeming Lynch Victims”; part 4, “Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism” (which is principally a reflection on what Du Bois knew of these religions and how they figured in some of his writings). Because the essays vary considerably in their topic of analysis and in their general conclusions, I will discuss only a few of them, though all of them require careful reading and prompt further inquiry into Du Bois's long and complex life.

In part 1, Phil Zuckerman's “The Irreligiosity of W. E. B. Du Bois” is the most straightforward dissent from the general theme of the book to reclaim Du Bois as a religious thinker. Zuckerman writes that Du Bois was a freethinking, irreligious critic. He points to Du Bois's distance from any social circle of religiously active groups (whether churches or close personal friends) and his commitment to sociological research that relativized religious beliefs, values, and institutions, and viewed religion as a social construction. Zuckerman does not so much prove this for Du Bois as to make an argument about a general tendency among the founders of sociology and what he perceives as a logical corollary to a commitment to a “sociological perspective” (12–13). Zuckerman rounds out his argument for Du Bois's irreligiosity by pointing to his Marxism and his “visceral intolerance” of religious hypocrisy (for which he found lots of evidence in American Christianity). It is important to note that Zuckerman acknowledges the presence of religious metaphors in Du Bois's writings and the importance of religion in his intellectual and scholarly imagination. Furthermore, he concedes that Du Bois was keenly aware of the significance of religion for African Americans. Yet, Zuckerman concludes that Du Bois rejected Christianity and ceased attending church as a young man and rarely returned. From his thirties onward, Zuckerman insists, Du Bois never expressed a “sincere belief” in any traditional Christian beliefs and doubted the efficacy of most Christian practices (5). In short, Du Bois was the irreligious figure that most biographers have written about, contrary to Blum's recent attempt to reclaim Du Bois's “spiritual power” (xi).

Although I am not at all satisfied with some of the conjectures in Zuckerman's essay and though I find his analysis of live options for Christian belief and practice in Du Bois's day a bit simplistic, his attention to the details of Du Bois's criticisms of religion, Du Bois's estrangement from churches and religious communities, and his willingness to concede that religion was still important to Du Bois in literary and instrumental terms all strike me as fundamentally sound. Any assertions of Du Bois's alleged personal religiosity must reckon with the salient issues that Zuckerman raises. Dwight Hopkins's “W. E. B. Du Bois on God and Jesus” and Jonathan Kahn's “The Pragmatic Religious Naturalism of W. E. B. Du Bois” complete part 1. I am not convinced that Hopkins's theological gloss on Du Bois reflections on religion, especially by using standard Christian categories, is the most helpful way to read Du Bois's writings, though Jesus in Du Bois's literary imagination is quite fruitfully addressed by Hopkins and other authors in the volume. Kahn's illuminating essay argues that Du Bois was a pragmatic religious naturalist, by which he means one who embraced religious resources to address the realities of race and social justice and yet who rejected metaphysical commitments and claims of supernatural truth. By seeking to elucidate the intersection of intellectual traditions to which Du Bois was indebted (particularly pragmatism) and his usage of “religious modalities” (biblical language, the figure of Christ, religious songs, moral virtue, and religious experience) because of his immersion in the cultural stuff of black communities, Kahn profoundly deepens our understanding of Du Bois's relationship to religion (44–45).

Part 2 includes essays by Anthony Pinn, Craig Forney, and Terrence L. Johnson. In my view, these essays (in addition to Kahn's) are the most important kinds of analyses of Du Bois that should be developed further. Pinn agrees with Kahn's description of Du Bois as a pragmatic naturalist. Yet Pinn is especially interested in Du Bois's “understanding of and posture toward religion and the study of religion,” which he renders as a hermeneutics of aesthetics as soul or depth (71). For Pinn, Du Bois “recognized in religion and religious experience a cultural resource, an often nonverbal format for addressing the absurdity of life” (75). Similarly, Forney examines the profound and lasting impact that death and dying in black communities in the late nineteenth century had on Du Bois's social thought. Forney points to the harsh circumstances of black life (and the seeming intransigence of racism and social injustice), striking an existential blow against the young scholar's commitment to and belief in scientific investigation, human reason's ability to advance solutions to societal problems, and universal laws of progress and social advancement (85–87). Although not quite the most accurate or compelling way to put it, in my view, Forney states that Du Bois emerged from these painful experiences as one who “found guidance in the Christian faith of African Americans” (87). Perhaps a more felicitous way to put this is that Du Bois, as Pinn notes, found a new orientation to suffering and religious experience in light of his encounter with the religious culture of blacks in the South, even though he never “believed” the tenets of the Christian faith.

Johnson adds to the personal dimensions of Du Bois's life, suggesting that his “tragic soul-life” was rooted in a “moral ideology of struggle, sacrifice, and hope” (115). Johnson argues that Du Bois found many of these cultural and religious resources through his participation in and study of black life. What all of these authors suggest is that Du Bois's actual encounter with and ongoing study of African American life in the South produced a lasting reorientation of his thinking with respect to what we might call the cultural resources of religion, though this has to be clearly distinguished from his critical stance on religious belief and institutions. One wishes at times that the authors said more about how Du Bois's racialist writings bore on his attribution of soul genius to black folk and how this related to more general claims about religion. Given that Du Bois was critical of black and white religious belief, practice, and institutions, what was it that led him to find resources within black religious culture and not within white religious traditions (as the authors seem to suggest)? After all, Du Bois consistently criticized hypocrisy in both communities. Was this orientation that Pinn and others write about a product of his romantic racialist understanding of African American culture?

This book is a necessary corrective to previous accounts that depict Du Bois as a dogmatic atheist or primarily as a hostile agnostic who had no use for religion. It invites us to consider the porous and evolving boundaries between the secular and the religious, even as most of the essays take seriously Du Bois's frequent criticisms of the actual religious beliefs, practices, and institutions that existed in his day. Attention to all of these complexities and ambivalences is the only way forward if we are to continue the entirely worthy and necessary study of W. E. B. Du Bois.