If asked, W. E. B. Du Bois might say, humani nihil a me alienum puto — nothing human is alien to me. Hence his life and work can be viewed with profit from a variety of perspectives. Edward J. Blum offers us a fresh angle of vision, one that “focuses on the varieties of religious contexts Du Bois engaged and the multitude of ways he used religious ideas to respond to black faith traditions, the cultures of white supremacy, the violence of American society, the rise of world capitalism, and the possibility of nuclear devastation” (14). He takes up in turn Du Bois's autobiographical presentations; his most acclaimed book, The Souls of Black Folk; his historical and sociological investigations of black and white religious experience; religious themes in his fictional writings; and his faith in Communism. The cumulative effect of these investigations is to validate the claim that Du Bois is an important religious thinker.

The term “religious thinker,” when applied to Du Bois, can itself be interpreted in at least four ways. First, Du Bois was an astute analyst of the interpenetration of race and religion. As Blum rightly claims, Du Bois

This first point leads on to the second. Du Bois made extensive use of Biblical rhetoric, so extensive and consistent a use that it is impossible to take it as lacking in substantive import. Blum is especially good at enabling the reader to see what a secularist optic obscures. Take as one example Du Bois's “Credo,” first published in 1904 and widely displayed in African American homes for many years thereafter. It begins “I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth,” followed almost immediately by “Especially do I believe in the Negro race, in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul and its strength in that meekness which shall yet inherit this turbulent earth” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 214). In a bleaker and angrier mood, there is his “Litany of Atlanta,” written after the terrible assault on black folk of 1906. On one level a polemic, on another it is a Jeremiad; and Du Bois's voice echoes that of the prophets of the Old Testament.

Third, there is the matter of Du Bois's audience. Leaving to one side the re-emergent role of religion in political life, Blum reminds us of the intense religiosity of the American people, black and white, to whom Du Bois addressed himself. Not surprisingly, his African-American readers often garbed him in a prophetic mantle (see, for example, Blum, 3–6).

Fourth, there is the question of what Du Bois himself believed. Blum begs this question: “whether [Du Bois] believed in God, in Christ, in Buddha, or in Vishnu — and how deeply he believed or did not — is a matter between him and the divinity of choice. This book refuses the audacious assertion that anyone can know such information” (19). Perhaps this might be an audacious assertion concerning Du Bois. But it wouldn't be audacious concerning, say, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. Surely there is a line to be drawn here, between someone who takes religion seriously and even personally, and one for whom it is a vocation. Put differently, one might ask whether, in a piece like the “Credo,” God is signifier or signified for Du Bois. If the latter, then the idea of God has the divine subjectivity that religious belief assigns him. If the former, then he is a place-holder for or summation of cultural and ethical values. In both instances, his presence is to be taken seriously — but in the one case literally and the other symbolically. Or, to shift the interpretive angle just a bit, I think Blum successfully shows that religion is one of the things that matter to Du Bois, both as an object of analysis and as a constituent of his own perspective. But in both regards, it is second to race and perhaps not even primus inter pares among the other dimensions of his identity.

Finally, the ambiguities that haunt the borders of Blum's fine book could have been avoided if the idea of religion had been framed within the broader category of the spiritual. That concept, with the wide range of meanings it encompasses, also encompasses Du Bois. His was a deeply spiritual vocation. But perhaps the force of Blum's analysis would have been blunted by such a re-framing. In any case, he tells us that he “wrote this book to learn religion and spirituality from Du Bois” (273). And we in turn are enabled to learn from him.