The US civil rights movement is the subject of innumerable historical studies, and liberal religion in twentieth-century America also enjoys a robust historiography. Nevertheless, Amanda Brown makes an important contribution to both fields with The Fellowship Church, a four-chapter intellectual history of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples and its remarkable founder, the African American theologian, mystic and social thinker Howard Thurman (1899–1981). Despite Thurman's high profile during his own time, historical interest in the civil rights advocate and scholar of religion lay mostly dormant before a recent renewal of interest. Brown offers a fresh perspective by shifting focus from Thurman's influence and accomplishments to the intellectual milieu he represented. According to Brown, Thurman and the Fellowship Church are best understood as part of America's distinctive liberal intellectual tradition, combining philosophical pragmatism and spiritual pluralism with an emphasis on openness, social justice and mystical experience.
Brown begins with an intellectual biography of Thurman's development into ‘a practical thinker who saw spirituality in functional terms as a means to alleviate contemporary problems’ including America's racial divide (p. 18). Melding the pragmatic philosophy of William James and W. E. B. Du Bois with the mysticism of the Quaker thinker Rufus Jones, Thurman turned the insights of religious experience toward the problem of racial reconciliation. Despite his deep fascination with mystical experience, Thurman was not an idiosyncratic thinker who stood outside the mainstream of American ideas. Rather, according to Brown, he was ‘completely representative of trends within modern American thought. He was a hopeful pragmatist who … thought that human agency and the transformation of personal consciousness could lead to the creation of a better, more pluralistic and hospitable society for all those who lived within it’ (p. 64).
That hopeful world view lent itself to progressive social engagement, even if Thurman never took the helm of a particular social movement. Rather, as Brown illustrates in her second chapter, Thurman worked within existing Christian organisations, including the Young Men's Christian Association and Fellowship of Reconciliation, advocating tirelessly for racial solidarity within the white-dominated Christian left. On a speaking tour of India, Thurman met Mohandas Gandhi and other non-Christian thinkers, who not only shaped his thinking about non-violence as a means of social change, but also reinforced his interest in religious pluralism and commitment to antiracist politics. Brown claims that Thurman's Indian trip ‘signified the total convergence of … [the] twentieth-century spiritual, pacifist cosmopolitanism’ of the progressive, white US Protestant elite, and the ‘colored cosmopolitanism’ of racial minorities in America and colonised peoples of colour abroad (p. 101). This argument is effective, if somewhat circumscribed. Although other historians, notably Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, have examined Thurman's Indian sojourn in detail, Brown might have expanded her analysis here to embed Thurman more thoroughly within this transnational history. Thurman was a unique pilgrim, but he was also one of many non-white activists who forged international bonds of solidarity in the early twentieth century.
Brown next returns to the US, where Thurman co-founded the Fellowship Church in San Francisco with the Presbyterian minister Alfred Fisk. Drawing heavily on church publications as well as Thurman's papers, Brown illustrates how Thurman's blending of experiential mysticism and a conscious commitment to social justice shaped the institution along ‘pragmatic’ lines, creating ‘a brand of religion that was, at its core, intended to do something’ (p. 137). Thurman's pragmatic approach reached its fullest expression in his 1949 book Jesus and the disinherited, which compared Jesus’ experience of persecution at the hands of the Roman authorities to the oppression of African Americans under Jim Crow. Brown notes that the text became an inspiration to black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr, but also that the book fit squarely within the ‘middlebrow religious book culture’ of mid twentieth-century US liberalism. Thurman, she writes, ‘sifted through the faith's historical clutter and politicization to depict Jesus as he was – a socially disenfranchised minority who sought to transform the world for the benefit of all people, a concept that was palatable to the period's religious readers committed to finding common ground with each other’ (p. 183). Thurman expanded on his ideas as dean of Boston University's Marsh Chapel, though ultimately the institution could not offer him the freedom of religious experimentation that he had enjoyed as minister of the Fellowship Church. Brown concludes with a discussion of Thurman's stint in Boston and his eventual return to San Francisco.
The Fellowship Church joins a growing literature on Thurman himself, including Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt's Visions of a better world (Boston 2011), Paul Harvey's Howard Thurman and the disinherited (Grand Rapids, Mi 2020) and Peter Eisenstadt's Against the hounds of hell (Charlottesville, Va 2021). In contrast to these volumes, Brown's treatment is less comprehensive, although her focus on Thurman as an essential figure of the American religious left invites potentially fruitful conversation with works by David Hollinger, David Chappell, Wendy Wall, Doug Rossinow and others. Brown suggests that Thurman was not merely a vital intellectual figure of his own time, but a prophetic voice from whom Americans can still learn today. Thurman's emphasis on individual, personal transformation may seem out of step with today's focus on the structural embeddedness of social problems, but perhaps his mystical openness might offer a way forward for today's increasingly disaffected spiritual seekers.
