We make our heroes what we need them to be. For Edward Blum, what the world needs now is a religious W.E.B. Du Bois. Such a Du Bois would not only be a historical marker in the history of African American intellectual life, or an intriguing artifact of turn-of-the-century African American sociology, but also would offer a usable model for the religious liberal in the modern world. W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet provides more than an examination of the religious keywords within the massive corpus of Du Bois' output. It proposes that a religious ontology for racial reconciliation might be gleaned from this survey.
Such a thesis stands strikingly against the historical consensus about Du Bois' relationship to religion. As Blum explains, the critical view on Du Bois is that "he had little, if any" religion. To be sure (scholarship concedes), Du Bois was shaped by his boyhood church, and as an African American man he could hardly escape the institutional dominance of Protestantism. But he never attended church regularly, nor acknowledged any private practices. Moreover, Du Bois displayed open discomfort with religious expression and performance. "It frightened me at first," Du Bois wrote of the worship practices of rural Tennessee adherents. "I thought they were going crazy." Such evidence, coupled with a lifetime commitment to social scientific criticisms of religion, led the major biographers of Du Bois to conclude that he was an ardent observer of religious life. Religion for him, so we've been assured, was emphatically not a site of personal exploration or social revelation
Yet this received account collapses under the weight of counter-evidence discovered by Blum. After all, religion abounded in Du Bois' life: he taught Sunday school classes, had favorite hymns, founded the study of African American religion, and cried out for the "Prince of Peace" to "vanquish the warmongers." He authored prayers and befriended many clerics. Most important to Blum is the religious language pervading Du Bois' bibliography. God, Christ, female messiahs, good and evil, and apocalyptic visions pervade the texts of W.E.B. Du Bois. In Blum's rendering, The Souls of Black Folk supplied "a literary act not only of theological and cultural defiance but also of religious creation." W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet
