Race and the Search for Religious Authenticity

My next book explores the crossing of racial boundaries for the purposes of religious exploration and enlightenment in the period from 1865 to 1975.  Beginning immediately after the Civil War, American liberals began to turn toward the racial “other” as a source of spiritual authenticity as they found themselves increasingly alienated from sources of meaning in a rapidly modernizing society.  In many ways intertwined with the phenomenon of “the cool” in popular culture—which since the 1920s, at least, has been heavily laden with racial voyeurism—cross-racial religious exploration has likewise entailed the simultaneous transgression of, and reinforcement of, racial boundaries, in this case as a formative component of liberal American religious practice. 

Significance

American religious history is a vibrant field of study, and yet research is frequently constrained by boundaries of race and religious tradition.  Even as the field has shifted in emphasis from the study of “official religion”—meaning the study of religious institutions, leadership, and the history of doctrine—to a more anthropological focus on religion as lived and practiced, surprisingly little work examines the religious interactions and exchanges between members of different races or traditions.

In addition to contributing to the literature on religious boundary crossing, this book will also advance the current conversation about religious liberalism in the United States.  In recent years a number of important works have sought to expand our understanding of liberal forms of religion, a scholarly movement spurred by contemporary moral, religious, and political concerns as much as by an effort to correct shortcomings in current scholarship.  Leigh Schmidt’s Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality has been the most significant of these works. My first book, Seeking a Spiritual Center:  Books, Book Culture, and Liberal Religion in Modern America, will soon participate as well in this renewed focus on liberalism.  I have come to understand that much work remains to be done on the role of race, in particular, in the construction and practice of religious liberalism in the twentieth century.  I contend that the transgression of racial boundaries served, in part, to reinforce race as a culturally significant category by tying racial difference to religious difference.

Liberal religion, especially in its Protestant formations, has typically been defined in theological terms—as an openness to modern science and historical critical study, for example, or as a belief in progress and an optimism about human nature.  These theological tenets, while certainly important, fail to take into account the ways religious liberalism has been lived and practiced in the everyday.  My project argues that the search for religious authenticity has played a central role, as American moderns in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought ways to counter the alienating forces of urbanization, scientific and bureaucratic rationalization, and consumerism.  One critical strategy American moderns used to search for the religiously authentic was to turn to the “primitive” or pre-modern, whether this was to be found among the racially or the religiously other.

This focus on finding authenticity in “the primitive” not only sharpens our framework for understanding religious liberalism, but also links the study of religious culture to the wider secular culture in important, and understudied, ways.  Primitivism, after all, is a longstanding impulse in Western high culture, dating at least to Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage, and finding expression in various forms of literature, painting, and music throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In popular culture, white Americans have for centuries appropriated various aspects of both Native American and African American culture as a means of cultural release, and as forms of protest and dominance.  My colleague Eric Lott has shown in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class that cultural race-crossing in the form of minstrel shows often functioned as both resistance and status reinforcement simultaneously.  Beginning in the 1920s, African-Americans transformed the urban North through the Great Migration, and this cultural voyeurism took on new forms, as white youth began to seek out “the cool” in the jazz clubs and speakeasies of Harlem and other African American cultural centers.  Ever since, trendsetters in music, fashion, and many other aspects of American popular culture have turned to black culture for validation of authentic style.

American religious culture has participated in these same large-scale and longstanding processes, yet few scholars have attempted to connect the secular and the religious in these ways.  Just as scholarship in American religious history remains overly compartmentalized by race and tradition, it also remains, all too often, cut off from currents in secular culture.  Theorists in religious studies as diverse as Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad have argued convincingly that the boundary between the religious and the secular is best understood as blurry, if visible at all.  Building on this body of theoretical work in the sociology and anthropology of religion, I aim to examine the cultural crosscurrents among the primitivist impulses in art, popular culture, and religion.