W.E.B. Du Bois and The First Congregational Church of Great Barrington

“I send enclosed a letter to the Sunday-school-after having written it I have had doubts as to its appropriateness, but I shall send it at any rate-perhaps it would be better for the Berkshire Courier, if so I should like to see a copy.”-W.E.B. Du Bois, “To Mr. Van Lennep, (September 29, 1892)”

In 1892, a 24-year-old Du Bois wrote a rather curious communique to his former assembly, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington. This revealing letter came nearly seven years after his last writings appeared in T. Thomas Fortune’s newspaper while still a teenager and his letters to the church during his Fisk University undergraduate days, which updated them on his progress. This letter was directed to the then-current superintendent, Mr. Van Lennep, of the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington’s Sunday school.

At the time, Du Bois was a Harvard doctoral student studying abroad at the University of Berlin in Germany, and apparently he was discerning for the first time that his scientifically and liberally informed opinion should probably appear within some secular medium instead of a primarily sacred one.

Du Bois’s description of the town of Eisenach-a town famously known because of its intimacy with the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther-is written from the standpoint of a detached historian and sociologist rather than of an ardent participant in the Protestant faith.

Du Bois’s letter-which goes on to describe his experience sitting in the pews of the church where Martin Luther preached, and the historical context of Luther’s radical stance and excommunication-leaves conspicuously absent the kind of adulation and praise for the spiritual components of Protestantism that Du Bois’s Sunday school audience probably would have preferred.

Instead, the letter focused upon Luther’s “deeds” in hopes of inspiring the kind of practical efforts that Du Bois believed the Sunday school communicants were most in need of. Du Bois’s concern that the letter should be published through a secular print medium instead of being read before a Protestant congregation is equally telling. (Perhaps this is why it is addressed to his high school principal who possessed standing both within both educational and religious sectors in Great Barrington?)

All the same, this letter points to Du Bois’s earliest inclinations to utilize a secular, rather than a religious, forum for communicating both his pragmatic and increasingly scientific views of morality and ethics, as well as his increasing discomfort with identifying with purely religious causes.

While it is not known whether the church’s superintendent at Du Bois’s former church read Du Bois’s letter either in private or in front of the Sunday school, it does appear that the letter represents his final break from the Congregationalism of his Great Barrington rearing, for that letter is Du Bois’s last recorded communication to his former church—the church of his youth.