‘Either religion is true or it is not true…learning will make it firmer’: W.E.B. Du Bois, the Church and the University

“The argument that college education makes a man irreligious seems to me mere fol-de-rol (foolish talk). Either religion is true or it is not true; if it is not true, men ought to be irreligious; and if it is true, learning will serve to make it firmer than ever. The Puritans did the best thing for morality and religion, when they backed their church by an institution of learning in my opinion. A religion that won’t stand the application of reason and common sense, is not fit for an intelligent dog. As to the snobbery connected with education, let me say that no thoroughly educated man ever turned up his nose at a fellow human being…When the church ceases to stand for education and morality, it must go. No power could do so much for the education of the colored people of Boston, for preparing them for the duties of citizenship…You have got to come to the point where you will call the man who announces a lecture and gives you fifteen minutes of rambling nonsense, a liar; the church which advertises a concert and gives a fiddle, a thief; a father who doesn’t educate his children, a public enemy; a man who allows a single penny to influence his vote, a traitor;”-“Does Education Pay?” (1891)

In “Does Education Pay?” delivered before the National Colored League in Boston, on March 10, 1891, Du Bois addresses those within the African American community who suggest that education contaminates religion. Resembling Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment preoccupation with reason and results more than religious profession in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Du Bois’s speech was far more concerned with what African American churches should do to aid others now instead of in the time to come. However, what is most intriguing about the speech is that in it one discovers that the seeds of Du Bois’s agnostic development were actually sown in his conception of “practical Christian work.”

It appears that the young Du Bois from Great Barrington, MA by way of Fisk University simply possessed a desire to see moral, ethical, intellectual and social dimensions of Christianity actualized within late 19th and early 20th Century African American communities; and he desired this in a manner similar Judge Justin Dewey—Du Bois’s Sunday school teacher at the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington who also adjudicated the infamous Borden trials. Dewey had raised similar concerns about the social contributions of his fellow white Great Barrington citizens while Du Bois was still a congregant. And if this suggestion is correct—that the seeds of Du Bois’s reformation writings were sown in his youthful and naive desire to see African American Christians make Protestant, Puritan even New England Congregational notions of morality and education manifest in their communities-these seeds both germinated and came into fruition through the pragmatism of William James, which he encountered during his undergraduate experience at Harvard.