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The Fellowship Church
The Fellowship Church
Howard Thurman and the
Twentieth-Century Religious Left
A M A N DA B R OW N
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brown, Amanda, author.
Title: The Fellowship Church : Howard Thurman and the twentieth-century
Religious left / Amanda Brown.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003264 (print) | LCCN 2021003265 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197565131 (hb) | ISBN 9780197565162 | ISBN 9780197565155 |
ISBN 9780197565148
Subjects: LCSH: Thurman, Howard, 1900–1981. | Church for the Fellowship of
All Peoples (San Francisco, Calif.)—History. | San Francisco
(Calif.)—Church history—20th century. | Liberalism (Religion)
Classification: LCC BX9999.S3 B76 2021 (print) | LCC BX9999.S3 (ebook) |
DDC 277.308/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003264
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003265
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197565131.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
In memory of John Pettegrew
Contents
List of Figures ix
Abbreviations xi
Howard Thurman Timeline xiii
Introduction 1
1. The American Thinker: Howard Thurman’s Mid-Twentieth-
Century Pragmatism and the Modern Intellectual Tradition 18
W. E. B. Du Bois, African American Activism, and the Talented Tenth 25
Rufus Jones and Affirmation Mysticism 40
A Modern, Pragmatic, African American Mystic 60
2. Coloring the Christian Left: Cosmopolitanism, Christian
Liberalism, and the Democratic Merits of Second Sight 65
Spiritual and Colored Cosmopolitanism 70
The Young Men’s Christian Association 74
The Fellowship of Reconciliation 82
Gandhi 91
India 94
Christian Liberalism for the Minority 101
3. Wartime San Francisco’s Pragmatic Religious
Institution: Pluralism and Mysticism within the Burgeoning
Fellowship Church 110
Thurman and the War 114
The Draw of San Francisco 118
New Beginnings 120
Pluralism within the Fellowship Church 131
Mysticism within the Fellowship Church 137
Mysticism as Spiritual Practice 139
Intellectual Supplements 146
Religious Experience through Art 149
Practical Implications 151
viii Contents
4. Another Side of the Christian Left: Institutional Religion and

Middlebrow Book Culture 155
The Fellowship Church’s Cosmopolitanism and Christian Liberalism 156
Cosmopolitan Community 156
Christian Liberalism 170
Jesus and the Disinherited 178
Institutional Christianity and the Historical Jesus 181
Psychology and Mysticism 186
Reception 193
Conclusion 199
Select Bibliography 219

Index 227
Figures
I.1. The Fellowship Church at 2041 Larkin Street in the Russian Hill
neighborhood of San Francisco, CA, 2014 3
I.2. The interior of the Fellowship Church, 2014 3
I.3. The “scales of justice” in a stained glass window of the Fellowship
Church, 2014 5
3.1. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Howard Thurman, and Coleman Jennings
(master of ceremonies), at a testimonial dinner in honor of Thurman
given in June 1944 in Washington, DC 121
3.2. Cover of The Growing Edge (1949) 125
3.3. The Fellowship Church, 2014 135
4.1. Intercultural Workshop group and their director, Heather Whitton,
from The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, 1947 158
4.2. The Fellowship Church Choir, 1952 161
Abbreviations
Frequently cited works have been identified by the following abbreviations:
HTC-HGARC The Howard Thurman Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival

Research Center, Boston University, Boston, MA.
HTPP The Howard Thurman Papers Project, Boston University,
Boston, MA.
PHWTV1 The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman. Walter Earl Fluker,
ed. Vol. 1, “My People Need Me, June 1918—March 1936.”
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.
ed. Vol. 2, “Christian, Who Calls Me Christian?, April 1936–
August 1943.” Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012.
ed. Vol. 3, “The Bold Adventure, September 1943–May 1949.”
ed. Vol. 4, “The Soundless Passion of a Single Mind June 1949—
December 1962.” Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2017.
ed. Vol. 5,“The Wider Ministry January 1963—April 1981.”
Note: The Howard Thurman Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival

Research Center has changed and been reorganized over the years. HTC-
HGARC indicates primary sources that I encountered directly through my
personal research at the archives, and HTTP indicates archival material that
I have come to through secondary sources.
Howard Thurman Timeline
1899 Howard Washington Thurman was born in (likely West Palm Beach) Florida.
1913 Joined Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Daytona, Florida.
1919 G
raduated from Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, Florida, as valedic-
torian, and received a scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
1922 S erved as president of the Morehouse branch of the Young Man’s Christian
Association (YMCA).
1923 G
raduated Morehouse College as valedictorian; entered Rochester
Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York.
1925 B
ecame a member of the National Council of Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR).
1926 Graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary.
1926–1928 Resided as pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio.
1929 B
egan study under Rufus Jones at Haverford College in Haverford,
Pennsylvania.
1932–1944 Served as professor of Christian theology and dean of Rankin Chapel at
Howard University in Washington, DC.
1935–1936 Led “Negro Delegation of Friendship” to India, Burma, and Ceylon on
behalf of the National YMCA and YMCA.
1936 Met Mahatma Gandhi in Bardoli, India.
1944–1953 Cofounded and presided over the Church for the Fellowship of All
Peoples in San Francisco, California.
1949 Published Jesus and the Disinherited.
1953–1965 Served as the dean of Marsh Chapel and Professor of Spiritual
Resources at Boston University.
1965–1981 Directed the Howard Thurman Educational Trust in San Francisco,
California.
1968 Eulogized Martin Luther King, Jr.
1981 Died at home with his family in San Francisco, California.
Introduction
The United States of America is in fact dedicated to the separation

of the races. Wherever it does not appear, it is the exception rather
than the rule. The will of the American people continues to resist all
movements that would undermine the validity of segregation as in-
digenous to the American way of life. The Christian church reflects
this fact, despite official pronouncements both of church and state.
The resistance does not seem to be influenced by loyalty to Christ or
devotion to His Kingdom on earth. It ignores the handwriting on
the wall that the planet is a small neighborhood owing to the anni-
hilation of space and time. It is unable to deal with the fact that the
earth’s population is predominantly non-Caucasian and that any na-
tional feeling of separation on the basis of race and color jeopardizes
the future of the human race and destroys the possibility of peace for
generations yet to be.
Nothing less than a major revolution in the human spirit can hope
to alter this crystallized pattern of behavior. Confronted with this
stubborn fact, how may the local church share in bringing about a
change? This is the crucial question.
—Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 19591
The African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman

cofounded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples—the United States’
first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church—in San Francisco in
1944. The institution emerged at a paradoxical historical moment: the United
States was waging war on behalf of democratic values while it maintained the
1 Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples
(1959; repr. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 141.
The Fellowship Church. Amanda Brown, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197565131.003.0001
2 Introduction
practice of Jim Crow segregation and controversially relocated around 120,000

Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast to government-mandated intern-
ment camps.2 Racial tensions ran high, especially in wartime industrial cities
like San Francisco, but, at the same time, many liberal leaders were increasing
their focus on civil rights and interracial cooperation. Amid the growing na-
tionalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and
cultural “others,” the Fellowship Church successfully established a pluralistic
community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship,
over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed
barriers.”3 Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected
to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the
human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism
within the long civil rights movement. The Fellowship Church attracted influ-
ential local, national, and international social leaders from the time of its in-
ception and the ideas behind it were so potent and relevant that it still operates
at 2041 Larkin Street in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood (Figure I.1).
In 2000, SF Gate journalist Scott Ostler called the Fellowship Church
“56 years ahead of its time.”4 The author was referring to the fact that the
American Christian church has historically been one of the most stubborn
institutions to integrate racially and that, even as the civil rights movement
was well under way in the late 1960s, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
accurately proclaimed that “the most segregated hour in Christian America
is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.”5 The Fellowship Church, which chal-
lenged both Jim Crow and the long-standing practices and doctrines of or-
ganized Western Christianity, can easily appear as an historical outlier, but
to call it “ahead of its time” is misleading. In actuality, through a lens of in-
tellectual history, the Fellowship Church was right on time—a product of
evolving twentieth-century ideas and a reflection of the shifting mid-century
American public consciousness.
There is no denying that the Fellowship Church was and is a unique
institution—one only needs to visit the church to comprehend its indi-
viduality (Figure I.2). An unassuming, off-white, boxy building tucked in
2 “Japanese Relocation during World War II,” National Archives and Records Administration,
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/japanese-relocation.
3 Scott Ostler, “Bringing Folks Together on Sunday,” SF Gate, November 13, 2000.
4 Ibid.
5 Martin Luther King, Jr. “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” lecture, National
Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968, in Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford
University, Stanford, CA.
Figure I.1 The Fellowship Church at 2041 Larkin Street in the Russian Hill
neighborhood of San Francisco, CA, 2014. Photo by author.
Figure I.2 The interior of the Fellowship Church, 2014. Photo by author.
4 Introduction
between a line of archetypal San Francisco row houses, the church does
not stand out as anything special or unique at first glance. The structure,
which was originally owned by an Evangelical and Reform congregation,
has a few signifiers of a “traditional” American church, but it is overall a
rather a generic building on a city block with big wooden doors. The inte-
rior contains some familiar features of institutional Christianity—a recre-
ation room, a pastor’s study, a worship room complete with pews, stained
glass windows, and a pulpit—but its intentional departure from other
common Christian décor is noticeable. There is no crucifix or depictions
of saints; the hymnbook is nondenominational; and the stained glass is
comprised of secular, democratic images like the scales of justice (Figure
I.3). The atmosphere feels completely spiritual yet completely secular at
the same time.
The services offered, which for the most part still follow Thurman’s orig-
inal format, are equally compelling—even to this individual who generally
feels helplessly uncomfortable within the walls of a church. The meeting
follows a clear, organized format, but it is one that is distinct to the Fellowship
Church’s principles. The worship begins with music, then silent meditation,
then a segment on “expressing a sense of awe” led by the pastor to inspire
the spiritual mood, then a meditation reading from a congregation member
followed by music and prayer, and then a segment on “resting in the pres-
ence” featuring a sermon with some contemporary social relevance. On a
particular Sunday in the summer of 2014, for example, Natasha Ostrom, a
visiting minister from the nearby Starr-King School for the Ministry, deliv-
ered a sermon that compared her experiences with the Occupy Phoenix
movement to certain aspects of the life of the historical Jesus.6 Ostrom’s
sermon, like many others delivered at the Fellowship Church today, applied
lessons from ancient religious texts to contemporary social issues and liberal
social activism. Recordings of recent years’ sermons include examples from
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and other belief systems utilized to
address a range of social issues like violence, homelessness, discrimination,
and economic inequality, to name just a few.7 After the sermon each Sunday,
service is closed with a casual coffee hour, also originally implemented by
Thurman, for the diverse members and guests to interact with each other and
6 Natasha Ostrom, lecture, The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, San Francisco, CA, June
22, 2014. This sermon was attended by the author. There is no archived manuscript to my knowledge.
7 The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, “Media,” The Church for the Fellowship of All
Peoples’ website, Soundcloud files. http://fellowshipsf.org/media/.

Introduction 5
Figure I.3 The “scales of justice” in a stained glass window of the Fellowship
Church, 2014. Photo by author.
discuss current affairs. The whole event is designed to spur feelings of spir-
itual connectivity between people and to inspire attendees to work for a more
harmonious and socially just world.
Although it is not the case, one can see why the SF Gate would mistakenly
depict the Fellowship Church to be ahead of its time in 2000—even today it
is unlike the majority of American churches, and its commitment to liberal
politics is a stark departure from the twenty-first-century Far Right’s domi-
nance over faith-based social politics. The Fellowship Church, at the current
6 Introduction
moment, is a refreshing counterpart to religious conservatism as well as a

promising example of social, cultural, and religious pluralism. The institu-
tion is so contemporarily relevant that it can be hard to imagine it promoted
the same ideas and practices prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act and
Voting Rights Act.
To be fair, historians have yet to fully explain the Fellowship Church’s
impact on modern cultural and religious practices and its influence on the
modern civil rights struggle. In terms of what it did to effect mass social
change, the original Fellowship Church’s impact is difficult to measure pre-
cisely. It did not have the same kind of agency as liberal religious organiza-
tions like the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) or the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), and it did not spearhead any significant tan-
gible changes in American institutional Christianity. No major historians
have devoted complete studies to the institution nor have any credited it
as an instrumental force in modern liberal social activism. The Fellowship
Church did not have an enormous national impact per se, and it is therefore
challenging to establish its historical importance. If it was truly “ahead of its
time,” however, it would surely never have survived this long, and it would
definitely not have thrived in the World War II and Cold War eras.
It is tempting to label an institution or an event or a person that does not
fit with our current understanding of the past as ahead of its time—as some-
thing outside of its own moment—but it is often the misunderstood and
overlooked aspects of history that warrant closest examination. Of course,
Scott Ostler is not a professional historian and the SF Gate is not a schol-
arly authority, but the journalist’s struggle to articulate the significance of the
church that he was so clearly impressed by is important. An unfortunate ten-
dency to deal with apparent historical outliers is to brand them with a con-
venient cliché or to ignore them altogether. The slim (but growing) amount
of scholarship on Howard Thurman and the Fellowship Church proves just
that. Historians have struggled to fully locate the Fellowship Church within
its historical moment and, although some acknowledge and applaud the ide-
alism behind it, they have failed to fully work it into accounts of American
religious liberalism and the civil rights movement. In this regard, the institu-
tion is generally treated as a noble but underachieving effort to combat racial
discrimination within the American church or it is ignored. Unsure where to
place it within the broader scope of modern American history, scholars who
have approached the topic have suggestively framed the Fellowship Church
as ahead of its time as well.
Introduction 7
Historian Albert Broussard briefly discussed the Fellowship Church in his

Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954
(1993) and argued that the experimental church “achieved only limited suc-
cess.”8 He noted the institution’s inability to “accelerate the pace of equality in
housing or employment” in San Francisco and concluded that the institution
served as a distraction to Thurman as his “work in the church kept him from
playing more than a peripheral role in the black community.”9 Broussard’s
negative depiction of the Fellowship Church has been the dominant view
of Thurman’s experiment— most scholarly references to the Fellowship
Church cite Broussard to some degree—but the institution is a crucial piece
of Thurman’s biography, and Thurman historians are starting to recognize its
central and culminating role in his life and work.
Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt’s Visions of a Better World: Howard
Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence
(2011) included a chapter on the Fellowship Church.10 The authors offered a
brief institutional biography and connected it to Thurman’s spirituality and
social activism, but their assessment ultimately concluded that the church
did not achieve Thurman’s goal of inspiring institutions nationwide to em-
ulate it. The chapter is informative and this work is indebted to the authors’
research, but the conclusion that the Fellowship Church was an unsuccessful
pet project leaves the reader wanting. Both assessments of the Fellowship
Church indicate that the institution was provocative and inspiring but that,
ultimately, its failure to affect major social change made it historically un-
important. Broussard, Dixie, and Eisenstaedt demonstrate clear respect for
Thurman, but their celebration of his church, what Dixie and Eisenstaedt
called “the favorite of all his possessions,” is reserved and limited.11 These
scholars clearly understand the church was an important part of Thurman’s
footprint—they wanted to talk about it and incorporate it in their work—but
they just could not completely pinpoint why it matters and how it fits. At least
that is the frustration out of which this project was born—and the frustration
that led to my evaluation of the Fellowship Church apart from just its wins
and losses.
8 Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 189.

9 Ibid.
10 Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to
India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 151–181.
11 Ibid., 179.
8 Introduction
It is this historian’s estimation that the answer to assessing the Fellowship

Church is through an exercise in intellectual history—to assess its meaning
fully, we must focus on its ideas and values. The historical significance of the
Fellowship Church is not necessarily what it accomplished, but rather what
it tells us about the moment in which it was founded and, ultimately, the cli-
mate in the following decades that nurtured its existence. This book locates
the Fellowship Church and the ideas behind it within the broad liberal in-
tellectual tradition of twentieth-century Christian America. The institution
is revealing of the role of liberal Christianity and spirituality within leftist
social movements; it is telling of the evolution of American public conscious-
ness and the popular embrace of pluralism and tolerance around World War
II; and it offers insight into elements of modern nonviolent activism other-
wise shadowed by the staged protests of the 1950s and 1960s. The Fellowship
Church was established during a moment of intense social and cultural con-
flict, but its history illuminates the ways in which people have imagined initi-
ating social activism from a grassroots level during times when government
has failed to protect its citizens’ civil liberties, safety, and overall wellbeing
through judicial safeguards. Thurman’s efforts to affect individual con-
sciousness in the midst of the broad and complicated systemic failures and
contradictions of his own historical moment are particularly relevant in the
conflicted social climate of the twenty-first century. His belief that “a major
revolution in the human spirit” could begin at the local level was indicative
of the time in which he lived and worked and is still pertinent and appli-
cable today.
The Fellowship Church was a product of a nexus of ideas that grew up in
the early twentieth century that gained power and relevance through World
War II’s challenge to hegemonic social norms. Some observers referred to
the Fellowship Church as “revolutionary,” and in terms of its staunch re-
jection of segregation and traditional Christianity, it was.12 It made plural-
istic cooperation a spiritual priority, and its members sought unity with an
unseen force of love that connected all the world’s peoples—a concept of a
shared God that “was neither male nor female, black nor white, Protestant
nor Catholic nor Buddhist nor Hindu.”13 The Fellowship Church upheld the
idea that Christianity was, at its core, an activist philosophy that commanded
its subscribers to work against ideas, systems, and institutions that divided
12 Editors of Christian Century, “Trumpet Ready in the West,” Christian Century 12 (September
1951), 1040–1045.
13 Dorsey Blake and Eleanor Piez, interview by author, San Francisco, CA, June 26, 2014.
Introduction 9
and oppressed members of the human family. Its inherent politicism, in that
regard, distinguished it from expressions of organized religion that focused
on dogmatic conformity and personal salvation. The Fellowship Church can
appear, even by today’s standards, as radical and anomalous, especially when
we consider organized religion’s stubbornness to integrate racially and the
hyperconservatism of our contemporary religious Right. While its estab-
lishment was certainly a brave, risky, and defiant act in 1944, its existence
and survival, as far as the intellectual historian is concerned, are the result of
factors far more evolutionary than revolutionary.
The Fellowship Church, as its current copastor Dorsey Blake told me in
2014, was “the actualization or the realization of [Thurman’s] thought”
and, for that reason, Thurman’s intellectual biography is a crucial element
of this project.14 Thurman was a provocative figure whose life and work
are just beginning to emerge as important historical topics. Twentieth-
century historians have begun to flesh out Thurman’s significance. Dixie and
Eisenstadt’s work highlights his role in transporting Gandhian ideas to the
Black Christian activist community, and their project is part of an effort to
secure his place within the history of modern African American civil rights
activism. Thurman was part of a cadre of African American intellectuals who
were educated within W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” model and who even-
tually molded the heroic figures of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and
1960s. The first African American to meet with Gandhi, Thurman played a
crucial role in merging nonviolence with African American protest strategy
and pitching the Hindu pacifist’s moral tactics and racial minority activism as
compatible with black activism and American Christian liberalism. He was
instrumental in injecting a minority perspective to the twentieth-century
Christian Left and helped lay the foundations for the faith-based nonviolent
activism of the integrationist civil rights movement. While he was rarely on
the front lines of nonviolent staged protests, his ideas were a leading force be-
hind them. Thurman mentored leaders like King, James Farmer, and Vernon
Jordan—all of whom drew from his ideas about the social activism of the
historical Jesus that were best articulated in Thurman’s 1949 study, Jesus and
the Disinherited.15 In 1978, Ebony magazine named Thurman one of the fifty
most important figures in African American history.16
14 Ibid.
15 Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
16 Lerone Bennett, “Howard Thurman: 20th Century Holy Man,” Ebony, February 1978, 68.
10 Introduction
In addition to his place within the long civil rights movement, Thurman was
a renowned religious intellectual whose theological contributions demanded
the attention of his contemporaries. In 1953, he was selected as one of Life
magazine’s twelve “Great Preachers” of the twentieth century.17 A student of
the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones, Thurman adopted Jones’s socially conscious
affirmation mysticism and employed it as a spiritual approach to dealing with
social disunity. Thurman’s work fits within the tradition of modern liberal
theology—a reformist culture within American Protestantism that balances
Christian orthodoxy with rationalism, knowledge, and ethics. An intellec-
tual movement best historicized through the works of scholars Gary Dorrien,
Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Matthew Hedstrom, liberal theology emerged as a
compromise between turn-of-the-twentieth-century secularism and long-
standing American religious tradition. Focused on empiricism and personal
experience, its practitioners judged ancient biblical texts by standards of
modern intellectual inquiry and sought out the usefulness of religious ethics
to contemporary life.18
Liberal theology was compatible and often interchangeable with the cul-
ture of twentieth-century spiritual “seeking” that provoked a peaked interest
in mysticism, Eastern religious practices like yoga and meditation, and a
widespread embrace of the idea that the spiritual quest is a universal impulse.
The idea that historical scrutiny of scripture and personal religious experi-
ence could serve the goals of social progressivism motivated intellectuals
to theorize about the relationship between religious experience and social
change. William James’s The Varieties of the Religious Experience (1902) es-
tablished religion and religious experience within the scholarly community
as a relevant and useful aspect of human life and the popularity of mid-
dlebrow religious book culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—to which
Thurman and his peers contributed—disseminated the modern appreciation
for spirituality among the general public.19
Narrow studies on modern liberal theology that focus on mysticism are
particularly kind to Thurman. Hal Bridges’s American Mysticism: From
17 Editors of Life, “Great Preachers,” Life, April 6, 1953, 126–133.

18 See Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity,
1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003); Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of
Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005).
19 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1902).
Introduction 11
William James to Zen (1970) portrays Thurman as “outstanding and repre-

sentative” of a culture of modern American mystics who were concerned
with contemporary social issues but were ultimately “intensely interested—
as mystics the world over have always been interested—in timeless questions
of good and evil, of the nature of God or ultimately reality, and of the ‘im-
prisoned splendor’ within man and how it may be found.”20 Arguing that the
twentieth-century United States was particularly hospitable to mysticism and
that American mystics were not just “exceptional swimmers against the so-
cial current,” Bridges’s analysis supported the notion that Thurman, instead
of being atypically otherworldly and disconnected, was a key part of a strong
American intellectual and spiritual tradition.21 Because Thurman’s African
American minority status made him acutely aware of the racially divisive
practices of the American church, Bridges attests that his reformist attitude
toward the church and his insistence that it be more focused on achieving
mystical unity were notably convincing. Life’s recognition of Thurman as a
figure responsible for “bringing Americans back to the churches” speaks to
the palatable nature of his practice.22
The long civil rights movement and modern theological liberalism are
interconnected, but the historiographies on the two topics are discordant.
Thurman is a fine example of this categorical rigidity as he is generally treated
either as a supporting character in the history of African American nonvio-
lent activism or as part of a long lineage of religious activists and mystics
within modern liberal theology. Thurman deserves attention in both these
historiographies. To put him at the center of the intellectual history of how
these two topics are intricately connected does justice to both Thurman and
the historical fields. The best way to do this is to anchor Thurman to his phil-
osophical foundation of pragmatism—the original American “idea about
ideas” that cultivated African American social activism and justified reli-
gious experience and, furthermore, heightened consciousness as a means of
social change.
Chapter 1 of this book establishes his place within modern American
thought. Thurman inherited pragmatism from William James by way of W. E.
B. Du Bois and Rufus Jones. Du Bois applied James’s ideas about people’s
“blindness” to the experiences of others and the theory that social norms
20 Hal Bridges, American Mysticism: From William James to Zen (New York: Harper & Row,
1970), 9.
21 Ibid.
22 Editors of Life, “Great Preachers.”
12 Introduction
could evolve over time, through human agency, to better represent the needs
of the democratic whole to his ideas about Black agitation and activism—
a school of thinking within which Thurman was educated and nurtured.
Thurman’s liberal theological component, especially his mysticism, is best
understood through the James-Jones lineage. Rufus Jones drew off of James’s
secular theories on mystical experience to popularize a culture of religious
seeking and the pursuit of spiritual truth. Informed by his Quaker back-
ground, Jones theorized that the individual could reach points of height-
ened consciousness and could achieve a sense of oneness with a divine truth
(James did not specify what this universal truth was, but Jones insisted that
it was God). Both James and Jones favored affirmation mysticism—the idea
that once a person experienced wholeness with the rest of the universe that
he would be motivated and even responsible for attempting to create the
same synchronicity within the society that he lived. Thurman, who had mys-
tical leanings since childhood but could never fully articulate his insights on
spirituality, felt as though he found a kindred spirit after he encountered one
of Jones’s books on mysticism in 1929. The discovery led Thurman to study
under Jones at Haverford that spring (with special permission from the col-
lege since Haverford did not admit Black students at that point). Thurman
emerged from Haverford armed with a sophisticated grasp of affirmation
mysticism that he connected seamlessly to his activist education. Through
close readings of James, Du Bois, Jones, and Thurman, the chapter argues
that Thurman’s pragmatist heritage both establishes him as a distinctly
modern American thinker and places the Fellowship Church—the physical
expression of his ideas—as a distinctly modern American institution.
The Fellowship Church, in addition to being an articulation of important
strains of twentieth-century American philosophy, is representative of the
evolution of the American Christian Left, especially the maturation of the
radical religious vanguard, the FOR. The church itself was born out of cor-
respondence between Thurman and other FOR members. Thurman’s intel-
lectual development—his education, his interactions with his mentors, his
academic life—clearly did not happen in a vacuum, and it is therefore impor-
tant to consider the organizations and, ultimately, the broad social and po-
litical currents in which he was involved. Thurman came of age in the Young
Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), one of the few national organizations
that were hospitable to young African Americans, and held a number of
leadership positions within it before he eventually rose through the ranks of
the further politically left FOR. He was both shaped by and a shaper of these
Introduction 13
institutions, and his experiences within them is telling of the ways in which
racial minority perspectives influenced the greater Christian Left over the
course of the twentieth century.
FOR was a vital social change agent in the twentieth century. Established
as a response to the violence of World War I, it legitimized Christian pacifism
as a serious political position and fostered the development of the African
American nonviolent campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights move-
ment. Black FOR members of Thurman’s generation were integral in tailoring
the Christian Left’s political ideology to include minority perspectives, but
the current scholarship on the topic muddles these important contributions.
Scholars of the Christian Left like Joseph Kip Kosek and Matthew Hedstrom,
for example, emphasized the instrumental efforts of White FOR members in
popularizing Gandhi’s theories on nonviolent direct activism in the United
States. In his 2009, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern
American Democracy, Kosek lionized the White lawyer Richard Gregg
for disseminating this message and Hedstrom favored White theologian
E. Stanley Jones in a 2014 talk, “The Rise of the ‘Nones.’ ” But they both over-
look the full extent of the agency of minority members.23 Other studies like
Dixie and Eisenstadt’s Visions of a Better World serve to correct this common
oversight by expanding on how Thurman, who toured through South Asia
and spoke with the Hindu activist about their shared minority status in 1935,
connected Gandhian philosophy to the African American talented tenth, but
there is still more to be said. What is missing in the historiography is a com-
plete explanation of how non-Whites within FOR shaped the organization’s
cosmopolitanism and pushed it to focus on issues of domestic and global
racial oppression. Thurman’s role within the organized Christian Left is cru-
cial as it serves as an entry point into the narrative of how the organization
and the broader movement developed to incorporate minority perspectives.
Black agency was vital to the development of FOR’s pluralistic character from
the organization’s inception.
Chapter 2 utilizes Thurman’s biography to comment on the ways in which
a dynamic minority point of view pushed the otherwise White-dominated
Christian Left to take on a more pluralistic and tolerant identity in the 1920s
and 1930s. In line with Du Bois’s theory that minorities have a special insight,
23 Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Matthew Hedstrom, “The Rise of the ‘Nones’ ” (lecture,
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, November 6, 2014); available at “Matthew Hedstrom,” C-
SPAN.org, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4533499%2Fmatthew-hedstrom.
14 Introduction
or “second sight,” to critique dominant culture, the chapter emphasizes how

Thurman and his peers merged the concerns of the colored cosmopolitan
community—the “darker peoples” that lived under Western imperialism
and American Jim Crow—with the concerns of the Christian spiritual cos-
mopolitan community whose ideology strived to transcend social position.
Minority agency propelled the Christian Left to adopt a pluralistic and tol-
erant character and encouraged respectful, interracial, intercultural, and in-
terfaith efforts to combat systems and ideologies that oppressed and divided.
White Christian liberals touted ideas about the historical Jesus as an advo-
cate for social justice and popularized Gandhi as a Christ-like activist, but
minority leaders like Thurman made those ideas relevant and useful to the
socially disinherited. The Fellowship Church’s establishment in 1944 marks
this consolidation.
While Thurman and the Christian Left were together evolving throughout
the twentieth century, certain macro-level developments created the op-
portunity for the ideas behind the man and the broader movement to grow
teeth. As convincingly argued in Harvard Sitkoff ’s A New Deal for Blacks: The
Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (1978) and historian Wendy
Wall’s Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New
Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (2008), the ideological conditions cre-
ated by the New Deal and World War II encouraged many Americans to
incorporate the values of tolerance and pluralism into the nation’s demo-
cratic ethos.24 The establishment of the Fellowship Church is indicative of
this moment as it represents the ways in which laypeople embraced ideas of
the intellectual and political facets of the Christian Left in the face of war-
time discrimination and social strife. The membership of the Fellowship
Church was diverse not only in its racial and cultural make-up but also in the
professions and education levels of its members. It is important to note that
while the church’s cofounders and a number of prominent members were
among the intellectual elite, the base of the local congregation and a number
of members at large were made up of middle-class (and some working-class)
Americans who were not otherwise tied to exclusive academic or political
sects. The fact that a small group of local San Franciscans was already laying
the foundations of the church that would embody Thurman’s evolving ideas
24 Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The
Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
Introduction 15
on the usefulness of pluralistic and cosmopolitan worship in the quest for

social justice is very telling of the ideological tensions and developments that
occurred during the World War II years.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus closely on the ways in which Thurman’s inherent
pragmatism, specifically his social activism centered on pluralism and mys-
ticism, and the characteristics of the period’s Christian Left—its colored
and spiritual cosmopolitanism as well as its Christian liberalism—were
represented within the early Fellowship Church. The chapters focus on the
years of Thurman’s direction between 1944 and 1953, as he is overwhelm-
ingly accepted to be the primary leader of the institution; the groundwork
he set during his tenure continues to frame its spiritual and philosophical
character today. Although the church’s other cofounder, clergyman and phi-
losophy professor Alfred Fisk, was instrumental in getting the Fellowship
Church off the ground, he left over differences with Thurman about the al-
liance with the Protestant Church in 1945, a decision that Fisk would later
regret.
An objective of the two chapters is to demonstrate how the major
twentieth-century intellectual developments evaluated in Chapters 1 and 2
played out on the ground during the 1940s and 1950s; they examine how
these big ideas were put into practice and evaluate their success. Drawing
heavily from the Fellowship Church’s publications “The Bulletin” and The
Growing Edge—sources housed in Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb
Archival Research Center that are underutilized in the existing Thurman
scholarship—the two chapters offer insight into the ways Thurman tried to
cultivate an environment in which people could connect spiritual practice
and experience with social activist impulses. Furthermore, they indicate the
ways in which local and at-large progressives within the Fellowship Church
community responded to and used their experiences with the church to work
for a more democratic society.
Another goal of these two chapters is to evaluate the inner workings of
the institution under Thurman’s leadership and to comment on how its spe-
cific brand of activism related to mid-century American culture. Chapter 3
traces the early years of the Fellowship Church during the tumultuous yet
promising World War II era and explores its experimentation with affirma-
tion mysticism. Examining both the pluralistic make-up of the congregation
and the means by which Thurman tried to elicit moments of heightened con-
sciousness, the chapter highlights and evaluates the ways in which the insti-
tution aimed to incite social activism through spiritual pursuit.
16 Introduction
Building off of that discussion, Chapter 4 takes a broader look at Thurman’s

activism within the scope of the mid-century Christian Left and examines
how the characteristic cosmopolitanism and Christian liberalism of the
movement thrived within the local institution. The chapter also expands
on how the Fellowship Church’s values transcended its walls through
connections to a dynamic international community of religious liberals
as well as through a thriving liberal religious middlebrow book culture via
Thurman’s 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited. Together, these chapters
emphasize the timeliness of the Fellowship Church and shed light on the
expressions of religious nonviolence that took shape in the mid-twentieth
century.
The book concludes with a discussion of the trajectory of Thurman’s career
and the Fellowship Church since Thurman’s departure in 1953. It examines
his work as dean of the Marsh Chapel and professor of theology at Boston
University and explores his successes and failures in replicating the ideas
promoted at the Fellowship Church in the new, high-stakes environment.
The conclusion then turns to the life of the Fellowship Church until the pre-
sent day, assessing its overall struggles and triumphs and its ability to remain
in operation and support a lively congregation. It ultimately ends with an
evaluation of the institution’s broad influence and contemporary relevance.
Was the institution a product of its time that has remained intact because of
some rogue financial backer grasping to a dream? Are its original members
just holding onto the comfortable community into (very) old age? Or are the
Fellowship Church and its ideas actually still necessary and important in our
early twenty-first-century life?
While racial oppression was a primary concern of Thurman’s, the scope
of his concern, as well as the scope of the institution’s concern, went well be-
yond the fact that American was “dedicated to the separation of the races.”
The initial impetus for Fellowship Church, as Thurman would often indicate,
was born out of the desire to end racism, but its particular brand of social
activism spanned many of the pervading problems of humankind. A news-
letter released by the church in 1947, for example, argued:
Most of us and our neighbors are not completely free from thoughts of
vengeance toward our erstwhile enemies. Most of us and our neighbors be-
lieve in force, in building more tanks, more planes, more rocket bombs—
which will make other nations hurry to build more tanks, and more
planes, and more rocket bombs. Most of us and our neighbors believe in
Introduction 17
maintaining our nation’s “uncompromised sovereignty” (whatever that

is), and securing far-flung bases so that we can protect ourselves and make
other nations behave. Most of us and our neighbors want our nation to be
the “greatest” and most powerful, and with the highest standard of living of
any. Most of us and our neighbors want our particular kind of people (race
or class or select group) to be the “leaders” in our society, directing affairs,
and reaping the rewards of such direction.
Most of us and our neighbors need a great deal of interior overhauling and
of spiritual redemption before the Kingdom of God has a chance where we
are. Yes, world peace can begin at home with us.25
This assessment of the global social climate in 1947 could easily appear in a
2021 American publication about the domestic, and even international, state
of affairs. The concern over issues like industrial weaponry, rising sentiments
of nationalism, the emphasis on economic competition and acquisition of
wealth, and the mistrust for the social or racial “other” reflects the uneasiness
about aspects of modernity that we still deal with today.
Thurman’s enduring prescriptive that people need to liberate their minds
before they can make lasting social change was dismissed by those who did
not find his work appropriate for the immediate struggles of the time, but
it is very possible that Thurman’s methods and his advocacy of a long-term
proactive strategy, as opposed to reactionary strategies like protest, could
have merit. Could it be that the questions and goals of Howard Thurman, as
well as the long lineage of mystics that came before and after him, really are
“timeless”? Or, in a less ambitious vein, could they at least still be useful and
meaningful today? This book, in addition to making a historiographical con-
tribution, attempts to scratch the surface of answering these questions.
25 Howard Thurman and Alfred Fisk, The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, PHWTV3, 1947,
212–221. It is unclear whether this particular section was penned by Thurman or Fisk.
1
The American Thinker
Howard Thurman’s Mid-Twentieth-Century
Pragmatism and the Modern Intellectual Tradition
[A] strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to

the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would
achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: human life
is one and all men are members of one another. And this insight is
spiritual and it is the hard core of religious experience.
—Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness, 19651
Howard Thurman was a practical thinker who saw spirituality in functional

terms as a means to alleviate contemporary problems. He believed racism to
be a spiritual crisis that disrupted the fundamental wholeness of the human
experience and thought a hopeful desire to achieve social harmony was
a natural impulse. Concerned with both individual and social experience,
he believed the best tool to overturn American racism and, for that matter,
all divisive and oppressive belief systems and institutions, was love. Shaped
by some of the twentieth-century’s leading liberal intellectuals, he devel-
oped and wielded an evolved version of American pragmatism that directly
targeted the pressing concerns of the mid-twentieth century. He stood in op-
position to deeply entrenched social and institutional norms and offered a
point of view that was useful enough to survive and mature into our pre-
sent day.
Thurman did not label himself a “pragmatist” per se, but his life and work
were pregnant with pragmatist influences, tenets, and methods. The goal of
1 Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of
Segregation and the Ground of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), x.
The Fellowship Church. Amanda Brown, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197565131.003.0002
The American Thinker 19
this chapter is therefore to distinguish him as one. Pragmatism arose in intel-

lectual circles after the close of the Civil War and is considered the first orig-
inal American philosophy. An open-minded and overall very modest way
of thinking, pragmatism contributed a modern view of the notion of “truth”
and offered a method of philosophy geared toward the practical application
of ideas. A departure from the formal philosophical pursuit of trying to lo-
cate abstract, overarching, and ultimate realities, pragmatism asserted that
the most truthful ideas were whichever ones were most useful in a given en-
vironment. Because environments and contexts were always changing, sys-
tems of beliefs and “norms” were therefore always subject to change. In other
words, there could be no absolutes if ideas and beliefs are tools for social
adjustment and progress. Pragmatism was largely a product of its historical
moment. It was both a reaction to the devastation of the Civil War—a battle
over dogmatic ideologies that took an astonishing number of American
lives—and an intellectual adoption of Darwin’s theories of biological evolu-
tion as laid out in On the Origin of the Species.2 It gave permission to break
with archaic tradition and ushered in the creative, democratic, experimental
mode of thinking that marked twentieth-century liberalism.3
Pragmatism’s founders were part of a small but elite group of late
nineteenth-century intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ironically
called the Metaphysical Club. The concept was originally conceived by
the American philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Charles Sanders
Pierce and was popularized and initiated as a philosophical movement by
William James. Although pragmatism was executed differently by indi-
vidual practitioners, James is a good anchor for this discussion of Thurman.
Writer Louis Menand credited James for launching the “second moment” of
American pragmatism (which Menand argued lasted from 1898 to 1917), and
it was in this moment that he shaped two primary contributors to Thurman’s
thought: W. E. B. Du Bois and Rufus Jones.4 Pragmatism influenced both the
Black activist culture in which Thurman was educated as well as the religious
liberalism and mystical tradition that distinguished his spirituality.
Thurman championed a very specific, nonviolent approach to social
activism—one that rested on the idea that social change would come as the
2 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: J. Murray, 1859). x.

3 See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 2001).

4 Ibid.; Louis Menand, “Pragmatism’s Three Moments,” lecture, Askwith Education Forum,
Boston, MA, February 12, 2014.

20 The Fellowship Church
result of an ongoing intellectual and spiritual education about the world

and the human experience within it. He thought that harmony could only
be achieved through the continuing process of acquiring knowledge about
the realities and experiences of others. His commitment to social change
through personal psychological transformation is less recognizable to
the historian’s eye than tactics of direct action popularized by the African
American civil rights movement and the Christian Left. But his methods,
rooted in pragmatism, are important expressions of the modern American
intellectual tradition.
Most striking about the intellectual relationship between Thurman and
James was their shared, overarching commitment to pluralism—the embrace
of a multitude of perspectives—and meliorism—the idea that the world can
be improved though human effort. While James could not, based on his own
philosophy, determine any absolute moral truths, he was very committed
to democracy on the broad level and theorized that it was both natural and
practical for human beings to work toward democratic goals. To James, one
of the biggest hindrances to democracy and, therefore, to human happiness
was intolerance. In his 1900 essay “What Makes a Life Significant,” he said,
“No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them
off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of
most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most
likely to make the angels weep.”5 This was also a core principle of Thurman’s
thought, and the “blindness,” as James would call it, of individuals to see the
values and experiences of others was the primary problem the Fellowship
Church intended to resolve. Like James, Thurman understood rigid dogmas
not only as narrow interpretations of the world but also as dangerous affronts
to other members of the human race.
For Thurman, the solution to the injustices and cruelties that intolerance
bred was largely a psychological one. He was concerned with how the human
mind interacted with the external world and thought that absolutisms and
closed-mindedness hindered basic desires for harmony. Thurman believed
that human beings have an inherent longing to sustain peaceful community.
Just as James saw the human organism to have a natural instinct for social
ethics, Thurman also based his theories on secular, scientific observations. In
The Search for Common Ground, he wrote, “In human society, the experience
5 William James, On Some of Life’s Ideals: On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; What Makes
Life Significant (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1918), 320.
of community, or realized potential, is rooted in life itself because the intu-

itive human urge for community reflects a characteristic of all life. In the
total panorama of the external world of nature, there seems to be a pattern of
structural dependability and continuity, or what may be called an inner logic,
that manifests itself in forms, organizational schemes, and in a wide variety
of time-space arrangements.” He continued, “The most striking pattern of
all this is that there seems to be an affinity between the human mind and all
external forms, a fact that makes an understanding of the world possible for
the mind.”6 This optimistic view of human nature made both Thurman and
James confident that the intolerances that marked both of their contempo-
rary worlds could dissolve.
James saw absolutes to be restrictive yet fallible. Thurman also thought
the “contradictions of life are not in themselves final or ultimate” and firmly
believed fixed ideologies to be discriminatory and problematic. He wrote, “If
there are contradictions between good and evil—between that which makes
for peace and that which makes for turbulence—then these contradictions
are regarded from this point of view as being in themselves ultimate and
final; and because they are ultimate, inescapable, and therefore binding.” He
went on, “Back of such a view is the conception that life in essence is fixed,
finished, unchanging. Man is caught in the agonizing grip of [the] inevi-
table; and whatever may be his chance of circumstantial assignment, all his
alternatives are reduced to zero.”7 James also rejected the “good and evil”
dichotomy of the world’s condition but believed that good was a possibility
if humans made it that way. Making a break with his contemporaries who
thought the evolution of ideas to be just as arbitrary as Darwin’s biological
evolution, James hoped pragmatism could facilitate some kind of progress.
While this perspective is, of course, based on personal choice and the will
to believe it, this hopeful outlook facilitated activist philosophy. The basis of
James’s meliorism was that societies would not naturally progress toward the
good of humankind on their own, but they could get better through human
agency. Thurman shared the same outlook.
To understand how James thought closed-minded intolerance could
evolve out of itself, we must also consider another very important aspect of
Thurman’s thought as well: the power of experience. James urged that the
6 Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground: An Inquiry into the Basis of Man’s Experience
of Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 5.

7 Howard Thurman, Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain of the Negro Spirituals
(New York: Harper, 1955), 63.

expedient knowledge derived from experience could override previously

held conceptions that did not coincide with the newly encountered true
knowledge. He said that experience “has a way of boiling over, and making
correct our present formulas,” meaning that peoples’ beliefs and perceptions
of realities could change when the individual is exposed to something that
more closely fits with one’s experience.8 Thurman wanted people to have
experiences that were powerful enough to change their minds or, at least,
incrementally alter them to be more inclusive. With that mental problem of
intolerance as his primary target, Thurman had
a profound conviction that meaningful and creative experiences between

peoples can be more compelling than all the ideas, concepts, faiths, fears,
ideologies, and prejudices that divide them; and absolute faith that if such
experiences can be multiplied and sustained over a time interval of suffi-
cient duration any barrier that separates one person from another can be
undermined and eliminated.9
The most important form of experience, for Thurman, was the religious
kind and William James was largely responsible for carving out a place for re-
ligion within secular pragmatism. It is through James that we can very clearly
understand how Thurman’s religious beliefs were both activist and suitable
for the changing spiritual landscape of the modern United States. Focused on
spiritual and religious experience as part of human life rather than the doc-
trine of the organized church, James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience
legitimized spirituality within the scientific community. Positioning reli-
gious experience both as possible and useful, he ascertained that its func-
tional benefits could not be dismissed. Many of the theories laid out in
Varieties are reflected in Thurman’s own ideas about the American Christian
church and the utility of mysticism.
Recognizing that there was not much serious, scholarly investigation into
the concept of religious experience around the turn of the twentieth century,
James wrote against modernity’s skepticism of religion and addressed the
subject though a scientific approach in order to give it credibility. Breaking
religion down into analytical categories, he explored the characteristics of
8 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans
Green and Co., 1907), 86.

9 Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 148.

religious experience, the “fruits” or benefits of such experience, and the char-
acteristics of religious life. James acknowledged that humans could not prove
whether a divine entity or ideal power existed or not and instead focused
more on the practical benefits that a person gained by feeling part of some-
thing bigger than one’s self. His thoughtful investigation of the primary re-
ligious experience that occurred in one’s mind led James to conclude that it
is worth our time to sincerely consider and try to understand the perceived
spiritual realm. While James did not go as far to argue that God was real, his
insightful interpretation of religious experience secured Varieties as a sem-
inal and enduringly important work on the subject.
James defended the possibility of religious experience through secular
language. In Varieties he argued that we cannot dismiss unseen realities like
intuition of “something being there,” or “undifferentiated senses of reality”
like hallucinations, or even the presence of God as unsupported psycholog-
ical experiences.10 James argued that unseen realities are often more mean-
ingful to people than things they perceive rationally through the senses and
that they are therefore viable within the pragmatist lens. He saw religious
experience as useful to individuals trying to cope with their own suffering
or even suffering within their own societies and understood truths gained
through religious experience to be workable and valid to those who chose to
accept it. Thurman echoed these ideas in ways that will be explored later in
this chapter and throughout this book.
Thurman defined religious experience as the “conscious and direct ex-
posure of the individual to God.”11 This definition could be problematic
to the secularist, but Thurman did not consider God to be what we would
imagine as the human-formed Christian God of, say, Renaissance artwork.
Thurman’s conception of God was more universal and inclusive than a spe-
cific interpretation of a higher power by a specific creed or group. Thurman’s
God was an abstract yet powerfully binding force of love that connected
all living things—a reoccurring theme in his work. Reminiscent of James,
Thurman was hopeful that periods of heightened consciousness, facilitated
by the intellectual work of meditation, prayer, social experience, or art could
provide insight that would make it easier for the individual to work produc-
tively within his or her personal and social life. Thurman firmly believed that
10James, Varieties of the Religious Experience, 58.

11Thurman, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness
(New York: Harper & Row, 1954; Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1978), 20–21.
moments of heightened consciousness were possible and revealing of accu-

rate truths. “The things that are true in any religious experience,” he said, “are
to be found in religious experience precisely because they are true; they are
not true simply because they are found in religious experience. It is not the
context that determines validity.”12
This is not to say, however, that heightened psychological consciousness
would revolutionize one’s entire personality or worldview but, rather, that by
revealing truths, religious experience could help the individual let go of ideas
incompatible with new truths and gradually work toward a more complete
understanding of the world. Thurman thought that insights gained through
these periods of heightened consciousness are so profound and so relevant
that the individual must make way in his or her mind, which is already filled
with the clutter of experience and personality, to fit this new, enlightened
perspective. In this regard, his ideas about religious experience and psycho-
logical transformation were completely compatible with pragmatism’s theo-
ries of incremental, evolutionary change.
Thurman is difficult to categorize because he was an important intellec-
tual in the early Black civil rights struggle, and his methods were not repre-
sentative of the majority of its activists. In fact, his commitment to internal,
incremental change was perplexing and sometimes looked down upon by
members of the movement. One young activist recalled being disappointed
in Thurman’s ideas about mysticism, remarking, “We thought we had found
our Moses in Thurman, but he turned out to be not Moses, but a mystic!”
The activist went on to call mysticism “the kind of spirituality that gets
people all riled up.”13 In recalling Thurman’s unique form of activism in 2002,
Dr. Robert Franklin, president of Howard University’s Interdenominational
Theological Center, said that Thurman was “way ahead of his generation,”
noting that he “was a twenty-first century theologian working in the middle
of the twentieth century.”14 While Franklin is correct in the notion that some
of Thurman’s peers were not on the same page as him in terms of approaches
to social activism, Thurman certainly was not out of place in his historical
moment. He was exactly where he belonged.
12 Thurman, With Head and Heart, 120.

13 PBS, “The Legacy of Howard Thurman: Mystic and Theologian,” PBS website, January 18, 2002,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2002/01/18/january-18-2002-the-legacy-of-howard-
thurman-mystic-and-theologian/7895/.
14 Ibid.
Thurman was born into a time that pragmatism created—a time in which
people understood the universe to be unfinished and a time in which indi-
viduals were, as Menand remarked, “the agents of their own destinies.”15
Systems that would have otherwise held people of Thurman’s race or dis-
position down in the past—absolute systems of racial hierarchy or religious
dogmatism—were exposed as the West raced into modernity and chal-
lenged their inability to move the world forward. The ways in which prag-
matism affected broad shifts in the American social and political landscape
will spill into other chapters of this book, but, for now, we must focus on the
two primary areas that shaped Thurman and placed him comfortably within
modern American thought: Black social activism and mysticism.
Howard Thurman never met William James—he was eleven when James
died in 1910—but it is very unlikely his life would have turned out the way
it did had William James never lived and taught. Thurman read James, of
course, but his primary access to the ideas of pragmatism’s “second moment”
came in the form of two of James’s philosophical descendants—the African
American activist W. E. B. Du Bois and the Quaker mystic activist Rufus
Jones. To be clear, Du Bois and Jones differ from James as well as each other
on a number of levels, but they served as mediums for pragmatism to shape
the major tenets of Thurman’s thought. Pragmatism opened the doors for
Black social activism and helped bring ideas about religious experience as
a means for social change into the public sphere—contributions that would
mold Thurman’s activism and provide the foundations of the Fellowship
Church.
W. E. B. Du Bois, African American Activism, and

the Talented Tenth
Pragmatism accounted for the way Thurman thought as well as the oppor-
tunities he was afforded. In terms of just how American of a thinker he was,
we must first look at pragmatism at the macro level and examine how it gave
a poor, Southern grandson of a former slave a voice in the twentieth cen-
tury. While we have already seen a glimpse of James in Thurman’s words,
we need to take a step back to consider both how Thurman attained access
to White-dominated American intellectual culture and, furthermore, how
15 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 371.

he earned public prestige and a social role as a highly respected theologian

and intellectual. Aside from his own intellectual capabilities, work ethic, and
talent, Thurman’s success was attributed to an early twentieth-century shift
in African American politics—a shift largely orchestrated by James’s student,
W. E. B. Du Bois.
Thurman knew Du Bois and even welcomed him as a guest at the
Fellowship Church, but the significance of their relationship runs much
deeper than personal acquaintance. Thurman was part of a modern Black
intelligentsia that was cultivated under the intellectual leadership of Du Bois.
The triumph of Du Bois’s Black agitation against Booker T. Washington’s
accommodationism has long been accepted as an important transition in
Black social politics, but the first generation to fully embody Du Bois’s “tal-
ented tenth” and use academic social science and philosophy to practically
address racial oppression needs fuller coverage. Thurman and his peers
formed a well-connected community of Black scholar activists that altered
twentieth-century American racial discourse and introduced new ways of
framing White supremacy and oppression.
While Du Bois can be difficult to label intellectually because he held an
array of political and philosophical positions throughout his career, some
historians have convincingly classified him, especially through his early
work, as a pragmatist.16 Cornel West’s interpretation of pragmatism as a
philosophy of cultural criticism, which this study accepts, is especially rele-
vant to Du Bois’s work. West has characterized pragmatism as an evasion of
traditional philosophical problems—a method of thinking that is free from
elite and exclusive methods that “attempts to transform linguistic, social, cul-
tural, and political traditions for the purpose of increasing the scope of in-
dividual development and democratic operations.”17 When we consider the
centrality of race to Du Bois’s work, this definition is quite applicable because
he was completely committed to resolving the social problems surrounding
inequality. When Du Bois famously proclaimed that “the problem of the
Twentieth Century was the problem of the color-line,” he surely meant it as a
problem the pragmatic method needed to address.18
16 See Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Ross Posnack, “Going Astray, Going Forward: Du
Bosian Pragmatism and Its Lineage,” in A Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law,
and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 7.
17 West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 230.
18 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903), vii.
Du Bois attended Harvard University from 1888 to 1895 and studied

under James “while he was first developing his pragmatic philosophy.”19
The two remained close friends after he graduated. Du Bois ran in the same
circles as other notable progressive pragmatists like Jane Addams and John
Dewey and was wholeheartedly committed to the idea that old systems could
change to fit the needs of the many. Whereas Booker T. Washington sought
out ways for African Americans to fit themselves into the broader American
way of life, Du Bois proposed the goals of the Black America should be to
alter American norms in order to fit its diverse society. In line with pragmatic
practice, Du Bois utilized sociological methods and empirical data to chal-
lenge contemporary institutions and firmly held belief systems to undermine
their guises of timeless truths and create opportunities for more suitable ones
to arise.
Du Bois undoubtedly began to develop his philosophies on African
American activism under James. He considered James one of the most influ-
ential professors at Harvard and utilized many Jamesian concepts to address
race issues. James’s ideas about democracy, pluralism, and social meliorism
can be found in Du Bois’s work, as can James’s theories about the role of the
intellectual in public life.20 James’s philosophy was laced with a moral call to
action. Be it a response to the “tedium vitae” of his day or the desire to redi-
rect human pugnacity toward democracy building instead of violence, James
demanded that philosophy have social implications.21 He sought to establish
a practical philosophical platform to deal with his contemporary moment’s
cultural crises.22 James thought the role of the intellectual was to apply one’s
skills to contemporary public life and take on a strenuous yet heroic mission
to improve the world in which he lived.23 Du Bois followed in step. He said
that James “guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist
pragmatism.”24 Du Bois’s intellectual pursuits were expressions of activism.
Although James and other early pragmatists are often criticized for failing
to address matters of racial inequality, James’s ardent anti-imperialism and
19 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers,
1969), 133.
20 James, “The Social Value of the College-Bred” (1907), in William James, Essays, Comments, and
Reviews, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 110.
21 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); George Cotkin, William James,
Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
22 Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher, 88.
23 Ibid., 95.
24 Du Bois, The Autobiography, 130.
opposition to the Spanish American War hints at the direction that Du Bois
would take pragmatism. Largely based on his own temperament and per-
sonal experiences with depression, James understood that there could be
many different perspectives and ways of seeing the world that are validated
as “true” by the individual experiencing them. His ideas about pluralism and
open-mindedness were largely connected to his acknowledgment of the ex-
periential reality of others, and they informed his critique of imperialism.
When American efforts in the Philippines turned into blatant colonialism,
James took up defense of Filipinos and attacked American imperial attitudes
as arrogantly ignorant to the lives and perspectives of the people the country
was aiming to subjugate.25 Du Bois would use the same logic to protest the
domineering quality of American Whiteness.
James’s “On a Certain Blindness of Human Beings” (1900) was specifically
relevant to the young Du Bois because it provided a psychological explana-
tion as to why people ignore the realities of the lives of those who are dif-
ferent from them.26 James’s argument that humans have a blind spot for the
feelings, experiences, and worldview that others hold likely struck a chord
with Du Bois, whose social experiences had largely been defined by what
White people thought him to be instead of their relation to his authentic self.
Du Bois had an interest in the psychological elements of racism and became
committed to finding ways to eradicate White supremacy by changing the
minds of those who perpetuated it.
Du Bois extended his work beyond the academy in order to have a mean-
ingful social function—his own public project was geared toward educating
a broad audience about the realities of African American life. His book The
Philadelphia Negro (1899) was an effort to show the plight of the African
American through the use of the sociological methods.27 Utilizing statistic-
based social science, the study presented the dire, hindering economic
conditions of urban African Americans. The Philadelphia Negro was lauded
for its refined sociological methods and its exposure of the social affordances
American racism denied urban Blacks. The study harnessed the tactics and
language of the emerging social sciences to prove African Americans’ sys-
tematically unequal access to quality education, employment, housing,
25 For more on James’s anti-imperialism and public philosophy, see George Cotkin’s chapter, “The
Imperial Imperative,” in William James, Public Philosopher, 123–151.

26 William James, On Some of Life’s Ideals: On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; What Makes a
Life Significant (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1900).

27 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899; repr. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1973).
and public entertainment. In addition, the book addressed racism’s attack

on humanity and served as a stepping-stone for Du Bois to develop more
penetrative means of studying the African American experience—one that
considered the unseen yet significant effects on the inner lives of racially op-
pressed peoples.
Du Bois’s most sophisticated work on Black America was The Souls of
Black Folk (1903). Souls offered a practical interpretation of ideas in James’s
The Principles of Psychology as well as his “On Certain Blindness,” with
the introduction of Du Bois’s theories on the African American “double-
consciousness” and “second sight.”28 Focusing on the personal self and the
public self, Du Bois argued that African Americans, because of their mi-
nority status, experienced life through two perspectives: how they under-
stood themselves within Black culture and how they understood themselves
through the lens of dominant, White culture. “Double-consciousness” was
a term borrowed from James’s transcendental predecessor, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and the idea of a person possessing many identities was concur-
rent with James’s own ideas about the performative social selves.29 Rather
than writing this condition off as a total disadvantage, though, Du Bois pos-
tured this multiperspective as a potential tool for eradicating the problem of
blindness. Du Bois argued that African Americans, because of their divided
double-consciousness, actually possessed a powerful “second sight”—a kind
of psychological agility that allowed them to both recognize social problems
caused by the dominant group and offer solutions on how to fix them.30
Minorities possessed a perspective that those who understood Whiteness as
an absolute totality could not. Du Bois thought second sight to be an invalu-
able device and theorized that it could be most effective in integrated settings
where both Blacks and Whites could share their different perspectives and
28 See William James, The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1890); Du Bois, The Souls
of Black Folk.
29 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in Conduct of Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860); Emerson,
“The Transcendentalist,” lecture, Masonic Temple, Boston, MA, January, 1842; James, The Principles
of Psychology.
30 It should also be noted that Du Bois’s “second sight” also had a spiritual or paranormal element
to it as well. While this study focuses heavily on the social and political agency of a minority per-
spective which exists outside of the mainstream, we must also acknowledge Du Bois’s own interest
in spiritual insight as he references the experience of “being born with a veil and gifted with second
sight in this American world.” See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” The Atlantic,
August 1897. This “veil” he writes of is representative of a caul, which, in African American culture,
was indicative of shamanistic or psychic ability to see beyond the ordinary. This book does not ex-
plore a specific relationship between Thurman and Du Bois’s second sight in the spiritual sense per
se, but Thurman was quietly interested in the paranormal and clairvoyance, a point worth at least
mentioning. See Fluker, “Biographical Essay,” 2017, PHWTV4, xxxii.
work together to improve social circumstances. Souls, in this regard, offered

pluralism as an answer to the American racial oppression. Du Bois was in-
terested in putting African Americans into positions in which they could
implement their second sight—where they could inject Black American per-
spective into conversations on American society.
Building the idea that African Americans had an important critical per-
spective, Du Bois advocated for the cultivation of “the talented tenth”—an
intellectual leadership class of African Americans that could challenge ex-
isting social structures and lead the masses of dispossessed Blacks.31 He
understood the need for industrial education, but he also held that same
social-activist intellectual elitism that James popularized in his “The Social
Value of the College-Bred.” This is not to be meant as an attack on Du Bois
but rather a practical assessment of the situation he faced. Just as an athletic
squad fields the team’s best players to win the game, Du Bois’s plan surmised
that the best and the brightest African Americans should be on the front lines
of the battle for the American mind. Du Bois agreed with Washington on the
point that Blacks should have access to economic advancement on the same
level as Whites, but he projected an image of the race that was more diverse
and optimistic than Washington’s. Just as Blacks should have economic op-
portunity, Du Bois argued that they should also have the same opportunities
to rise through the academic ranks and utilize the same classical Western
education that the White race had unfettered access to. Proper educational
opportunities would naturally produce African American leaders who could
address and work to ameliorate the race’s distinct problems.
Du Bois’s ideas about pluralism and the development of the talented tenth
were popularized through the growing strength of the Niagara movement
and the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. His influence ushered in a new African
American social platform—one that was antilynching, and in direct oppo-
sition to Jim Crow, advocated for equal education and employment oppor-
tunities, and demanded civil rights in full. The push to develop an elite
class of African American intellectuals that could overturn racist systems
gained momentum, significantly challenging ideas about accommodation
and White paternalism and inspiring American Blacks that they could de-
mand and work for more. While James did a lot of theorizing about utilizing
31 Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science XI (January 1898), 1–23.

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Sir,—Whatever the cause of the slander, whether malice or
misadventure, the fact remains that you have done a very cruel thing. I
enclose a cutting from the London Press, sent me by a friend, which
will show you that the calumny is becoming widely spread. Mr. Stirring
is so weak and dispirited that we fear he may have got some inkling of
it. Your position if he discovers the worst will be terrible.
I am, Yours faithfully,
Augusta Stirring.
(The Enclosure)
From “The Morning Star”
Signs of the Times
We get the new movement in a nutshell in the report from Eastbury
that Lord Glossthorpe has let his historic house to a retired baker
named Stirring, etc., etc.
VIII
From “The Eastbury Herald” 9 Sept.
Erratum.—In our issue last week an unfortunate misprint made us
state that the new tenant of Kildin Hall was a retired baker. The word
was of course banker.
IX
Mr. John Bridger, Baker, to the Editor of “The Eastbury Herald.”
Dear Hedges,—I was both pained and surprised to find a man of
your principles and a friend of mine writing of bakers as you did this
week. Why should you “of course” have meant a banker? Why cannot
a retired baker take a fine house if he wants to? I am thoroughly
ashamed of you, and wish to withdraw my advertisement from your
paper.
Yours truly, John Bridger.
X
Messrs. Greenery & Bills, Steam Bakery, Dumbridge.
Dear Sir,—After the offensive slur upon bakers in the current
number of your paper we feel that we have no other course but to
withdraw our advertisement; so please discontinue it from this date.
Yours faithfully,
Greenery & Bills.
XI
Mrs. Stirring to the Editor of “The Eastbury Herald.”
Sir,—I fear you have not done your best to check the progress of
your slanderous paragraph, since only this morning I received the
enclosed. You will probably not be surprised to learn that through your
efforts the old-world paradise of Kildin, in which we had hoped to end
our days, has been rendered impossible. We could not settle in a new
neighbourhood with such an initial handicap.
Yours truly, Augusta Stirring.
(The Enclosure)
From “The Daily Leader”
The Triumph of Democracy
After lying empty for nearly two years Lord Glossthorpe’s country
seat has been let to a retired baker named Stirring, etc., etc.
XII
Mrs. Michael Stirring to Mr. Guy Lander.
Dear Sir,—After the way that the good name and fame of my
husband and myself have been poisoned both in the local and the
London Press, we cannot think further of coming to live at Kildin Hall.
Every post brings from one or other of my friends some paragraph
perpetuating the lie. Kindly therefore consider the negotiations
completely at an end. I am, Yours faithfully,
Augusta Stirring.
XIII
The Editor of “The Eastbury Herald” to Mr. John Bridger.
Dear Bridger,—You were too hasty. A man has to do the best he
can. When I wrote “of course,” I meant it as a stroke of irony. In other
words, I was, and am, and ever shall be, on your side. You will be glad
to hear that in consequence of the whole thing I have got notice to
leave, my proprietor being under obligations to Lord Glossthorpe, and
you may therefore restore your patronage to “The Herald” with a clear
conscience.
Yours sincerely, Edward Hedges.
XIV
The Editor of “The Eastbury Herald” to Mrs. Stirring.
The Editor of “The Eastbury Herald” presents his compliments to
Mrs. Stirring for the last time, and again assures her that the whole
trouble grew from the natural carelessness of an overworked and
underpaid compositor. He regrets sincerely the unhappiness which that
mistake has caused, and looks forward to a day when retired bakers
and retired bankers will be considered as equally valuable additions to
a neighbourhood. In retirement, as in the grave, he likes to think of all
men as equal. With renewed apologies for the foul aspersion which he
cast upon Mr. and Mrs. Stirring, he begs to conclude.
P.S.—Mrs. Stirring will be pleased to hear that not only the writer
but the compositor are under notice to leave.
The New Chauffeur
(An Impossible Dialogue)
EMPLOYER. And now as to wages. What do you want?

Chauffeur. Forty pounds a year and all found.
E. And what do you expect to do for that?
C. To keep the car in good order and drive you out in it.
E. Yes. You must excuse me asking so much, but you see I don’t
know you at all. What kind of a temper have you?
C. Very good.
E. Yes, of course. But I mean what kind of temper have you when
you are told suddenly, late on a wet night, to go to the station?
C. Very good.
E. Always?
C. Certainly.
E. Well, I want you to be quite sure. Is your temper so perfect that
if I were to offer you another £5 a year to secure this point about
unexpected runs in bad weather and so forth, it would make no
difference?
C. I think it might make a difference.
E. And you would stand by the bargain? Never for a moment go
back on it?
C. No.
E. Then we will say £45. And one other point. There are some
chauffeurs so poor spirited that on an open road with no danger they
will go at only, say, twelve miles an hour. You are not like that, are you?
C. Certainly not.
E. You hate going slow?
C. Yes.
E. Ah, then, that settles it, for a chauffeur who objects to go slow is
no good to me. You see, I often want to go slow: in fact, always when it
is very dusty and we are near cottage gardens.
C. Yes; but, of course, if you wished it——
E. You said you hated it. Now, an unwilling servant is the last thing
I require.
C. But——
E. You mean that you could get over your dislike and become
willing to meet my wishes?
C. Yes.
E. But willingness must be more spontaneous than that. Suppose
we were to fix it up now absolutely, would you continue in that frame?
You would always be willing?
C. Always.
E. Then shall we say another £5 a year? That makes £50.
C. Thank you very much.
E. Oh, no, not at all. It’s a commercial transaction. I want what you
are prepared to sell. There is one other point. What kind of an
expression do you wear when you are told by your employer to take
out for a drive certain of his poorer friends who cannot afford more
than a small tip, if any?
C. I am perfectly content.
E. Perfectly?
C. Well, of course, one prefers to drive one’s own employer.
E. Ah!—but supposing I wished all your passengers to be of equal
importance and interest to you? There is no pleasure in a drive if the
driver is sullen. Have you ever thought of that?
C. Never.
E. You see it now?
C. Yes, I see it now.
E. And if I were to add another £5 it would guarantee the smile?
C. Absolutely.
E. Very well, then, that makes it £55. We will leave it at that. You
will begin on Monday.
The Fir-tree; Revised Version
(Too Long after Hans Andersen)

ONCE upon a time there grew a fir-tree in a great Newfoundland
forest.
It had a delightful life; the rain fell on it and nourished its roots; the
sun shone on it and warmed its heart; now and then came a great jolly
wind to wrestle with it and try its strength. The peasant children would
sit at its foot and play their games and sing their little songs, and the
birds roosted or sheltered in its branches. Often the squirrels frolicked
there.
But the tree, although everything was so happy in its surroundings,
was not satisfied. It longed to be something else. It longed to be, as it
said, important in the world.
“Well,” said the next tree to it, “you will be important; we all shall.
Nothing is so important as the mast of a ship.”
But the tree would not have it. “The mast of a ship!” he said. “Pooh!
I hope to be something better than that.”
Every year the surveyors came and marked a number of the taller
trees, and then wood-cutters arrived and cut them down and lopped off
their branches and dragged them away to the ship-builders. The tree
disdainfully watched them go.
And then one day the surveyor came and made a mark on its bark.
“Ha! ha!” said a neighbour, “now you’re done for.”
But the tree laughed slyly. “I know a trick worth two of that,” he
said, and he induced a squirrel to rub off the mark with its tail, so that
when the wood-cutters came it was not felled after all.
“Oh,” said the swallows when they came back next year, “you here
still?”
“Surely,” said the tree conceitedly. “They tried to get me, but I was
too clever for them.”
“But don’t you want to be a mast,” they said, “and hold up the sails
of a beautiful ship, and swim grandly all about the seas of the world,
and lie in strange harbours, and hear strange voices?”
“No,” said the tree, “I don’t. I dislike the sea. It is monotonous. I
want to assist in influencing the world. I want to be important.”
“Don’t be so silly,” said the swallows.
And then the tree had his wish, for one day some more wood-
cutters came; but, instead of picking out the tallest and straightest
trees, as they had been used to, they cut down hundreds just as they
came to them.
“Look out,” said the swallows. “You’ll be cut down now whether you
want it or not.”
“I want it,” said the tree. “I want to begin to influence the world.”
“Very well,” said a wood-cutter, “you shall,” and he gave the trunk a
great blow with his axe, and then another and another, until down it fell.
“You won’t be a mast,” he added, “never fear. Nothing so useful!
You’re going to make paper, my friend.”
“What is paper?” asked the tree of the swallows as they darted to
and fro over its branches.
“We don’t know,” they said, “but we’ll ask the sparrows.”
The sparrows, who knew, told the tree. “Paper,” they said, “is the
white stuff that men read from. It used to be made from rags; but it’s
made from trees now because it’s cheaper.”
“Then will people read me?” asked the tree.
“Yes,” said the sparrows.
The tree nearly fainted with rapture.
“But only for a few minutes,” added the sparrows. “You’re going to
be newspaper paper, not book paper.”
“All the same,” said the tree, “I might have something worth
reading on me, mightn’t I? Something beautiful or grand.”
“You might,” said the sparrows, “but it isn’t very likely.”
Then the men came to haul the tree away. Poor tree, what a time it
had! It was sawed into logs, and pushed, with thousands of others, into
a pulping machine, and the sap oozed out of it, and it screamed with
agony; and then by a dozen different processes, all extremely painful,
it was made into paper.
Oh, how it wished it was still growing on the hillside with the sun
and the rain, and the children at its foot, and the birds and squirrels in
its branches. “I never thought the world would be like this,” it said. And
the other trees in the paper all around it agreed that the world was an
overrated place.
And the tree went to sleep and dreamed it was a mast, and woke
up crying.
Then it was rolled into a long roll five miles long and put down into
the hold of a ship, and there it lay all forlorn and sea-sick for a week. A
dreadful storm raged overhead—the same wind that had once tried its
strength on the hillside—and as they heard it all the trees in the paper
groaned as they thought of the life of the forest and the brave days that
were gone.
The worst of it was that the roll in which our tree lay was close by
the foot of the mast, which came through the hold just here, and he
found that they were old friends. The mast said he could think of no life
so pleasant as that of a mast. “One has the sun all day,” he said, “and
the stars all night; one carries men and merchandise about the world;
one lies in strange harbours and sees strange and entertaining sights.
One is influencing the world all the time.”
At these words the tree wept again. But he made an effort to be
comforted. “You wouldn’t suggest,” he inquired timidly, “that a mast
was as important, say, as a newspaper?”
The mast laughed till he shook. “Well, I like that,” he said. “Why, a
newspaper—a newspaper only lasts a day, and everything in it is
contradicted and corrected the day after! A mast goes on for years.
And another thing,” he added, “which I forgot: sometimes the captain
leans against it. The captain! Think of that.”
But the tree was too miserable.
In the harbour it was taken out of the ship and flung on the wharf,
and then it was carried to the warehouse, below a newspaper office in
London. What a difference from Newfoundland, where there was air
and light. Here it was dark and stuffy, and the rolls talked to each other
with tears in their voices.
And then one night the roll in which our poor tree found himself
was carried to the printing-rooms and fixed in the press, and down
came the heavy, messy type on it, all black and suffocating, and when
the tree came to itself in the light again it was covered with words.
But, alas! the sparrows were right, for they were not beautiful
words or grand words, but such words as, “Society Divorce Case,” and
“Double Suicide at Margate,” and “Will it be fine to-morrow?” and
“Breach of Promise: Comic Letters,” and “The Progress of the Strike,”
and “Terrible Accident near Paris,” and “Grisly Discovery at Leeds,”
and “Bankruptcy of Peer’s Cousin,” and “Burglary at Potter’s Bar,” and
“More Government Lies”; and there were offers of a thousand pounds
and smaller sums to cottagers for the best bunch of Sweet Williams,
bringing to myriad simple homes in England, where flowers had been
loved for their own sake, the alloy of avarice.
“Oh, dear,” sighed the tree as it realized what it was bearing on its
surface, “how I wish I had gone to sea as I was meant to do!” And he
vowed that if ever he got out of this dreadful life he would never be
headstrong again. But alas!—
Then, cut and folded, it was, with others like it, carried away in the
cold, grey morning to a railway station bookstall, and a man bought it
for a halfpenny and read it all through, and said there was nothing in it,
and threw it under the seat, and later another man found it and read it,
and blew choking tobacco over it, and then wrapped up some fish in it,
and took it home to his family. All that night it lay scrunched up on the
floor of a squalid house, feeling very faint from the smell of fish, and
longing for Newfoundland and the sun and the rain, and the children
and the birds.
And the next morning an untidy woman lit the fire with it. It was an
unimportant fire, and went out directly.
The Life Spherical
IT was a beautiful September day, and they floated softly over green
Surrey.
“And this is England!” said the foreigner. “I am indeed glad to be
here at last, and to come in such a way.”
“You could not,” the other replied, “have chosen a more novel or
entertaining means of seeing the country for the first time.”
They leaned over the edge of the basket and looked down. The
earth was spread out like a map: they could see the shape of every
meadow, penetrate every chimney.
“How beautiful,” said the foreigner. “How orderly and precise. No
wonder you conquered the world, you English. How unresting you
must be! But what,” he went on, “is the employment of those men
there, on that great space? Are they practising warfare? See how they
walk in couples, followed by small boys bent beneath some burden.
One stops. The boy gives him a stick. He seems to be addressing
himself to the performance of a delicate rite. See how he waves his
hands. He has struck something. See how they all move on together;
what purpose in their stride! It is the same all over the place—men in
pairs, pursuing or striking, and small bent boys following. Tell me what
they are doing. Are they tacticians?”
“No,” said the other, “they are merely playing golf. That plain is
called a golf links. There are thousands like that in England. It is a
game, a recreation. These men are resting, recreating. You cannot see
it because it is so small, but there is a little white ball which they hit.”
“The pursuit has no other purpose?” asked the foreigner. “It
teaches nothing? It does not lead to military skill?”
“No.”
“But don’t the boys play too?”
“Oh, no. They only carry.”
The foreigner was silent for a while, and then he pointed again.
“See,” he said, “that field with the white figures. I have noticed so
many. What are they doing? One man runs to a spot and waves his
arm; another, some distance away, waves a club at something. Then
he runs and another runs. They cross. They cross again. Some of the
other figures run too. What does that mean? That surely is practice for
warfare?”
“No,” said the other, “that is cricket. Cricket is also a game. There
are tens of thousands of fields like that all over England. They are
merely playing for amusement. The man who waved his arm bowled a
ball; the man who waved his club hit it. You cannot see the ball, but it is
there.”
The stranger was silent again. A little later he drew attention to
another field. “What is that?” he said. “There are men and girls with
clubs all running among each other. Surely that is war. See how they
smite! What Amazons! No wonder England leads the way!”
“No,” said the other, “that is hockey. Another game.”
“And is there a ball there too?” he asked.
“Yes,” was the reply, “a ball.”
“But see the garden of that house,” he remarked; “that is not
hockey. There are only four, but two are women. They also leap about
and run and wave their arms. Is there a ball there?”
“Yes,” was the reply, “there is a ball there. That is lawn tennis.”
“But the white lines,” he said. “Is not that, perhaps, out-door
mathematics? That surely may help to serious things?”
“No,” the other replied, “only another game. There are millions of
such gardens in England with similar lines.”
“Yes,” he said, for they were then over Surbiton, “I see them at this
moment by the hundred.”
They passed on to London. It was at that time of September when
football and cricket overlap, and there was not only a crowded cricket
match at the Oval but an even more crowded football match at
Blackheath.
The foreigner caught sight of the Oval first. “Ah,” he said, “you
deceived me. For here is your cricket again, played amid a vast
concourse. How can you call it a game? These crowds would not come
to see a game played, but would play one themselves. It must be more
than you said; it must be a form of tactics that can help to retain
England’s supremacy, and these men are here to learn.”
“No,” said the other, “no. It is just a game. In England we not only
like to play games, but to see them played.”
It was then that the stranger noticed Blackheath. “Ah, now I have
you!” he cried. “Here is another field and another crowd; but this is
surely a battle. See how they dash at each other. And yes, look, one of
them has had his head cut off and the other kicks it. Splendid!”
“No,” said the other, “that is no head, that is a ball. Just a ball. It is
a game, like the others.”
He groaned. “Then I cannot see,” he said at last, “how England
won her victories and became supreme.”
“Ah,” said the other, “at the time that England was winning her
victories and climbing into supremacy, the ball was not her master.”
Four Fables
I.—The Stopped Clock

ONCE upon a time there was a discredited politician whose nostrums
no longer took any one in. And being thrown out of office he wandered
about, seeking, like many men before him, for comfort and consolation
among his inferiors. These, however, failing him, he passed on to the
lower animals, and from them to the inanimate, until he came one day
to a clock which, the works having been removed, consisted only of a
case, a face, and two hands.
“Ha,” said the politician, as he stood before it, “at last I have found
something beyond question and argument more useless than myself.
For you, my friend, are done. I, at any rate, still have life and
movement. I can speak and act; I have a function still to perform in the
world; whereas you are a mockery and a sham.”
“Kindly,” the clock replied, “refrain from associating me with
yourself. I decline the comparison. Lifeless I may be, but not useless.
For two separate moments every day I am absolutely right, and for
some minutes approximately right; whereas you, sir, are, have been,
and will be, consistently wrong.”
II.—Truth and Another

She came towards me rather dubiously, as though not sure of her
reception.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Truth,” she said.
I apologized for not having realized it.
“Never mind,” she said wearily, “hardly anyone knows me. I’m
always having to explain who I am, and lots of people don’t understand
then.”
A little later I met her again.
“Well I shan’t make any mistake this time,” I said. “How are you,
Miss Truth?”
“You are misinformed,” she replied coldly; “my name is Libel.”
“But you’re exactly like Truth,” I exclaimed—“exactly!”
“Hush!” she said.
III.—The Exemplar
Once upon a time there was a little boy who had a fit of
naughtiness. He refused to obey his nurse and was, as she said
afterwards, that obstreperous that her life for about half an hour was a
burden. At last, just as she was in despair, a robin fluttered to the
window-sill of the nursery and perched on it, peeping in.
“There,” said the nurse, “look at that dear little birdie come to see
what all the trouble’s about. He’s never refused to have his face
washed and made clean, I know. I’d be ashamed to cry and scream
before a little pretty innocent like that, that I would.”
Now this robin, as it happened, was a poisonously wicked little
bird. He was greedy and jealous and spiteful. He continually fought
other and weaker birds and took away their food; he pecked sparrows
and tyrannized over tits. He habitually ate too much; and quite early in
life he had assisted his brothers and sisters in putting both their
parents to death.
None the less the spectacle of his pretty red breast and bright eye
shamed and soothed the little boy so that he became quite good again.
IV.—The Good Man and Cupid

There was once a good and worthy man, a minister of the gospel
and an altruist of intense activity, who was grievously distressed by the
unhappy marriages in his neighbourhood. He saw young men who
ought (as he thought) to marry Jane and Eliza leading to the altar
Violet and Ermyntrude; and young women fitted to be wise helpmates
to John and Richard setting their caps at Reginald and Hughie; the
result being the usual bickerings and dissatisfactions of the ill-matched.
The matter troubled him so seriously that he joined a toxophilite
club and took lessons in archery until he could hit the gold at five
hundred yards twenty times in succession; and having reached this
state of proficiency he called on Dan Cupid and expressed to that
mischievous and uncovered boy his disapproval of the happy-go-lucky
way in which he pulled his bow-string and directed his arrows, almost
without looking. He then offered himself to shoot in Cupid’s stead.
“There may be something in what you say,” Cupid replied; “at any
rate you seem to be older and graver and possibly wiser than I, and
you certainly wear more clothes. Take the bow and try.”
The good man did so, and the next day or so he was very busy
conscientiously transfixing the hearts of his parishioners. Such was the
accuracy of his aim that he made only one slip, and that was when, in
his endeavours to unite by puncture the cardiac penumbras of pretty
little Lizzie Porter and Mr. Godfrey Bloom, his eye faltered, and instead
Mr. Godfrey Bloom was paired with the exceedingly unprepossessing
Dorothea Atkins, who happened to be standing close by.
The good man did all that was possible to repair the mischief which
he felt his lapse has caused; but it was in vain, and Miss Lizzie Porter
never regained her chance.
“Well,” said Cupid, as he strolled into the good man’s garden a few
years after, “how has your shooting turned out? Perfectly, I suppose.”
“No,” the good man replied with a sigh, “I am afraid not. As a
matter of fact the only happy brace in the whole bag are Godfrey and
Dorothea.”
“Quite so,” said the little fellow. “I expected it. I always felt those
archery lessons were a mistake.”
“Then what is to be done?” asked the good man. “What is to be
done if neither taking aim nor shooting at random avails?”
“Nothing,” said Cupid as he fitted an arrow to the string. “Nothing.
One just goes on shooting and hopes for the best.”
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The Fellowship Church: Howard

Thurman and the Twentieth-Century

The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century

The Twentieth Century: A World History R. Keith Schoppa

Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century Chamion

Healthy Minds In The Twentieth Century: In And Beyond

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the

The Twentieth Century: A World History 1st Edition R.

The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American

The Church and Employment Law: A Comparative Analysis

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

4. Another Side of the Christian Left: Institutional Religion and

Select Bibliography  219

Frequently cited works have been identified by the following abbreviations:

HTC-​HGARC The Howard Thurman Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival

Note: The Howard Thurman Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival

The United States of America is in fact dedicated to the separation

The African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman

(1959; repr. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 141.

practice of Jim Crow segregation and controversially relocated around 120,000

Peoples’ website, Soundcloud files. http://​fellowshipsf.org/​media/​.

moment, is a refreshing counterpart to religious conservatism as well as a

Historian Albert Broussard briefly discussed the Fellowship Church in his

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 189.

It is this historian’s estimation that the answer to assessing the Fellowship

17 Editors of Life, “Great Preachers,” Life, April 6, 1953, 126–​133.

William James to Zen (1970) portrays Thurman as “outstanding and repre-

or “second sight,” to critique dominant culture, the chapter emphasizes how

on the usefulness of pluralistic and cosmopolitan worship in the quest for

Building off of that discussion, Chapter 4 takes a broader look at Thurman’s

maintaining our nation’s “uncompromised sovereignty” (whatever that

[A] strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to

Howard Thurman was a practical thinker who saw spirituality in functional

1 Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of

this chapter is therefore to distinguish him as one. Pragmatism arose in intel-

Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: J. Murray, 1859). x.

and Giroux, 2001).

Boston, MA, February 12, 2014.

result of an ongoing intellectual and spiritual education about the world

of community, or realized potential, is rooted in life itself because the intu-

of Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 5.

(New York: Harper, 1955), 63.

expedient knowledge derived from experience could override previously

a profound conviction that meaningful and creative experiences between

Green and Co., 1907), 86.

Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 148.

10James, Varieties of the Religious Experience, 58.

moments of heightened consciousness were possible and revealing of accu-

12 Thurman, With Head and Heart, 120.

W. E. B. Du Bois, African American Activism, and

15 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 371.

he earned public prestige and a social role as a highly respected theologian

16 See Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism

Du Bois attended Harvard University from 1888 to 1895 and studied

19 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishers,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

4. Another Side of the Christian Left: Institutional Religion and

Select Bibliography 219

HTC-HGARC The Howard Thurman Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival

Peoples’ website, Soundcloud files. http://fellowshipsf.org/media/.

17 Editors of Life, “Great Preachers,” Life, April 6, 1953, 126–133.

Imperial Imperative,” in William James, Public Philosopher, 123–151.

and Social Science XI (January 1898), 1–23.