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This chapter is devoted to showing how Du Bois's greatest text, The Souls of Black Folk, represents an exemplary text of pragmatic religious naturalism. Du Bois uses the modalities of African American religion—its language, songs, concepts, and narratives—along with his explicit discursive writings about religion, to create, stitch, and bind Souls as a single, cohesive text on African American history and politics. The vocabulary of religion produces a Nietzschean genealogy that reinterprets the nature of America. To do this, he employs African American religious sources as a pragmatic religious naturalist. Du Bois understands religion as a naturalistic practice, as an historical product of human interpretation, as the efforts of historically situated actors. The chapter concludes by distinguishing the pragmatic religious naturalism of Souls from that of James, Dewey, and Santayana.

This chapter begins by introducing the heterodox nature of Du Bois's religious voice. Against David Levering Lewis, it argues that despite Du Bois's hostile comments against religion, Du Bois also speaks with a deeply religious register. Du Bois turns his discontent with religion and its affects on American democracy into a religious faith of his own making. The chapter presents five theses on Du Bois's religious imagination, which work to claim Du Bois as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist.

This chapter explores the conceptual resources of religious naturalism — the attempt to attribute religious significance or meaning to a world conceived entirely within the limits of the natural sciences. It investigates three questions. Can naturalism retain a conception of the sacred? What are the grounds for thinking that it needs to? What are the implications if it cannot? The concept of the sacred is explicated in terms of proper objects of veneration and taboo, and special attention is given to the idea that natural beauty might be a proper focus for these attitudes. The chapter concludes that a concept of the sacred is indispensible to religious naturalism, which does not, however, have the resources to sustain such a concept. This has important implications for environmental philosophy.

This concluding chapter begins to look beyond Du Bois for a larger tradition of African American pragmatic religious naturalism. Du Bois inaugurates this tradition, and this chapter argues that it continues in figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Using Albert Murray's work, the chapter understands African American pragmatic religious naturalism as a form of blues improvization where mimicking traditional forms of African American religion leads to flights of novel inspiration. The focus of this chapter is on a scene from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which Ellison uses religion to unsettle racial essentialisms. Ironically, Ellison turns religion into a source for indeterminacy and ambivalence that strengthen a pragmatic confrontation with racial terms of existence.

This chapter describes the emergence of an African-American religious naturalism that has affinities with theoretical developments offering new materialist views of the human. It proposes a humanistic discourse that resists both problematic forms of anthropocentricism implicit in modern humanism and questionable racial differentials reinforced by Enlightenment ideals. The chapter introduces scientific theories advanced by the tenets of religious naturalism that help to envision humanity as a specific life form, or as nature made aware of itself. With the concept of sacred humanity, it explores humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep relationality and interconnectedness become key metaphors for understanding what constitutes our processes of becoming human. This naturalistic view of humanity is set within the context of African-American culture and history to underscore the conceptual richness of the liberationist motif within black religiosity and to celebrate its enduring legacy.

The conclusion ties together some of the major motifs expressed throughout all of the chapters. A summary of key aspects of this model of African American religious naturalism highlights important implications and offers a sense of its potential value in African American life and within the nation at large. The African American religious naturalism introduced here symbolically represents what the human individual or group might creatively accomplish with an expanded concept of our humanity; it may also serve as a guide to behavior. With its emphasis on the necessity of conceiving humans as centers of values, this naturalistic model of African American religiosity inspires cultural critics, poets, and political leaders to conceive of new worlds, and to hope beyond what seems immediate and available by investing in our sacred humanity.

Religious naturalists say all divine or sacred things are natural. A unifying framework is presented for religious naturalism. Nature has five religiously significant levels of organization. These are nature as a whole, the universe, solar system, earth, and body. Each level involves power, cyclicality, complexity, and evolution. These levels take their religious contents from the Zygon group, the World Pantheist Movement, the New Atheists, the New Stoics, and the Burners. Religious naturalists have also taken ideas from the Wicca, the Green Sisters, and the Evolutionary Christians. Rituals can be performed at each level. Linkages between all complex things and the cycles of nature entail a positive soteriology. No gods are involved in this religious naturalism.

Chapter two continues establishing the theoretical framework for the conception of sacred humanity. It introduce scientific theories advanced by the tenets of religious naturalism that help to envision humanity as a specific life form, or as nature made aware of itself. The chapter also explores humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep relationality and interconnectedness become key metaphors for understanding what constitutes our processes of becoming human. This view of humanity is set within the context of African American culture and history to underscore the conceptual richness of the liberationist motif within black religiosity and to celebrate its enduring legacy. With the concept of sacred humanity, this chapter bring to light newer, deeper understandings of key basic convictions in African American religious expression.

What is scientism and where and why does it differ from its rivals? The second aspect is crucial because, in assessing scientism, we also need to identify its rivals and the border areas between scientism and these rivals. If we reject one we need to know what alternatives there are and where there is overlap. This chapter offers answers to these questions and distinguishes between different types of scientism. It also suggests that liberal naturalism, humanism, social constructionism, religious naturalism, and theism are best understood as rivals to scientism, although that does not mean that they are on all accounts necessarily incompatible with scientism. It merely means that they contain elements that are in serious tension with the epistemology and ontology of scientism or its overall tendency to be deeply suspicious about everything in reality that cannot be described, understood, or explained by the natural sciences.

This chapter examines the compatibility between natural religion and religious naturalism. John Stuart Mill’s “religion of humanity” is taken as an important example of religious naturalism, but more modern exponents are considered as well. Among these are Mark Johnston and Ronald Dworkin. The argument of the chapter turns on whether a satisfactory concept of “sacred” can be completely divorced from any concept of the supernatural. It argues that a fully adequate concept of the sacred does presuppose a supernaturalist metaphysics. The relation, however, is one of presupposition not inference, so that the necessity of supernatualism does not imply that theological doctrine has a foundational role in religious practice.

This chapter introduces the study as a work of philosophical theology that adopts the morality of inquiry prevalent within the modern research university. This requires seeking knowledge without privileging the special interests of religious or anti-religious individuals or groups, doctrines, or traditions. The inquiry operates comparatively and evaluatively; it is post-foundationalist, coherentist, and fallibilist in its approach to argumentation, evidence, belief, and knowledge; and it is conducted within an apophatic frame of reference that promotes precision and play. A key term is defined: Ultimate reality is reality as it is most truly, most simply, most comprehensively, most significantly; it is the final word on reality. The chapter introduces three “Great Models” of ultimate reality and three cosmological frameworks that help to connect those models to empirical and experiential considerations. The result is six viable combinations, of which three form the focus of the reverent comparative competition presented in the book.