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It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of
Negro religion. First, we must remember that living as the
blacks do in close contact with a great modern nation, and
sharing, although imperfectly, the soul-life of that nation,
they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all
the religious and ethical forces that are to-day moving the
United States. These questions and movements are, however,
overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important
question of their civil, political, and economic status. They
must perpetually discuss the "Negro Problem,"--must live,
move, and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its
light or darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of
their inner life,--of the status of women, the maintenance of
Home, the training of children, the accumulation of wealth,
and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of
intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intellectual
unrest. From the double life every American Negro
must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the
current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of
the fifteenth century,--from this must arise a painful self-consciousness,
an almost morbid sense of personality and a
moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds
within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and
changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same
way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul,
a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double
life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social
classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals,
and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or
radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps
most clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the
Negro of to-day and is tingeing and changing his religious
life. Feeling that his rights and his dearest ideals are being
trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever more deaf
to his righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces of
prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength
and fresh allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma. Conscious
of his impotence, and pessimistic, he often becomes
bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of a worship, is
a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer
rather than a faith. On the other hand, another type of mind,
shrewder and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the very
strength of the anti-Negro movement its patent weaknesses,
and with Jesuitic casuistry is deterred by no ethical considerations
in the endeavor to turn this weakness to the black man's
strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one
lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type
of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the
other is too often found a traitor to right and a coward before
force; the one is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps
impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more
than meat and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is
not this simply the writhing of the age translated into black,--
the triumph of the Lie which today, with its false culture,
faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?
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