In Footprints of a Dream (1959), his own account of the Fellowship Church, Howard Thurman observed that America was “dedicated to the separation of the races” and that “wherever it does not appear, it is the exception rather than the rule.” The passage from which these lines are taken serves as a fitting epigraph to Amanda Brown's monograph on the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. In a certain sense it is misleading to suggest that any individual or institution is ahead of its time, argues Brown, and perhaps this is what Hegel meant when he claimed that “it is foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world.” But surely the arc of history does not bend itself in the direction of justice: rather, the arc is bent by extraordinary individuals if not outliers who transcend the spirit of their age. Thurman has always seemed like a person who was, in some nontrivial way, ahead of his times.
Amanda Brown provides an instructive account of the Fellowship Church, which Thurman claimed—in 1944—to be “the first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church” in America. And while the Fellowship Church can “easily appear as an historical outlier,” it was, on the contrary, writes Brown, and when examined by an intellectual historian, “right on time—a product of evolving twentieth-century ideas and a reflection of the shifting mid-century American public consciousness” (2). For Brown, the Fellowship Church is simply a for-instance of how “modern theological liberalism evolved . . . and grew to encompass the perspectives and problems of racial minorities as African Americans and victims of Western imperialism became increasingly relevant within the Christian Left” (107).
In the opening chapter, Brown situates Thurman within the context of mid-twentieth-century pragmatism and the modern intellectual tradition: this includes Du Bois's doctrine of the talented tenth and philosophical pragmatism as well as affirmation mysticism. Although she notes the influence of Dewey on Thurman, Brown would have us think more along the lines of Cornel West's interpretation of prophetic pragmatism as cultural criticism. The second chapter locates Thurman's cosmopolitanism and theological liberalism within the landscape of an increasingly pluralistic Christian Left in America. According to Brown, the “cosmopolitanism [of the Fellowship Church], its Christian liberalism, and its wholesale commitment to social transformation through tapping into the universal love force was parallel with the aims and practices of the broader Christian Left during the 1940s and 1950s” (177). The third and fourth chapters examine “how these big ideas were put into practice and evaluate their success.” Brown explains how Thurman, and the institutions with which he was affiliated, “aimed to incite social activism through spiritual pursuit.” She also places Thurman within the exigencies of the Second Great Migration, Roosevelt's New Deal, and wartime San Francisco. The final chapter traces the trajectory of Thurman's career and resilience of the Fellowship Church, which still exists, following his departure from San Francisco in 1953 to become the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University.
The Fellowship Church: Howard Thurman and the Twentieth-Century Religious Left is ostensibly concerned with Howard Thurman and the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples; and yet, it is clear from the outset that the Fellowship Church is simply an occasion to float the hypothesis—and she may be right about this, though it seems too simplistic—that “[b]y the 1940s the Christian Left was a united interracial, intercultural, and interfaith front that addressed a host of issues through the lens of a liberal, activist version of Christianity” or, alternatively, the story of “how the Christian Left came to lead the fight against racial inequality in the United States” (107). Brown reconciles two seemingly distinct historiographical interpretations of Thurman as a modern mystic on the one hand and civil rights activist on the other: “Not only was the Fellowship Church indicative of its time: it had and continues to have the vitality to withstand the changing social and political currents of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century” (213). Along similar lines, Brown suggests that Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited (1948) was “indicative of its time and representative of the culture's openness to the inclusion of minority perspectives” (181), as “a model representation of the progressively inclusive liberal middlebrow religious book culture” (189), that “the basic premise was not unprecedented” (183), and that it “fit right in with the popular movement toward religious inclusivity” (194). Understood in this way, Thurman may seem more radical to us today than he did to those who read him fifty years ago. It is tempting to say that Brown has a well-taken but ultimately exaggerated point.
In “The Fascist Masquerade” (1946), written while he was pastor of the Fellowship Church, Thurman bemoaned “the bitter truth that the Church has permitted the various hate-inspired groups in our common life to establish squatter's rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching of the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity and human worth.” Brown recognizes that Thurman and the Christian Left alike were nevertheless out of step with many of their contemporaries for whom the Church “was broken and, worse, a weapon of hatred and division” (170). Early on in his ministry, Thurman understood the role of the African American religious leader was “to encourage the cultivation of spiritual power over the demand for things, to draw practical meaning out of personal piety, and to ensure that the spirit of Jesus is not overshadowed by Christian institutions.” Though Brown often depicts the Fellowship Church as more or less “along for the ride,” as a beneficiary if not symptom rather than a unique influence of the shift of focus within the radical wings of the Christian Left after World War I to “spiritual cosmopolitanism” and “racial equality,” she does acknowledge that “Thurman was at helm of this metamorphosis” (73). Brown argues that the Fellowship Church was illustrative of a larger cultural movement within the American Christian Left while also claiming that it was in some sense unique: “Yes, the Fellowship Church was a distinctively American institution and a direct product of its time but concerns about the human condition exceeded its specific historical moment” (218).
