The American Thinker

Abstract

Chapter 1 establishes Thurman’s place within modern American thought, arguing that he is part of the American pragmatist tradition. 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 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 background, Jones theorized that the individual could reach points of heightened 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 mystical 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 college 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 sets the Fellowship Church—the physical expression of his ideas—as a distinctly modern American institution.