To return to where I began this brief essay, in conclusion, is to remember that the categories of religion and spirituality are never mutually exclusive. Rather they are porous, mutually informing, and often co-constitutive of one another. That is, many church-goers embrace spiritual grammars, and many “spiritual, but not religious” folks have formed their own institutions. This familiar fluidity—between church and spirit—was also present at the launching of the Harlem Renaissance, in a special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, which Alain Locke edited in 1925. Much of this periodical became the core of his larger, definitive anthology. However, in a piece that would not be included in The New Negro, George Haynes most directly addressed the church/spirit fault-line with his article, “The Church and the Negro Spirit.” Haynes was the first African American to receive a PhD from Columbia University, a founding member of the National Urban League, a longtime Presbyterian layperson, and a key contributor to the Federal Council of Churches’ race relations work. Fittingly, Haynes turned his gaze to Harlem’s churches to interpret the Negro Renaissance. In his view, churches did not constrain, censor or compromise the aspirations of New Negro aesthetes. Rather, he proffered, “The Negro churches of Harlem are visible evidence of an aspiring people to express the best of life within them.” Reading Haynes alongside Dubois and Locke allows for recognition of the place of churches in a standing, and expanding, aesthetic history. That is, in parlors, poetry readings, and political rallies, and in pulpits and pews, one could espy the spirit of the New Negro. At the same time, one was also privy to gifts of the spirit on display in racial aesthetics. As Haynes put it, each of these entities are, “channels of their spiritual life blood.”
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