When discussing religion, today it is quite common (perhaps cliché) to hear people say, “Well, I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” Even in churches it is not uncommon to hear something along the lines of, “I don’t believe in religion, but I believe in a relationship with God.” A favorite at the church of my youth was, “I’m not religious, but I love the Lord!” Numerous scholars and journalists have directed energies to analyzing this phenomenon. One of the more popular interpretations attributes the emphasis on personal spirituality to novelty in the contemporary historical moment. In this view, younger generations are seen to display an increasing skepticism towards organized religion, even as they embrace an ethic of personal choice in the face of a global cultural marketplace.

In contrast, others have persuasively linked this novel neoliberal spiritual impulse to a long tradition of religious liberalism. For instance, Leigh Schmidt has argued that liberalism, more generally, “was always as much a religious vision of emancipated souls as a political theory of individual rights… For religious liberals, unlike their secular cousins, a deepened and diversified spirituality was part of modernity’s promise.”

Alongside of the grand narrative of religious liberalism that has helped to produce the personal vision of spirituality so popular today, there is a vibrant tradition of African American cultural expression that has cultivated a similar concern with spirituality. In the poetry, prose, performances, visual culture and criticism that comprise this history, one can readily observe what might be called a grammar of spirit (i.e. spirit, spiritual, spirituality). That is, black artists and intellectuals—men and women, alike—have persistently engaged in spirit-talk.

Obviously, it is impossible to cover the entirety of this story of spirit-talk. So, perhaps it is most productive to center my gaze on the most chronicled moment in this longer narrative; namely, the apex of the New Negro movement, aka the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1920s.

Early accounts of the Harlem Renaissance have framed this moment as an aesthetic intervention in race politics; an attempt at “civil rights by copyright,” according to the historian David Levering Lewis. At the center of such efforts were leading civil rights organizations in the liberal tradition of interracial activism, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. The artistic energies of the two organizations were guided by, amongst others, two now familiar figures: W.E.B Du Bois and Alaine Locke, respectively. Du Bois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, worked closely with Jessie Redmon Fauset in editing the NAACP’s Crisis. Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar, received his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1918. He played a role similar to that of Dubois; but he did so for Charles S. Johnson at the Urban League, helping to edit Opportunity and oversee its literary competitions. While they represented competing aesthetic positions and institutional interests, together Dubois and Locke had a hand in the publishing careers of most of Harlem’s literati; including the likes of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay—the list goes on.

Perhaps appropriate to their educational pedigree, both Locke and Dubois cast their lots with science and reason. Still, even as men clearly on the side of “modernity,” much can be said of the import of religion to their aesthetic and political visions. One thinks of Herbert Aptheker’s collection, Prayers for Dark People, which includes a range of prayers written by Dubois over the course of his life. And there is Locke’s longstanding relationship with the American Bahai community, which included writing for its publications and advising its racial amity committees. More apropos for my purposes here is that both men also contributed much to what I have previously named as a grammar of spirit, especially as they theorized the aesthetics of the New Negro movement.

W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk is the most celebrated book about the black life in the United States, as well as it is a foundational text of the field now identified as African-American Studies. It is increasingly becoming a classic for religious studies as well. With the term “soul” Dubois invites readers within “the veil,” into the inner-worlds of black communities at the turn of the twentieth century. Writing against the grain just after the triumph of legal segregation, he affirmed black humanity by asserting black interiority. A small signal of Dubois’ significance, “soul” has since become synonymous with blackness. However, he developed a grammar of “spirit” to interpret religion in the United States, and black contributions therein. In his less heralded book, The Gift of Black Folk, Dubois insisted that the gifts that “the Negro” brought to America were singularly spiritual.

Of course, from a 21st century lens this smacks of essentialism. That said, however, Dubois’ arguments also enable an alternate reading of the Harlem Renaissance, illuminating its certain spiritual grammar. At the start of the book’s final chapter, fittingly named “The Gift of the Spirit,” Dubois argues, “Above and beyond all that we have mentioned, perhaps least tangible but just as true, is the peculiar spiritual quality that the Negro has injected into American life and civilization.” (italics mine) There are so many layers of significance to unpeel in this short sentence alone. Indeed, Dubois begins this task in the remainder of the chapter.

Yet beyond the author’s arguments, Dubois’ particular take on “The Gift of the Spirit” points to a spiritual grammar displayed by Alain Locke and others who sought to interpret the New Negro. Also in 1925, Locke edited what has come to be known as the “bible” of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro. In both the foreword and first chapter of an anthology that totaled almost five hundred pages, he framed the entire enterprise as spiritual. Spirit-talk pervades these pages. Attesting to both its great vigor and vacuity, in places this spiritual grammar appeals to Africa, taking inspiration from the “ancestral arts” of Ivory Coast, Congo and elsewhere. Other instances reveal an indebtedness to the rhetorics of German Romanticism. In this latter view, spirit-talk seems to evince a hedging of bets that the New Negro was evidence of a new racial zeitgeist. If nothing else, for Alain Locke the best of both worlds—Africa and Europe—were apparent in Harlem. This was the very spirit of the New Negro. “Harlem isn’t typical, but it is prophetic,” he insisted. Yet Locke’s arguments were more about race than geography. Harlem was but a key epicenter for the New Negro movement, a cultural, political and racial project that at its theoretical core was spiritual—it was about the forging of “a new race-spirit.” The final paragraph of Locke’s “Foreword” captured this best, “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing… There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart.”

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.”

Let me be perfectly frank: I’ve loved each one of the Walkmans that I’ve owned. I even loved my discman and my MiniDisc player, and I’ve loved each of my iPods and now, I love the fact that my cellphone can play music. The invention of mobile music has probably been the most important technological advancement of my lifetime, and it has undoubtedly added a complex layer of mediation between me and the worlds I inhabit.

There are days when I can’t wait to get my headphones in, and other days when everything I choose to hear seems painfully out of tune. There are days when “shuffle” seems cruelly calibrated to chafe against my hearing, and other days when it seems smarter than I am.

Occasionally, I use mobile music as armature, guarding me against a social world I don’t want to get too close to. Often, I use it as accompaniment, to embellish a familiar walk or repetitive task. But always, mobile music is something that’s going to get in between me and wherever I am. Sometimes, it blocks out what’s out there, and sometimes it can invite in what is out there by opening up new ways of hearing spaces, places, and pieces of music that I thought I knew.

I well understand the irony here: my sense of the world around me rests on my ability to import a soundtrack of my own choosing and exert my sonic will on it. There is always another option: to forego my own desires and tune into whatever serendipitous sounds that circumstances generate. In the former, you can hear overtones of ids, egos and control freaks run wild. In the latter, strains of zen-like acceptance of one’s aural environment.

To be sure, an alternative reading of this kind of listening is possible: portable, personalized music echoes with a desire to not hear what everyone else is hearing, to build a sonic buffer from the sensory assault on contemporary landscapes. “If I’m listening to my musical choices,” goes the logic, “then, for a moment, I won’t overhear the overly-loud conversation of my neighbor, or the market-tested, consumer-calibrated, ‘coffee shop’ radio station on the piped-in sound system.” By that logic, not jamming ear buds in your ears is tantamount to sheepishly knuckling under to a world that is almost always under an aural assault (passing cars, car stereos, neighbors fighting, and other sounds you might rather not hear).

To critics, this is nothing but anti-social behavior. Cultural critic Allan Bloom wrote that the Walkman was little more than a distraction from the “great tradition.” Historian of religion Mark Noll described it as “one more competitor to the voice of God.”

Each of these authors uses the aural as a register, but really, they are upset by the broader, social context of the “personal stereo.” Concerns about the Walkman sound like they’re about music, but really, they’re about the culture of listening. The anxiety that the Walkman elicits is that people do not seem to be listening, or that they’re listening to one thing while they ought to be listening to something else. But most importantly, by listening to their headphones, they’re opting out of listening in a more social context.

Ironically, the first generation Walkman was supposed to be social. The very first generation of the Walkman had two headphone jacks, and early advertisements featured fit-looking young couples skating and skydiving together, while listening simultaneously, too. The dual headphone jacks represented an engineering response to the possibly apocryphal story of the president of Sony taking an early prototype for an informal test while golfing with friends one day. They all loved the technology but they found it isolating and antisocial.

It’s a strange technical solution to a social problem. If listening seems isolating, let more people wear headphones and listen to the same music simultaneously but separately. The dual headphone jacks were gone by the second generation of Walkman, but debates over the meaning of the Walkman were not.

Recently, in the New York Times, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh blamed iPods for keeping Americans from rising up in protest about America’s recent economic turmoil. “In public spaces,” he wrote, “serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants.”

We can again hear strains that the Walkman (or its more robust technological offspring) inhibits social interaction, impedes participation in civic life, and otherwise distracts people from paying attention to something more important than their favorite song. Cultural Studies scholar Rey Chow has written that this kind of “distracted listening” represents a political statement, of sorts, a refusal to participate in mainstream sonic-social discourse.

I disagree. Chow misses the fact that both the music and the technology on which it relies are embedded in other circuits of capital and power, thus making it impossible to be fully distracted—you are always “hearing” the technology as noise in the cultural circuit. If the technology itself were mute, then listening to a Walkman would be the same as listening to anything else (a portable stereo, a transistor radio, a loudspeaker).

It’s not. Listening to a Walkman is a particular kind of listening, and listening to an iPod is yet another. It is perfectly postmodern, insofar as this kind of listening always calls attention to the material condition of the act of listening itself (this is why Apple’s white earbuds were such a brilliant advertising move). Similarly, the Walkman is a beautiful artifact of late liberal culture, with its emphasis on individual choice and fulfillment; with my Walkman, I only need to hear what I want to hear, provided I’ve paid for it.

Yet, the beauty of the Walkman, further elaborated by the iPod, is that it is often mobilized as a refusal of those same cultural contexts. Every act of listening performs tensions between what one hears and how one hears it, between where one is and what one is attending to, between what one wants to hear (my music) and what one hears (the technology), between connecting with my environment and being distanced from it, with little or no hope for reconciliation.

Nevertheless, I keep listening, and perhaps those tensions keep me listening, so that I might hear a little better the spaces between the notes, the pauses between the words, the gaps between what I hear and how I hear it.