LITERATURE SCHOLARS HAVE not always paid much attention to that ‘critical, if commonly overlooked, element’ – religion, Christianity especially – ‘in the aesthetic, institutional, and political manifestations of the New Negro Renaissance’. Until recently it was not uncommon for critics to describe the New Negro poets as ‘united in rejecting religion of any kind’, or to say that ‘the writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not devote much attention to religious life and institutions in their works’. Criticism on Langston Hughes, a writer regularly described as ‘secular to the bone’ and ‘notoriously reticent about matters of religion’, provides a particularly telling example. For the reality is that Hughes, a lifelong churchgoer – as Wallace Best demonstrates in his important book Langston’s Salvation (2017) – ‘maintained and cultivated a religious sensibility and sensitivity to religious systems, and he harbored a deep affection for many aspects of the church of his youth, mainly its worship’ (LS, 11). Noting that Hughes ‘wrote as much about religion as any other topic’, including at least eighty ‘explicitly religious poems’, Best regards the poet as in fact ‘one of the most percipient thinkers about religion in twentieth-century arts and letters’ (LS, 4, 6, 10).

Yet Hughes was far from alone among Harlem Renaissance writers and artists in his thinking about religion and in the frequent artistic uses he made of it. Many New Negro authors deployed religious themes throughout their works, often in determinedly ‘modernist’ ways that belie the once-standard critical narrative of both modernism and modernity as inherently secular. As Michael Lackey rightly observes, ‘Black writers […] have been rejecting [this] secularization hypothesis for some time.’ And the Harlem Renaissance writers put particular pressure on that hypothesis by refusing, as Caroline Goeser argues, those ‘normative polarities between religion and the modern world that began during the Enlightenment and continued into twentieth-century scholarship in art and cultural studies’.