Jefferson's Bible, Douglass's Faith: The Spiritual Discourse of Black Modernity

• In Event: African American Political Thought

Abstract

Recently, scholars have been paying close attention to the role of religious expression in democratic dialogue. Many have debated models of political discourse posed by thinkers such as John Rawls (2005) and Jürgen Habermas (2010, 2008) that require the translation of religious beliefs into “public reasons” accessible to non-religious audiences (Tyler 2018, Areshidze 2017, Sikka 2016, Cooke 2011). However, the history of political thought in the early United States is largely absent from these deliberations, as is the role of African American thinkers who presented creative alternatives to translation strategies in the wake of Enlightenment empiricism and incipient positivism--frameworks that tended to marginalize religious discourse.

This paper points to the dangers of foreclosing untranslatable elements of religious convictions by drawing on Thomas Jefferson’s physical transformation of the New Testament Gospels, which expunged all references to spirituality. It shows how Frederick Douglass, in particular, models the process of productively co-articulating--rather than merely translating--religious and non-religious language in ways that can serve as a guide for renovating today's democratic discussions. Building on Habermas’s recent attempts to reconstruct the relationship between religion and knowledge (2017/2023) by using antebellum Black American voices to restore what Habermas might call “an awareness of what is missing,” this paper thus seeks to repair the foundational limitations of Jefferson’s framework, which in addition to ruling out transcendent elements of the Bible, also foreclosed the rationality and lived experiences of Black subjects.

By staging a multi-century conversation among Jefferson, Douglass, Rawls, and Habermas—four of the most consequential thinkers of their eras—I advance a model for supporting vibrant democratic dialogue in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic nation where racial identity continues to influence power relations and social outcomes.

Author

• Keidrick Roy, Harvard University